igions. We recognized the validity of
this idea of Revelation, and the supreme importance to the moral and
religious life of such historical revelations, on one condition--that
the claim of any historical Religion to the allegiance of its followers
must be held to rest in the last resort upon the appeal which it makes
to their Reason and Conscience: though the individual may often be
{158} quite justified in accepting and relying upon the Reason and
Conscience of the religious Society rather than upon his own.

The view which I have taken of Revelation makes it quite independent of
what are commonly called miracles. All that I have said is quite
consistent with the unqualified acceptance or with the unqualified
rejection of miracles. But some of you may perhaps expect me to
explain a little more fully my own attitude towards that question. And
therefore I will say this much--that, if we regard a miracle as
implying a suspension of a law of nature, I do not think we can call
such a suspension _a priori_ incredible; but the enormous experience
which we have of the actual regularity of the laws of nature, and of
the causes which in certain states of the human mind lead to the belief
in miracles, makes such an event in the highest degree improbable. To
me at least it would seem practically impossible to get sufficient
evidence for the occurrence of such an event in the distant past: all
our historical reasoning presupposes the reign of law. But it is being
more and more admitted by theologians who are regarded as quite
orthodox and rather conservative, that the idea of a miracle need not
necessarily imply such a suspension of natural law. And on the other
hand, decidedly critical and liberal theologians are more and more
disposed to admit {159} that many of the abnormal events commonly
called miraculous may very well have occurred without involving any
real suspension of natural law. Recent advances in psychological
knowledge have widened our conception of the possible influence of mind
over matter and of mind over mind. Whether an alleged miraculous event
is to be accepted or not must, as it seems to me, depend partly upon
the amount of critically sifted historical evidence which can be
produced for it, partly upon the nature of the event itself--upon the
question whether it is or is not of such a kind that we can with any
probability suppose that it might be accounted for either by known laws
or by laws at presen