falsely, mistook natural phenomena for supernatural miracles.
What more easy than to suppose people dead when they were not, and
who were merely recovered from a swoon or trance? than to imagine
the blind, deaf, or dumb to be miraculously healed, when in fact
they were cured by medical skill? than to fancy the blaze of a flambeau
to be a star, and to shape thunder into articulate speech, and so on?
Christ was no miracle-worker, but he was a capital doctor."

I pondered over this "natural" explanation for a long time. At last
I ventured to express to a third infidel friend my dissatisfaction
with it. "Not only," said I, "is such a perpetual and felicitous
genius for gross blundering, such absolute craziness of credulity,
in strange contrast with the intellectual and moral elevation which
the New Testament writers everywhere evince, and especially in the
conception of that Ideal of Excellence which even those who reject
all that is supernatural in Christianity acknowledge to be so
sublime a masterpiece,--in whose discourses the most admirable ethics
are illustrated, and in whose life they are still more divinely
dramatized,--not only is such ludicrous madness of fanaticism at
variance with the tone of sobriety and simplicity everywhere
traceable; but,--what is more,--when I reflect on the number and
grossness of these supposed illusions, I find it hard to imagine how
to image how even individual could have been honestly stupid enough
to be beguiled by them, and utterly impossible to suppose that a
number of men should on many occasions have been simultaneously
thus befooled! But, what is much more, how can those who must
often have managed the phenomena which were thus misinterpreted
into miracles,--how, especially, can the great Physician himself,
who knew that he was only playing the doctor, be supposed honestly
to have allowed the simple-minded followers to persist in so strange
an error? Either he, or they, or both, must, one would think, have
been guilty of the grossest frauds. But the mere number and
simultaneity of such strange illusions, under such a variety of
circumstances, render it impossible to receive this hypothesis. I
cannot see, I said, that it is so very easy for a number of men to
have been continually mistaking 'flambeaux' for 'stars,' 'thunder'
for 'human speech,' and 'Roman soldiers' for 'angels.'"

My friend laughed outright. "I should think it is not easy, indeed!"
he exclaimed, "especially that