is not wanted, because the moral truths are their own evidence.  But Christianity cannot be maintained as a revelation undiscoverable by human reason, a revelation of a supernatural scheme for man’s salvation, without the evidence of miracles.

The question of miracles, then, of the supernatural disclosed in the world of nature, is the vital point for everything that calls itself Christianity.  It may be forgotten or disguised; but it is vain to keep it back and put it out of sight.  It must be answered; and if we settle it that miracles are incredible, it is idle to waste our time about accommodations with Christianity, or reconstitutions of it.  Let us be thankful for what it has done for the world; but let us put it away, both name and thing.  It is an attempt after what is in the nature of things impossible to man—­a revealed religion, authenticated by God.  The shape which this negative answer takes is, as Mr. Mozley points out, much more definite now than it ever was.  Miracles were formerly assailed and disbelieved on mixed and often confused grounds; from alleged defect of evidence, from their strangeness, or because they would be laughed at.  Foes and defenders looked at them from the outside and in the gross; and perhaps some of those who defended them most keenly had a very imperfect sense of what they really were.  The difficulty of accepting them now arises not mainly from want of external evidence, but from having more keenly realised what it is to believe a miracle.  As Mr. Mozley says—­

How is it that sometimes when the same facts and truths have been before men all their lives, and produced but one impression, a moment comes when they look different from what they did?  Some minds may abandon, while others retain, their fundamental position with respect to those facts and truths, but to both they look stranger; they excite a certain surprise which they did not once do.  The reasons of this change then it is not always easy for the persons themselves to trace, but of the result they are conscious; and in some this result is a change of belief.

An inward process of this kind has been going on recently in many minds on the subject of miracles; and in some with the latter result.  When it came to the question—­which every one must sooner or later put to himself on this subject—­Did these things really take place?  Are they matters of fact?—­they have appeared to themselves to be brought to a standstill, and to be obliged to own an inner refusal of their whole reason to admit them among the actual events of the past.  This strong repugnance seemed to be the witness of its own truth, to be accompanied by a clear and vivid light, to be a law to the understanding, and to rule without appeal the question of fact....  But when the reality of the past is once apprehended and embraced, then the miraculous occurrences in it are realised too; being realised they excite surprise, and surprise,