67. Various able writers, Leslie, Paley, and Douglas, have laid down certain tests or criteria of matters of fact, which may serve as guarantees that the miracles really took place which are recorded in Scripture. They consider these criteria to be of so rigid a nature that an alleged event which satisfies them must necessarily have occurred, and that, as their argument seems to imply, however great its antecedent improbability. Thus they reply to objections such as Hume’s drawn from the uniformity of nature; not meeting them directly, but rather superseding the necessity of considering them; for what is proved to be true, need not be proved to be possible. Hume scruples not to use “miracle” and “impossibility” as convertible terms 1; Leslie before him, Douglas after him, seem to answer, “Would you believe a miracle if you saw it? Now we are prepared to offer evidence, if not as strong, still as convincing, as ocular demonstration.” Thus they escape from the abstract argument by a controversial method of a singularly practical, and as it may be called, English character.
68. It would be well if such writers stopped here, but it was hardly to be expected. Disputants are always exposed to the temptation of being over-candid towards objections which they think they have outrun; they admit as facts or truths what they have shown to be irrelevant as arguments. Thus, even were there nothing of a kindred tone of mind in Hume, who has assailed the Scripture miracles, and in some of our friends who have defended them, it might have been anticipated that the consciousness of possessing an irresistible weapon in the contest would have led us to treat the arguments of our opponents with a dangerous generosity. But, unhappily, there is much in Protestant habits of thought actually to dispose our writers to defer to a rationalistic principle of reasoning, the force of which they have managed to evade in the particular case. Hence, though they are earnest in their protest against Hume’s summary rejection of all miraculous histories whatever, they make admissions, which only do not directly tell against the principal Scripture miracles, and do tell against all others. They tacitly grant that the antecedent improbability of miracles is at least so great that it can only be overcome by the strongest and most overpowering evidence; that second-best evidence does not even tend to prove them; that they are absolutely incredible up to the very moment that all doubt is decisively set at rest; that there can be no degrees of proof, no incipient and accumulating arguments to recommend them; that no relentings of mind or suspense of judgment is justifiable, as various fainter evidences are found to conspire in their favour; that they may be scorned as fictions, if they are not to be venerated as truths.
69. It looks like a mere truism to say that a fact is not disproved, because it is not proved; ten thousand occurrences are ever passing, which leave no record behind them, and do not cease to have been because they are forgotten. Yet Bishop Douglas, in his defence of the New Testament Miracles in answer to Hume, certainly assumes that no miracle is true which has not been proved so, or that it is safe to treat all miracles as false which are not recommended by evidence as strong as that which is adducible for the Miracles of Scripture.
70. In estimating statements of fact, it is usual to allow that various occurrences may be all true, which rest upon very different degrees of evidence. It does not prove that this passage of history is false and the fabrication of impostors, because that passage is attested more distinctly and fully. Writers, however, like Douglas, are constantly reminding us that we need not receive the Ecclesiastical miracles, though we receive those of the New Testament. But the question is not whether we need not, but whether we ought not to receive the former, as well as the latter; and if it really is the case that we ought not, surely this must be in consequence of some positive reasons, not of a mere inferiority in the evidence. It is plain, then, that such reasoners, though they deny that an à priori ground can be maintained in fact against the miracles of Scripture, still at least agree with Hume in thinking such a ground does exist, and that it is conclusive against ecclesiastical miracles even antecedent to the evidence.
71. In the title of his Dissertation, Douglas promises us “a criterion by which the true miracles recorded in the New Testament are distinguished from the spurious miracles of the Pagans and Papists;” yet, when he proceeds to state in the body of the work the real object to which he addresses himself, we find that it relates quite as much to the evidence for either class of miracles as to the fact itself of their occurrence. He says, that whereas “the accounts which have been published to the world of miracles in general,” are concerned with events which are supernatural either in themselves or under their circumstances, while the latter class can be explained on natural principles, the former “may, from the insufficiency of the evidence produced in support of them, be justly suspected to have never happened.” 2 But how does insufficiency in the evidence create a positive prejudice against an alleged fact? How can things depend on our knowledge of them? This writer must mean that evidence of an inferior kind is insufficient to overcome a certain pre-existing objection which attaches to the very notion of these miracles; otherwise even slight evidence is sufficient to influence our minds, as Bishop Butler would tell us, so far as it is positive, and evidence of this defective kind may constitute the very trial of our obedience.