On examining the alleged miraculous evidence for Christianity as Divine Revelation, however, we find that, even if the actual occurrence of the supposed miracles could be substantiated, their value as evidence would be destroyed by the necessary admission that miracles are not limited to one source and are not exclusively associated with truth, but are performed by various spiritual Beings, Satanic as well as Divine, and are not always evidential, but are sometimes to be regarded as delusive and for the trial of faith.  As the doctrines supposed to be revealed are beyond Reason, and cannot in any sense be intelligently approved by the human intellect, no evidence which is of so doubtful and inconclusive a nature could sufficiently attest them.  This alone would disqualify the Christian miracles for the duty which miracles alone are capable of performing.

The supposed miraculous evidence for the Divine Revelation, moreover, is not only without any special Divine character, being avowedly common also to Satanic agency, but it is not original either in conception or details.  Similar miracles are reported long antecedently to the first promulgation of Christianity, and continued to be performed for centuries after it.  A stream of miraculous pretension, in fact, has flowed through all human history, deep and broad as it has passed through the darker ages, but dwindling down to a thread as it has entered days of enlightenment.  The evidence was too hackneyed and commonplace to make any impression upon those before whom the Christian miracles are said to have been performed, and it altogether failed to convince the people to whom the Revelation was primarily addressed.  The selection of such evidence for such a purpose is much more characteristic of human weakness than of Divine power.

The true character of miracles is at once betrayed by the fact that their supposed occurrence has thus been confined to ages of ignorance and superstition, and that they are absolutely unknown in any time or place where science has provided witnesses fitted to appreciate and ascertain the nature of such exhibitions of supernatural power.  There is not the slightest evidence that any attempt was made to investigate the supposed miraculous occurrences, or to justify the inferences so freely drawn from them, nor is there any reason to believe that the witnesses possessed, in any considerable degree, the fulness of knowledge and sobriety of judgment requisite for the purpose.  No miracle has yet established its claim to the rank even of apparent reality, and all such phenomena must remain in the dim region of imagination.  The test applied to the largest class of miracles, connected with demoniacal possession, discloses the falsity of all miraculous pretension.