ome are as
well authenticated as facts of such a kind can be authenticated at all.
The Protestant Christian rejects every one of them--rejects them without
enquiry--involves those for which there is good authority and those for
which there is none or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and
sweeping denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely, in the
words of Hume, that men should deceive or be deceived, than that the
laws of nature should be violated. At this moment we are beset with
reports of conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of
hands projected out of the world of shadows into this mortal life. An
unusually able, accomplished person, accustomed to deal with
common-sense facts, a celebrated political economist, and notorious for
business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain mesmerist, who
was my informant's intimate friend, had raised a dead girl to life. We
should believe the people who tell us these things in any ordinary
matter: they would be admitted in a court of justice as good witnesses
in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a man on their word. The
person just now alluded to is incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our
experience of the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and
our experience of the capacities of human folly on the other is so
large, that when people tell us these wonderful stories, most of us are
contented to smile; and we do not care so much as to turn out of our way
to examine them.

The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as from other histories
we reject miracles without hesitation, so of those in the Bible we
insist on the universal acceptance: the former are all false, the latter
are all true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so sweeping as
these, we cannot even suppose that we are being guided by what is called
historical evidence. Were it admitted that, as a whole, the miracles of
the Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the saints, we
should be far removed still from any large inference, that in the one
set there is no room for falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The
writer or writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The books
themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings which are
lost; and the accounts of the great prophets of Israel are a
counterpart, curiously like, of those of the mediaeval saints. In many
instances the authors of the lives of these saints were