dence, not a description of our present state, but the actual prediction or rather fulfilment of a promise in our future history. The divination in fact is heightened into a prophecy. "He that seeketh findeth"-this, if at length verified upon us, and verified in the very peculiar way that we have already explained, will lead us to the view of another coincidence than any which we have yet specified. Not a coincidence between the statements of the book, and the state of our own moral economy; not a coincidence between the provisions which it offers, and the felt necessities of our actual condition-but a coincidence between what to us is a most interesting prophecy or promise, and the living or actual fulfilment of it in our own persons -a proof most effective individually to ourselves; and which, multiplied as it is in the frequent and unceasing repetitions of it throughout all the countries of Christendom, might furnish a general and enlightened observer with the very strongest materials, for the demonstration of the reality of our faith.

49. The event which we now suppose to have taken place in the mental history of an inquirer, supplies him with a great deal more than a mere introduction to the first and second experimental evidences. It is in itself a distinct and additional evidence. There is even more in it than another species of accordancy beside either of those which come under the two former heads of this argument -not an accordancy between what the Bible says we are, and what we discern ourselves to be; not an accordancy between what the Bible offers as a remedy, and we feel that we require; but an

accordancy between what the Bible says will happen to its disciples, and what they experience in themselves to happen actually. But over and above this we behold, in this great spiritual transaction, the characters, not merely of the divine prescience, but of the divine agency. For it comes as the fulfilment of a promise, and in answer to prayer; and so gives the irresistible conviction, that the power and the will and the knowledge and the faithfulness of the living God are all concerned in it. It bears every mark of a special interposition on the part of Him who "commands the light to shine out of darkness," who hath promised to "draw near unto those who draw near unto Him," and tells the sinner who awakens at His call that "Christ shall give him light." And yet special though the interposition be, if by a miracle we mean a contravention to some known sequence or law of nature, it stands distinguished from an ordinary miracle. The change is too far back for being a miraculous one, in the commonly understood sense of that term.' It takes place, not among the known processes of the intellect, but in the powers of the intellect-at the margin of separation between the known and the unknown, if not behind it. We are made conscious, by this mental change, of brighter perceptions than before; but all our trains of perception and reasoning proceed in their wonted order; and our faculties, now gifted with a clearer discernment of scripture than before, are nevertheless similarly exercised in the study of this book to what they are in the study of

See "Natural Theology." Book V., Chap. iii., Art. 26.

all human authorship.

If by a miracle be meant

that by which a different consequent emerges from the same antecedent as before-then we have not the means of detecting a full miracle in that gracious change, by which transition is made from the darkness of nature to the light of the Gospel. For the change takes place on the first or remotest term of the progression that is visible to us. With the senses of the mind made clearer; and our first perceptions, whether of the Bible or of ourselves, more luminous than before, we may be said to start from new antecedents-while after this, all the mental phenomena, observable by us, strictly conform to the laws of the mental philosophy. Neither is there any new creation of objective light, for the purpose of making the convert see. The change is an organic one on his seeing faculties; or rather, the removal of an obstruction which prevents its ingress into the soul. God, in this

work of illumination, does not command the light to exist; but he commands the light, the preexistent light, to shine out of darkness, or to shine through the veil by which it was before intercepted.

50. But he who is the subject of this visitation may be altogether unable to philosophize on the grounds of that conviction in which it has issued; or on the steps by which he has been led to it. The conviction, however, is not the less clear or warrantable on that account.* He who has thus been made to see, sees upon evidence as sound as

See in our former volume the distinction made by us between the direct process, and the reflex view that might be taken of it in the act of reasoning.

to himself it is satisfactory; and could we by any means be made to know what passes in the minds of others, as intimately as we know and feel what passes in our own minds-we might from the history of every manifestation, gather a strong argument, of a peculiar but very conclusive kind for the truth of Christianity. Such a general observation as this, however, were not very practicable; and therefore it is the more fortunate, that this evidence, which it were so difficult to collect from the history of others, gathers in brightness every day along the line of the individual history of each real Christian. And this experimental evidence is perpetually growing. There is not merely an agreement between the declarations of the book and his own experience, in the great event that marks and that constitutes in fact the outset of that new moral career upon which he has entered; but there is a sustained agreement between its declarations, and the evolutions of his mental or spiritual history in all time coming. There is a busy interchange of correspondence and of mutual confirmation going on, between what he finds and what it says. There is thus a growing confidence that he attaches to this book-just as he would attach a growing confidence to the prophet who had adventured himself on the futurities of his own personal story; and, in favour of whom, every new day of his life had brought round some accomplishment or other. And so it is, that even the unlettered peasant may receive an impression of the truth of this book, from the truth of its manifold agreements with his own intimate experience.

He may recognize throughout its pages, not merely the shrewd discernment of what he is, but the prophetic discernment of what he will be along the successive stages of his preparation for heaven. And, with every new experience of the way in which its descriptions tally with the details of his own history-as in the account, for example, that it gives of the exercises of the spirit, whether under the afflictions of life or the assaults of temptation or in the fulfilments of prayer-or in the facilities that open up, for a still more prosperous cultivation of the heart, along the path of an advancing excellence-or in the light which it casts over the ways and the arrangements of providence in the world-there redounds from all these, and from many more which cannot be specified, the glory of an increasing evidence for the truth of that volume, whose insight, not only reaches to the penetralia of the human character, but lays open the secrets and the dark places that lie in the womb of futurity. This is truly an accumulating evidence. It brightens with every new fulfilment, and every new step in the journey of a Christian's life; and, amid the incredulity and derision of those who have no sympathy either with his convictions or his hopes-still we hold that the faith, thus originated and thus sustained, is the faith not of fanaticism but of sound philosophy; that his experimental Christianity rests, in fact, on a basis as firm as experimental science; that there is neither delusion in the growing lustre of his convictions through life, nor delusion in the concluding triumphs and ecstasy of his death-bed.