It is, indeed, avowed by those who reduce man in nature, that upon the admission of free-will, the objection to the miraculous is over, and that it is absurd to allow exception to law in man, and reject it in nature. But the broad, popular sense of natural order, and the instinctive and common repugnance to a palpable violation of it, have been forged and refined into the philosophical objection to miracles. Two great thinkers of past generations, two of the keenest and clearest intellects which have appeared since the Reformation, laid the foundations of it long ago. Spinoza urged the uselessness of miracles, and Hume their incredibility, with a guarded subtlety and longsighted refinement of statement which made them in advance of their age except with a few. But their reflections have fallen in with a more advanced stage of thought and a taste for increased precision and exactness, and they are beginning to bear their fruit. The great and telling objection to miracles is getting to be, not their want of evidence, but, prior to all question of evidence, the supposed impossibility of fitting them in with a scientific view of nature. Reason, looking at nature and experience, is said to raise an antecedent obstacle to them which no alleged proof of fact can get over. They cannot be, because they are so unlike to everything else in the world, even of the strangest kind, in this point--in avowedly breaking the order of nature. And reason cannot be admitted to take cognizance of their claims and to consider their character, their purpose, their results, their credentials, because the mere supposition of them violates the fundamental conception and condition of science, absolute and invariable law, as well as that common-sense persuasion which everybody has, whether philosopher or not, of the uniformity of the order of the world. II To make room for reason to come in and pronounce upon miracles on their own merits--to clear the ground for the consideration of their actual claims by disposing of the antecedent objection of impossibility, is Mr. Mozley's main object. Whatever difficulty there is in believing in miracles in general arises from the circumstance that they are in contradiction to or unlike the order of nature. To estimate the force of this difficulty, then, we must first understand what kind of belief it is which we have in the order of nature; for the weight of the objection to the miraculous must depend on the nature of the belief to which the miraculous is opposed.