Human testimony, we repeat, under the most favourable circumstances imaginable, knows nothing of “absolute certainty;” and if historical facts are bound up with the creed, and if they are to be received with the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the divine witness in ourselves.  On human evidence, the miracles of St. Teresa and St. Francis of Assisi are as well established as those of the New Testament.

M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account of the Gospel story which, written as it is by a man of piety, intellect, and imagination, is spreading rapidly through the educated world.  Carrying out the principles with which Protestants have swept modern history clear of miracles to their natural conclusions, he dismisses all that is miraculous from the life of our Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the original Galilean youth who lived, and taught, and died in Palestine eighteen hundred years ago.  We have no intention of reviewing M. Renan.  He will be read soon enough by many who would better consider their peace of mind by leaving him alone.  For ourselves we are unable to see by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part of the narrative, he retains the rest; the imagination and the credulity which invent extraordinary incidents invent ordinary incidents also; and if the divine element in the life is legendary, the human may be legendary also.  But there is one lucid passage in the introduction which we commend to the perusal of controversial theologians:—­

No miracle such as those of which early histories are full has taken place under conditions which science can accept.  Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them.  No miracle has ever been performed before an assemblage of spectators capable of testing its reality.  Neither uneducated people, nor even men of the world, have the requisite capacity; great precautions are needed, and a long habit of scientific research.  Have we not seen men of the world in our own time become the dupes of the most childish and absurd illusions?  And if it be certain that no contemporary miracles will bear investigation, is it not possible that the miracles of the past, were we able to examine into them in detail, would be found equally to contain an element of error?  It is not in the name of this or that philosophy, it is in the name of an experience which never varies that we banish miracles from history.  We do not say a miracle is impossible, we say only that no miracle has ever yet been proved.  Let a worker of miracles come forward to-morrow with pretensions serious enough to deserve examination.  Let us suppose him to announce that he is able to raise a dead man to life.  What would be done?  A committee would be appointed, composed of physiologists,