of the saints of the Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the present day, are a complete tissue of miracles resembling and rivalling those of the Gospels.  Some of these stories are romantic and imaginative; some clear, literal, and prosaic:  some rest on mere tradition; some on the sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are obvious fables; some are as well authenticated as facts of such a kind can be authenticated at all.  The Protestant Christian rejects every one of them—­rejects them without inquiry—­involves those for which there is good authority and those for which there is none or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and sweeping denial.  The Protestant Christian feels it more likely, in the words of Hume, that men should deceive or be deceived, than that the laws of nature should be violated.  At this moment we are beset with reports of conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of hands projected out of the world of shadows into this mortal life.  An unusually able, accomplished person, accustomed to deal with common-sense facts, a celebrated political economist, and notorious for business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain mesmerist, who was my informant’s intimate friend, had raised a dead girl to life.  We should believe the people who tell us these things in any ordinary matter:  they would be admitted in a court of justice as good witnesses in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a man on their word.  The person just now alluded to is incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our experience of the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and our experience of the capacities of human folly on the other is so large, that when they tell us these wonderful stories, most of us are contented to smile; we do not care so much as to turn out of our way to examine them.

The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as from other histories we reject miracles without hesitation, so of those in the Bible we insist on the universal acceptance:  the former are all false, the latter are all true.  It is evident that, in forming conclusions so sweeping as these, we cannot even suppose that we are being guided by what is called historical evidence.  Were it admitted that as a whole the miracles of the Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the saints, we should be far removed still from any large inference, that in the one set there is no room for falsehood, in the other no room for truth.  The writer or writers of the Books of Kings are not known.  The books themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings which are lost; and the accounts of the great prophets of Israel are a counterpart, curiously like, of those of the mediaeval saints.  In many instances the authors of the lives of these saints were their companions and friends.  Why do we feel so sure that what we are told of Elijah or Elisha took place exactly as we read it?  Why do we reject the account of