184 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



will make men much more cautious in framing dogmas about his di- 

 vinity ; but experience in the future as in the past can but increase the 

 sense of his moral supremacy, and the power of his life and death. 

 And it is supremacy, not exclusiveness, which must be vindicated for 

 the whole Christian system. These two terms, supremacy and exclu- 

 siveness, may be taken as marking the contrast between the position 

 of Christianity under the new and under the old conditions. 



4. As to miracles. It is evident that the arguments relied on in 

 the last century do not help us now. We see that they imported the 

 idea of a violation of the order of Nature into a time when no such 

 notion as the order of Nature existed ; that they assumed an exactness 

 of observation and description in the narrators which our knowledge 

 of the times and the documents forbids us to assume ; and further that 

 they dwelt on the mere physical process, while to the writers it is a 

 part of the " many good works shown them from the Father," or the 

 " signs of the kingdom of heaven." The theologian of the future will 

 probably be little concerned with them. We have all learned to read 

 in a natural sense the account of the crossing of the Red Sea, which 

 even Mr. M. Arnold, some years ago, took as meant to record a viola- 

 tion of physical order. The strong east wind ; the cloud which beat 

 in the faces of the Egyptians, but by its lightning showed the Israel- 

 ites their way ; the waters kept back at low tide by the east wind, and 

 walling in the course of the fugitives, but returning upon their pursu- 

 ers when the tide rose and the eye of God looked forth upon them 

 through the cloud in the morning, lose nothing in majesty or in provi- 

 dential importance when we read them without importing violations 

 of the laws of Nature. And so it will be in many other cases ; while 

 as to those which are notable only for their strangeness, the action of 

 hyperbole and the growth of the wonderful by tradition will be always 

 present to the mind of the theologian, and will make him pass over 

 them "with a light foot." We have no difficulty when we read of the 

 miracles of St. Bernard or the prophecies of Savonarola, nor do they 

 interfere with our estimate of those great men. The miracles of heal- 

 ing in the Gospel will, we can hardly doubt, always appear as evidence 

 of a peculiar condition of human life in the East in the first century, 

 and of the restorative power of a great personality. Little stress will 

 be laid on the accounts of the infancy of Christ, since they are men- 

 tioned nowhere in the New Testament, outside the first chapters of the 

 first and third Gospels. The case of the resurrection is quite different, 

 since it passed immediately into the Christian consciousness. But the 

 theologian who starts from the Epistles of St. Paul as the solid central 

 ground of New Testament literature, will go upon the apostle's teach- 

 ing that not flesh and blood, but the spiritual personality clothed in 

 the new house which is from heaven inherits the kingdom of God, 

 and will take the vision by which the apostle was converted as the 

 type of all the manifestations by which the companions of Christ were 



