education, for the habits of virtue upon which you now justly value yourself. You might easily display your excellent talents of reasoning upon a less hazardous subject, and thereby obtain a rank with our most distinguished authors. For among us it is not necessary as antong the: Hottentots, that a youth to be raised into the company of men should prove his manhood by beating his mother. I would advise you therefore not toattempt unchaining the tiger, but

to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person, whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification from the enemics it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it? I intend this letter itself as a proof of my friendship, and therefore add no professions to it; but subscribe simply your's,

B. FRANKLIN.

An Examination of Mr. Hume's Objection to Miracles.

R. HUME, in his celebrated

MR. Essay, Note K, defines a mi

racle "A transgression of a law of nature, by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of an Invisible Agent." This Essay, to use his own words, is designed to show "That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish: and even, in that case, there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force which remains after deducting the inferior."

In the above quotation, Mr. Hume assumes the utter incapacity of testimony to prove a miracle. That the assump tion is specious, will not be denied: and unhappily, considerable numbers have been imposed upon by it. In reality, however, a more gratuitous one hath never been made, as will be fully exemplified by an investigation of the grounds upon which he has attempted to defend it. The corner-stone of his building is another assumption of a still more extraordinary nature, but which, if correct, would undoubtedly silence all oppugners, namely, that a greater miracle must be wrought to prove the existence of a lesser one, or in other words, that a miracle is the only crite

*

rion by which to prove or judge of the existence of miracles. The credit due to them, it is admitted, rests entirely upon testimony; but the specious ob jection to it, from the supposed incom petency of human testimony, is invalid, and at most a mere begging of the question. Nevertheless, it must be remembered, that the failure of an ingenious sophister to prove a negative by no means establishes the converse, an affirmative. On the present occasion, therefore, it will not be irrelevant, and, perhaps, the only satisfactory reply to an objection of this sort, not merely to silence the negation, but also to attempt upon adequate evidence to substantiate the affirmative. (The minor support attempted to be derived from the subsequent sophisms contained in the Essay, such as the notion of an hypothetical array of conflicting testimonies, the want of an uniform experience, &c. &c. will in due time be adverted to, but not much enlarged upon, volumes having already been ably written, amply refuting them.)

My first and principal endeavour, then, will be to ascertain and prove the competency of human testimony, to establish and record the existence of any fact, whether of an ordinary or extraordinary kind, even although it were "A transgression of a law of nature, by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of an Invisible Agent," which is Mr. Hume's

definition of a miracle.

"The evidence, that the course of nature has been departed from, is the very same by which we judge when it is not departed from, and must be equally competent in both cases. For

certainly the eyes, ears and other senses of men are equally capable of judging concerning all things, which they are equally capable of perceiving."

All miracles are facts, of a nature cognizable by the ordinary faculties and suited to the common apprehension of mankind indeed if they were not so, to no purpose would they have been performed. Those recorded in the Christian Scriptures have a peculiar efficacy in this view, since they do not depend upon à priori arguments and recondite speculations for proof; but uniformly referring to plain facts, and addressed to the common sense of man. kind, the most illiterate as well as the most learned could equally judge of their truth. Like other facts, therefore, which are not miraculous, they may be established by testimony, the persons recording them affirming only the experience of their own senses, and that of others, in a plain and simple case, namely, that certain effects were repeatedly produced in the presence of considerable numbers, and of which, too, they themselves had a personal knowledge.

Mr. Hume, in Note K of his Essay, informs us, "That a miracle may be discoverable by man or not; this alters not its nature and essence." A more positive admission of the existence of miracles could not have been made, since whatever has a nature and essence must necessarily exist. And that a miracle is discoverable by man, Mr. Hume has furnished us undeniable evidence in his own example; for if not so, how could he have known, and affirmed of it, that its nature and essence would not have been altered by the circumstances alluded to in the quotation? That a miracle is in itself possible, and capable of being proved by the senses, is certain; and farther, that it may also be satisfactorily proved to others by testimony, Mr. Hume acknowledges when he remarks, that our observation of the veracity of human testimony constrains our assent to the belief of ordinary facts, even although they have never immediately fallen under the cognizance of our own senses. Just so is it with miracles, which, although undoubtedly facts of an extraordinary nature, are not on that account the less discoverable by us, when, as in the case of ordinary facts, they have been submitted to our im

