But to return to the Christian apologists in their order.  Tertullian:—­“That person whom the Jews had vainly imagined, from the meanness of his appearance, to be a mere man, they afterwards, in consequence of the power he exerted, considered as a magician, when he, with one word, ejected devils out of the bodies of men, gave sight to the blind, cleansed the leprous, strengthened the nerves of those that had the palsy, and lastly, with one command, restored the dead to life; when he, I say, made the very elements obey him, assuaged the storms, walked upon the seas, demonstrating himself to be the Word of God.”  (Tertul.  Apolos. p. 20; ed.  Priorii, Par. 1675.)

Next in the catalogue of professed apologists we may place Origen, who, it is well known, published a formal defence of Christianity, in answer to Celsus, a heathen, who had written a discourse against it.  I know no expressions by which a plainer or more positive appeal to the Christian miracles can be made, than the expressions used by Origen; “Undoubtedly we do think him to be the Christ, and the Son of God, because he healed the lame and the blind; and we are the more confirmed in this persuasion by what is written in the prophecies:  ’Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear, and the lame man shall leap as a hart.’  But that he also raised the dead, and that it is not a fiction of those who wrote the Gospels, is evident from hence, that if it had been a fiction, there would have been many recorded to be raised up, and such as had been a long time in their graves.  But, it not being a fiction, few have been recorded:  for instance, the daughter of the ruler of a synagogue, of whom I do not know why he said, She is not dead, but sleepeth, expressing something peculiar to her, not common to all dead persons:  and the only son of a widow, on whom he had compassion, and raised him to life, after he had bid the bearers of the corpse to stop; and the third, Lazarus, who had been buried four days.”  This is positively to assert the miracles of Christ, and it is also to comment upon them, and that with a considerable degree of accuracy and candour.

In another passage of the same author, we meet with the old solution of magic applied to the miracles of Christ by the adversaries of the religion.  “Celsus,” saith Origen, “well knowing what great works may be alleged to have been done by Jesus, pretends to grant that the things related of him are true; such as healing diseases, raising the dead, feeding multitudes with a few leaves, of which large fragments were left.” (Orig. cont.  Cels. lib. ii. sect. 48.) And then Celsus gives, it seems, an answer to these proofs of our Lord’s mission, which, as Origen understood it, resolved the phenomena into magic; for Origen begins his reply by observing, “You see that Celsus in a manner allows that there is such a thing as magic.” (Lardner’s Jewish and Heath.  Test, vol. ii. p. 294, ed. 4to.)