but all enlightenment also.  The believer knows that he learns spiritual truth in proportion as he refers his life to God’s judgment, prays to God for clearer vision of what is duty and what is right faith, and makes it his one great aim to do God’s will.  He uses all the faculties that God has given him to understand the great divine law; but he perpetually looks to God for instruction, and whatever else may be said of that instruction his experience tells him that his advance in spiritual knowledge is in proportion to his nearness in thought and feeling to God Himself.  That the progress of the human race in spiritual knowledge, unlike progress in scientific knowledge, should be due not to thinkers intellectually gifted, but to Prophets and Apostles inspired by God, thus exactly corresponds with what the spiritually-minded man finds within his own soul.  And so too does it correspond with what he sees in others.  Often and often the unlearned and untrained by sheer goodness of life attain to wonderful perception of spiritual truth, and the holiness of the unlettered peasant reveals to his conscience the law of right conduct in circumstances which perplex the disciplined and well informed.  As the human race has learnt the highest spiritual truth by direct communication from God, so too on communion with God far more than on intellectual power, depends the progress of spiritual knowledge in every human soul.

But though the hold of the Bible on the faith of believers unquestionably depends on its satisfying the conscience in every stage of its enlightenment, it is equally certain that those who gave the messages recorded in the Bible claimed something more as proof of their authority than the approval of the conscience of their hearers.  They professed to prove their mission by the evidence of supernatural powers; and the teaching of the Bible cannot be dissociated from the miraculous element in it which is connected with that teaching.  If, indeed, the Old Testament stood alone we might acknowledge that the miraculous element in it occupied comparatively so small a place, and was so separable from the rest, and the evidence for it was so rarely, if ever, contemporaneous, that it might be left out of count.  But we cannot say this of the New Testament, nor in particular of the account that has reached us of the sayings and doings of our Lord.  The miracles are embedded in, are indeed intertwined with, the narrative.  Many of our Lord’s most characteristic sayings are so associated with narratives of miracles that the two cannot be torn apart:  ’I have not seen so great faith, no, not in Israel;’ ‘My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;’ ‘Son, thy sins be forgiven thee;’ ’Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees;’ ’It is not meet to take the children’s bread and cast it to dogs;’ ‘This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting;’ ‘Were there not ten cleansed, but where are the nine?’ ’Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.’  In fact, there can be no