so-called histories are nothing else but a string of these ; which yet (and
this too is singularly characteristic) stand wholly disconnected from the
ministry of Christ. Not one of them belongs to the period after his
Baptism, but they are all miracles of the Infancy, — in other words, of
that time whereof the canonical Gospels relate no miracle, and not
merely do not relate any, but are remarkably at pains to tell us that
during it no miracle was wrought, that in Cana of Galilee being* his
first. (John ii. 11.)

It follows of necessity that they are never seals of a word and doc-
trine which has gone before ; they are never " signs," but at the best
i wonders and portents. Any high purpose and aim is clearly altogether
absent from them. It is never felt that the writer is writing out of any
j higher motive than to excite and feed a childish love of the marvellous
j — never that he could say, " These are written that ye might believe
. that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, and that believing ye might have
life through his name." (John xx. 31.) Indeed, so far from having a
religious, they are often wanting in a moral element. The Lord Jesus
appears in them as a wayward, capricious, passionate child, to be
feared indeed, seeing that he is furnished with such formidable powers
of avenging every wrong or accidental injury which he meets ; and so
bearing himself, that the request which the parents of some other chil-
dren are represented as making, that he may be kept within the house,
for he brings harm and mischief wherever he comes, is perfectly justified
I by the facts.

It may be well to cite a few examples in proof, however harshly
• some of them may jar on the Christian ear. Thus some children refuse
i to play with him, hiding themselves from him ; he pursues and turns
j them into kids.* Another child by accident runs against him and
I throws him down ; whereupon he, being exasperated,")" exclaims, " As
1 thou hast made me to fall, so shalt thou fall and not rise ;" at the same
f hour the child fell down and expired.:}: He has a dispute with the master
who is leaching him letters, concerning the order in which he shall go
through the Hebrew alphabet, and his master strikes him ; whereupon

* Evang. Infant., c. 40, in TniLo's Cod. Apocr., p. 115 ; to wliose admirable edi-
tion of the apocryphal gospels the references in this section are made throughout,
t [liKpavOeii.

t Evang. Infant., c. 47, p. 123 ; cf. Evang. T/ioma, c. 4, p. 234.



WITH OTHER CYCLES OF MIRACLES. 41

Jesus curses him. and straightway his arm is withered, and he falls on
his face and dies.* This goes on, till at length Joseph says to Mary,
" Henceforward let us keep him within doors, for whosoever sets himself j
against him, perishes." His passionate readiness to avenge himself
shows itself at the very earliest age. At five years old he has made a
pool of water, and is moulding sparrows from the clay. Another child,
the son of a scribe, displeased that he should do this on the Sabbath, .
opens the sluices of his pool and lets out the water. On this Jesus is
indignant, gives him many injurious names, and causes him to wither
and wholly dry up with his curse. f

Such is the image which the authors of these books give us of the
holy child Jesus; — and no wonder; for man is not only unable to \,
realize the perfect, he is unable to conceive it. The idea is as much a
gift, as the power to realize that idea. Even the miracles which are
not of this revolting character are childish, tricks like the tricks of a /
conjurer, never solemn acts of power and love. Jesus enters the shop /
of a dyer, who has various cloths from various persons, to be dyed of ^
divers colors. In the absence of the master, he throws them all into the
dyeing vat together, and when the dyer returns and remonstrates, draws
them out of the vat each dyed according to the color which was enjoined.:):
He and some other children make birds and animals of clay ; while each
is boasting the superiority of his work, Jesus says, " I will cause those
which I have made to go ;" — which they do, the animals leaping and
the birds flying, and at his bidding returning, and eating and drinking
from his hand.§ While yet an infant at his mother's breast, he bids a
palm-tree to stoop that she may pluck the fruits ; it obeys, and only
returns to its position at his command. || Another time his mother sends ;
him to the well for water ; the pitcher breaks, and he brings the water
in his cloak. IT And as the miracles which he does, so those that are
done in regard of him, are idle or monstrous ; the ox and ass worship-
ping him, a new-born infant in the crib, may serve for an'example.**

In all these, as will be observed, the idea of redemptive acts alto-
gether falls out of sight ; they are none of them the outward clothin"-
of the inward facts of man's redemption. Of course it is not meant to
be said that miracles of healing and of grace are altogether wanting in



* Evang. Infant., c. 49, p. 125. In the Evang. Thorn., c. 14, p. 307, he only falls
into a swoon, and something afterwards pleasing Jesus, (c. 15,) he raises him up again.

t Evang. Thorn., c. 3, p. 282. This appears with variations in the Evang. Infant.,
c. 46, p. 122,

t Evang. Infant., c. 37, p. Ill, § md., c. 36. || Ibid., p. 395.

