I am speaking of the process itself, and its correctness is shown by its general adoption. In religious questions a single text of Scripture is all-sufficient with most people, whether the well disposed or the prejudiced, to prove a doctrine or a duty in cases when a custom is established or a tradition is strong. "Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together" is sufficient for establishing social, public, nay, Sunday worship. "Where the tree falleth, there shall it lie," shows that our probation ends with life. "Forbidding to marry" determines the Pope to be the man of sin. Again, it is plain that a man's after course for good or bad brings out the passing words or obscure actions of previous years. Then, on a retrospect, we use the event as a presumptive interpretation of the past, of those past indications of his character which, considered as evidence, were too few and doubtful to bear insisting on at the time, and would have seemed ridiculous, had we attempted to do so. And the antecedent probability is even found to triumph over contrary evidence, as well as to sustain what agrees with it. Every one may know of cases in which a plausible charge against an individual was borne down at once by weight of character, though that character was incommensurate of course with the circumstances which gave rise to suspicion, and had no direct neutralizing force to destroy it. On the other hand, it is sometimes said, and even if not literally true will serve in illustration, that not a few of those who are put on trial in our criminal courts are not legally guilty of the particular crime on which a verdict is found against them, being convicted not so much upon the particular evidence, as on the presumption arising from their want of character and the memory of their former offences. Nor is it in slight matters only or unimportant that we thus act. Our dearest interests, our personal welfare, our property, our health, our reputation, we freely hazard, not on proof, but on a simple probability, which is sufficient for our conviction, because prudence dictates to us so to take it. We must be content to follow the law of our being in religious matters as well as in secular. 6.