“To render the testimony of any person credible, say these writers, he must not only be a man of veracity, but of sufficient ability to judge of the subject to which he is to bear witness. It is not on the evidence of an ignorant, illiterate person, who has more fancy and fear than judgment, that we are to rest our belief of what is supernatural.” Here again their weapon is from the arsenal of those who oppose our Saviour’s resurrection, known first to some of “the timorous and pious sex,” as Hume has termed them, and then to illiterate, ignorant fishermen, who, say the deists, had more fancy and fear than judgment. The truth is, some ignorant men have no more fancy nor fear than the learned, and a much better judgment than many of the latter. The corporeal senses of the illiterate are as infallible as those of the learned. The former can see and hear a ghost or an angel as distinctly as the latter, and can attempt to handle a ghost with as much composure of mind, and so are capable of knowing whether they can feel a substance or not, as a Locke or a Newton. On the whole, it appears that the reason why mankind in this enlightened age, must believe that apparitions are a mere fiction, is not because this negative thesis was ever established by any solid demonstration, but because the unanimity of modern names, the substitute of argument, has given it popularity. Doubtless the counterfeit apparitions which duped the popish ages, were numerous; but counterfeits will never prove that there is nothing to be counterfeited. Among the greatest impositions of this nature, where shall we find one, which will compare with the late events of Sullivan, in the county of Hancock, Maine. In that place has never been found any theatrical representation, or magic glass, or lantern, or ventriloquist, or speaking automaton, or Phantasmagoria, or Statue of Kircher: and were all these means of imposition found there, they would afford no rational explanation of the subsequent phenomena. How easy of solution was that fraud in the city of Bern, mentioned by Mosheim,[8] as imposed upon one Jetzer, by four Dominicans, to confirm their doctrine of original sin. The apparition was indeed terrific, and exhibited false miracles, but never offered to appear in the day time, nor predict any event, which could not be foreknown by other means, nor was there any address to the sense of feeling to satisfy Jetzer that the Spectre was a Phantom.