attempt it any more than the others: this I have already said, and the Koran will more fully prove it to any one who will take the pains to read that plagiarism of the Bible made by a student of rhetoric at Mecca. Beyond Jesus Christ, in the ages claimed by history, what remains if we put aside Moses and the prophets-that is, the very ancestors of Jesus Christ? Shall we notice certain strange facts connected with Greece and Rome? Shall we speak of that augur who, says Livy, cut a stone with a razor; or of that Vestal who drew along a vessel by her girdle, or even of the blind man cured by Vespasian? These facts, whatever they may be, are isolated and belong to no doctrine; they have provoked no discussion in the world, and have established nothing; they are not doctrinal facts. Now we are treating of miracles which have founded religious doctrines-the only miracles worthy of consideration; for it is evident that if God manifests himself by acts of sovereignty, it must be for some great cause worthy of himself and worthy of us, that is to say, for a cause which affects the eternal destinies of the whole human race. This places out of the question altogether all isolated facts, such as those related in the life of Apollonius of Thyana.

This personage is of the first century of the Christian era, and his life was written at a much later period by an Alexandrine philosopher called Philostratus, who designed to make of it a rival to the Gospel, and of Apollonius himself the counterpart of Jesus Christ. A most singular physiognomy is here presented to us, but that is all. What has Apollonius of Thyana accomplished in regard to the doctrine? Where are his writings, his social works, the traces of his passage upon earth? He died in the morning of his life. Instead of certain equivocal facts, even had

he removed mountains during his life, it would have been but a literary curiosity, an accident, a man, nothing.

Where, then, shall we look for doctrines founded in the light of history upon miraculous events? Where in the historical world is there another omnipotence than that of Jesus Christ? Where do we find other miracles than his and those of the saints who have chosen him for their master, and who have derived from him the power to continue what he had begun? Nothing appears upon the horizon; Jesus Christ alone remains, and his enemies, eternally attacking him, are able to bring against him nothing but doubts, and not a single fact equal or even analogous to him.

But do there not at least exist in nature certain occult forces which have since been made known to us and which Jesus Christ might have employed? I will name, gentlemen, the occult forces alluded to, and I will do so without any hesitation; they are called magnetic forces. And I might easily disembarrass myself of them, since science does not yet recognize them, and even proscribes them. Nevertheless I choose rather to obey my conscience than science. You invoke, then, the magnetic forces; I believe in them sincerely, firmly; I believe that their effects have been proved, although in a manner which is as yet incomplete, and probably will ever remain so, by instructed, sincere, and even by Christian men; I believe that these effects, in the great generality of cases, are purely natural; I believe that their secret has never been lost to the world, that it has been transmitted from age to age, that it has occasioned a multitude of mysterious actions whose trace is easily distinguished, and that it has now only left the shade of hidden transmissions because this age has borne

upon its brow the sign of publicity. I believe all this. Yes, gentlemen, by a divine preparation against the pride of materialism, by an insult to science, which dates from a more remote epoch than we can reach, God has willed that there should be irregular forces in nature not reducible to precise formulas, almost beyond the reach of scientific verification. He has so willed it, in order to prove to men who slumber in the darkness of the senses that even independently of religion there remained within us rays of a higher order, fearful gleams cast upon the invisible world, a kind of crater by which our soul, freed for a moment from the terrible bonds of the body, flies away into spaces which it cannot fathom, from whence it brings back no remembrance, but which give it a sufficient warning that the present order hides a future order before which ours is but nothingness.

All this I believe is true; but it is also true that these obscure forces are confined within limits which show no sovereignty over the natural order. Plunged into a factitious sleep, man sees through opaque bodies at certain distances; he names remedies for soothing and even for healing the diseases of the body; he seems to know things that he knew not, and that he forgets on the instant of his waking; by his will he exercises great empire over those with whom he is in magnetic communication; all this is difficult, painful, mixed up with uncertainty and prostration. It is a phenomenon of vision much more than of operation, a phenomenon which belongs to the prophetic and not to the miraculous order. A sudden cure, an evident act of sovereignty, has nowhere been witnessed. Even in the prophetic order, nothing is more pitiful.

