unfavorably on the minds of many, in averting their attention from divine revelation, is without any just foundation. We hope that religion can be reconciled with science upon a safer and easier plan than the sacrifice of either.

The works named at the head of our article cover the whole ground which we propose to occupy. We shall pursue the method adopted by Dr. Wardlaw, and discuss, first, the nature; then the apologetic worth; and finally, the credibility of miracles.

1. What, then, is a miracle? It is obvious that the definition should contemplate it only as a phenomenon, and include nothing but the difference which distinguishes it from every other species of events. There should be no reference to the cause that produces it; that must be an inference from the nature of the effect. Those who make, as Mill does in his Logic, the belief of God's existence essential to the credibility of a miracle, virtually deny that the miracle can be employed as a proof of His being. But there is evidently no reason in the nature of things why the argument here cannot proceed from the effect to the cause, as in the ordinary changes of nature. The miracle presupposes God, and so does the world. But the miracle, as a phenomenon, may be apprehended even by the Atheist. It is an event, and an event of a peculiar kind, and God comes in, when the inquiry is made for the cause. Hence Cudworth and Barrow, as well as the Fathers and Schoolmen, do not hesitate to appeal to miracles as an argument for the divine existence. Considered as a phenomenon, in what does the peculiarity of the miracle consist? Trench does not give a formal definition, and we find it difficult to determine precisely what his notion was. He explains the terms by which miracles are distinguished in Scripture, but these terms express only the effects upon our own minds, the purposes for which and the power by which they are wrought, and the operations themselves the effect, the end, the cause-but they do not single out that in the phenomenon by which it becomes a wonder, a sign, a power, or a work. In his comparison of miracles and nature, we

either failed to understand him or he contradicts himself. He asserts, first, that the agency of God is as immediate in the ordinary occurrences of nature, as in the production of miracles. The will of God is the only power which he recognizes anywhere, and to say "that there is more of the will of God in a miracle than in any other work of His, is insufficient."-P. 10. And yet, in less than a page, he asserts: "An extraordinary divine casuality belongs, then, to the essence of the miracle; more than that ordinary, which we acknowledge in everything; powers of God, other than those which have always been working; such, indeed, as most seldom or never have been working until now. The unresting activity of God, which at other times hides and conceals itself behind the veil of what we term natural laws, does

in the miracle unveil itself; it steps out from its concealment, and the hand which works is laid bare."-P. 12. If God immediately produces all events, what can be meant by extraordinary divine casuality? And if the will of God is the sole energy in nature, what are "the powers of God other than those which have been always working?" Has the will of God been seldom or never exerted? If the hand of God was directly in every event, how has it been concealed behind natural laws? There is certainly a confusion here. The two sects of statements must have been written under the influence of different feelings. His anxiety to escape from a dead, mechanical view of nature, and from epicurean conceptions of the indolence of God, may account for his denial of all secondary agencies; the palpable features of the miracle forced upon him the admissions of these same agencies, as a standard by which it was to be tried.

The scriptural term which gives us the nearest insight into the real nature of the miracle, is precisely the one of which Dr. Trench speaks most slightingly-the word wonder.* It is true that every wonder is not a miracle, but every miracle is a wonder. The cause of wonder is the unexpectedness of an event; and the specific difference of the miracle is that it contradicts that course of nature which we expected to find uniform. It is an event either above or opposed to secondary causes. Leave out the notion of these secondary causes, and there can be no miracle. All is God. Admit a nature, apart and distinct from God, and there is scope for an extraordinary power. The doctrine of nature, as consisting of a series of agencies and powers, of substances possessed of active properties in their relations to each other, by no means introduces à dead, mechanical view of the universe. God has not left the world, as a watchmaker leaves his clock, after he has wound it up, to pursue its own course independently of any interference from Him. He is present in every part of His dominion; He pervades the powers which He has imparted to created substances by his ceaseless energy. He sustains their efficiency, and he regulates all the adjustments upon which their activity depends. He is the life of nature's life. In Him we live, and move, and have our being. But still, in dependence upon his sustaining care and the concurrence of His pervading energy, nature has powers and consists of causes which, in the same circumstances, always produce the same effects. To the following remarks of Dr. Wardlaw, we cordially assent:

