It is true, without knowledge conscious life is impossible. Hence there is no religious life without a definite religious confession, and in this sense, certainly, it is important to draw from the records of revelation, the Bible, the propositions of the revealed faith and life, that in them the facts of revelation and the present state of affairs, i. e., the presence of salvation, may be brought to expression. Of this work the Sacred Scriptures, as the "register" of divine revelation in its relations to our inner life and experience, must be made the basis, without their being so used as that they shall in any way encroach upon the reason or trespass upon the rights of conscience.

It is entirely wrong to speak of an opposition between believing and knowing in the sense that by it the realm of the religious life in general, or even that of the life in the God of present grace,― of the revealed faith, is separated from the opposite. All faith rests upon knowledge, and when it is not produced by deduction or logical demonstration, it must ground itself upon spiritual perception and contact. Knowledge and faith are distinguished from each other like cognition and recognition, so, faith is an exercise of obedience, of recognition, and hence of trust, of surrender. Believing and knowing are also distinguished from each other like cognizing and understanding, and in all realms of life believing has the privilege of going farther than is possible to the understanding.

Let us return once more to revelation. What we find in it -the God of atonement, He is not merely the ideal fountain of life, one existing only in thought, but since he is present, he is actually our life's new origin, and in his grace and truth we find ourselves born anew. The reason as man's sense of truth, the conscience as his sense of right, are alike satisfied by the life and righteousness which we

here find. What the reason seeks, living, personal truth, a bride for the soul; what the conscience requires, righteousness, such as is good before God; what our entire being demands, life, eternally flowing, streaming, blooming life, — all is offered us by the God of salvation, of grace, of atonement; and hence we know that we were right when at the beginning we said that reason, conscience, and salvation formed a heavenly better a divine-human harmony. All is new that revelation offers us, and yet it is to us nothing strange.

We might conclude, were it not necessary, for the sake of completeness, that we notice yet briefly one or two incidental questions. There is one which concerns the accompanying of revelation with miracles. It is really not difficult to see that the God, whose purpose is to redeem the human race from sin and all the disturbances and abnormities brought into the world by sin, must be a God of miracles, a God who places his almighty creative power in the service of his redeeming love. Not the miracles should make us suspicious; rather would it be strange and adapted to bring the fact of divine revelation into question, if it were not accompanied with miracles. In this, however, it is implied that the miracles are not to be regarded as separate thaumaturgic feats of a magician, with the motto car tel est mon plaisir, but must be apprehended in connection with divine revelation and their ends. Then, moreover, it is apparent that they cannot be expressions of a self-correcting power, i. e., of a power which annuls the laws of nature, but are, at most, corrections of a mistake where in individual cases they seem to harm a natural law, extraordinary, but not unreasonable manifestations of power, wherever they occur manifestly outside

of the natural connection of cause and effect.1 Reasonable as to order, purpose, and end; reasonable notwithstanding all their deviations from nature; reasonable, i. e., not as disturbance or destruction of the otherwise uninterrupted course of nature, in the end all the miracles, even the most decried of them, can in connection with divine revelation · be explained, although not naturally.

Only there is needed, assuredly, neither an acquaintance with natural science, nor a contemning of all physical investigation; but there is needed a knowledge of the God who reveals himself as the God of salvation, of redemption, and so of miracles. It sounds lofty, but is, mildly expressed, a boundless immodesty, which in a reverse of positions. would never be forgiven us, when Justus von Liebig so grandiosely says that, by the explanation of the force-· which, between ourselves, natural science has not to this day yet discovered of the planetary system and of fire, the earlier conceptions of God, heaven, and hell have lost their meaning. Let us, however, have the courage to set up for our Christian believing, thinking, and teaching, just as is done by the natural sciences, the claim of exact investigation, of close observation, and to cause it to be

1 Comp. my lecture "Ueber die Wunder im Zusammenhang der göttlichen Offenbarung" (Barmen, 1865), Dr. R. Rothe, Zur Dogmatik (Gotha, 1863), p. 108. "Where does a miracle come into conflict with the laws of nature? We answer confidently, Nowhere! However, it does sharply oppose the presumed absolutism of natural law, and the idolatry which atheism would like to practise therewith. It attests that natural law is by no means the highest power in the world, but that above it rules He who made it, the living, personal God,—that in it the Creator made not a barrier to himself, by which his absolute and absolutely sacred freedom is limited, but a serviceable means, which never refuses itself to his purposes. When God works miracles, he would say thereby, that here is One who can do what created nature, what creation entire cannot do; he works in a miracle something outside of and above the process and the laws of nature." Comp. p. 100 f.

accepted, that the spirit within us, reason and conscience, are better observers than are the microscope and retort.

And now, finally, as to the way in which the revelations of God were received, let us not forget that their content extends beyond the bounds of the every-day and natural thinking and knowing as far as God does himself. Hence, it cannot be considered absurd and unreasonable if, wherever a man is chosen to be a receiver and bearer of these revelations, the barriers of the every-day, of the natural knowing, fall, and the man's inner sense must be opened before he can receive the impartations of God, as was the case with the seers and prophets, until all that God has to impart the Word has descended entirely out of its supernatural sphere into the domain of humanity, until the Word was made flesh, and is present in the Christian assembly (Tit. 1: 3), whereby the manner of New Testament knowing differs from that of Old Testament knowing.

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Thus much must here suffice. The revelation of God forms a great system, complete in itself, embracing heaven and earth, time and eternity, God and man, in which all is reasonable, if the premise is correct, God, sin. And these the conscience attests to every one. The contest against the truth and contents of divine revelation, in the name of reason and conscience, is only the second stage of a contest we all have to engage in to a greater or less extent with ourselves, - a contest in which the enemy can take three positions: I like not; I can not; I will not. The real spiritual struggle will commence only when the enemy has taken the third position.

IV.

MIRACLES.

BY REV. M. FUCHS,

PASTOR AT OPPIN, NEAR HALLE.

HE subject which is to occupy us at this hour, taken in its full compass, is of such deep-reaching and determinative import for all Christian thinking,

believing, and living, that with it Christianity can be said, without exaggeration, to stand and fall. The question of miracles, which the present lecture must try to answer, is as fundamental and cardinal a question of the Christian view of the world as is that of revelation, and the two are most intimately connected; faith in revelation and faith in miracles being inseparable things, each of which requires and conditions the other. Not only is revelation historically associated with miracles, so that every manifestation of God to the world is, as it were, irradiated with miracles, as the sun is with beams, but at the basis of this historical connection, of which the entire Scripture gives us evidence, there is also an inner connection of essence. Every revelation is, in the wider sense, a miracle, a supernatural event, something which has entered into the world from without, not something produced by the world itself; and every miracle, in the narrower sense, is a revelation, an immediate self-announcement of the living God. The two conceptions resolve into each other, and their distinction is

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