96 PROF. H. LANGHORNE ORCHARD, M.A., B.SC., ON 
ace, that is, ace will be thrown on an average only once in six 
throws. But this is no reason against believing that ace was 
thrown on a given occasion, if any credible witness asserts 
it.” And he reminds* us that “In the instances on record in 
which a great number of witnesses, of good reputation and 
scientific acquiremenis, have testified to the truth of something 
which has turned out untrue, there have almost always been 
circumstances which, to a keen observer who had taken due 
pains to sift the matter, would have rendered the testimony 
untrustworthy.” We may also notice that Hume’s way of 
putting the matter, since it regards testimony as the sole 
evidence for miracle, is not just ; since this evidence may not 
be restricted to testimony, but may include the conditions and 
circumstances of the case, the relation of the event to other 
events before or after, and also its power of explaining what 
may otherwise be inexplicable. 
Spinoza’sf objection to miracles as probable is based upon his 
conception of the Divine character. We must beware, he says, 
of “running into the dangerous error of the Multitude that 
God hath created Nature so impotent, and given Laws and 
Rules so barren, as that he is compelled sometimes to help her 
by new ordinances and supplies of Vertue, in order to her 
Support and conservation, and that things may succeed 
according to his Intention and Design. An Error than which 
nothing is more alien from Reason, nothing more unworthy the 
Majesty of the divine Nature.” “The power of God and the 
power of Nature are,” he says, “one and the same.” From this. 
postulate, he draws the conclusion that whatever takes place in 
nature, since it takes place by the power of God, takes place by 
the power of nature. “ Nature,” in his pantheistic theory, is a 
form of God; therefore, if a miracle were to occur in nature, 
it must be explicable by natural causes,—in other words, it 
could not really be a miracle. “ For,” he says,t “if we under- 
stind the natural causes of the fact, however rare it be; or if 
we have often seen the like done before, though we do not 
conceive the natural cause thereof, we no longer adimire it, nor 
call it a miracle.” That God should change His own decrees, 
“from the perfection of the Divine nature” Spinoza holds to 
be absurd. 
* Logic, vol. ii, p. 169. + Miracles no Violations, pp. 7, 8. 
+ Miracles. Similarly, Hobbs (in Leviathan, Part iii) regards a miracle 
as “a work of God which men admire or wonder at,” and again, in the 
same chapter, as “a work of God beside His operation by the way of 
Nature ordained in the Creation.” 
