Fellowes smiled incredulously.  “First, however,” said he, “what is the more notorious fallacy to which you allude?”

“It is so barefaced an assumption, that I am surprised that his acuteness did not see it; or that, if he saw it, he could have descended to make a point by appearing not to see it.  It has been often pointed out, and you will recollect it the moment I name it.  You know he commences with the well-known argument of Tillotson against Transubstantiation and flatters himself that he sees a similar argument in relation to miracles.  Now it certainly requires but a moderate degree of sagacity to see that the very point in which Tillotson’s argument tells, is that very one in which Hume’s is totally unlike it.  Tillotson says, that when it is pretended that the bread and wine which are submitted to his own senses have been ‘transubstantiated into flesh and blood,’ the alleged phenomena contradict his senses; and that as the information of his senses as much comes from God as the doctrines of Scripture (and even the miracles of Scripture appeal to nothing stronger), he must believe his senses in this case in preference to the assertions of the priest.  Hume then goes on quietly to take it for granted that the miracles to which consent is asked in like manner contradict the testimony of the senses of him to whom they appeal is made; whereas, in fact, the assertor of the miracles does not pretend that he who denies them has ever seen them, or had the opportunity of seeing them.  To make the argument analogous, it ought to be shown that the objector, having been a spectator of the pretended miracles, when and where they were affirmed to have been wrought, had then and there the testimony of his senses that no such events had taken place.  It is mere juggling with words to say that never to have seen a like event is the same argument of an event’s never having occurred, as never to have seen that event when it was alleged to have taken place under our very eyes!”

“I give up the reasoning on this point,” said Fellowes, “but how, I should like to know, do you retort the argument upon him?”

“Thus; you see that we maintain that a miracle is incredible per se, because impossible; not to be believed, therefore, on any evidence.”

“Certainly.”

“If, then, we saw what seemed a miracle, we should distrust our senses; we should say that it was most likely that they deceived us.  Hear what Voltaire says in one of his letters to D’Alembert:  ’Je persiste a penser que cent mille hommes qui ont vu ressusciter un mort, pourraient bien etre cent mille hommes qui auraient la berlue.’  And what he says of their bad eyes, there is no doubt he would say of his own, if he had been one of the hundred thousand.”

“I think so, certainly.”

“And Strauss, and Hume, and Voltaire, and you and I, and all who hold a miracle impossible, would distrust our senses, and fall back upon that testimony from the general experience of others, which alone could correct our own halting and ambiguous experience.”