228 REV. H. C. M. WATSON 



of a circle be expressed in any finite number of parts of its diameter. I will 

 not write over again here what may be read in my small Review of Hume 

 and Hivxley on Miracles, which may be got for sixpence from the S.P.C.K. ; 

 and therefore I will refer to that for a statement of Babbage's mathematical 

 calculation of the balance of probabilities between an event against which 

 the odds are a million millions to one, and the uncontradicted testimony 

 of a very small number of persons who tell the truth only ten times 

 as often as they do not— a very moderate degree of veracity. It follows 

 with mathematical certainty that, if anything like ' 500 brethren at 

 once ' ever declared that they had ' seen the Lord after His resurrection,' 

 especially as they had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by 

 saying so, the probability in favour of it overbears any conceivable 

 a priori demonstration against it in a proportion of which no number 

 of figures that could be written could convey any idea to our minds. It 

 is true that we have not now before us the actual testimony of the 500 

 brethren ; and if 1 Cor. xv. 6 stood as a bare assertion of St. Paul, unconfirmed 

 by results, we should be bound to treat it as we do the assertions of the 

 popish miracles. But though that particular testimony does not survive, its 

 effects do ; and if it was once sufficient to convert an unbelieving world, and 

 did so, we require it no more. We are justified in believing that any 

 murderer was justly convicted long afterwards if the evidence convinced a 

 judge and jury at a time, though every bit of it is forgotten — always assuming 

 that there has been no discovery of evidence the other way ; and there is no 

 pretence of any such against the Resurrection or the Ascension. Nor against 

 the long course of preceding miracles, which the a priori objectors to them 

 make no attempt to deal with or explain away ; at any rate, no attempt that 

 would be listened to for five minutes, against any other events which pro- 

 duced such a tremendous and abiding change over the whole world as they 

 did, far beyond any others that have ever happened. The believers in 

 Hume's often-exposed paradox about ' experience ' are misled by a mere 

 verbal trick. His ' experience-^ is only the one-sided experience of all the 

 non-miraculous events in the world, coolly throwing aside all those, at least 

 apparently, miraculous ones which have to be accounted for somehow or 

 explained away somehow, and yet never are. A man who propounded a new 

 scientific theory on the ground that it explains all the known phenomena 

 except one obstinate set of them which he cannot get rid of, would be 

 laughed at — or rather ought to be, and would be, if so-called science had 

 not become so depraved by prejudice and timidity that men are allowed to 

 pass for philosophers and solvers of the great problem of cosmogony by 

 tracing some phenomena up to natural causes, which they call ' an insoluble 

 mystery,' and then assuring us that all phenomena are thus accounted for. 

 (See my paper in these ' Transactions,' vol. xvii., ' Hoiv did the World 

 evolve itself'/'') This a posteriori or historical mode of dealing with the 

 question, you see, supersedes all necessity for framing definitions of miracles, 

 on which also I refer to my aforesaid Eeview, exposing a quite astonishing 



