Glimpses of the Supernatural Author:Frederick George Lee Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE MIRACULOUS IN CHURCH HISTORY. HE important subject of the Miraculous in Church History sufficiently well known to students of it, involv... more »es the existence of a religious principle of universal application. This will be apparent, in due course, from the following preliminary considerations :—"A miracle," writes Hume, "is a violation of the laws of Nature ; and, as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined." Further on, he declares " that a miracle supported by any human testimony is more properly a subject of derision than of argument."3 On these statements, definiteand precise as they appear, and yet not sufficiently definite, it may be remarked in the first place that no human experience is unalterable: it may to a certain person or certain persons have been hitherto unaltered. But this is all. Are there then no facts beyond our experience—no natural positions or states with which we are unacquainted ? When a man writes of " unalterable experience," he obviously means so much of that experience, as either mediately or immediately has come to his knowledge ; in other words his own past experience.1 And thisHume declares sufficient to enable him to determine what are the unvarying laws of Nature, and, by consequence, what are miracles. But surely here is something akin to arrogance. For what modest person would venture to maintain his own experience to be altogether and absolutely firm and unalterable ? Who would declare of a witness, who testified, for example, what was contrary to that experience, that such a man was worthy only of disbelief and derision ? And yet many, in the present day, adopt and put into practice this unstable and imper...« less