"Perhaps," he writes, "the breaking heart grasps at the Bible; it has only spikes and nails, but no balm of consolation. Perhaps the dying man calls in those who have the care of souls; the words of comfort slide over the ears, while the Holy Spirit seals none of them upon the heart. Perhaps he partakes of the Holy Supper; yet the feast is to him not a feast of blessings, but an eating of judgment. Perhaps he prays to the Lord himself: the Lord answers, 'I know you not.'

"Oh, it is sad to be so near Heaven, and yet to be lost-to be almost saved, and yet altogether lost. Were it not the Lord who speaks here, Jesus Christ, the Life Eternal, the Judge of the living and the dead, our feeling would be mightily to resist the terrible conclusion of this Parable, which cuts all and every hope clean away, and leaves not an If or a But behind, nor any other possible interpretation. But He speaks; and before His words every mouth is silent in fear and adoration. He writes into our breast with a glowing iron pen the warning word-therefore "Watch: for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh.' Short is life; fleeting is time; quick is death; long is eternity. Therefore what thou desirest to do, do it quickly."

But let us not forget, however solemn

this warning of the Parable may be, it is nevertheless designed to win. The Lord by "the terrors of the law" would "persuade men." The voice from an open Heaven

season:

refuses to promise any grace to those who, deceiving themselves with a nominal profession, are secretly and really delaying the soul's decision for God till a "convenient " but that same voice proffers all grace now. "The end of the foolish virgins is unveiled in order that we may be wise unto salvation in the beginning of our days." "The lighthouse reared on a sunken reef flings its lurid glare far through a stormy air and over a stormy sea, not to teach the mariner how to act with vigour when he is among the breakers, but to warn him back, so that he may never fall among the breakers at all. Even so the end of the lost is revealed in the Word of God, not to urge us to utter a very loud cry when the door is shut, but to compel us to enter now while the door is open."

The Gospel is thus in this Parable. It places before the eye of faith the true Bridegroom of the Church, who "loved it and gave Himself for it." And, if we learn to say, "He loved me and gave Himself for me," we shall be of the number of those who "love His appearing;" and, loving His appearing, we shall not fail to watch for His coming.

A

N Englishman likes in a general way to have his finger in every pie. In the rough impetuosity of his character, or in the pride of his island home, or in the belief of the superiority of his own beloved institutions, he thinks it his privilege and duty to express, at least within the circle of his own friends, his approval or disapproval of the proceedings of his neighbours. But at Christmas time, surrounded by his boys and girls from school, and shut in with his curtains drawn down, and his fire blazing on his comfortable hearth, he is content, for the nonce, to dismiss all reference to the events of either foreign or domestic politics.

Christmas and the things of Christmas alone occupy his mind. His thoughts are for a brief interval concentrated on the reunion of families, the gathering of friends, the interchange of good wishes, the oblivion of petty offences, the opportunity for reconciliation, the general amnesty of trifling grievances which have arisen either from a temporary misinterpretation of actions or from the frailties of human imperfection, and on the sympathy extended to poorer neighbours. Recollections, too, of the past, remembrances of old friends, of departed relatives, and of long-forgotten circumstances, blend themselves in happy conjunction with the enjoyment of the present, and help to enhance the value and to impart a keener

relish to the realization of existing blessings.

Christmas thus observed is an exclusively English institution. No other nation under the wide canopy of heaven honours it with a like commemoration. In France and in other foreign countries the observances of New Year's Day eclipse the solemnities of Christmas; that is, the flight of time, the inauguration of a new civil year, supersede in the popular mind the deeper obligations of the Christian festival. This is pre-eminently the case in Scotland, where Christmas obtains the least possible amount of consideration, and New Year's Day alone finds a place in the habits and rejoicings of the people. America, too, has lost much of the pure religious feeling with which this anniversary is kept in the mother country; while the very expression of good wishes on New Year's Day, yet so effective in Old England as being confined to friends and neighbours, loses much of its value and significancy in the United States by its being degraded into a mere ceremony of hurried and unmeaning visits. Long may our present national mode of observing Christmas be continued and preserved, as bearing witness to two valuable points in our national character -viz., the importance we attribute to the element of family and domestic life as stereotyped amongst us, and the firm hold which the objective truths of religion retain upon the national mind. Any other observance of Christmas than that which prevails would imply a diminution of these two distinct peculiarities, the retention of which gives strength and excellence to our national characteristics.

