Copernican theory because, as they said, it manifestly
contradicted their experience,--that the schoolboy who refuses to admit
the first law of motion because, as he says, it gives the lie to all
his experience,--that the Oriental prince (whose scepticism Hume vainly
attempts, on his principle, to meet) who denied the possibility of ice
because it contradicted his experience,--and, in the same manner, that
the men who, with Dr. Strauss, lay down the dictum that a miracle
is impossible and a contradiction because it contradicts their
experience,--have all been alike contravening the first principles of
the modest philosophy of Bacon, and have fallen into one of the most
ordinary illusions against which he has warned us namely, that that
cannot be true which seems in contradiction to our own experience. We
confidently predict that the day will come when the favourite argument
of many so called philosopher in this matter will be felt to be the
philosophy of the vulgar only; and that though many may, even then, deny
that the testimony which supports the Scripture miracles is equal to
the task, they will all alike abandon the axiom which supersedes the
necessity of at all examining such evidence, by asserting that no
evidence can establish them.

While on this subject, we may notice a certain fantastical tone of
depreciation of miracles as an evidence of Christianity, which is
occasionally adopted even by some who do not deny the possibility or
probability, or even the fact, of their occurrence. They affirm them to
be of little moment, and represent them--with an exquisite affectation
of metaphysical propriety--as totally incapable of convincing men of any
moral truth; upon the ground that there is no natural relation between
any displays of physical power and any such truth. Now without denying
that the nature of the doctrine is a criterion, and must be taken into
account in judging of the reality of any alleged miracle, we have but
two things to reply to this: first, that, as Paley says in relation
to the question whether any accumulation of testimony can establish a
miraculous fact, we are content 'to try the theorem upon a simple case,'
and affirm that man is so constituted that if he himself sees the blind
restored to sight and the dead raised, under such circumstances as
exclude all doubt of fraud on the part of others and all mistake on
his own, he will uniformly associate authority with such displays of
superhuman po