a writer claims to have himself performed a miracle.(1) Wherever there has existed even the comparatively accurate means of information which a person who himself performed a miracle might possess, the miraculous entirely fails, and it is found only where faith or credulity usurps the place of knowledge. Pious men were perfectly ready to believe the supposed miracles of others, and to report them as facts, who were too veracious to imagine any of their own. Even if Apostles and Saints had chronicled their own miraculous deeds, the argument for their reality would not have been much advanced; but the uniform absence of such personal pretension enables us more clearly to trace such narratives to pious credulity or superstition.
If we consider the particular part which miracles have played in human history, we find precisely the phenomena which might have been expected if miracles, instead of being considered as real occurrences, were recognized as the mistakes or creations of ignorance and superstition during that period in which "reality melted into fable, and invention unconsciously trespassed on the province of history." Their occurrence is limited to ages which were totally ignorant of physical laws, and they have been numerous or rare precisely in proportion to the degree of imagination and love of the marvellous characterizing the people amongst whom they are said to have occurred. Instead of a few evidential miracles taking place at one epoch of history, and filling the world with surprise at such novel and exceptional phenomena, we find miracles represented as taking place in all ages and in all countries. The Gospel miracles are set in the midst of a series of similar wonders, which commenced
1 This is fully discussed in the third volume.
many centuries before the dawn of Christianity and continued, without interruption, for fifteen hundred years after it. They did not in the most remote degree originate the belief in miracles, or give the first suggestion of spurious imitation. It may, on the contrary, be much more truly said that the already existing belief created these miracles. No divine originality characterized the evidence selected to accredit the Divine Revelation. The miracles with which the history of the world is full occurred in ages of darkness and superstition, and they gradually ceased when enlightenment became more generally diffused. At the very time when knowledge of the laws of nature began to render men capable of judging of the reality of miracles, these wonders entirely failed. This extraordinary cessation of miracles, precisely at the time when their evidence might have acquired value by an appeal to persons capable of appreciating them, is perfectly unintelligible if they be viewed as the supernatural credentials of a Divine revelation. If, on the other hand, they be regarded as the mistakes of imaginative excitement and ignorance, nothing is more natural than their extinction at the time when the superstition which created them gave place to knowledge.
As a historical fact, there is nothing more certain than that miracles, and the belief in them, disappeared exactly when education and knowledge of the operation of natural laws became diffused throughout Europe, and that the last traces of belief in supernatural interference with the order of nature are only to be found in localities where ignorance and superstition still prevail, and render delusion or pious fraud of that description possible. Miracles are now denied to places more enlightened
than Naples or La Salette. The inevitable inference from this fact is fatal to the mass of miracles, and it is not possible to protect them from it. Miracle cures by the relics of saints, upheld for fifteen centuries by all the power of the Church, utterly failed when medical science, increasing in spite of persecution, demonstrated the natural action of physiological laws. The theory of the demoniacal origin of disease has been entirely and for ever dispelled, and the host of miracles in connection with it retrospectively exploded by the progress of science. Witchcraft and sorcery, the belief in which reigned supreme for so many centuries, are known to have been nothing but the delusions of ignorant superstition. "A l'époque où les faits merveilleux qui s'y (dans les légendes) trouvent consignés étaient rapportés," asks an able French writer, "possé dait-on les lumieres suffisantes pour exercer une critique véritable et sérieuse sur des témoignages que venaient affirmer des faits en contradiction avec nos connaissances? Or, on peut assurer hardiment que non. Au moyen-age, l'intime conviction que la nature voit tres fréquemment ses lois interverties par la volonté divine régnait dans les esprits, en sorte que pour peu qu'un fait se présentat avec des apparences extraordinaires, on se hatait de le regarder comme un miracle, comme loeuvre directe de la divinité. Aujourd'hui on cherche au contraire à tout rapporter à la loi commune; on est tellement sobre de faits miraculeux, que ceux qui paraissent tels sont ^cartes comme des fables ou tonus pour des faits ordinaires mal expliques. La foi aux miracles a disparu. En outre, au moyen-age le cercle des connaissances qu'on possédait sur la nature était fort restreint, et tout ce qui n'y rentrait pas était regardé comme surnatural.