All honour, then, to all that tends to give dignity and pre-eminence to this high festival. Our kings and princes, it is true, no longer hold their Christmas entertainments in public, nor sit with their crowns upon their heads at the feasts provided with courtly pomp for their great nobles and retainers; but yet there are many outward emblems of national festivity which mark out this season with tokens of special honours. The temporary cessation of the current of business, the universal holiday, the ornamentation of houses and decoration of churches, the more largely exercised charity, the extended interchange of sympathy between rich and poor, are all signs and symbols of a festival fraught with elements of good, and laden with healthy and healing influences. If too many exclude from their thoughts the idea of promoting, in their obser

vance of this festival, the "glory of God," yet do they promote, even unconsciously to themselves, "peace on earth, and goodwill towards men."

Many of the most curious of our ancien: legends are connected with our national observance of this festival. The Glastonbury Thorn, for instance (which, according to popular belief, originally sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea), was said to bad annually on the 24th of December, to break forth into flower on Christmas Day, and to cease flowering with the twelve days of Christmas. Our great national dramatist, too, bears witness to the kind of religious veneration entertained by the common people for this

season:

"Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long.
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad:
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strik
No fairy takes; no witch hath power to charm;
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time."

Taught by our Reformed Church a purer theology, we are enabled to discard the tra ditions of these legends. Their spirit, however, remains with us. We, like the fabled thorn of Glastonbury, may allow our deeds of charity, our larger alms, our universal loving sympathy, to bud forth and blossom in greater profusion, and may assist in contributing to the wants and in mitigating the sufferings of those around us. We may realise the blessed influences of this season in our forgiveness of wrongs, in our reconciliation with those from whom we may be temporarily estranged, in our heaping coals of fire on the heads of enemies by deeds of kindness and liberality. We may be grateful for that light of an open Bible and of a pure Scriptural faith which at once enables us to reject all profane fables and superstitious observances, and yet teaches us to commemo rate "the hallowed and gracious time" of our Christmas festival by deeds of charity, and by the exercise of a wise and wide beneficence.

The season thus employed will ever abound in blessing, and in streams of refreshing comfort to our land. It will not only tend to the union of families, the promotion of friendships. the growth of a general goodwill; but it will assist the counsels of the statesman and the plans of the philanthropist, in softening class prejudices and party animosities, in narrowing the chasm between the rich and poor, and in

binding together the various classes of society by ties of mutual obligation in the bestowal and reception of kindnesses.

All honour, then, we repeat, to our English method of celebrating this festival. At every

fireside gathering may peace and joy and love be Christmas guests, and every good wish be realized which we can frame for ourselves or for our friends.

G. F. T.

CHAPTER X.

MIRACLES.

"Truth incontestable! in spite of all

A Bayle has preached, or a Voltaire believed.” YOUNG. HAT is a miracle? A contradiction. An impossibility. A violation of the law of nature. Nature is a miracle. Everything is a miracle. There is no miracle. There cannot be a miracle. It would be a miracle if there were a miracle.

A strange tangle truly. And yet these are but a tithe of the contradictions so loudly and incessantly vociferated when we speak of the Christian miracles as attesting the claims of Christianity. Let us examine them. They cannot all be true (without a miracle!) But is there any truth in any of them?

"Things done in a hurry are seldom done well." But it is in the highest degree desirable that our examination of this subject should be "thorough." It should be thoroughly well done, because done once for all. The truth of the Christian miracles is a foundation-truth; and we cannot always be relaying the foundation. Nor can we submit to be liable to continual alarm for the safety of our superstructare, imperilled (according to the alarmists) by the insecurity of our foundation. We will, therefore, take measures to be thoroughly satisfied on that head, once for all.

And, first, as to the meaning of the controverted word. Dr. Samuel Clarke defines a miracle to be "A work effected in a manner unusual, or different from the common and regular method of Providence, by the interposition of God Himself, or of some intelligent agent superior to man, for the proof or evidence of some particular doctrine, or in attestation of the authority of some particular person." Other definitions shall be noticed as

we proceed, but this is quite sufficient to start with.

It may be asked, however, Wherein does the miracle differ from the ordinary course of nature? For that, too, is wonderful. The fact that it is a marvel of continual recurrence may rob it of our admiration; we may be accustomed to regard it with a dull, incurious eye; yet, not the less on that account, does it remain a marvel still.

