If we take first the attitude of the contemporaries, it seems to me that several fixed points come out in regard to them on which we may really take our stand with great confidence. (i) The first point is that what these men fully believed to be miracles undoubtedly happened. We have evidence on this head that is strictly first-hand, the evidence of those who believed that they had wrought miracles themselves, as well as that they had witnessed the working of miracles by others. (ii) The second point is that this evidence is absolutely bona fide. Our best example is, I suppose, St. Paul. It is a good exercise to collect the allusions to miracles in the Epistles of St. Paul, to ‘signs and wonders,’ to δυνάμεις or ‘acts of power,’ to special gifts of the Spirit. There can be no doubt that St. Paul was possessed with the conviction that he was living in the midst of miracle. This conviction lies behind and permeates all his thought in the same natural, spontaneous, inevitable way in which he performed, or saw others perform, the most ordinary functions of nature, eating or drinking or sleeping or breathing. (iii) We observe further that these extraordinary phenomena of which he was conscious had for him the value of miracle. The ancients conceived of miracle as a mark of the presence and co-operation of Deity. The man who could work miracles showed thereby that God was actively with him. Hence the working of miracles served to authenticate teaching; it was the proof of commission from God. It was in this sense that St. Paul appealed to his own miracles as the ‘signs of an apostle’ (2 Cor. xii. 12), and in this sense that he claimed that his preaching carried with it ‘the demonstration of the Spirit and of power’ (1 Cor. ii. 4; cf. Rom. xv. 19). (iv) If we enlarge our view and look away from the performance of miracle by individuals to the great part which the belief in miracle has played in the history of mankind, and more particularly in the history of the Christian Church, we cannot, I think, fail to see that it must have had a providential function. I do not hesitate to introduce teleology. The history of the evolution of the world and of man is such that we are compelled to think of it as designed; in other words we are compelled to think that the Power which lies behind phenomena has had a purpose, which is at least analogous to purpose in man. There may be some paradoxical features in the carrying out of this purpose, due to the peculiar conditions under which it has operated; but these cannot obscure the broad lines of purposeful development; and over a considerable tract of that development the belief in miracle has played a substantial part, and a part that we can see to be deeply interwoven with some of the culminating events in the history of the human race.