wn sake has restricted him, and apart from which condition I have
already stated that a revelation would be worthless. It is a far
more difficult matter than those who have not reflected upon the
subject would suppose, and you would have more reason to say so
still, if you knew, as I do, how ludicrously, as well as how utterly,
many other attempts have failed."

He then amused me with an account of a sage, who, seeing the ill
consequences which had followed from the very local or limited
character of miracles (when a few generations had passed by),
resolved to remedy this by a series of wonders so stupendous and
magnificent, that the very echo of them, as it were, should
reverberate through the hollow of future ages, and so impress all
tradition as to render them independent of the voice of individual
historians. He accordingly passed to the very extreme limit (if he
did not go beyond it) by which a miracle is necessarily restricted,--
that of not disturbing general laws. He succeeded perfectly in the
place in which these phenomena were witnessed; though, as there were
multitudes who knew nothing of the operator, but were only conscious
that nature was playing some strange pranks, no connection was
established in their minds between the doctrine and the miracles.
But the consequences in the future were the direct contrary of what
the sanguine philosopher had contemplated. If the impression of
those who saw these splendid wonders could have been prolonged,
all had been well; but so far from the report of them conciliating
the regard of posterity, their very grandeur and vastness were the
principal arguments against them, and condemned them to universal
rejection. Who could believe, men said, that phenomena so strange
and so portentous--not only so different from, and so contrary to,
the uniform course of nature, but so much beyond the limited purpose
which must have been contemplated by a truly miraculous
interposition--had ever happened? If they had been single events,
very transient and local disturbances of the laws of nature for a
high object, the case, they candidly avowed, would have been wholly
different; but such wholesale infractions of the fixed laws of the
universe were at once to be summarily rejected. They were
unquestionably the offspring of an age of fable and superstition.

It did not fare much better with another miracle-monger of the
same species. In one community, which he had engaged to instruct in