They are working without an object. They know not what they are aiming at. Their work is not to prove any thing, to settle any thing, or establish any thing; but to unsettle, confuse and throw into doubt. What have they done for the world? What do they propose to do for man? Nothing, only to pull down religion, do away with the church, and put the Bible out of the world! They appear to think that the principal thing now required to do, for the happiness of the world, is to rid it of all religion. But where is the evidence that they are doing any good? Where have they made the people happy? Where have they done any good? What good are they now doing? None under the shining sun. MIRACLES. What is a miracle? A miracle is not, as Hume defined it, “something _contrary to the laws of nature_,” but something above the laws of nature, or something that the laws of nature, in their legitimate and ordinary operations, could not produce. For instance, the laws of nature, in their legitimate and ordinary operations, from parents, can produce offspring, and bring them to manhood and womanhood. But the laws of nature, in their legitimate course of operation, never produced a man and a woman, without parents, or never brought into existence a man and a woman, at sufficient maturity to care for themselves and live, without parents. No law of nature, in its legitimate and ordinary course of operation, brought Adam and Eve into existence, at maturity, and without parents. In other words, no law or laws of nature, in their legitimate and ordinary operation, ever began the human race. In the plainest terms, no law of nature ever produced a human being without parents. In other words, it is not a miracle for children to come from parents, but it was a miracle to create the first human pair. All who admit that the human race ever had a beginning, must admit that it began by miracle. It is not a miracle for an oak to produce an acorn, nor for an acorn to produce an oak; but it is a miracle to produce an oak without an acorn, and equally a miracle to produce an acorn without an oak. The laws of nature, in the legitimate and ordinary course of their operation, never produced an acorn without an oak, or an oak without an acorn. The first acorn, or the first oak, was, unquestionably, a miracle. The first man was a miracle. The second man, the Lord from heaven, was a miracle. Isaac, the child of promise, and the only son of Abraham, as Jesus was the child of promise, and the only begotten of the Father, was a miracle. To sum all up, and express it in one sentence, everything,—every species of animal, insect and vegetable, began by miracle. The laws of nature create nothing, give us no new species or kind, but simply propagate and perpetuate that which was given by miracle at first. By the established laws of nature, the human race have been propagated and perpetuated, but the human race had its commencement in miracle.