eached--which I pronounce unlawful.' Then
a period may come when man will be able to raise the dead. If this be
conceded--and I do not see how Mr. Mozley can avoid the concession--it
destroys the necessity of inferring Christ's Divinity from His
miracles. He, it may be contended, antedated the humanity of the
future; as a mighty tidal wave leaves high upon the beach a mark which
by-and-by becomes the general level of the ocean. Turn the matter as
you will, no other warrant will be found for the all-important
conclusion that Christ's miracles demonstrate Divine power, than an
argument which has been stigmatised by Mr. Mozley as a 'rope of
sand'--the argument from experience.

The learned Bampton Lecturer would be in this position, even had he
seen with his own eyes every miracle recorded in the New Testament.
But he has, not seen these miracles; and his intellectual plight is
therefore worse. He accepts these miracles on testimony. Why does he
believe that testimony? How does he know that it is not delusion; how
is he sure that it is not even fraud? He will answer, that the
writing bears the marks of sobriety and truth; and that in many cases
the bearers of this message to mankind sealed it with their blood.
Granted with all my heart; but whence the value of all this? Is it
not solely derived from the fact that men, _as we know them_, do not
sacrifice their lives in the attestation of that which they know to be
untrue? Does not the entire value of the testimony of the Apostles
depend ultimately upon our experience of human nature? It appears,
then, that those said to have seen the miracles, based their
inferences from what they saw on the argument from experience; and
that Mr. Mozley bases his belief in their testimony on the same
argument. The weakness of his conclusion is quadrupled by this double
insertion of a principle of belief, to which he flatly denies
rationality. His reasoning, in fact, cuts two ways--if it destroys
our trust in the order of nature, it far more effectually abolishes
the basis on which Mr. Mozley seeks to found the Christian religion.

*****

Over this argument from experience, which at bottom is _his_ argument,
Mr. Mozley rides rough-shod. There is a dash of scorn in the energy
with which he tramples on it. Probably some previous writer had made
too much of it, and thus invited his powerful assault. Finding the
difficulty of belief in miracles to rise from their being in
cont