syllogism has no part, even verificatory, in the action of my mind. I take this instance at random in illustration; now let me follow it up by more serious cases. 2. Leighton says, “What a full confession do we make of our dissatisfaction with the objects of our bodily senses, that in our attempts to express what we conceive of the best of beings and the greatest of felicities to be, we describe by the exact contraries of all that we experience here,—the one as infinite, incomprehensible, immutable, &c.; the other as incorruptible, undefiled, and that passeth not away. At all events, this coincidence, say rather identity of attributes, is sufficient to apprise us that, to be inheritors of bliss, we must become the children of God.” Coleridge quotes this passage, and adds, “Another and more fruitful, perhaps more solid, inference from the facts would be, that there is something in the human mind which makes it know that in all finite quantity, there is an infinite, in all measures of time an eternal; that the latter are the basis, the substance, of the former; and that, as we truly are only as far as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess, that is, enjoy our being or any other real good, but by living in the sense of His holy presence.(13)” What is this an argument for? how few readers will enter into either premiss or conclusion! and of those who understand what it means, will not at least some confess that they understand it by fits and starts, not at all times? Can we ascertain its force by mood and figure? Is there any royal road by which we may indolently be carried along into the acceptance of it? Does not the author rightly number it among his “aids” for our “reflection,” not instruments for our compulsion? It is plain that, if the passage is worth anything, we must secure that worth for our own use by the personal action of our own minds, or else we shall be only professing and asserting its doctrine, without having any ground or right to assert it. And our preparation for understanding and making use of it will be the general state of our mental discipline and cultivation, our own experiences, our appreciation of religious ideas, the perspicacity and steadiness of our intellectual vision. 3. It is argued by Hume against the actual occurrence of the Jewish and Christian miracles, that, whereas “it is experience only which gives authority to human testimony, and it is the same experience which assures us of the laws of nature,” therefore, “when these two kinds of experience are contrary” to each other, “we are bound to subtract the one from the other;” and, in consequence, since we have no experience of a violation of natural laws, and much experience of the violation of truth, “we may establish it as a maxim that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.”