IT Evang. Infant., p. 121, ** Ibid., p. 382.



42 TPIE EVANGELICAL, COMPARED

tliese books ;* that would evidently have been incompatible with any
idea of a Redeemer ; but only that they do not present to us any clear
and consistent image of a Saviour full of grace and power, but an
image rather continually defaced by lines of passion, and caprice, and
anger. The most striking, perhaps, of the miracles related in regard
of the child Jesus, is that of the falling down of the idols of Egypt at
his presence in the land ; for it has in it something of a deeper signifi-
cance, as a symbol and prophecy of the overthrow of the idol worship
of the world by him who was now coming into the world. f The lions
and tlie leopards gathering harmlessly round him as he passed through
the desert on the way to Egypt, is again not alien to the true spirit of
the Gospel, and has its analogy in the words of St. Mark, that he " was
with the wild beasts ;" (i. 13 ;) words which certainly are not intro-
duced merely to enhance the savageness of the wilderness where he
spent those forty days of temptation, but are meant as a hint to us that
in him, the new head of the race, the second Adam, the Paradisaical
state was once more given back. (Gen. i, 28.) But with a very few
such partial exceptions as these, the apocryphal gospels are a barren
and dreary waste of wonders without object or aim ; and only instruc-
tive as making us strongly to feel, more strongly than but for these ex-
amples we miglit have felt, how needful it is that there should be other
factors besides power for producing a true miracle ; that wisdom and
love must be there also; that where men conceive of power as its
chiefest element, they give us only a hateful mockery of the divine.
Had a Christ such as these gospels paint actually lived upon the earth,
he had been no more than a potent and wayward magician, from whom
all men would have shrunk with a natural instinct of distrust and fear.



3. The Later, or Ecclesiastical, Miracles.

It would plainly lead much too far from the subject in hand to enter
into any detailed examination of the authority upon which the later, or,
as they may be conveniently termed, the ecclesiastical miracles, come
to us. Yet a few words must of necessity find place concerning the
permanent miraculous gifts which have been claimed for the Church as
her rightful heritage, equally by some who have gloried in their pre-

* For instance, Simon the Canaanite {Ibid., p. 117,) is healed, while yet a child,
of the bite of a serpent. Yet even in miracles such as this, there is always something
that will not let us forget that we are moving in another world from that in which the
sacred evangelists place us.

t Evang. Infant., c. 10—12, pp. 75 — 77 ; cf 1 Sam. v. 3, 4.



WITH OTHER CYCLES OF MIRACLES. 43

sumed presence, as by olhcrs who have lamented their absence— by
those alike who have seen in the presence of such, evidences of her
sanctity, or in their absence, of her degeneracy and fall. It is not my
belief that she has this gift of working miracles, nor yet that she was
intended to have, and only through her own unfaithfulness has lost it;/
nor that her Lord has abridged her of aught that would have made her'
strong and glorious in not endowing her with powers such as these. \
Willi reasons enough for humbling herself, yet I do not believe that
among those reasons is to be accounted her inability to perform these
works that should transcend nature. So many in our own day have
arrived at a directly opposite conclusion, that it will be needful shortly
to justify the opinion here expressed.

