Or is it possible for a question to be more distinctly begged than when, to the question whether a miracle has occurred, it is answered that a miracle is not a miracle unless there be uniform experience against it; that uniformly adverse experience is direct and full proof against anything; and that therefore there must always be full proof against miracles? What is here taken for granted to be full proof is the very thing requiring to be proved. If past uniformity really be a pledge for continued uniformity, of course there can be no departure from uniformity. If the whole question does not at once fall to the ground, it is because no question has ever really arisen. But what shadow of pretext is there for treating an hitherto unvaried course of events as necessarily invariable? From past experience we have deduced what we are pleased to call _laws_ of nature, but it is morally impossible that we can seriously think, whatever we are in the habit of saying, that these laws are self-denying ordinances whereby nature's God has voluntarily abdicated part of His inalienable prerogative. The utmost efficacy we are warranted in ascribing to them is that of lines marking certain of the courses within which God's providence is pleased to move. But how can we pretend to know for how long a season such may continue to be the divine pleasure? How do we know that the present season may not be the first of an alternating series, and that it may not at any moment terminate, and be succeeded by one of an opposite character? What though we have some shadow of historical evidence that most physical phenomena have been going on in much the same order for some six thousand years, is that a basis whereon to theorise with regard to the proceedings of Him in whose sight one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day? Might not as well some scientific member of an insect tribe of ephemera, whom ancestral tradition, confirmed by personal experience, had assured that an eight-day clock had already gone on for six days, pronounce it to be a law of the clock's nature that it should go on for ever without being again wound up? Would the insect philosopher's dogmatism be one whit less absurd than that of those human ephemera who so positively lay down the law about the clockwork of the universe? Those laws of nature to which unerring regularity and perpetuity of operation are so confidently attributed, may they not, perchance, be but single clauses of much farther reaching laws, according to whose other provisions the force of these isolated clauses may, in novel combinations of circumstances, be counteracted by some latent and hitherto unsuspected force? Or is it not, at all events, open to their divine promulgator to suspend their operation at his pleasure? May it not conceivably have been preordained that the globe of our earth, after revolving for a given number of ages, in one direction, shall then, like