one hair's
breadth our judgment of right and wrong, and the true appeal of a
religion must be to our moral sense.

No miracle can prove that immoral teaching is sacred. But it can prove
that it is supernatural. And this is precisely what Scripture always
proclaims. In the New Testament, we are bidden to take heed, because a
day will come, when false prophets shall work great signs and wonders,
to deceive, if possible, even the elect (Mark xiii. 22). In the Old
Testament, a prophet may seduce the people to worship other gods, by
giving them a sign or a wonder which shall come to pass, but they must
surely stone him: they must believe that his sign is only a temptation;
and above whatever power enabled him to work it, they must recognise
Jehovah proving them, and know that the supernatural has come to them in
judgment, not in revelation (Deut. xiii. 1-5).

Now, this is the true function of the miraculous. At the most, it cannot
coerce the conscience, but only challenge it to consider and to judge.

A teacher of the purest morality may be only a human teacher still; nor
is the Christian bound to follow into the desert every clamorous
innovator, or to seek in the secret chamber every one who whispers a
private doctrine to a few. We are entitled to expect that one who is
commissioned directly from above will bear special credentials with him;
but when these are exhibited, we must still judge whether the document
they attest is forged. And this may explain to us why the magicians were
allowed for awhile to perplex the judgment of Pharaoh whether by fraud,
as we may well suppose, or by infernal help. It was enough that Moses
should set his claims upon a level with those which Pharaoh reverenced:
the king was then bound to weigh their relative merits in other and
wholly different scales.

_THE PLAGUES._

vii. 14.

There are many aspects in which the plagues of Egypt may be
contemplated.

We may think of them as ranging through all nature, and asserting the
mastery of the Lord alike over the river on which depended the
prosperity of the realm, over the minute pests which can make life more
wretched than larger and more conspicuous ills (the frogs of the water,
the reptiles that disgrace humanity, and the insects that infest the
air), over the bodies of animals stricken with murrain, and those of man
tortured with boils, over hail in the cloud and blight in the crop, over
the breeze that bears the locust and the sun th