“But will the result not contradict your uniform experience, if your hopes be realized?  Is not your experience sufficiently long and sufficiently varied to show that the belief of miracles and all sorts of prodigies is the normal condition of mankind, and that it is only a comparatively few who can discern that uniform experience justifies man in believing that no miracle is possible?  While it teaches us that a miracle is impossible does it not also teach us that, though none is possible, it is nevertheless impossible that they should not be generally believed?  Is not this taught us as plainly by our uniform experience as any thing else?  See how fairly Hume admits this at the commencement of his Essay on Miracles.  He says, ’I flatter myself that I have discovered an argument which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently will be useful as long as the world endures.  For so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all histories, sacred and profane.’  Thus are we led to the conclusion, that, though miracles never can be real, they will nevertheless be always believed; and that, though the truth is with us, it never can be established in the minds of men in general.  And, my dear friend, let us be thankful that it never can; for if it could, that fact would have proved the possibility of miracles by contradicting one of those very deductions from uniform experience on the validity of which their impossibility is demonstrated.

“These are some of the perplexities,” continued Harrington, “which, as Theaetetus says, sometimes make ‘My head dizzy,’ when I revolve the subject.  Meantime, surely a nobler spectacle can hardly present itself than our fairly abiding by our principle, amidst so many plausible difficulties as assail it.  I know no one principle in theology or philosophy which has been so battered as that of Hume.  Not only Campbell, Paley, and so many more, confidently affirm errors in it,—­such as his assuming individual or general experience to be universal; his quietly attributing to individual experience a belief of facts which are believed by the vast mass of mankind on testimony, and nothing else; his representing the experience of a man who says he has seen a certain event as ‘contrary’ to the experience of him who says he has not seen a similar one; his implying that no amount of testimony can establish a miracle, which might compel us to believe moral miracles to get rid of physical miracles; I say not only so, but the most recent investigators of the theory of evidence cruelly abandon him.  The argument of Hume and Paley, says De Morgan, in his treatise on Probabilities, (Encyclopaedia Metropolitana:  Theory of Probabilities, 182.) is a ’fallacy answered by fallacies,’—­meaning by this last that Paley had conceded to his opponent more than he ought to have done.  With similar vexatious opposition, Mr. J. S. Mill says, that, to make any