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 our purpose is concerned — through His messengers, the good Angels. If the wonderful effect may, for all we know, have been produced by a man or by an evil spirit, or by some law of material nature, then we have no right to call the fact a miracle. We may distinguish two kinds of true miracles. If God interferes with the laws of material nature, we have a physical miracle, as when He restores the dead to life; if with the laws of moral nature, it is a moral miracle, as when a whole people, at the words of a preacher, suddenly abandons inveterate habits of vice and enters on a life of heroic virtue. A moral miracle, therefore, is an event depending upon the free-will of man, but which is inconsistent with the principles that ordinarily regulate human conduct, and which can only come from God.

13. If true miracles are known for certain to have been wrought at the word of a man who claims to have a mission from God, he must then be received as an accredited messenger of the Most High, and his message as a true revelation. That real miracles are thus credentials from God is evident, since God alone can perform them. They are like His signature or His seal; and He certainly cannot put His seal upon the claims of an impostor.

Since however miracles, if they really happen, are convincing proofs of God's approbation of a doctrine, rationalists have brought all manner of objections against their occurrence and their very possibility; and they have striven hard to prove that, even if a miracle were worked, we could never know it to be genuine, really proceeding from God. It will suffice to answer them thus: 1. The testimony of science cannot be invoked against the possibility of miracles, since even the leading Agnostic scien-