reasonable soul. The change of
times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things
which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed
once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer
acquaintance with the phenomena of experience has revealed to us the
action of forces before undreamt of working throughout nature with
unerring uniformity; and to the mediaeval stories of magic, witchcraft,
or the miracles of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The
direct evidence on which such stories were received may remain
unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in
ordinary human things where the evidence is lost--as in some of our own
State trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought
conviction to judges, juries, and parliaments--historians do not
hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking it more likely
that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud
or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been
committed. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value
of our new criteria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less
certain that this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like
every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not
by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own
sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events probable or
improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general
knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages a miracle was
more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been
worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a
shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds
upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the
malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch; and if two or more witnesses
could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse
him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on
the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; when he can find
a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the
intervention of a cause beyond nature; and thus that very element of
marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of
truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.

So it has be