COCKBURN

IR

justice, was born December 24, 1802, and was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. He studied law at the Middle Temple, and was admitted to the bar in 1829, up to this period being distinguished for cleverness rather than for industry. He soon, however, developed the latter quality and by 1841 had become queen's counsel, and in a few years more acquired a large fortune in railway legislation. In 1847 he entered Parliament as an advanced Liberal member for Southampton, and on June 28, 1850, delivered a memorable speech before the Commons in defence of Palmerston's policy with reference to the claim of Don Pacifico and other British subjects upon the Greek government. A few hours later he denounced with great eloquence the cruelties which the government of Austria had inflicted upon the Magyar rebels. In 1851 Cockburn succeeded Sir John Romilly as attorney-general, and in 1856 became chief justice of the court of common pleas, and in June, 1859, lord chief justice of England. In the previous year he had succeeded to a baronetcy by the death of his uncle, the dean of York. In 1873 he tried the famous Tichborne case, which lasted one hundred and eighty-eight days. His charge to the jury occupied eighteen days in delivery and was published in 1874 in two huge volumes. In the Geneva tribunal for the settlement of the Alabama claims, Cockburn was selected as one of the arbitrators. He died in London November 20, 1880. Cockburn was an able and eloquent rather than a great lawyer, and his uniform courtesy and generosity to young counsel rendered him extremely popular in his profession.

ON THE GREEK DIFFICULTY

[What was known about this time as the celebrated "Don Pacifico Case " originated as follows: Don Pacifico, a Jew of Portuguese extraction, was a native of Gibraltar, and therefore a British subject. He resided at Athens, where it was a time-honored custom to burn an effigy of Judas Iscariot at Easter. The police prevented this celebration in 1847, whereupon the mob, attributing the action to the influence of the Jews, wreaked their resentment upon Don Pacifico, whose house stood close to the spot annually chosen for the burning of Judas. His claim against the Greek government, side by side with that of Mr. Finlay, being ignored, the British government took upon itself to redress the wrongs of its subjects. The following speech was delivered in the House of Commons June 28, 1850.]

I

THINK, sir, as I was personally and pointedly alluded to in the course of the debate last night by the right honorable the member for the University of Oxford [Mr. Gladstone], that the House will not consider me presumptu(5865)

ous if I trespass for a short time upon its patience. I am anxious, sir, in the first place, if the House will indulge me for a moment, to set myself right with the right honorable gentleman. He was pleased in the course of his observations in the House last night to say that I had "sneered” at him. Now, I beg to assure the right honorable gentleman and the House that nothing on earth was further from my wishes or intentions than to show him the slightest disrespect or discourtesy. The right honorable gentleman, with his accustomed talent, threw down the gauntlet on the floor of this House and challenged a reply from any honorable member to the facts which he stated or to the principles of law which he then enunciated. I felt, sir, at the time, as truly and as fully convinced as I ever was of anything in my life, that the right honorable gentleman's facts were totally inaccurate, and that his law. was utterly intolerable. I ventured, therefore, to accept the challenge which he so threw out, and I meant by my cheer on that occasion-a mode which I believe to be a perfectly parliamentary one of expressing that sentiment-to say that I was ready and anxious to accept the challenge of the right honorable gentleman, and I am now prepared to answer him, although I am fully conscious of the vast difference of ability and disparity of power which exists between us; for the right honorable gentleman, from his position, his high character, and, above all, his great abilities, is entitled to be treated with the utmost respect by every member of this House.

Having thus put myself right with the right honorable gentleman, I must take the liberty of saying this, that in all my experience I never heard such a series of misrepresentations and misstatements as those which were made by the right honorable gentleman; and I will undertake to prove this assertion, step by step, and position by position, if the House