“Yes, unquestionably,” replied Fellowes; “if I found, for instance that a dozen men could take an ounce of arsenic or half a pound of opium with impunity, I should not hesitate to regard it as a miracle, although the precise amount sufficient to kill in any particular case might not be capable of being ascertained.  In the same manner, if I found that though the amount of heat and cold in summer and winter in our climate is subject to marked variations, yet that suddenly for several consecutive years we had more frost in July than in December; that gooseberries and currants were getting ripe on Christmas day, and men were skating on the Serpentine on the 10th of August, I should certainly argue that a change tantamount to a miracle had been wrought in nature.”

“You have just expressed my own feelings on that point,” said Harrington; “and it was this very consideration which made me say, that, in order to render my expression perfectly clear, and to obviate misconception and misrepresentation, we must endeavor to include this very frequent case of a certain limited variation from the order of nature as consistent with the absence of miracle, and a certain degree of that variation as inconsistent with it.”

“Will you just state our criterion once more, with the limitation attached; and then I shall know better whether we are certainly agreed in the criterion we ought to employ?”

“I say, then,” resumed Harrington, “that our uniform experience, that of our friends and neighbors, and of all whose experience we have the opportunity of testing, as to the order of nature,—­meaning by that either an order absolutely invariable, or varying only limits which are themselves absolutely invariable,—­justifies us in pronouncing an event contradicting such experience to be all impossibility.  If the principle is worth any thing, let us embrace it, and inflexibly apply it.”

“And I, for one,” replied Fellowes, “am quite satisfied with the principle and the limitations you have laid down; and am so confident of its correctness, that I do not hesitate to say that all the miraculous histories on record are to be summarily rejected.”

“For example,” said Harrington, “we have seen the sun rise every morning and set every evening all our lives; and every one whose experience we can test has seen the same.  Every man who has come into the world has come into it but one way, and has as certainly gone out of it, and has not returned; and every one whose experience we can test affirms the same.  We therefore conclude on this uniform and invariable experience, that the same sequences took place yesterday and the day before, and will take place tomorrow and the day after; and we may fearlessly apply this principle both to the past and the future.  I know of no other reason for rejecting a miracle; and if I am to apply the principle at all to phenomena which have not fallen under my own observation, I must apply it without restriction.”