its use and its value simply from the end which it was to serve.  He observes that all the stupendous “marvels of nature do not speak to us in that way in which one miracle does, because they do not tell us that we are not like themselves”; and he remarks on the “perverse determination of Spinoza to look at miracles in that aspect which does not belong to them, and not to look at them in that aspect which does.”

He compares miracles with nature, and then says how wise is the order of nature, how meaningless the violation of it; how expressive of the Almighty Mind the one, what a concealment of it the other!  But no one pretends to say that a miracle competes with nature, in physical purpose and effectiveness.  That is not its object.  But a miracle, though it does not profess to compete with nature upon its rival’s own ground, has a ghostly force and import which nature has not.  If real, it is a token, more pointed and direct than physical order can be, of another world, and of Moral Being and Will in that world.

Thus, regarding miracles as means to fulfil a purpose, Mr. Mozley shows what has come of them.  His lecture on “Miracles regarded in their Practical Result” is excelled by some of the others as examples of subtle and searching thought and well-balanced and compact argument; but it is a fine example of the way in which a familiar view can have fresh colour and force thrown into it by the way in which it is treated.  He shows that it is impossible in fact to separate from the miracles in which it professed to begin, the greatest and deepest moral change which the world has ever known.  This change was made not by miracles but by certain doctrines.  The Epistle to the Romans surveyed the moral failure of the world; St. Paul looked on the chasm between knowledge and action, the “unbridged gulf, this incredible inability of man to do what was right, with profound wonder”; but in the face of this hopeless spectacle he dared to prophesy the moral elevation which we have witnessed, and the power to which he looked to bring it about was the Christian doctrines.  St. Paul “takes what may be called the high view of human nature—­i.e. what human nature is capable of when the proper motive and impulse is applied to it.”  He sees in Christian doctrine that strong force which is to break down “the vis inertiae of man, to set human nature going, to touch the spring of man’s heart”; and he compares with St. Paul’s doctrines and hopefulness the doctrinal barrenness, the despair of Mohammedanism:—­

If one had to express in a short compass the character of its remarkable founder as a teacher, it would be that that great man had no faith in human nature.  There were two things which he thought man could do and would do for the glory of God—­transact religious forms, and fight; and upon those two points he was severe; but within the sphere of common practical life, where man’s great trial lies, his code exhibits