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CANON R. B. GIRDLESTONE^ M.A.^ ON 



explain away the fact that our Lord's human consciousness was 

 penetrated through and through with the knowledge that in Him 

 there were inherent powers more than human. So that, if men say 

 that " Christianity is Christ," while they refuse to recognise the 

 very basis upon which He claimed to rest His authority, the 

 " Christ " left to them is an emasculated Christ, and not the Christ 

 of the Gospels and of the Church. 



In his seventh Bampton Lecture, Archbishop Temple remarks : — 

 " It is not possible to get rid of miracles from the history of the 

 Apostles. They testify to our Lord's Resurrection as an actual 

 fact, and they make it the basis of all their preaching. They testify 

 to our Lord's miracles as a jxirt of the character of His life." 



This brings us to the argument elaborated years ago by Paley, 

 whose book still holds its ground in the ancient University of 

 Cambridge. 



Lieut.-Colonel G. Mackixlay. — This excellent paper comes at 

 an opportune time. The illustration of the child and the falling 

 leaf appears to give the most probable explanation of miracles 

 — no breach of natural law, but another kind of force brought into 

 play. 



Again, the Canon remarks on the timing of certain wonderful 

 events in Scripture ; this appears to be a salient feature with many 

 of them, not only with those which may have been performed by 

 agencies familiar to us, but also with others in which the agency was 

 certainly supernatural, for instance — 



(a) When the Savicur was dying the li^ht of the &un failed (the 

 sun failing, Gk.) Luke xxiii, 45 ; Christ had been called the sun 

 prophetically (Is. ix, 2 ; Mai. iv, 2), and He had proclaimed 

 Himself under the same figure, when He said, "I am the Light of 

 the World " (John viii, 12 ; ix, 4, 5). 



(h) The miracle of the resurrection took place at al)0ut the time 

 of the vernal equinox, when the power of the sun on the earth is 

 most rapidly increasing. This miracle was also timed to occur on 

 the day when the first-fruits were presented before the Lord " on 

 the morrow after the Sabbath" (Lev. xxiii, 10, 11) after the 

 Passover, and this coincidence is alhided to in 1 Cor. xv, 20, 23. 



(c) The Ascension took place when the moon of the month 

 following that of the Passover was fading from the sky, for it was 

 some forty-three days (Matt, xii, 40, Acts i, 3), after the Crucifixion, 



