The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

its credibility may be reasonably suspected. Finally, in the fifth section, the principal objections which had been raised, or which seemed likely to be raised, to the tenor of the argument are cited and refuted.

The book was received with a storm of criticism, reprobation, even abuse. It was not refuted. Many published careful and searching examinations of its facts and arguments, among others Doctor William Dodwell ^"^ (the younger) and Doctor Thomas Church, ^^ to whom Middleton replied in a Vindication, published posthumously (1751). After a century and a half the book remains unrefuted, and, indeed, despite the faults arising from the writer's spirit and the limitations inseparable from the state of scholarship in his day, its main contention seems to be put beyond dispute.^ ^

As over against the effort made more especially by Anglican writers to confine genuine ecclesiastical miracles to the first, and in their view the purest and most authoritative, centuries of Christianity, the Romish theologians boldly declare that God has been pleased in every age to work a multitude of evident miracles in His church. Before this assertion, as we have seen, the Anglican theory is helpless, on the ground whether of fact or of principle. Of fact, because the evidence for the later miracles, which it denies, is very much greater in volume and cogency than that for the earlier miracles, which it accepts. Of principle, because the reason which it gives for the continuance of miracles during the first three centuries, if valid at all, is equally valid for their continuance to the twentieth century. What we shall look upon as the period of the planting of the church is determined by our point of view. If the usefulness of miracles in planting the church were sufficient reason for their occurrence in the Roman Empire in the third century, it is hard to deny that it may be sufficient reason for the repetition of them in, say, the Chinese Empire in the twentieth century. And why go to China? Is not the church still essentially in the position of a missionary church everywhere in this world of unbelief? When we take a really ''long view" of things, is it not at least a debatable question whether the paltry two thousand years which have passed since Christianity came into the world are not a negligible quantity, and the age in which we live is not still the age of the primitive church? We must adjudge, therefore, that the Romish theory is the more consistent and reasonable of the two. If we are to admit that the miracles of the first three centuries happened, slightly and only generally witnessed as they are, we should in all reason go on and admit that the much more numerous and much better attested miracles of the fourth century happened too — and those of the fifth, and of the sixth, and of every subsequent century down to our day.

The force of this reasoning is interestingly illustrated by the conversion by it of Edward Gibbon, in his youth, to Roman Catholicism. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen gives a somewhat caustic account of the circumstances. "At

Oxford," he says,^ '* 'the blind activity of idleness' iinpelled him to read Middleton's Free Inquiry. Yet he could not bring himself to follow Middleton in his attack on the early Fathers, or to give up the notion that miracles were worked in the early church for at least four or five centuries. 'But I was unable to resist the weight of historical evidence that within the same period most of the leading doctrines of Popery were already introduced in theory and practice; nor was the conclusion absurd that miracles are the test of truth, and that the church must be orthodox and pure which was so often approved by the visible interposition of the Deity.'

"From the miracles affirmed by Basil, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Jerome, he inferred that celibacy was superior to marriage, that saints were to be invoked, prayers for the dead said, and the real presence believed in; and whilst in this frame of mind he fell in with Bossuet's Exposition and his History of the Variations. 'I read,' he says in his affected way, 'I applauded, I believed'; and he adds with truth in reference to Bossuet, 'I surely fell by a noble hand.' *In my present feelings it seems incredible that I ever should have believed in transubstantiation; but my conqueror oppressed me with the sacramental words, and dashed against each other the figurative half-meanings of the Protestant sects....'

"No one, we will venture to say, has been converted in

the nineteenth century by a belief that, as a fact, miracles were worked in the early church, and that, as a consequence, the doctrines professed at the time must be true. As a rule the doctrines have carried the miracles.... The fact that the process began at the other end with Gibbon is characteristic both of the man and of the age; but it is put in a still stronger Hght by the account which he gives of his reconversion.... The process from first to last was emphatically an intellectual one.... Gibbon himself observes: 'I still remember my solitary transport at the discovery of a philosophical argument against the doctrine of transubstantiation: that the text of Scripture which seems to inculcate the real presence is attested only by a single sense — our sight; while the real presence itself is disproved by three of our senses — the sight, the touch, and the taste.'"

Only a brief account will be necessary of the state of the case for the fourth and later centuries. When we pass from the Hterature of the first three into that of the fourth and succeeding centuries, we leave at once the region of indefinite and undetailed references to miraculous works said to have occurred somewhere or other — no doubt the references increase in number and definiteness as the years pass — and come into contact with a body of writings simply saturated with marvels. And whereas few writers were to be found in the earher period who professed to be eyewitnesses of miracles, and none who wrought them were named to us, in the later period everybody appears to have witnessed any number of them, and the workers of them are not only named but prove to be the most famous missionaries and saints of the church. Nor must we imagine that these marvels are recounted only by obscure and otherwise unknown hero-worshippers, whose only claim to be remembered by posterity is that they were the overenthusiastic admirers of the great ascetics of their time. They are rather the outstanding scholars, theologians, preachers, organizers of the age. It is Jerome, the leading bibhcal scholar of his day, who wrote the distressing lives of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus; Gregory of Nyssa, one of "the three great Cappadocians," who narrates the fantastic doings of his thaumaturgic namesake;^ the incomparable Athanasius himself, who is responsible for the life of Antony. And not to be left behind, the greatest preacher of the day, Chrysostom; the greatest ecclesiastic, Ambrose; the greatest thinker, Augustine, — all describe for us miraculous occurrences of the most incredible kind as having taken place within their own knowledge. It will be not only interesting but useful for our purpose, as well, if a specimen instance be brought before us of how these great men dealt with miracles.

