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APPENDIX.

SUPPLEMENT A. Page 37.

ON THE ABSTRACT CREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES.

THE introduction of Paley's Treatise is occupied chiefly with an objection of Hume, in his "Essay on Miracles," which has gained more celebrity than it deserves. Besides other replies, Dr. Campbell devoted a separate work to its refutation, and more recently the subject has been renewed by Mr. Somerville, Mr. Penrose, and Dr. Chalmers,-the last of whom bestows all the opening chapters of his valuable treatise on this one question. The critical school of German philosophy has helped further to save the objection from neglect. Its disciples appear to accept the reasoning of that essay, as just and accurate, and content themselves with interpreting seriously the scornful remark at its close, that the Christian religion is to be received only by faith, since it is incapable of being proved on the ground of reason. The few remarks of Paley are just and forcible; yet, since the objection has gained such a currency, it may be well to sift it more closely, and to go a little deeper into the whole subject.

The objection is of this kind, All our knowledge is derived from experience. Now it is not contrary to experience that testimony should be false, but it is contrary to experience that a miracle should be true. For a miracle, by its definition, is a violation of the laws of nature. But since a firm and unalterable experience has established those laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. "Upon the whole we may conclude," the writer finally observes, "that the Christian religion was not only at first attended with miracles, but even at this present day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience."

The argument here consists of two premises, that the falsehood of testimony is not improbable, since it is of frequent occurrence;

and that the truth of a miracle is impossible, because it opposes a fixed and unalterable experience. Each of these is a sophism of the grossest kind.

And first, that some testimony is false, can never warrant the inference that all testimony is alike deceitful and uncertain. This is to return to a worse than childish ignorance. It is the very test of growing wisdom, to be able to discriminate between different kinds of testimony, according to the moral character of the witnesses and their means of information. But the force of the objection depends on a rejection of all these distinctions, the fruits of a ripe and manly reason. "The error," Dr. Chalmers observes, “lies in this, that all testimony is made responsible for all instances of falsehood, whereas each kind should be made responsible for its own. Divide the testimony into its kinds, and the sophistry is dispelled. It were thought a strange procedure in ordinary life to lay on a man of strict honesty any portion of the discredit which is attached to an habitual impostor, or even to one who has been detected in one instance of fraud or falsehood. It were equally strange to lay upon testimony, marked by all the characters, and accompanied by all the pledges of sincerity, the burden of that discredit which belongs to testimony of a different kind."

This first sophism, then, of the sceptical argument, has been answered long ago in that one brief sentence of the wisest of men: "A faithful witness will not lie: but a false witness will utter lies." To confound together these moral contrasts, in order to shake our faith in the gospel, is not only a wicked per verseness, but a childish folly.

The other premise is, if possible, still more strange. Miracles are said to be impossible, because they contradict a firm and unalterable experience. In other words, God cannot suspend any law of nature, or reveal his will by supernatural tokens, to mankind, because unalterable experience proves that this has never been done. This is the boasted argument against Divine revelation; to assume it false, to derive from that assumed falsehood a most absurd inference, and then by that absurdity to prove the falsehood again! The moral blindness implied in such reasoning seems almost incredible.

To say that miracles contradict universal experience, is merely to beg the question, that they never have occurred, or can occur. To say that they contradict our own experience, is simply untrue. They may lie beyond it, as the battles of Thermopyla and Salamis, or the death of Cæsar; but they contradict it, only if they are asserted to have happened before our eyes, and we did not see them. Miracles are unlikely, prior to actual experience, only so far as it is unlikely that God should reveal his will to mankind. They are likely to be frequent, only if it be likely that God will often suspend the laws of nature, to attest new revela

tions of his will, or to confirm others already given. And hence the fact, that none may have occurred within our own experience, yields not the slightest presumption against their reality in other cases. The sceptic can draw no just inference against them from his own limited experience, unless there be good reason to suppose that God would select him, or some one in his circle of friends, for his agent, or witness, in conveying a supernatural revelation to mankind.

When it is said, however, that a fixed and unalterable experience disproves all miracles, it is plain that an inference from a partial and limited experience is confounded with the proper teaching of experience itself, whether particular or universal. Let us inquire, then, what laws ought really to guide us in deriving such inferences from the limited experience either of ourselves or of others.

Experience can only observe particular facts; and before we can deduce any law from these facts, some higher faculty must be called into exercise. Reason tells us that every change must have some cause; and every lower or dependent cause, another that is higher the First Cause of all things. When an event is observed, fancy or conjecture suggests some other previous event or change as its probable cause. If this were so, a similar result will always follow. On trial, some of these conjectures fail, and are cast aside; while others are confirmed by frequent repetition, as far as our own observation extends. These are the laws of nature, as they appear to our infantile knowledge. Presently our information is enlarged by the testimony of others. Experience shows that this testimony is commonly true; and reason, with a wider experience, points out the limits of its credibility. Our first impressions are now corrected and revised, by the wider range of facts thus opened before us. The laws of nature, as they appeared to the child, are transformed into others, which form the popular philosophy of every-day life. But the search after knowledge becomes more earnest and assiduous, and grows into a science: loose and general experience is enlarged, and rigorously tested by careful experiment, and the popular creed is thus replaced by laws of natural philosophy, more exact, simple, and profound. These laws, established and confirmed by men of science, are then received on trust, from their testimony, by the great body of mankind, until their implicit faith is confirmed by multiplied proofs in their daily observation.

