Joseph, of Pharoah, of Nebuchadnezzar, of Jacob, of Abimelech, of Laban, of Solomon, of Daniel, in the Hebrew Scriptures; of Joseph, of Pilate's wife, of Peter,* and of Paul, in the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, are in exact accordance with the Jewish theory as to dreams, which is expounded at much length in the Ghemara of the 9th Section of the Book Berachoth of the Talmud. It may be objected that the words used by the authors of the Acts of the Apostles are not identical with the words used by the first Evangelist. But it must be remembered that the distinction between them is one which we are not able, even at this moment, clearly to point out; and that to the Jew it was unimportant or unintelligible. It may make a considerable difference in our ideas whether the words "in a dream" are inserted, as they are by the first Evangelist, or omitted, as they are by the third. To the Jew of Herodian times, as to the Arab of to-day, the presence or absence of the qualification in either case would be matter of no moment. A dream would naturally be supposed to be the form of the communication. Amongst ourselves it is held as a mark of superstition, or at least of want of education, to believe in dreams. The floating hints of intelligence thus communicated with which most of us have from time to time come in contact, are quietly set down to "coincidence." It is not remembered that to speak of a coincidence between two events, apparently in some way connected, is only to admit a fact, not to explain it. Coincident facts should at least lead us to

search for common origin. Amid the vast mass of idle gossip which besets the subject, such established cases of significant dreams as that which preceded the murder of Mr. Percival, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, stand out with startling distinctness. We can but repeat the words of Aristotle, that while the majority of dreams are vague, unimportant, or explicable by the natural action of the brain, the fact that dreams not thus explicable do at times occur is beyond doubt.

Dreams of this nature, then, as to which the Semitic people, the Latin races of Southern Europe, and the Celtic population of our own islands, attach an importance which men of English culture consider exaggerated, are ranked both by the Pentateuch and by the Jewish doctors in the same category as the mission of the prophet. A dream, afterwards fulfilled, was both a message and a sign. To read the hidden purport of the message taxed the powers of the most venerated prophet. And the accomplished dream was regarded as a fulfilled prediction, in the highest sense of the word.

We are thus continually reminded of the totally different stand-point from which the question of the miraculous is regarded by the Englishman of to-day and by the hearer of Christ or of the Apostles. To say that the Jew lived in an atmosphere of marvel, will be only incorrect inasmuch as to him the occurrence of signs and wonders was a part of the expected course of things. He looked, in all cases of difficulty, for supernatural guidance, by oracle, by omen, or by dream. The Italian of to-day does the

§ Luke i. 11-28; ii. 9. A.A. loc-cit.

same; at least, in the great majority of the rural districts of Italy. Thus a sign of any kind, whether true or false, had a currency and acceptance of which we can form no adequate idea. If a person now appeared in our streets or places of public recourse and announced that he came with a Divine message, he would only get himself into a lunatic asylum. If he appealed to the fulfilment of a prediction, or the accomplishment of a dream, as a proof that he was not mad, but inspired, he would appeal altogether in vain. With the Jew, or the Arab, or many of the Southern people, on the contrary, even clear signs of what we call madness would not detract from the authority of such a selfproclaimed prophet. Those whose intelligences are thus clouded on the physical plane are regarded as all the more likely to be in direct communication with the invisible world.

It is thus clear that in order to form any intelligent opinion on this subject of miracle, we must lay aside very much prejudice, and must approach the subject with the modest pace of learners.

We

must endeavour to collect facts. Our search will be directed, in the first instance, to evidence alone. We must sift, as well as collect that evidence. But we must not apply to it tests altogether foreign to the matter in hand. To most of us the explanation that a prediction, published under known circumstances, and afterwards definitely fulfilled, was made in consequence of a dream, would destroy the claim of the anticipation to be thought miraculous. To the Jew it was not so. That method was as acknowledged a mode of Divine communication, to his mind, as any other. Our inquiry, then, should be as to the proof of the asserted fact, rather

than as to what we may consider the importance of the surrounding conditions. If a man arrived, on a given day, in London, stating that he had been informed that the Chancellor's life was in danger, and if, at the very time when he reached the Houses of Parliament, big with warning, the Chancellor of the Exchequer fell beneath the bullet of the assassin, it is by no means so sure that the Semitic view of the case.is erroneous, and that the question whether the impression which sent him from Devonshire were made on his mind in the sleeping or in the waking state is matter of comparatively unimportant detail. That the agent of death was a bullet, rather than a sudden and fatal disease, does not affect the case, provided it be clear that the assassin and the author of the forebodings were not in communication.

