mainly a military enthusiasm. Men were drawn to it at once, and without conditions, by the splendor of the achievements of its disciples, and it declared an absolute war against all the religions it encountered. Its history, therefore, exhibits nothing of the process of gradual absorption, persuasion, compromise, and assimilation that was exhibited in the dealings of Christianity with barbarians.” And again: “One of the great characteristics of the Koran is the extreme care and skill with which it labors to assist men in realizing the unseen. Descriptions the most minutely detailed, and, at the same time, the most vivid, are mingled with powerful appeals to those sensual passions by which the imagination in all countries, but especially those in which Mohammedism has taken root, is most forcibly influenced."*

When we remember these things, and when we remember, “as modern criticism has shown from the state of the Arab mind and character in the period antecedent to the coming of Mohammed, that the race was fully prepared for its mission as soon as some principle should unite in one nationality the struggling and divided tribes of the Peninsula,” it is not difficult to explain "the rapid expansion of the power of that religion, the brilliant and fugitive bloom of civilization which embellished the dominion of the Arabs,” without the supposition that it was from God.

* Lecky, Hist. of Rationalism, i., 235.

† Edinburg Review, vol. cxxiv., 1. The literature on this subject, in order to a full understanding of the causes of the rise and declinc of this extraordinary power, may be found in the following works : Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chs. l., li., vol. iii., P. 360-460. Mohammed der Prophet, sein Leben und seine Lehre, von Gustav Weil, Stuttgardt, 1844. Life of Mahomet, and History of Islam to the Era of the Hegira, by William Muir, 4 vols., London, 1861. The Mohammedan religion was in the line of human nature; was in accordance with a previous state of the public mind; was under the guidance of an eminent military chieftain and his not less illustrious successor; was connected with the founding of a mighty empire -it appealed to the most powerful passions of men, and yet, at the same time, gave to men what they pant fora god, a religion, a hope of immortality—and immortality, in its case, which was of all things most gratifying, a prolongation forever of the pleasures of sense. How different from the Christian scheme !

Mohammedism rose, and spread, and flourished as a religion constructed with eminent ability, and sustained by military power, and the love of national glory; it is decaying and falling as a false religion must do, not keeping up with the progress and wants of the world; Christianity, as we shall see hereafter, becomes more extended and wide-spread in its power and influences as the world advances in civilization, science, and the arts, and is the only system of religion that has any promise, in itself, of spreading over the nations, and of enduring to the end of human affairs. Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammed's, von Adolf Sprenger, 3 vols., Berlin, 1855-1865.

LECTURE V.

MIRACLES: THE EVIDENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CEN

TURY THAT THEY WERE PERFORMED IN THE FIRST.

I PROPOSE, in this Lecture, to consider the evidence in favor of the divine origin of Christianity as derived from miracles. The particular point which I shall have in view is the evidence as it exists in the nineteenth century that miracles were performed in the first, or as the evidence appeals to the men of this generation. The remarks will have reference to the argument in the present age of the world, and in view of the objections which may be urged by those who deny the divine origin of Christianity as derived from the present state of science, and from the great changes which have occurred in the minds of men on the stability of the laws of nature now after the lapse of eighteen hundred years since Christianity was introduced, and on the whole subject of supernatural interferences and agencies. It is evident that the state of the argument must be somewhat different from what it was when Christianity was first proclaimed, and that it would have been comparatively easy to convince men of the reality of such supernatural interferences as those on which Christianity is based at a time when the belief in such interferences was almost universal. There has been a growing confidence, as science has advanced, in the fixedness of the laws of nature, and it is conceivable that the confidence in the fixedness and stability of those laws might become so strong as to lead men to adopt it as a maxim that all testimony in favor of miracles is to be at once rejected. With many persons that point is already reached. “We summarily," says Strauss (Intr. to the Life of Jesus),“ reject all miracles, prophecies, narratives of angels and demons, and the like, as simply impossible and irreconcilable with the known and universal laws which govern the course of events.” So Renan, and so the Westminster Review, in passages which I have had, or shall have occasion to refer to, adopt this as a maxim. The question whether this is so is, perhaps, the great question which is before mankind in this age; it is certainly a question which the friends of religion in this age are to meet, and in reference to which the enemies of religion are pressing very hard on the faith of the Church.

The essential idea of a miracle is that of an event where the only antecedent is the divine will and the divine power. Theologically considered, it is where such an event occurs as performed in attestation of the divine mission of him who performs it, and as showing that he is authorized to proclaim the law, or to disclose the will of God, as the credentials of an embassador accredit him to a foreign court, and authorize him to declare the will of the government which has sent him.

It is not difficult, therefore, to distinguish the idea of a miracle from that of an ordinary event, and it is not necessary, in order to obtain that idea, to inquire whether it is a suspension of the laws of nature, as theologians have commonly affirmed it to be, or a violation of the laws of nature, as Mr. Hume was pleased to regard it, or as the introduction of a higher law of nature adjusted to the occasion, as Dr. Thomas Brown seems to have regarded it. If there are laws of nature already in operation in relation to that on which the miracle is performed, of course those laws would be

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“suspended” for the time; whether in any case there would be a violation” of those laws, or whether all that there is in the case is the introduction of higher laws, are points which, perhaps, are above us, and which would not, at any rate, help us in understanding the real nature of a miracle.

The idea is, that the only antecedent in the case is the divine will—the divine power. That is all that enters into the result. That covers and explains all. In the creation of the world, the only antecedent was the divine will—the divine power. It was not by any established laws; it was not by the use of subordinate agencies; it was not a development from things already existing. In the formation of new races upon the earth in the old geological periods preparatory to the introduction of man, and in the creation of man himself, the only antecedent in each case was the divine willthe divine power. One race was not developed from another, nor were the elements of the one taken as materials from which to form the other. One race was entirely swept away from the earth, to be succeeded by another, brought into existence in a similar manner, and by the same power. In raising the dead, the only antecedent in the case is the divine will—the divine power. There is nothing in the condition of the dead tending to that; there are no laws of nature operating in the grave in that line or direction; there is nothing in the condition of the dead—no germ-no hidden life —that can be developed into the new form of being. All the laws of nature” in the case tend to a different result—to decomposition and permanent death; and if those laws continued to operate with no counteracting will or power, the dead would remain in their graves forever.