ffected by it
a good deal to think about.

VIII

MOZLEY'S BAMPTON LECTURES[10]

I

[10]
_Eight Lectures on Miracles: the Bampton Lectures for 1865_. By the
Rev. J.B. Mozley, B.D. _The Times_, 5th and 6th June 1866.

The way in which the subject of Miracles has been treated, and the
place which they have had in our discussions, will remain a
characteristic feature of both the religious and philosophical
tendencies of thought among us. Miracles, if they are real things, are
the most awful and august of realities. But, from various causes, one
of which, perhaps, is the very word itself, and the way in which it
binds into one vague and technical generality a number of most
heterogeneous instances, miracles have lost much of their power to
interest those who have thought most in sympathy with their generation.
They have been summarily and loosely put aside, sometimes avowedly,
more often still by implication. Even by those who accepted and
maintained them, they have often been touched uncertainly and formally,
as if people thought that they were doing a duty, but would like much
better to talk about other things which really attracted and filled
their minds. In the long course of theological war for the last two
centuries, it is hardly too much to say that miracles, as a subject for
discussion, have been degraded and worn down from their original
significance; vulgarised by passing through the handling of not the
highest order of controversialists, who battered and defaced what they
bandied about in argument, which was often ingenious and acute, and
often mere verbal sophistry, but which, in any case, seldom rose to the
true height of the question. Used either as instruments of proof or as
fair game for attack, they suffered in the common and popular feeling
about them. Taken in a lump, and with little realising of all that they
were and implied, they furnished a cheap and tempting material for
"short and easy methods" on one side, and on the other side, as it is
obvious, a mark for just as easy and tempting objections. They became
trite. People got tired of hearing of them, and shy of urging them, and
dwelt in preference on other grounds of argument. The more serious
feeling and the more profound and original thought of the last half
century no longer seemed to give them the value and importance which
they had; on both sides a disposition was to be traced to turn aside
from them. The deeper religion an