fact

mediate and personal observation, or te that of others, who have recorded them to us. To assert, then, that cannot be proved, when already admitted to have been fully proved, is an absolute contradiction, the very absurdity charged upon the abettors of miracles. A miracle, then, we must admit, in the first instance, is capable of being proved by the senses; and the subsequent establishment of its proof by testimony is no contradiction: indeed, why its being registered and recorded as a testimony of its truth to others should alter its nature, and as it were by enchantment annihilate its previous capacity of proof, a wiser head than even Mr. Hume's is requisite to determine. It must be conceded, however, that the veracity of testimony is not uniform; and here it is that we meet the difficulty in its fullest force, and freely admit that miracles require a stronger testimony than common facts, but deny that the nature and capacity of testimony is on that account any ways altered or impaired, which by the objector is strenuously contended to be the case.

Had he confined himself to this single point, his objection would have had considerable weight, though it would by no means have been insuperable; but by blending with it the utter incapacity of testimony to prove at all, he has effectually defeated his own purpose. A testimony that proves nothing cannot lie.

A more than reiterated experience in proof of miracles is not wanting. If all occurrences, and all must be comprehended under the idea of an uniform experience, were to be brought about by means of particular interpositions (which is the notion of a miracle), every practical benefit to result from them would be lost, and to us they would no longer be miracles: an unceasing series of miraculous interventions would in effect be the same as an established law. The efficacy of a reasonable experience in judging of them is not denied: but the futility and unreasonableness of an uniform experience is manifest. Moreover, our competency to judge of the existence of any fact, whether of an ordinary or of an extraordinary nature, does not depend upon its constant recurrence, nor is it altered by our ignorance of what produced it; since the mode in which the operation of the usual course of the laws of na

ture is effected equally with the supposed deviation from or transgression of them (the case of miracles) is unknown to us.

The supposition supported by Mr. Hume of an array of antagonists or opposite proofs between miracles, and testimony as the criterion of them, is so weak and untrue, as to be really unworthy of him. Wherein is exemplified any mutual destruction of arguments? Does the liability to falsehood in testimony, annul or impede its capacity to record truth, even although that truth be of a miraculous nature? Certainly not; both the concessions in the Essay, and numerous other more powerful considerations herein adduced, prove it beyond doubt. Is testimony any other than the record of experience?" the criterion of facts which do not fall immediately under our own observation." What, then, can be more absurd than to oppose the record of positive experience to the absence of an uniform and personal one, or to the liability to error in testimony, designed or undesigned, especially in a case of this kind, where multitudes of living witnesses could have contradicted it? At the time the miracles are recorded to have been performed, they were never denied; the Power only by which they were accomplished was ever called in question. Human nature, too, having been fully admitted to be the same in all ages, the persons living in those days were equally competent with ourselves, not only to ascertain the facts, but also to record to others the experience of their senses: and surely nothing more either has been done, or is wanting to be done, to establish the proof of miracles, since this is the test by which we can alone know them: but such are the minor sophisms adduced in corroboration of this celebrated objection, and maintained to be indispensable by their author.

Much stress has been laid by Mr. Hume and others on the natural improbability of miracles, but with little reason. Were it a question of probability only (which, however, it certainly is not), the balance of records in which they are noticed affirming their truth, and the preponderance of veracity in human testimony having been conceded in the Essay, the evidence in their favour, even on this ground, is

decisive. By the addition of a single ounce to a pair of well poised, though ordinary scales, you will turn them as completely, and more commodiously too, than by that of a pound; but the addition of hundreds or thousands of ounces, at once, to a pair of sceptical scales, would produce no other effect that I am acquainted with, than the breaking of them: and well would it be for the experimentalist, if he were not materially injured in the general wreck. Improbability, moreover, has no relation to testimony, but only to opinion: where testimony begins, improbability ends. To give testimony to any event, supposes that we have already ascertained the fact, either directly, by the observation of our own senses, or indirectly, through the medium of the senses of others. In either case, improbability is wholly out of the question.

