great preponderance of evidence against miracles, he says:  “Against this weight of negative evidence we have to set such positive evidence as is produced in attestation of exceptions; in other words, the positive evidences of miracles.  And I have already admitted that this evidence might conceivably have been such as to make the exception equally certain with the rule.” [38:1] Mr. Mill’s opinion of the evidence actually produced is not flattering, and may be compared with my results: 

“But the evidence of miracles, at least to Protestant Christians, is not, in our day, of this cogent description.  It is not the evidence of our senses, but of witnesses, and even this not at first hand, but resting on the attestation of books and traditions.  And even in the case of the original eye-witnesses, the supernatural facts asserted on their alleged testimony are not of the transcendent character supposed in our example, about the nature of which, or the impossibility of their having had a natural origin, there could be little room for doubt.  On the contrary, the recorded miracles are, in the first place, generally such as it would have been extremely difficult to verify as matters of fact, and in the next place, are hardly ever beyond the possibility of having been brought about by human means or by the spontaneous agencies of nature.” [38:2]

It is to substantiate the statements made here, and, in fact, to confirm the philosophical conclusion by the historical proof, that I enter into an examination of the four Gospels, as the chief witnesses for miracles.  To those who have already ascertained the frivolous nature of that testimony it may, no doubt, seem useless labour to examine it in detail; but it is scarcely conceivable that an ecclesiastic who professes to base his faith upon those records should represent such a process as useless.  In endeavouring to place me on the forks of a dilemma, in fact, Dr. Lightfoot has betrayed that he altogether fails to appreciate the question at issue, or to comprehend the position of miracles in relation to philosophical and historical enquiry.  Instead of being “altogether superfluous,” my examination of witnesses, in the second and third parts, has more correctly been represented by able critics as incomplete, from the omission of the remaining documents of the New Testament.  I foresaw, and myself to some degree admitted, the justice of this argument; [39:1] but my work being already bulky enough, I reserved to another volume the completion of the enquiry.

I cannot close this article without expressing my regret that so much which is personal and unworthy has been introduced into the discussion of a great and profoundly important subject.  Dr. Lightfoot is too able and too earnest a man not to recognise that no occasional errors or faults in a writer can really affect the validity of his argument, and instead of mere general and desultory efforts to do some damage