A modern philosopher has given the quietus to miracles in the following death-blow:--"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined; and, therefore, no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, _unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish_" This argument is absolutely invincible. The boundless plenum of Nature--the revolution of hundreds of millions of globes round a million of suns, may be called miraculous, but in all this, Nature, or the material universe in motion,* is still invariable, and acting by _self-existing qualities or properties_, which are therefore inviolable and immutable. If it is asked, "cannot a law that is made by the Supreme Power be suspended by its author?" we reply, that the innate or essential properties of matter, being _principles_, could have no author--no antecedent--no beginning:--they are co-eternal as matter and motion, or the immutable Power which we call Nature. This hypothesis is plain, simple, easy, and rational: but the theory of your personified, localised artificer, is the reverse of all this; for he himself would stand a thousand times more in need of an artificer or author than does the material universe. We _know that matter exists:**--_there can be only one infinite--ergo, matter _must_ be that infinite. * Lalande says that at the age of nineteen, he thought the heavens proved a personified God (the anthropomorphism of the Jews). but now, says he, I see in them nothing but matter and motion. He said also that Materialism was beyond the vulgar, to whom it would be neither agreeable nor useful. ** Begging my Lord of Cloyne's pardon.