MIRACLES, SCIENCE, AND PRAYBE. 279 



not merely in harmony with the higher laws we find at work, 

 modifying the order of nature, but were necessary steps in 

 the moral and spiritual evolution of man. With a spirit reduced 

 to the condition of a rudimentary organ which had almost 

 ceased to perform its original function, with a soul degraded 

 and enslaved to the body, it was needful that the senses 

 themselves should be first appealed to, in order to waken the 

 higher elements of his being into life. Thus by a gradual 

 chain of demonstration we proceed from the possibility of 

 miracles to their harmony with the forces at work in nature, 

 and from that harmony to the conception of their moral 

 necessity in the work of the salvation of man. 



Our clemonstration, it will be seen, confines itself to the 

 Gospel miracles alone. Even if the progress of scientific and 

 Biblical criticism should tend to diminish the evidence for 

 some other miracles which our forefathers dev^outly believed, 

 we need not concern ourselves very seriously about it. We 

 may believe that Moses and Elijah, as well as Jesus Christ, 

 needed the support of miracles on behalf of their Divine 

 Mission. But their work and His diff'ered Avidely, both in its 

 object and in its results. We cannot therefore predicate 

 miracles of them, in the same way that we can of the 

 Incarnate God, the Saviour of mankind. We can but con- 

 tend that in their case the possession of miraculous power 

 Avas not unreasonable. If the story of the Exodus, of the 

 passage of the Jordan, of the falling of the walls of J ericho, 

 of the swallowing up of Korah and his compa,ny, be accounted 

 for by natural causes — that is to say, be removed into the 

 category of special providences from that of miracles — even 

 if this view be accepted, our faith in the overruling providence 

 of God need suffer no diminution. I have always felt that 

 the history of the siege of Leyden is as miraculous in one 

 sense, that is to say, it affords as distinct an evidence of a 

 superintending Providence overruling the ways of man, as 

 anything in the history of the Jews, The mighty strong 

 Avest wind which brought the relieving fleet to the walls of 

 the beleagiu'ed city just at the last moment when help was 

 possible, the fall of the city wall, leaving the w^hole city at 

 the mercy of the Spaniards, the unaccountable panic which 

 seized those hardy soldiers at the very occurrence which 

 had placed victory within their grasp, and the fact that 

 these marvellous events formed the crisis of the conflict 

 between religious liberty and ecclesiastical terrorism, are as 

 indubitable proofs as any in Holy Writ, that God " ordereth 



