Recent controversy has forced them again on men’s thoughts, and has made us see that, whether they are accepted or denied, it is idle to ignore them.  They mean too much to be evaded.  Like all powerful arguments they cut two ways, and of all powerful arguments they are the most clearly two-edged.  However we may limit their range, some will remain which we must face; which, according to what is settled about them, either that they are true or not true, will entirely change all that we think of religion.  Writers on all sides have begun to be sensible that a decisive point requires their attention, and that its having suffered from an old-fashioned way of handling is no reason why it should not on its own merits engage afresh the interest of serious men, to whom it is certainly of consequence.

The renewed attention of theological writers to the subject of miracles as an element of proof has led to some important discussions upon it, showing in their treatment of a well-worn inquiry that a change in the way of conducting it had become necessary.  Of these productions we may place Mr. Mozley’s Bampton Lectures for last year among the most original and powerful.  They are an example, and a very fine one, of a mode of theological writing which is characteristic of the Church of England, and almost peculiar to it.  The distinguishing features of it are a combination of intense seriousness with a self-restrained, severe calmness, and of very vigorous and wide-ranging reasoning on the realities of the case with the least amount of care about artificial symmetry or scholastic completeness.  Admirers of the Roman style call it cold, indefinite, wanting in dogmatic coherence, comprehensiveness, and grandeur.  Admirers of the German style find little to praise in a cautious bit-by-bit method, content with the tests which have most affinity with common sense, incredulous of exhaustive theories, leaving a large margin for the unaccountable or the unexplained.  But it has its merits, one of them being that, dealing very solidly and very acutely with large and real matters of experience, the interest of such writings endures as the starting-point and foundation for future work.  Butler out of England is hardly known, certainly he is not much valued either as a divine or a philosopher; but in England, though we criticise him freely, it will be a long time before he is out of date.  Mr. Mozley’s book belongs to that class of writings of which Butler may be taken as the type.  It is strong, genuine argument about difficult matters, fairly facing what is difficult, fairly trying to grapple, not with what appears the gist and strong point of a question, but with what really and at bottom is the knot of it.  It is a book the reasoning of which may not satisfy every one; but it is a book in which there is nothing plausible, nothing put in to escape the trouble of thinking out what really comes across the writer’s path.  This will not recommend it to readers who