i^40 THE TWO FLORAS, 



ral law, and have thus shown himself to be its Author and 

 Master. Such seems to be the philosophy of miracles ; which 

 are thus evidently not only not impossibilities, but even not 

 improbabilities. Even were we to permit the sceptic himself 

 to fix the numbers representative of those several rnays in the 

 case which I have just repeated, the chances against them, 

 so to speak, would be less by many thousand times than the 

 chances against the hundred dice of La Place's illustration all 

 turning up aces. The existence of a Great First Cause is at 

 least as probable — the sceptic himself being judge in the mat- 

 ter — as the non-existence of a Great First Cause : and so the 

 probability in this first stage of the argument, instead of being, 

 as in the case of the single die, only one to six, is as one to 

 one. Again, — in accordance with an expectation so general 

 among the human family as to form one of the great instincts 

 of our nature, — an instinct to which every form of religion, 

 true or false, bears evidence, — it is in no degree less probable 

 that this God should have revealed himself to man, than that 

 he should not have revealed himself to man ; and here 

 the chances are again as one to one, — not, as in the second 

 stage of the calculation on the dice, as one to thirty-six. Nor, 

 in the third and last stage, is it less probable that God, in 

 revealing himself to man, should have given miraculous evi- 

 dence of the truth of the revelation, so that man " might be- 

 lieve in Him for his work's sake," than that He should not 

 have done so ; and here yet again the chances are as one to 

 one, — not as one to two hundred and sixteen. No rational 

 sceptic could fix the chances lower ; nay, no rational sceptic, 

 so far as the existence of a Great First Cause is concerned, 

 would be inclined to fix them so low : and yet it is in order 

 to annihilate all belief in a possibility against which the 

 chances are so few as to be represented — scepticism itself 

 being the actuary in the case — by three units, that Hume 

 and La Place have framed their ars;ument. Miracles mat/ 



