demands a miracle as a
certificate of character. He will not accept any other evidence of
the perfect goodness of Christ. 'No outward life and conduct,' he
says, 'however irreproachable, could prove His perfect sinlessness,
because goodness depends upon the inward motive, and the perfection of
the inward motive is not proved by the outward act.' But surely the
miracle is an outward act, and to pass from it to the inner motive
imposes a greater strain upon logic than that involved in our
ordinary methods of estimating men. There is, at least, moral
congruity between the outward goodness and the inner life, but there
is no such congruity between the miracle and the life within. The
test of moral goodness laid down by Mr. Mozley is not the test of
John, who says, 'He that doeth righteousness is righteous; 'nor is it
the test of Jesus: 'By their fruits ye shall know them: do men gather
grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?' But it is the test of
another: 'If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be
made bread.' For my own part, I prefer the attitude of Fichte to that
of Mr. Mozley. The Jesus of John,' says this noble and mighty
thinker, knows no other God than the True God, in whom we all are, and
live, and may be blessed, and out of whom there is only Death and
Nothingness. And,' continues Fichte, 'he appeals, and rightly
appeals, in support of this truth, not to reasoning, but to the inward
practical sense of truth in man, not even knowing any other proof than
this inward testimony, "If any man will do the will of Him who sent
Me, he shall know of the doe-trine whether it be of God."'

Accepting Mr. Mozley's test, with which alone I am now dealing, it is
evident that, in the demonstration of moral goodness, the _quantity_ of
the miraculous comes into play. Had Christ, for example, limited
himself to the conversion of water into wine, He would have fallen
short of the performance of Jannes and Jambres; for it is a smaller
thing to convert one liquid into another than to convert a dead rod
into a living serpent. But Jannes and Jambres, we are informed, were
not good. Hence, if Mr. Mozley's test be a true one, a point must
exist, on the one side of which miraculous power demonstrates
goodness, while on the other side it does not. How is this 'point of
contrary flexure' to be determined? It must lie somewhere between the
magicians and Moses, for within this space the power passed from the
diabolical