And what sort of Lord would there be left to believe in if he were bereft of the sacraments and parables of power. To point to the wordy of his mouth as the objective of our faith is a quite feeble gesture. It is not by wisdom: of words the world can be saved but (to quote the dictum of St. ~Paul) by "the demonstration of spirit and of power," by the evidences of an overwhelming personality, who is Master of the Nature by which we ave surrounded, of the sin by which we are enslaved, of the death by which we are defeated. These are powers that matter to us intensely, powers with which we have to put up a fight, and our only interest is in One who is fit to challenge them on the strength of his "'signs and powers," illustrated in the manner of his coming, his living and his going. And as to this faith of ours I repeat that if our Lord is not armed with powers in activity and parables in action there is nothing left worthy of belief, and we may as well shut up our Bibles and our Churches Taking this standpoint there are two other considerations I want to propose before I finish. (1) The telling of these so-called miracles corresponds with the mental standpoint of their time, but (2) the meaning of them is entirely congruous with the character of Christ's revelation. (1) We can hardly expect that the story of Jesus should be told in terms of 20th century knowledge or even according to the standard of 20th century precision. That would indeed be a miracle in the popular sense of the term. The ministry of Jesus could only be reported in the terms available at the time. It is sufficient to believe that it convinced those who heard. As for us we have had plenty of "signs and powers" of various kinds since then as evidences that Christ is vison and that the finger of God -hag been among us.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.