it is believed upon its miraculous evidence. Now, for a set of miracles to be accepted in a rude age, and to retain their authority throughout a succession of such ages, and over the ignorant and superstitious part of mankind, may be no such great result for the miracle to accomplish, because it is easy to satisfy those who do not inquire. But this is not the state of the case which we have to meet on the subject of the Christian miracles. The Christian being the most intelligent, the civilized portion of the world, these miracles are accepted by the Christian body as a whole, by the thinking and educated as well as the uneducated part of it, and the Gospel is believed upon that evidence."(1) The picture of Christendom here suggested is purely imaginary. We are asked to believe that succeeding generations of thinking and educated as well as uneducated men, since the commencement of the period in which the adequate inquiry into the reality of miracles became possible, have made that adequate inquiry, and have intelligently and individually accepted miracles and believed the Gospel in consequence of their attestation. The fact, however, is that Christianity became the religion of Europe before men either possessed the knowledge requisite to appreciate the difficulties involved in the acceptance of miracles, or minds sufficiently freed from ignorant superstition to question the reality of the supposed supernatural interference with the order of nature, and belief had become so much a matter of habit that, in this nineteenth century, the great majority of men have professed belief for no better reason than that their fathers believed before them. Belief is now little more than a transmitted quality or hereditary custom. Few men, even {206} now, have either the knowledge or the leisure requisite to enable them to enter upon such an examination of miracles as can entitle Dr. Mozley to affirm that they intelligently accept miracles for themselves. We have shown, moreover, that so loose are the ideas even of the clergy upon the subject, that dignitaries of the church fail to see either the evidential purpose of miracles or the need for evidence at all, and the first intelligent step towards inquiry--doubt--has generally been stigmatized almost as a crime.