heaven, therefore, was the only method by which infinite wisdom and perfect goodness could reform a bewildered and vicious race. But this revelation, at whatever time we suppose it given, must have been made directly either to some chosen individuals commissioned to instruct others, or to every man and woman for whose benefit it was ultimately intended. Were every person instructed in the knowledge of his duty by immediate inspiration, and were the motives to practise it brought home to his mind by God himself, human nature would be wholly changed; men would not be moral agents, nor by consequence be capable either of reward or of punishment. It remains, therefore, that, if God has been graciously pleased to enlighten and reform mankind, without destroying that moral nature which man possesses, he can have done it only by revealing his truth to certain chosen instruments, who were the immediate instructors of their contemporaries, and through them have been the instructors of succeeding ages. "Let us suppose this to have been actually the case, and consider how those inspired teachers could communicate to others every truth which had been revealed to themselves. They might easily, if it were part of their duty, deliver a sublime system of natural and moral science, and establish it upon the common basis of experiment and demonstration; but what foundation could they lay for those truths which unassisted reason cannot discover, and which, when they are revealed, appear to have no necessary relation to any thing previously known? To a bare affirmation that they had been immediately received from God, no rational being could be expected to assent. The teachers might be men of known veracity, whose simple assertion would be admitted as sufficient evidence for any fact in conformity with the laws of nature; but as every man has the evidence of his own consciousness and experience that revelations from heaven are deviations from these laws, an assertion so apparently extravagant would be rejected as false, unless supported by some better proof than the mere affirmation of the teacher. In this state of things we can conceive no evidence sufficient to make such doctrines be received as the truths of God, but the power of working miracles committed to him who taught them. This would, indeed, be fully adequate to the purpose; for if there were nothing in the doctrines themselves impious, immoral, or contrary to truths already known, the only thing which could render the teacher's assertion incredible would be its implying such an intimate communion with God as is contrary to the established course of things, by which men are left to acquire all their knowledge by the exercise of their own faculties. Let us now suppose one of those inspired teachers to tell his countrymen, that he did not desire them, on his ipse dixit, to believe that he had any preternatural communion with the Deity, but that, for the truth of his assertion, he would give them the evidence || of their own senses; and after this declaration let us suppose him immediately to raise a person from the dead in their presence, merely by calling upon him to come out of his grave. Would not the only possible objection to the man's veracity be removed by this miracle? and his assertion that he had received such and such doctrines from God be as fully credited as if it related to the most common occurrence? Undoubtedly it would; for when so much preternatural power was visibly communicated to this person, no one could have reason to question his having received an equal portion of preternatural knowledge. A palpable deviation from the known laws of nature in one instance, is a sensible proof that such a deviation is possible in another; and in such a case as this it is the witness of God to the truth of a man. "Miracles, then, under which we include prophecy, are the only direct evidence which can be given of Divine inspiration. When a religion, or any religious truth, is to be revealed from heaven, they appear to be absolutely necessary to enforce its reception among men; and this is the only case in which we can suppose them necessary, or believe for a moment that they ever have been or will be performed. "The history of almost every religion abounds with relations of prodigies and wonders, and of the intercourse of men with the gods; but we know of no religious system, those of the Jews and VOL. II. T Christians excepted, which appealed to miracles as the sole evidence of its truth and divinity. The pretended miracles mentioned by Pagan historians and poets are not said to have been publicly wrought to enforce the truth of a new religion contrary to the reigning idolatry. Many of them may be clearly shewn to have been mere natural events; others of them are represented as having been performed in secret on the most trivial occasions, and in obscure and fabulous ages long prior to the era of the writers by whom they are recorded; and such of them as at first view appear to be best attested, are evidently tricks contrived for interesting purposes, to flatter power or to promote the prevailing superstitions. For these reasons, as well as on account of the immoral character of the divinities by whom they are said to have been wrought, they are altogether unworthy of examination, and carry in the very nature of them the completest proofs of falsehood and imposture. "But the miracles recorded of Moses and of Christ bear a very different character. None of them are represented as wrought on trivial occasions. The writers who mention them were eye-witnesses of the facts; which they affirm to have been performed publicly, in attestation of the truth of their réspective systems. They are, indeed, so incorporated with these systems, that the miracles cannot be separated from the doctrines; and if the miracles be not really performed, the doctrines cannot possibly be true. Besides all this, they were wrought in support of revelations which opposed all the religious systems, superstitions, and prejudices, of the age in which they were given: a circumstance which of itself sets them, in point of authority, infinitely above the Pagan prodigies, as well as the lying wonders of the Romish church. If quently repeated would not be "It is indeed, we believe, universally admitted, that the miracles mentioned in the book of Exodus, and in the four Gospels, might, to those who saw them performed, be sufficient evidence of the Divine inspiration of Moses and of Christ, but to us it may be thought that they are no evidence whatever, as we must believe in the miracles themselves, if we believe in them at all, upon the bare authority of human testimony. Why, it has been sometimes asked, are not miracles wrought in all ages and countries? the mighty works which he perIf the religion of Christ was to be formed. Mr. Hume, indeed, enof perpetual duration, every ge-deavoured to prove, that'no tesneration of men ought to have complete evidence of its truth and divinity. "Be this, however, as it may, we shall take the liberty to affirm, that for the reality of the Gospel miracles we have evidence as convincing to