Antecedent to all experience one empirical thing is probable as another. To the first man, with no experience, birth from one parent is no more surprising than birth from two; to feed five men with five ship-loads of corn, or five thousand with five loaves; the reproduction of an arm, or a finger nail; the awakening from a four days' death, or a four hours' sleep; to change water into wine, or mineral coal into burning gas; the descent into the sea, or the ascent into the sky; the prediction of a future or the memory of a past event;—all are alike, one as credible as the other. But to take our past experience of the nature of things, the case wears a different aspect. We demand more evidence for a strange than a common thing. From the very constitution of the mind a prudent man supposes that the Laws of Nature continue; that the same cause produces always the same effects, if the circumstances remain the same. If it were related to us, by four strangers who had crossed the ocean in the same vessel, that a man, now in London, cured diseases, opened the blind eyes, restored the wasted limb, and raised men from the dead, all by a mere word; that he himself was born miraculously, and attended by miracles all his life,—who would believe the story? We should be justified in demanding a large amount of the most unimpeachable evidence. This opinion is confirmed by the doubt of scientific men in respect of “animal magnetism” and “spiritualism”—where no law is violated, but a faculty hitherto little noticed is disclosed.
Now if we look after the facts of the case, we find the evidence for the Christian miracles is very scanty in extent, and very uncertain in character. We must depend on the testimony of the epistolary and the historical books of the New Testament. It is a notorious fact that the genuine Epistles, the earliest Christian documents, make no mention of any miracles performed by Jesus; and when we consider the character of Paul, his strong love of the marvellous, the manner in which he dwells on the appearance of Jesus to him after death, it seems surprising, if he believed the other miracles, that he does not allude to them. To examine the testimony of the Gospels; two profess to contain the evidence of eye-witnesses. But we are not certain these books came in their present shape