To this question it has been replied that, since all is thus marvellous-since the growing gress, the springing seed, the rising sun, are as much the result of powers which we cannot trace or measure, as the water turned into wine, or the sick healed by a word, or the blind restored to vision by a touch-there is therefore no such thing as a miracle, eminently so called. We have no right (it is said), in the mighty and complex miracle of nature which encircles us on every side, to separate arbitrarily a few facts, and say that these are wonders, and all the rest mere processes of nature. We must confine ourselves to one language or the other, and say either that all is miracle or none.

But this, however deep and true it may at first sight seem, is, notwithstanding, most shallow and fallacious. In itself, and in its purposes, there is abundantly sufficient to distinguish the iniraculous (so called) from the ordinary. Nindeed that we can admit the distinction sometimes made, that in the miracle God is working immediately, while in other events He is leaving the work to the operation of the laws which He has established. For this distinction has its root in a dead, mechanical view of the universe, altogether opposed to the truth. The clockmaker makes his clock and leaves it; the shipbuilder launches his ship, and others navigate it; but the world is no mere piece of curious mechanism, to be dis

missed from its Maker's hands as soon as it has been constructed, and only from time to time to be reviewed and repaired. Apart from that vital energy by which it is sustained, and that active superintendence by which it is governed, the world would at once sink not merely into that chaos, but even into that nothingness, from which it sprang. Without the constant operation of that parent Spirit who "renews the face of the earth," all created things must "die and return to their dust." HE-none less, and none other, without pause and without cessation-still "upholdeth all things by the word of His power." And thus He speaks, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work."‡ And to speak of laws of nature," and even "laws of God" (in the same sense), is to surrender ourselves to an illusion of lan. guage, and to hide the real verity from our own eyes. Laws of God exist only for us. But, viewed in relation to Himself, all His laws are simply the expression of His Will. Augustine was right: "It is the will of God that constitutes the nature of things."§ Each "law of Nature" is merely what we have learned concerning His Wil! in that particular region of its activity. To say, then, that there is more of the will of God in a miracle than in any other work of His is incorrect. Shall we attempt to magnify the miracle, as a manifestation of the presence and power of God, by depreciating that manifestation which is furnished in the ordinary processes of nature? By no means. All is wonder. To make a man is at least as great a marvel as to raise a man from the dead. The seed that multiplies in the furrow is as marvellous as the bread that multiplied in Christ's hands. Wherein, then, lies the difference? In this: the difference of manifestation.

THE miracle is not a GREATER manifestation of God's power than those ordinary and everrepeated processes; but it is a DIFFERENT manifestation.

By those, God is speaking to all men, always, and everywhere. They are a vast revelation of Him. "The invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead." || Yet this language, from its very vastness and universality, may miss its aim. It has no speciality. It lacks peculiar

Ps. civ. 29, 30.
+ Heb. i. 3.
John. v. 17.
"De Civitate Dei," 21, 8; "Dei voluntas natura rerum

est."

Rom, i. 20.

and personal significance. But the miracle, claiming the special attention of those in whose sight it is wrought, speaks to them in particular. The voice which in nature speaks to all the world, now addresses itself directly to them, and singles them out from the crowd. It is plain that God has now a peculiar word to which they are to give heed—a message to which He is bidding them listen.

There belongs, therefore, to the essence of miracle, an extraordinary Divine causality. The unresting activity of God, which at other times hides and conceals itself behind the veil of what we term natural laws, is in the miracle unveiled. It steps out from its concealment, and the hand which works is laid bare. Beside and beyond the ordinary operations of nature, higher powers intrude and make themselves felt; higher, not as coming from a higher source, but as bearing upon higher ends.

Yet while thus affirming it to be of the very essence of a miracle that it should be "a new thing in the earth," we may not overlook the fact that the natural itself may become miraculous to us, by the way in which it is timed, or the ends which it is made to serve. There may be in it so remarkable a convergence of many unconnected causes to a single end; it may so meet a crisis in the lives of men, or in the onward march of the kingdom of God, that, while plainly deducible from natural causes, we may be justified in terming it a—providential, though not an absolute-miracle. In other words, the natural may be lifted up into the miraculous, either by a peculiarity in the time of its occurrence, or by the purposes which it is made to fulfil. It thus becomes a 'wonder" for us, when not a wonder in itself -a subjective, though not an objective miracle.