"I have already, at the very outset, given a definition of them in other terms-as works, involving a temporary suspension of the known laws of

* Nomen miraculi ab admiratione sumitur. Thomas Aquinas, Summa 1, Quest. 105, Art. 7.

nature, or a deviation from the established constitution and fixed order of the universe; or, perhaps more correctly, of that department of the universe which constitutes our own system, whose established order and laws we are capable, to the full extent requisite for the purpose, of accurately ascertaining-works, therefore, which can be effected by no power short of that which gave the universe its being, and its constitution and laws. In this definition, let it be observed, I have called a miricle a suspension of the known laws of nature. It is necessary to mark this. Effects, it is abundantly obvious, might be produced, such as, to those who witnessed them, might appear, and might be believed, miraculous, while the persons by whom they are performed are well aware, from their superior acquaintance with the laws, and powers, and phenomena of nature, that the appearance is fallacious, and the belief unfounded. The persons before whom they are performed may be utterly unable to account for them by any natural laws or powers known to them-while, in point of fact, in place of their being suspensions of any law or laws of nature whatsoever, they are actually the product of their operation; so that, in the circumstances, the real miracle would have lain, not in their production, but in their non-production. That would have been the true deviation from the settled constitution of nature. In such a case, the miracle is a miracle only to ignorance; that is, it is no miracle. A little further development of the secrets of nature annihilates the seemingly miraculous, and only reads to the previously uninformed mind a new lesson of nature's uniformity. It becomes, therefore, an indispensible requisite to a genuine miracle, that it be wrought both on materials, and by materials, of which the properties are well and familiarly known; respecting which, that is, the common course of nature is fully understood.'j-P. 34-35.

Dr. Wardlaw subsequently criticises, and, we think with justice, the distinctions and evasions by which Trench undertakes to rescue the miracle from being a violation of nature's order: to this point we shall afterwards refer. We cannot forbear to quote a portion of his remarks:

"The truth is, we must understand the term nature, in the sense usually attached to it, as relating to the constitution and laws of the physical system of our own globe. It is true, that, in consequence of sin, there have been jarrings and disturbances' of its 'primitive order.' But it does not follow from that, that there are no natural principles and laws in fixed and constant operation. And when an event occurs for which these natural principles and laws make no provision-for which they can in no way account-which is quite aside from, and at variance with, their ordinary uniform operations-it does not to me seem very material, whether we speak of it as beyond nature, or above nature, or beside nature, or against nature, or contrary to nature-whether as a suspension, an interruption, a contravention, or a violation of nature's laws; provided we are understanding nature and nature's laws' as having reference to the physical economy of our own system. When, in illustration of his position that a miracle is not all the infraction of a law, but only a lower law neutralized and put out of working by a superior,' Mr. Trench says, 'Continually we behold, in the world around us, lower laws held in

restraint by higher, mechanic by dynamic, chemical by vital, physical by moral; yet we say not, when the lower thus gives place in favour of the higher, that there was any violation of law, that anything contrary to nature came to pass; rather we acknowledge the law of a greater freedom swallowing up the law of a lesser;' he seems to forget that this holding in restraint of one law by the operation of another,' is itself one of the very laws whose working we behold in the world around us;' and that it comes, therefore, among the laws of nature as ordinarily understood, that is as, having relation to this said world around us,' to the physcial order of our system. But it is manifestly unfair, in interpreting nature, to quit our own system, to mount to a loftier sphere, to take in a wider amplitude, to embrace the entire range of being; and then, because a thing, though a manifest contravention of the laws of the world around us of the nature which we know '-may not be out of harmony with nature when considered as embracing the boundless universe, and even the attributes of its Maker, thus bringing omnipotence itself into the range of ‘natural causes,' to deny the propriety of pronouncing anything whatever to be against nature. For this involves the fallacy of taking the same term in two senses; and, because the thing in question may not be inconsistent with it in the one, concluding that it cannot be inconsistent with it in the other!"-P. 40-41.

