a new light on the subject of
Miracles, and they seem to have led me to re-consider the view which
I took of them in my Essay in 1825-6. I do not know what was the date
of this change in me, nor of the train of ideas on which it was
founded. That there had been already great miracles, as those of
Scripture, as the Resurrection, was a fact establishing the principle
that the laws of nature had sometimes been suspended by their Divine
Author; and since what had happened once might happen again, a
certain probability, at least no kind of improbability, was attached
to the idea, taken in itself, of miraculous intervention in later
times, and miraculous accounts were to be regarded in connection with
the verisimilitude, scope, instrument, character, testimony, and
circumstances, with which they presented themselves to us; and,
according to the final result of those various considerations, it was
our duty to be sure, or to believe, or to opine, or to surmise, or to
tolerate, or to reject, or to denounce. The main difference between
my essay on Miracles in 1826 and my essay in 1842 is this: that
in 1826 I considered that miracles were sharply divided into two
classes, those which were to be received, and those which were to
be rejected; whereas in 1842 I saw that they were to be regarded
according to their greater or less probability, which was in some
cases sufficient to create certitude about them, in other cases only
belief or opinion.

Moreover, the argument from analogy, on which this view of the
question was founded, suggested to me something besides, in
recommendation of the ecclesiastical miracles. It fastened itself
upon the theory of church history which I had learned as a boy from
Joseph Milner. It is Milner's doctrine, that upon the visible Church
come down from above, from time to time, large and temporary
_Effusions_ of divine grace. This is the leading idea of his work. He
begins by speaking of the Day of Pentecost, as marking "the first of
those _Effusions_ of the Spirit of God, which from age to age have
visited the earth since the coming of Christ" (vol. i. p. 3). In a
note he adds that "in the term 'Effusion' there is not here included
the idea of the miraculous or extraordinary operations of the Spirit
of God;" but still it was natural for me, admitting Milner's general
theory, and applying to it the principle of analogy, not to stop
short at his abrupt _ipse dixit_, but boldly to pass forward to the
con