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"miracles to be false," the account of which was not published at the time or place of their alleged occurrence, or if so published, yet without careful attention being called to them; yet St. Mark is said to have written at Rome, St. Luke in Rome or Greece, and St. John at Ephesus; and the earliest of the Evangelists wrote some years after the events recorded, while the latest did not write for sixty years; and, moreover, true though it be that attention was called to Christianity from the first, yet it is true also that it did not succeed at the spot where it arose, but principally at a distance from it. Once more, Leslie almost confines his tests to the Mosaic miracles, or rather to certain of them; and though he is unwilling to exclude those of the Gospel from the benefit of his argument, yet it is not easy to see how he brings them under it at all.

On the whole then, it will be found that the greater part of the miracles of revelation are as little evidence for revelation at this day, as the miracles of the Church are evidence for the Church. In both cases the number of those which carry with them their own proof now, and are believed for their own sake, is small; and they furnish the grounds on which we receive the rest. The difference between the two cases is this-that, since an authentic document has been provided for the miracles by which revealed religion was introduced, which are thus connected together into one whole, we know here exactly, what miracles are to be received on warrant of those which are already proved; but since the Church has never catalogued her miracles, those which are known to be such, do but create an indefinite presumption in favour of others, but cannot be taken in proof of any in particular.

On the other hand, that fables have ever been in circulation, some vague and isolated, others attached to particular spots or to particular persons, is too notorious to need dwelling on; it is more to the purpose to observe that the

fact of such pretences has ever been acknowledged even by those who have been the believers or the reporters of miraculous histories. We have seen above, that one of St. Martin's first miracles in his episcopate, as recorded by Sulpicius, was the detection of a pretended Saint and Martyr, whose tomb had been an object of veneration to the ignorant people. And in the very beginning of Christianity St. Luke, by speaking of the "many" who had "taken in hand to set "forth in order a declaration of those things which are most "surely believed among us," seems to allude to the Apocryphal Gospels, which ascribe a number of trifling as well as fictitious miracles to our Lord. And when St. Paul cautions the Thessalonians against being "soon shaken in mind or "troubled, by spirit or by letter, as from himself, as that the "day of Christ was at hand," he testifies both to the fact that spurious writings were then ascribed to him, and that they contained professedly supernatural matter. What is confessed by Apostles and Evangelists in the first century, and by Martyrologists in the fourth, would naturally happen both in the interval and afterwards. Hence Pope Gelasius, while warning the faithful against various Apocryphal works, mentions among them the acts of St. George, the Martyr under Dioclesian, which had been so interpolated by the Arians, that to this day, though he is the patron of England, and in Chapters of the Garter is commemorated with honours which even Apostles do not gain from us, nothing whatever is known for certain of his life, sufferings, or miracles ". Again, we are told by St. John Damascene, and in the Revelations of St. Bridget and St. Mathildis, that the Emperor Trajan was delivered from the place of punishment at the prayers of St. Gregory the First; but Baronius says, concern

• Page xxxiii.

Jones on the Canon, part i. ch. 2, has collected the ancient and modern authorities in proof that St. Luke was

alluding to the Apocryphal writings. Wolf denies it. Cur. Phil. in loc.

u Baron. Annal. 290. 35. Martyrol.

Apr. 23.

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ing this and similar stories, "Away with idle tales; silence "once for all on empty fables; be they buried in eternal "silence. We excuse those, who accounting true what they "received as fact, committed it to writing; praise to their "zeal, who, when they found it asserted, discussed in scho"lastic fashion, how it might be; but more praise to them "who scenting the falsehood, detected the error"." Melchior Canus, again, a Dominican and a Divine of Trent, uses the same language even of St. Gregory's Dialogues and the Ecclesiastical History of Bede. "They are most eminent persons," he says, "but still men; they relate certain miracles as commonly reported and believed, which critics, especially of this age, will consider uncertain. Indeed, I should like those "histories better, if their authors had joined more care in "selection to severity in judgment;" though he adds that far more was to be retained in their works than was to be rejected. He does not, however, speak even in these measured terms of the Speculum Exemplorum, and the Aurea Legenda of Jacobus de Voragine; the former of which, he says, contains "monsters of miracles rather than truths;" and the latter is the production of "an iron mouth, a leaden "heart, and an intellect without exactness or discretion." Avowals such as these from the first century to the sixteenth, from inspired writers to the schools of St. Dominic and the Oratory, may serve to prepare us for fictitious miracles in Ecclesiastical history in no small measure, and to shew us at the same time that such fictions are no fair prejudice to others which possess the characters of truth'. And in like

