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He had heard of the cruel butchery of John the Baptist by Herod, and probably fearing a similar fate for him- self, he and his disciples took ship privately on the sea of Galilee, and landed at "a desert place" not far from Bethsaida. (4) Section 2. At this time Jesus had already gained (3) iBt Kings, ch. 17. (4) Mark 6, v. 31 and 32. 32 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES the reputation of an exorcist, or healer, and the people, learning of his hiding place, thronged after him in multitudes, that he might cure their sick. (5) The day being far spent, his disciples pressed him to "send the people to the villages and country round about, to buy bread for themselves, for they had noth- ing to eat." "How many loaves have you?" inquired Jesus. And the apostles replied, "Five loaves and two fishes." (6) "Bring them hither," said Jesus (7), and he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grosss, by fifties in a company (8), and he took the five loaves and two small fishes, and looking up to heaven he blessed and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples; and they, to the multitude; and they (/// ate and were all filled. The record says there were about fiz'e thousand men that partook of this repast, besides women and chil- dren. (9) And that nothing might be lost, Jesus ordered the fragments of the feast to be gathered up, and the fragments that remained filled twelve bas- kets. (10) This feeding of so great a multitude surpasses by (5) The story about his feeding 5,000 people miraculously, took its present form about 100 or 120 years after his death, as we shall see hereafter. (6) John, ch. 6, v. 9, says five barley loaves and two STudll fishes. But John is always extravagant in his statements. (7) Matt. 14, V. 18. (8) Grass does not grow in a desert. (9) Matt. 14, V. 21. (10) Luke 9, V. 12 to 17. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 33 far Mendaka's miracle, for here we have probably more than ten thousand men, women and children. And all these make a full meal of that which comes to Jesus from a mysterious, unseen quarter. And the fishes were cooked, for they surely would not eat raw fish. Let us inquire who baked those barley loaves? Moreover, that barley must have been first planted and grown. It must have been reaped and winnowed. It must have been ground and kneaded, baked and brought to that "desert place." That crowd would have devoured more than two wagon loads of bread alone. It would consume as much as ten full regi- ments. Then there were the fish. Who caught those fish? Who scaled and cooked them? Who brought them thither? Mendaka is here very far surpassed, and even Elijah is left a long way behind. Did the bread and the fish pour down from the skies in two great streams, into Jesus' hands, after the man- ner of grain into Mendaka's bins? But I am told there is nothing impossible with God. Yes, there are some things impossible even with Him. It is impossible for Him to add two and two and make the sum equal to five. He can not make this paper upon which I am writing, all white and all black at the same instant. He can not make two adjoining hills without a hollow between them. He can not make two parallel lines intersect each other. Besides, there is no place in history where it can be shown that God ever did anything for man where man could do for himself. There was no necessity for those people to be thus fed. 34 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES They could, it seems ( 1 1 ) , have gone into "the vil- lages round about and bought for themselves." More- over, those five thousand men do not tell us that they were thus miraculously fed. They are all silent, mouldering in their graves more than one hundred years, when this story of the loaves and fishes is written about them by Matthew and others. Jesus himself never wrote a word about it. And right at the exact point where we want full and com- plete information about how all those fishes and those loaves got into Jesus' hands, we are left in the dark. (12) Section 3. If the record be true, there must have been a secret hidden spout, unseen by the multitude, which conveyed to Jesus this marvelous amount of food. For God can not make two small dead fishes into a hundred or five hundred fishes, any more than He can make two and five to be a thousand. A seeming miracle in and of itself is not always con- vincing, for wizards and magicians have been able to do the same tricks; as, when the Hebrews were seek- ing deliverance from Egypt, the Lord told Aaron to cast his rod before Pharaoh, and the rod became a ser- pent. (13) Pharaoh does not seem to have been as- tounded at this, for he called his own magicians and sorcerers, and they cast down their rods, and they (11) Matt. 14, V. 15. (12) I shall not stop to mention a similar performance in ch. 15 of Matt., V. 32 to 39; if one be true the other may be also. Both, however, are extremely doubtful. (13) Exodus 7, 8 to 12. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 35 likewise became serpents. This curious legend is not complete unless we mention that Aaron's rod swal- lowed up all the other rods. The record here discloses more than was intended, for it makes the plain asser- tion that magicians and sorcerers could perform mir- acles as well as the Hebrew priests. I mention this matter here, not for the purpose of either affirming or denying the truth of the legend, but to emphasize the fact that for more than fifteen hundred years before Jesus was born, the Hebrews had learned from their holy books, and had been taught by their priests, so much about miracles and angels, that such things, even if they had not become an in- herited belief, were regarded as the particular heir- loom of their race. Such thoughts were in the very air, and children from generation to generation were taught to believe in the supernatural. But I shall be told that no sleight-of-hand perfor- mance or legerdemain can or could ever cause a hungry man to be deceived as to whether he had eaten a full meal or not. So much is true ; but no one of these five thousand men who are alleged to be present in that desert place near Bethsaida, has ever said that he was present, or that he knew anything about the supposed miracle whereby he was fed. Nor do I assert that the miracle did not take place ; but this I insist upon, viz. : that the proof to establish it is totally insuificiettt. True, there are four persons who have written an account about that marvelous af- 36 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES fair, but not one of them telJs us that he saiv the trans- action. Nor do they tell us how or where he, or they, got their information. At most their evidence is only hearsay of the cheap- est sort. It may have its whole foundation based upon falsehood. Does any sane person today believe that Aaron's rod swallowed the magicians' rods, even if they were turned into serpents ? If four of the most truthful men or greatest saints in America were to declare that they saw a similar transaction, in some desert place, or any place, they w^ould be questioned and cross-questioned until every fact, even to the minutest particular, would be known, and the people who partook of the feast would be called upon to confirm or disprove the matter. There was surely no such thing in this Bethsaida affair. Even as in India after Buddha's death, the mar- velous in the Hindu bible subsided somewhat, we may notice that in Palestine about a century, or perhaps a little more, after Jesus died, miracles took their flight to fairyland, from whence they came, and now for nearly nineteen hundred years they have failed to return. As miracles suddenly ceased with the deaths of those two great personages, we again press the question. Did the miracles ever have a beginning? Section 4. Henceforth in these pages when I en- counter the marvelous I shall simply relate what the Hin- du and the Hebrew books tell us. And if wondrous sto- ries are pleasing to the reader, he will be enchanted as he passes along. However, there is one thing that we A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 37 are absolutely certain about, viz. : that angels long since ceased visiting this earth. And are we not just as much in need of them as were the people in India and Palestine twenty-four hundred and nineteen hundred years ago ? If we could just see even one celestial Hyer, how many doubts it would dispel ! But as we are in the land of the marvelous, let us journey a little further.