for having accounted for Christianity by the theory of ecstasy, and not by that of madness. The hypothesis of madness is, in reality, the legitimate child of that of visions; and the daughter will soon, at least in France, where minds are logical, replace the mother. Then we shall have a council of free-thinkers, branding, by a decree more infallible than those of the Pope, all persons who can believe in the resurrection of a dead man as out-and-out madmen; all those also who, in the course of history up to our day, have maintained that they have felt Jesus living and working in them, out-and-out madmen! This is what we are coming to, since the belief in miracles is absurd, and to believe in absurdities is to be mad: Christians, with the apostles at their head, and Jesus Christ at the head of the apostles, are therefore madmen. The Church is a society of madmen. And holding this view, men claim the right nevertheless to class themselves with us, to worship in the same temples with us, to preach in our pulpits, to gather round the same communion tables, when a much more fit place for us would be a lunatic asylum ! Come manage your own affairs, and leave us to manage ours,—unless, indeed, seeing the impossibility of being trees, you have adopted the noble ambition of being morbid excrescences in trees. III. THE MIRACLES OF JESUS CHRIST. AM not about, in what I shall now write, to I offer a spontaneous challenge to Scepticism. Scepticism is an adversary from whom we may accept a challenge when it is offered us, but with whom it is never wise to take the aggressive. I only desire at this time, in which the atmosphere is saturated with doubts, and in which we are exposed to breathing them in, as we do particles of dust that fill the air, to induce my readers to realize to themselves more clearly what it is that they believe upon this particular subject. Both In former times, the miraculous events recorded in the Gospels were considered the principal supports of the Christian Faith. In our day, many regard them principally as difficulties of faith. these ways of viewing the subject appear to me to be exaggerations, in opposite directions. I could not make miracles the principal support of my faith, but I am still less able to see in them a serious difficulty which can be brought to bear effectively against Christianity. Miracles form a part of the riches of the faith; that appears to me to be their true character. It is their claim to that distinction which it will be the object of the following lecture to vindicate for these exceptional facts. We shall first seek in history for evidences to the reality of the miracles of Jesus Christ. We shall then investigate nature, in order to discover in it the conditions of the possibility of such facts. Lastly, we shall ask of Holy Scripture to reveal to us their purpose in the divine plan. The miracles of Jesus are facts; how and why do they exist? These are the three points of which I propose to treat. I. THE REALITY OF THE MIRACLES OF JESUS CHRIST. The more exceptional a fact is, the stronger will be the evidences required to prove its reality. Have we then sufficient historical proofs of the reality of 1 I am not here speaking of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which, while it is indeed a miracle, and the principal miracle, is also something different from, and more than, a miracle. |