; not warranting, indeed, the rejection of all, yet making us at least very cau- tious and doubtful of receiving them in particular : 1. These miracles have a much lower moral tone than those of the Bible, while in some cases they far exceed them in § 88. MIRACLES OF THE NICENE AGE. 463 outward pomp, and make a stronger appeal to our faculty of belief. Many of the monkish miracles are not so much super- natural and ahove reason, as they are t^^inatural and against reason, attributing even to wild beasts of the desert, panthers and hyenas, with which the misanthropic hermits lived on confidential terms, moral feelings and states, repentance and conversion,^ of which no trace appears in the New Testament.' 2. They serve not to confirm the Christian faith in general, but for the most part to support the ascetic life, the magical virtue of the sacrament, the veneration of saints and relics, and other superstitious practices, which are evidently of later origin, and are more or less offensive to the healthy evangelical mind.^ 3. The further they are removed from the apostolic age, the more numerous they are, and in the fourth century alone there are more miracles than in all the three preceding centu- ries together, while the reason for them, as against the power of the heathen world, was less. 4. The church fathers, with all the worthiness of their char- acter in other respects, confessedly lacked a highly cultivated sense of truth, and allowed a certain justification of false- hood ad majorem Dei gloriam, or fraus pia, under the mis- nomer of policy or accommodation ; ^ with the solitary excep- ' Comp. the examples quoted in § 34, p. 17*7 f. ' The speaking serpent La Paradise (Gen. iii.), and the speaking ass of Balaam (Num. xxii. 22-33 ; comp. 2 Pet. ii. 16), can hardly be cited as analogies, since in those cases the irrational beast is merely the organ of a moral power foreign to him. ' Is. Taylor, 1. c. vol. ii. p. 235, says of the miracles of the Nicene age : " These alleged miracles were, almost in every instance, wrought expressly in support of those very practices and opinions which stand forward as the points of contrast, distinguishing Romanism from Protestantism . . . the supernatural properties of the eucharistic elements, the invocation of saints, or direct praying to them, and the efficacy of their reUcs ; and the reverence or worship due to certain visible and palpable religious symbols." Historical questions, however, should be investigated and decided with all possible freedom from confessional prejudices. * So especially Jerome, Epist. ad Pammachium (Lib. apologeticus pro libris contra Jovinianum, Ep. xlviii. c. 12, ed. Vallarsi, tom. i. 222, or Ep. xxx. in the Beqedic- tine ed.) : " Plura esse genera dicendi : et inter csetera, aliud esse yvfivaariKais scri- bere, aliud Soyfj-ariKus. In priori vagam esse disputationem ; et adversario respon- dentem, nunc hasc nunc