usual or perhaps unprecedented effects of one or more of those unknown combinations of the active principles at work in the universe, which are seldom or never brought under our observation.

And here the circumstance that most, or many, of those miracles were performed subsequently to the doctrine revealed, and in direct and professed attestation of it, refutes immediately every such supposition. Supposing that Moses, on his declaring to Pharaoh that he had a divine commission to conduct the Israelites out of Egypt, had, instead of working some miracle on this occasion, only appealed to a miracle formerly performed, that miracle, I apprehend, if quite incontestable, might still have given him his alleged authority. But if Pharaoh had replied, that though he professed not to detect the precise fallacy of the pretension advanced, or the arts which had produced an effect apparently arising from the exertion of superhuman power, he must yet distrust the claim which was rested on it: that he could not

a See Preliminary Dissertation, Sect. III.

but suspect that some well-planned artifice, the execution of which had turned out successfully, had suggested the hope of grounding credit on the event; or that the accidental occurrence of some unaccountable fact had given occasion to the apparent actor to pretend a miracle; I do not say that these objections would have been justly adequate to refute a claim such as was urged by Moses; but yet assuredly they might excite a degree of suspicion which cannot attach under the real circumstances. For the miracles which Moses wrought before Pharaoh in express attestation of his divine commission, though we will suppose them no greater than those he might have claimed to have worked before at any remote or unconnected period, yet must have been incalculably less exposed to suspicion. They were worked before witnesses either apprehensive of imposture, or at all events able and prepared to detect it: and though we may suppose it possible that certain unknown principles may once in a century produce something so strange, that an adroit impostor may avail himself of the accident, to ground on it the claim of a divine commission,

yet that this accident should, as I have said, take place so opportunely, we may well assert to be wholly incredible.-Such is the power of mere coincidence over the human mind: and so entirely exempted are the Scripture miracles from all suspicion of chance, by the mere strength, it may be said, of the chances in their favour. That the principles which apply in this alleged case of Moses apply equally in the case of the other prophets, and apply most strongly in the case of our Saviour himself, it would be a mere waste of words to argue.

Of the various copulas or coincidences, which may be thus alleged to prove the miraculousness of many of those events which are in Scripture recorded as miracles, the connection which may be traced between those miracles and prophecy, is one of the most signal and obvious. It is a remarkable coincidence, that both miracles and prophecy conspire, even independently of each other, to prove the same religion. That both should be so strong, and strong in our case only, while all other pretensions to either the one proof or the other are evidently and admit

* See pp. 68, 69.

tedly false and feeble, is, in addition to all else, a strong chance in our favour.

But besides this conspiration of the separate evidences, it has often been remarked as a strong feature in the proof of miracles, that with regard to some of them, besides the particular proof of the fact, we have clear proof also that they were predicted before-hand. Thus our Saviour's miracles are foretold in Isaiah 2; or if any one should account these predictions indefinite, yet the Jews, at all events (and this is the sole point of the case which for the present purpose it is at all necessary to establish), undoubtedly interpreted them to mean that miracles should be performed by the future Messiah. The strongest case of all is our Saviour's own prediction that he should rise again on the third day from the dead ̊.

The connexion which in these cases, and others like these, may be proved to subsist between the miracle and the prediction, is, in point

a

31.

Isaiah, xxix. 18, xxxv. 5, 6, lxi. 1.

b Compare Matt. xi.,3, 4, xii. 23. 38, and John, vi. 14. 30,

c Matt. xii. 40, xvi. 24, xvii. 23, xx. 19. Mark, viii. 31; x. 34. Luke, ix. 22. John, ii. 19.

of fact, a consideration of so much weight to prove the miracle real, that some writers rest on it as the chief point on which the decisiveness of the Gospel miracles depends, and without which their reality might be open to question.

This, doubtless, is an error, is the common weakness of arguing on only one favourite side of a question. The reason why this coincidence has so strong an effect to augment the evidence for the reality of the miracle (the evidence arising from the completion of the prophecy is manifestly not here a case to be argued), is exactly the same reason which increases the strength of the evidence in all those cases in which the miracle and the doctrine are united by any other bond of connexion 2. The point is to exclude all accidental events from being urged as evidences of superhuman authority. This is done, equally, whether we exclude the surmise that the event might possibly have happened by chance, at that time exactly when some unexpected impostor might with most effect use it to colour his doctrine; or the similar surmise that that person on whom the prophecies had fixed

P. 66, &c.