neteenth century Mr. Rogers thinks he must needs be
mad: and when according to the well-known law that mental excitement
is contagious, [26] several persons are said to have concurred in
interpreting some phenomenon supernaturally, Mr. Rogers cannot see why
so many people should all go mad at once! "To go mad," in fact is his
favourite designation for a mental act, which nearly all the human race
have habitually performed in all ages; the act of mistaking subjective
impressions for outward realities. The disposition to regard all strange
phenomena as manifestations of supernatural power was universally
prevalent in the first century of Christianity, and long after. Neither
greatness of intellect nor thoroughness of scepticism gave exemption.
Even Julius Caesar, the greatest practical genius that ever lived,
was somewhat superstitious, despite his atheism and his Vigorous
common-sense. It is too often argued that the prevalence of scepticism
in the Roman Empire must have made men scrupulous about accepting
miracles. By no means. Nothing but physical science ever drives out
miracles: mere doctrinal scepticism is powerless to do it. In the age
of the Apostles, little if any radical distinction was drawn between a
miracle and an ordinary occurrence. No one supposed a miracle to be an
infraction of the laws of nature, for no one had a clear idea that
there were such things as laws of nature. A miracle was simply an
extraordinary act, exhibiting the power of the person who performed it.
Blank, indeed, would the evangelists have looked, had any one told them
what an enormous theory of systematic meddling with nature was destined
to grow out of their beautiful and artless narratives.

[26] Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 87-152.

The incapacity to appreciate this frame of mind renders the current
arguments in behalf of miracles utterly worthless. From the fact that
Celsus and others never denied the reality of the Christian miracles,
it is commonly inferred that those miracles must have actually happened.
The same argument would, however, equally apply to the miracles of
Apollonius and Simon Magus, for the Christians never denied the reality
of these. What these facts really prove is that the state of human
intelligence was as I have just described it: and the inference to be
drawn from them is that no miraculous account emanating from an author
of such a period is worthy of serious attention. When Mr. Rogers
sup