eless task to convince men that there is a God by
pointing, not to His creation but to His interference with creation. But
if a man do believe there is a God, what kind of evidence ought he to
expect to show him that God has interfered in the course of the
creation?

In the first place, he must not expect that the physical evidence, that
is the miraculous evidence, for Revelation should be of such a character
as to stand above the spiritual evidence. Just as the fundamental
evidence for the existence of a God is to be found in the voice of
conscience, and the arguments from design and from the order and beauty
and visible purpose of the creation are secondary--corroborative not
demonstrative--so too the primary evidence of a Revelation from God must
be found in the harmony of that Revelation with the voice of conscience,
and only the secondary and corroborative evidence is to be looked for in
miracles. And in both cases the reason is the same. For it is not God's
purpose to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the
clever, but to win the spiritually gifted, the humble, the
tender-hearted, the souls that are discontented with their own
shortcomings, the souls that have a capacity for finding happiness in
self-sacrifice. It would defeat the purpose of the Revelation made to us
if the hard-headed should have an advantage in accepting it over the
humble-minded. The evidence must be such that spiritual character shall
be an element in the acceptance of it. There would be a contradiction,
if the faculty whereby we mainly recognised God were the spiritual
faculty, and the faculty whereby we mainly recognised His Revelation
were the scientific faculty.

And, in the second place, we have no right to expect that the evidence
for miracles wrought in one age should be such evidence as properly
belongs to another age. It is sometimes urged that the evidence supplied
by the testimony of the early Christians is of little value because it
was never cross-examined. No such precautions surrounded the evidence as
would now be required to give any value to evidence of similar events.
The witnesses gave up their lives to attest what they taught; but there
was no one to scrutinise what they asserted. St. Paul's evidence on our
Lord's Resurrection cannot now be put to the test of searching
questions. But to make such objections as these is to make what is on
the face of it an absurd demand. It is to ask that the scientific