incredulity of these Rulers and of the Sanhedrim remained unshaken. It is evident, too, that it was genuine and sincere disbelief-not merely a refusal to accept the inference of the divine mission of Christ, on the ground of his miraculous power, but a disbelief in the miraculous power itself—or at least of its being miraculous in our full modern acceptation of the term; they were exasperated, but no way intimidated, by the wonders which he wrought before them. Had they really supposed that he could cure the blind, heal the lame, command spirits, still the waves, raise the dead (in a different manner, and with a different degree or kind of power from their own thaumaturgists)-still more, had they seen any one of these awful evidences of supernatural power -then, however hostile selfishness and ambition might have made them to his pretensions, they would have dreaded to provoke his enmity, or to practise against his safety, satisfied, as they must have been, that he could not only foresee and baffle their machinations, but could inflict a fearful retaliation. But we see nothing of all this; we see just the reverse; they feared, not him, but the people who were friendly to him;-they more than once openly attacked him, and tempted him, even by taunts, to a display of his superhuman gifts ;--in a word their whole conduct shows that his miracles, whatever they were, had not gone any way towards producing in their minds a conviction (or even a fear) of his supernatural power. 4. The minuter objections to the individual miraculous narratives in the Gospel, we need not dwell on. The discrepancies in the accounts were given by more than one Evangelist; the entirely distinct set of miracles recorded in the fourth, from those in the first three Gospels; the remarkable circumstance that, of the three cases of the dead being restored to life, one is mentioned by John only, one by Luke only, and the third case, mentioned by three of the Evangelists, was no resurrection from the dead at all (for all accounts concur in representing Jesus to have said expressly, "The damsel is not dead, but sleepeth ;")-all these topics have been dwelt upon in detail by other critics, and need not be considered here. The conclusion suggested by all these combined considerations seems to be this:-that the miracles spoken of in the New Testament had not the effect of real miracles upon the bystanders; that they were probably, either remarkable occurrences elevated into supernatural ones by the general supernaturalistic tendencies of the age, or examples of wonderful healing powers, the original accounts of which have become strangely intermingled and overlaid with fiction in the process of transmission. The Gospels (we must bear constantly in mind) are not contemporaneous annals; they merely narrate the occurrence of certain events, which, at the time when the tradition was congealed into a record, had assumed such and such a form and consistency in the public mind. They show us not the facts that occurred in the year A.D. 30, but the form those facts had assumed in popular belief in the year A.D. 70. There is yet another objection to the plan of propounding miracles as the basis for a Revelation, which is all but insuperable. The assertion of a miracle having been performed, is not a simple statement; it involves three elements—a fact and two inferences. It predicates, first, that such an occurrence took place; second, that it was brought about by the act and will of the individual to whom it is attributed; third, that it implied supernatural power in the agent-i. e. that it could not have been produced by mere human means. Now, the fact may have been accurately observed, and yet one or both of the inferences may be unwarranted. Or, either inference may be rendered unsound by the slightest omission or deviation from accuracy in the observation or statement of the fact'. Nay, any new discovery in scienceany advance in physiological knowledge-may show that the inference, which has always hitherto appeared quite irrefragable, was, in fact, wholly unwarranted and incorrect. the process of time, and the triumphant career of scientific inquiry, any miracle may be-as so many thousand prodigies have been-reduced to a natural occurrence. No miracle can, therefore, be a safe foundation for so vast and weighty a superstructure as a Revelation. A miracle is an argument in some measure ab ignorantia-based upon ignorance, and, therefore, defeasible by advancing knowledge. A miraculous revelation-a creed, whose foundation is miracle-must always be at the mercy of Science, and must always dread it. 1 Bentham observes that the report of a man going up with a balloon would become a miracle, if a spectator told all the rest of the story truly, but omitted to tell of the balloon. It should, then, be clearly understood that, when we decline to receive a miracle as evidence of a divine commission, we are not refusing simple testimony-we are demurring to a proposition composed of one observation and two inferences- a proposition, each of the three constituents of which contains the elements of possible inaccuracy;-we are demurring, in fact, to a process of reasoning, which assumes as its basis that the limits of human power and knowledge are indisputably known to us'. 1 "The miracle is of a most fluctuating character. The miracle-worker of to-day is a matter-of-fact juggler to-morrow. Science each year adds new wonders to our store. The master of a locomotive steam-engine would have been thought greater than Jupiter Tonans, or the Elohim thirty centuries ago."-Parker, p. 202. CHAPTER XIV. RESURRECTION OF JESUS. WE are now arrived at the most vitally important, and the most intensely interesting, portion of the Christian recordsthe resurrection of Jesus. This is the great fact to which the affections of Christians turn with the most cherished eagerness, the grand foundation on which their hopes depend, on which their faith is fixed. If, in consequence of our inquiries, the ordinary doctrine of Scriptural Inspiration be relinquished, we have reason to rejoice that Religion is relieved from a burden often too great for it to bear. If the complete verbal accuracy of the Gospel narratives is disproved, orthodoxy and not Christianity is a sufferer by the change, since it is only the more minute and embarrassing tenets of our creed that find their foundation swept away. If investigation shows the miracles of the Bible to be untenable, or at least unobligatory upon our belief, theologians are comforted by feeling that they have one weak and vulnerable outpost the less to defend. But if the resurrection of our Lord should prove, on closer scrutiny, to rest on no adequate evidence, and a regard to mental integrity should compel us to expunge it from our creed, the generality of Christians will feel that the whole basis of their faith and hope is gone, and their Christianity will vanish with the foundation on which, perhaps half unconsciously, they rested it. Whether this ought to be so is a point for future consideration. All that we have now to do is to remember that truth must be investigated without any side-glance to the consequences which that investigation may have upon our hopes. Our faith is sure to fail us in the hour of trial if we have based it on fallacious grounds, and maintained it by wilfully closing our eyes to the flaws in its foundations. The belief in the resurrection of our Lord, when based upon reflection at all, and not a mere mental habit, will be found to rest on two grounds:-first, the direct testimony of the Scripture narratives; and secondly, the evidence derivable from the subsequent conduct of the Apostles. I. The narratives of the resurrection contained in the four Gospels present many remarkable discrepancies. But discrepancies in the accounts of an event given by different narrators, whether themselves witnesses, or merely historians, by no means necessarily impugn the reality of the event narrated, but simply those accessaries of the event to which the discrepancies relate. Thus, when one evangelist tells us that the two malefactors, who were crucified along with Jesus, reviled him, and another evangelist relates that only one of them reviled him, and was rebuked by the other for so doing, though the contradiction is direct and positive, no one feels that the least doubt is thereby thrown upon the fact of two malefactors having been crucified with Jesus, nor of some reviling having passed on the occasion. Therefore the variations in the narratives of the resurrection given by the four evangelists do not, of themselves, impugn the fact of the resurrection, nor disqualify the evangelists from being received as witnesses. It is characteristic of the honest testimony of eye-witnesses to be discrepant in collateral minutiæ. But, on a closer examination of these accounts, several peculiarities present themselves for more detailed consideration. 1. We have already seen reason for concluding that, of the four Gospels, three at least were certainly not the production of eye-witnesses, but were compilations from oral or documentary narratives current among the Christian community at the time of their composition, and derived doubtless for the most part from very high authority. With regard to the fourth Gospel the opinions of the best critics are so much divided, that all we can pronounce upon the subject with any certainty is, that if it were the production of the Apostle John, it was written at a time when, either from defect of memory, redundancy of imagination, or |