theirs. And yet the main gist of the mat ter lies here. We would not expect to be convinced

of the truth of religion, nor converted to it, by outward miracles; we would not expect

them at all. Not but that, if a notable miracle really did occur, its impression and effect

would be overwhelming; although, unless a miracle submitted itself to the strictest

scientific tests, when in the nature of things it would cease to be a miracle, it would

scarcely find general credence. Hence, truth to say, the miraculous in the New Testament

constitutes to modern thought not its strong, but its weak point; not its convincing

evidence, but its point of attack and difficulty. Accordingly, treating of, or contemplating

the miracles of the New Testament, it is always their moral, not their natural (or

supranatural), aspect which has its chief influence upon us. But what is this but to say that

ours is modern, not ancient thought, and that the evidential power of Christ's miracles has

given place to the age and dispensation of the Holy Ghost? With us the process is the

reverse of what it was with them of old. They approached the moral and spiritual through

the miraculous; we the miraculous through the moral and spiritual. His Presence, that one

grand Presence is, indeed, ever the same. But God always adapts His teaching to our

learning; else it were not teaching at all, least of all Divine teaching. Only what carries it

now to us is not the same as what carried it to them of old: it is no more the fingerpost of

'signs,' but the finger of the Spirit. To them the miraculous was the expected - that

miraculous which to us also is so truly and Divinely miraculous, just because it applies to

all time, since it carries to us the moral, as to them the physical, aspect of the miracle; in

each case, Divine reality Divinely conveyed. It may therefore safely be asserted, that to

the men of that time no teaching of the new faith would have been real without the

evidence of miracles.

In those days, when the idea of the miraculous was, so to speak, fluid - passing from the

natural into the supernatural - and men regarded all that was above their view-point of

nature as supernatural, the idea of the miraculous would, by its constant recurrence,

always and prominently suggest itself. Other teachers also, among the Jews at least,

claimed the power of doing miracles, and were popularly credited with them. But what an

obvious contrast between theirs and the 'signs' which Jesus did! In thinking of this, it is

necessary to remember, that the Talmud and the New Testament alike embody teaching

Jewish in its form, and addressed to Jews, and - at least so far as regards the subject of

miracles - at periods not far apart, and brought still nearer by the singular theological

conservatism of the people. If, with this in our minds, we recall some of the absurd

Rabbinic pretensions to miracles - such as the creation of a calf by two Rabbis every

Sabbath eve for their Sabbath meal,5 or the repulsive, and in part blasphemous, account

of a series of prodigies in testimony of the subtleties of some great Rabbi6 - we are almost

overwhelmed by the evidential force of the contrast between them and the 'signs' which

Jesus did. We seem to be in an entirely new world, and we can understand the conclusion

at which every earnest and thoughtful mind must have arrived in witnessing them, that

He was, indeed, 'a Teacher from God.'

Such an observer was Nicodemus (Naqdimon),7 one of the Pharisees and a member of the

Jerusalem Sanhedrin. And, as we gather from his mode of expression,  8 not he only, but