And first, as a strong presumption against the intended continuance
of these powers in the Church, may be taken the analogies derived
from the earlier history of God's dealings with his people. We do not
find the miracles sown broadcast over the whole Old Testament history,
but they all cluster round a very few eminent persons, and have re-
ference to certain great epochs and crises of the kingdom of God.
Abraham, the father of the faithful, — David, the great theocratic king, —
Daniel, the "man greatly beloved," are alike entirely without them ;
that is, they do no miracles ; such may be accomplished in behalf of them,
but they themselves accomplish none. In fact there are but two great
outbursts of these ; the first, at the establishing of the kingdom under
Moses and Joshua, on which occasion it is at once evident that they
could not have been wanting ; the second in the time of Elijah and
Elisha ; and then also there was utmost need, when it was a question
whether the court religion which the apostate kings of Israel had set
up, should not quite overbear the true worship of Jehovah, when the
Levitical priesthood was abolished, and the faithful were but a scattered
few among the ten tribes. Then, in that decisive epoch of the king-
dom's history, the two great prophets, they too in a subordinate sense
the beginners of a new period, arose, equipped with powers which
should witness that he whose servants they were, was the God of Israel,
however Israel might refuse to acknowledge hmi. There is here in all
this an entire absence of prodigality in the use of miracles; they are
ultimate resources, reserved for the great needs of God's kingdom, not
its daily incidents ; they are not cheap off-hand expedients, which may
always be appealed to, but come only into play when nothing else would
have supplied their room. How unlike this moderation to the wasteful
expenditure of miracles in the church-history of the middle ages !
There no perplexity can occur so trifling that a miracle will not be
brought in to solve it ; there is almost no saint, certainly no distin-



44 THE EVANGELICAL, COMPARED

guished one, without his nimbus of miracles around his head ; they are
adorned with these in rivalry with one another, in rivalry with Christ
himself; no acknowledgment like this, " John did no miracle," (John
X. 41,) in any of the records of their lives finding place.

We must add to this the declarations of Scripture, which I have
already entered on at large, concerning the object of miracles, that they
are for the confirming the word by signs following, for authenticating a
message as being from heaven — that signs are for the unbelieving. (1
Cor. xiv. 22.) What do they then in a Christendom 1 It may indeed
be answered, that in it are unbelievers still ; yet not in the sense in
which St. Paul uses the word, for he would designate not the positively
unbelieving,' not those that in heart and will are estranged from the
truth, but the negatively, and that, because the truth has never yet
sufficiently accredited itself to them. Signs are not for the positively
unbelieving, since as we have seen, they will exercise no power over
those who harden themselves against the truth ; such will resist them
as surely as they will resist every other witness of God's presence in
the world ; but for the unbelieving who are such by no fault of their
own — for them to whom the truth is now coming for the first time.
And if not even for them now, — as they exist, for instance, in a heathen
land, — we may sufficiently account for this by the fact that the Church
of Christ, with its immense and evident superiorities of all kinds over
every thing with which it is brought in contact, and some portions of
which superiority every man must recognize, is itself now the great
witness and proof of the truth which it delivers. That truth, therefore,
has no longer need to vindicate itself by an appeal to something else ;
but the position which it has won in the very forefront of the world is
itself its vindication now — is sufficient to give it a first claim on every
man's attention.

And then further, all that we might ourselves beforehand presume
from the analogy of external things leads us to the same conclusions.
We find all beginning to be wonderful — to be under laws different
from, and higher than, those which regulate ulterior progress. Thus
the powers evermore at work for the upholding the natural world are
manifestly insufficient for its first creation ; there were other which
must have presided at its birth, but which now, having done their work,
have fallen back, and left it to its ordinary development. The multi-
tudinous races of animals which people this world, and of plants which
clothe it, needed infinitely more for their first production than suffices
for their present upholding. It is only according to the analogies of
that which thus every where surrounds us. to presume that it was even
so with the beginnings of the spiritual creation — the Christian Church.



WITH OTHER CYCLES OF MIRACLES. 45

It is unquestionably so in the beginning of that new creation in any
single heart. Then, in the regeneration, the strongest tendencies of the
old nature are overborne; the impossible has become possible, in some
measure easy ; by a mighty wonder-stroke of grace the polarity in the
man is shifted ; the flesh, that was the positive pole, has become the
negative, and the spirit, which was before the negative, is henceforth
the positive. Shall we count it strange, then, that the coming in of a
new order, not into a single heart, but into the entire world — a new
order bui'sting forcibly through tlie bonds and hindrances of the old,
should have been wonderful ? It had been inexplicable if it had been
otherwise. The son of Joseph might have lived and died and done no
miracles: but the Virgin-born, the Son of the Most Highest, himself
the middle point of all wonder, — for him to have done none, herein,
indeed, had been the most marvellous thing of all.

