After the question of inspiration, the most striking feature of the Bible is its appeal to miracles and the miraculous element.  It is now necessary to examine the position assumed by Huxley towards these.  Two great a priori difficulties have been brought against accepting any record of miracles as true.  The first of these is very simple, depending on the history of all times and peoples.  It is that the human race has shewn itself universally credulous in this matter.  It has cried “Wolf!” so readily, so honestly, and on so many occasions that the cry has ceased to carry conviction with it.  Every religion has its series of miraculous events; every savage tribe and every uneducated race has its miracle-workers implicitly accepted.  In mediaeval and modern Europe up to our own times, miracles have been so constantly recorded on testimony of such undoubted integrity that we must either believe that miracles can be performed by numberless persons with no other claim to special regard, or that it is singularly easy to get false but honest evidence regarding them.  Huxley supported the latter alternative strongly, and held the view that to believe in any particular miracles would require evidence very much more direct and very much stronger than would be necessary in the case of inherently probable events.

The second a priori objection to the credibility of miracles has been urged more strongly, but was not accepted by Huxley.  It is that miracles are inherently incredible inasmuch as they are “violations of the order of nature.”  Hume, attacking miracles, had made this objection the chief ground of his argument.  Huxley paid a logical respect, at least as great, to the continuity of nature.

“When the experience of generation after generation is recorded, and a single book tells us more than Methuselah could have learned, had he spent every waking hour of his thousand years in learning; when apparent disorders are found to be only the recurrent pulses of a slow-working order, and the wonder of a year becomes the commonplace of a century; when repeated and minute examination never reveals a break in the chain of causes and effects; and the whole edifice of practical life is built upon our faith in its continuity; the belief that that chain has never been broken and will never be broken, becomes one of the strongest and most justifiable of human convictions.  And it must be admitted to be a reasonable request, if we ask those who would have us put faith in the actual occurrence of interruptions of that order, to produce evidence in favour of their view, not only equal, but superior, in weight, to that which leads us to adopt ours.”

But out of the mouth of Hume himself he declared against making the recorded experience of man, however lengthy and impressive, a necessary ground for rejecting the possibility of the miraculous.  Hume had said, “Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly