man who believes this fact, and yet thinks it no sign of Christ’s mission; when I can even conceive of a man in his right senses who, believing all the facts and events related in the New Testament, and as there related, does yet remain a Deist, I may think it time to enter into a disquisition respecting the right definition of a miracle; and meantime, I humbly trust that believing with my whole heart and soul in the wonderful works of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, I shall not forfeit my title of Christian, though I should not subscribe to this or that divine’s right definition of his ‘idea’ of a miracle; which word is with me no ‘idea’ at all, but a general term; the common surname, as it were, of the wonderful works wrought by the messengers of God to man in the Patriarchal, Mosaic, and Christian dispensations.

It is to these notions and general definitions, far more than to the facts themselves, that the arguments of Infidels apply; and from which they derive their plausibility.  Nor is this all.  The Infidel imitates the divine, and adopts the same mode of arguing, namely, by this substantiation of mere general or collective terms.  For instance, Hume’s argument (stated, by the by, before he was born, and far more forcibly, by Dr. South, who places it in the mouth of Thomas,) [2]—­reduce it to the particular facts in question, and its whole speciousness vanishes.  I am speaking of the particular facts and actions of the Gospel; of those, and those only.  Now that I should be deceived, or the eye-witnesses have been deceived, under all the circumstances of those miracles, with all antecedents, accompaniments, and consequents, is quite as contrary to, that is, unparalleled in my experience, as the return to life of a dead man.

So again in the second paragraph of page 502, [3] the position is true or false according to the definition of a miracle.  In the narrower sense of the term, miracle,—­that is, a consequent presented to the outward senses without an adequate antecedent, ejusdem generis,—­it is not only false but detractory from the Christian religion.  It is a main, nay, an indispensable evidence; but it is not the only, no, nor if comparison be at all allowable, the highest and most efficient; unless, indeed, the term evidence is itself confined to grounds of conviction offered to the senses, but then the position is a mere truism.

There is yet another way of reasoning, which I utterly dislike; namely, by putting imaginary cases of imaginary miracles, as Paley has done.  “If a dozen different individuals, all men of known sense and integrity, should each independently of the other pledge their everlasting weal on the truth, that they saw a man beheaded and quartered, and that on a certain person’s prayer or bidding, the quarters reunited, and then a new head grew on and from out of the stump of the neck:  and should the man himself assure you of the same, shew you the junctures, and identify himself