takeable enough for him who is willing to believe, but dark and uncertain enough for him who means to doubt. Nor should it be otherwise. For only those can or may penetrate into the secrets of the divine government who have experienced the miraculous spiritual power of God in their own hearts. To him only who sustains a living relation to Christ, the miracle of all miracles, and who recognises himself as a miracle, not merely as a man, but still more as a child of God, and to such an one assuredly, the miraculous operation of God in the world, as well as in his own experience, will appear intelligible and necessary; and the supernatural will seem natural, because it is shaping his inmost life. The longer his experience, the more profoundly and clearly will he trace the finger of God even in a thousand small events, where the blind world sees only natural laws and chance, because he discerns that finger continually in himself in grace and discipline. And therefore no one can dispute his right to continue in that faith which the angel invited in his announcement of the greatest miracle, that "with God nothing shall be impossible" (Luke i. 37).

SIXTH LECTURE.

MODERN ANTI-MIRACULOUS ACCOUNTS OF THE LIFE OF

CHRIST.

"If they shall say that no miracles have been wrought, they will thereby only turn the edge of their weapons against themselves. For that were the greatest miracle, that without signs and wonders twelve poor and unlearned men should have drawn the whole world into then net."-CHRYSOSTOMUS (in Act. Ap. Hom. I.).

WHAT

HAT think ye of Christ? whose Son is He?" This question it is which once more agitates the world most deeply in our own day. Thus did our Lord in a decisive hour address the assembled Pharisees in one of His last public discourses. And whenever this question is addressed to a whole people or generation, it is a sign that the times are pregnant with solemn issues, and that a turning-point in its history is at hand. It is not a question, but the question, the innermost vital issue, the decision of which by individuals or nations now, as then in the case of Israel, pronounces the sentence of judgment on their future destiny.

The answer to this question touches the centre of our faith. And surely the fact that the assault upon Christian belief is now being concentrated more and more upon this its central bulwark, is a proof that our age is pressing on to a decision, and that the battle of well-nigh two thousand years, which the Christian faith has been waging with science and with life, is at length nearing its final issue. The spirit of our age, weary -and that not without good reason-of mere speculation, is in every department asking for realities and facts. The study of dogma has had to yield to that of history. Men no longer look to authoritative statements of Church doctrines or dogmatic treatises, but to historical investigations of the Gospel narratives and of primeval Christianity, for an answer to the question, Who was and is Jesus Christ?

This question, so decisive for our whole faith, is forced upon us, not only by the spirit of our age, but also by the progressive development of modern theology. As formerly the Reformers appealed from the Church to the Scriptures, so now our modern critics appeal "from the Scriptures to the actual history upon which they are based," and claim to make a distinction between the biblical narration of facts and the facts themselves. In order to attain to an historical comprehension of the origin of Christianity, modern criticism first began to investigate the apostolic and post-apostolic ages, seeking in the struggles which agitated these periods to discover the growing germs of the Church and her faith. For a time the critics hovered round the person of Christ with a cautious reserve. But soon it became evident that all criticism must eventually have recourse to this as the only reasonable way to account for the origin of Christianity. Thus investigations into the latter made way for inquiries after the person of Christ. As this was the chief religious problem for the scribes in Israel and the wise men of heathendom, so, too, it is once more the great question that occupies the theology of the day, and has attracted more general interest than any other. This question is addressed to us also. We may not evade it, and therefore we must seek a clear and concise answer. No one may remain undecided in the face of this issue; for on it depends our whole future, as individuals, as churches, and (witness the example of Israel) as nations.

