Unrecorded as these miracles are - because the words they spoke were not recorded on many hearts - it was not only here and there, by this or that miracle, that their power was felt. Their grand general effect was, to make the more spiritually minded and thoughtful feel that Jesus was indeed a teacher come from God.' In thinking of the miracles of Jesus, and generally of the miraculous in the New Testament, we are too apt to overlook the principal consideration in the matter. We regard it from our present circumstances, not from those of the Jews and people of that time; we judge it from our standpoint, not from theirs. And yet the main gist of the matter lies here. We would not expect to be convinced of the truth of religion, nor converted to it, by outward miracles; we would not expect them at all. Not but that, if a notable miracle really did occur, its impression and effect would be overwhelming; although, unless a miracle submitted itself to the strictest scientific tests, when in the nature of things it would cease to be a miracle, it would scarcely find general credence. Hence, truth to say, the miraculous in the New Testament constitutes to modern thought not its strong, but its weak point; not its convincing evidence, but its point of attack and difficulty. Accordingly, treating of, or contemplating the miracles of the New Testament, it is always their moral, not their natural (or supranatural), aspect which has its chief influence upon us. But what is this but to say that ours is modern, not ancient thought, and that the evidential power of Christ's miracles has given place to the age and dispensation of the Holy Ghost? With us the process is the reverse of what it was with them of old. They approached the moral and spiritual through the miraculous; we the miraculous through the moral and spiritual. His Presence, that one grand Presence is, indeed, ever the same. But God always adapts His teaching to our learning; else it were not teaching at all, least of all Divine teaching. Only what carries it now to us is not the same as what carried it to them of old: it is no more the fingerpost of signs,' but the finger of the Spirit. To them the miraculous was the expected - that miraculous which to us also is so truly and Divinely miraculous, just because it applies to all time, since it carries to us the moral, as to them the physical, aspect of the miracle; in each case, Divine reality Divinely conveyed. It may therefore safely be asserted, that to the men of that time no teaching of the new faith would have been real without the evidence of miracles.
In those days, when the idea of the miraculous was, so to speak, fluid - passing from the natural into the supernatural - and men regarded all that was above their view-point of nature as supernatural, the idea of the miraculous would, by its constant recurrence, always and prominently suggest itself. Other teachers also, among the Jews at least, claimed the power of doing miracles, and were popularly credited with them. But what an obvious contrast between theirs and the signs' which Jesus did! In thinking of this, it is necessary to remember, that the Talmud and the New Testament alike embody teaching Jewish in its form, and addressed to Jews, and - at least so far as regards the subject of miracles - at periods not far apart, and brought still nearer by the singular theological conservatism of the people. If, with this in our minds, we recall some of the absurd Rabbinic pretensions to miracles - such as the creation of a calf by two Rabbis every Sabbath eve for their Sabbath meal, [1827] or the repulsive, and in part blasphemous, account of a series of prodigies in testimony of the subleties of some great Rabbi [1828] - we are almost overwhelmed by the evidential force of the contrast between them and the signs' which Jesus did. We seem to be in an entirely new world, and we can understand the conclusion at which every earnest and thoughtful mind must have arrived in witnessing them, that He was, indeed, a Teacher from God.'