the stars, and wields them in their orbits, and that made all things, visible and invisible.

There is another contrast between the miracles of the Old and of the New Testament perhaps worth noticing; it is this, that all the miracles recorded in the Old Testament Scriptures were more in contact with external nature; they were more visible, more colossal, and if I might use the expression without being misconstrued-more gross in their character. It was the rending earthquake, the fire losing its power to consume, the wild beasts their ability to devour great, startling, portentous acts, fitted to awe and subdue the senses of all that beheld them. But when we look at the miracles of the New Testament, we find they are neither the whirlwind that rushes in its fury, nor the earthquake that spreads its terrible vibrations, nor the fire that consumes all that approaches it, but the "still small voice,"―miracles that relate more to man's soul than to man's body, and occupy, as it were, a loftier sphere, hold communion with sublimer things, and give evidence of a new, and nobler, and more glorious dispensation.

Having made this contrast between the miracles recorded in the Old Testament and those in the New, I may also contrast the miracles of the New Testament with the pseudo or pretended miracles ascribed to our Lord in those silly legends composed in the second and third century, and, by courtesy, called the New Gospel, such as what was called "The Gospel of the Infancy," and "The Gospel of Nicodemus." They were legends concocted in cells, and palmed, some by superstitious, and others by wicked, persons upon the world, all bearing internal and external evidence of their utter absurdity and forgery. One of the most striking proofs of their absurdity-an indirect, but very powerful proof-is to be seen in the miracles they record as performed by Jesus. There are other proofs of their

forgery, such as their making allusion to facts which did not occur till centuries after they were written, and their containing things that are positively contradictory, absurd, and ridiculous; but the most complete proof of their falsehood is in an investigation of the miracles which they ascribe to Jesus. In the gospel every miracle performed by Jesus was subordinated to some great truth he was teaching, or associated with the moral and spiritual well-being of the person who was its subject; and you are less stuck with the miracle than with the worker of the miracle. Every miracle that Jesus did withdraws you from the deed of beneficence and power, and surrounds the doer of it with a halo of imperishable and refulgent glory. But the miracles ascribed to Jesus as recorded in these false legends which I have alluded to, are mere portents: they are fitted to make people stare, and wonder, and be amazed; they are more like the deeds of a magician than the doings of the Son of God. You cannot conceive a more complete contrast than that between the simple and grand feats of power, reflecting glory on the doer, recorded in the Gospels, and the silly, puerile portents, influencing merely the senses of the reader, recorded in what have been called the "pseudo-gospels," written afterward. We may notice, too, this peculiarity; every miracle recorded in the New Testament is related to have been done by Christ during the three years of his ministry; and all the miracles recorded in the false gospels are all described to have been done by Jesus when he was an infant. The grandeur of the gospel is, that it speaks of nothing but what contributes in some shape to the glory of God and to the edification of the church; the peculiarity of these legends is, that they speak of nothing but what is calculated to startle, to amaze, or to make the beholder stare and wonder. You have in them, too, a direct contradiction to what is ex

pressly stated in the gospel. In the second chapter of the Gospel of St. John we are told that the miracle performed at the marriage-feast was the beginning of Christ's miracles; but these Gospels record miracles said to have been performed when he was a child or a babe; the one, therefore, directly contradicts the other. There is also this peculiarity about the miracles ascribed to Christ in these false legends, that none of them have the redemptive and restorative character of the miracles of Christ. Every miracle that Christ did seems to bring nature back to her primeval harmonies, casting out the disease, the discord, the intrusive and disorganizing elements that sin introduced, and giving, as it were, an earnest and a foreshadow of that blessed day when all sounds shall be harmony, all lessons shall be light, and all affections shall be love.

Thus, then, we see the position that the miracles in the New Testament occupy with reference to past genuine miracles recorded in the Old Testament Scripture, and with reference to the pseudo-miracles subsequently ascribed to Christ in legends that impiously assumed his name. Having made these remarks, I will turn your attention now to the miracle immediately before us.

Jesus, we are told, had entered into Capernaum, and a centurion, that is, a subaltern in the Roman army, approached him, anxious for the health and recovery of his servant or slaye. This centurion was what was called “a proselyte at the gate;" he was one of those Gentiles who felt the worthlessness of heathenism, the absurdity of its polytheistic rites, and saw in the doctrines of the Jews, interpolated as they were, mutilated as they had become, a response to what was deepest and most earnest in his heart; he abjured the heathenism which could not satisfy him, and cleave to that living religion which the Pharisee had overlaid, but from which truth still broke forth in

much of its primeval purity and brightness. He was of the same class, plainly, as the centurion spoken of in the Acts of the Apostles: "Cornelius, a centurion of the band called the Italian band; a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway." Just previous to the advent of Christ there were many of these proselytes making their appearance, and one can see in their development the commencement of a great process. They were the links that connected the Jew with the Gentile world; they were, so to speak, those intermediate persons who were in communion with the Jew upon the one hand, and in contact with the Gentile upon the other hand; and were the premonitory signs and symptoms of that great fusion of the human family, in which there should be neither Jew nor Gentile, nor Greek nor barbarian, nor bond nor free, but Christ should be all and in all. They were, in fact, instalments of that sublime fellowship which knows neither Jew nor Gentile, which calls no man clean, or unclean, or common, but recognises all as brothers who bear the stamp and the superscription of a divine and heavenly likeness.

It is a remarkable fact, that whenever God is about to take a great step in the development of his kingdom upon earth, he always gives preliminary signs of its approach. The great fact that was to occur when Christ came was the fusion of the Jews and Gentiles into one redeemed family. The preliminary foreshadows, flung back upon the world from that Sun before he rose above the horizon, were these proselytes at the gate-men who were not Jews, because they did not conform to all the rites of the Jews, and who were not Gentiles, because they rejected the polytheistic religion of the Gentiles, but who therefore constituted the connecting links and bands between the two, and the pioneers of that brighter and blessed fellow

ship, in which Jew and Gentile should be lost in the family name, "Christian," and Christ should be all and in all. So it seems to me that, in the day in which we live, we have the preliminary signs-of some great fusion about to take place. We saw that before the fusion of Jew and Gentile occurred, we had all these premonitory signs and foreshadows; and in the present day we may notice going on processes and efforts that are oft disappointed, attempts that are frequently frustrated and broken, to make all mankind feel the sympathies and respond to the touch of a common and a glorious brotherhood. It seems to me that all the discoveries of the age are but the pioneers and preparations for this. I look upon the triumphs of steam, the railroad, and the electric wire, the Great Exhibition of 1851, as portions of that great net which is being cast over the length and the breadth of the human family, to teach all mankind, by extinguishing space, shortening time, and removing obstructions to the interchange of the sympathies of life, that a day comes with all the speed, as it will dawn with all the splendour, of the lightning, when Scottish, English, Irish, European, Asiatic, African, shall lose their distinctive denominational names in that name which was pronounced in scorn, if proclaimed from heaven, at Antioch, but which will be sounded in the everlasting jubilee, and Christ and Christian shall be all and in all.

This centurion, then, who was thus "a proselyte at the gate," came to Christ, as it is recorded in one Gospel, or sent to Christ by his friends, as it is recorded in another -and what one does by his representative he does himself; for you will often see this interchange of terms used in the New Testament. But his sense of unworthiness was so great, that he said, "I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof." He felt that Christ was a high and a holy being, and that he was, though a proselyte and