if it was a rebuke at all, it was a rebuke to a rampant “Bibliolatry.”  As I heard all these different versions of so simple a matter, and found that not a few were inclined to each, I could, not help exclaiming, “In truth the Devil is a very clever fellow, and man even a greater blockhead than I had taken him for.”  But in spite of the surprise with which I had listened to these various explanations of an event which seemed to me clear as if written with a sunbeam, this last reason, which assigned as the cause of God’s resumption of his own gift, an extravagant admiration and veneration of it on the part of mankind,—­it being so notorious that those who professed belief in its divine origin and authority had (even the best of them) so grievously neglected both the study and the practice of it,—­struck me as so exquisitely ludicrous, that I broke into a fit of laughter, which awoke me.  I found that it was broad daylight, and the morning sun was streaming in at the window, and shining in quiet radiance upon the open Bible which lay on my table.  So strongly had my dream impressed me, that I almost felt as though, on inspection, I should find the sacred leaves a blank, and it was therefore with joy that my eyes rested on those words, which I read through grateful tears:  “The gifts of God are without repentance.”

____

July 19.  This morning my friends treated me to a long dialogue in which it was contended

That miracles are impossible, but that it is impossible to prove it.

“I think, Fellowes,” Harrington began, “if there be any point in which you and I are likely to agree, it is in that dogma that miracles are impossible.  And yet here, as usual, my sceptical doubts pursue and baffle me.  I wish you would try with me whether there be not an escape from them.”  Fellowes assented.

“As I have to propose and explain my doubts,” said Harrington, “perhaps you will excuse my taking the ‘lion’s share’ of the conversation.  But now, by way of beginning in some way,—­what, my dear friend, is a miracle?”

“What is a miracle?  Ay, that is the question; but though it may be difficult to find an exact definition of it, it is easily understood by every body.”

“Very likely; then you can with more ease give me your notion of it.”

“If, for example,” said Fellowes, “the sun which has risen so long, every morning, were to rise no more; or if a man, whom we knew to be dead and buried, were to come to life again; or if what we know to be water were at once to become wine, none would hesitate to call that a miracle.”

“You remember, perhaps,” said Harrington, “an amusing little play of Socratic humor in the dialogue of Theaetetus, somewhere in the introduction, when the ironical querist has asked that intelligent youth what science is?

“I cannot say that I do; for though I have read that dialogue, it is some years ago.”