God is the being moral and free par excellence, that is to say, the being excellently capable of acting as first cause beyond the influence of causation. By his title as a moral being and free agent, man is in intimate relation with God. Who shall define the possible contingencies, or fathom the mysteries of this relation? Who dare to say that God cannot modify, that He never does modify, according to his plans with respect to the moral system and to man, the laws which He has made and which He maintains in the material order of nature?
Some have hesitated absolutely to deny the possibility of supernatural facts; and so their attack is indirect. If those facts, say they, are not impossible, they are incredible, for no particular testimony of man in favour of a miracle can give a certitude equal to that which, on the opposite side, results from the experience which men have of the fixity of the laws of nature.
"It is experience only," says Hume, "which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience which assures us of the laws of nature. When therefore these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do, but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principles here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation: and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion." [Footnote 19]
[Footnote 19: Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, by David Hume; Essay on Miracles, vol. iii. p. 119-145, Bâle, 1793. [Same work, p. 91, London, 16mo, 1860.—TRANSLATOR.]
It is in this reasoning of Hume that the opponents of miracles shut themselves up as in an impregnable fortress to refuse them all credence.
What confusion of facts and ideas! What a superficial solution of one of the grandest problems of our nature! What! a simple operation of arithmetic, with respect to two experimental observations, estimated in ciphers, is to decide the question whether the universal belief of the race of man in the Supernatural is well-founded or simply absurd; whether God only acts upon the world and upon man by laws established once for all, or whether He still continues to make, in the exercise of his power, use of his liberty! Not only does the sceptic Hume here show himself unconscious of the grandeur of the problem; he mistakes even in the motives upon which he founds his shallow conclusion; for it is not from human experience alone that human testimony draws her authority: this authority has sources more profound, and a worth anterior to experience: it is one of the natural bonds, one of the spontaneous sympathies which unite with one another men and the generations of men. Is it by virtue of experience that the child trusts to the words of its mother, that it has faith in all she tells it? The mutual trust that men repose in what they say or transmit to each other is an instinct, primitive, spontaneous, which experience confirms or shakes, sets up again or sets bounds to, but which experience does not originate.
I find in the same essay of Hume, [Footnote 20] this other passage: "The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events from which it is derived."
[Footnote 20: Hume's Essay on Miracles, p. 128, ubi supra.]