332 AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY ;x 



power from the Church at the exact point of 

 time when Anglican doctrine ceased and Roman 

 doctrine began. With a little adjustment a 

 squeeze here and a pull there the Christianity 

 of the first three or four centuries might be made 

 to fit, or see in to fit, pretty well into the Anglican 

 scheme. So the miracles, from Justin say to 

 Jerome, might be recognised ; while, in later 

 times, the Church having become " corrupt " 

 that is to say, having pursued one and the same 

 line of development further than was pleasing to 

 Anglicans its alleged miracles must needs be 

 shams and impostures. 



Under these circumstances, it may be imagined 

 that the establishment of a scientific frontier 

 between the earlier realm of supposed fact and 

 the later of asserted delusion, had its difficulties ; 

 and torrents of theological special pleading about 

 the subject flowed from clerical pens ; until that 

 learned and acute Anglican divine, Conyers 

 Middleton, in his " Free Inquiry," tore the sophis- 

 tical web they had laboriously woven to pieces, and 

 demonstrated that the miracles of the patristic 

 age, early and late, must stand or fall together, 

 inasmuch as the evidence for the later is just as 

 good as the evidence for the earlier wonders. If 

 tho one set are certified by contemporaneous 

 witnesses of high repute, so are the other; and, 

 in point of probability, there is not a pin to choose 

 between the two. That is the solid and irrefrag- 



