Books of Moses, or of David, or of Solomon, or Isaiah, or Daniel, or Matthew, or Paul, or John? These authors are all old, but they are always new. Why, their very words are as weighty, as powerful, as confidently appealed to now as ever, and far more widely read than at any previous time. The path of the Bible is not, like the path of the infidel book, a steep descent to dark oblivion; but it is like the path of those who are justified by its faith, which "is as a shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day." (Dr. Monro Gibson.)

WHAT THE BIBLE IS AND DOES.

"A nation must be truly blessed, if it were governed by no other laws than those of this blessed Book. It is so complete a system that nothing can be added to it or taken from it. It contains every thing needful to be known or done. It affords a copy for a king, and a rule for a subject. It gives instruction and counsel to a senate; authority and direction for a magistrate. It cautions a witness, requires an impartial verdict of a jury, and furnishes the judge with a sentence. It sets the husband as lord of the household, and the wife as mistress of the table; tells him how to rule, and her how to manage. It entails honor to parents, and enjoins obedience upon children. It prescribes and limits the sway of the sovereign, the rule of the ruler, and the authority of the master; commands the subjects to honor, and the servants to obey; and promises the blessing and protection of its Author to all that walk by its rule. It gives directions for weddings and for burials. It promises food and raiment, and limits the use of both. It points out a faithful and eternal Guardian to the departing husband and father; tells him with whom to leave the fatherless children, and in whom his widow is to trust; and promises a father to the former, and a husband to the latter. It teaches a man how to set his house in order, and how to make his will. It defends the right of all, and reveals vengeance to every defrauder, overreacher, and oppressor. It is the first book, the best book, and the oldest book in the world. It contains the choicest matter; gives the best mysteries that were ever penned. It brings the best of tidings, and affords the best of comfort to the inquiring and disconsolate. It exhibits life and immortality, and shows the way to everlasting glory. It is a brief recital of all that is past, and a certain prediction of all that is to come. It settles all matters in debate, resolves all doubts, and eases the mind and conscience of all these scruples. It reveals the only living and true God, and shows the way to him; and sets aside all other gods, and

describes the vanity of them, and of all that trust in them. In short, it is a book of laws, to show right and wrong; a book of wisdom, that condemns all folly, and makes the foolish wise; a book of truth, that detects all lies, and confutes all errors; and a book of life, and shows the way from everlasting death. It is the most compendious book in the world; the most authentic and the most entertaining history that ever was published. It contains the most early antiquities, strange events, wonderful occurrences, heroic deeds, unparalleled wars. It describes the celestial, terrestrial, and infernal worlds, and the origin of the angelic myriads, human tribes, and infernal legions. It will instruct the most accomplished mechanic and the profoundest artist. It will teach the best rhetorician, and exercise every power of the most skillful arithmetician; puzzle the wisest anatomist, and exercise the nicest critic. It corrects the vain philosopher, and exposes the subtile sophist. It is a complete code of laws, a perfect body of divinity, an unequaled narrative; a book of lives, a book of travels, and a book of voyages." (Anonymous.)

PROOF FROM MIRACLES.

The proof from miracles is highly encouraging to faith. Yet it should be remembered that Christianity does not rest on miracle; it contains miracle and has employed miracle for ends more or less important. When the proof of miracles is denied to Christianity, as Chateaubriand observes, the sublimity of its morality will still remain, in the diffusion of its blessings, in the beauty of its ceremonies, to afford adequate proof that it is the most heavenly religion, and the purest worship which mankind ever observed. Christianity is perfect, and men are imperfect. Perfection can never issue out of imperfection. Christianity, then, does not come from man. If it is not from man, it must be from God. If it is from God, it must have come to man by a revelation. Then Christianity is a revelation from God.

"If we ask ourselves why we believe, we shall find the miracles occupying but a very small place among our foundations. We shall, after criticism has taken away all that it finds defective, have left a history of beliefs and characters, of truths and holy men, of conflicts with toil and self sacrificing devotion, in which we unfeignedly believe. We shall also find in our hearts a force not ineffectually striving to make us better, purer, truer, manlier; and this force we shall connect in our thinking with the man Christ Jesus. Here there are two immense foundation-stones-the old perpetuated faith of Abraham and Spur

geon, and our own humble personal faith. It is probable that on these all believers-real believers-have always rested during the Christian era."*

Belief in miracles is not as taxing to faith as some people imagine. True faith expects just such occurrences. It would be more surprised without them than with them. "It seems to me," says George MacDonald, "that it needs no great power of faith to believe in the miracles; for true faith is a power, not a mere yielding. There are far harder things to believe than the miracles; for a man is not required to believe in them save as believing in Jesus. If a man can believe that there is a God, he may well believe that, having made creatures capable of hungering and thirsting for him, he must be capable of speaking a word to guide them in their feeling after him."

But what is a miracle? We must have an accurate definition, for much depends upon it. Skeptics define a miracle to be "a violation of the laws of nature." Then they proceed to show that those laws are never violated; and, hence, miracles never happen, and are impossible. The definition is primarily at fault. Christians are as firm believers as any in the stability of the laws of nature. They yield to no skeptic on earth in their conviction of the reign of law. But they have a different and a better view of the character of that reign, and a true apprehension of the power of the Lawgiver.