the reflecting mind, though not so striking to vulgar apprehension, as those had who were contemporary with Christ and his apostles, and actually saw timony is sufficient to establish a miracle; and the reasoning employed for this purpose is, that 'a miracle being a violation of the laws of nature, which a firm and unalterable experience has established, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can be: whereas our experience of human veracity, which (according to him) is the sole foundation of the evidence of testimony, is far from being uniform, and can therefore never preponderate against that experi "To the performance of miracles in every age and in every country, perhaps the same objections lie as to the immediate inspiration of every individual. Were those miracles universally received as such, men would be so overwhelmed with the number rather than with the force of their authority, as hardly to remain masters of their own conduct; and in that case the very end of all miracles would be defeated by their frequency. The truth, however, ence which admits of no excepseems to be, that miracles so fre-tion. This boasted and plausible argument has with equal candour every possible circumstance in and acuteness been examined by Dr. Campbell, in his Dissertation on Miracles, who justly observes, that so far is experience from being the sole foundation of the evidence of testimony, that, on the contrary, testimony is the sole foundation of by far the greater part of what Mr. Hume calls firm and unalterable experience; and that if, in certain circumstances, we did not give an implicit faith to testimony, our knowledge of events would be confined to those which had fallen under the immediate observation of our own senses. which they could be placed, and have prepared consistent answers to every question that could be put to them by their most inveterate and most enlightened enemies; by the statesman, the lawyer, the philosopher, and the priest. That such foreknowledge as this would have been miraculous, will not surely be denied; since it forms the very attribute which we find it most difficult to allow even to God himself. It is not, however, the only miracle which this supposition would compel us to swallow. The very resolution of the apostles to propagate the belief of false miracles in support of such a religion as that which is taught in the New Testament, is as great a miracle as human imagination can easily conceive. "When they formed this design, either they must have hoped to succeed, or they must have foreseen that they should fail in their undertaking; and, in either case, they chose evil for its own sake. They could not, if they foresaw that they should fail, look for any thing but that contempt, disgrace, and persecution, which were then the inevitable consequences of an unsuccessful endeavour to overthrow the established religion. Nor could their prospects be "We need not waste time here in proving that the miracles, as they are represented in the writings of the New Testament, were of such a nature, and performed before so many witnesses, that no imposition could possibly be practised on the senses of those who affirm that they were present. From every page of the Gospels this is so evident, that the philosophical adversaries of the Christian faith never suppose the apostles to have been themselves deceived, but boldly accuse them of bearing false witness. But if this accusation be well founded, their testimony itself is as great a miratle as any which they record of themselves or of their Master. For if they sat down to fabri- brighter upon the supposition of cate their pretended revelation, their success. As they knew themand to contrive a series of mira-selves to be false witnesses, and cles to which they were unanimously to appeal for its truth, it is plain, since they proved successful in their daring enterprise, that they must have clearly foreseen impious deceivers, they could have no hopes beyond the grave; and by determining to oppose all the religious systems, superstitions, and prejudices of the age in which they lived, they wilfully exposed themselves to inevitable misery in the present life, to insult and imprisonment, to stripes and death. Nor can it be said that they might look forward to power and affluence, when they should, through sufferings, have converted their countrymen; for so desirous were they of obtaining nothing but misery, as the end of their mission, that they made their own persecution a test of the truth of their doctrines. They introduced the Master from whom they pretended to have received these doctrines as telling them, that they were sent forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; that they should be deJivered up to councils, and scourged in synagogues; that they should be hated of all men for his name's sake; that the brother should deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child; and that he who took not up his cross, and followed after him, was not worthy of him.' The very system of religion, therefore, which they invented and resolved to impose upon mankind, was so contrived, that the worldly prosperity of its first preachers, and even their exemption from persecution, was incompatible with its success. Had these clear predictions of the Author of that religion, under whom the apostles acted only as ministers, not been verified, all mankind must have instantly perceived that their pretence to inspiration was false, and that Christianity was a scandalous and impudent imposAll this the apostles could not but foresee when they formed their plan for deluding the world. ture. Whence it follows, that when they resolved to support their pretended revelation by an appeal to forged miracles, they wilfully, and with their eyes open, exposed themselves to inevitable misery, whether they should succeed or fail in their enterprise; and that they concerted their measures so as not to admit of a possibility of recompense to themselves, either in this life or in that which is to come. But if there be a law of nature, for the reality of which we have better evidence than we have for others, it is, that 'no man can choose misery for its own sake, or make the acquisition of it the ultimate end of his pursuit. The existence of other laws of nature we know by testimony, and our own observation of the regularity of their effects. The existence of this law is made known to us not only by these means, but also by the still clearer and more conclusive evidence of our own consciousness. "Thus, then, do miracles force themselves upon our assent in every possible view which we can take of this interesting subject. If the testimony of the first preachers of Christianity were true, the miracles recorded in the Gospel were certainly performed, and the doctrines of our religion are derived from heaven. On the other hand, if that testimony were false, either God must have miraculously effaced from the minds of those by whom it was given all the associations formed between their sensible ideas and the words, of language, or he must have endowed those men with the gifts of |