immediately and said to Joseph, his father, Behold, thy child is at the water-course, and hath taken clay and formed twelve birds, and hath profaned the Sabbath.  And Joseph came to the place, and when he saw him, he cried unto him, saying, Why art thou doing these things on the Sabbath, which it is not lawful to do?  And Jesus clapped his hands, and cried unto the sparrows, and said to them, Go away; and the sparrows flew up and departed, making a noise.  And the Jews who saw it were astonished, and went and told their leaders what they had seen Jesus do” ("Gospel of Thomas:  Apocryphal Gospels,” B.H.  Cowper, pp. 130, 131).  Making the water pure by a word is no more absurd than turning water into wine (John ii. 1-11); or than sending an angel to trouble it, and thereby making it health-giving (John v. 2-4); or than casting a tree into bitter waters, and making them sweet (Ex. xv. 25).  The fashioning of twelve sparrows out of soft clay is not stranger than making a woman out of a man’s rib (Gen. ii. 21); neither is it more, or nearly so, curious as making clay with spittle, and plastering it on a blind man’s eyes in order to make him see (John ix. 6); nay, arguing a la F.D.  Maurice, a very strong reason might be made out for this proceeding.  Thus, Jesus came to reveal the Father to men, and his miracles were specially arranged to show how God works in the world; by turning the water into wine, and by multiplying the loaves, he reminds men that it is God whose hand feeds them by all the ordinary processes of nature.  In this instructive miracle of the clay formed into sparrows, which fly away at his bidding, Jesus reveals his unity with the Father, as the Word by whom all things were originally made; for “out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air” (Gen. ii. 19) at the creation, and when the Son was revealed to bring about the new creation, what more appropriate miracle could he perform than this reminiscence of paradise, clearly suggesting to the Jews that the Jehovah, who, of old, formed the fowls of the air out of the ground, was present among them in the incarnate Word, performing the same mighty work?  Exactly in this fashion do Maurice, Robertson, and others of their school, deal with the miracles of Christ recorded in the canonical gospels (see Maurice on the Miracles, Sermon IV., in “What is Revelation?").  The number, twelve, is also significant, being that of the tribes of Israel, and the local colouring—­the complaining Jews and the violated Sabbath—­is in perfect harmony with the other gospels.  The action of Jesus, vindicating the conduct complained of by the performance of a miracle, is in the fullest accord with similar instances related in the received stories.  It is, however, urged that some of the miracles of Jesus, as given in the apocrypha, are dishonouring to him, because of their destructive character; the son of Annas, the scribe, spills the water the child Jesus has collected, and Jesus gets