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absolutely insensible passage from the highest intelligence of 
the inferior animals to the improvable reason of man.”* The 
departure from usage in which a human being should be born 
of one of the lower animals would surely be departure enough 
from what Hume calls experience ! And yet that is only an 
idea produced (in one who has had a very wide experience), 
by the departures from usage that are in nature. These, how- 
ever, are no violation of law. Nexther are the greatest oj Scrip- 
ture miracles. Take a case to our purpose in this inquiry as to 
prayer. “ Elijah was a man of like passions with ourselves, and 
he prayed that it might not rain.” What natural law did he 
wish suspended ? Is the absence of rain the suspension of 
some natural law ? Can Hume’s experience, or that of any 
one else, point out the law of which it is either the suspension 
or the infraction ? But Elijah prayed again that it might rain. 
And when that cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, at length 
rose on the horizon, was some natural law broken or sus- 
pended? There is not a shadow of a ground for saying so. 
Human experience of natural law was as perfect all through 
that famine, and at the close of it when the rain came, as it 
ever had been ; but the miracle was not the less real on that 
account. That agent, by whose power the heavens give rain 
and withhold it, acted in this case, as in ail cases, in perfect 
accordance with everything that can be called law, whether in 
the sphere of matter or in that of mind : so Hume’s great 
argument is only a great blunder. Hume was fortified in his 
error by his ideas of “ antecedence and consequence ” as all 
that we know of cause and effect ; but even here his founda- 
tion was a blunder as to fact. He took it for granted that man’s 
ff experience ” of “ antecedence and consequence ” in nature 
has been that of uniformity, which, as we have already shown, 
is palpably and egregiously untrue. When we are asked, there- 
fore, if we expect God to work a miracle in response to our 
requests, we may reply by asking — what if he should ? If it 
is asked again, if we think He will violate His natural laws to 
answer us, we may reply that there is no need for any 
such violation. We can think of nothing we could for a moment 
desire that would call for his departure by the slightest con- 
ceivable degree from any one of these laws. 
If we epitomize our discussion and follow out the sound 
principle on which all the facts of the case come under review, 
we find ourselves surrounded by a very clear atmosphere of 
thought as to our great subject. Minds everywhere we see 
Antiquity of Man , p. 504, Ed. 1863. 
