36 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



disbelieve it. To this argument I avow my deliberate conviction, 

 after the best thought I can give the subject, that no answer can be 

 given regarded from a merely intellectual point of view, and subject 

 to the conditions which modern thought not only prescribes, but is 

 strong enough to enforce. It goes by the name of Hume, because he 

 was the first to formulate it, but it is not so much an argument as a 

 simple statement of common experience. All men who, from the days 

 of St. Thomas, have disbelieved in miracles, have done so practically 

 upon this ground. And to the " doubting " Apostle maybe safely 

 attributed the first use of the now famous formula, " It is much more 

 likely that you, my friends, should be mistaken than that He should 

 have risen." Now, to such a state of mind, what answer short of 

 another miracle could be given then, or can be given now ? True, 

 you may point out the moral defects in the mind of Thomas which 

 led him to disbelieve, but these are immediately counterbalanced by 

 a reference to the intellectual defects of Mary Magdalene, which 

 prompted her to accept the miracle. There is no real room for 

 weighing the evidence on both sides, and pronouncing for that which 

 has the greatest probability, when your opponent, by a simple asser- 

 tion, reduces all the evidence on one side to zero. Once more let 

 one ask Christian apologists to realize this, and having realized it, 

 no matter at what cost to the fears and prejudices of theology, let us 

 then proceed the more calmly to examine what it precisely means 

 and to what conclusions it leads us. 



We observe, first, that this argument is derived not from the first 

 of the two ways in which, as we saw, science influences belief, namely, 

 by altering the nature of the evidence required, but from the second, 

 namely, by predisposing the minds of men against belief upon any 

 attainable evidence whatever. "We have seen that the evidence is 

 that of honest men, that it is scientifically to the point, and sufficient 

 to prove ordinary historical events. More than this cannot be 

 demanded in the case of events which do not come under law or per- 

 sonal observation. But the minds of men are so predisposed by 

 their experience of unchanging order to reject the miraculous, that, 

 first, they demand more and more clear evidence than in other cases ; 

 and, secondly, they have recourse at once to the many considerations 

 which weaken the force of evidence for things supernatural, and 

 account for men's mistakes without impugning their veracity. Any 

 one who reads Hume's essay will be struck at once with the, so to 

 speak, subjectivity of the argument. Upon this very point he says, 

 *' When any one tells me he saw a dead man restored to life, I imme- 

 diately consider within myself" etc., etc.. We ask then, at once, " To 

 whom is it more likely that evidence of a miracle should be false than 

 that the miracle should be true ? " and the answer must of course be, 

 " Those who, rightly or wrongly, are predisposed in that direction, by 

 their experience of a changeless law, growing ever wider and more 



