tainable by those persons who received an account of them from eye-witnesses.

In appreciating the correctness with which evidence may be transmitted, it of course makes no difference whether it be the evidence of a miracle, or the evidence of only an ordinary fact. If the evidence of the miracles of Moses or Christ must be less now than it was, in the age in which they lived, to all persons who were not eye-witnesses, so must the evidence of the invasion of Asia by Alexander, or of the existence of the war between Cæsar and Pompey, be to us a less evidence than that which was possessed in Italy or Macedonia, in the ages immediately subsequent to those events. But if it may be affirmed to be wholly incredible that, if no such events had existed, they could by any possibility have been so attested as they are in history, our evidence of them is not diminished, nor, while we retain in our hands the same complete attestations, will it ever be diminished to future generations by the lapse of any assignable number of ages. Keep a chain unbroken, and there can be no difference of strength between the several links of it: that is, no difference arising from the order in which they are placed.

To the eye, no doubt, the order, or the length, may in point of impression make a very great difference. And so many persons who perceive that twice two is four, cannot see that in every right-angled triangle the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the square of the two sides. Yet these two positions are, doubtless, equally certain. Reason sees that it is so. It is the very business of the reasoning faculty to carry into a conclusion often very remote, and even undiscernible to careless inquirers, the very same certainty which exists in the premises.

Or to take for example any supposed affirmation of a miracle which might be asserted now to take place.

Suppose it asserted that some miracle has been performed in Dublin, at the tomb of a Roman Catholic saint: and suppose also that we receive an account of it from persons professing to have been eye-witnesses. Is this stronger evidence that some such miracle has been asserted, than that which we should derive from receiving authentic documents that the miracle had been affirmed by the very same witnesses to several large bodies of unprejudiced men, to the civil authorities, and to other cautious in

quirers, and that they all had actually, in conscientious belief of the fact, abandoned all their civil and political interests, and become converts to the Roman Catholic faith? We suppose them to do this in defiance of that ridicule which they must expect to encounter in venturing to espouse what would commonly be regarded so stale a trick as a miracle, in defiance of the injury or inconvenience which they must sustain by deserting their own, the predominant party, and embracing the interests of a rival party instead; and what is perhaps still more, in painful opposition to all those prepossessions of birth and education which might naturally incline them to despise all such pretensions.

Suppose all this, and then, I ask, must authentic documents which prove that this conduct of such persons, and these conversions, arose from their conviction that some miracle had been performed, a conviction founded on the affirmation of persons professing to have been eyewitnesses;-must, I ask, these documents, if quite express on these points, be of necessity a less evidence to us that some such affirmation was made, than the evidence which we should possess if the same report had been made to our

selves by those same eye-witnesses? It is removed a step farther from us. The witnesses in the one case tell their story to us: we have proof in the other case that they told their story to others. In the mere impression there may be much in this difference. The vulgar will listen to him who has seen the king, with much stronger interest than to one who has not seen him. But that there is a king they might know with equal certainty, though they were to see nothing but the newspapers. It is not impossible that there may be Atheists now, who would have believed in God if they could have conversed with Adam. But yet I see not that they must have had more reason for believing, merely because they were placed so much the nearer to the original fountain of all human existence.

And so in the case of the supposed miracle in Dublin. If we know absolutely that certain facts must have originated in some story of miracles, that they cannot possibly be so much misrepresented to us as that there should not have been any foundation for the story, we have then equal evidence that some such story existed, whether we ourselves see the witnesses of it or not.

Prior facts which are necessary to,

or which are implied by other subsequent facts, cannot be less certain than those subsequent facts themselves. Hence I think it follows, that our not seeing the witnesses may make no difference to us in the strength of our evidence, namely of our evidence that the miraculous fact was affirmed or asserted on the occasion assigned.

But if one remove makes no difference, why should a hundred? or rather, if these authentic documents which we now possess of the fact, go down in their integrity, and with full proof of their integrity, to future ages, those future ages will, of course, be placed in the same circumstances with those in which we are placed now. As we have evidence equal to that derived from eye-witnesses, so must future ages also have the same evidence. There exists not any necessity that it must be altered by time.

Nor is the case of the Scripture miracles any way different. If authentic documents are come down to us, which contain statements either of the Jewish story or of the Christian, which could not have found their way into those documents, unless some miracles had been at least asserted to have been performed, we have then