hat is the historical
root and basis from which this one great moral revolution in the
world's history, so successful, so fruitful, so inexhaustible, has
started?

But if, as the source and inspiration of practice, doctrine has
been the foundation of a new state of the world, and of that
change which distinguishes the world under Christianity from the
world before it, miracles, as the proof of that doctrine, stand
before us in a very remarkable and peculiar light. Far from being
mere idle feats of power to gratify the love of the marvellous;
far even from being mere particular and occasional rescues from
the operation of general laws,--they come before us as means for
accomplishing the largest and most important practical object that
has ever been accomplished in the history of mankind. They lie at
the bottom of the difference of the modern from the ancient world;
so far, i.e., as that difference is moral. We see as a fact a
change in the moral condition of mankind, which marks ancient and
modern society as two different states of mankind. What has
produced this change, and elicited this new power of action?
Doctrine. And what was the proof of that doctrine, or essential to
the proof of it? Miracles. The greatness of the result thus throws
light upon the propriety of the means, and shows the fitting
object which was presented for the introduction of such means--the
fitting occasion which had arisen for the use of them; for,
indeed, no more weighty, grand, or solemn occasion can be
conceived than the foundation of such a new order of things in the
world. Extraordinary action of Divine power for such an end has
the benefit of a justifying object of incalculable weight; which
though not of itself, indeed, proof of the fact, comes with
striking force upon the mind in connection with the proper proof.
It is reasonable, it is inevitable, that we should be impressed by
such a result; for it shows that the miraculous system has been a
practical one; that it has been a step in the ladder of man's
ascent, the means of introducing those powerful truths which have
set his moral nature in action.

Of this work, remarkable in so many ways, we will add but one thing
more. It is marked throughout with the most serious and earnest
conviction, but it is without a single word, from first to last, of
asperity or in