As a specimen of the manner in which Hume would have one weigh the probabilities for and against miracles, we may take the oft-cited passage with which the discussions closes. “... Let us examine those miracles related in scripture; and not to lose ourselves in too wide a field, let us confine ourselves to such as we find in the _Pentateuch_, which we shall examine, ... not as the word or testimony of God himself, but as the production of a mere human writer and historian. Here, then, we are first to consider a book presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they are still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts which every nation gives of its origin. Upon reading this book, we find it full of prodigies and miracles. It gives us an account of a state of the world and of human nature entirely different from the present; of our fall from that state; of the age of man extended to nearly a thousand years; of the destruction of the world by a deluge; of the arbitrary choice of one people as the favorites of heaven, and that people the countrymen of the author; of their deliverance from bondage by prodigies the most astonishing imaginable: I desire any one to lay his hand upon his heart, and after a serious consideration declare whether he thinks that the falsehood of such a book, supported by such testimony, would be more extraordinary and miraculous than all the miracles it relates; which is, however, necessary to make it to be received, according to the measure of probability above established.” Higher critical ability and wider knowledge have since Hume’s day been brought to bear upon the interpretation of such documents as the books of the Old Testament, and it is not as an ethnologist that he has any claim upon our attention. But the citation will serve to show that the skepticism of the empirical method is not of a kind greatly to disturb our confidence in the commonly accepted laws of nature. It will further serve to establish one point respecting Hume’s theology, a point which throughout all his hesitating utterances on this subject he never abandons, that, namely, if aught in the world as we know it points to a God, it is not the strange and exceptional, but the regular and law-abiding aspects of nature. To him, a wonder-working God is a superstition of the ages of ignorance and of the ignorant of all ages.