primitive
people--it is at any rate permissible to ask why? Science may be
unable to define the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from
the moral obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged
wonderful occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence
for the Gadarene miracle is altogether worthless. We have simply
three, partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive
form, the origin, and the authority for which we know absolutely
nothing. But the evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good
as that for any other.

Elsewhere, I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to
declaim against these conclusions on the ground of their asserted
tendency to deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian
faith, and to destroy the foundations of morality; still less to brand
them with the question-begging vituperative appellation of
"infidelity." The point is not whether they are wicked; but, whether,
from the point of view of scientific method, they are irrefragably
true. If they are, they will be accepted in time, whether they are
wicked, or not wicked. Nature, so far as we have been able to attain
to any insight into her ways, recks little about consolation and makes
for righteousness by very round-about paths. And, at any rate,
whatever may be possible for other people, it is becoming less and
less possible for the man who puts his faith in scientific methods of
ascertaining truth, and is accustomed to have that faith justified by
daily experience, to be consciously false to his principle in any
matter. But the number of such men, driven into the use of scientific
methods of inquiry and taught to trust them, by their education, their
daily professional and business needs, is increasing and will
continually increase. The phraseology of Supernaturalism may remain on
men's lips, but in practice they are Naturalists. The magistrate who
listens with devout attention to the precept "Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live" on Sunday, on Monday, dismisses, as intrinsically
absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought against some old woman;
the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who substituted exorcism for
rational modes of treatment would have but a short tenure of office;
even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers for rain, so long as
the wind is in the east; and an outbreak of pestilence sends men, not
to the churches, but to the drains. In spite of pra