time worse than the beasts, who were carefully provided against miserable man’s inconveniences!  Certainly, I think you may alter the account of man’s creation given in Genesis, to great advantage.  Instead of God’s saying, ’Let us create man in our image, he must be supposed to have said, ’Let us create man in the image of a beast:  and in the image of a beast created he him, male and female created he them’; and very imperfect beasts they must have been, after all.  This is that old savage theory which I had supposed was pretty well abandoned.  If the necessity of denying miracles imposes any necessity of believing that, I fear that I shall sooner be got to believe a thousand.”

“Well,” said Fellowes, who seemed ashamed of this theory, but knew not how to abandon it; “I cannot believe there have been any miracles, and, what is more, I will not.”

“That is perhaps the best reason you have given yet,” said Harrington.  “The Will is indeed your only irresistible logician.  You are one degree, at all events, better off than I, for I can hardly say either that I believe, or that I do not believe, in miracles.”

“And yet,” continued Harrington, after a pause, “two or three other strange consequences seem to follow from that seemingly undeniable principle on which we base the conclusion that there neither has been nor can be any such thing as a miracle:  in other words, a departure from the established series of sequences which, as tested by our own experience and by that of other men, we are convinced is stable.  Will you see with me whether there is any fair mode of escaping from them?  I should be very glad if I could do so.”

“What are they?”

“Why, first, I am afraid it must be said, that we must entirely justify a man in the condition of the Eastern prince mentioned by Hume, who could not be induced to believe that there was such a thing as ice.  I am afraid that he was quite in the right; and yet we know that in fact he was wrong.”

“You are not, then, satisfied with Hume’s own solution?”

“So far from it, that I cannot see, upon the principles on which we refuse to believe miracles, that it is even intelligible.  We agree, do we not, that, from the experience we have (and, so far as we can ascertain, from every body else’s) of the uniform course of events, of the established order of sequences, we are to reject any assertion of a violation of those sequences; as, for example, of a man’s coming into the world in any preternatural manner, or, when he has once gone out of it, coming into it again; and that we are entitled to do this without any examination of the witnesses to any such fact, merely on the strength of the principles aforesaid?”

“I admit that we have agreed to this.”

“Now was not the assertion that in a certain quarter of the world water became solid as stone, could be cut into pieces, and be put into one’s pockets, contrary, in a similar manner, to all the phenomena which the said prince had witnessed, and also to the uniform experience of all about him from his earliest years?”