As to miracles, they were regarded at this period as the indispensable mark of the divine, and as the sign of the prophetic vocation.  The legends of Elijah and Elisha were full of them.  It was commonly believed that the Messiah would perform many.[1] In Samaria, a few leagues from where Jesus was, a magician, named Simon, acquired an almost divine character by his illusions.[2] Afterward, when it was sought to establish the reputation of Apollonius of Tyana, and to prove that his life had been the sojourn of a god upon the earth, it was not thought possible to succeed therein except by inventing a vast cycle of miracles.[3] The Alexandrian philosophers themselves, Plotinus and others, are reported to have performed several.[4] Jesus was, therefore, obliged to choose between these two alternatives—­either to renounce his mission, or to become a thaumaturgus.  It must be remembered that all antiquity, with the exception of the great scientific schools of Greece and their Roman disciples, accepted miracles; and that Jesus not only believed therein, but had not the least idea of an order of Nature regulated by fixed laws.  His knowledge on this point was in no way superior to that of his contemporaries.  Nay, more, one of his most deeply rooted opinions was, that by faith and prayer man has entire power over Nature.[5] The faculty of performing miracles was regarded as a privilege frequently conferred by God upon men,[6] and it had nothing surprising in it.

[Footnote 1:  John vii. 34; IV.  Esdras, xiii. 50.]

[Footnote 2:  Acts viii. 9, and following.]

[Footnote 3:  See his biography by Philostratus.]

[Footnote 4:  See the Lives of the Sophists, by Eunapius; the Life of Plotinus, by Porphyry; that of Proclus, by Marinus; and that of Isidorus, attributed to Damascius.]

[Footnote 5:  Matt. xvii. 19, xxi. 21, 22; Mark xi. 23, 24.]

[Footnote 6:  Matt. ix. 8.]

The lapse of time has changed that which constituted the power of the great founder of Christianity into something offensive to our ideas, and if ever the worship of Jesus loses its hold upon mankind, it will be precisely on account of those acts which originally inspired belief in him.  Criticism experiences no embarrassment in presence of this kind of historical phenomenon.  A thaumaturgus of our days, unless of an extreme simplicity, like that manifested by certain stigmatists of Germany, is odious; for he performs miracles without believing in them; and is a mere charlatan.  But, if we take a Francis d’Assisi, the question becomes altogether different; the series of miracles attending the origin of the order of St. Francis, far from offending us, affords us real pleasure.  The founder of Christianity lived in as complete a state of poetic ignorance as did St. Clair and the tres socii.  The disciples deemed it quite natural that their master should have interviews with Moses and Elias, that he should command the elements,