and
without effort even in questions of belief; so far from it, that
the question of faith against reason may often be more properly
termed the question of reason against imagination. It does not
seldom require faith to believe reason, isolated as she may be
amid vast irrational influences, the weight of custom, the power
of association, the strength of passion, the _vis inertiae_ of
sense, the mere force of the uniformity of nature as a
spectacle--those influences which make up that power of the world
which Scripture always speaks of as the antagonist of faith.

The antecedent questions about miracles, before coming to the question
of the actual evidence of any, are questions about which reason--reason
disengaged and disembarrassed from the arbitrary veto of
experience--has a right to give its verdict. Miracles presuppose the
existence of God, and it is from reason alone that we get the idea of
God; and the antecedent question then is, whether they are really
compatible with the idea of God which reason gives us. Mr. Mozley
remarks that the question of miracles is really "shut up in the
enclosure of one assumption, that of the existence of God"; and that if
we believe in a personal Deity with all power over nature, that belief
brings along with it the possibility of His interrupting natural order
for His own purposes. He also bids us observe that the idea of God
which reason gives us is exposed to resistance of the same kind, and
from precisely the same forces, in our mental constitution, as the idea
of miracles. When reason has finished its overwhelming proof, still
there is a step to be taken before the mind embraces the equally
overwhelming conclusion--a step which calls for a distinct effort,
which obliges the mind, satisfied as it may be, to beat back the
counteracting pressure of what is visible and customary. After
reason--not opposed to it or independent of it, but growing out of it,
yet a distinct and further movement--comes faith. This is the case, not
specially in religion, but in all subjects, where the conclusions of
reason cannot be subjected to immediate verification. How often, as he
observes, do we see persons "who, when they are in possession of the
best arguments, and what is more, understand those arguments, are still
shaken by almost any opposition, because they want the faculty to
_trust_ an argument when they have got one."

Not, however, that the existe