opinion, that in miracles alleged to sustain a divine revelation it is necessary that the doctrine be declared first, and the power confirmatory of it evidenced afterwards, I have already shown that this condition cannot be by any means indispensably necessary to substantiate the agent's superhuman authority.

But although thus not, perhaps, a matter of moment, the superhuman power in the act being admitted, yet this copula may still be of the greatest moment in the question whether the act itself be really an act of superhuman power, or not. How many most extraordinary things do happen by chance, or by that hidden regulation of Providence to which the name of chance is commonly given! Every man is witness, both in his own life, and in the lives of others, to combinations of circumstances very unusual and surprising, in which he sees not, however, any symptoms of the miraculous. A man may, by chance, throw seven with a pair of dice five hundred or a thousand times successively, and though we may be inclined to wonder, perhaps, at this extraordinary run of luck,

we should absolutely ridicule his pretending in consequence of it, to the possession of superhuman power or authority. But if he were previously to declare a mission from heaven, and predict his doing this act in attestation of it; we might suspect some trick, probably, as that the dice were loaded ;-we might be very reluctant to admit the evidence of the fact;-we might remark the great difference between the character of an act like this, and those admirable characters of justice and mercy which are conspicuous in the Scripture miracles.-But admitting the fact, and coupling the chances. against it with the extreme improbability of its taking place exactly at that time, at which it might be colourably alleged to support a claim of a nature so very extraordinary as that of a claim of divine revelation ;-I hardly know (so nearly in our apprehension do we naturally connect all extreme improbabilities with the strongest contradictions which we can conceive to take place in the ordinary course of nature or of experience), I hardly know that we could deny it. to prove the interference or agency of a superhuman being.

One easy case to which these principles may

be applied, is the very common one in which men who have been possessed of the previous knowledge that an eclipse was to take place, have gained a false credit by pretending to foretel a supernatural darkness which was about to arise. We know nothing better than that no pretensions of this kind can ever deserve a single moment's attention: but granting for the argument's sake that such a prediction were verified, and that we could prove satisfactorily of the person predicting it, that he himself could neither have calculated the phenomenon, nor yet have possessed the means of availing himself of the calculations made by others, how greatly should we be startled by so remarkable a coincidence?

Or let us take, for another case, the remarkable history of the attempt said to have been made by the emperor Julian to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. The story is, that "when the work was begun, terrible balls of fire broke out from the foundations, and made the place inaccessible, and upon many repeated endeavours slew the workmen, so that, the fire never ceasing to rage whilst any attempt was made to go on with the work, the undertaking was laid

aside." a

the

On this it has been remarked, that appearance of balls of fire is far from being an unequivocal proof of a miracle, and instances are alleged, some of them exceedingly similar to the story which is thus related of Julian, in which fire is said to have broke out from the earth, and to have occasioned the same sort of destruction. Who can say, therefore, that this eruption also at Jerusalem, supposing the accuracy of that relation of it which has come down to us, may not be attributable to natural causes, and that its coincidence with Julian's attempt to rebuild the temple may not by possibility have been merely casual?

To this I reply, that if, in Julian's attempt, there had been nothing to attract forcibly the attention; if it had seemed to originate in the mere desire to gain celebrity by the restoration of so ancient and splendid a building; if he had attempted the restoration of almost any other temple, excepting this temple, or perhaps that of Delphi, or one or two others; we might agree in attributing the interruption of the work to some such casual origin. But that in this

a Jortin's Remarks, II. 322, 8vo. 1805.

b Jortin, ibid. pp. 323, 324, 325.

particular case, in which an evident defiance appears to have been offered to the God of the Christians, and under circumstances in which we might even look out for his interposition; that, in a case like this, so very remarkable a coincidence between the defiance offered, and the instant confusion of it by the events which followed, can be regarded as a coincidence merely casual, scarcely any person, I presume, will seriously believe".

Granting the facts, therefore, in this history of Julian, it is wholly impossible to deny that we possess in it clear and incontrovertible proof of a miracle and it is moreover plain that this whole proof is created by the existence in this case of that direct copula which is so frequently observed to subsist between the miracles and the doctrines of Scripture, the rea limport of which copula is here the point for our consideration. If the facts appealed to by the Scripture writers as miracles were not, as they were affirmed to be, truly miraculous, they must either have been impostures, or they must have been, as has before been intimated", some un

2 Jortin, ubi sup. p. 326.

b P. 65, head III.