The scientific part of induction being only the pursuit of a particular fact, miracles cannot in the nature of the case receive any blow from the scientific part of induction; because the existence of one fact does not interfere with the existence of another dissimilar fact. That which _does_ resist the miraculous is the _un_scientific part of induction, or the instinctive generalisation upon this fact.... It does not belong to this principle to lay down speculative positions, and to say what can or cannot take place in the world. It does not belong to it to control religious belief, or to determine that certain acts of God for the revelation of His will to man, reported to have taken place, have not taken place. Such decisions are totally out of its sphere; it can assert the universal as a _law_, but the universal as a law and the universal as a proposition are wholly distinct. The one asserts the universal as a fact, the other as a presumption; the one as an absolute certainty, the other as a practical certainty, when there is no reason to expect the contrary. The one contains and includes the particular, the other does not; from the one we argue mathematically to the falsehood of any opposite particular; from the other we do not.... For example, one signal miracle, pre-eminent for its grandeur, crowned the evidence of the supernatural character and office of our Lord--our Lord's ascension--His going up with His body of flesh and bones into the sky in the presence of His disciples. "He lifted up His hands, and blessed them. And while He blessed them, He was parted from them, and carried up into heaven. And they looked stedfastly toward heaven as He went up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight."