'31.(3 



as that on which we would accept an ordinary event, we reject them from 

 their repugnance to the Divine character, or because they were not performed 

 for the purpose of attesting a Divine commission." 



Now it seems to me much more wise, and much more rational, and much 

 more safe ground, at all events, for the Christian to take up, to say, " I shall 

 not believe in any event as of a miraculous nature, because it is not given to 

 attest a Divine revelation," than it would be to say, " I will not believe it, 

 because it does not square with my conceptions of the Divine character." 

 In the latter case, you merely reduce the evidence of a miracle to your own^ 

 subjective feelings, and your own self-consciousness, and one man may greatly 

 differ from another in that respect. In reducing it in that way to natural 

 subjective feelings and self-consciousness, you remove it in a great degree 

 from that sacred ground of belief on which it is desirable that it should rest. 

 The only safe ground to go upon is that all miracles are antecedently incre- 

 dible, unless they are sent by a Divine Creator, to attest a Divine revelation. 

 That takes from the region of history all absurd so-called miracles ; and it is 

 upon that ground that I should reject the miracle of Constantine and the 

 Popish miracles, like those that are alleged to have occurred in France lately. 

 All miracles that do not come as the attestation of a Divine revelation, I 

 take to be without any locus standi. And now let me say one or two words 

 on the last part of the paper, where we have a criticism upon the forgery of 

 documents. Some remarks are there made by Mr. Eow on the authorship 

 of the Gospel of St. John as compared with St. John's first epistle, and the 

 difference in the style of the two works. Let me add a remark in relation 

 to St. J ohn's Gospel as placed side by side with the Revelations of St. John. 

 The divergences between those two works are much gTeater than the diver- 

 gences between the Gospel and the Epistle ; in fact, the Epistle stands as 

 intermediate in style between the other two, the Book of Revelations being 

 rugged and full of Hebraisms, and.quite distinct from the more polished Greek 

 of the Gospel. It is upon this that the modern school of critics say that 

 internal evidence shows the two works could not have been written by the 

 same author, and that the Revelations are St. John's genuine work, and the 

 Gospel a forgery. How are we to answer that ? The author of the paper and 

 Dr. (Jurrey very properly say that the mere question of internal evidence is 

 not enough, and that we must look to external facts to throw light upon the 

 style. Now there is one external fact which, I think, will clearly explain the 

 whole thing. St. John, to whom Greek was not a native language, when 

 jiving at Pcitmos, wrote in Greek ; and naturally there were at first archaisms 

 and Hebraisms in his style, when writing in a tongue not his own, just as the 

 style in our writing would be very indifferent indeed if we wrote in French. 

 But after a time — the^ospel being a very much later composition— St. John 

 became more familiar with Greek, and obtained that knowledge of the lan- 

 guage which any one will get by experience in a country ; and thus he was 

 enabled to write the Gospel in much purer Greek. This is an explanation 

 of the variety in style which allows the two documents to proceed from the 



