are here judging of them, by their impression upon our minds.

It is obvious to apply what has been said to the case of the miracles of the Church, as compared with those in Scripture. Scripture is to us a garden of Eden, and its creations are beautiful as well as 66 very good;" but when we pass from the Apostolic to the following ages, it is as if we left the choicest valleys of the earth, the quietest and most harmonious scenery, and the most cultivated soil, for the luxuriant wildernesses of Africa or Asia, the natural home or kingdom of brute nature, uninfluenced by man. Or rather, it is a great injustice to the times of the Church, to represent the contrast as so vast a one; and Adam might much more justly have been startled at the various forms of life which were brought before him to be named, than we may presume at once to decide that certain alleged miracles in the Church are not really such, because they are unlike those to which our eyes have been accustomed in Scripture. There is far greater difference between the appearance of a horse or an eagle and a monkey, or a lion and a mouse, as they meet our eye, than between the most august of the Divine manifestations in Scripture and the meanest and most fanciful of those legends which we are accustomed without further examination to cast aside. Such properties, or rather such impressions of them upon our minds, may be the necessary consequence of Divine Agency moving on a system and not by isolated acts; or the necessary consequence of its deigning to work with or through the eccentricities, the weaknesses, nay, the wilfulness of the human mind. As then birds are different from beasts, as tropical plants from the productions of the north, as one scene is severely beautiful and another rich or romantic, as the excellence of colours is very different from that of form, as pleasures of sight from pleasures of scent, so also in the case of those works and productions which are above or beside the ordinary

d

course of nature, in spite of their variety, "to every thing "there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the "heaven," and "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time;" and as one description of miracles may be necessary for evidence, viz. such as are at once majestic and undeniable, so for those other and manifold objects which the economy of the Gospel kingdom may involve, a more hidden and intricate path, a more complex exhibition, a more exuberant method, a more versatile rule, may be essential; and it may be as shallow a philosophy to reject them merely because they are not such as we should have expected from God's hand, or as we read of in Scripture, as to judge of universal nature by the standard of our own home, or again with the ancient heretics to refuse to admit that the Creator of the physical world is the same with the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Nay, it may even be urged that the variety of nature is antecedently a reason for expecting variety in a supernatural agency, if it be introduced; or, again, (as has been already observed,) if such agency is conducted on a system, it must even necessarily involve diversity and inequality in its separate parts, and, granting it was intended to continue after the Apostolic age, the want of uniformity between the miracles first wrought and those which followed, as far as it is found, might have been almost foretold without the gift of prophecy in that age, or at least may be fully vindicated in this,-nay, even the inferiority of the Ecclesiastical miracles to the Apostolic, for if Divine Wisdom had determined, as is not difficult to believe, that the wonderful works which illuminate the history of the first days of the Church should be the highest and best, what was left to subsequent times, by the very terms of the proposition, but miracles which are but second best, which would necessarily belong to another and rival system if they too were the best, and which admit of belonging to the same system for the very reason that they are not the best?

So much then on the general correspondence between the works of nature, on the one hand, and the miracles of sacred history, whether Scriptural or Ecclesiastical, viewed as one whole, on the other. And while the physical system bears such an analogy to the supernatural system, viewed in its Scriptural and Ecclesiastical portions together, as forms a strong argument in defence of the supernatural, it is on the other hand so far unlike the Scriptural portion of that supernatural when taken by itself, as to protect the portion which is not Scriptural, from objections drawn from any differences observable between it and the portion which is in Scripture. If it be true that the Ecclesiastical miracles are in some sense an innovation upon the idea of the Divine Economy, as impressed upon us by the miracles of Scripture, it is at least equally true that the Scripture miracles also innovate upon the impressions which are made upon us by the order and the laws of the natural world; and as we reconcile our imagination, nevertheless, to that deviation from the course of nature in the Economy of revelation, so surely may we bear without impatience or perplexity that the subsequent history of revclation should in turn diverge from the path in which it originally commenced. Hume argues against miracles ge

