testimony of such undoubted integrity that we
must either believe that miracles can be performed by numberless
persons with no other claim to special regard, or that it is
singularly easy to get false but honest evidence regarding them.
Huxley supported the latter alternative strongly, and held the view
that to believe in any particular miracles would require evidence very
much more direct and very much stronger than would be necessary in the
case of inherently probable events.

The second _a priori_ objection to the credibility of miracles has
been urged more strongly, but was not accepted by Huxley. It is that
miracles are inherently incredible inasmuch as they are "violations of
the order of nature." Hume, attacking miracles, had made this
objection the chief ground of his argument. Huxley paid a logical
respect, at least as great, to the continuity of nature.

"When the experience of generation after generation is recorded,
and a single book tells us more than Methuselah could have
learned, had he spent every waking hour of his thousand years in
learning; when apparent disorders are found to be only the
recurrent pulses of a slow-working order, and the wonder of a
year becomes the commonplace of a century; when repeated and
minute examination never reveals a break in the chain of causes
and effects; and the whole edifice of practical life is built
upon our faith in its continuity; the belief that that chain has
never been broken and will never be broken, becomes one of the
strongest and most justifiable of human convictions. And it must
be admitted to be a reasonable request, if we ask those who would
have us put faith in the actual occurrence of interruptions of
that order, to produce evidence in favour of their view, not only
equal, but superior, in weight, to that which leads us to adopt
ours."

But out of the mouth of Hume himself he declared against making the
recorded experience of man, however lengthy and impressive, a
necessary ground for rejecting the possibility of the miraculous. Hume
had said, "Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived
implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any
demonstration, argument, or reasoning, _a priori_." This or the like
applies to most of the recorded miracles. Huxley was extremely careful
not to assert that they were incredible merely because they might
involve