If
with respect to a much less startling narration is the point in dispute between us?"
Such and so peculiar, and to an honest mind so unmistakeable, is the character of veracity and simplicity on the very countenance, as it were, of the Gospel, that every remove of the inquirer's attention from the facts themselves is a remove of his conversion. It is your business to keep him from wandering, not to set him the example.
Never, surely, was there a more unequal writer than Skelton;—in the discourses on the Trinity, the compeer of Bull and Waterland; and yet the writer of these pages, 500-501! Natural magic! a stroke of art! for example, converting the Nile into blood! And then his definition of a miracle. Suspension of the laws of nature! suspension—laws—nature! Bless me! a chapter would be required for the explanation of each several word of this definition, and little less than omniscience for its application in any one instance. An effect presented to the senses without any adequate antecedent,
ejusdem generis
, is a miracle in the philosophic sense. Thus: the corporeal ponderable hand and arm raised with no other known causative antecedent, but a thought, a pure act of an immaterial essentially invisible imponderable will, is a miracle for a reflecting mind. Add the words,
præter experientiam
: and we have the definition of a miracle in the popular, practical, and appropriated sense.
Vol. III.