on the objector. His a priori assumption of the impossibility of a miracle, as an expression of the will of the immanent God, begs the question.

Another academic argument against miracles perennially put forth is that we of this day and age have never seen an authenticated miracle. They are not in harmony with the present experience and observation of mankind, it is said, and there is a growing disposition among scientific men to deny all alleged miracles, including those recorded in the New Testament as incredible. They are empirically improbable, and the records of these marvelous events are to be accounted for on the basis of hero-worship, and the imaginative romancing of a crude and uncritical age when the bizarre, the marvelous, and the magical were superstitiously credited by popular credulity. They are relics of a period of superstition and mythology, as the advance of modern knowledge and science has demonstrated. But hold! such hasty inferences are not new. Young Gideon himself thus addressed his God over 1,200 years before Christ: "O, my Lord, if the Lord be with us, why is all this befallen us? And where are all His miracles which our fathers told us of?" (Judges 6: 13.) Yet this self-same Gideon had a demonstration later of God's miraculous power when it pleased

Him to exercise it. Because men can not themselves see with their own eyes the works of God they are tempted to cast aspersion on their reality. How convincing a demonstration is it for one primed and plumed in the proud position of modern science to deny miracles, because, forsooth, he has never seen one. We have never seen a mastodon, a plesiosaurus, a pterodactl, nor a multitude of paleontological creatures now extinct. Yet their discovery and classification, through fossils, are the proud trophies of modern science. Nevertheless, no one living ever saw these strange creatures, whose bones are wired and displayed in museums. Nor could one readily refute the obstinate ignoramus who never saw the inside of a museum, if he should insist upon a similar argument of denial.

A showy attempt has recently been made by a popular theologian to demonstrate that belief in the miracles of the New Testament has no religious value, and that the New Testament revelation of Christianity would be uninjured by their entire surrender. He asserts that he is not concerned with a destruction of belief in miracles, but rather desires to propose a method of looking at the essentials of the Christian faith that will allay the perplexities of some within the pale of Christianity itself, who are honestly suspicious of the

reality of the miraculous. Miracles, he declares, have been under suspicion among educated minds in all ages. "Miracles have gone because the fashion of the world is against them." The dilemma in which he finds himself is this, "that while the denial of miracles can not be logically sustained, the reality of miracles is unlikely. Miracles are logical possibilities and natural improbabilities.' "The unverifiable," he adds, “can never remain an essential part of reasonable faith." The universe is a mechanism, the operation of its laws as certain as fate, any suspension or violation of them, antecedently discredited by science. Proceeding, he attempts to show how limited a relation a belief in miracles bears to vital faith, and that the great recorded miracles of the New Testament, including Jesus' resurrection, really becloud the facts they were designed to glorify. In fine, he never has had any religious use for miracles, and thinks others do not regard them as essential.

The theologian in question begins by declaring he has no interest in denying miracles, proceeds first to cast doubt upon them, and then to discredit them with patronizing compassion on those who believe them. Writing, as he claims, to allay doubts, he at once raises and multiplies them. His

attitude is either a big "If" or a big "Nay." This would be fatal to the faith of many Christians. In his loose method of thinking, a fatalistic and mechanical conception of the universe is presupposed, and the immanent God is thus shut up within the necessities of a materialistic mechanism, like a blind Samson, grinding in the mills of the Philistines. Betraying some characteristics of a mystic, he wings his way to the stars, and being far above any need of an historical or miraculous ladder, up which others must toilsomely climb, he kicks it from beneath the feet of those who are not blessed with wings. Nor can any amount of explanation save his discussion from a practical discrediting of the great facts of the Christian religion, including the resurrection of Jesus, on which the Christian hope of immortality is based. By implication also, his argument results in a virtual abrogation of that miracle of miracles, the the Person of Jesus Christ. When those within the pale of the Christian Church begin to cast suspicion on the New Testament miracles, it is time to ask where they are drifting. The end can only mean religious anarchy.

Let us observe, in conclusion, how the thoroughgoing application of the abstract denial of miracles would affect the New Testament records them

selves. One might as well take an ax and literally hew them to pieces, as to attempt to cut out the miracles of Jesus and their intimately related context as recorded in any of the Gospels. Mark, the simplest, earliest and concededly best accredited, will serve as an example. Expunging the miracles from the text, but a few choice unrelated sayings and incidents remain. This new doxy would have to begin by gouging out the baptism of our Lord and the healings at Capernaum from Chapter one, leaving only a half dozen lines of Jesus' early message. Practically all of Chapter two must go with the restoration of the paralytic. Too, the multitude without it would have had little cause to resort to the seaside. From Chapter three would be discarded the healing of the man with the withered hand, and in addition the charges of Jesus' enemies, who confessedly could neither deny or discredit His healing power, but merely accused Him of working these miracles by the power of Beelzebub, the prince of devils. The whole of Chapter five must be omitted, with its cure of the man afflicted with a legion of devils; the woman with an issue of blood and the raising of Jairus' daughter. In Chapter six Jesus' charge to the seventy must be mutilated, as He gave them miraculous power, together with instructions how to use