not deducible by reasoning from the divine works." The great object of Christianity, he affirms, is not to discover new truths, but to awaken spiritual Life, and such knowledge as it communicates is that which is appropriated by the affections, rather than the Understanding. The argument is, that there is in man a religious sentiment, a capacity and a desire of knowing God; that this sentiment presupposes some adequate provision for its satisfaction and development; that man cannot supply from within the limits of his own being this provision for knowledge of and access to a personal God; that the material universe, though it reveals his power, does not reveal his spirit, nor convey to the heart a moral image of the Invisible, and is less fitted to awaken spiritual sensibility than to satisfy it when it is awakened; that, yet, God's gifts and graces to us in external nature, his influences and processes, are not to be considered as experiments that have failed, unsuccessful attempts to open an access to Him, but rather the excitement and preparation of the heart for the introduction of the personal knowledge of Himself, to fit us to receive the due impression and respond with readiness; that this personal knowledge of Himself is given in Jesus Christ, who is recognized by the heart thus prepared and educated as the Moral Image of the Invisible God; and that this concurrence of the spiritual craving with the spiritual manifestation, the correspondence and adaptation between the subjective and the objective, is, according to all the analogies of God's workings, a sure Basis for Belief.

"No man, probably, unencumbered with a philosophy which he wishes to reconcile with the reputed facts and doctrines of Holy Writ, would rise from a candid perusal of the New Testament without confessing that, whatever human reason may say to it, the writers of that book plainly intended that men should look up to Jesus Christ, as the human expression of the Eternal Spirit. Not indeed that we are bound to take all the theological dogmatism which has been uttered on this theme, as warranted by the representations of it in Scripture-but that unless we are justified in explaining away certain phrases as may best suit our preconceived notions, and in doing obvious violence to the drift and spirit of the entire volume, we are bound to regard the peculiar mission of Christianity, as explained by itself, to be the revelation of the

Divine mind and purpose through the medium of a human life and history.

"If this be a true account of the obvious and explicit purport of the Gospel of Christ,-and, to say the least, this account requires us to put no strain on the tenour of the record,-then Christianity presents itself to us in this wise: It is a translation of the idea of God into a language intelligible to the religious sensibilities of man. The works of creation interpret him to the intellectual powers,the life of Christ, to the moral sympathies. The action of physical mechanism supplies the alphabet in the one case,—of moral mechanism in the other. Logic is for the understanding, love is for the heart. And truly the plan, on the first blush of it, appears to be well suited to our nature and its wants. Our religious constitution partaking far more largely, as we have seen, of the emotional than of the ratiocinative element, demands, in order to its full development, an emotional representation to it of the objects with which it was designed to be conversant. Can we conceive of this demand being met in any other way equally efficacious, than by showing them to us in a human form and dress? The abstract truths expressive of divine excellences are powerless in themselves to kindle our affections or to govern our wills. How can they be best embodied so as that we may choose them as our companions for daily converse, our guardians and our guides for confiding consultation, our ministering angels in our hours of sorrow, our heart's portion for time and for eternity? In what accents can our sense of guilt,which no ingenious reasonings of ours can wholly extinguish,—be spoken unto, so that all gloomy anxieties shall give place to a quiet and abiding peace of conscience? How can those our obligations to the Author of our being be so presented to our will, as to secure not only its constrained acquiescence in their propriety, but its delighted recognition of, and passionate surrender to, their claims? If it be the benign purpose of the Supreme to allure us to that higher sphere of being, activity, and enjoyment, in which our noblest capabilities may have full scope for exercise and satisfaction, how better could he do it than by putting his truth, his purity, his love, his will and purpose concerning us, into the shape of a man's history, crowded with passages that come right home to our inmost and tenderest sympathies? What are the chief, the all but irresistible, instrumentalities by which heart moves heart? How, usually, are strong wills bowed, and violent prejudices soothed to sleep, and fierce enmities overborne and slain? By the numerous expressions and acts in which disinterested kindness will dress itself, by magnanimous self-sacrifice, by cheerful exposure to wrong, by meek forbearance under wrong, by the helping hand when help is needed, by the silent tear of commiseration when suffering is endured, by

-a sense

heroic enterprise for others' benefit, by long and unwearied consistency in pursuit of benevolent ends. These are charmed agencies all the world over. These have ever been found, and will always continue to be, the cords of love and the bands of a man' the most potent to draw the will of humanity whithersoever he would who wields them. There is scarcely a depth of degradation to which we can sink from which these might not drag us-scarcely an eminence of virtue within the possibility of man's attainment, to which these might not lead us on. Well, it is precisely by this class of agencies that Christianity professes to reveal to our moral nature the All-wise God, otherwise invisible to it, or at best but 'dimly seen.' And hence the convergence of all the lines of light in the person of Jesus Christ—hence the intensely personal character of the entire system —hence the earnest and reiterated direction of faith, hope, and love, to him, rather than to his oral utterances. What he discoursed of God is not referred to as the principal medium by which he imaged the Deity to man's heart-but rather what he was, what he did, what he suffered-his purity, his all-comprehensive benevolence, his heroic self-sacrifice, his tenderness, his meekness. Herein we are instructed to look for the manifested God-to attain to the truest understanding of what He is morally-what are His regards to uswhither He would lead us-and how deep and moving is His love to us. Here affection displays itself with a view to excite affection -the appeal to moral sympathy is made by a previous exhibition of moral sympathy-and in the natural language of human deeds, struggles, tears, distresses, death, we have translated to us the else unutterable thoughts, propensions, and will of the ever-blessed God."-P. 121.