VI.

The preceding inquiry has been limited to the views of miracle entertained by the writers of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, and by the doctors of the Jewish Law. It has been so confined because it is within this circle alone that the authority for the Christian conception of miracle as a theological or religious question is to be found. Those Patristic, medieval, or modern writers who have attempted to deal with this subject, without familiar acquaintance with what may be called its common law, have rather perplexed than illustrated it. Those anti-theological writers who have insisted on the impossibility, or inherent incredibility, of miracle have shewn, if possible, a stiil more profound ignorance of the matter of which they spoke. The primary principle is clear and simple. It is laid down with perfect distinctness in

the Pentateuch. It is discussed by Maimonides, and other great Semitic writers, as the belief in the occurrence of, and the rules for discrimination in, events of a miraculous nature entered into the daily life of the Jewish people. Thus regarded, while grave questions may still be open with regard, first, to the physical limits within which miracle may be regarded as credible; and secondly, as to the moral limits which define the acceptance of the doctrine; the primary question becomes reduced simply to that of the trustworthiness of the evidence brought forward in any particular case.

There is, of course, a broader and more comprehensive view of the subject, into which it might be both instructive and interesting to enter. Between the belief of the Jews in the time of Moses, of Joshua, or of Hezekiah, as to the occurrence of miracles, and that of the contemporary Egyptians, Syrians, and Assyrians, the difference was simply that of the Object of worship. The King of Moab had the same description of belief in the efficacy of sacrifice that was held by the Hebrew Patriarch. The language of Sennacherib, Sargon, or Shalmanezer, as recovered from tablets and obelisks of cuneiform record, is indistinguishable, except as to the names of the deities invoked, and the sites of their temples and favoured abodes, from the language of Isaiah or of Jeremiah. But to enter on the comparative view of the question, to inquire into the oracles of Egypt, Libya, Greece, Rome, Gaul, England, Germany,

not only demands ample space and careful research, but raises a philosophic, rather than a religious question, in so far as the term religious is confined to the faith of Christendom. In the same way the history of belief in the manifestation of what

is called the supernatural, first from the dawn of history down tothe closing of the temples by Constantine, and then from the days of Constantine to our own time, including the weird and littleunderstood phenomena of witchcraft, religious mania, mesmeric trance, electro-biology, and American Spiritualism, covers a large area of contemplation. An exhaustive treatment of the entire subject is desirable. It will probably be more possible to perform such a task a few years hence than it is at the present moment. But it is unnecessary that the religious treatment of the question, in so far as it is connected with the doctrines and the sacred books of the monotheistic religions, should await this more comprehensive labour. It is not as a philosophic, but as a religious, question that the doctrine of miracles is interesting to ninety-nine persons. out of every hundred amongst us. And as this branch or portion of the inquiry is in itself simple, defined, and capable of exhaustive treatment, there seems no good reason for postponing discussion until the completion of a more arduous task, on the very bases and postulates of which much question will arise in all but very luminous minds.

We can thus afford to neglect, on the one hand, such attacks as that of the famous essay on miracles, and on the other hand, all such defences as have been reared without full and familiar acquaintance with those precise rules which have been laid down by the only authorities to which the student of the view of the miraculous held by the writers of the Bible can confidently refer. The Church of Rome is to this hour consistent in her acceptance of the main doctrine of the written and of the oral law on the subject of miracles. How

ever striking the appeal made by any event, wonder, or fulfilled prediction to the imagination, the acceptance of such event as not only a true, but a holy, miracle is subordinated to the accordance of the doctrine attested by the worker of such miracle with the Divine law.

Conveyed in other words, the faith has been constant in the Church that the imagination must be subjected to the intelligence, and that wonder must sit at the feet of faith. It is the moral or religious doctrine of the worker of miracles that attests the origin of his thaumaturgic power. No such power is in itself to be held sufficient to attest the truth of any doctrine inconsistent with the Divine law, or with the weightier matters of mercy, justice, and truth.