But this new order, having not only declared but constituted itself,
having asserted that it is not of any inevitable necessity bound by the
heavy laws of the old, henceforth submits itself in outward things, and
for the present time, to those laws. All its true glory, which is its in-
ward glory, it retains ; but these powers, which are not the gift — for
Christ himself is the gift — but the signs of the gift, it foregoes. They
were as the proclamation that the king was mounting his throne ; yet
the king is not proclaimed every day, but only at his accession : when
he sits acknowledged on his throne, the proclamation ceases. They
were as the bright clouds which gather round, and announce the sun at
his first appearing : his mid-day splendor, though as full, and indeed
fuller, of light and heat, knows not those bright heralds of his rising.
That it has had these wonders — that its first birth was, like that of its
wondrous Founder, wonderful — of this the Church preserves a record
and attestation in its Scriptures of truth. The miracles recorded there
live for the Church ; they are as much present witnesses for Christ to
us now as to them who actually saw them with their eyes. For they
were done once, that they might be believed always — that we, having
in the Gospels the living representation of our Lord's life portrayed for
us, might as surely believe that he was the ruler of nature, the healer
of the body, the Lord of life and of death, as though we had actually
ourselves seen him allay a storm, or heal a leper, or raise one dead.

Moreover, a very large proportion of the later miracles presented to
our belief bear inward marks of spu piousness. The miracles of Scrip-
ture, — and among these, not so much the miracles of the Old Covenant
as the miracles of Christ and his apostles, being the miracles of that
highest and latest dispensation under which we live — we have a right to
consider as normal, in their chief features at least, for all future mira-



4G THE EVANGELICAL, COMPARED

cles, if such were to continue in the Church. The details, the local
coloring, may be different, and there were no need to be perplexed at
such a difference appearing ; yet the later must not be, in their inner
spirit, totally unlike the earlier, or they carry the sentence of condem-
nation on their front. They must not, for instance, lead us back under
the bondage of the senses, while those other were ever framed to release
from that bondage. They must not be aimless and objectless, fantastic
freaks of power, while those had every one of thorn a meaning, and dis-
tinct ethical aim — were bridges by which Ciirist found access from
men's bodies to their souls, — manifestations of his glory, that men might
be drawn to the glory itself. Tliey must not be ludicrous and gro-
tesque, saintly jests, wliilc those were evermore reverend and solemn
and awful. And lastly, they must not be seals and witnesses to aught
which the conscience, enlightened by the Woi'd and Spirit of God, —
whereunto is the ultimate appeal, and which stands above the miracle,
and not beneath it, — protests against as untrue, (the innumerable Romish
miracles which attest transubstantiation,) or as error largely mingling
with the truth, (the miracles which go to uphold the whole Romish sys-
tem,) those other having set their seal only to the absolutely true. Mira-
cles such as any of these, we are bound, by all which we hold most
sacred, by all which the Word of God has taught us, to reject and to re-
fuse. It is for the reader, tolerably acquainted with the church-history
of the middle ages, to judge how many of its miracles will, if these tests
be acknowledged and applied, at once fall away, and come no more
even into consideration.*



* The results are singularly curious, which sometimes are come to through the fol-
lowing up to their first sources the biographies of eminent Romish saints. Tholuck
has done so in regard of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier ; and to him ( Verm.
Schrift., pp. £0 — 57,) I am mainly indebted for the materials of the following note. —
There are few, perhaps, who have been surrounded with such a halo of wonders as
the two great pillars of the order of the Jesuits, Loyola and Xavier. Upwards of two
hundred miracles of Loyola were laid before the Pope, when his canonization was in
question, — miracles beside which, those of our Lord shrink into insignificance. If
Christ by his word and look rebuked and expelled demons, Ignatius did the same by a
letter. If Christ walked once upon the sea, Ignatius many times in the air. If Ciirist,
by his shining countenance and glistening garments, once amazed his disciples, Igna-
tius did it frequently ; and, entering into dark chambers, could, by his presence, light
them up as with candles. If the sacred history tells of three persons whom Christ
raised from the dead, the number which Xavier raised exceeds ail count. In like
manner, the miracles of his great namesake of Assisi rivalled, when they did not leave
behind, those of Christ. The author of the Liber Conformitattnn, writing of him less
than a century after his death, brings out these conformities of the Master and the
servant ; Hie sicut Jesus aquam in vinuni couvertit, panes multiplicavit, et de navicul&