III. Our Author inquires by what means God authenticated and marked off a human life as intended for a manifestation of Himself, a "portrait through all the animate features of which the Father of spirits looks into the very depths of our souls, and awakens fellowship." He thinks that Miracle is the only way by which God could say to man "This is my beloved Son,"—and this he calls the SEAL. And here begins the weakness and blindness of the argument. Miracles may have been necessary, we believe they were, to fix attention upon Jesus Christ, in order that the spiritual manifestation may have had opportunity to display itself. Miracles may have been necessary, we believe they were, in order to perfect the spiritual manifestation, to show that Love is the spirit that directs Power: but now, to us, Miracles cannot serve the

first purpose at all, of awakening attention, for to this effect the Miracles must be performed before our eyes— and if the wonderful works of Christ still serve the purpose of manifestation, then they do not seal the manifestation but convey it, and the only seal it is now capable of is "the witness of the spirit," the testimony of God in the soul. Mr. Miall, in direct violation of the whole spirit of his book, makes common cause with a material philosophy, with the most withering and barren of all scepticisms, when he asserts that God has no means to authenticate a revelation except by Miracle. If this is the case, then what becomes of his own previous argument that the glory of God in the face of Christ is the living countenance through which the Father looks into the hearts of His children? If we cannot recognize that countenance as the Image of His except upon the external testimony of a Miracle, then wherein consists its spiritual power as a living Instrument? We accept it on mechanical not on spiritual grounds. It must be clear, now, that we cannot first prove a Miracle and on its testimony accept the spiritual manifestation; that on the other hand, it is the Image of God, spiritually recognized, that authenticates the Form in which it is given, the divine beauty of the picture that stamps its value upon the frame in which it is fitly set. The history preserves the spiritual manifestation, but it is the spiritual manifestation and the according witness in the soul of man, awakened by it, of God's spirit, that authenticate the history. That Christianity was supernatural, as not being an ordinary growth. of human nature, we fully believe that Christianity required the accompaniment of Miracle for the purpose both of excitement and of manifestation, we also believebut to make Miracle now the only verifier of the Revelation is to deliver over the world to scepticism, for the Miracle cannot be established independently of the internal and spiritual evidence, and if it could we should still require the criterion of the spirit to determine what the truth is to which the Miracle bears witness. Mr. Miall, indeed, does not contend that Miracles have any demonstrative power to produce a belief in dogmas, but he does contend that we have no other means of recognizing the veritable stamp of God upon a human life. Yet Christ

refused to work Miracles because of unbelief-whereas if the ordinary logic is right, the rule should have been, the more of unbelief the more of Miracle. And when Peter recognized him as the Son of God, he said, "Flesh and Blood have not revealed it unto you, but the spirit of my Father." That the Miracles of Christ were the medium of divine manifestations, and are now accepted through the power of those manifestations, through their irresistible appeals to all that is divine in the nature of man, is not only a different thing, but an opposite thing, to the statement that now it is the Miracle that seals the manifestation. It is the manifestation that accredits the Miracle. In the following view of the purpose served by the Christian Miracles we fully accord:

"They exemplify very impressively the gentleness and benignity of Divine power. They all of them teach God's sympathy with suffering, God's care for the wretched, God's pity for the outcast. Throughout the life of Christ, wherever supernatural power is brought to bear upon man, it is invariably in tenderness. The leper, the lunatic, the maniac, the paralyzed, the deaf and dumb, the blind, the dying, and the dead-such are the subjects selected on whom to display the all-conquering energy of God. When we descend to particulars, there are usually to be found associated with each case, circumstances which set off the benignity expressed by the miracle, so that on the whole the feature of it which addresses our affections is, if anything, more prominent than that which awakens our astonishment. The bulk of that which is recorded of what Jesus Christ did during his public ministry consists of supposed manifestations of Almighty power-and his use of that power, therefore, must have contributed very mainly to our general estimate of his character. Now what is that estimate, we ask? What has it uniformly been? Has it not been such, in all subsequent times, as to commend him to man's heart, as the most touching impersonation of compassionate benevolence which the world has ever witnessed? Put the two ideas together-unbounded power and unparalleled gentleness-a hand that can do anything, at the service of a heart that can feel nothing but disinterested kindness. Is not such an association worthy of God! But is it not also unique and novel as compared with man's ordinary conceptions of what supernaturalism would be likely to perform? We will not go the length of affirming that man's imagination, excited by religious ideas, conld not have hit upon this combination of might and tenderness-but we submit with confidence that the seemly and