the other as a practical certainty, when there is no reason to expect the contrary.  The one contains and includes the particular, the other does not; from the one we argue mathematically to the falsehood of any opposite particular; from the other we do not....  For example, one signal miracle, pre-eminent for its grandeur, crowned the evidence of the supernatural character and office of our Lord—­our Lord’s ascension—­His going up with His body of flesh and bones into the sky in the presence of His disciples.  “He lifted up His hands, and blessed them.  And while He blessed them, He was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.  And they looked stedfastly toward heaven as He went up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.”

Here is an amazing scene, which strikes even the devout believer, coming across it in the sacred page suddenly or by chance, amid the routine of life, with a fresh surprise.  Did, then, this event really take place?  Or is the evidence of it forestalled by the inductive principle compelling us to remove the scene as such out of the category of matters of fact?  The answer is, that the inductive principle is in its own nature only an expectation; and that the expectation, that what is unlike our experience will not happen, is quite consistent with its occurrence in fact.  This principle does not pretend to decide the question of fact, which is wholly out of its province and beyond its function.  It can only decide the fact by the medium of a universal; the universal proposition that no man has ascended to heaven.  But this is a statement which exceeds its power; it is as radically incompetent to pronounce it as the taste or smell is to decide on matters of sight; its function is practical, not logical.  No antecedent statement, then, which touches my belief in this scene, is allowed by the laws of thought.  Converted indeed into a universal proposition, the inductive principle is omnipotent, and totally annihilates every particular which does not come within its range.  The universal statement that no man has ascended into heaven absolutely falsifies the fact that One Man has.  But, thus transmuted, the inductive principle issues out of this metamorphose, a fiction not a truth; a weapon of air, which even in the hands of a giant can inflict no blow because it is itself a shadow.  The object of assault receives the unsubstantial thrust without a shock, only exposing the want of solidity in the implement of war.  The battle against the supernatural has been going on long, and strong men have conducted it, and are conducting it—­but what they want is a weapon.  The logic of unbelief wants a universal.  But no real universal is forthcoming, and it only wastes its strength in wielding a fictitious one.

It is not in reason, which refuses to pronounce upon the possible merely from experience of the actual, that the antecedent objection to miracles is rooted.  Yet that the objection is a powerful one the consciousness