It would have been long before an Israelite could have brought himself to see this meaning in the words of our Lord; but St Peter must have thought over this last miracle, all the more from the apparent harshness of our Lord shewn in it—from its being the solitary instance of a final condemnation from His lips—and he must have asked himself; What did it mean? There are many other miracles in which the instruction of the Apostles and notably of St Peter seems to be the leading aim. The walking on the water might have taught him how closely failure treads on the heels of impulse: the prophecy, “Before the cock crow thou shalt deny me thrice,” again conveyed this same lesson together with much beside: and the words “Then are the children free,” which point the moral of the finding of the stater in the fish’s mouth, must have recurred to St Peter when the Church at Jerusalem was debating as to how far she could free her Gentile members from the burdens of the Law. Of this I shall speak again. I have adduced sufficient instances to shew what I mean by miracles of instruction and the way in which they worked. Lastly we come to the important subject of (7) Miracles as a means of proof. The signs, worked by our Lord, whatever other functions they fulfilled, had one office which in the eyes of some apologists is so important as to drive all other functions into the back-ground. They are regarded as the main ground of conviction. The Apostles, it is true, make little appeal to the Signs worked by Christ: this may have been because they worked similar Signs themselves, and knew that their enemies ascribed them to magic. Their favourite arguments were the fulfilment of prophecy and the resurrection of the Lord. The earlier hearers were Jews, and the question with them was, “Did Jesus of Nazareth answer to the prophetic notices of the expected deliverer of their race?” The Jews we hear “were mightily convinced” by Apollos, not because he declared Christ’s works but because he “shewed by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.”(43) But in time the early preachers addressed themselves to the Gentiles. The Jewish notion of the Messiah was strange to hearers, who had never heard of the prophets; while the idea that God should love the world and reveal Himself to it commended itself to them, and they would expect that such a revelation would be accompanied by manifestations beyond human experience. The consequence was that, after a century or two, less was made of prophecy and more was made of miracles: and if the question “What makes you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God?” had then been put to all Christendom, the answer of an overwhelming majority would have been, “Because of the wondrous works which He performed.”