In the establishment of a religion of such high pretensions as Christianity, which offers eternal life to those who receive it, and denounces the most awful judgments against those who reject it, we have a right to expect the strongest evidence that can possibly be afforded, consistently with the plans of God's government: and if we had our option as to the nature and extent of the necessary proofs, the mind can conceive nothing more de cisive than the miracles performed by our Lord and his Apostles. But we cannot be so unreason able as to expect that those signs and wonders are to be repeated to every successive generation: if any man will still require a sign from heaven to confirm his faith, lie can only be gratified through the medium of candid and diligent inquiry into the nature and evidence of the miracles recorded in Scripture.
With regard to our Lord's miracles, the first thing deserving notice is that they were publicly performed ; and that the account of them, in the very form in which it has come down to us, was circulated among the men of that generation which had witnessed them.
It ought to be observed also, that our Lord's mi racles were not disputed by the early opponents of Christianity. Their attempts to account for them amount to an admission of their reality. Julian, the apostate, does not deny the fact of the five thousand being fed, apparently, by five loaves and two fishes, but he accounts for it by ascribing it to the power of magic, or to some illusion wrought on their ima gination. They who can swallow this need not bogle at any miracle, for we can conceive nothing more miraculous than that five thousand hungry men should be satisfied with an imaginary feast.
It was reserved for modern unbelievers to dispute facts which remained uncontroverted by the only persons who had it in their power to give an effec tual refutation, by an unequivocal denial of the statements, had they known them to be false. Yet this was never done: unreasonable as the first ad versaries of Christianity were, they did not dare to show the extent of their prejudice and animosity, by denying what thousands could attest on the evi dence of their own senses. And on the same prin ciple the evangelists boldly state, and publish to the world what they knew the most inveterate of their enemies would not dare to contradict. They make no parade in the statement of these miracles: to them they were not wonderful; for they knew that nothing was impossible to him who performed them: they show no anxiety to conciliate belief; it never entered into their mind to suppose that there could be any doubt on the subject: they therefore state them as simple historical facts, for the infor mation of those who were not eye-witnesses of them; and the time and circumstances in which they were published may be considered as equivalent to a chal lenge to the whole nation of the Jews, to contradict, if they could, any one of their statements.
Take any one of the miracles which our Lord is said to have performed, and think how impossible were the means of imposition. Would any persons, in possession of their senses, have affirmed in the face of thousands who could have refuted them, had they deviated from the truth, that Christ fed five thousand persons in the wilderness with five loaves and two fishes, and that twelve baskets of fragments remained after the feast; that he raised Lazarus from the dead, after he had been four days in the grave, in the presence of a great number of persons who had gone from Jerusalem to condole with his sisters; that great multitudes went out to meet Jesus on his approach to Jerusalem, and that one great motive was that they might see Lazarus who had been raised from the dead ? Would any one have ventured to affirm that the sun was covered with darkness during the space of three hours, when our Lord was on the cross, had not this been a fact. notorious to the whole land of Judea? The most barefaced impostors that ever lived never dared to vent such falsehoods as these, in the face of thou sands, who had the evidence of their own senses, or the testimony of numberless eye-witnesses to con tradict their assertions. And had the evangelists been guilty of such extravagance, they must not have been impostors but madmen; and the history of their phrenzy never would have survived to excite the astonishment of the world: or if it should be affirmed that they were really mad, then the world must be concluded to have been as mad as they, to have believed their account, or to have allowed their extravagant assertions to pass uncontradicted, when the impression which they made became obvious, and in considerably less than forty years, under mined the foundations of all the religious systems in the world. We shall soon see that the Apostles were possessed of sound and candid minds, and that they only who resisted the conclusions resulting from their statements deserved the name of madmen.