66

For example: there was nothing miraculous in the simple fact that swarms of flies should infest the houses of the Egyptians, or that flights of locusts should strip their fields, or that a murrain should destroy their cattle. But the occurrence of all these plagues, their intensity, the manner and order of their suc cession, their close connexion with the word of Moses which foretold them; with Pharaoh's trial, then proceeding; with Israel's deliver ance, then approaching; their sudden and extra-natural disappearance, not less than their unavoidable infliction,-these are the par

* But not opposed to them. In the language of the greatest theologians, præter naturam, and super naturam, but never contra naturam.

ticulars which procured for them their Scriptural designation of "the signs and wonders of Egypt." It is no absolute miracle to find a coin in a fish's mouth,† or that a lion should meet a man and slay him,‡ or that a thunderstorm should happen at an unusual period of the year. Yet these circumstances may be so timed for strengthening faith, for punishing disobedience, for awakening repentance; they may serve such high moral purposes in God's moral government, that we at once, and justly, range them in the catalogue of miracles without waiting for a minute discrimination between the miracle absolute and the miracle providential. Especially have such events a right to their place among miracles strictly so called, when, as in each of the forementioned instances, the final event is the seal of a Divine message; for then they claim that place as prophecy, i. e., as miracles of foreknowledge if not as miracles of power.||

To all this, however, the enemies of Christianity have a very short answer. Despising all definitions and deriding all distinctions, they pertinaciously assert that " all miracles are impossible." And thus they pretend to prove

it

"Our modern world, after centuries of research, has attained a conviction that all things are linked together by a chain of causes and effects which suffer no interruption. The totality of finite things forms a vast circle, which, except that it owes its existence and laws to a superior power, suffers no intrusion from without. This conviction is so much a habit of thought in the modern world, that in actual life the belief in immediate Divine agency is at once attributed to ignorance or imposture. . . . . The proposition that God acts sometimes mediately, and sometimes immediately, upon the world, introduces a changeableness, and therefore a temporal element into the nature of His action. Now, since our idea of God requires an immediate, and our idea of the world a mediate, Divine operation, and since the idea of combination of the two spheres of action is inadmissible, nothing remains for us but to regard them both as so permanently and immoveably united, that this operation is for ever and everywhere twofold, both mediate and immediate; so that + Matt. xvii. 27. § 1 Sam. xii. 16, 19.

Psalm 1xxviii. 43; Acts. vii. 36. 1 Kings xiii. 24.

Archbishop Trench's "Notes on the Miracles of our

Lord." Preliminary Essay, p. 14.

we must say-God acts upon the world as a whole immediately; but on each part, only by means of His action on every other part; that is to say, by the laws of nature."*

Such is Dr. Strauss's statement of those ripe results of German metaphysics by which its able and laborious professors have tied up the hands of the Most High God Himself, and reasoned away all His power ever to work a miracle again. Their decree is just as absolute, and more severe, than that procured by the Persian satraps; and if Daniel were sentenced a second time to the den of lions, neither God nor angel could be suffered to interfere for his deliverance. The reasoning which achieves this mighty result is so ambitious as to grasp the whole universe, and the vast circle of "the whole totality of finite things."

Without daring to follow it in this lofty flight, let us try its consistency in an easier form, just as astronomers work out the law of gravitation in the problem of two and three bodies. Let A, B, C, stand for three parts, which compose the whole universe. Now the theory is this: that God acts on A, only through the medium of His action on B and C.; on B, only through His action on A and C; and on C, only by his action on A and B. Every one of the three is further from Him than the two others, since He acts on it only through the medium of His action upon them.

Or, to vary the illustration: there are three individuals, the first in succession of our race -Adam, Cain, and Enoch. We wish to account for their existence, without the admission that all were created-which is fanatical-or that one was created, and the others derived from him by natural generationwhich is both fanatical and partial. So we invent the ingenious hypothesis that each of them is both grandfather and father to the two others. All the three are thus immediately from the hand of God; but each one of them is from Him only by his being son and grandson with two others. Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum, and I will move the earth;" and verily these German metaphysicians have found out a singular fulcrum whereby to uproot the Gospel from its foundations in real history and consign it for ever to the land of dreams.† Here, for the present, however, we must pause.

"Leben Jesu;" vol. i., pp. 71–73.

+ Rev. T. R. Birks' "Modern Rationalism," pp. 14–17.