THE ATTITUDE OF SCIENCE TOWARDS MIRACLES. 17 
sufficient to have invented them. Men will in time give up miracles 
as they have given up witchcraft.” 
Professor Lecky.—* We must quite dismiss from our minds the 
ordinary Protestant notion that miracles are very rare and 
exceptional phenomena, the primary object of which was always 
to accredit the teacher of some divine truth that could not otherwise 
be established. In the writings of the fathers, especially of the 
fourth and fifth centuries, they were a kind of celestial charity, 
supplying the wants of the faithful. Both Christians and Pagans 
admitted the reality of the miracles of the other, though ascribing 
them to the agency of demons. Whenever a saint was canonised 
it was necessary to prove that he had worked a miracle ; there were 
25,000 in the Bollandist collection, also thousands of miraculous 
images and pictures. All history shows that in exact proportion to 
the intellectual progress of nations the accounts of miracles become 
rarer and rarer, until at last they entirely cease. It is the 
fundamental error of most writers on miracles to ignore the 
predisposition of men in certain stages of society towards 
the miraculous, which makes an amount of evidence that would 
be quite sufficient to establish an ordinary fact altogether inadequate 
to establish a supernatural one. ‘To suppose that the Fathers who 
held these opinions were capable in the second or third century to 
ascertain with any degree of just confidence whether miracles had 
taken place in Judzea in the first century is grossly absurd. The 
predisposition to believe the miraculous constructed out of a few 
natural facts the complicated system of witchcraft, persuaded all 
the ablest men for many centuries that it was incontestably true, 
and conducted tens of thousands of victims to a fearful and 
unlamented death, the minds of men were completely imbued 
with an order of ideas that had no connection with experience.” 
J. A. Froude.—“ The Emperor Vespasian restored a blind man to 
sight, and a man with a disabled hand had recovered the use of it 
under circumstances which closely resemble those of the Gospel 
miracles. The historical inquirer can look only through the eyes 
of the early Christian writers who neither saw as he sees or judged 
as he judges. The world as they already knew it was already full 
of signs and wonders. A miracle was as little improbable in itself 
as any other event. Celsus wrote, ‘The Christian teachers have 
no power over men of education, they call human wisdom folly.’ 