It is pure reason, therefore, a faculty higher than experience, though awakened by it, which establishes the universal truths of law and causality; since experience, by itself, can exhibit only a phantasmagoria of useless and unconnected sensations. When those ideas are once established, reason and experience combine to prove the existence, and determine the nature, of physical laws in the world around us. Even then, the advance of knowledge

disproves successively many of those laws, which seemed to be proved by a more limited observation. Philosophy corrects these crude results of an imperfect induction, and replaces them by wider laws, deduced from careful experiment, and a comparison of all the facts that are supplied by credible testimony. What a wide difference there is between the maxims, that wood swims and metals sink in water, and that smoke rises in the air, and the sublime discovery of universal gravitation! No limit can be assigned to this process of correction, until we arrive at laws which reason pronounces to be absolutely final and irreversible. And this is true of no physical law whatever. Reason declares plainly that all these have, at the best, only a relative certainty, that the highest of all laws must be the will and word of the Supreme Lawgiver, and that every inferior law may be suspended or repealed at his pleasure.

That appeal, therefore, to a limited experience, as if universal, which forms the second premise of the sceptical argument, is in truth a childish superstition, the ruin of all sound and true philosophy. Its direct result must be, to abrogate all the discoveries of science, which rest on the use of credible testimony, and could never have been made by individual experience alone. It is the greatest folly thus to frame mimic laws of nature from our own scanty observations, and then to reject the testimony of others, however strong the marks of its truth, that we may cling to these puerile conclusions. The Indian Prince, referred to by Hume in his Essay, who would not believe the freezing of water, because he had never seen it, illustrates excellently the greater folly of the sceptic himself. It was far less likely, in the abstract, that so common a substance, so long observed, should reverse its unvaried character of fluidity, than that a God of love and wisdom should some time or other make a supernatural revelation to mankind. The testimony of some chance traveller, by whom the fact was first reported to him, falls infinitely short of the accumulated evidence that proves the resurrection of Christ. If the incredulity of the Indian was unwise, how much more inexcusable is the unbelief of the sceptic, who has quoted the fact to his own condemnation.

On the other hand, Christian faith, when it believes the miracles of the gospel, is only the climax and topstone of true philosophy. Experience, as it enlarges, supplies the reason with ampler materials, by which to rise from accidental relations to real causes; from complex causes to those which are simple; from dependent causes to that which is absolute and Divine. The child infers, from its own observation, that water will always extinguish fire. He who has a knowledge of history will learn to restrict this law by an exception, that seems arbitrary, but rests on conclusive testimony, in the case of the Greek fire. The chemist, by further research, may form a theory of

combustion, where this exception is resolved into some higher law. The analyst, perhaps, may afterwards resolve the laws of the chemist into others still higher, depending on the nature of heat, which is now unknown; and thus modify them by further truths that contradict and supersede them. The Christian alone climbs the best and highest stair in this ladder of true philosophy. When he reads the history of the three children in the furnace, or of Jesus walking on the sea, he remembers that the physical properties, both of fire and water, are subject to a still higher law, even the will of that Supreme Lawgiver, on whom nature and all her elements must continually depend.

Miracles, then, are not opposed to a fixed and unalterable experience, but only to a crude and false inference from limited observation; an inference akin to those hasty deductions of childish ignorance, which are one chief hindrance in the pathway of true science. The testimony which confirms them, if derived from competent and honest witnesses, cannot be weakened in the least by the falsehood of other witnesses, who are either incompetent or dishonest. It would be just as wise to reject all the discoveries of astronomy, because we ourselves have seen the fall of a shooting star, as to discredit the resurrection of Christ, because we have heard liars give false evidence in a court of justice. The two pillars, on which the objection is based, are equally rotten and unsound.

Dr. Campbell, in his "Dissertation on Miracles," has replied to this argument of Hume in a different way. He affirms that our faith in testimony is not derived from experience, but depends on a distinct and separate principle: "To say that our diffidence in testimony is the result of experience, is more philosophical, because more consistent with truth, than to say that our faith in testimony has this foundation. Youth, which is inexperienced, is credulous; age, on the contrary, is distrustful. Exactly the reverse would be the case if the doctrine were just." Others, as Bishop M'Ilvaine, in his excellent treatise, have borrowed this same reply. Its only effect, however, as Dr. Chalmers well observes, is to obscure and perplex the real argument. If the two kinds of evidence, that of testimony and of experience, are heterogeneous, how can they be compared, in any case, so as to lead to a safe decision? Why, the sceptic might well rejoin, should we prefer the credulity of inexperienced youth to the wise suspicions of age?

The remark itself, however, is quite groundless. Experience creates diffidence only in defective and dishonest testimony, while it increases our confidence in testimony of an opposite kind. The case is precisely the same with the physical laws of nature. Experience weakens our faith in superficial conclusions, but increases our confidence in those deeper laws which constitute the discoveries of accurate science.

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