I felt, therefore, that the brandy and water logic had perfectly convinced me that this was far too precarious ground on which to conclude that the miracles of the New Testament had been wrought.

I was further confirmed in my convictions of the illogical nature of all a priori views on the subject, by the whimsical differences of opinion among my infidel friends.

One told me that it was plain that miracles were “incredible,” and “impossible,” per se; but he was immediately contradicted by a second, who said that he really could not see any thing incredible or impossible about them; that all that was wanting to make them credible was sufficient evidence, which perhaps had in no case been given.

A third said, that it was of little consequence; that no miracle could prove a moral truth; and; taking a view just the opposite to that of my first acquaintance, swore that, if he saw a score of miracles, he should not be a bit the more inclined to believe in the authority of a religion authenticated by them.

Here was a fine beginning for an ingenuous neophyte, who was eager to be fully initiated in infidel theology!

It set me to examine the miracles themselves, and the evidence for them.

“They were the simple result of fraud practising upon simplicity,” said one of the genuine descendants of Bolingbroke and Tindal.

I pondered over it a good deal.  At last I said one day to another infidel acquaintance, “You ask me to believe that the miraculous events of the New Testament were contrivances of fraud; which, though ventured upon in the very eyes of those who were interested in detecting them, who must have been prejudiced against them, nay, the majority of whom (as the events show) were determined, whether they detected them or not, not to believe those who wrought them, were yet successfully practised, not only on the deluded disciples of the impostors, but on their unbelieving persecutors, who admitted them to be miracles, only of Beelzebub’s performing.  I really know not how to believe it.  As I look at the general history of religion, I see that this open-day appeal to miracles—­especially such as raising the dead—­among prejudiced spectators interested in unmasking them is, if unsupported by truth, just the thing under which a religious enterprise inevitably fails.”

I reminded him that the French prophets in England got on pretty well till their unlucky attempt to raise the dead, when the bubble burst instantly; that for this reason the more astute impostors have refrained from any pretensions of the kind, from Mahomet downwards; (How discreetly cautious, again, have the Mormonites been on this point!) that the miracles they professed to have wrought were conveniently wrought in secret, on the safe theatre of their mental consciousness; or that they were reserved for times when their disciples were predetermined to believe them, because they were cordial believers already in the religion which appealed