down his staff, and it becomes a serpent. Still the king refuses, and attempts to justify his refusal, on the plea, that the act does not necessarily prove a Divine interposition. And to show that it may be the work of mere man, he summons his magicians; who effect a work, which to all appearance, is the same. Aaron's serpent then swallows Still, to a strongly prejudiced mind, this might exhibit but a more powerful mastery of the science of enchantments.

up all the others.

The first miracle has been one of mere power, unconnected with suffering. But its denial is followed by one connected with suffering. The waters of the Nile are turned into blood. Still, Pharaoh denies the sufficiency of the evidence, as the work of a God; for his magicians effect apparently the same miracle, if on a much more incomplete and diminished scale. The trial thus goes no further than the acknowledgment, that Moses is the superior magician; and Pharaoh still justifies himself in his refusal. The plague of frogs follows. It is met in the same way; the magicians show, that something like it may be produced by human means. But the disgust of this plague is so strong, that Pharaoh, willing to concede any terms, offers to let the Israelites go, if Moses will entreat his Lord to take away this sickening and repulsive visitation.

But the king's doubt of his credentials is to have no further plausibility. The plague of lice,

or insects, comes. This is an act of Creation. The magicians renew their attempts; fail altogether; and then make the final acknowledgment, that it is no longer a question of human skill on either side; that this can be only the work of Deity. Pharaoh, thus stripped of all plea, now fiercely entrenches himself in stubbornness of heart; and the heavier visitations are let loose against him and his people.

The minute consistency of the narrative is, throughout, admirable. In the first instance of the appeal, the evidence of power is perfectly harmless. In the second, this evidence is of a severer nature, the pollution of the river and fountains of the land. Yet, as its immediate pressure is obviated by the expedient of digging wells, the king's obstinacy remains untouched. In the third plague, the disgust and abhorrence reject delay; and, as no expedient against it can be found, Pharaoh stoops at once to the acknowledgment of the Divine commission, and the concession of Israelite freedom. The third plague has left him without even the feeble pleas which sheltered him, in the former instances, from the direct charge of acting irrationally and impiously. He, thenceforth, perseveres, in scorn of all pretext; and, thenceforth, the more tremendous punishments, the real agonies of sense and soul, begin.

But the whole tenor of the narrative distinctly

argues, that the magicians relied entirely on human skill or science. It is observable that they act only on materials already before them, the water and the frogs'. At the third plague, a work implying direct Creation, they relinquish the attempt in despair, as totally beyond human powers. From the beginning, they are so far from claiming any higher origin of their own performances, that their attempt to rival those of Moses is, for the express purpose of showing that they do not exceed the faculties of mere man; and, in consequence, have no right to be assumed as credentials of the Deity.

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Yet the name of " jugglery and sleight of hand," usually given to those Egyptian enchantments," is inapplicable. Mere dexterity of hand would be too contemptible and commonplace a foundation, for the high authority which the Magus exercised in Egypt and all the Asiatic kingdoms. He was the master of all that was known of the secrets of nature in his time,—its

The change of their rods into serpents, or rather, of serpents into their rods, was a common trick of Eastern ingenuity; so common, that we can scarcely conceive the "wise men,"the royal soothsayers and diviners-to have condescended to exhibit it, except that Aaron had set the example, and that they were desirous of showing how vulgar were his pretensions to miracle. The arts of the serpent-tamers, who seem to have been the lowest tribe of jugglers, are commemorated by Herodotus, Euterpe. Bochart, Hieroz., &c. &c.

rude astronomy, mineralogy, and chemistry; perhaps, too, acquainted with some vast and vivid uses of natural materials, which have escaped posterity; the healer of disease; the interpreter of those moody and significant dreams which, in the convulsed monarchies of the East, must have so often sat upon the pillows of chieftains and kings; the calculator of those signs and wonders in the stars, which were once so solemnly believed, and on which, even to this hour, we can scarcely look, without some conviction, like the Chaldæan of old, that we see the living characters of Providence, the fiery letters written by the finger of God, to tell nations that they are weighed, measured, and undone."

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THE evidence of Miracle is the evidence of the senses, ascertaining a supernatural disturbance of the order of nature'. The evidence that a

1 On this ground Tillotson raises his argument against transubstantiation: "For want of the evidence of our senses, transubstantiation is no miracle: a sign or miracle is always a thing sensible; otherwise it could be no sign. Now, that such a change, as is pretended in this thing, should really be wrought, and yet there should be no sign of it, is very wonderful; but not to sense, for our senses perceive no change. And that a thing should remain, to all appearance, just as it was, hath nothing at all of wonder in it. We wonder, indeed, when we see a strange thing done; but no man wonders when he sees nothing done."-Sermons, vol. ii.

This is altogether unanswerable. But the argument would be not the less forcible for being more succinct.-As we discover the order of nature only by our senses, so we can discover the disturbance of that order only by our senses. Miracle is the disturbance of that order. Therefore, miracle must be obvious to our senses, or it has no existence: it is a disturbance which disturbs nothing.

Therefore, transubstantiation, which, to the senses, leaves all things as it found them; while it professes to be the greatest of