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ho difficulty in believing in a miracle, but such a belief is most in accordance 
with our belief in a personal God. Hence we have only to consider what 
end miracles are intended to serve, and our moral nature and reason easily 
recognize the fact that there have been certain purposes for which it is in 
accordance with our belief in a personal God that He should have interrupted 
the order and course of nature. This seems to me to lay aside altogether the 
supposed resemblance between extraordinary occurrences and miracles. As 
to the other point on which the main purpose of the paper rests, namely, the 
consideration of the nature of historical evidence, and the province of the 
historian, I must fairly say that I differ from Mr. Eow, if I rightly apprehend 
his arguments. In fact, I think that the views enunciated in this 
part of the paper leave us in a most hopeless condition ; for if we lay 
aside altogether the use of conjecture and hypothesis, we lay aside 
the noblest province of the historian. It is true that history is not a 
mathematical science, and we have not the same means of verification that 
we have in such a science. But it seems to me to be the duty of the historian, 
as well as of the mathematician, to make use of hypothesis, in order to 
bring together isolated phenomena or isolated facts under one general theory. 
Work of that description, as illustrated in the department of history, is par- 
ticularly exemplified in the case of the great historian whose labours have 
recently been undervalued by some authors, and, among others, by the author 
of this paper— I refer to Niebuhr. When Niebuhr first began to write his 
history, he was vehemently assailed for believing too little, but, of late years, 
the attack has been directed against him on the ground that he believed too 
much, and those things which he accepted as facts and truths, he has been 
assailed for accepting at all ; and it has been said that many, if not most of 
the supposed facts which he has picked out from legendary history, are of no 
value at all. Some indeed go so far as to maintain that hypothesis itself 
is not within the province of . the historian. But this would destroy 
one of the great charms of the study of history. It is true that a hypothesis 
may be wrong, and that Niebuhr may have made mistakes ; but it does not 
follow that the method is wrong, and that his labours were in vain. Because 
he made some mistakes, it does not follow that he had not a great work to 
perform, and that he did not perform it. Let us consider what he did. In 
striking out that noble hypothesis with regard to the Roman Constitution, 
which runs through his whole work, he has thrown altogether a new light on 
the history of the Roman Commonwealth, though probably, in his ardour for 
that hypothesis, he may have laid stress on small matters, and unduly pressed 
them to support his theory and plan. Some of the details may be shown to 
be errors ; but is his great hypothesis an error 1 — that -hypothesis accord- 
ing to which he demonstrated the relations of the commonalty of Rome to 
the Patrician houses — a perfectly new idea, that still remains as a possession 
for future historians and students : Niebuhr’s main points are, I think, estab- 
lished beyond doubt, but, of course, it is possible for a man to rise up and 
put forward another hypothesis i and when that is done we must examine it, 
and see which is most likely to be true. Even in science, and in the present 
