the Scripture canon was incomplete, there was need of miracles. When documentary evidence was at hand, miracles were seen no longer. The fathers of the second century speak of miracles, but they confess that they are of a class widely different from the wonders wrought in the days of the apostles. And so of medieval and modern miracles. The Scripture recognizes the existence of counterfeit miracles and denominates them lying wonders.' These counterfeit miracles, in various ages, argue that the belief in miracles is natural to the race and that somewhere there must exist the true. They serve to show that not all supernatural occurrences are of divine origin, and to impress upon us the necessity of careful examination before we give them credence. False miracles may commonly be distinguished from the true, by their acompaniments of immoral conduct or of doctrine contradictory to truth already revealed, as in modern spiritualism; by their internal characteristics of inanity or extravagance, as in the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, or in the miracles of the Apocryphal New Testament; in the insufficiency of the object which they are designed to further, as in the case of Apollonius of Tyana, or of the miracles said to accompany the publication of the doctrine of the immaculate conception; or finally, in their lack of substantiating evidence, as in mediæval miracles, which are seldom if ever attested by contemporary and di-interested witnesses.

A simple comparison of other so-called miracles with those of Scripture suffices to show the vast superiority of the latter in sobriety, in benevolence, in purpose, in evidence. Mahomet disclaimed all power to work miracles, and appealed to the Koran in lieu of them, so that its paragraphs are called aiát, or 'sign.' But later legends relate that Mahomet caused darkness at noon, whereupon the moon flew to him, and after going seven times round the Kaaba, bowed to him, then entered his right sleeve, and, slipping out at the left, split into two halves, which after severally retiring to the extreme east and west, were once more united to each other. These were truly signs from heaven, but they make no impression upon us. The fable of St. Alban, the first martyr of Britain, illustrates to us the nature of mediæval miracles. The saint walks about, after his head is cut off, and, that he may not be wholly deprived of that useful portion of his body, he carries it in his hand. Mediæval miracles were part of a complicated system of deceit and evil, constructed to further the secular interests of a domineering church. Antecedently improbable, from their connection with the organization of which they are the representatives, they fail to pass either of the tests which distinguish the true miracle from the false. But in the New Testament all these tests are met. Here is purity of life in the teachers who work them, accompanied by the proclamation of doctrine not only consistent with God's past teachings, but constituting the keystone of the arch of revelation; here are sobriety and grandeur, benevolence and wisdom, united in every act; here are objects worthy of divine intervention, the attesting of the divine commission of his Son and the certification that what he teaches is God's authoritative word of life and salvation; here is evidence of the occurrence of these miracles from eye-witnesses of keen discernment and irreproachable integrity, who had no conceivable motive for dishonesty, and who imperiled their lives by the testimony they gave-witnesses who mutually support

each other without the possibility of collusion, and whose testimony perfectly agrees with collateral facts and circumstances, so far as these can be ascertained from the most rigorous investigations into the literature and history of their time. No other religion professes to be attested by miracles at all; no other miracles of any age present evidence of their genuineness comparable to these. Indeed, the result of extended investigation is simply this: The Christian miracles are the only series of miracles that have the slightest claim to rational credence, yet no man can rationally doubt that the Christian miracles were wrought by God.

Here we might leave our theme. We make but one closing remark. The belief in many fancied manifestations of the supernatural has vanished with the advance of civilization. Sir Matthew Hale and his belief in witches are things of the past. But the belief in the Christian miracles has not vanished: it has not decreased; it sways a larger number of minds, and minds of higher quality and culture, to-day than ever before. With civilization, the belief in other wonders disappears. With civilization, the belief in the Christian miracles steadily and irresistibly advances. It is an instance of survival of the fittest. It is inexplicable, except by difference of kind between the faith and the superstition. And the faith whose progress is never retrograde, but whose dominion perpetually widens, unless the laws of mind and of history be changed in the interest of unbelief, must some day inevitably embrace among its adherents the total race of man.

X.

THE METHOD OF INSPIRATION.*

Among sincere believers in the all-pervading inspiration of the Scriptures, there are minor differences of opinion. These differences have respect chiefly to the method in which the Holy Spirit wrought upon the sacred writers. Some are unable to conceive of any inspiration which does not involve an external communication and reception. Richard Hooker, the great English Churchman of the sixteenth century, asserts that the authors of the Bible "neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths." We may call this the dictation-theory of inspiration. There are undoubtedly instances in which this method was used by God. When Moses went into the taberernacle, he "heard the voice speaking to him from between the cherubim." When John was in the Spirit on the Lord's-day, he was bidden to write certain definite words to the seven churches. But we conceive that this theory rests upon a very partial induction of Scripture facts. It unwarrantably

assumes that occasional instances of direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God's communications of truth to the writers of the Bible.

There is another far larger class of facts which this theory is wholly unable to explain. There is a manifestly human element in the Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the productions of each writer from those of every other, witness Paul's anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and of enthusiasm. There are variations in accounts of the same scene or transaction, which indicate personal idiosyncrasies in the different writers,― witness the descriptions of Mark as compared with those of Matthew. These facts tend to show that what they wrote was not dictated to them, but was in a true sense the product of their own observation and thought. They were not simply pens-they were penmen- of the Spirit. God's authorship did not preclude a human authorship also.

