literal, and prosaic: some rest on mere tradition; some
on the sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are
obvious fables; some are as well authenticated as facts
of such a kind can be authenticated at all. The
Protestant Christian rejects every one of them--rejects
them without inquiry--involves those for which there
is good authority and those for which there is none
or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and sweeping
denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely,
in the words of Hume, that men should deceive or
be deceived, than that the laws of nature should be
violated. At this moment we are beset with reports of
conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted,
of hands projected out of the world of shadows into
this mortal life. An unusually able, accomplished
person, accustomed to deal with common-sense facts, a
celebrated political economist, and notorious for
business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain
mesmerist, who was my informant's intimate friend,
had raised a dead girl to life. We should believe the
people who tell us these things in any ordinary matter:
they would be admitted in a court of justice as good
witnesses in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a
man on their word. The person just now alluded to is
incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our experience of
the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and
our experience of the capacities of human folly on the
other is so large, that when they tell us these wonderful
stories, most of us are contented to smile; we
do not care so much as to turn out of our way to
examine them.

The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as
from other histories we reject miracles without hesitation,
so of those in the Bible we insist on the universal
acceptance: the former are all false, the latter are all
true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so
sweeping as these, we cannot even suppose that we are
being guided by what is called historical evidence.
Were it admitted that as a whole the miracles of the
Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the
saints, we should be far removed still from any large
inference, that in the one set there is no room for
falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The writer or
writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The
books themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older
writings which are lost; and the accounts of the great
prophets of Israel are a c