of miracles, the occurrence of which in biblical times was
axiomatic, but by the problem: When did miracles cease? Anglican divines
were quite sure that no miracles had happened in their day, nor for some
time past; they were equally sure that they happened sixteen or
seventeen centuries earlier. And it was a vital question for them to
determine at what point of time, between this _terminus a quo_ and that
_terminus ad quem_ miracles came to an end.

The Anglicans and the Romanists agreed in the assumption that the
possession of the gift of miracle-working was _prima facie_ evidence of
the soundness of the faith of the miracle-workers. The supposition that
miraculous powers might be wielded by heretics (though it might be
supported by high authority) led to consequences too frightful to be
entertained by people who were busied in building their dogmatic house
on the sands of early Church history. If, as the Romanists maintained,
an unbroken series of genuine miracles adorned the records of their
Church, throughout the whole of its existence, no Anglican could lightly
venture to accuse them of doctrinal corruption. Hence, the Anglicans,
who indulged in such accusations, were bound to prove the modern, the
mediaeval Roman, and the later Patristic, miracles false; and to shut off
the wonder-working power from the Church at the exact point of time when
Anglican doctrine ceased and Roman doctrine began. With a little
adjustment--a squeeze here and a pull there--the Christianity of the
first three or four centuries might be made to fit, or seem to fit,
pretty well into the Anglican scheme. So the miracles, from Justin say
to Jerome, might be recognised; while, in later times, the Church having
become "corrupt"--that is to say, having pursued one and the same line
of development further than was pleasing to Anglicans--its alleged
miracles must needs be shams and impostures.

Under these circumstances, it may be imagined that the establishment of
a scientific frontier between the earlier realm of supposed fact and the
later of asserted delusion, had its difficulties; and torrents of
theological special pleading about the subject flowed from clerical
pens; until that learned and acute Anglican divine, Conyers Middleton,
in his "Free Inquiry," tore the sophistical web they had laboriously
woven to pieces, and demonstrated that the miracles of the patristic
age, early and late, must stand or fall together, inasmuch as the
evidenc