wonderful counsels of His right hand. It must suffice us that He did choose this way of dealing with us, and that He suffered the revelation of His purpose to be weighted by the powers and possibilities of the men and times that He chose. It may have been of the necessity of His conditions that the message of life could only be continued and realised in and by means and methods that carried more of temporal and secular interest to a temporal and secular people, like the chosen race, at their best, and at their worst. And this is always to be remembered, that the revelation of God came to a people that did not much care about it, whilst they were living in the very discipline that it was laying on them; and it came not through astrologers, ascetics, or philosophers, but through those whom God appointed as His lawgivers and prophets, as He chose, from all sorts and conditions of life.

However, granting all this, there still remains the consideration, which cannot be left out of our sight in these matters, and which I have mentioned before. We cannot, we cannot possibly, eliminate miraculous and angelical operation from the history of the Old Testament. We cannot look at the Bible history as one that can be divested of miraculous manifestation; we cannot reduce that miraculous manifestation to terms of psychical subjectivity, or ways of relegating unusual pheno

mena to supernatural agency, when more careful appreciation would have discovered them to be natural. There is no way of making the history of the Bible non-miraculous; the direct agency of God is a primary condition of the simplest apprehension of it. It works in, and through, and to miracle culminating in the greatest of all miracles, without which the Gospel falls into the mere limbo of pious deceptions by men themselves deceivedthe miracle of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, and the Ascension of the Son of God. "Why should it be thought incredible among you that God should raise the dead?" Why incredible, when the history of one nation was full of providential guidings, and positions and interpositions, quite inconsistent with what were regarded as natural law in the growth and rise and fall of peoples? Why incredible in the view of the history of a people which, for the next two thousand years after St. Paul asked the question, has seen, through experience, the complement of what went before. "Hath God dealt so with any nation?" If this element is to be eliminated from the Old Testament, how much more goes with it, we do not dare to calculate, we would not wish to think.

But for all that, we do not value or regard all recorded miracles alike. I do not imagine that in these days in which the place of the earth in the

solar system is fixed on a hypothesis mathematically unimpugnable, the most conscientious believer would assert it as a matter of faith, that when the sun stood still over Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, the course of this world was essentially altered; and yet that essential alteration remained unrecorded in the books of the nations, whose first and most ancient steps of knowledge were in the science of the stars. And that is a test illustration to our faith. We should as soon think of reconciling the anomaly by the variations of clocks and watches, and the computation of true and mean times as we do in travelling by land or by sea. Of such it is absurd to speak seriously. But, in fact, we know that we believe in various things with various kinds and degrees of faith. We believe in the daily quotations of the Stock Exchange with a belief different in kind from that with which we receive the forecasts of the meteorological department. We believe in the doctrines of the Apostles' Creed with a belief very different from that with which we believe the records of St. Paul's journeys, though we have no doubt about the correctness of the details. And, further, we know by experience that the acceptance we accord to the faithful record of chroniclers and historians may be very different from the negative or suspensory creed with which we regard their

illustration and interpretation of the things which they believed themselves to record truly.

Analysis, I may say, is an important element in the comparative treatment of experience and analogy. An historian of the eighth, ninth, down to the thirteenth century, records the current of history with names and dates of incontrovertible authority; and we believe in him so thoroughly that we could risk a great deal on his exact accuracy. And the same man, on the same page that he gives us an essential date or decisive particular, will tell us a miraculous story of something that he saw with his own eyes, which we should never think of accepting as possible, and the narration of which we can only welcome with the kind assumption that the man has told us what he thought he saw, and that he himself believed that what he saw was what he told us that he saw. Of analysis of such record a great deal has at different times been written, and the accepted conclusion as to the phenomenon is, I think, that such episodes constitute no objection at all to the credibility of the author who has introduced them; rather, as being the specialities or marks of idiosyncrasy of a sincere writer of limited and, it may be, perverted intellectual insight, they add an element of credibility to the acceptance of faith in so ingenuous an exposer of his own weakness.

Well, we say we believe that he thought he saw something of the kind; he lived in an atmosphere in which such things were of daily contemplation, doubtless he longed to believe it true, and as doubtless something occurred which he could in such a frame and atmosphere so interpret. But this is a very different thing from believing him or his story. I mention this, however, not for a moment intending a parallel between the most apparently useless and inconsistent of the Old Testament miracles and the fabled miracles of the mediæval saints; rather to point out that the intermixture of what is incredible to us is no bar to the acceptance, as certain, of that which is credible on the same evidence, and then to make the distinction of the kind and degree of faith which we give to different sorts of narration. I do not say that analysis is always, or indeed ever, easy or perfect, or in many points safe and trustworthy. To some things we pledge our belief on the issues of life and hereafter; to some we accord our assent as believing them to be quite true, although, if they were not, it would matter very little to any practical purpose for us; to some we give just the nod of assent. Well, I suppose he meant to tell the truth, and thought he saw what he said he did.

I could not dwell on this were it not that I see, in various regions of modern criticism, an inclina