on as a mechanical impression, though the reason counterbalances it.  Resistance, therefore, is not disbelief, unless by an act of my own reason I give it an absolute veto, which I do not do.  My reason is clear upon the point, that there is no disagreement between itself and a miracle as such.” ...  Nor is it dealing artificially with ourselves to exert a force upon our minds against the false certainty of the resisting imagination—­such a force as is necessary to enable reason to stand its ground, and bend back again that spring of impression against the miraculous which has illegally tightened itself into a law to the understanding.  Reason does not always prevail spontaneously and without effort even in questions of belief; so far from it, that the question of faith against reason may often be more properly termed the question of reason against imagination.  It does not seldom require faith to believe reason, isolated as she may be amid vast irrational influences, the weight of custom, the power of association, the strength of passion, the vis inertiae of sense, the mere force of the uniformity of nature as a spectacle—­those influences which make up that power of the world which Scripture always speaks of as the antagonist of faith.

The antecedent questions about miracles, before coming to the question of the actual evidence of any, are questions about which reason—­reason disengaged and disembarrassed from the arbitrary veto of experience—­has a right to give its verdict.  Miracles presuppose the existence of God, and it is from reason alone that we get the idea of God; and the antecedent question then is, whether they are really compatible with the idea of God which reason gives us.  Mr. Mozley remarks that the question of miracles is really “shut up in the enclosure of one assumption, that of the existence of God”; and that if we believe in a personal Deity with all power over nature, that belief brings along with it the possibility of His interrupting natural order for His own purposes.  He also bids us observe that the idea of God which reason gives us is exposed to resistance of the same kind, and from precisely the same forces, in our mental constitution, as the idea of miracles.  When reason has finished its overwhelming proof, still there is a step to be taken before the mind embraces the equally overwhelming conclusion—­a step which calls for a distinct effort, which obliges the mind, satisfied as it may be, to beat back the counteracting pressure of what is visible and customary.  After reason—­not opposed to it or independent of it, but growing out of it, yet a distinct and further movement—­comes faith.  This is the case, not specially in religion, but in all subjects, where the conclusions of reason cannot be subjected to immediate verification.  How often, as he observes, do we see persons “who, when they are in possession of the best arguments, and what is more, understand those arguments, are still shaken by almost any opposition, because they want the faculty to trust an argument when they have got one.”