real doubt that our Lord believed that He could work miracles, and professed to work them, and that His disciples believed that He worked many, and included that fact in their meaning when they spoke of Him as going about doing good.  And these disciples professed to work miracles themselves and believed that they did work them.  It is of course true that they had no strictly scientific conception of a miracle, and would often have called by that name what was in reality extraordinary but not miraculous.  And it is true too that, if we take each miracle by itself, there is but one miracle, namely our Lord’s Resurrection, for which clear and unmistakeable and sufficient evidence is given.  But while the exclusion of any one miracle as insufficiently attested is possible, the exclusion of the miraculous element altogether is not possible without a complete surrender of the position taken by the first Christian teachers.  As they claimed to be inspired and to have enlightenment which was not shared by mankind at large, so did they claim, if not each for himself, yet certainly for our Lord, power not shared by ordinary men, power to step out of the ordinary course of natural events, and, whether by virtue of some higher law operative only in rare instances, or by direct interference of the Almighty, to prove a divine mission by exhibiting in fact what is an essential part of the supremacy of the Moral Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical world.

The teachers of other religions besides the Christian have claimed supernatural powers, and have professed to give a supernatural message.  This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need in the human soul for such a direct communication from God to man.  Men seem to need it so much that without it they are unable to accept the truth, or to hold it long if they do accept it.  All who thus claim supernatural authority must, of course, justify their claim.  They must justify their message to the human conscience.  What they teach must be an advance towards, and finally an expression of, the Supreme Moral Law.  And if they profess to have miraculous power they must give reasonable evidence that such power is really theirs.  But if they fail in this, still the fact remains that their very claim must answer to something in the spiritual nature of man, or it would not be so invariably made nor so largely successful.

It seems as if, whatever may be the ground of belief when once revelation has penetrated into the soul, the exercise of supernatural power was needed to procure that access in the first instance.  We believe because we find our consciences satisfied, and we bring up our children in such discipline of conscience that they too shall have sufficient training to recognise and hold fast divine truth.  And if we had lived at the time and could have had our eyes opened to see the spiritual power of the Christian Faith, we might have believed without any external evidence at all.