ii David Hume. 15 



know them, is final as a statement of scientific truth 

 a statement on which the entire agnostic literature 

 is one long commentary." l 



Any admission whatever ought no doubt to be 

 made if its truth is proved beyond question. But 

 so tremendous an admission ought not to be 

 made without almost lifelong consideration; yet 

 Professor Drummond has made it in the heat of 

 controversy, in a work which bears many marks of 

 somewhat hasty composition, and apparently with- 

 out perceiving that it is an admission at all. Yet it 

 amounts to asserting in sober earnest what David 

 Hume said with a sneer I quote from memory 

 that Christianity is so miraculous, it takes a miracle 

 to make a man believe it. This saying of Drum- 

 mond's amounts to admitting that the sceptic and 

 the agnostic are right from their own point of view 

 that the power of recognising, believing, and 

 knowing spiritual truth is not an endowment of the 

 race of man, but is specially and miraculously con- 

 ferred on a few, who have no means of making its 

 existence known to those who are without it ; that 

 the only message of the Christian preacher and the 

 Christian missionary to the ignorant masses of man- 

 kind is, "I have a Gospel to proclaim, but you have 

 no faculty whereby to understand it." 



It is, no doubt, Saint Paul who says that 

 "the natural man receiveth not the things of the 

 Spirit of God ; and he cannot know them, because 

 1 Natural Law in the Spiritual World, p. 78. 



