been the only revelation given, and might have been enough under primary conditions; but by so much as man fell from those conditions, he required a book as well as a conscience. Nor does Christ's example militate against this position, for throughout he combated the diabolic spirit as a man; nowhere did he launch the lightnings of his proper divinity in reply, but ever made the simple answer of a man who had read the revelation of God. Other courses were open to Christ. He could have recalled the tempter's own memories of heaven, the ancient sentence, the terrible deposition; the indwelling God might have shone through the human eyes, and abashed the Tempter by the light from which he had been expelled; yet all this side of defence is untouched, and the tempted man shelters himself behind the rampart of the written Word. Every assault is encountered upon the human side to have met the Tempter otherwise, would have been to deflect from the only course possible to man, and to have divested the wilderness period of the Incarnation of all the features which endear it to probationary manhood.

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CHAPTER VI.

THE MIGHTY WORKS.

HE baptized and tempted Son was now prepared for his mission. There is a very striking and suggestive consistency between the, preparation and the work. So much power had been held in restraint for so long a time, that it was not to be wondered at that on its liberation "mighty deeds should show forth themselves in him." One of his biographers, as if overpowered by the number and splendor of his miracles, instead of introducing detailed statements of supernatural cures, groups in one impressive mass the beneficent works of many days; and the grouping is the more remarkable as coming at the very beginning rather than at the end of the narrative. If the miraculous mission had been opened leisurely, with a cure here, and a storm quieted there, the narrator would probably have given detailed accounts on his first pages, and as the miracles increased, he would have summarized towards the conclusion. Instead of this leisurely introduction of the miraculous element, we are startled very early with this announcement: "They brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy; and he

healed them." All was as easy as bringing ice into the presence of the summer sun, that it might be melted. The unity of the mystery is again evident. Even in this marvellous statement there is nothing out of harmony with what has preceded. Is there anything to be wondered at, with sceptical wonder, that the Man who conquered the devil in the wilderness, should conquer the devil's works in human nature? The greater involves the less. All true conquest must be fundamental, and to be fundamental it must be moral. To the man who has conquered himself, all other conquests must be easy. Only a man's bad elements stand between him and the greatest achievements. If the prince of this world finds nothing in a man, that man is free of the checks and impediments which limit abnormal human nature.

Miracles can be difficult of credence only according to the low spiritual altitude from which they are viewed. As wonder is a sign of ignorance, so unbelief is a sign of incompleteness. The unlettered man is amazed at language which to the learned man is perfectly simple, just because the learned man has conquered himself by bringing his powers under adequate discipline, whereas the untaught man is ruled by his own ignorance. The novice, in anything, is necessarily impressed with the difficulty of a great work, whereas the adept has overcome all the disturbing sensations which inevitably accompany inexperience. The novice invariably first sees the difficulty; he is conscious of a disparity between the forces at his command, and the result to be attained, and soon augments difficulty into impossibility. The

man of diminutive faith, a man in whom the selfelement is uppermost, is astounded at the miracles of Jesus Christ; while the man of large faith, in whom the self-element is subordinated, accepts them with composure. Christ himself taught the doctrine both negatively and positively, and with incessant urgency, that faith was the nexus binding the natural to the supernatural. In proportion as any man has faith, is he led away from himself; and this brings us to the point just stated, that self-conquest makes all other conquests easy. Christ said that faith even so small as a grain of mustard-seed was more than a match for mountains. Why not? Power is mental rather than physical. It would be a poor thing to be a man, if he could not make himself master of the dust on which he lives. But the highest mastery is moral, and if the moral element is wrong, his dominion is of course abridged or upset. Wickedness is weakness. As the intellectual man inhabits a wider region than the man who is ignorant, so the good man has a power compared with which the bad man's rulership is a pitiful travesty of influence. The bad man has the power of destruction, the good man of restoration. Any beast can do mischief. But more on this point presently.

There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent miracles being wrought to-day as well as they were ever wrought. The Yogis among the Hindus believed that they could acquire perfect mastery over elementary matter. They sought to effect a vital union between the spirit that was in the body, and the spirit that was in nature, and having effected that mystic union, the Yogi was master of the situation, traversing

space, raising the dead, rendering hirnself invisible, and going up to Siva, the spirit and essence of all creation. There is a good deal more in this philosophic dreaming than our modern notions may be prepared to allow. It was not the mere power of the hand which the Yogi sought, but the wider and grander empire of the spirit. What the Yogi sought to effect was a union between spirit and spirit; and this was precisely what Christ sought to effect when he demanded faith as the condition of miraculous healing. Where this union was complete, the working of miracles was as natural and easy as breathing. They were miracles only to the observers, not to the workers, for the workers stood on a moral elevation high above them, and saw their exact relation to God and man. It is not extraordinary that the faith which is not strong enough to work miracles should not be strong enough to believe that miracles can be wrought, though it may be narrow enough to brand him as a fanatic who affirms their possibility. Man cannot advance to the miracle except through the faith. There can be no doubt that the faith of the world has gone down; and in part this may be accounted for by the intellectual transition through which we are being driven by revived and ambitious science. We have come upon an era which has hardly time to pause and add results; information is arriving so quickly, the messengers throng upon each other so tumultuously, that most of men have taken upon themselves the duties of recorders; and if sometimes they are a little heedless of the punctuation, and by mistaking a comma for a full stop they do now and again speak too soon, the impatience or