than what it may strike out from the materials it has to work upon, all beyond must appear wilderness and amazement: therefore the animals having little intercourse among us in our affairs, nor means of information by speech, would have no conception of our politics, commerce, mechanics, mathematics, rhetoric, fashion, and other methods of employing our time, but our proceedings must appear for the most part strange and unaccountable. I have heard a story of some very valuable jewel or piece of plate in a house having been lost in such manner as to make it certain some of the family had taken it, but no suspicion could be fastened upon any particular person, for they all denied having any knowledge of the matter. The vicar was called in to examine them, but being able to get nothing out by his interrogatories, he engaged to discover the thief by art magic: for he had a cock among his poultry of wonderful sagacity, that being rightly prepared and situated, would know the touch of a light-fingered person in the dark; so he fetched the cock tied down upon a nest of hay in a basket, which was placed at the further end of a darkened room: the servants were ordered to go in one by one and stroke the back of the cock, who upon feeling the delinquent would instantly crow. They went in each of them alone and returned, but still the cock did not crow. Our conjurer seemed surprised, for he said he never knew the cock fail before, and surely they had not all touched him. Yes, indeed, and indeed they had. Pray, says he, lets see your hands. Upon turning them up, the palms of all except one were found as black as the chimney stock, for he had besmeared the cock's back with grease and lampblack, of which those who were conscious of their innocence, had taken a strong impression by giving a hearty rub, but the guilty person, though having no great faith in the cock's virtue, yet not knowing what tricks your learned men may play, thought it safest not to venture, especially as his word must be taken, there being no witnesses in the room with him to see how he behaved.

Now imagine the parson's poultry possessing as large a share of the rational faculty as you please, they will never be able to account for these ceremonies undergone by the cock but when he got home to relate his adventures, if there were any free-thinking cockerills in the henroost, they would treat it as an idle, incredible tale; for there could be no use nor purpose in daubing his back, tying him in a basket, shutting him up in a dark room, and sending so many different people to rub him over. Certainly, say they, our daddy begins to doat, and vents his dreams for real facts: or else has been perching carelessly upon the edge of a tub until he fell backwards into some filthy stuff within it, and now would

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impose this invention upon the credulous vulgar among the chicken kind, to set us a pecking away the grease from his feathers, in hopes we shall foul our bills or spoil our stomachs so that we cannot eat, and then he will have all our barley to himself.

To return now to the human species: it is far from incredible, that our sentiments and transactions are of some uses to invisible orders of Beings, but what those uses are, or how resulting, we have no sort of means to investigate therefore it is impossible for us to know what thoughts or actions of ours might not be serviceable to them, which yet would not follow in the ordinary course of natural causes. We know that delusions have abounded in the world; and upon the principle of All things ordered for the best, we may presume there is some good use of their so abounding: why then may not the same apprehensions and state of mind be excited by real appearances, as are now effected by delusion? Thus much we may allow, that many a man has been persuaded of a superior power by means of his imagination, whose understanding was too dull, too superficial, or too little exercised ever to have been convinced by rational proof, and such persuasion, though leaving gross and erroneous impressions behind, yet is better than none at all. For my part, I see nothing absolutely incredible even in the common tales of witches, fairies, and apparitions though they carry so strong an improbability as not to be overcome by any evidence I have yet met with in support of them. But I do not think so highly of my judgment as to take its decisions for mathematical demonstration, or imagine any improbabilities discerned by it absolutely invincible: a moral assurance to the exclusion of all doubt is the highest pitch I can expect to reach, but I have sometimes found reason for doubting upon points whereof I had not any the least suspicion before.

7. With regard to the speculative credibility of interposition, I have observed on the Chapter on Providence that the constitution of all created intelligences, so far as we can comprehend of them, seems to require it: for if God had rested from his works from everlasting, having once for all given such a vigor and regularity to nature as that it might have proceeded on its course forever without needing the further touch of his hand, all dependence and thought of him must have been utterly lost from among them. For he would have been deemed to have delivered them over to the establishment of second causes, with which alone they had concern: so the question whether all things had a beginning, or from what power derived, would have remained a matter of mere curiosity. And within the sphere of our experience we see what efficacy the opinion of divine interpositions has to preserve a sense

of God upon the mind. It can hardly be denied, that much more than half the Religion of mankind grows from this root, which if you could totally eradicate, you would leave very little notion of him remaining in the world. Men at best would proceed upon the principles laid down at the conclusion of my first Volume, of consulting the good of others so far as their own temporal interests were concerned and it must be great luck to prevail on them to practise so much goodness as that.

Then if we proceed from the abstractions of theory to reason upon facts, we shall find, as has been already urged in the same Chapter, that neither the present form of this Earth we inhabit, nor courses of the planets composing the solar system, could have been eternal, nor probably coeval with the existence of matter and general laws of solidity, impulse, attraction, repulsion, and motion: therefore, there must have been an interposition to produce the present order of visible nature out of the confusion of a Chaos, or out of some former order obtaining before. Thus here seems to be a positive proof deduced from experience that the divine Power, either by itself or by some sufficient minister, does interfere with the laws of universal nature in the production of a new system, which was not provided for by those laws: what then should hinder but that the like might interfere upon great and important occasions, during the continuance of a system? Nor is experience wanting in the apprehension of most people of events happening among us daily, which upon reflection must be acknowledged miraculous in the strictest sense, that is, immediate effects of Almighty power without any second cause intervening.

