old would become more visionary than ever. In a very few days the attempt itself, and the party which had undertaken it, would be numbered among things forgotten. Give them rank; give them authority; give them education; advantages which were entirely wanting to the teachers of Christianity; still the barrier opposed by national belief, prescriptive customs, and personal habits, is so strong, that it has never been overcome without some commensurate power, civil or military. civil or military. And I have taken more pains than might appear necessary, to show the difficulties encountered by the apostles; because if these difficulties were more justly appreciated, the consequence proved by their success would be more generally admitted. I have supposed nothing greater than they attempted; nothing greater than they achieved; and not in a single city, but over half the world; the same scheme which we at once declare to be impracticable as to our own age or country, was tried within the first century throughout the most civilized parts of the world then known, and succeeded; succeeded too by

means which we are aware must now be ineffectual, unless they were supported as the apostles profess to have been supported; succeeded too in spite of opposition, not for want of it; for there is no proof that either Jews or heathens were less attached to the religion, the traditions, or the worship of their ancestors, than ourselves3.

These are our grounds for believing, that if it were the purpose of God to establish a revelation like the Christian, he would see fit for a time to suspend or change the ordinary operation of his laws; and that in the case before us he actually did so.

The cases of successful imposture or enthusiasm which sometimes astonish us, are no exception to this argument. Such persons as Swedenborg and Southcote do not introduce a new religion, but stand forward as interpreters of a religion before established on very different grounds; and because that is believed, they are listened to. If the religion were not already believed, these persons would gain no attention. The apostles raised Christianity out of nothing, and against every thing.

Y

Here, however, an adversary steps in, and affirms that this exercise of miraculous power is too improbable to be credited on any testimony. It is contrary to the nature of the Deity, and contrary to uniform experience; and, therefore, cannot be believed.

Whatever force may seem to be in this objection, a slight consideration will show that it carries us too far, and leads to consequences which even a Deist would hesitate to admit.

2

The argument stands thus. The laws of nature are fixed and uniform, being established by the Creator as the most suitable for the world he has made. To suppose that he would alter what he has once established, is to suppose mutability in his counsels, or imperfection in his laws. Therefore it is more probable that men should deceive or be deceived, than that he should have suffered that temporary change in the constitution of things which we call a miracle.

The most satisfactory answer to any abstract argument is that which can be drawn from matter of fact. In speaking of the Deity, more particularly, it is chiefly by considering what he has done, that we can safely decide what it may be consistent with his attributes to do. And with regard to the present question, it is certain, that if he created the world, he has already seen fit to interfere with what was before established, and to alter the actual order of things.

Where our world now exists, and the innumerable worlds which philosophy opens to our view, before they were created there must either have been vacant space, or matter in another form. That space, or that form of matter, was then the order of nature. And a being of some other sphere might have argued with the same plausibility, that God could not, consistently with his attributes, alter the existing state of things, and create a world like ours. But that being would have been mistaken. He would have been refuted by the act of creation. We believe that God did interpose his power, and

did create our world. Wherever we look around us, whenever we are conscious of our own existence, we have a proof of that very divine interference which is declared to be so improbable. Whether we go back six thousand years, or six thousand ages, or six thousand centuries, we must believe, if we are not altogether atheists, that this world, and all that it contains, once had no existence in its present form, and received its being and its properties contrary to the order of things previously existing.

That then which God certainly saw fit to do for one purpose, he might see fit to do for another for another, and not a less glorious purpose. For when we reflect on the difference which Christianity has already wrought in the moral world, and the still greater difference which it is calculated to work, and probably will effect in the progress of time, we cannot think it a less important exercise of power to have introduced the Gospel by suspending the laws of nature, than to have created the world by first establishing them.