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manner, if it be necessary, exceptions might be taken to certain of the miracles recorded by Palladius in his Lausiac, and by Theodoret in his Religious History, and by the unknown collector of the miracles of St. Stephen, which a late writer has brought forward with the hope of thereby involving all the supernatural histories of antiquity in a general suspicion and contempt. That Palladius has put in writing a report of an hyena's asking pardon of a solitary for killing sheep, and of a female turned by magic into a mare, or that one of the Clergy of Uzalis speaks of a serpent that was seen in the sky, will appear no reason except to vexed and heated minds for accusing the holy Ambrose of imposture, or the keen, practised, and experienced intellect of Augustine of abject credulity".

Nor is there any thing strange or startling in this mixture of fable with truth, as appeared from what was said on the subject in a former page. It as little derogates from the supernatural gift residing in the Church that miracles should have been fabricated or exaggerated, as it prejudices her holiness that within her pale good men are mixed with bad. Fiction and pretence follow truth as its shadows; the Church is at all times in the midst of corruption, because she is in

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"must command respect; but in pro"portion as we assign praise to the man individually, we condemn the system which could so far vitiate a "noble mind, and impel one so lofty "in temper to act a part which heathen 'philosophers would utterly have ab"horred... Under the Niccne system,

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jam olim creditis, et juxta Breviarii 66 præscriptum hodiedum recitandis, in disputationem adduci." Dissert. Bolland. tom. ii. p. 140. Vid. also Alban Butler's Saints, Introd. Disc., p. xlvii, &c. ed. 1833. Bauer's Theolog. tom. i. art. ii. p. 487, and works there referred to. Benedict. XIV. de Canon. Sanct. iv. v. p. 1. c. 5, &c. Farmer on Miracles, p. 320; also the passages from various authors quoted in Geddes' Tracts, vol. iii. pp. 115-118. ed. 1730; who also furnishes, though not in a good spirit, a number of specimens of the sort of miracles which such authors condemn.

z "Ambrose occupies a high position "among the Fathers; and there was a "vigour and dignity in his character, as well as a vivid intelligence, which

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Bishops in the great cities could "stand up in crowded churches, with"out shame, and with uplifted hands "appeal to Almighty God in attestation "of that, as a miracle, which them"selves had brought about by trickery, "bribes, and secret instructions." Ancient Christ. part vii. pp. 270, 271. "He [Augustine] was the dupe of his "own credulity, not the machinator of "fraud." p. 318.

the midst of the world and is framed out of human hearts; and as the elect are fewer than the reprobate and hard to find amid the chaff, so false miracles at once exceed and conceal and prejudice those which are genuine. Nor would the difficulty be overcome, even if we took on ourselves to reject all the Ecclesiastical miracles altogether; for the fictions which startle us must in fairness be viewed as connected, not only with the Church and her more authentic histories, but with Christianity, as such. Superstition is a corruption of Christianity, not merely of the Church; and if it discredits the Divine origin of the Church, it discredits the Divine origin of Christianity also. Those who talk even most loudly of the corruptions of the fourth and fifth centuries, seem, when closely questioned, still to admit that Christianity was not extinct but overlaid by corruptions. If then the Church herself and her miracles in toto are to be included in that corruption, then of course the corruption was only deeper and broader, than if she is to be accounted as in herself a portion of Apostolic Christianity; and if such greater corruption does not compromise the divinity of Christianity, so the lesser surely does not compromise the real power and gifts of the Church. On both sides fanaticism, imposture, and superstition are admitted as existing in the history of miracles; and on neither side must these evil agents be held to throw suspicion on miracles which have no direct or probable connection with them.

And now after these preliminary considerations, let us proceed to inquire into the evidence and general character of two or three of the miracles ascribed to that period of the Church in which the history which follows is included.

1. The Thundering Legion.

Claudius Apollinaris, Bishop of Hierapolis, addressed an Apology for Christianity to the Emperor Marcus, about A. D. 176. It is lost, but an allusion to it, as it would appear, or

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