One cannot always tell what grounds to go upon in arguing with particular persons, their notions being so various, and so often kept in reserve, as makes it difficult to know what they will admit and what they will deny. But it is the orthodox and current opinion, that the Souls of men were created at some time while the fœtus lay growing in the womb. But it must be acknowledged that no created Being, of how exalted a nature soever, can produce a new substance out of nonentity, or be employed as a minister in the operation. The laws and highest powers of nature can do no more than form compounds of the materials under their command; which materials, if corporeal, can at best make but an exquisite machinery, destitute of all perception and voluntary motion, unless some particle of spiritual substance be stationed therein drawn from another fund where it had resided before. But to breathe into the organized clay a breath of life nowhere existing before, so as that the composition shall become a living soul, must be the work of no less than God himself,

So

that miracles are so far from being incredible or even uncommon, that we have them continually worked, as often as a child is born, if not as often as a woman becomes pregnant.

8. Perhaps these daily creations will not be counted miraculous, because happening daily, and nothing be admitted to bear that title, unless what is rare and extraordinary: but whether we give them the epithet or no, their essence remains the same, and there may be wisdom and expedience in a measure taken upon particular occasions, though it be not repeated perpetually. To reject everything as incredible merely for its being strange and unusual, would be doing like the lowest of the vulgar, who scarce can be brought to credit anything of the manners or ingenuity of foreigners, very different from what they have been accustomed to see: or like those who will not believe an historian relating that the beaux of king Edward the Fourth's reign wore their shoes of such enormous length, they were forced to tie up the toes by a string coming from the knee, to prevent their doubling under them. So that this argument proceeds at best upon the principles of the nursery, for it is much the same with that used by my children's nurse, when upon seeing a picture of my Euridice brought home, she cried Lauk! that cannot be like mistress, for she has、 never a blue gown. But if this anile objection must prevail with us, yet it will not hold good against the miracles most strongly contended for, which for some years during the Christian, and some ages during the Jewish dispensations, were so frequent that they can scarcely be called strange and unusual events, so much as an established method of Government.

Nevertheless, how much soever this objection may be the real obstacle with men against the credibility of miracles, they may not know it themselves; for it is neither miraculous nor uncommon with us to mistake the true grounds of our persuasions and we find it now backed with another, namely, that the case of the miracles they reject, is not the same with that of the acts of Omnipotence exerted in the formation of a world, or the creation of Souls for children. For the first of these gave beginning to a system of nature not before existent, and the latter co-operate with the natural laws of generation to finish the work they must have left imperfect: but that a wise Governor should innovate upon the laws himself had provided, or break through them while subsisting unrepealed, still remains incredible.

To this I shall answer that all interposition does not make innovation in the laws established. What if water was once changed into wine, the laws of nature producing wine by the vine and the grape continue still the same. What if injunction was once

given to cut off every soul of the Amalekites, the laws of humanity and mercy, of love even to enemies, still remain inviolate, and have been strongly inculcated by the same authority which issued the injunction. If we must be obliged to justify the ways of God by the proceedings of man, let us recollect there have been many suspensions of human laws upon particular occasions: we have known it done in our own times upon the Habeas Corpus act, that great barrier of our liberties, yet without derogating from the wisdom either of the law or the legislature.

And the interpositions now in question must appear less incredible when we consider the purpose for which they are supposed to have been made, not to supply defects in laws provided, but to manifest the dominion of the Governor: which it is notorious was so far overlooked, that many labored arguments have been carried on in prose and verse, in seriousness and ridicule, to prove the laws self-ordained, without a legislature to enact them, or governor able to control them. Were there a kingdom so well policied as that all things might be kept in order everywhere by subordinate magistrates fully instructed in their duty; yet if the people in some distant corner, seeing nothing higher than constables and justices among them, should grow refractory, as thinking those officers acted upon their own authority, would it not be more than credible, that the prince should manifest himself by some signal interposition of power, to convince the mutineers of his dominion.

Then if we take the whole series of interpositions jointly, they may not unfitly be likened to those used in the formation of a world for we may reflect how great an influence they have had upon the moral world which is a part of the natural, introducing a new system of thinking and acting, scarce less important than that formed at what is vulgarly called the creation, out of a chaos of ignorance, darkness, and uncertainty; or as the orthodox say, out of the ruins of an old system originally perfect.

From all these considerations I think it may be fairly concluded, that miracles are not essentially incredible, nor the evidences of them deserving to be rejected without hearing: and though not discoverable by reason founded on experience, yet neither are they contrary to reason, or experience, nor like the idle tale of a man who should pretend by his natural sagacity to have found out a method of flying about in the air; because we know the extent of human powers, and know that this exploit does not lie within them.

9. Nevertheless, credible as I have endeavored to show them, I still hold them highly improbable: but that I may not give offence by being misapprehended, I must beg leave to explain my