To revive in the world, what the world had wellnigh lost, the consciousness of God: to sacrifice His outward life, that He might so pass, in this self-revealing consciousness, into the inward life of men: to build up on this basis, and none other, that kingdom of God which is at once outside us and within us :such, and no less, was the divine plan of Christ.

In connexion with what I have ventured to call 'the divine plan' of Christ, there is another point which must be carefully borne in mind by one who would rightly understand the Gospel narrative. It is this :— Christ came to be the subject, rather than the author, of Christianity.

Christianity, as a religion and as a church, dates, not from Christmas, nor yet from the Ministry, but from Pentecost. It was the work of the Third, rather than of the Second Person of the ever-blessed Trinity. Our Lord came to redeem the world, and to atone for sin. He had a baptism of suffering to be baptized with; and till that was accomplished, His teaching and His ministry were straitened (Luke xii. 50).

This straitening of Christ in His ministry—as one speaking to men still under the old, not yet under the new, dispensation, with much need therefore of reserve-must be borne in mind by all readers of our Lord's discourses. It explains too the often repeated charge not to make Him known.

When once He was exalted to God's right hand, all need of this reserve ceased. It is to the later books of the New Testament, therefore, rather than to the Gospels, that we must look for the development of the doctrine and organization of the Church.

THE

CHAPTER IV

On Our Lord's Miracles

HE common objection to the credibility of miracles, as old as Hume and older, is this :A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as all human experience has established the constancy of those laws, it must always be more likely that testimony should be mistaken than that a miracle should have occurred.

The answer is a very simple one:-A miracle is not 'a violation of the laws of nature;' it is simply the revelation of a superhuman agent, possessing superhuman powers, and therefore not included under the rules generalized from human experience1.

To one who believes in the existence of such a superhuman Agent, and in the probability of His willing to make a special revelation of Himself to mankind, this answer must be entirely satisfactory.

Without going further, therefore, into this question, let us humbly and reverently endeavour to draw out the chief lessons which our Lord's miracles were designed to teach.

1 It is much to be regretted that the writer of the article on Miracles in Aids to Faith should inadvertently have used the phrase, introduction of a new agent, possessing new powers.' The novelty was not the presence of a Ďivine Power in the world, but the revelation of it.

Our Lord's miracles were revelations. A revelation is the lifting of a veil. Our Lord, in these miracles, lifted a veil, as it were; and allowed mankind to see, what had ever been going on behind it, the working of Divine Power. It was but for a few short years. The veil was then again lowered. And the Church was thenceforth required to believe by faith, what had been thus revealed, the continued working of the Divine Power behind the veil.

That Christ should be able thus to lift the veil, or (to drop the metaphor) to give men these new experiences, was a clear proof of His divinity. For no mere man could do it. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin but now have they both seen and hated both Me and My Father.'

To identify Himself with His Father, by showing that He could do visibly what His Father was ever doing invisibly, was doubtless the first great purpose of Christ's miracles. So far from wishing men to regard His miracles as contrary to the laws of nature, Christ was careful to teach the very opposite lesson —the perfect harmony of His mode of working, in these miracles, with God's mode of working in what is called the ordinary course of nature:-' My Father worketh hitherto, and I work ;' 'The Son can do nothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do; for what things soever the Father doeth, these things doeth the Son likewise.'

Instead, therefore, of presuming to say, 'I understand God's ordinary mode of working in nature, and these miracles of Christ are quite unlike it, and therefore incredible :'-let us rather confess that there is much of mystery in nature, and see what light these

miracles of Christ may throw upon it. And that they do throw a most blessed light on what, after all, we most wish to know about this world in which we live, will more and more appear, the more attentively we study them.

Our Lord's miracles, with this view, may be conveniently divided into three groups :—

I. The great draughts of fishes, the calming of the storm, the withering of the fig-tree. These miracles, it will be observed, involve nothing new, but only a providential arrangement of natural events. For shortness' sake, they may be called 'providential.

II. The walking on the sea, the change of water into wine, the multiplication of the loaves, the cure of infirmities humanly speaking incurable. Here a new and strange experience was introduced; all these miracles belonged to the world of nature, and yet were beside nature,-men had never seen the like before. They may be called, for shortness, 'preternatural.

III. The expulsion of demons, and the recall of the departed human spirit. These miracles, as belonging to a world above and beyond the world of nature, may most properly be termed 'supernatural.

Now let us endeavour to learn the three lessons taught severally by these three classes of miracles.

I. Of the miracles of the first class it has been already remarked that they involved in their results nothing new or foreign to our ordinary experience. Often and often before had men's efforts to obtain their livelihood been unusually prospered, storms calmed, fruits of the earth blighted. Such occurrences were common. But men had observed, or thought they had observed, indications of design, of

moral purpose, in these occurrences. Was it so, or was it not? If it was so, then the world was governed not by chance or fate, but by a personal Providence; and if so, prayer was a possibility.

Clearly a momentous question; and one to which it was highly probable that Christ would give an answer. And how better could Christ answer it, than by giving a specimen of such special providence, in which, not only the result, but also He who willed that result, should be visible? And this was precisely what Christ did in this first group of miracles: -'Lord save us, we perish!' Often and often before had the prayer been uttered to One unseen, in the hope that such an unseen One was ruling the event. But here the whole process was laid bare, and the special providence stood revealed :-' And He arose, and rebuked the wind, and the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.'

Let none say that such special providences are incompatible with the constancy of nature's laws. This world of ours is like an organ,-not a barrel-organ (to which the fatalist would liken it), but a key-board organ,- -on which, without violating one of those laws under which the forces of the organ act, the organist may play what melody he will; the wish of a child may change the tune. Even so this system of forces, to which we give the name of nature, is sufficiently elastic (as we know by daily experience) to allow room for our free will,—and if for man's free will, then much more for God's free will,—and if so, then for special providence and prayer.

Such, we may reverently believe, was the special lesson about nature revealed in this first group of our Lord's miracles.