If we inquire after the inner motives which have led our modern theology back to this old question, it is not difficult to see that chief among them is the aversion to the miraculous which characterizes the spirit of our age. We have seen that Jesus Christ is the central miracle of history. He who denies the miraculous cannot accept this chief miracle. For this reason the deists and the old school of rationalists exerted themselves to get rid of one miracle after another; but they soon discovered that all this was labour lost, so long as the supernatural, in the person of Christ, was bodily present in the world and its history. Since then our opponents have become wiser, and have transferred the conflict to the person of Christ. The foundations of all supernatural revelation cannot 1 Cf. Luthardt, Die modernen Darstellungen des Lebens Jesu.

be considered as destroyed until this Jesus of Nazareth, with His unique life,-until all His doings and sayings, and even His peculiar religious consciousness, are naturally explained as the result of a merely human development. Here we have the reason for the most recent attempts at a purely natural solution of this enigma.

But there is another alternative. The result of our investigations may show that all these attempts, even the most unbridled and arbitrary of them, still leave an inexplicable something, which the most desperate efforts to divest the life of Christ of its divinity cannot do away with; and that they arrive at this something only by means of an abrupt leap, i.e. by giving up all natural connecting links,-a proceeding which must lead us to the conclusion that it was a supernatural agency which here interfered. Our investigations may show that the old Stone of stumbling, the person of the Crucified, still lies before us to this day as a Rock of offence which the stormy floods of human criticism can neither wash away nor crumble into ordinary shingle; nay, a Stone from which all the learned human masons cannot even grind away the sharp corners, which they must needs let alone in the unique grandeur of its origin and its effects. If such be the case, then we have a fresh argument for the possibility of miracles in addition to those already adduced, viz. the impossibility of removing the miraculous from the Bible, and from history in general, since its opponents are fain to let it stand in its central manifestation-Christ.

Not a device has been left untried in order to divest the life of our Lord of its supernatural character. The most clumsy method was, to accuse either Himself or the gospel writers of lying and fraud. This was the main point in the well-known Wolfenbüttel Fragments, by Reimarus (†1768), and long before, in the writings of Celsus, that heathen adversary of the Christian faith in the second century. The same method, too, was partially carried out by some of the English deists, but especially by Voltaire and the French illuminati. In our day there is no longer any difference of opinion as to this frivolous and morally revolting theory. It is condemned by a single question: How can He from whom the moral regeneration of the world proceeded have been an immoral deceiver?

Or how can it be conceived as possible that a number of fraudulent men should be able to invent the purest, grandest, and most exalted character, the mere idea of which far transcends the loveliest visions of poets, and the noblest speculations of philosophers?

For this reason the accusation of conscious fraud soon fell to the ground, and others set up the theory that Christ was the victim of self-deception and enthusiasm. We shall find that this supposition is, partially at least, accepted by Strauss and Renan, who, in their explanation of our Saviour's words and deeds towards the close of His life, are compelled to make use of it. But neither does this theory explain anything; on the contrary, it only multiplies enigmas. For all the sayings and doings of Christ which are recorded in the Gospels give an unprejudiced reader the impression of the most sober clearness of spirit, the calmest dignity, and the most prudent selfcommand, ever wondrously the same in all situations; and this accompanied by the glance of profound knowledge which penetrates through all outward show to the real essence, and the sure judgment which is never deceived, but constantly hits the nail upon the head. Is not all this directly opposed to enthusiastic imagination and self-deception?

Others, therefore, have attributed the errors and the selfdeception to the disciples, whom they suppose to have formed a false conception of the deeds of Christ, in their superstitious prejudice making purely natural events into supernatural ones, and converting an extraordinary human being into a God-man. This is the creed of vulgar Rationalism. We are to believe that the fabrications and dreams of a few Galilean fishermen, imposed upon Jews and Greeks, conquered the world, morally regenerated it, and have since proved to be a ruling spiritual power and an inexhaustible source of culture and education! And is this the pass at which exalted reason has arrived?

Since this theory has been undermined, in part by the historical contradictions which it provoked, but especially by the intolerably arbitrary exegesis which it necessitated, a final and most recent attempt has been made to show that the miraculous history and the "deification" of Christ originated in the (unconscious) legendary invention of the first Christian communities, which surrounded and darkened the original history with an