desolation.  Now, he thought, was the time to put an end to all this strange disorder, and avow himself the great agent in all these marvels!  But he found, to his chagrin, that, so far from having convinced men of the being and attributes of God, and of the truth of the revelation which he had brought them, they were never less disposed to listen to any such story; and, in fact, that the very few whose terror had left them at all in possession of their senses, had become perfectly convinced that the universe was under the dominion of Chance; and that the only orthodox belief in such a world was stark Atheism.  As there will always be men who will speculate upon chance itself, there were not wanting philosophers who concocted admirable theories of all this disorder, but not one of them dreamed of the true.  They all agreed, however, that the state of things admitted of no remedy from any gods, celestial or infernal; for if a divine artificer had existed, they said, it could not have occurred.  And thus the miracles which were designed by this great man to convince the world of a God, served for a demonstration that there was and could be none!  They equally served also to stifle the sage’s claims to be considered God’s messenger, for, unhappily exhorting a large crowd to believe that he was the cause of all the misery and terror which they had suffered, they were so exasperated that they took summary vengeance on him:  upon which the sun resumed his wonted quiet pace again through the heavens, and every thing fell into the old harmonious jogtrot of uniformity.  Philosophers who lived at a distance from the scene of the prophet’s exit quietly adjusted their old theory to the new phenomena, and showed most conclusively that the whole train of things had been just what must necessarily have been, and could not but have happened, without the most serious consequences; while those who lived near to the scene aforesaid, and were privy to the circumstances, speculated upon the curious coincidence between the impostor’s death and the return of nature to her order.  It was well, they said, that such things did not happen often, or they could not fail to give rise to some superstitious notions as to some law of causation between ignorant fanaticism and the sublimest phenomena of the universe.

I asked my visitor how it fared with the many who have objected to the clearness and force of prophecy, and who have not scrupled to assert, that, if prophecies had been given, they would have been given in such a shape as would have made their claims more plain, and their fulfilment more incontrovertible.  “Were there none who relied on this mode of demonstrating the reality of a divine revelation, and manifesting their claims to be regarded as an embassy from heaven?”