Now, the apostles died in asserting the truth of Christ’s resurrection.  It was always in their power to quit their evidence and save their lives.  Even their bitterest enemies, the Jews, required no more of them than to be silent. [Acts 4:17, 5:28] Others have denied facts, or asserted facts, in hopes of saving their lives, when they were under sentence of death:  but these men attested a fact at the expence of their lives, which they might have saved by denying the truth.  So that between criminals dying, and denying plain facts, and the apostles dying for their testimony, there is this material difference:  criminals deny the truth in hopes of saving their lives; the apostles willingly parted with their lives, rather than deny the truth.

We are come now to the last, and indeed the most weighty consideration.

The council for the apostles having in the course of the argument allowed, that more evidence is required to support the credit of the resurrection, it being a very extraordinary event, than is necessary in common cases, in the latter part of his defence sets forth the extraordinary evidence upon which this fact stands.  That is, the evidence of the Spirit, the Spirit of wisdom and power, which was given to the apostles, to enable them to confirm their testimony by signs and wonders, and mighty works.  This part of the argument was well argued by the Gentleman, and I need not repeat all he said.

The council for Woolston, in his reply, made two objections to this evidence.

The first was this:  That the resurrection having all along been pleaded to be a matter of fact, and an object of sense, to recur to miracles for the proof of it, is to take it out of its proper evidence, the evidence of sense; and to rest it upon a proof which cannot be applied to it:  for seeing one miracle, he says, is no evidence that another miracle was wrought before it; as healing a sick man, is no evidence that a dead man was raised to life.

To clear this difficulty, you must consider by what train of reasoning miracles come to be proofs in any case.  A miracle of itself proves nothing, unless this only, that there is a cause equal to the producing the effect we see.  Suppose you should see a man raise one from the dead, and he should go away and say nothing to you, you would not find that any fact, or any proposition, was proved or disproved by this miracle.  But should he declare to you, in the name of him, by whose power the miracle was wrought, that image-worship was unlawful, you would then be possessed of a proof against image-worship.  But how?  Not because the miracle proves anything as to the point itself, but because the man’s declaration is authorised by him who wrought the miracle in confirmation of his doctrine; and therefore miracles are directly a proof of the authority of persons, and not of the truth of things.