ON MIRACLES. 227 



impossible to convince them as if tlie argument employed has no power at 

 all with them. I think we shall all agree that such papers as this, con- 

 taining so admirable a presentation of the argument on the side of 

 miracles, must be of great value in the case of those who have not made 

 up their minds upon the subject, and, also, of advantage to the cause of calm 

 and philosophical protest against what is inconsistent in argument. It 

 would seem, however, that those against whom the argument itself is 

 specially directed very much resemble that portion of the community who 

 suffer from colour-blindness, or who have not the power of appreciating 

 music. We know that there are persons who, if they had skeins of coloured 

 wool put before them, would confuse blue with green and green with blue, 

 and yet persist that they were right, although the great majority of mankind 

 would take a diflerent view. Such persons undoubtedly suffer from a physical 

 defect. So it is with regard to music. There are some persons who appear 

 to be utterly unconscious of the influence of sweet sounds, owing, also, to a 

 defect in the organs of perception. Those people are to be pitied ; but it is 

 quite impossible, humanly speaking, to help them. Some communications 

 have been received, and these the Honorary Secretary will now read. 



Captain Francis Petrie, F.G.S. (Hon. Sec.) — The first communication 

 is one from the Right Honourable the Lord Grimthorpe, until now known 

 as Sir Edmund Beckett, Bart., LL.D., Q.O. 



" I am sorry to be unable to come to the reading of Mr. Watson's paper, 

 but perhaps written remarks on a subject which requires so much care are 

 more likely to be useful than spoken ones. On the paper itself I have nothing 

 particular to say beyond general agreement. The abstract or a priori mode 

 of dealing with miracles which the author follows is undoubtedly the popular 

 mode of dealing with that and most other questions at present. In this 

 case it may be called Butler's mode, as against Paley's, which is concrete, 

 historical, and a posteriori, and has the advantage of not having to assume 

 anything, not even God, or to define anything, an operation which is seldom 

 free from question. The turn of my mind in all matters is in favour of the 

 latter method, though it is doubtless useful to be able to give an answer of 

 the a priori kind to arguments which pretend to prove that the miracles of 

 Christianity are incredible because they are impossible; and that because the 

 course of nature is uniform according to the world's experience in all cases 

 except those which are called miraculous, therefore its experience of those 

 cases is to be thrown aside, and those events treated as if there were no 

 testimony for them. For you must observe that is exactly what is done by 

 all the abstract or a imori pretended proofs that the events which are 

 commonly called miraculous are impossible. Moreover, all that kind of 

 proof proceeds on a misuse of the word ' impossible/ and forgets that there 

 is not merely a difference of degree, but a mathematically infinite difference, 

 between any degree of improbability founded on experience or reasoning and 

 an absolute impossibility, such as that 2 and 2 should make 5, or the sum of the 

 angles of a.planc. triangle differ from 180 degrees, or the area or circumference 



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