2. Having settled that the essence of the miracle consists in the contranatural, or the supernatural, we are now prepared to investigate its apologetic worth. The question to be answered is briefly this-we quote the words of Mr. Trench-"Is the miracle to command, absolutely and without further question, the obedience of those in whose sight it is done, or to whom it comes as an adequately attested fact, so that the doer and the doctrine, without any more debate, shall be accepted, as from God?" In other words, is the miracle, in itself, from its own intrinsic character, a sufficient credential of divine inspiration, or a divine commission?

Trench, in company with the Jewish and pagan enemies of Christianity, and a large body of both Catholic and Protestant theologians, answers in the negative. Dr. Wardlaw answers in the affirmative; and we think that Dr. Wardlaw is right The assumption on which the negative proceeds is, that a real miracle may be wrought by beings inferior to God. The Jews ascribed those of our Saviour to Beelzebub, the gentiles to magic, and the Scriptures themselves warn us against the lying wonders of the man of sin. The miracle, consequently, establishes, in the first instance, only the certainty of a superhuman origin, without determining anything as to its character. It may be heaven or it may be hell. To complete the proof, the nature of the doctrine must be considered. If that is approved by the conscience, or commends itself to the reason, it settles the question as to the real source of the miracle-and the miracle, thus authenticated as from God, confirms in turn the divine origin of the doctrine.

We

acquit this reasoning of the charge which has often been brought against it of arguing in a circle. When it is said that the doctrine proves the miracle, and the miracle the doctrine, it is obvious, as Warburton has judiciously remarked, that "the term, doctrine, in the first proposition, is used to signify a doctrine agreeable to the truth of things, and demonstrated to be so by natural light. In the second proposition, the term, doctrine, is used to signify a doctrine immediately, and, in an extraordinary manner, revealed by God. So that these different significations, in the declared use of the word, doctrine, in the two propositions, sets the whole reasoning free from that vicious circle within which our philosophic conjurers would confine it. In this there is no fruitless return of an unprogressive argument, but a regular procession of two distinct and different truths, till the whole reasoning becomes complete. In truth, they afford mutual assistance to one another; yet not by taking back, after the turn has been served, what they had given; but by continuing to hold what each had imparted to the support of the other."* The whole argument may be stated

in a single sentence: The goodness of the doctrine proves the divinity of the miracle; the divinity of the miracle proves-not the goodness, that would be the circle-but the divine authority of the doctrine.

But though we admit that this reasoning is valid as to form, we cannot make the same concession in relation to its matter. We cannot bring ourselves to believe that any created being, whether seraph or devil, can work a real miracle. We hold that this is the exclusive prerogative of God. The only power which any creature possesses over nature is the power which results from the knowledge of, and consists in obedience to, her laws. No finite being can make or unmake a single substance, nor impart to matter or to mind a single original property. Nature is what God made it; her laws what God appointed, and no orders of finite intelligence, however exalted, can ever rise above nature-for they are all parts of it-nor accomplish a single result independently of the properties and laws which God has ordained. They, like man, can only conquer by obeying. They may, through superior knowledge, effect combinations and invent machinery, which, to the ignorant and uninstructed, may produce effects that shall appear to transcend the capabilities of a creature, but they can never rise above, nor dispense with the laws they have mastered. They may reach the mirabile, but never the miraculum.† It was to set this

* Divine Legation, book ix., chap. 5.

The distinction between finite power and that by which a real miracle is wrought, and between real and relative miracles, is clearly stated by Aquinas, Summa 1, Quest. 110, Art. 4: "Miraculum proprie dicitur, cum aliquid sit præter ordinem naturæ. Sed non sufficit ad rationem miraculi; si aliquid fiat præter ordinem naturæ alicujis