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 w T e have a criticism upon the forgery of 
documents. Some remarks are there made by Mr. Row on the authorship 
of the Gospel of St. J ohn as compared with St. J ohn’s first epistle, and the 
difference in the style of the two works. Let me add a remark in relation 
to St. John’s Gospel as placed side by side with the Revelations of St. John. 
The divergences between those two works are much greater 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. Currey 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 Patmos, 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 Gospel 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 
