it; that powerful overbearing sense of the actual and the real, which when it is opposed by reason is apt to make reason seem like the creator of mere ideal theories; which gives to arguments implying a different condition of things from one which is familiar to present experience the disadvantage of appearing like artificial and unsubstantial refinements of thought, such as, to the uncultivated mind, appear not merely metaphysical discussions, but what are known to be the most certain reasonings of physical and mathematical science.  It is that measure of the probable, impressed upon us by the spectacle; to which we are accustomed all our lives long, of things as we find them, and which repels the possibility of a break or variation; that sense of probability which the keenest of philosophers declares to be incapable of rational analysis, and pronounces allied to irrational portions of our constitution, like custom, and the effect of time, and which is just as much an enemy to invention, to improvement, to a different state of things in the future, as it is to the belief and realising of a different state of things in the past.  The antecedent objection to the miraculous is not reason, but an argument which limits and narrows the domain of reason; which excludes dry, abstract, passionless reason—­with its appeals to considerations remote from common experience, its demands for severe reflection, its balancing and long chains of thought—­from pronouncing on what seems to belong to the flesh and blood realities of life as we know it.  Against this tyrannical influence, which may be in a vulgar and popular as in a scientific form, which may be the dull result of habit or the more specious effect of a sensitive and receptive imagination, but which in all cases is at bottom the same, Mr. Mozley claims to appeal to reason:—­

To conclude, then, let us suppose an intelligent Christian of the present day asked, not what evidence he has of miracles, but how he can antecedently to all evidence think such amazing occurrences possible, he would reply, “You refer me to a certain sense of impossibility which you suppose me to possess, applying not to mathematics but to facts.  Now, on this head, I am conscious of a certain natural resistance in my mind to events unlike the order of nature.  But I resist many things which I know to be certain:  infinity of space, infinity of time, eternity past, eternity future, the very idea of a God and another world.  If I take mere resistance, therefore, for denial, I am confined in every quarter of my mind; I cannot carry out the very laws of reason, I am placed under conditions which are obviously false.  I conclude, therefore, that I may resist and believe at the same time.  If Providence has implanted in me a certain expectation of uniformity or likeness in nature, there is implied in that very expectations resistance to an unlike event, which resistance does not cease even when upon evidence I believe the event, but goes