ility of miracles,
of a rare and unusual transcendence of the world order is not here in
question" (p. 38). It may be permitted me to suppose, however, that,
if miracles were in question, the speaker who warns us "that we must
look for the heart of the absolute religion in that part of it which
prescribes our moral and religious relations" (p. 46) would not be
disposed to advise those who had found the heart of Christianity to
take much thought about its miraculous integument.

My anonymous sermon will have nothing to do with such notions as
these, and its preacher is not too polite, to say nothing of
charitable, towards those who entertain them.

Scientific men, therefore, are perfectly right in asserting
that Christianity rests on miracles. If miracles never
happened, Christianity, in any sense which is not a mockery,
which does not make the term of none effect, has no reality.
I dwell on this because there is now an effort making to get
up a non-miraculous, invertebrate Christianity, which may
escape the ban of science. And I would warn you very
distinctly against this new contrivance. Christianity is
essentially miraculous, and falls to the ground if miracles
be impossible.

Well, warning for warning. I venture to warn this preacher and those
who, with him, persist in identifying Christianity with the
miraculous, that such forms of Christianity are not only doomed to
fall to the ground; but that, within the last half century, they have
been driving that way with continually accelerated velocity.

The so-called religious world is given to a strange delusion. It
fondly imagines that it possesses the monopoly of serious and constant
reflection upon the terrible problems of existence; and that those who
cannot accept its shibboleths are either mere Gallios, caring for none
of these things, or libertines desiring to escape from the restraints
of morality. It does not appear to have entered the imaginations of
these people that, outside their pale and firmly resolved never to
enter it, there are thousands of men, certainly not their inferiors in
character, capacity, or knowledge of the questions at issue, who
estimate those purely spiritual elements of the Christian faith of
which the Bishop of Manchester speaks as highly as the Bishop does;
but who will have nothing to do with the Christian Churches, because
in their apprehension and for them, the profession of belie