sible. Again, and yet again, in these essays Pro-
fessor Huxley tells us that he knows of nothing
in natural law which should make a miraculous
occurrence impossible. "May I be permitted to
repeat once more," he says (p. 306), "that the
statements denoted by the terms 'natural order'
and law of nature' have no greater value or
cogency than such as may attach to generalisations
from experience of the past, and to expectations
for the future based upon that experience? No-
body can presume to say what the order of nature
must be; all that the widest experience (even if it
extended over all past time and through all
space) that events had happened in a certain way
could justify, would be a proportionally strong ex-
pectation that events will go on so happening, and
the demand for a proportional strength of evidence
in favour of any assertion that they had happened
otherwise. It is this weighty consideration which
knocks the bottom out of all à priori objections
either to ordinary 'miracles' or to the efficacy of
prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miraculous
intervention of a higher power. No one is entitled
to say à priori that any given so-called miraculous
event is impossible; and no one is entitled to say
à priori that prayer for some change in the ordi-
nary course of nature cannot possibly avail."

It

But Professor Huxley is an unbeliever still.

is true he refuses the title of infidel and prefers

the term agnostic, of which he is himself the

original inventor. But to all those who accept

the actual occurrence of a single miracle, say the

resurrection of our Lord from the dead, he is an

unbeliever, for he believes in the actual occurrence

of none. It is a simple matter of evidence, he

says; and there is no miracle in the Bible or out

of it for which there is evidence enough to enable

Professor Huxley to believe it.

So we ask at once, Has Professor Huxley con-

sidered the evidence for the resurrection of Christ

-the evidence of the Gospels, of the Acts, of the

Epistles, of the Apocalypse; the evidence of St.

Peter's gigantic "Having loosed the pains of

death, for it was not possible that He should

be holden of it;" of St. John's "We know,"

and "Our hands have handled," while the love

in the life betrayed the truth of the spoken

words; of St. Paul's "Whereupon as I went to

Damascus," with its finger pointing to a career

swept completely round by means of the risen

Christ; the evidence of the sudden birth of Chris-

tianity, of its rapid and overwhelming progress, of

the grip it has on the civilised world of to-day;

the evidence of the Christian believer's experience,

that unconquerable conviction in the individual

soul of the reality and the power of Christ's resur-

rection, and the vast accumulation of that experi-

ence from the morning upon which Mary uttered

the first "Rabboni"? Has Professor Huxley

weighed the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus

Christ?

Granted. If, then, the evidence for the resurrection of Christ is sufficient to establish that miracle as a fact, you have no right to demand the same amount of evidence for the miracle at Gadara. If one supernatural event is proved to have taken place, you, who already admit the possibility, must move on towards the admission of the probability, that other supernatural events have occurred also, and be content with a less overwhelming amount of evidence in their behalf. Your duty, therefore, was to commence with that miracle for which the strongest evidence was claimed. Destroy that, and the rest of your task is

easy. But while that miracle stands, your work is not even begun. To commence with the Gadarene miracle may have been adroit polemics, but it was not science.

And yet Professor Huxley has done a more extraordinary thing than that. In a long and most interesting "Prologue" which he has written to this volume of essays, he claims that, having destroyed the credibility of the Gadarene miracle, he has destroyed the credit of every miracle in the Bible. These are his words: "Science may be unable to define the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from the moral obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged wonderful occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence for the Gadarene miracle is

altogether worthless. We have simply three, partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive form, the origin, and the authority for which we know nothing. But the evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good as that for any other." That last sentence ought to have been printed in italics.

But has Professor Huxley proved in these essays that even the Gadarene miracle is incredible? A few sentences will let us see. In the first place, having a desire to be "perfectly candid," Professor Huxley admits that he has no à priori objection to offer. "There are physical things such as

taniæ and trichina which can be transferred from men to pigs, and vice versa, and which do undoubtedly produce most diabolical and deadly effects on both. For anything I can absolutely prove to the contrary, there may be spiritual things capable of the same transmigration with like effects." Thus, here as elsewhere, it is simply a question of evidence. Indeed, as Professor Huxley immediately shows, it is simply a question of the date of the Synoptic Gospels. For he admits that the Gospels are clear and decided in their statements of its occurrence. Well, we have a witness to our hand as to the date of the Gospels at least as competent and quite as candid as Professor Huxley; and Dr. Sanday not only shows that Professor Huxley adopts an indefensibly late date, but that his arguments throughout are quite inconclusive. But, more than that, Professor Huxley has himself afforded us an excellent instance by which we can test his capacity for unbiassed examination of the question.

In speaking of this miracle, we have called it the Gadarene miracle. We have done so partly because it is unfortunately the popular designation, but chiefly because that is Professor Huxley's word throughout. But it is quite certain that the miracle did not take place at Gadara at all, but at a place called Gerasa, close to the Sea of Galilee. Yet Professor Huxley deliberately tells us that he has examined the whole evidence, and that he has no hesitation in concluding that Gadara—a town seven miles distance from the lake-was the place from which the swine are represented to have commenced the run which landed them in the lake at last. No; Professor Huxley has not proved even the Gerasene miracle incredible. Principal Wace says: "He has removed the only objection to my believing it;" and that may be the judgment of many.

IN THE EXPOSITORY TIMES for August, Professor Ryle wrote: "According to the Hebrew tradition, Nimrod was the founder of the kingdom of