It has been sought to break the force of these facts by urging that the omniscient and omnipotent Spirit could without difficulty put his communications into all varieties of human speech. Quenstedt, the Lutheran theologian, declared that "the Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to themselves." We are reminded of Voltaire's idea that God created fossils in the rocks, just such as they would have been had ancient seas e isted. A theory like this virtually accuses God of unveracity. In nature he has not made our senses to deceive us. Much less in his word has he led our minds astray by filling it with illusory ind.cations of intellectual activity on the part of prophets and evangelists.

* Printed in the Examiner, Oct. 7 and Oct. 14, 1880.

We must remember, moreover, that large parts of the Scriptures consist of narratives of events with which the writers were personally familiar. It is inconsistent with any wise economy of means in the divine administration, that the Scripture-writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already, or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural powers. That Luke made diligent inquiry as to the facts which he was to record, he expressly tells us in the preface to his Gospel. If, after all this gathering of materials, Luke still required to have his Gospel dictated to him word for word, it is difficult to see the need of the preliminary investigations. Why employ eye-witnesses of the Saviour's life, like John? Might not the Gospel which proceeded from his pen have been equally well written by one who never saw the Lord, nay, by one who lived a thousand years before his coming?

It is sometimes said that these considerations, convincing as they may seem, can weigh nothing against the plain assertion of Paul that he speaks "not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth." A careful examination of this passage, however, will show that there is not only no dictation here, but that all such mechanical influence is by implication excluded. In what way are we to suppose that "man's wisdom teacheth?" By dictating word for word? Not at all. It is rather by so filling the writer's mind, that he uses words addressed to the merely natural tastes and opinions of men. So the speech "taught by the Spirit," or "learned of the Spirit," as we may better translate the phrase, is not the utterance of words dictated one by one by the Holy Ghost, but simply the expression of the thought with which the Spirit has filled the mind, in words of whose adequateness and appropriateness that same Spirit furnishes the guarantee. The passage teaches nothing more than that the general manner of discourse was ordered by God, so that the writers joined to the matter revealed by the Spirit words which they had also learned from the Spirit how to employ. In what precise way the Holy Spirit secured a right use of words we may or may not be able to determine. It is certain that this particular passage does not inform us,- much less does it constitute a direct affirmation of the dictation-theory of inspiration.

By way of transition to what seems to us a more reasonable conception of the general method of inspiration, we may add to all the preceding objections still one more. The theory of word-for-word dictation contradicts what we know of the law of God's working in the soul. The higher and nobler God's communications are, the more fully is the recipient in possession and use of his own faculties. To Joseph's dullness of perception God speaks in a vision of his sleep, but to Mary the angel of the annunciation delivers his message in her waking hours. We cannot suppose that the composition of the Scriptures, that highest work of man under the influence of God's Spirit, was purely mechanical. On the contrary, it seems plain to us that Psalms and Gospels and Epistles alike bear indubitable marks of having proceeded from living human hearts, and from minds in the most active and energetic movement. But, in order clearly to present our own view of God's method, it will be necessary to say a preliminary word with regard to the general matter of divine and human coöperation.

There are those who conceive of God's working and man's working as

mutually exclusive of each other. They cannot comprehend the possibility of an act's having man for its author in the most complete sense, and yet being in an equally complete sense the work of God. Yet just such coöperation of God and man is brought to our view in the apostle's injunction : "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure." Even regeneration and conversion are respectively the divine and the human aspects of a change in which God and man are equally active, although logically speaking the initiative is wholly with God. But the highest and most wonderful proof and illustration of such union of divine and human activities is found in the person of the God-man, Jesus Christ. There surely the fact that a work is human does not prevent its being also divine, nor the fact that a work is divine prevent its being also human.

It is the great service to theology of Dorner, the distinguished German writer, that he has reiterated and emphasized this truth that man is not a mere tangent to God, capable of juxtaposition and contact with him, but of no interpenetration and indwelling of the divine Spirit. Every believer knows that the effect of God's union with his soul is only to put him more fully in possession of his own powers; in truth, he never is truly and fully himself until God is in him and works through him. Then only he learns how much there is of him, and of what lofty things he is capable. Now in this truth, as we conceive, lies the key to the doctrine of inspiration. The Scriptures are the production equally of God and of man, and are never to be regarded as merely human or merely divine. The wonder of inspiration - that which constitutes it a unique fact-is in neither of these terms separately, but in the union of the two. Those whom God raised up and providentially qualified, spoke and wrote the words of God, not as from without but as from within; and that, not passively, but in the most conscious possession and the most exalted exercise of their own powers of intellect, emotion and will.

Inspiration is a unique fact, and in attempting to illustrate our meaning, we run the risk of misleading. But let us run this risk, and trust to subsequent explanation to correct any false inferences from our illustrations. What dictation is, we know without any example. The merchant dictates a letter by word of mouth, and after it is written reads it over, and if it is correct authorizes the sending of it. It is his letter, though not a word of it is in his handwriting. This is the first method- a method employed, as we grant, in Scripture, though, as we also believe, only in rare and exceptional cases. There is a second method which may conceivably have been employed. In an interview with his confidential clerk, the same merchant may give the clerk a general idea of the letter which he desires to have written, but may leave the words and even the method of treatment in large degree to the clerk's discretion. Still it is the merchant's letter, not the clerk's. In fact, it would be to all intents and purposes his letter, had he given no special directions to his secretary, but had left him to be guided in his writing by what he knew of the general spirit and business methods of his employer, that is, it would be the employer's letter, if it were accepted by that employer and sent forth by one authorized to act in his name. Now it is possible that the Scriptures might be the word of God, even though the