them. One of those persons, for example, made a trenchant and powerful defence of Christ before the Pharisees. Like a common-sense man, he took his stand upon the simple facts of the case; despising all the cajolery of the baffled and incredulous critics, he said, with the charming and unanswerable frankness of an honest and thankful man, "Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not; one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.' Christ had thus, by his miraculous power, made a marked advance upon the man's nature,— he had established "one thing" in his convictions, and thus prepared the way for further conquest. Accordingly we find this to be the case, for the man afterwards "worshipped him." The mighty Worker was admitted through the body to the soul. We have only to take this instance as a specimen, and to multiply it by the number of the mighty works, to obtain a comparative view of the value of constructive miracles in the propagation of Christian faith. Not only upon the clients themselves, but upon thoughtful observers, the miracles produced very helpful impressions, as may be seen from the confession of a ruler of the Jews, who candidly said, "Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.” This was the conclusion of a reasoner who did not examine effects in the light of religious prejudices, but who considered them in relation to adequate causes. He had seen displays of human power, and he knew the general range of human ability, but these particular miracles of the despised Rabbi went far beyond all that he had seen, far beyond all he had imagined, and compelled the conclusion,

willing or not willing, that this man that this man was at least a co-worker with God, carrying keys of power, such as he had never seen on the girdle of the strongest man.

Then, too, as already hinted, the miracles bore a special relation to the devil himself. The miracles were polygonal; one side looked towards suffering men, another towards observers, a third towards doubters, a fourth towards the devil, and so on. Christ's struggle with the tempter was only begun in the wilderness; it was continued to the very end of his earthly course. No devil, would have meant no Christ. Peter put the case concisely and strikingly, when he talked to Cornelius speaking of Jesus Christ, he said, "He went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil." The works of the enemy were on every hand; they must be thrown into contrast by the works of the Son. They must be distinctly charged upon the enemy, and the responsibility must be publicly and immovably fixed upon him. No doubt must be left on men's minds as to the source of all evil and suffering. The two workers were thus brought, as it were, face to face before society, and each was openly identified with a particular course. On the one hand there was destruction, on the other restoration. Men thus had an opportunity of seeing that Christ's opposition to the devil was the controversial aspect of his love for man; an opportunity which owed much to the miraculous works which immediately appealed to the physical senses and the common instinct of the observers. The opportunity would not have been marked by the same commanding breadth, if Christ had confined himself entirely to teaching; the cure of the body being more easily

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appreciable as an introductory step, than a direct attempt at the illumination of the mind. Every miracle was a challenge to a comparison of powers. Every healed man was Christ's living protest against death. The mere fact of the miracle was but a syllable in Christ's magnificent doctrine of life. Christ's mission may be summed up in the word Life; the devil's, in the word Death; so that every recovered limb, every opened eye, every purified leper, was a confirmation of his statement, “I have come, that they might have life."

The limitation of miraculous power was twofold. There was, first, the limitation which came from the unreceptive condition of the people; and there was the limitation necessitated by the difference between he outward and the inward, the material and the moral. At one place Christ could not do many mighty works because of the unbelief of the people; the utmost he could do was to lay his hands upon a few sick folks and heal them. The electric current was incomplete. The inhabitants were self-involved; no tendril of the heart was putting itself forth in search of protection; all the fibres were knotted in impenetrable selfishness: Christ himself had no power there. He must have faith as a starting-point, otherwise no miracles in harmony with his moral purpose could be wrought. Miracles of mere power he could have performed anywhere, but such miracles were not included in his plan of life. His omnipotence was the agent of his mercy, and consequently it was the province of mercy to determine where the services of omnipotence should be offered, and where mercy was rejected omnipotence was held in abeyance. On one occasion, indeed, Christ's power

operated in a direction that was merely destructive. A legion of devils besought him to let them enter into a herd of swine (a terrible illustration of the intolerableness of life in hell), and on obtaining permission the whole herd, to the number of two thousand, ran into the sea and was destroyed. Much has been said against the people who besought Christ to leave their coasts on finding their swine destroyed; they have been charged with sordidness, selfishness, and low ideas of the value of human amelioration: though we may steal a cheap reputation for magnanimity at the expense of those unfortunate people, yet they were right after all in desiring such a man as they took Christ to be to depart from their midst. Their request was the expression of a great principle in the human constitution, implanted there by the Creator. Men cannot be benefited by mere power, but they are necessarily reduced to a meaner manhood by the presence of a power that is destructive. The history of despotism proves this. To have in the city or nation a power that is incontrollably destructive is to live in perpetual fear, and fear can never train a noble and generous manhood. People never beg thunder and lightning to continue amongst them, but they often wish that summer would never go away. The Jews, therefore, who lost their swine, showed what would have been the result if Christ had given full scope to his power of destruction; men would have been overshadowed by a great apprehension, and in the darkness of such a horror would have dwindled into a pitiable dwarfishness. Besides, as said before, there is nothing so common and so vulgar as destructive power. The meanest insect can destroy the loveliest flower the

coarsest lips can utter defamatory and injurious words. All destructiveness, individual, social, national, lies in the same direction, and the beginning and end of that direction is the devil. The constructiveness of the Christian miracles is a most emphatic confirmation of Christ's claim to be the Saviour of the world. They are consonant with the natal song "good will to men; they are opposed to the unchanging diabolic policy under which the world has endured so much, and they prepare men to accept the promise of a higher salvation than that of the body.

We have said that there is nothing in the nature of things to prevent miracles being wrought to-day. This is true abstractly, yet miracles are practically superseded by the dominion of the Spirit. The working of miracles in a purely spiritual dispensation would be an anachronism. Miracles were quite in accordance with the personal superintendence of the visible Christ, but now that Christ is no more known after the flesh the whole system of objective demonstration has gone up with him. What, then, is in harmony with the rulership of the Spirit? Not miracles, certainly, but science probably. Intellect is now summoned to a new and critical position. Creation has apparently exhausted its period of reticence, and seems now, using figurative language, to be prepared for a frank communication of its secrets;-or better, man has been educated so far by Christian agencies as now to be master of the right method of holding intercourse with the laws which have been the problem and even the dread of many ages. Humanity has been carried forward by the mystery which began in Christ— forward from the material to the spiritual, from the