So far from casting doubt upon the miracles which he narrates, the "Preface" of Augustine is clearly intended to establish them. These "signs of divine power similar to those of old," are not less real and important, but merely less known, because the eyes of the world are not directed to them, and they have not the advantage of being everywhere published abroad by means of canonical scriptures constantly read to the people and acknowledged as authoritative. Dr. Mozleys statement is quite unwarranted, and it seems to us gratuitously injurious to St. Augustine. This Father of the Church and Bishop must have had as little good faith as good sense, if he did what such a statement implies. In order to demonstate the truth of his assertion that miracles were still performed in his day, Dr. Mozley represents Augustine as deliberately producing a long list of instances of which "he cannot even be said to guarantee the truth," and the more important cases in which "evidently represent no more than mere report, and report of a very vague kind." We have furnished the reader with the materials for forming an opinion on these points. The judgment of Dr. Mozley may with equal justice be applied to {186} the authors of the synoptic Gospels. They certainly do not guarantee the truth of the miracles they relate in any more precise way than Augustine. Like him, they merely narrate them as facts, and he as evidently believes what he states as they do. Indeed, as regards comparative fulness of testimony, the advantage is altogether on the side of the miracles reported by St. Augustine. These miracles occurred within two years of the time at which he wrote, and were at once recorded with the names of the subjects and of the places at which they occurred; most of them were performed in his own diocese, and several of them in his own presence; some, of which he apparently did not feel sure, he personally investigated; he states his knowledge of others, and he narrates the whole of them with the most direct and simple affirmation of the facts, without a single word indicating hesitation, or directly or indirectly attributing the narrative to mere report. Moreover, he not only advances these miracles deliberately and in writing, in support of his positive assertion that miracles were still performed, but these accounts of them had in the first instance been written that they might be publicly read in his own church for the edification of Christians, almost on the very spot where they are stated to have occurred. We need scarcely say that we do not advance these reasons in order to argue the reality of the miracles themselves, but simply to maintain that, so far from his giving the account of them as mere report, or not even professing to vouch for their truth, St. Augustine both believed them himself, and asked others to believe them as facts, and that they are as unhesitatingly affirmed as any related in the Gospels. {187}