d possibly a chapter
in Deuteronomy may foreshadow the final fall of Jerusalem; the Messianic
prophecies are mere contemporaneous history; and the fifty-third chapter
of Isaiah is only a description of the sufferings of Jeremiah.
Inspiration is too loftily conceived by "the well-meaning crowd," for
whom we should manifest "grave compassion."

What is the Bible, continues the essayist, but the written voice of the
congregation, and not the written voice of God? Why all this reverence
for the sacred writers, since they acknowledge themselves men of like
passions with us? Justification by faith is merely peace of mind from
trust in a righteous God, and not a fiction of merit by transfer.
Regeneration is a correspondent giving of insight or an awakening of the
forces of the soul; propitiation is the recovery of peace, and the
atonement is our sharing the Saviour's Spirit, but not his purchase of
us by his own blood. Throughout the Scriptures we should assume in
ourselves a verifying faculty,--conscience, reason, or whatever else we
choose to term it.

III. ON THE STUDY OF THE EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. By Baden Powell, M.
A. The author of this essay having recently died, he has therefore
incurred less censure than he would otherwise have received. The views
here expressed, taken in connection with his more elaborate treatise on
the _Order of Nature_, do not place him on the same theoretical ground
with Hume and Spinoza; but the moral effect of the present attack upon
miracles as an evidence of Christianity is not less antagonistic than
the theories of either of those authors. Spinoza held that miracles are
impossible, because it would be derogatory to God to depart from the
established laws of the universe, and one of Hume's objections to them
was their incapability of being proved from testimony.[179]

Professor Powell objects to them because they bear no analogy to the
harmony of God's dealings in the material world; and insists that they
are not to be credited, since they are a violation of the laws of matter
or an interruption of the course of physical causes. The orthodox
portion of the Church are laboring under the egregious error of making
them an essential doctrine, when they are really a mere external
accessory. Reason, and not "our desires" must come to our aid in all
examination of them. The key-note to Professor Powell's opposition is
contained in the following statement: "From the nature of our antecedent
co