He opened His heart wide to all the genial and all the mournful impressions of this manifold life of ours. And this is what we have to do; be natural. Let God, that is, let the influences of God, freely play unthwarted upon the soul. Let there be no unnatural repression, no control of feeling by mere effort. Let there be no artificial and prolonged grief, no "minstrels making a noise." Let great Nature have her way; or, rather, feel that you are in a Father's world, and live in it with Him, frankly, in a free, fearless, childlike, and natural spirit. Then grief will do its work healthily. The heart will bleed, and stanch when it has bled enough. Do not stop the bleeding; but, also, do not open the wound afresh.

II. We come to the principles on which a miracle rests.

1. I observe that the perception of it was confined to a few. Peter, James, John, and the parents of the child were the only persons present. The rest were excluded. To behold wonders, certain inward qualifications, a certain state of heart, a certain susceptibility are required. Those who were shut out were rendered incapable by disqualifications. Absence of spiritual susceptibility in the case of those who laughed Him to scorn "unbelief, in those who came with courteous skepticism, saying, "Trouble not the Master;" in other words, He is not master of impossibilities-unreality in the professional mourners-the most helpless of all disqualifications. Their whole life was acting: they had caught the tone of condolence and sympathy as a trick. minds such as these the wonders of creation may be spread in vain. Grief and joy alike are powerless to break through the crust of artificial semblance which envelops them. Such beings see no miracles. They gaze on all with dead, dim eyes-wrapped in conventionalisms, their life a drama in which they are but actors, modulating their tones and simulating feelings according to a received standard. How can such be ever witnesses of the supernatural, or enter into the presence of the wonderful ?

Before

Two classes alone were admitted. They who, like Peter, James, and John, lived the life of courage, moral purity, and love, and they who, like the parents, had had the film removed from their eyes by grief. For there is a way which God has of forcing the spiritual upon men's attention. When you shut down the lid upon the coffin of a child, or one as dearly loved, there is an awful want, a horrible sense of insecurity, which sweeps away the glittering mist of time from the edge of the abyss, and you gaze on the phantom

wonders of the unseen. Yes, real anguish qualifies for an entrance into the solemn chamber where all is miracle.

In another way, and for another reason, the numbers of those who witness a miracle must be limited. Jairus had his daughter restored to life: the woman was miraculously healed. But if every anxious parent and every sick sufferer could have the wonder repeated in his or her case, the wonder itself would cease. This is the preposterousness of the skeptic's demand-Let me see a miracle, on an appointed day and hour, and I will believe. Let us examine this.

A miracle is commonly defined to be a contravention of the laws of nature. More properly speaking, it is only a higher operation of those same laws in a form hitherto unseen. A miracle is perhaps no more a suspension or contradiction of the laws of nature than a hurricane or a thunderstorm. They who first travelled to tropical latitudes came back with anecdotes of supernatural convulsions of the elements. In truth, it was only that they had never personally witnessed such effects; but the hurricane which swept the waves flat, and the lightning which illuminated all the heaven, or played upon the bayonets or masts in lambent flames, were but effects of the very same laws of electricity and meteorology which were in operation at home.

A miracle is perhaps no more in contravention of the laws of the universe, than the direct interposition of a whole nation in cases of emergency to uphold what is right in opposition to what is established, is an opposition to the laws of the realm. For instance, the whole people of Israel reversed the unjust decree of Saul which had sentenced Jonathan to death. But law is the expression only of a people's will. Ordinarily we see that expression mediately made through judges, office-bearers, kings: and so long as we see it in this mediate form, we are by habit satisfied that all is legal. There are cases, however, in which, not an indirect, but a direct expression of a nation's will is demanded. Extraordinary cases and because extraordinary, they who can only see what is legal in what is customary, conventional, and in the routine of written precedents, get bewildered, and reckon the anomalous act illegal or rebellious. In reality, it is only the source of earthly law, the nation, pronouncing the law without the intervention of the subordinate agents.

This will help us to understand the nature of a miracle. What we call laws are simply the subordinate expressions of a will. There must be a will before there can be a law. Certain antecedents are followed by certain consequents. When we see this succession, we are satisfied, and call it nat

ural. But there are emergencies in which it may be necessary for the will to assert itself, and become not the mediate, but the immediate antecedent to the consequent. No subordinate agent interposes; simply the first cause comes in contact with a result. The audible expression of will is fol lowed immediately by something which is generally preceded by some lower antecedent which we call a cause. this case, you will observe, there has been no contravention of the laws of nature, there has only been an immediate connection between the first cause and the last result. A miracle is the manifestation to man of the voluntariness of power.