Augustine no doubt will serve our purpose here as well as another. In the twenty-second book^ of the City of God, he has circumstantially related to us a score or more of miracles which had come under his own observation, and which he represents as only a tithe of those he could relate. A considerable number of these were wrought by the relics of "the most glorious martyr, Stephen." The bones of Stephen had come to light in Jerusalem in 415. Certain portions of them were brought into Africa and everywhere they were taken miracles were wrought. Somewhere about 424 Hippo obtained its fragments and enshrined them in a small chapel opening into the cathedral church, on the archway of which Augustine caused four verses to be cut, exhorting worshippers to ascribe to God all miracles wrought upon Stephen's intercession. Almost seventy miracles wrought at this shrine had been officially recorded in less than two years, while incomparably more, Augustine tells us, had been wrought at the neighboring town of Calama, which had received its relics earlier. "Think, beloved," he cries, in the sermon which he preached on the reception of the relics, "what the Lord must have in store for us in the land of the living, when

He bestows so much in the ashes of the dead." Even the dead were raised at these shrines, with great promptness and facility. Here are some of the instances recorded by- Augustine with complete confidence.*

"Eucharius, a Spanish priest residing at Calama, was for a long time a sufferer from stone. By the relics of the same martyr (Stephen) which the bishop Possidius brought him, he was cured. Afterward the same priest sinking under another disease, was lying dead, and already they were binding his hands. By the succor of the same martyr he was raised to Hfe, the priest's cloak having been brought from the oratory and laid upon the corpse.... Audurus is the name of an estate where there is a church that contains a memorial shrine of the martyr Stephen. It happened that, as a little boy was playing in the court, the oxen drawing a wagon went out of the track and crushed him with the wheel, so that immediately he seemed at his last gasp. His mother snatched him up and laid him at the shrine, and not only did he revive but also appeared uninjured. A religious female who lived at Caspalium, a neighboring estate, when she was so ill as to be despaired of, had her dress brought to this shrine, but before it was brought back she was gone. However, her parents wrapped her corpse in the dress, and, her breath returning, she became quite well. At Hippo, a Syrian called Bassus was praying at the relics of the same martyr for his daughter, who was dangerously ill. He too had brought her dress with him to the shrine. But as he prayed, behold, his servants ran from the house to tell him she was dead. His friends, however, intercepted them and forbade them to tell him, lest he should bewail her in public. And when he returned to his house which was already ringing with the lamentations of his family, and had thrown on his daughter's body the dress he was carrying, she was restored to life. There, too, the son of a man, Irenaeus, one of the taxgatherers, took ill and died. And wliile his body was lying

lifeless, and the last rites were being prepared, amidst the weeping and mourning of all, one of the friends who were consoling the father suggested that the body should be anointed with the oil of the same martyr. It was done and he was revived. Likewise, Eleusinus, a man of tribunitian rank among us, laid his infant son, who had died, on the shrine of the martyr, which is in the suburb where he lived, and, after prayer, which he poured out there with many tears, he took up his child alive. "^

Not all the miracles which Augustine includes in this anthology were wrought, however, by the bones of Stephen. Even before these bones had been discovered, miracles of the most astonishing character had occurred within his own personal knowledge. He tells us, for example, of the restoration of a blind man to sight at Milan — "when I was there," he says — by the remains of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius, discovered to Ambrose in a dream. And he tells us with great circumstantiality of a miraculous cure of fistula wrought in Carthage — "in my presence and under my own eyes," he says — when he and Alypius had just returned from Italy. A special interest attaches to these early instances, because Augustine, although an eyewitness of them, and although he insists on his having been an eye-witness of them as their attestation, does not seem to have recognized their miraculous character until long afterward. For Augustine's hearty belief in contemporary miracles, illustrated by the teeming list now before us, was of slow growth. It was not until some years after his return to Africa that it became easy to him to acknowledge their occurrence. He arrived in Africa in 388, but still in his treatises, On the True Religimt, which was written about 390, and On the Usefullness of Believing, written in 391 or 392, we find him speaking on the hypothesis that miracles no longer happened. "We perceive," he writes in the

former of these treatises,^ "that our ancestors, by that measure of faith by which the ascent is made from tem-