subjected to the examination of every beholder. Lest, however, it should be said that a crowd are bad judges of a miraculous work, others were performed before individuals, competent witnesses, and then submitted to the public eye. Peter and James and John, and the father and the mother of the damsel (the persons best able to discern the truth of the restoration to life) were present at the raising of Jairus' daughter: whilst all the people weeping and wailing at her death, and the scoffers who derided our Lord's attempt to restore her, were so many witnesses of the truth of the miracle, and, had there been any imposition, would have been so many accusers of the fraud. The circumstances of the damsel's walking, and being capable of receiving her ordinary food, are further proofs of the perfection of the work and its miraculous character.

3. Then the first Christian miracles were wrought, not before a heathen nation, but before the Jewish, accustomed to judge of miracles and to weigh the evidence arising from them. At that very time they were expecting their Messiah, and therefore prepared to examine with care and jealousy the truth of the wonderful works; and were excited to bitter hostility against our Lord when they heard his doctrine; and scrutinized his miracles with eager desire to detect a fraud. Yet this people admit the miracles of Christ to be notable and decisive; they ascribe them to a divine power; the impressions made upon their minds, contrary to their wishes and prejudices, is evidently that which undeniable miracles could alone produce; their very endeavors to oppose and resist them, or to explain away the just inferences from them, proclaim aloud the truth of the supernatural operations.

4. Further, our Lord's mighty deeds include such numerous and various suspensions of the course of nature as, under the circumstances, constitute the most decisive proof of miraculous agency. It was not one or two or three professed miracles, with many failures and a long interval of time between each, which were performed, but a great number, without a single failure, during the whole of our Lord's ministry. His life was a life of miracles.

He went about doing good in the exertion of an abiding and unfailing miraculous power. More than fifty express instances are recorded-whilst whole masses of them are registered in such words as these, And Jesus went about all Galilee healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people; and his fame went throughout all Syria, and they brought unto him all the sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy, and he healed them. And at the close of his history St. John adds, And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.

Again, these miracles of our Lord were of every sort; some less grand and stupendous, others more imposing. At one time he feeds an assembled multitude, at another he heals the trembling woman that came behind him and touched the hem of his garment. His power was universal. At Jerusalem, in several parts of Judea and Galilee, in streets and villages, in synagogues, in private houses, in the streets, in highways, in different manners, and on every kind of occasion, did he perform his mighty works. Some with preparation and a solemn prediction of what he was about to do, as in the case of Lazarus, and the daughter of Jairus; others without preparation and by accident, as we speak, as the widow's son at Nain. Some when attended by the multitudes, others when alone with the patient. Most of these works were performed at the earnest entreaty of a father, a mother, a master of a family on behalf of persons whom they loved; so that our Lord did not choose the subjects of his miracles, but displayed his power in cases where the attention would be most awakened, and the reality of the cures best ascertained. By this variety every attempt at explaining away the accounts is precluded. If some might overwhelm the senses of the beholders, as the transfiguration and the ascension; others were submitted to the

(k) In the one species of miracle, the raising from the dead, mark the gradations -the daughter or Jairus was just dead and lay like one asleep-the widow's son had been dead some little time and was being carried to the tomb-Lazarus had been dead four days, and corruption had taken place.

most sober, deliberate contemplation-as the calming of the sea, the turning water into wine, the feeding the five thousand. No fortuitous circumstances, no exaggeration, can solve the phenomena of miracles varied in every possible form, and which never in a single instance failed of their end.

5. Consider, further, the miracles of which our Lord was the subject, as well as those which he himself performed.' He was conceived and born by a direct, miraculous power. Three times during his life did a voice from heaven proclaim him to be the Son of God. At his death the rending of the vail, the earthquake, the supernatural darkness, the opened graves, were divine attestations. The greatest of all miracles was his own resurrection from the dead. I say nothing of his divine knowledge of the hearts and thoughts of men; I omit the miraculous fast of forty days; I pass by various other demonstrations of superhuman operations. I confine myself to the remark that the distinct miracles I have mentioned, of which our Saviour was the subject, are calculated to strengthen our expectation of a truly supernatural character in his own mighty works.