"and though, in many cases, it may "reasonably be presumed, yet in none, I can it certainly be known. For it is

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common with men, out of crafty and "selfish views, to dissemble and de"ceive; or out of weakness and cre"dulity to embrace and defend with "zeal what the craft of others had im"posed upon them; but plain facts "cannot delude us; cannot speak any "other language, or give any other in"formation, but what flows from nature "and truth. The testimony therefore "of facts, as it is offered to our senses, in this wonderful fabric and consti"tution of worldly things, may pro"perly be called the testimony of God "Himself, as it carries with it the surest "instruction in all cases, and to all "nations, which in the ordinary course

nerally, "Though the Being to whom the miracle is ascribed, "be, in this case, Almighty, it does not, upon that account, "become a whit more probable; since it is impossible for us "to know the attributes or actions of such a Being, otherwise "than from the experience which we have of His productions "in the usual course of nature h." And elsewhere he says, "The Deity is known to us only by His productions. . . As "the universe shews wisdom and goodness, we infer wisdom "and goodness. As it shews a particular degree of these "perfections, we infer a particular degree of them, precisely "adapted to the effect which we examine. But farther at"tributes, or farther degrees of the same attributes, we can "never be authorized to infer or suppose, by any rules of just "reasoning." And in a note he adds, "In general, it may, "I think, be established as a maxim, that where any cause " is known only by its particular effects, it must be impossible "to infer any new effects from that cause. . . . To say that "the new effects proceed only from a continuation of the "same energy, which is already known from the first effects, "will not remove the difficulty. For even granting this to "be the case, (which can seldom be supposed), the very con"tinuation and exertion of a like energy (for it is impossible "it can be absolutely the same), I say, this exertion of a

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judice may prompt us, about things "unknown to us." p. xi.

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"The whole which the wit of man can possibly discover, either of the 66 ways or will of the Creator, must be acquired... not by imagining vainly "within ourselves, what may be proper or improper for Him to do; but by "looking abroad and contemplating "what He has actually done; and at'tending seriously to that revelation "which He made of Himself from the beginning, and placed continually be"fore our eyes, in the wonderful works "and beautiful fabric of this visible "world." p. xxii.

Essay on Miracles, part ii. circ. fin. i Essay on Providence.

"like energy, in a different period of space and time, is a very arbitrary supposition, and what there cannot possibly "be any traces of in the effects, from which all our knowledge "of the cause is originally derived. Let the inferred cause "be exactly proportioned, as it should be, to the known "effect; and it is impossible that it can possess any qualities, "from which new or different effects can be inferred." This is not the place to analyze a paradox which is sufficiently refuted by the common sense of a religious mind; but the point which concerns us to consider, is whether persons who, not merely question, but prejudge the Ecclesiastical miracles on the ground of their want of resemblance, whatever that be, to those contained in Scripture,—as if the Almighty could not do in the Christian Church what He had not already done at the time of its foundation, or under the Mosaic Covenant, whether such reasoners are not siding with the sceptic who in the above passages denies that the First Cause can act supernaturally at all, because in nature He can but act naturally, and whether it is not a happy inconsistency by which they continue to believe the Scriptures while they reject the Church.

Indeed, it would not be difficult to shew that the miracles of Scripture are a far greater innovation upon the economy of nature than the miracles of the Church upon the economy of Scripture. There is nothing, for instance, in nature at all to parallel and mitigate the wonderful history of the assemblage of all animals in the Ark, or the multiplication of an artificially prepared substance, such as bread. Walking on the sea, or the resurrection of the dead, is a plain reversal of its laws. On the other hand, the narrative of the combats of St. Antony with evil spirits, is a development rather than a contradiction of revelation, viz. of such texts as speak of Satan being cast out by prayer and fasting. To be shocked then at the miracles of Ecclesiastical history, or to ridicule