are grounded there is always an indispensible condition mixed up, which discriminates them altogether from the Scripture miracles. Those past improvements have been made by method and process, and usually by the help of some scientific apparatus. The analogy is, therefore, that all future improvements will be made similarly by the aid of such methods and processes.

But the miracles of Scripture were performed without any process. "He spake, and it was

done." "He blessed and brake, and the five thousand were fed with five barley loaves and two small fishes." And in those few cases in which some process was used, as in the anointing with clay the eyes of the man born blind, all these processes, though it may be exceedingly difficult to assign a reason why these in particular, or indeed why any, should have been used, are yet at all events such as cannot be imagined to have at all contributed to the effect produced. In the time of Daniel, or in that of Joshua, to traverse the air, or to walk at the bottom of the sea, would doubtless have been esteemed acts not less impossible, or less demanding a super

a See Note D. at the end of the volume.

human power, than for a man unarmed and bound like Daniel to restrain the rage of hungry lions, or than the act of Joshua in causing the sun to stand still. Yet we may now traverse the air in balloons, or descend in the diving-bell to the bottom of the sea. But still all these discoveries do not bring us the nearer to the power of performing such acts without instruments, or with only such instruments as are recorded to have been used in the performance of the Scripture miracles. Though the cataract may be removed by the art of the surgeon; though the potable gold which could restore youth to decrepitude were proved to have real, instead of fabulous, virtues; or though the galvanic battery could recal life to the dead; yet the giving of sight by anointing the eyes with spittle, or the calling up of Lazarus by a word from the tomb, are no less evidently the acts of a superhuman agent, than they would have been, if blindness were still universally incurable, or if Volta and Galvani never had been born. It is quite plain, therefore, that though we were to indulge the wildest and most irrational reveries as to the future improvement of human science and art, we yet should not advance a step to

wards the presumption that human art will ever be equal to the performance of any such works as the Scripture miracles. And hence we conclude that the Scripture miracles, if performed in the manner which is related, are acts of an indubitably superhuman power.

III. The only demur which can be possibly raised to this conclusion is, that these events may perhaps have happened by chance, or that they may have been only some unusual or extraordinary effects of some law, as it is called, or rather of some principle, of nature, rarely brought into operation. With all those laws, or with all those principles, we cannot affirm ourselves to be acquainted. The natural effects of some of their rarer combinations may, though not absolutely inconsistent with those laws by which we observe the world to be governed, yet be to us unprecedented: and these may be interpreted, it will be said, by superstition or fraud, into real miracles, and as such may acquire an undeserved reputation, and be regarded as vouchers of a superhuman authority.

The answer to this objection was to be the third and last head of this chapter, under which it was proposed to set forth the principles on

F

which we peremptorily exclude all such suppositions.

One part of the answer, or rather an answer which in itself might justly be regarded as complete and convincing, is that we are wholly ignorant of the existence of any law of nature, or natural principle, by which, without the intervention of some superhuman being, the dead can be restored to life, or by which most other of the Scripture miracles may have been performed. We have no presumption that there exists any such principle: there is no probability of it: it is a mere guess, for which, whether true or false, there is not any, even the least, foundation.

But besides this negative, we have also positive evidence, that the Scripture miracles could not have happened by chance. Let us leave it undetermined whether there be, or be not, beyond all experience, and beyond all detection, any principle of nature which can produce any such acts as those which the Scripture miracles purport to be. Yet still, at all events, the very extraordinary coincidence between the happening of any event, of a kind altogether strange and unheard of, and its happening under cir

cumstances which would allow the apparent actor to claim it as an attestation of a divine authority, this coincidence also being observed to take place not once only, but in many instances, is itself an inconsistency with those laws of nature of which we may trace and know the existence. As such it constitutes a positive evidence that the agent affirms nothing but the truth, unless, as before, we can disprove his doctrines by showing them to be inconsistent with what we otherwise know. If any act so very extraordinary is alleged to us, and we cannot show by something better than a blind guess, that it may by possibility be natural, or casual, we must confess the exercise of a superhuman power, and then all the rest follows of course.

It is here to be remarked, also, that the entire exclusion of chance, or of the operation of any occult law of nature, is eminently promoted by that immediate copula which has been observed to subsist, in many of the Scripture miracles, between the act of power performed and the doctrine which is affirmed on the credit of it. Concerning this copula, and the common

P. 52, and the Preliminary Dissertation.