ect the naked fact which may lie beneath the
imaginative or marvellous language in which it is recorded; but even
in these cases the solution can be hardly more than conjectural.' In
other cases 'the supernatural so entirely predominates and is so of
the intimate essence of the transaction that the facts and the
interpretation must be accepted together or rejected together.' In
such cases it is the duty of the historian simply 'to relate the facts
as recorded, to adduce his authorities, and to abstain from all
explanation for which he has no ground.'

The distinction between the providential and the strictly miraculous
appears to him impossible to draw. 'Belief in Divine Providence, in
the agency of God as the Prime Mover in the Natural world as in the
mind of Man, is an inseparable part of religion. There can be no
religion without it.' But in numerous cases, to distinguish between
the simply providential and the strictly miraculous implies a
knowledge of the working of natural causes greater than we possess;
and in certain stages of civilisation, and very eminently in the
Jewish mind, there is a marked tendency to suppress secondary causes,
and to attribute not only the more extraordinary but also the common
events of life to direct divine agency. The possibility and the
reality of the miraculous he emphatically asserts.

'The palmary miracle of all, the Resurrection, stands entirely by
itself. Every attempt to resolve it into a natural event, a delusion
or hallucination in the minds of the disciples, the eye-witnesses and
death-defying witnesses to its truth, or to treat it as an allegory or
figure of speech, is to me a signal failure. It must be accepted as
the keystone--for such it is--and seal to the great Christian doctrine
of a future life, as a historical fact, or rejected as a baseless
fable.'

But great numbers of what were deemed miracles may be explained by
natural causes, by figurative modes of expression which were common in
Oriental nations, by the tendency of the human mind to embellish or
exaggerate surprising facts, or invent supernatural causes for what it
is unable to explain, by the retrospective imagination which seeks to
dignify the distant past with a supernatural halo. The early annals of
all nations are strewn with pretended miracles which no one will now
maintain, and Milman shows in a powerful passage how the idea of the
miraculous has been steadily contracting and receding; how dangerous