true. It requires only to be understood to be accepted. It is a matter of direct and positive knowledge, dependent on no outside authority, while the Christian miracles are, at best, but a matter of testimony, and therefore of secondary and indirect knowledge. The thing to be proved is notoriously true; the alleged means of proof notoriously uncertain. Is it not better, then, to proceed to Religion at once? for when this is admitted to be as true as the demonstrations and axioms of science, as much a matter of certainty as the consciousness of our existence, then miracles are of no value. They may be interesting to the historian, the antiquary, or physiologist, not to us as religious men. They now hang as a mill-stone about the neck of many a pious man, who can believe in Religion, but not in the transformation of water to wine, or the resurrection of a body.
reason must be the judge what is a miracle, and what is not, which—not knowing how far the power of natural causes do extend themselves, and what strange effects they may produce—is very hard to determine. 2. It will always be as great a miracle that God should alter the course of natural things, as overturn the principles of knowledge and understanding in a man, by setting up anything to be received by him as a truth which his reason cannot assent to, as the miracle itself; and so at best it will be but one miracle against another, and the greater still on reason's side; it being harder to believe God should alter and put out of its ordinary course some phenomenon of the great world for once, and make things act contrary to their ordinary rule, purposely, that the mind of man might do so always afterwards, than that this is some fallacy or natural effect, of which he knows not the cause, let it look never so strange. … I do not hereby deny in the least, that God can do, or hath done, miracles for the confirmation of truth; but I only say that we cannot think he should do them to enforce doctrines or notions of himself or any worship of him not conformable to reason, or that we can receive such for truth for the miracle's sake; and even in those books which have the greatest proof of revelation from God, and the attestation of miracles to confirm their being so, the miracles are to be judged by the doctrine, and not the doctrine by the miracle.” King's Life of Locke, Vol. I. p. 231, et seq. See the remarks of Calvin, Institutes, Dedication to Francis I., Allen's Tr., Lond. 1838, Vol. I. p. xix. Gerhard, in his Common Places, says, “Miracles prove nothing, unless they have a doctrinal Truth connected with them.”
