when it comes in, takes two directions—­it either makes belief more real, or it destroys belief.  There is an element of doubt in surprise; for this emotion arises because an event is strange, and an event is strange because it goes counter to and jars with presumption.  Shall surprise, then, give life to belief or stimulus to doubt?  The road of belief and unbelief in the history of some minds thus partly lies over common ground; the two go part of their journey together; they have a common perception in the insight into the real astonishing nature of the facts with which they deal.  The majority of mankind, perhaps, owe their belief rather to the outward influence of custom and education than to any strong principle of faith within; and it is to be feared that many, if they came to perceive how wonderful what they believed was, would not find their belief so easy and so matter-of-course a thing as they appear to find it.  Custom throws a film over the great facts of religion, and interposes a veil between the mind and truth, which, by preventing wonder, intercepts doubt too, and at the same time excludes from deep belief and protects from disbelief.  But deeper faith and disbelief throw off in common the dependence on mere custom, draw aside the interposing veil, place themselves face to face with the contents of the past, and expose themselves alike to the ordeal of wonder.

It is evident that the effect which the visible order of nature has upon some minds is, that as soon as they realise what a miracle is, they are stopped by what appears to them a simple sense of its impossibility.  So long as they only believe by habit and education, they accept a miracle without difficulty, because they do not realise it as an event which actually took place in the world; the alteration of the face of the world, and the whole growth of intervening history, throw the miracles of the Gospel into a remote perspective in which they are rather seen as a picture than real occurrences.  But as soon as they see that, if these miracles are true, they once really happened, what they feel then is the apparent sense of their impossibility.  It is not a question of evidence with them:  when they realise, e.g., that our Lord’s resurrection, if true, was a visible fact or occurrence, they have the seeming certain perception that it is an impossible occurrence.  “I cannot,” a person says to himself in effect, “tear myself from the type of experience and join myself to another.  I cannot quit order and law for what is eccentric.  There is a repulsion between such facts and my belief as strong as that between physical substances.  In the mere effort to conceive these amazing scenes as real ones, I fall back upon myself and upon that type of reality which the order of nature has impressed upon me.”

The antagonism to the idea of miracles has grown stronger and more definite with the enlarged and more widely-spread conception of invariable natural law, and also, as