one doubts the high religious enthusiasm of the early Christians, or the earnest and fanatical zeal with which they courted martyrdom, but this is no exclusive characteristic of Christianity. Every religion has had its martyrs, every error its devoted victims. Does the marvellous endurance of the Hindoo, whose limbs wither after years of painful persistence in vows to his Deity, prove the truth of Brahmanism? or do the fanatical believers who cast themselves under the wheels of the car of Jagganath establish the soundness of their creed? Do the Jews, who for centuries bore the fiercest contumelies of the world, and were persecuted, hunted, and done to death by every conceivable torture for persisting in their denial of the truth of the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension, and in their rejection of Jesus Christ, do they thus furnish a convincing argument for the truth of their belief and the falsity of Christianity? Or have the thousands who have been consigned to the stake by the Christian Church herself for persisting in asserting what she has denounced as damnable heresy, proved the correctness of their views by their sufferings and death? History is full of the records of men who have honestly believed every kind of error and heresy, and have been stedfast to the death, through persecution and torture, in their mistaken belief. There is nothing so inflexible as superstitious fanaticism, and persecution, instead of extinguishing it, has invariably been the most certain means of its propagation. The sufferings of the Apostles, therefore, cannot prove anything beyond their own belief, and the question what it was they really did believe and suffered for is by no means so simple as it appears. Now the long succession of ecclesiastical and other {197} miracles has an important bearing upon those of the New Testament, whether we believe or deny their reality. If we regard the miracles of Church history to be in the main real, the whole force of the Gospel miracles, as exceptional supernatural evidence of a Divine Revelation, is annihilated. The "miraculous credentials of Christianity" assume a very different aspect when they are considered from such a point of view. Admitted to be scarcely recognizable from miracles wrought by Satanic agency, they are seen to be a continuation of wonders recorded in the Old Testament, to be preceded and accompanied by pretension to similar power on the part of the Jews and other nations, and to be succeeded by cycles of miracles, in all essential respects the same, performed subsequently for upwards of fifteen hundred years. Supernatural evidence of so common and prodigal a nature certainly betrays a great want of force and divine speciality. How could that be considered as express evidence for a new Divine Revelation which was already so well known to the world, and which is scattered broad-cast over so many centuries, as well as successfully simulated by Satan?