will make men much more cautious in framing dogmas about his divinity; but experience in the future as in the past can but increase the sense of his moral supremacy, and the power of his life and death. And it is supremacy, not exclusiveness, which must be vindicated for the whole Christian system. These two terms, supremacy and exclusiveness, may be taken as marking the contrast between the position of Christianity under the new and under the old conditions.
4. As to miracles. It is evident that the arguments relied on in the last century do not help us now. We see that they imported the idea of a violation of the order of Nature into a time when no such notion as the order of Nature existed; that they assumed an exactness of observation and description in the narrators which our knowledge of the times and the documents forbids us to assume; and further that they dwelt on the mere physical process, while to the writers it is a part of the "many good works shown them from the Father," or the "signs of the kingdom of heaven." The theologian of the future will probably be little concerned with them. We have all learned to read in a natural sense the account of the crossing of the Red Sea, which even Mr. M. Arnold, some years ago, took as meant to record a violation of physical order. The strong east wind; the cloud which beat in the faces of the Egyptians, but by its lightning showed the Israelites their way; the waters kept back at low tide by the east wind, and walling in the course of the fugitives, but returning upon their pursuers when the tide rose and the eye of God looked forth upon them through the cloud in the morning, lose nothing in majesty or in providential importance when we read them without importing violations of the laws of Nature. And so it will be in many other cases; while as to those which are notable only for their strangeness, the action of hyperbole and the growth of the wonderful by tradition will be always present to the mind of the theologian, and will make him pass over them "with a light foot." We have no difficulty when we read of the miracles of St. Bernard or the prophecies of Savonarola, nor do they interfere with our estimate of those great men. The miracles of healing in the Gospel will, we can hardly doubt, always appear as evidence of a peculiar condition of human life in the East in the first century, and of the restorative power of a great personality. Little stress will be laid on the accounts of the infancy of Christ, since they are mentioned nowhere in the New Testament, outside the first chapters of the first and third Gospels. The case of the resurrection is quite different, since it passed immediately into the Christian consciousness. But the theologian who starts from the Epistles of St. Paul as the solid central ground of New Testament literature, will go upon the apostle's teaching that not flesh and blood, but the spiritual personality—clothed in the new house which is from heaven—inherits the kingdom of God, and will take the vision by which the apostle was converted as the type of all the manifestations by which the companions of Christ were