The consideration that the subsequent effects in the Christian world can be accounted for on no other principle, than upon the supposition of the truth of the miracles, with the important end to be answered by them, are arguments that have justly made a forcible impression on numbers. Some have denied experience to be the sole foundation on which to ground our belief in testimony: others, in answer to the objection that miracles are not wrought in our days, have replied to it by saying that they are no longer necessary; information now abounds in the world; mankind are of themselves sufficiently inclined to examine the records of immortality; a præternatural stimulus is no longer wanting; and the Almighty cannot be expected to resort to extraordinary means while ordinary ones are fully adequate; à priori considerations have actuated the researches of a few, who have directed their principal efforts to ascertain the abstract nature of miracles, rather than the subsequent establishment of their proofs. sum total, however, of these united observations, seem to me to tend more to the refutation of the minor difficulties of the case, than to the subversion of the principal one: and one, more specious than Mr. Hume's, will, I apprehend, be easily admitted to have never been made.

The

The capacity of testimony to record truth, even although that truth be of a miraculous nature, can no longer be

denied the futility of its supposed incompetency having, it is presumed, been fully ascertained. I have directed my observations more immediately to this point of the objection, the nature and capacity of testimony, because it is the point which appears to me to be the principal one, and in most of the answers given, to have been the least attended to.

A BELIEVER IN MIRACLES.

Genealogy of Jesus and Joseph.

Gosport, Jun. 2, 1817.

light upon the subject. From the latter cause, too, I cannot discover whether my conjecture be new, but I have certainly never heard of it before. My reasons for believing it well-founded, are, that we have no ground to imagine that any doubts existed in the time of our Lord with regard to his being the son of Joseph by natural generation, and therefore no cause for the Evangelist's writing the words 66 as was supposed," after the name of Jesus; whereas there is a manifest propriety in their being appended to that of Jo

glish this verse thus: "And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli."

as was

The Improved Version, for supposed," reads, "as was allowed by law."

It is not the present writer's design to enter into the dispute concerning the disagreements between the genealogy of Matthew and that of Luke; neither is it of very material importance to his argument whether we read "supposed" or allowed by law to be the son of Joseph," he being well persuaded that those words in the parenthesis were not intended by the Evangelist to describe Jesus, but his father Joseph, and that the passage originally stood:

"And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being the son of Joseph, who was supposed to be (or allowed by law to be) the son of Heli."

From Dr. Priestley's Harmony of the Gospels (Sect. II. Notes), I find that according to Eusebius, it was a tradition in the family of Joseph, that he was properly the legal son of Heli, who, dying without children, his brother Jacob married his wife, and having a child by her, it was transferred to Heli."

The only use which Dr. P. makes of the citation, is to account for the difference in the genealogies-Matthew stating that Jacob begat Joseph, and Luke that "Joseph" was "the son of Heli."

Whether at the time he published the Harmony, the Doctor believed the miraculous conception or not, is less apparent than might be wished in the notes to that work; and I have no other books at hand which will throw

natural generation, but (if the of Eusebius be correct, and I know not how, without admitting it, to reconcile the genealogies) by legal transfer only-Jacob having "raised up seed

to his brother."

Could it be proved that by accident or design these words had been transposed by a copyist from their original situation (which, perhaps, may be done, or at least the presumption strengthened, by some of your ingenious and learned correspondents), the believers in the miraculous conception would have one argument the less in defence of their hypothesis.

I should be happy to see the discussion taken up. J. READ. Narrative of a celebrated Auto de Fé in the City of Logrono.

[Continued from Vol. XI. pp. 576
and 658.]

THE inquisitors state that the following ceremonies take place on the installation of a witch:—

The witch, who persuades any persons to become noviciates, first anoints them with a foetid, greenish liquid, and then takes them rapidly through the air to the Aquelarre, where they are received by the devil on his throne. They there renounce God, the virgin, all the saints and sacraments, and on their knees they kiss various parts of the devil's body, and acknowledge him for their God and Lord; after which his infernal majesty makes a wound in their flesh with his nail, and with a liquid like gold marks the apple of their eye, by which mark the witches recognize one another. Though the pain from the former operation is excessive, the place wounded soon becomes senseless, and the inquisitors