n, 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
evidence for the later is just as good as the evidence for the earlier
wonders. If the one set are certified by contemporaneous witnesses of
high repute, so are the other; and, in point of probability, there is
not a pin to choose between the two. That is the solid and
irrefragable, result of Middleton's contribution to the subject. But
the Free Inquirer's freedom had its limits; and he draws a sharp line
of demarcation between the patristic and the New Testament
miracles--on the professed ground that the accounts of the latter,
being inspired, are out of the reach of criticism.

A century later, the question was taken up by another divine,
Middleton's equal in learning and acuteness, and far his superior in
subtlety and dialectic skill; who, though an Anglican, scorned the
name of Protestant; and, while yet a Churchman, made it his business
to parade, with infinite skill, the utter hollowness of the arguments
of those of his brother Churchmen who dreamed that they could be both
Anglicans and Protestants. The argument of the "Essay on the Miracles
recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages"[88] by the
present [1889] Roman Cardinal, but then Anglican Doctor, John Henry
Newman, is compendiously stated by himself i