their companions
and friends. Why do we feel so sure that what we are told of Elijah or
Elisha took place exactly as we read it? Why do we reject the account of
St. Columba or St. Martin as a tissue of idle fable? Why should not God
give a power to the saint which He had given to the prophet? We can
produce no reason from the nature of things, for we know not what the
nature of things is; and if down to the death of the Apostles the
ministers of religion were allowed to prove their commission by working
miracles, what right have we, on grounds either of history or
philosophy, to draw a clear line at the death of St. John--to say that
before that time all such stories were true, and after it all were
false?

There is no point on which Protestant controversialists evade the real
question more habitually than on that of miracles. They accuse those who
withhold that unreserved and absolute belief which they require for all
which they accept themselves, of denying that miracles are possible.
They assume this to be the position taken up by the objector, and
proceed easily to argue that man is no judge of the power of God. Of
course he is not. No sane man ever raised his narrow understanding into
a measure of the possibilities of the universe; nor does any person with
any pretensions to religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray
is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery of a sick friend,
for the gift of any blessing, or the removal of any calamity, we expect
that God will do something by an act of his personal will which
otherwise would not have been done--that he will suspend the ordinary
relations of natural cause and effect; and this is the very idea of a
miracle. The thing we pray for may be given us, and no miracle may have
taken place. It may be given to us by natural causes, and would have
occurred whether we had prayed or not. But prayer itself in its very
essence implies a belief in the possible intervention of a power which
is above nature. The question about miracles is simply one of
evidence--whether in any given case the proof is so strong that no room
is left for mistake, exaggeration, or illusion, while more evidence is
required to establish a fact antecedently improbable than is sufficient
for a common occurrence.

It has been said recently by 'A Layman,' in a letter to Mr. Maurice,
that the resurrection of our Lord is as well authenticated as the death
of Julius Caesar. It is far bette