6. Then the wonderful works of Christ produced such permanent effects on those who were the subjects of them, as to prove their supernatural character. They were most of them performed, indeed, instantaneously; but the effects remained, and were submitted to every one's observation. When Lazarus was raised, he did not merely move and speak and die again, or come forth out of the grave and vanish away. He returned to his family, and was visited by the Jews from motives of curiosity or malevolence. A momentary effect may be called in question; the solid and lasting consequences of a cure, in the abiding health of the individual, attest the finger of God.

7. Lastly, the miracles of the New Testament were done for a high and holy end, an end worthy of the Almighty Creator, which renders a suspension of the ordinary course of nature highly credible. They were not wasted on any trivial occasion. They were not superfluous or undefined

(1) This is one of the fine thoughts with which Franks's Lectures abound.

in their purpose. The wise and benevolent end was to ascertain the truth of a declaration of God's will; to mark out the Saviour of mankind from all pretenders; to give his accountable creatures a due assurance of a divine revelation -such an end is unquestionably neither inconsistent with the divine wisdom, nor unbecoming the divine goodness. So far as we can judge, some such interference was absolutely necessary as an attestation to a religion sent from God. The extraordinary acts were precisely suitable to the extraordinary occasion which called for them. And to those who admit the being and perfections of the Moral Governor of the universe, (and those only I address,) it must appear in the highest degree probable that miraculous works would attend the declaration of his will. With such positive evidence before us, then, the case is undoubted-the wonderful actions of the gospel history were directly and palpably miraculous.

But this leads us to notice

III. That there was such a cONNEXION BETWEEN THESE MIRACLES AND THE RELIGION THEY ARE SAID ΤΟ ATTEST,

as to prove satisfactorily that that religion was from God.

1. For our Saviour and the apostles constantly appealed to their mighty works in proof of their mission. When John Baptist sent his disciples to our Lord to inquire whether he were the Messiah, he bid them return and tell John what miracles they had witnessed, and what doctrine they had heard. A previous notice of many of his miracles was given, the character of an ambassador from God assumed, and then a series of mighty works performed in proof of the truth of his mission. To trace out the manner of this proof, to follow our Lord's various arguments, to study the credentials of the gospel in the gospel itself, to read the Christian evidences as Jesus himself stated them, will give the most entire satisfaction to the candid mind. The progress of the proof-the wise and forcible manner of our Saviour's. arrangement of it-the majesty, the compassion, the truth of his appeals, carry their own conviction with them. Every time that we read the gospel, we are more struck with the matchless character of veracity appearing in the proofs

which he adduced of his mission. At first he made scarcely any remarks on his miracles; he performed them, and let them speak for themselves. Towards the close of his ministry, again, he wrought but few mighty works, because of the unbelief of the people. But between these periods, the intermixture of arguments and miracles, of appeals to the heart and displays of divine power, form an irresistible evidence to every attentive mind, that his doctrine was divine.m

2. Moreover the miracles of our Lord had been predicted as the express evidence of the Messiah. A long previous expectation had been excited, no room was left for conjecture either as to the agent or the design. The wonders of our Lord were not single, unconnected, unexplained prodigies, but miracles performed in consequence of a design. avowed long before, and which ceased to be wrought when that design was accomplished. The prophet Isaiah had marked out the very miracles which should designate the Messiah: Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, then shall the lame man leap as the hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing. We shall see the finger of prophecy pointed to the Messiah still more clearly when we come to the proper place; but the predictions fulfilled in the miracles of our Lord, fix and designate and seal him as divinely commissioned of God, and as not only a prophet, but the Messiah and the Saviour of the world.

3. And surely we cannot fail to observe the admirable fitness of this attestation to a divine religion. It is a manner of acting worthy of God. Let men reason to support their opinions; let them establish their doctrines by a course of arguments-they have no right to command the understanding of others. But for the Almighty God, it is not becoming that he should speak as a philosopher who disputes-no, he speaks as a Master who decides; he supports his religion, not by arguments, but by deeds of omnipotence. His word is truth; to obey it is the duty of man-and what more worthy of God than to command the obedience of man

(m) Franks.