performed through the power of evil spirits as well as by the power of God.  To imagine that the working of miracles proved that Jesus came from God, is the most patent importation of a modern apologetic notion into the area of ancient thought.  We must remember that Jesus himself laid no great weight upon the miracles which we assume that he believed he wrought, and some of which we may believe that he did work.  Many he performed with hesitation and desired so far as possible to conceal.

Even if we were in a position at one point or another in the life of Jesus to defend the traditional assumptions concerning the miraculous, yet it must be evident how opposed it is to right reason, to lay stress on the abstract necessity of belief in the miraculous.  The traditional conception of the miraculous is done away for us.  This is not at all by the fact that we are in a position to say with Matthew Arnold:  ’The trouble with miracles is that they never happen.’  We do not know enough to say that.  To stake all on the assertion of the impossibility of so-called miracles is as foolish as to stake much on the affirmation of their actuality.  The connexion of nature is only an induction.  This can never be complete.  The real question is both more complex and also more simple.  The question is whether, even if an event, the most unparalleled of those related in the Gospels or outside of them, should be proved before our very eyes to have taken place, the question is whether we should believe it to have been a miracle in the traditional sense, an event in which the actual—­not the known, but the possible—­order of nature had been broken through, and in the old sense, God had arbitrarily supervened.

Allowed that the event were, in our own experience and in the known experience of the race, unparalleled, yet it would never occur to us to suppose but that there was a law of this case, also, a connexion in nature in which, as work of God, it occurred, and in which, if the conditions were repeated, it would recur.  We should unceasingly endeavour through observation, reflexion, and new knowledge, to show how we might subordinate this event in the connexion of nature which we assume.  We should feel that we knew more, and not less, of God, if we should succeed.  And if our effort should prove altogether futile, we should be no less sure that such natural connexion exists.  This is because nature is for us the revelation of the divine.  The divine, we assume, has a natural order of working.  Its inviolability is the divinest thing about it.  It is through this sequence of ideas that we are in a position to deny, not facts which may be inexplicable, but the traditional conception of the miracle.  For surely no one needs to be told that this is not the conception of the miracle which has existed in the minds of the devout, and equally of the undevout, from the beginning of thought until the present day.