Now, if the miracles recorded by Augustine, or any of them, were true and real, the only inference is that the action of miraculous power continued in the Church to a far later date than some modern writers allow.  If, on the contrary, they are false, then they take their place among hosts of other counterfeits of what is good and true.  They no more go to prove the non-existence of the real miracles which they caricature, than any other counterfeit proves the non-existence of the thing of which it is the counterfeit.  Nay, rather, the very fact that they are counterfeits proves the existence of that of which they are counterfeits.  The Ecclesiastical miracles are clearly not independent miracles; true or false, they depend upon the miraculous powers of the early Church.  If any of them are true, then these powers continued in the Church to a late date; if they are false accounts (whether wilfully or through mistake, makes no difference), their falsehood is one testimony out of many to the miraculous origin of the dispensation.

Those recorded by Augustine are in no sense evidential.  Nothing came of them except the relief, real or supposed, granted to the sufferers.  No message from God was supposed to be accredited by them.  No attempt was made to spread the knowledge of them; indeed, so far from this, in one case at least, Augustine is “indignant at the apathy of the friends of one who had been miraculously cured of a cancer, that they allowed so great a miracle to be so little known.” (Vol. ii. p. 171.) In every conceivable respect they stand in the greatest contrast to the Resurrection of Christ.

Each case of an Ecclesiastical miracle must be examined (if one cares to do so) apart, on its own merits.  I can firmly believe in the reality of some, whilst the greater part are doubtful, and many are wicked impostures.  These last, of course, give occasion to the enemy to disparage the whole system of which they are assumed to be a part, but they tell against Christianity only in the same sense in which all tolerated falsehood or evil in the Church obscures its witness to those eternal truths of which it is “the pillar and the ground.”

Now, all this is equally applicable to Superstition generally in relation to the supernatural.  As the counterfeit miracles of the later ages witness that there must have been true ones to account for the very existence of the counterfeit, so the universal existence of Superstition witnesses to the reality of those supernatural interpositions of which it is the distorted image.  If Hume’s doctrine be true, that a miracle, i.e. a supernatural interposition, is contrary to universal experience and so incredible—­if from the first beginning of things there has been one continuous sequence of natural cause and effect, unbroken by the interposition of any superior power, how is it that mankind have ever formed a conception of a supernatural power?  And yet the conception, in the shape of superstition at least, is absolutely universal.  Tribes who have no idea of the existence of God, use charms and incantations to propitiate unseen powers.