it a pious belief, or a pious opinion, or a religious
conjecture, or at least, a tolerance of such belief, or opinion or
conjecture in others; that on the other hand, as it was a duty to have a
belief, of more or less strong texture, in given cases, so in other
cases it was a duty not to believe, not to opine, not to conjecture, not
even to tolerate the notion that a professed fact was true, inasmuch as
it would be credulity or superstition, or some other moral fault, to do
so. This was the region of Private Judgment in religion; that is, of a
Private Judgment, not formed arbitrarily and according to one's fancy or
liking, but conscientiously, and under a sense of duty.

Considerations such as these throw a new light on the subject of
Miracles, and they seem to have led me to reconsider the view which I
had taken 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 connexion 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