Doctor Priestley, with his usual candor, endeavours to assign a natural cause for what Constantine saw, and you are inclined to his opinion, to all of which I have no objections to make; and I am by no means certain, that a proper attention to the pretended miracles of the Shakers, might not issue in assigning a natural cause for them. But however this may be, I cannot see how the matter affects our belief in Jesus Christ. Do you not discover a difference too wide between the case of Jesus and his doctrine, and Ann Lee and her principles to admit of the comparison which you seem inclined to make? You have also mentioned the case of Mrs. A----'s seeing her husband and talking with him after he was dead, which you would draw into the same comparison. That Mrs. A---- may have satisfactory evidence of her having seen and conversed with her husband since his death, I am not at all disposed to dispute; but here the matter ends. God has not seen fit to endue her with the power of working miracles. If this woman should come into a public assembly and work astonishing miracles before all the people as an attestation of her having seen her husband, and you and I should be present, and see these marvellous things with our own eyes should we doubt the woman's testimony? I have already, in a former communication shown that the declaration of the apostles of the resurrection of Jesus, until it was accompanied with power from on high, was never even communicated to the public, or ordered to be communicated. But in fact the disciples were strictly commanded to tarry at Jerusalem until the gift of the Holy Spirit. Constantine would have had no occasion to depose under the solemnity of an oath, concerning the sign of the cross, &c. if he had had power to evidence his declaration by miracles. If Ann Lee's disciples will heal the sick, restore the lame, and raise the dead in so public a manner that the people at large may know these facts, then, sir, they will no longer need to purchase poor children in order to increase their societies. And if God should see fit to call me from my wife and children by such evidences as these, I hope I should not disobey his divine mandate. But will you reply, that miracles having ceased, we have no right to expect them? In return it may be asked, how we are assured that miracles are not now necessary as they were twenty or thirty years ago? Will you retort this question and ask why miracles are not now as necessary to evince the truth of christianity as in the days of Jesus and his apostles? To this we reply: the miracles on which the gospel was founded, or propagated, were of the most extraordinary kind; they were of extensive publicity, and of ocular notoriety; they were vastly numerous, extending to the infirmed of all descriptions; and they were continued long enough to answer the purpose for which they were intended.