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Asia by one of his own officers on his way to join him, but at twenty days' distance of travel; and by Didymus the blind Christian at Alexandria in Egypt. Theodoret says his death was also seen by his namesake Julian, a monk, in his monastery at many days' distance. These historians relate that nothing was more common amongst the ascetics in the desert of the Thebais, than curing diseases by the laying on of hands and anointing with oil. Sozomen says that John the apostle raised a man from the dead at Hierapolis, and that the daughters of Philip living there did the same. In these histories are many instances of remarkable prophecies, and of visible interposition of armed angels in defence of the Christians, as in the case of Gainas the Goth, attempting to take Constantinople against Arcadius, in support of the Emperor Theodosius.

The last miracle in the histories of the Christian church of the first six centuries which I shall refer to, is that of the sixty-six Christian professors at Carthage, whose tongues Hunneric the Vandal cut out in the year 484. He also cut off their right hands, besides putting numbers of others to most barbarous deaths. It is stated, and that by numerous eye-witnesses and contemporaries of the highest character, that these confessors, though their tongues were cut out to the very roots, continued to speak during their lives as perfectly as before. Victor, Bishop of Vite, who published his account only two years after the event, says that he saw one of these men at Constantinople, named Reparatus, who had become a sub-deacon there, and in great favour with the Emperor Zeno, and that his speech was perfect. Æneas of Gaza, says he saw a number of these men at Constantinople, found their articulation admirable, and examined their mouths to satisfy himself that they had no trace of a tongue. Procopius, the well-known historian, gives the same evidence of some of them living in his own time, and adds that two of them, on becoming dissolute, immediately lost the use of this miraculous speech.

The Emperor Justinian, in an edict, states that he had seen

some of these wonderful men; and Marcellinus, the emperor's chancellor, adds his personal knowledge also. Besides these who had seen more or less of these men, the writers near the time received the account as unquestionable, as Victor, Bishop of Tormo, Pope Gregory I., etc. One of the most remarkable cases amongst these was that of a youth who was dumb up to the moment that his tongue was extracted, and who spoke immediately, and ever afterwards.

The Rev. J. H. Newman, in summing up this irresistible evidence in hisEssay on Miracles,' is indignant at Middleton and Douglas, when they could not deny the completeness of the evidence, endeavouring to prove it no miracle, asserting that there have been other cases of people speaking without tongues. Mr. Newman need not be astonished. These men were, in reality, disbelievers in all miracle whatever, but dare not avow this as regarded the miracles of Scripture. Being resolved on denying all miracles out of the Bible, had they heard of martyrs miraculously speaking when their heads were cut off, if they could not deny the excision of the heads, they would have coolly asserted that nothing was more common than for people to speak when their heads were off.

The spirit of Mr. Newman in his Essay is much to be admired for its fairness. He makes no attempt to attach weight to doubtful evidence; he makes none to deny the notorious fact of the corruption of the church in the fourth and fifth centuries, and of the reckless manufacture of miracles in the ages of the Roman Church preceding the Reformation. He says candidly, There have been at all times true miracles (p. xiii.) and false ones; some of the miracles were true miracles; some were certainly not true; under these circumstances the decision in particular cases is left to each individual according to his opportunities of judging.' (Introduction.)

In fact, when we have gone over history, its miracles in all ages and countries must be judged by the same evidence

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as the rest of the narratives of these historians. From all history which, as Lord Bryon well says—

Lies like truth, and yet most truly lies,

we must make a liberal deduction of falsehood; but when that is done, there must be left a substantial residuum of truth, of which miracle claims its legitimate dividend. To say that all the miracles of the early Christian church were sheer fiction, would be to stamp that church, instead of being, with all its faults, undoubtedly the best church which the world had seen, the most infamous, not only of all churches, Jewish, pagan, or others, but the most infamous of all human institutions. The characters of many of the holy and great men who vouched for many of these miracles, and the historic evidence first produced, repel such a charge. In common with all ages and peoples, the early Christian church must claim its share of miracle as its hereditary human right, if it claimed no more. We must admit proper historic evidence on all subjects, miraculous or ordinary, or in the words of Cicero and John Locke, we destroy history altogether.

CHAPTER XIX.

SUPERNATURALISM OF THE NEO-PLATONISTS.

Divination is not a human work, but is divine and supernatural, and is supernaturally sent from heaven.

LAMBLICHUS, De Mysteriis Egyptorum.

"Tis Apollonius sage, my trusty guide
And good instructor.

KEATS'S Lamia.

YOINCIDENT with Christianity arose the Alexandrian

school of philosophy, the last school of the philosophy of Greece. It was based on the psychological systems of Pythagoras and Plato, but not on them alone. It embraced the original sources whence those philosophers had drawn their most potent and spiritual ideas, the profound and primeval teachings of the sages of Egypt and India, which it merged into and amalgamated with the new life of Christianity. At Alexandria,' says Ennemoser, the point of union between the East and the West of the spiritual and temporal life and traffic of the time, soon after the Christian era, originated that remarkable school which at once combined all the tendencies of the Greek philosophy with the doctrines of the Orientals, of the Jewish Cabala with the reflections and speculations of the Occidentalists. The NeoPlatonists sought to present the elements of theosophy and philosophy according to the primeval doctrines of the Oriental prophets in combination with the poetical Platonism and the Aristotelian philosophy in the form of Grecian dialectics. The Oriental doctrine of emanation, the Pytha

THE NEO-PLATONIC SCHOOL.

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gorean number of harmony, Plato's ideas of the creation and the separation from the world of sense, constitute the proper fabric of the so-called Neo-Platonic school.'

In this philosophy the soul of man was represented as in Egypt and India, and by Plato and Pythagoras in their creed drawn thence, as descending from the Divinity to earth on a course of trial and purification. This purification was thought to be greatly promoted by conquest over the senses, and this conquest to be accomplished at once by prayer and temperance and purity of body. By these means men became endowed with power, not only from on high but from surrounding nature, which entered into union with it by certain secret influences, which were resident in nature but tending upwards into a higher nature. They were, in fact, fully cognisant of what are now called the mesmeric and magnetic principles which open the gates of clairvoyance, and through the same admit the disembodied spiritual natures to approach ours sensibly. This school thus taught all the sublime theories of Brahminism, and Buddhism; of the ascension by means of spiritual abstraction and ecstasy into the unity with the divine whilst still in the body; and at this point they came in contact with the clearer light and flame of Christianity, and were elevated by it into a nobler spiritual sphere than unassisted paganism had hitherto reached.

Porphyrius, one of the greatest teachers of this faith, says Apollonius of Tyana, who may be termed its prime practical demonstrator, was four times united to the Deity by inward life; and by pursuing the plan laid down in the Banquet of Plato, the Deity was manifested to him, though He has neither form nor ideas, but is established above intellect and everything intelligible; and he adds, that he himself, when sixty years of age, was thus also united to the Deity.

It might have been supposed that men with such ideas would have been the first to receive Christianity, seeing its miracles, and hearing its kindred doctrines in their original power. But like learned men now-a-days who cannot accept spiritualism, they were already educated into another