and independent of reason, what right has it to raise up a bar of intellectual necessity, and to shut out reason from entertaining the question of miracles?  They may have grounds which appeal to reason; and an unintelligent instinct forbids reason from fairly considering what they are.  Reason cannot get beyond the actual fact of the present state of things for believing in the order of nature; it professes to find no necessity for it; the interruption of that order, therefore, whether probable or not, is not against reason.  Philosophy itself, says Mr. Mozley, cuts away the ground on which it had raised its preliminary objection to miracles.

And now the belief in the order of nature being thus, however powerful and useful, an unintelligent impulse of which we can give no rational account, in what way does this discovery affect the question of miracles?  In this way, that this belief not having itself its foundation in reason, the ground is gone upon which it could be maintained that miracles as opposed to the order of nature were opposed to reason.  There being no producible reason why a new event should be like the hitherto course of nature, no decision of reason is contradicted by its unlikeness.  A miracle, in being opposed to our experience, is not only not opposed to necessary reasoning, but to any reasoning.  Do I see by a certain perception the connection between these two—­It has happened so, it will happen so; then may I reject a new reported fact which has not happened so as an impossibility.  But if I do not see the connection between these two by a certain perception, or by any perception, I cannot.  For a miracle to be rejected as such, there must, at any rate, be some proposition in the mind of man which is opposed to it; and that proposition can only spring from the quarter to which we have been referring—­that of elementary experimental reasoning.  But if this experimental reasoning is of that nature which philosophy describes it as being of, i.e. if it is not itself a process of reason, how can there from an irrational process of the mind arise a proposition at all,—­to make which is the function of the rational faculty alone?  There cannot; and it is evident that the miraculous does not stand in any opposition whatever to reason....

Thus step by step has philosophy loosened the connection of the order of nature with the ground of reason, befriending, in exact proportion as it has done this, the principle of miracles.  In the argument against miracles the first objection is that they are against law; and this is answered by saying that we know nothing in nature of law in the sense in which it prevents miracles.  Law can only prevent miracles by compelling and making necessary the succession of nature, i.e. in the sense of causation; but science has itself proclaimed the truth that we see no causes in nature, that the whole chain of physical succession