consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death; because that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus." (John xii. 10, II.)

Would the biographers of Christ have given names and places with such particularity if the whole story as to the miracles was a fabrication and a falsehood, when they had every reason to believe that some of those mentioned were alive at the time the story was written?

If the miracles never happened, and if the names of persons and places were fictitious, would they have recorded the miracles as ever having taken place at all, when they were bound to know that the record would be challenged immediately and utterly refuted?

The miracles of Jesus, as recorded by his biographers, touched nature at every point. He exercised dominion over life and death and restored the lifeblood into putrefied human bodies. He controlled the intellect of man and drove madness from his brain. The sight of the eye yielded to his touch, and the blind were made to see. He spoke to the dumb, and the dead organs of articulation caught his voice and responded with his praise. He put the power of hearing into deaf ears and enabled them

to hear his words of wisdom. He commanded the muscles and nerves of impotent limbs to assume their strength, and paralytics arose and walked. He spoke to inanimate nature, and a fig tree withered, the winds of a storm ceased, and the lashing waves of the sea subsided.

Looking back across two thousand years of the world's history into the days of these miracles, granting that they took place as alleged, it seems wonderfully strange to us that every human being who was then old enough to think and reason did not become convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ and accept him as the promised Saviour of the world.

We must remember, however, that miracles did not mean to the Jews of Judea in those days what they would now mean to us. The Jews had been taught that their prophets and holy men performed miracles; and, therefore, to them the power to work miracles did not necessarily indicate that the possessor of such power was a divine being. They did not distinguish between one who wrought miracles of his own power and one who obtained such special power from God. The fact that Jesus avowed that he was also God or the Son of God only aggravated matters for the Jews; because, according to their

law, for a man to assert that he was God or the equal of God constituted blasphemy and was punishable with death.

This did not excuse the Jews, however. If Jesus Christ did not perform the miracles attributed to him by his biographers, then he was an impostor; and it is inconceivable that God would empower an impostor to work miracles. Therefore, if he actually wrought the miracles, the Jews ought to have accepted him as the promised Messiah. They ought to have recognized the fact that Christ claimed to be God and to work the miracles of his own power; and then they ought to have reflected that one who set up a spurious claim to divinity could not perform miracles at all, since God would not grant this power to an impostor.

The same may be said of those who reject the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus, but accept him as an inspired teacher and expounder of a new religion. His biographers declare emphatically that he did perform the miracles and that he plainly asserted his divinity; and if these things are not true, then he was an impostor and not even a good man.

Again, if the story of the miracles of Jesus is not true, then the authors of the four Gospels are un

truthful historians and are unworthy of belief as to anything they wrote.

Pagan and Jewish historians tell us that Christianity existed both in Jewish and in Gentile countries. during the latter half of the first century. Josephus tells us that Christians were persecuted and slain in Jerusalem prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, only thirty-seven years after Christ ended his mission on earth, according to his biographers; and Tacitus tells us that they were slain by thousands in Rome under Nero in the year 64, or only about thirty years after the crucifixion of Christ.

How had Christianity originated and spread at that time if the story of the miracles is untrue? Had the people learned Christianity from the New Testament Scriptures? This is incredible, unless the miracles had been performed, because the people would know for themselves whether the record was true in this respect. A man fifty years of age then would have been twenty when some of the miracles were performed, if such events actually happened; and if not, the falsity of the record would have been known.

The people could not have learned Christianity at that time from the preaching of the apostles if

the miracles had not been performed. It is inconceivable that the people in great numbers could have been brought to believe in Christ to such an extent as to cause them to abandon the religion of their fathers and adopt a new religion simply by the preaching of the apostles. On the other hand, if Christ had performed the miracles and had risen from death, as alleged, then the apostles could have appealed to the people by citing these supernatural events as within the personal knowledge of the people or could have asked them to investigate for themselves. In this way only could the results shown by secular history have been obtained. Though Jesus "spake as never man spake” and uttered truths so sublime as to cause the mightiest intellects of the world to yield allegiance to him, it is very improbable, if not altogether impossible, that those teachings, within thirty-five years after they were uttered, could have so convinced the people of the divinity of Christ as to cause them to suffer martyrdom in "immense multitudes" under Nero, as described by Tacitus, or to suffer death by stoning in the streets of Jerusalem, as described by Josephus.

The entire record of the miracles of Jesus had been written at the time Josephus and Tacitus wrote