WITH OTHER CYCLES OF MIRACLES. 47

Very interesting is it to observe how the men who in some sort fell
in with the prevailing tendencies of their age. (for, indeed, who escapes
them ?) yet did ever, in their higher moods, with a truest Christian in-

in medio fluctuum maris miraculosfe immota, per se a terrS abducta, docuit turbas au-
dientes in littore. Huic omnis creatura quasi ad nutum videbatur parere, ac si in ipso
esset status innocentiae restitutus. Et ut caetera taceam : csdcos illuminavit ; surdos,
claudos, paralyticos, omnium infirmitatum generibus laborantes curavit, leprosos mun-
davit ; daemones effugavit ; captives eripuit ; naufragis succurrit, et qukm plures mor-
tuos suscitavit. (Gieseler, Lehrhuch der Kirchengeschichte, v. 2, part 2, p. 355.

But to return to Ignatius, and the historic evidence of his miracles. Ribadeneira,
'rom early youth his scholar and companion, published, fifteen years after his death,
that is in 1572, a life of his departed master and friend ; which book appeared again
in 1587, augmented with many additional circumstances communicated by persons
who had lived in familiar intercourse with Ignatius while living, and who had most
intimate opportunities of being acquainted with all the facts of his life (gravissimi viri
et Ignatio valde familiares). Now it is sufficiently remarkable that neither in the first,
nor yet in the second so greatly enlarged and corrected edition, does the slightest trace
of a miracle appear. On the contrary, the biographer enters into a lengthened discus-
sion of the reasons why it did not please God that any signal miracle should be wrought
by this eminent servant of his: — Bed dicat ahquis, si haec vera sunt, ut profecto sunt,
quid causae est, quam ob rem illius sanctitas minus est testata miraculis, et, ut multo-
rum Sanctorum vita, signis declarata, virtutumque operationibus insignita 1 Cui ego ;
Quis cognovit sensum Domini, aut quis conciliarius ejus fiiit ? Ille enim est qui facit
mirabilia magna solus, propterea illius tantummodo infinita virtute fieri possunt, qus-
cumque aut naturas vim aut moduni excedunt. Et ut solus ille haec potest efficere,
ita ille solus novit, quo loco, quo tempore miracula et quorum precibus facienda sint.
Sed tamen neque omnes sancti viri miraculis excelluerunt ; neque qui illorum aut mag-
nitudine praestiterunt, aut copia idcirco reliquos sanctitate superarunt. Non enim
sanctitas cujusque signis, sed caritate aestimanda est. Two years before the appear-
ance of the second edition of this work, that is, in 1585, Maffei, styled the Jesuit Livy,
published at Rome his work, De Vita et morihus S. Ignatii Loyola Lihri tres ; and
neither in this is aught related of the great founder of the Order, which deserves the
name of a miracle, however there may be here some nearer approach to such than in
the earlier biography — remarkable intimations, as of the death or recovery of friends,
glimpses of their beatified state, ecstatic visions in which Christ appeared to him ;
and even of these, the list is introduced in a half apologetic tone, which shows that
he has by no means thoroughly convinced himself of the historic accuracy of those
things which he is about to relate : Non pauca de eodem admirabilia priEdicantur, quo-
rum aliqua nobis hoc loco exponere visum est.

But with miracles infinitely more astounding and more numerous the Romish
church has surrounded his great scholar, Francis Xavier. Miracles were as his daily
food ; to raise the dead was as common as to heal the sick. Even the very boys who
served him as catechists received and exercised a similar power of working wonders.
Now there are, I believe, no historic documents whatever, laying claim to an ordinary
measure of credibility, which profess to vouch for these. And in addition to thi.'?, we
have a series of letters written by this great apostle to the heathen, out of the midst of
his work in the far East, {S. Fravcisci Xaverii Epistolarum Lihri tres. Pragae,



48 THE EVANGELICAL, COMPARED

sight, witness against those very tendencies by which thev, with the
rest of their contemporaries, were more or less borne away. Thus was
it with regard to the over-valuing of miracles, the counting them the
ooly evidences of an exalted sanctity. Against this what a continual
testimony in all ages of the Church was borne ; not, indeed, sufficient