implicitly and exclusively to the latter. For it is as irrational to reject testimony, when experience is mute, in matters of religion as in matters of philosophy, and as imprudent to deny the credibility of the miracles of revelation, because they have never been observed to have been wrought upon any other occasion, as to deny the freezing of mercury under the pole, because it has never been observed under the equator. The circumstances of the two experiments and occasions being different, we cannot with propriety expect the same results in both.

The true doctrine then with regard to evidence would appear to be just what we have stated it to be, namely, that our experience of what has already occurred, is a safe guide of reasoning and a sound rule of judgment as to the natural credibility of alleged matters of fact, only in those cases in which the circumstances are similar or the same. Where the circumstances vary, and in proportion as they vary, in the same degree are the deductions from past experience inapplicable, and in the same degree does testimony alone become the measure of truth and the ground of belief. And this is a rule which leaves the testimony to every fact which is recorded in the Bible, whether it be of a miraculous or of an ordinary kind, both unimpeached and unim

peachable. The declarations of the Evangelists are equally credible, so far at least as this argument is concerned, whether they record the most uncommon or the commonest occurrences of our Saviour's life; whether they merely relate his birth and his burial, or speak of his bursting the barriers of the grave and planting his footsteps on the waters of the deep. For the Gospel is a solitary and a singular religion, against which we must never presume to judge by the laws which are deduced only from our experience in the common occasions of life.

I should much regret the logical and didactic statements into which I have been thus compelled to enter, did I not hope that they might have a tendency to remove that confusion of the understanding (for few, I should presume, have ever found their understandings satisfied with the reasonings of Hume, when applied to the Gospel miracles) which almost every one must have felt when rising from the perusal of his loose and unconnected Essay; and did I not think that there are some useful and important fruits to be gathered even in this wilderness of sophistry. For what shall we say of them who have thus laboured to cast a stumbling-block in the way of every one that would lay hold on Christ? Shall we judge of the motives of their conduct by its

tendency, and say that as it was their endeavour, so it was their hope, to obliterate the remembrance of God's Son from the earth, and blot out his words of mercy to mankind? Or shall we not rather call to mind the words of the Lord Jesus which he spake, saying, "Judge not, that ye be not judged," and acquiesce in the milder censure of the text by supposing that they deceived others, because they were themselves deceived? Strange indeed it may appear that, upon any subject, the cloud of error should. cast its delusive darkness over minds like theirs, into which God in his mercy had poured a double portion of the spirit of understanding. Yet it is vain, and happily it is needless, to deny that they, like many other unbelievers were men of comprehensive genius and a mighty mind. But it is neither the strength nor the acuteness, it is the direction of the understanding which alone can secure us from perversion or error. God gives us our faculties, but leaves their use or abuse to our own responsibility and care. The resistless mightiness of Samson's frame forms the reverential wonder of our childhood, and the belief and meditation of our riper years. We know that such mightiness was given him for purposes of holiness, to impress the terror of God's name on the enemies of God's people, and to bless both himself and others by the lawful exertion of his power. We know all this; but we

know also that the end corresponded not with the intention. Sold by his own fault and folly into the hands of a woman, and brought into captivity under those he was intended to subdue, he remembered with sorrow the waste and perversion of his wondrous gifts, and grasping the pillars of Dagon's house with the yet terrible power of his enfeebled arms, shook the fabric from the foundations on which it rested, and was buried in the ruins which his own strength had made. What is there in the mind to preserve it from the same misguided exercise of its power? Is the spirit of a man relieved from the dangers to which his body is subject, and is the freedom of the agent to abuse his powers, suspended when applied to his intellectual endowments? The history of human opinions upon every science should teach us the idleness of such an expectation, and convince us that there is no subject of inquiry, however clear and incontrovertible in itself, into which the pride and prejudices of the heart will not intrude to disturb the judgment, and teach it to hold fast to that which is manifestly erroneous and confessedly evil. If there be any sphere of investigation in which we might hope that the vanity and passions of mortality would cease to operate, it is in those questions of pure and abstract science which are capable of strict and mathematical demonstration. Yet even here we find that the force of the most

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undeniable truth has been sometimes unable to prevail over the perverseness of a powerful and reasoning mind. It is a curious and important fact in the history of the philosophic world, that Hobbes, one of the most ingenious of those who have lifted up their voices against the Lord of life, maintained his mathematical as well as religious errors, errors in which he was condemned and deserted by all, with a fruitless obstinacy and in the face of repeated defeat. It is not then the mere strength of a cause which can repel, nor is it its weakness alone which invites the attacks of adversaries. A thousand unseen springs are in operation to pervert the judgment and mislead the heart in every case, but more especially in the consideration of the truth of the Christian creed, which is so holy in its precepts as to arm against its purity a host of evil inclinations, and so humbling in its doctrines as to make the pride of human reason its natural enemy. In many of those who have laboured in the defence of infidelity we may distinctly trace the operation of this cause of enmity to our holy faith. In the impure imagination of Gibbon, unable to restrain its pruriency even amidst the learned researches of the historian, in the sensual Confessions of Rousseau, and the degrading blasphemies and vices of Paine, we may easily discriminate the origin of doubt or disbelief. The word of God was against them, and therefore they were

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