common conceptions, and
ordinary history, and requiring no ascent of the mind to embrace,
viz. the solution of miracles as the growth of fancy and legend;
the other requiring an ascent of the reason to embrace it, viz.
the rationale of the supremacy of a Personal Will in nature. The
one is the explanation to which we fall when we dare not trust our
reason, but mistake its inconceivable truths for sublime but
unsubstantial visions; the other is that to which we rise when we
dare trust our reason, and the evidences which it lays before us
of the existence of a Personal Supreme Being.

The belief in a personal God thus bringing with it the possibility of
miracles, what reason then has to judge is whether it can accept
miracles as such, or any set of miracles, as worthy of a reasonable
conception of the Divine Nature, and whether it can be fairly said that
such miracles have answered a purpose which approves itself to our
reason. Testimony will always speak at a disadvantage till we are
assured on these points. Into the subject of testimony Mr. Mozley
enters only in a general way, though his remarks on the relation of
testimony to facts of so exceptional a nature as miracles, and also on
the distinct peculiarities of Christian evidence as contrasted with the
evidence of all other classes of alleged miracles, are marked by a
characteristic combination of acuteness, precision, and broad practical
sobriety and moderation. He rebukes with quiet and temperate and yet
resolute plainness of statement the misplaced ingenuity which, on
different sides, to serve very different causes, has tried to confuse
and perplex the claims of the great Christian miracles by comparisons
which it is really mere wantonness to make with later ones; for, be
they what they may, it is certain that the Gospel miracles, in nature,
in evidence, and in purpose and result, are absolutely unique in the
world, and have nothing like them. And though the book mainly confines
itself to its proper subject, the antecedent question of credibility,
some of the most striking remarks in it relate to the way in which the
purpose of miracles is visible in those of Christianity, and has been
served by them. A miracle is an instrument--an instrument without which
revelation is impossible; and Mr. Mozley meets Spinoza's objection to
the unmeaning isolation of a miracle by insisting on the distinction,
which Spinoza failed to see, betwee