It may be here observed how much worse than idle is the attempt which has been organised, some years ago, at a cost of nearly a thousand pounds per week, raised from the pockets of well-meaning but misguided persons, to effect the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. Experience as to the benefit derived from the fund appears, happily, to have reduced the annual subscriptions. The primary position taken by the agents of these societies is that they understand the Hebrew Scriptures better than the custodians of the Law, to whom Hebrew has never become a dead language. Whereas, as a rule, they read (if they can read them at all) without any acquaintance with the necessary supplement of the Synhedral laws. And then they insist on the hard-heartedness of the Jews in resisting the truth of the miraculous attestations of Christianity. These searchers for proselytes are unaware that neither Moses himself nor any prophet who followed him, could have assigned any

weight to any miracle adduced to justify a departure from the express language of the ancient law. Nothing was more carefully, positively, and authoritatively forbidden. The aim, then, of the Christian missionary should be, not to urge that miraculous attestation was given to doctrines subversive of the Law, but to shew that between his teaching and that of the great Prophet of Mount Sinai there is a real accord and harmony. Let him do this, and he will persuade the Jew on ground which admits of no dispute. Let him fail to do this, and no appeal to miracle, however fully attested to have taken place, has, or ought to have, any effect in disturbing the faith of the believer in the Divine inspiration of the Pentateuch. Not a jot or a tittle of the Law, according to the words of Christ himself, was to pass from the obedience of the Jew.

Had the funds raised in a single year by these societies been devoted to the founding, at our two great Universities, of a chair of Aramaic literature, the occupant of which should not (like Regius Professors of Hebrew) expound the books of the Prophets from the interpretation of St. Jerome, in contemptuous ignorance of the mass of national literature which shews what was the Law as in action at the time of Christ, something more might have been done than the stirring up angry controversy or the purchase of a few temporary adherents to a professed creed. Only Christians very ignorant of Judaism can hope by the methods already employed to effect any change in the views of a Jew. Only a Jew who is something worse than ignorant is likely to be affected by any such argument.

VII.

It is evident from the foregoing considerations that a perfectly

compact and intelligible theory of the subject of miracles is to be drawn from a study of the only writings which have any authority on the subject as a matter of theology. The entire structure of the attack or the belief in the miraculous, based on a false definition of the doctrine attacked, crumbles into dust. We see in the belief in the miraculous an integral portion of the Jewish religion, based on the express ordinance of the written law, and fully illustrated by the Synhedral legislation, by the civil and domestic life of the people, and by the writings of the great Aramaic and Arab writers. Of the perfect consistency of this belief with the faith of contemporary nations we have not allowed ourselves to speak. It was so accordant in point of fact; but that is part of a more general inquiry. Above all, it is certain that the very law which acknowledged the evidence of wonder, prediction, or dream, as a sign of a Divine message, guarded that admission by the provision that the message must be accordant with the law itself. No miracle, for instance, would have been held to give weight to the words of a prophet or teacher who should attempt to distinguish between what he might choose to call the moral and the ceremonial law; or to say that the spirit, and not the letter of the law was to be obeyed; or that any part of the ancient institution was symbolic, unimportant, or transitory. And the Catholic Church, while holding that it was in accordance with the language of the Evangelist that the power of working miracles abode with her priests, as an attestation of true faith, has ever pointed out the danger of being misled by miracles which she considers not divine but diabolic.

On the other hand, we must

acknowledge that when we seek for the evidence on which an impartial student of history can be called upon to accept any par ticular miracle as an established fact, we are very much at sea. All that we have firmly within our grasp is the fact that certain miracles were, at certain times, objects of popular belief; or that they are so represented in certain books of great antiquity, and highly venerated by their custodians. The establishment of the authenticity and perfectly historic character of these books is a necessary preliminary to the examination of the exact sense in which their testimony is to be understood. It is only in the lifetime of the present generation that literary criticism, in this country, has begun to apply itself to this preliminary task. With regard to the more ancient marvels of the Hebrew books, our oldest evidence as to the state of the text (for a portion of them only) ascends to about 270 years before the Christian era. At that time we are made aware, by the variant Greek versions, that differences of some importance existed in the text. As to the state of the latter before the time of Ezra, and as to the actual date of many books or portions of books in their present form, we are quite in the dark. It was, indeed, held by some of the Jewish doctors that the whole of the Bible was re-written by Ezra. Divine inspiration was claimed for his guidance; but means of verification were wanting. The Talmud ascribes the earlier books to the prophets whose deeds or words were recorded in them; and even the Book of Deuteronomy, which speaks of Moses in the third person, and quotes particular passages as words spoken by Moses, is there ascribed to the authorship of that great legislator. We are brought