40 Human Levitation. (January, 
had to be held. The witnesses and experts, including three 
first-rate engineers, named Vignoles, Crampton, and Fox, 
agreed that the fall was “‘one of those events that cannot be 
accounted for ;” that neither the materials nor plan of con- 
struction could be better (Builder, 1853, p. 546); the two 
former that both were such as they would repeat identically, 
and Crampton advised that this should be done, “ believing 
it to be perfectly safe,”—safe by physical law, though in 
fact it had fallen. Neither our engineers nor coroners’ 
courts, then, object to miracles in Dr. Newman’s sense—: 
events without physical cause, or breaches of physical law. 
They will on occasion, on what they consider ‘‘dignus 
vindice nodus,” admit as readily as any medizval monk, that 
‘Deus intersit’”’ in this capricious manner. But as Paul 
said that if the Sadducees were right, he and his fellows 
must be ‘‘false witnesses of God,” in testifying that he 
raised up a man from death, ‘‘ whom he raised not up if 
so be that the dead rise not ;’”” we must admit that, similarly, 
if the view of continuity common to St. Paul, Grove, 
Tyndall, and ourselves be sound, these engineers are just 
such witnesses, in swearing that, to overthrow the scaffold- 
ing, He interrupted natural law, which He did not interrupt 
if (as we hold) it is continuous. 
Events that we hold to be, like all events, natural and 
**in the wheels,” but which are not explicable without the 
volition of unseen beings, and have so been taken to attest 
the presence of an invisible population, require some dis- 
tinctive name. Any that were clearly predicted would of 
course, by my definition, be miracles; but when they are 
not predicted, this definition excludes them, and I would 
suggest the non-scriptural but classic and patristic term 
thaums. In every historical age of the most civilised 
countries, these have been as well attested as any terrestrial 
facts, not reproducible at will, can be attested; and during 
the centuries, before and since the Reformation, that the 
frightful superstitions as to the crime of witchcraft held 
sway, plenty of such facts were always sufficiently testified 
to induce English judges and juries, and afterwards American 
ones, to consign hundreds of unfortunate, harmless women 
to death. One phenomenon always then held to fix this 
crime—and which, if proved in court, would cost the subject 
his or her life—was bodily levitation; in which some force 
was seen to work, in Archbishop Trench’s words, “‘as an 
opposing force to the attraction of the earth,” and also “‘ to 
overbear it.” The thing is testified now, of Mr. Home, a 
Scotchman, the American Davenports, when children, the 
