f the same kind_. Ethical truth must
be ethically attested. The moral and religious character of the
Revelation presents its credentials of worth in its history of the
moral and religious renovations it has wrought both in individuals and
in society. This is its proper and incontrovertible attestation, in need
of no corroboration from whatever wonderful physical occurrences may
have accompanied its first utterance. Words of God are attested as such
by the work of God which they effect. It may well be believed that those
wonderful occurrences--the Biblical name for which is "signs," or
"powers," terms not carrying, like "miracles," the idea of something
contra-natural[11]--had an evidential value for those to whom the
Revelation originally came. In fact, they were appealed to by the
bearers of the Revelation as evidencing its divine origin by the mighty
works of divine mercy which they wrought for sufferers from the evils of
the world. But whatever their evidential value to the eye-witnesses at
that remote day, it was of the inevitably volatile kind that exhales
away like a perfume with lapse of time. Historic doubts attack remote
events, especially when of the extraordinary character which tempts the
narrator to that magnifying of the marvellous which experience has found
to be a constantly recurring human trait. It is simply impossible that
the original evidential value of the "signs" accompanying the Revelation
should continue permanently unimpaired. To employ them now as
"evidences of Christianity," when the Revelation has won on ethical
grounds recognition of its divine character and can summon history to
bear witness of its divine effects in the moral uplift of the world, is
to imperil the Christian argument by the preposterous logical blunder of
attempting to prove the more certain by the less certain.

A second net result consequent on the preceding may be described as the
transference of miracles from the ordnance department to the
quartermaster's department of the Church. Until recently they were
actively used as part of its armament, none of which could be dispensed
with. Now they are carried as part of its baggage, _impedimenta_, from
which everything superfluous must be removed. It is clearly seen that to
retain all is to imperil the whole. That there are miracles and
miracles is patent to minds that have learned to scan history more
critically than when a scholar like John Milton began his _History of
Engla