Let us cite an authority or two as to the nature of a miracle. Archbishop Trench says: "We should term the miracle not the infraction of a law, but behold in it the lower law neutralized, and for the time put out of working by a higher; and of this abundant analogous examples are evermore going forward before our eyes. Continually we behold in the world around us lower laws held in restraint by higher, mechanic by dynamic, chemical by vital, physical by moral; yet we may not say, when the lower thus gives place in favor of the higher, that there was any violation of law, or that any thing contrary to nature came to pass; rather we acknowledge the law of a greater freedom swallowing up the law of a lesser. Thus, when I lift my arm, the law of gravitation is not, as far as my arm is concerned, denied or annihilated; it exists as much as ever, but is held in suspense by the higher law of my will. The chemical laws which would bring about decay in animal substances still subsist, even when they are checked and hindered by the salt which keeps those substances from corruption. The law of sin in a regenerate man is held in continual check by the law of the spirit of life; yet it is in his members still, not

* President D. H. Wheeler, D. D., LL. D.

indeed working, for a mightier law has stepped in and now holds it in abeyance, but still there, and ready to work did that higher law cease from its more effectual operation. What in each of these cases is wrought may be against one particular law, that law being contemplated in its isolation, and rent away from the complex of laws, whereof it forms only a part. But no law does thus stand alone, and it is not against, but rather in entire harmony with, the system of laws; for the law of those laws is that where powers come into conflict, the weaker shall give place to the stronger, the lower to the higher."

Robertson also sees in a miracle "not the contravention of the laws of nature, but only a higher operation of those same laws, in a form hitherto unseen. A miracle is, perhaps, no more a suspension or contradiction of the laws of nature than a hurricane or a thunderstorm. They who first traveled to tropical latitudes came back with anecdotes of supernatural convulsions of the elements. In truth, it was only that they had never personally witnessed such effects; but the hurricane which swept the waves flat, and the lightning which illuminated all the heavens or played upon the bayonets or masts in lambent flames, were but effects of the very same laws of electricity and meteorology which were in operation at home."

Miracles are the voluntary acts of a personal agent or being. They are not chance occurrences, if, indeed, there be any such thing. They are not the regular play, however sublime and wonderful, of the regular forces of the universe. These may be quite as suggestive of the existence of God as the other; but miracles, as ordinarily understood, they are not. They are well worth contemplating. "When we see the miracle of nature by which the death-like Winter is changed into the season of flowers and foliage and singing birds, of sunshine and rainbows, of zephyrs and sweet air at morning and evening, why should we doubt? Is He who works this miracle for things material and comparatively inconsiderable, unable to keep his promises with his own redeemed children? Is it any harder to raise up a man from the dust, than to clothe the earth with verdure after ice and snow? We are familiar with the one miracle, and not with the other: nothing less than Omnipotence can work either; and when we see that God is constantly working the one, we may be sure he can work the other also."*

But the established order of the natural world is by no means as impenetrable to the touch of personal agents as may be at first supposed. There are exceptions real and numberless to the working of

Bishop A. Cleveland Coxe, D. D., LL. D.

66

natural causes, and these exceptions partake of the nature of the miraculous. 'Every voluntary act," says Rev. Dr. W. D. Wilson, 'every act that arises from spontaneity is of the nature of a miracle; something unforeseen by science, something that can not be accounted for on scientific principles, if we insist upon using the words 'science' and scientific' with exclusive reference to natural science. Something is done for a purpose and with a view to an end such as could not or would not be accomplished in the ordinary course of nature without the intervention of mind, whether by evolution or otherwise. Miracles are the acts of personal agents, and not the products of physical forces. They are in their very nature relative; when there was no living thing, growth and locomotion would have been regarded as both incomprehensible and miraculous, if there had been a crystal capable of intelligence to see and think about such phenomena. So, too, in a world of intelligent beings, where all are deaf the man that could hear would be all the time performing what would be regarded as miraculous. And even any of the phenomena of inanimate matter, if it should occur only once, and we should be unable to assign to it any adequate cause or give it any satisfactory explanation, would be, in the estimation of all men, a miracle. Thus, if we look from mere matter up to animal life, or from the level of mere animal life up to the intelligent voluntary activity of man, we see in either case a region of miracles. Now, omitting for the present the element of rarity and novelty in the occurrence, what we find common to all the events that are or would be called miraculous, is the intervention of a force or being that is higher than that which is found to be active in the region below. What I want to have especially noted is that in all this, so far as we have thus gone, there is no contravention, suspension or violation of the laws of nature, in the phenomena which, as we have seen, would be regarded as miraculous in these various cases. In the phenomena of animal organization and life there is no violation or departure from the laws of chemistry and mechanics, but there is a new force at work combining the elements, and using the laws in ways that have not been. before observed. So in human life and voluntary action, the laws of nature prevail. There is, however, a new force-the human mind-guiding them. And although it can not suspend or counteract those laws, it can give new directions and new combinations to their modes of activity, so that results that could not occur in nature without such an agent are all the while occurring with his presence, and constitute what we regard as the sphere of human action."*

"The Foundations of Religious Belief." (Page 276.)