y other people of
theirs, then should it happen to be yourself to whom the sun appeared in
the west at an hour when, according to custom, he ought to have been in
the east, you are not to allow the protestations of any number of
persons who, happening at the time to have been looking the other way,
saw the sun in his usual place, to persuade you that what you saw was a
mock sun or an _ignis fatuus_. Rather than imagine that your own senses
can have deceived you, you are to suppose that all about you are in a
league to deceive you. For precisely the same reason for which you
should reject even universal testimony in favour of a miracle which you
have not witnessed, you are equally to reject universal testimony in
opposition to a miracle the similitude of which you have witnessed.

Or is it possible for a question to be more distinctly begged than when,
to the question whether a miracle has occurred, it is answered that a
miracle is not a miracle unless there be uniform experience against it;
that uniformly adverse experience is direct and full proof against
anything; and that therefore there must always be full proof against
miracles? What is here taken for granted to be full proof is the very
thing requiring to be proved. If past uniformity really be a pledge for
continued uniformity, of course there can be no departure from
uniformity. If the whole question does not at once fall to the ground,
it is because no question has ever really arisen. But what shadow of
pretext is there for treating an hitherto unvaried course of events as
necessarily invariable? From past experience we have deduced what we are
pleased to call _laws_ of nature, but it is morally impossible that we
can seriously think, whatever we are in the habit of saying, that these
laws are self-denying ordinances whereby nature's God has voluntarily
abdicated part of His inalienable prerogative. The utmost efficacy we
are warranted in ascribing to them is that of lines marking certain of
the courses within which God's providence is pleased to move. But how
can we pretend to know for how long a season such may continue to be the
divine pleasure? How do we know that the present season may not be the
first of an alternating series, and that it may not at any moment
terminate, and be succeeded by one of an opposite character? What though
we have some shadow of historical evidence that most physical phenomena
have been going on in much the same order for some six