e nine?' 'Sin no more,
lest a worse thing come unto thee.' In fact, there can be no real doubt
that our Lord believed that He could work miracles, and professed to
work them, and that His disciples believed that He worked many, and
included that fact in their meaning when they spoke of Him as going
about doing good. And these disciples professed to work miracles
themselves and believed that they did work them. It is of course true
that they had no strictly scientific conception of a miracle, and would
often have called by that name what was in reality extraordinary but not
miraculous. And it is true too that, if we take each miracle by itself,
there is but one miracle, namely our Lord's Resurrection, for which
clear and unmistakeable and sufficient evidence is given. But while the
exclusion of any one miracle as insufficiently attested is possible, the
exclusion of the miraculous element altogether is not possible without a
complete surrender of the position taken by the first Christian
teachers. As they claimed to be inspired and to have enlightenment which
was not shared by mankind at large, so did they claim, if not each for
himself, yet certainly for our Lord, power not shared by ordinary men,
power to step out of the ordinary course of natural events, and, whether
by virtue of some higher law operative only in rare instances, or by
direct interference of the Almighty, to prove a divine mission by
exhibiting in fact what is an essential part of the supremacy of the
Moral Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical world.

The teachers of other religions besides the Christian have claimed
supernatural powers, and have professed to give a supernatural message.
This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need in the human soul for
such a direct communication from God to man. Men seem to need it so much
that without it they are unable to accept the truth, or to hold it long
if they do accept it. All who thus claim supernatural authority must, of
course, justify their claim. They must justify their message to the
human conscience. What they teach must be an advance towards, and
finally an expression of, the Supreme Moral Law. And if they profess to
have miraculous power they must give reasonable evidence that such power
is really theirs. But if they fail in this, still the fact remains that
their very claim must answer to something in the spiritual nature of
man, or it would not be so invariably made nor so largely s