The following extracts from "Gibbons' Rome" are interesting as showing the works and healing of sickness and raising the dead during the early years of the Christian religion. When Christianity was understood and practised in its purity, surely the "days of miracles" had not passed. When did they cease, and what caused them to cease? Did the divine law, the Principle by virtue of which they were accomplished, cease?
If so when and why? Divine Science is rapidly bringing to the knowledge of men the great fact that the understanding of and living the Principle which Jesus taught and practised, produce the same results now that were accomplished in times gone by. Of course it will be understood that we use the word "miracle" in the Scientific sense.
"The supernatural gifts, which even in this life were ascribed to the Christians above the rest of mankind, must have conduced to their own comfort, and very frequently to the conviction of infidels.... The divine inspiration,... is described as a favor very liberally bestowed on all ranks of the faithful, on women as on elders, on boys as well as upon bishops.... The expulsion of the daemons from the bodies of those unhappy persons whom they were permitted to torment, was considered as a signal though ordinary triumph of religion, and is repeatedly alleged by the ancient apologists, as the most convincing evidence of the truth of Christianity.... But the miraculous cure of diseases of the most inveterate or even preternatural kind, can no longer occasion any surprise, when we recollect, that in the days of Irenæus, about the end of the second century, the resurrection of the dead was very far from being esteemed an uncommon event; that the miracle was frequently performed on necessary occasions, by great fasting and the joint supplication of the church of the place, and that the persons thus restored had lived afterwards among them many years. At such a period, when faith could boast of so many wonderful victories over death, it seems difficult to account for the skepticism of those philosophers, who still rejected and derided the doctrine of the resurrection." Pages 401-2, Vol. I.
