But, admitting that God chose to distinguish a small number of men by particular favors, is there any necessity that, in order to accomplish this object, He should change what He established for all periods and for all places? He certainly can have no need of this inconstancy in order to bestow favors on any of His creatures: His favors consist in His laws themselves: he has foreseen all and arranged all, with a view to them. All invariably obey the force which He has impressed forever on nature. For what purpose would God perform a miracle? To accomplish some particular design upon living beings? He would then, in reality, be supposed to say: "I have not been able to effect by my construction of the universe, by my divine decrees, by my eternal laws, a particular object; I am now going to change my eternal ideas and immutable laws, to endeavor to accomplish what I have not been able to do by means of them." This would be an avowal of His weakness, not of His power; it would appear in such a being an inconceivable contradiction. Accordingly, therefore, to dare to ascribe miracles to God is, if man can in reality insult God, actually offering Him that insult. It is saying to Him: "You are a weak and inconsistent Being." It is, therefore, absurd to believe in miracles; it is, in fact, dishonoring the divinity. These philosophers, however, are not suffered thus to declaim without opposition. You may extol, it is replied, as much as you please, the immutability of the Supreme Being, the eternity of His laws, and the regularity of His infinitude of worlds; but our little heap of earth has, notwithstanding all that you have advanced, been completely covered over with miracles in every part and time. Histories relate as many prodigies as natural events. The daughters of the high priest Anius changed whatever they pleased to corn, wine, and oil; Athalide, the daughter of Mercury, revived again several times; Æsculapius resuscitated Hippolytus; Hercules rescued Alcestes from the hand of death; and Heres returned to the world after having passed fifteen days in hell. Romulus and Remus were the offspring of a god and a vestal. The Palladium descended from heaven on the city of Troy; the hair of Berenice was changed into a constellation; the cot of Baucis and Philemon was converted into a superb temple; the head of Orpheus delivered oracles after his death; the walls of Thebes spontaneously constructed themselves to the sound of a flute, in the presence of the Greeks; the cures effected in the temple of Æsculapius were absolutely innumerable, and we have monuments still existing containing the very names of persons who were eye-witnesses of his miracles. Mention to me a single nation in which the most incredible prodigies have not been performed, and especially in those periods in which the people scarcely knew how to write or read.