212 KEY. H. C. M. WATSON 



The Second peincipal Objection, — That a Miracle is 

 incredible. 



That a miracle is incredible is tlio second main objection to 

 miracles as subjects of testimony. Granted, it is said, that 

 a miracle is possible, yet it is not credible, — it cannot be 

 proved (testimony cannot reach to the supernatural). 



Preliminary Form of this Objection. 



The preliminary form of this objection may be thus stated : 

 To affirm the existence of a miraculous dispensation on the 

 authority of testimony is to strike a deadly blow at the 

 authority of testimony itself ; for it affirms the violation of 

 the law which assures us of the integrity of testimony; it is 

 to act like the man in the fable, who sawed off the branch of 

 the tree on which he was sitting-. We accept and rely upon 

 the testimony of men and women who lived in past ages 

 because we believe them to be men and women like ourselves. 

 We believe them to be so because we believe that nature is 

 uniform in her operations. But if nature is not uniform, as 

 the existence of a miraculous dispensation implies, then, how 

 are we to know that the men and women of past ages, living 

 under a different order of nature, ivere men and women, and 

 not monstrosities, acting from different principles, and 

 influenced by different motives ? 



"All our historical knowledge depends upon our know- 

 ledge of the habits of men, by virtue of which we can infer 

 past facts from written records. A sufficiently great change 

 to make such records generally untrustworthy or incapable of 

 interpretation would destroy the whole of it ; but we cannot 

 logically arrive at the conclusion that the laws of nature, 

 which we believe to be unconditionally true, were not true in 

 past time ; for if we admit that these laws were not true we 



have no fixed standard by which to measure anything 



Our means of looking back into the past depend upon the 

 assumption that they were the same during the period covered 



by our investigation as they are now In other words, 



in order to infer any fact, past or future, we must assume that 

 there is a course of nature, that we know that course of 



