ge, country, and, above
all, such men as the problem limits us to), must the infidel receive,
and receive all at once; and of him who can receive them we can but once
more declare that so far 'from having no faith', he rather possesses
the 'faith' which removes 'mountains!'--only it appears that his faith,
like that of Rome or of Oxford, is a faith which excludes reason.

On the other hand, to him who accepts Christianity, none of these
paradoxes present themselves. On the supposition of the truth of
the miracles and the prophecies, he does not wonder at its origin
or success: and as little does he wonder at all the literary and
intellectual achievements of its early chroniclers--if their elevation
of sentiment was from a divine source, and if the artless harmony, and
reality of their narratives was the simple effect of the consistency of
truth, and of transcription from the life.

Now, on the other hand, what are the chief objections which Reconcile
the infidel to his enormous burden of paradoxes, and which appear to the
Christian far less invincible than the paradoxes themselves? They
are, especially with all modern infidelity, objections to the a priori
improbability of the doctrines revealed, and of the miracles which
sustain them. Now, here we come to the very distinction on which we
have already insisted, and which is so much insisted on by Butler. The
evidence which sustains Christianity is all such as man is competent to
consider; and is precisely of the same nature as that which enters into
his every-day calculations of probability; While the objections are
founded entirely on our ignorance and presumption. They suppose that we
know more of the modes of the divine administration--of what God may
have permitted, of what is possible and impossible to the ultimate
development of an imperfectly developed system, and its relations to the
entire universe,--than we do or can know.*
___

* The possible implications of Christianity with distant regions of the
universe, and the dim hints which hints which Scripture seems to throw
out as to such implication, are beautifully treated in the 4th, 5th,
and 6th of Chalmer's 'Astronomical Discourses;' and we need not tell the
read of Butler how much he insists upon similar considerations.
____

Of these objections the most widely felt and the most specious,
especially in our day, is the assumption that miracles are an
impossibility+; and yet we will venture to say that the