In

Now, bearing this in mind, let it be supposed that every one had a right to demand a miracle-that the occurrence of miracles was unlimited-that as often as you had an ache, or trembled for the loss of a relation, you had but to pray, and receive your wish.

Clearly in this case, first of all, the constitution of the universe would be reversed. The will of man would be substituted for the will of God. Caprice and chance would regulate all: God would be dethroned; God would be degraded to the rank of one of those beings of supernatural power with whom Eastern romance abounds, who are subordinated by a spell to the will of a mortal, who is armed with their powers and uses them as vassals; God would be merely the genius who would be chained by the spell of prayer to obey the behests of man. Man would arm himself with the powers of Deity, and God would be his slave.

He

Further still: This unlimited extension of miracles would annihilate miracles themselves. For suppose that miracles were universal-that prayer was directly followed by a reply that we could all heal the sick and raise the dead-this then would become the common order of things. It would be what we now call nature. It would cease to be extraordinary, and the infidel would be as unsatisfied as ever. would see only the antecedent, prayer, and the invariable consequent, a reply to prayer; exactly what he sees now in the process of causation. And then, just as now, he would say, What more do you want? These are the laws of the universe: Why interpose the complex and cumbrous machinery of a God, the awkward hypothesis of a will, to account for laws?

Miracles, then, are necessarily limited. The non-limitation of miracles would annihilate the miraculous.

Lastly; it is the intention of a miracle to manifest the Divine in the common and ordinary.

For instance, in a boat on the Sea of Tiberias the Redeemer rose and rebuked the storm. Was that miracle merely a proof of His divine mission? Are we merely to gather from it that then and there on a certain day, in a certain obscure corner of the world, Divine power was at work? It is conceivable that a man might credit that miracle-that he might be exceedingly indignant with the rationalist who resolves it into a natural phenomenon-and it is conceivable that that very man might tremble in a storm. To what purpose is that miracle announced to him? He believes in God existing in the past, but not in the present; he believes in a Divine presence in the supernatural, but discredits it in the natural; he recognizes God in the marvellous, but does not feel Him in the wonderful of every day but unless it has taught him that the waves and winds now are in the hollow of the hand of God, the miracle has lost its meaning.

Here again, as in many other cases, Christ healed sickness and raised the dead to life. Are we merely to insert this among the "Evidences of Christianity," and then, with lawyer-like sagacity, having laid down the rules of evidence, say to the infidel, “Behold our credentials; we call upon you to believe our Christianity ?" This were a poor reason to account for the putting forth of Almighty Power. More, truly and more deeply, these miracles were vivid manifestations to the senses that Christ is the Saviour of the bodythat now, as then, the issues of life and death are in His hands—that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God's power in the ordinary. Nay, the ordinary marvels are greater than the extraordinary, for these are subordinate to them; merely indications and handmaids guiding us to perceive and recognize a constant Presence, and reminding us that in everyday existence the miraculous and the Godlike rule us.

III.

BAPTISM.

"For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise."-Gal. iii. 26-29.

WHEREVER opposite views are held with warmth by religious-minded men, we may take for granted that there is some higher truth which embraces both. All high truth is the union of two contradictories. Thus predestination and free-will are opposites: and the truth does not lie between these two, but in a higher reconciling truth which leaves both true. So with the opposing views of baptism. Men of equal spirituality are ready to sacrifice all to assert, or to deny, the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. And the truth, I believe, will be found, not in some middle, moderate, timid doctrine which skillfully avoids extremes, but in a truth larger than either of these opposite views, which is the basis of both, and which really is that for which each party tenaciously clings to its own view as to a matter of life and death.

The present occasion* only requires us to examine three

views.

I. That of Rome.

II. That of modern Calvinism.

III. That of (as I believe) Scripture and the Church of England.

I. The doctrine of Rome respecting baptism. We will take her own authorities.

1. "If any one say that the sin of Adam . . . is taken away, either by the powers of human nature or by any other remedy than the merit of the One Mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ, or denies that the merit of Jesus Christ, duly conferred by the sacrament of baptism in the church form, is applied to adults as well as to children-let him be accursed." -Sess. v. 4.

"If any one deny that the imputation of original sin is re

* The recent decision on the Gorham case of the Privy Council.