f supernatural Religion, and the removal thereby of a
serious antagonism between Science and Christian Theology, as well as of
a serious hindrance of many thoughtful minds from an intelligent embrace
of Christianity.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Professor W. T. Adeney in the _Hibbert Journal_, January, 1903, p.
302.

[2] See the recent new edition of _Supernatural Religion_, "carefully
revised."

[3] For an earlier statement of this by the present writer, see a
discourse on "Miracle and Life," in _New Points to Old Texts_. London:
James Clarke & Co., 1889. New York: Thomas Whittaker.

[4] _The New Englander_, September, 1884.

MIRACLES AND SUPERNATURAL RELIGION

I

I

SYNOPSIS.--The gradual narrowing of the miraculous element in the
Bible by recent discovery and discussion.--The alarm thereby excited
in the Church.--The fallacy which generates the fear.--The atheistic
conception of nature which generates the fallacy.--The present
outgrowing of this conception.

It is barely forty years since that beloved and fearless Christian
scholar, Dean Stanley, spoke thus of the miracles recorded of the
prophet Elisha: "His works stand alone in the Bible in their likeness to
the acts of mediaeval saints. There alone in the Sacred History the gulf
between Biblical and Ecclesiastical miracles almost disappears."[5] It
required some courage to say as much as this then, while the storm of
persecution was raging against Bishop Colenso for his critical work on
the Pentateuch. The evangelical clergymen in England and the United
States then prepared to confess as much as this, with all that it
obviously implies, could have been seated in a small room. But time has
moved on, and the Church, at least the scholars of the Church, have
moved with it. No scholar of more than narrowly local repute now
hesitates to acknowledge the presence of a legendary element both in the
Old Testament and in the New. While the extent of it is still
undetermined, many specimens of it are recognized. It is agreed that the
early narratives in Genesis are of this character, and that it is marked
in such stories as those of Samson, Elijah, and Elisha. Even the
conservative revisers of the Authorized Version have eliminated from the
Fourth Gospel the story of the angel at the pool of Bethesda, and in
their marginal notes on the Third Gospel have admitted a doubt
concerning the historicity of the angel and the bloody sweat in
Get