some indications which, as it has been thought, are afforded in Scripture, that the authority which miracles have been given to sanction, may be withdrawn after it has been given; or, in other words, may be superseded. The chief argument to be derived from Scripture to this effect is from the remarkable history recorded 1 Kings xiii, of the man of God who went down from Judah, and was misdirected by the old prophet of Bethel to his own destruction. We see in this history a real prophet, appealing in form, and yet appealing falsely (though evidently without any impious intent), to the prophetic authority which he possessed, and making this appeal with the design of persuading his guest to commit an act of disobedience to God: which he commits accordingly, and is then punished with death. It appears to follow from this history, and I am ready to concede that it does follow from it, that this old prophet could not have had, in his act of misdirecting the other, that divine illumination which he had possessed formerly, and which, indeed, seems to have been restored to him immediately afterwards. And hence, doubtless, it also follows, that the having

once been in possession of a clearly superhuman or even divine, authority, does not always and unequivocally confer that authority on the subsequent acts of him who possessed it.

There is little in the Old Testament to which a strict counterpart may not be found in the New and to this case of the old prophet of Bethel, whose prophetic authority we thus find invalidated, it may be plausibly contended that we may add the cases of those persons, of whom we read, it is said, in the first age of the church, who although possessed of miraculous gifts, were yet men of irreligious dispositions, and of whom some, if not arrayed against Christ, yet opposed themselves to the authority of the apostles. I speak not here of any who set themselves up in actual hostility against the religion. It is hard to suppose that those false Christs or false prophets possessed any really miraculous powers. But were there not persons really possessed of those powers, who, though designing no fraud probably, and only too much elated by this great distinction conferred on them, and overset by personal pride and ambition, must have gone, and really did go, into heterodoxy? Is not this

a Sec pp. 35, 36, and note C at the end of the volume.

also the more presumable, as we know that some even of the apostles themselves were divided among each other, divided on doctrinal points; -and if so, and if the possession, at any one time, of any superhuman or miraculous gifts, may be alleged at any other time as a miraculous attestation of a miraculous or superhuman authority, may it not be alleged for opposite doctrines?

For the sake of the argument, I concede this point also, though I must observe by the way that, because even men divinely commissioned carry the treasure entrusted to them "in earthen vessels”, are liable to be disturbed by human passions, and even to allow those passions to warp their doctrine, yet it would be a most rash inference that God may permit them (not only to work miracles in behalf of that cause which it was their real commission to declare or promulgate, but also) to appeal to miracles on points beside their commission, or for doctrines adverse to it. The appealing to miracles in behalf of the doctrine is, it will be remembered, one main ingredient in the nature of all miraculous

a 2 Cor. iv. 7.

b See p. 5, and note A at the end of the volume.

evidence; and assuredly we cannot deny it to be possible that, in order to promote the common cause of Christianity, God's providence may impart the gift of miracles even to the assertors of rival and inconsistent opinions, and may yet cause also that these miracles shall be alleged for those doctrines only which they hold in common, and which only it is His will to sanction. And this view of the case is the more deserving of consideration, because we see in Scripture itself, that the apostles were studious to make an evident discrimination between those precepts which they taught as strictly divine, and those which emanated from their own advice or opinion.

Waiving, however, all this, and granting it to be possible that, as the natural consequence of the position here affirmed, it may happen that one superhuman authority shall really be set up against another; yet assuredly this consequence interferes not in the least with the statement laid down concerning all such authorities, namely that miracles are attestations of the divine au

a 1 Cor. vii. 12. 25.

b Namely of the position that the performance of a miracle does confer on the agent a lasting subsequent authority.

thority, not absolutely (which of course they cannot be, if they may be performed in behalf of opposite doctrines), but only conditionally that the doctrine be credible. If it be not credible, God will find means of conducting us even through the longest and most artificial labyrinth, which error, either human or superhuman, can possibly weave. Nor, indeed, is there of this principle any plainer illustration than may be derived from the exposition of the cases which have been produced, that of the prophet of whom we read in 1 Kings, xiii. and the imagined case of true miracles being appealed to by any teachers of false doctrines of Christianity: these being cases in which it has been usual to assign as the reason for disallowing the alleged authority, that the miracle wants that copula which connects it immediately with the doctrine taught.

In the first of these cases every reader feels satisfied that the man of God from Judah must have had sufficient means of determining that he was not at liberty on the authority of the prophet at Bethel, to violate the peremptory commission which he had received. Commentators have suggested that though the authority