Equally inaccurate is the assertion that the evidence of miracles as the attestation to a revelation was a “hackneyed” one. The Old Testament professed to rest on miraculous evidence. This being the case, the Jews were fully entitled to expect that if God made a further revelation of His will, it would be accompanied by a miraculous attestation. But Judaism was the only religion of the ancient world which professed to be founded on the evidence of miracles. A belief in a current supernaturalism was no doubt mixed up with the ancient religions, but its wonders were not alleged to have been wrought in attestation of the fact that they were revelations, nor even as attestations to their truth. The religion of the Greeks possessed both priests and prophets; but they performed no miracles in attestation of a divine commission. The only attestation of this kind which they claimed was the utterance of obscure or mendacious oracles. I am not aware that anyone who pretended to be a revealer of the divine will in ancient times ever professed to perform visible and palpable miracles in proof of his assertions. Similar is the position of the old religions which still exist in the modern world. Many of them abound in stories of the most fantastic manifestations of their gods in ancient times. Their votaries believe in the efficacy of magic, charms, and incantations. But none of these things have been affirmed to have been wrought in attestation of a divine commission. Mahometanism claims, in the strictest sense, to be a divine revelation; yet the Koran even offers apologies for the fact that its founder wrought no miracles in attestation of his claim to be a divine messenger. So far therefore is it from being the fact that miracles are so generally alleged by religions in vindication of their claim to be revelations, that Judaism and Christianity are absolutely unique in this respect. The idea of working a miracle in attestation of a divine commission is so far from being a “hackneyed” one, that it has the strongest claims to originality. 2. It is urged by the same writer that “every marvel and every narrative of supernatural interference seemed a matter of course to the superstitious credulity of the age. However much miracles are the exception to the order of nature, they have always been the rule in the history of ignorance. In fact the excess of belief in them throughout many centuries of darkness, is almost fatal to their claims to credence now. They have been limited to periods of ignorance and superstition, and are unknown to ages of enlightenment. The Christian miracles are rendered almost as suspicious from their place in a long series of similar occurrences, as they are by their being exceptions to the sequence of natural phenomena. It would be extraordinary if cycles of miracles occurring before and since those of the Gospels, and in connection with every religion, could be repudiated as fables, and these alone maintained as genuine.”