many centuries before the dawn of Christianity and continued, without interruption, for fifteen hundred years after it. They did not in the most remote degree originate the belief in miracles, or give the first suggestion of spurious imitation. It may, on the contrary, be much more truly said that the already existing belief created these miracles. No divine originality characterized the evidence selected to accredit the Divine Revelation. The miracles with which the history of the world is full occurred in ages of darkness and superstition, and they gradually ceased when enlightenment became more generally diffused. At the very time when knowledge of the laws of nature began to render men capable of judging of the reality of miracles, these wonders entirely failed. This extraordinary cessation of miracles, precisely at the time when their evidence might have acquired value by an appeal to persons capable of appreciating them, is perfectly unintelligible if they be viewed as the supernatural credentials of a Divine revelation. If, on the other hand, they be regarded as the mistakes of imaginative excitement and ignorance, nothing is more natural than their extinction at the time when the superstition which created them gave place to knowledge. As a historical fact, there is nothing more certain than that miracles, and the belief in them, disappeared exactly when education and knowledge of the operation of natural laws became diffused throughout Europe, and that the last traces of belief in supernatural interference with the order of nature are only to be found in localities where ignorance and superstition still prevail, and render delusion or pious fraud of that description possible. Miracles are now denied to places more enlightened {203}