analogy, of faith? Does not the universally admitted canon--that
each part of Scripture must be interpreted by the spirit of the
whole--lead to the same practical conclusion as that for which I am
now contending--namely, that it is the spirit of the Bible, and not
the detached words and sentences, that is infallible and absolute?
Practical, I say, and spiritual too; and what knowledge not practical
or spiritual are we entitled to seek in our Bibles? Is the grace of
God so confined--are the evidences of the present and actuating
Spirit so dim and doubtful--that to be assured of the same we must
first take for granted that all the life and co-agency of our
humanity is miraculously suspended?

Whatever is spiritual, is eo nomine supernatural; but must it be
always and of necessity miraculous? Miracles could open the eyes of
the body; and he that was born blind beheld his Redeemer. But
miracles, even those of the Redeemer himself, could not open the eyes
of the self-blinded, of the Sadducean sensualist, or the self-
righteous Pharisee--while to have said, I SAW THEE UNDER THE FIG-
TREE, sufficed to make a Nathanael believe.

To assert and to demand miracles without necessity was the vice of
the unbelieving Jews of old; and from the Rabbis and Talmudists the
infection has spread. And would I could say that the symptoms of the
disease are confined to the Churches of the Apostasy! But all the
miracles, which the legends of Monk or Rabbi contain, can scarcely be
put in competition, on the score of complication, inexplicableness,
the absence of all intelligible use or purpose, and of circuitous
self-frustration, with those that must be assumed by the maintainers
of this doctrine, in order to give effect to the series of miracles,
by which all the nominal composers of the Hebrew nation before the