appeared to justify this mode of working on the popular mind; it was admitted and avowed. To deceive into Christianity was so valuable a service as to hallow deceit itself. But the largest portion was probably the natural birth of that imaginative excitement which quickens its day-dreams and nightly visions into reality. The Christian lived in a supernatural world; the notion of the divine power, the perpetual interference of the Deity, the agency of the countless invisible beings which hovered over mankind, was so strongly impressed upon the belief, that every extraordinary, and almost every ordinary incident became a miracle, every inward emotion a suggestion either of a good or an evil spirit. A mythic period was thus gradually formed, in which reality melted into fable, and invention unconsciously trespassed on the province of history."(1) Whether we look upon this picture or on that, the result is equally unfavourable to miracles, and a ready explanation both of the earlier and later instances is suggested. We must, however, again recall the fact that, setting aside for the present the effect of pious fraud, this vivid and superstitious imagination, which so freely created for itself the miraculous, was not merely developed by Christianity, but was equally rampant before it, and was a marked characteristic of the Jews. The same writer, in a passage already quoted, says: "During the whole life of Christ, and the early propagation of the religion, it must be borne in mind that they took place in an age, and among a people which superstition had made so familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events, that wonders awakened no emotion, or were speedily superseded by some new demand on the ever {200} ready belief. The Jews of that period not only believed that the Supreme Being had the power of controlling the course of nature, but that the same influence was possessed by multitudes of subordinate spirits, both good and evil."(1) Between the "superstition," "imaginative excitement," and "pious fraud" of the early Church, and the "deliberate and audacious fraud" of the later, we have abundant material for the natural explanation of all supposed miracles, without going to such an extreme hypothesis as exceptions to the order of nature, or supposing that a few miracles can be accepted as supernatural facts, whilst all the rest must be discarded as human fables.