MIRACLES, ECCLESIASTICAL. The position of the reformed churches generally with regard to miracles is that they ceased in the church after the apostolic age, while the Romanists contend that the power to perform miracles has remained with the church and will continue forever. The arguments of the reformed are that when the work of the apostles was finished the necessity for miracles ceased, and that during the first hundred years after the death Of the apostles we hear little or nothing of the early Christians working miracles. Bishop Douglas says: "I can find no instances of miracles mentioned by the fathers before the 4th century." In the 4th c. they speak of the age of miracles as past, and say that they were no longer to be expected. This is frequently asserted by Augustine, and Chrysostom testifies the same in his ser mons on the resurrection and the feast of Pentecost. And even when they relate remarkable deeds performed by Christian believers, and which the Roman Catholics pronounce miraculous, they declare them to be natural results. Bishop Douglas says that these wonderful workings were confined to "the cures of diseases, particularly the cures of demonises, by exorcising them; which last seems, indeed, to be their favorite standing miracle." Even prof. Newman, contrasting the scriptural and ecclesiastical miracles, says: "The miracles of Scripture am, as a whole, grave, simple, and majestic; those of ecclesiastical history often partake of what may not unfitly be called a romantic character, and of that wildness and inequality which enters into the notion of romance." Yet Butler says: "Roman Catholics, relying with confidence on the promises of Christ, believe that the poweii of working miracles was given by Christ to his church, and that it never has been and never will be withdrawn from her." And Bellarmine argues that the Protestant church, lacking this power, is manifestly not of God. Romanists refer to what Ignatius, of the 1st c. after Christ, relates of the wild beasts let loose upon the martyrs being restrained from hurting them, and to the miracle which prevented the apostate Julian from rebuilding the temple of Jerusalem. As to the first, Ignatius regarded the occurrence as wholly in the line of natural events. It is important to notice the fact that the writings of time ante-Nicene church are more free from miraculous and superstitious elements than the records of the middle ages, and especially of monasticism. Dr. Isaac Taylor remarks: "From the period of the Nicene council and onward, miracles of the most astounding kind were alleged to be wrought from day to day.
But these miracles were, in almost every instance, wrought expressly in support of those very practices and opinions which stand forward as the points of contrast distinguishing Romanism from Protestantism, as the ascetic life, the supernatural properties of the eucharistic elements, the invocation of the saints, and the efficacy of their relics, and the reverence or worship due to certain visible and palpable religious symbols." Dr. Schaff makes the following remarks concerning the miracles of the Latin church: 1. Many of them have a much lower tone than those of the Bible, making a stronger appeal to our faculty of belief. 2. They serve not to confirm the Christian faith in general, but to support the ascetic life and many superstitious practices. 3. The farther removed from the apostolic age, the more numerous they are. 4. Most of the church fathers allowed falsehood for the glory of God. 5. Several church fathers concede that in their time extensive frauds with the relics of saints were already practiced. 6. The Nicene miracles were doubted and contradicted even among contemporaries. 7. The church fathers contratliet themselves sometimes respecting the prevalent faith in miracles, and again maintaining that miracles in the biblical sense had long since ceased. Yet Dr. Schaff remarks that a rejection of these miracles by no means charges intentional deception in every case, for between the propel: miracle and fraud there are many intermediate steps of self-deception: clairvoyance, magnetic phenomena and cures, and unusual states of the huinan soul, which is full of deep mysteries. Constantine's vision of the cross, for example, may be traced to a prophetic dream, and the frustration of Julian's attempt to build the Jewish temple to a special providence or a natural historical judganent of God. A conclusive argument againstamany, at least, of these so-called miracles is that they are trifling and childish; others indecorous; others irreverent, and even blasphe mous. Those contained in the Breviary and Roman ecclesiastical histories are too punier Tans to recite. Finally, it may be said that many distinguished Roman Catholic authors du not accept these as genuine tniraeles; even pope Gregory Xl., who had been persuaded by the prophecies of St. Catharine of Sienna to return to Rome from Avignon, warning all on his death-bed to beware of human beings, whether male or female, speak ing under pretense of religion the visions of their own brain, for by these, he said, lie had been led away.