So far from Dr. Mozley's statement being correct, it is notorious that the great mass of those who are competent to examine, and who have done so, altogether reject miracles. Instead of the "thinking and educated" men of science accepting miracles, they, as a body, distinctly deny them, and hence the antagonism between science and ecclesiastical Christianity, and Dr. Mozley surely does not require to be told how many of the profoundest critics and scholars of Germany, and of all other countries in Europe, who have turned their attention to Biblical subjects, have long ago rejected the miraculous elements of the Christian religion. Such being the case we necessarily revert to the first part of Dr. Mozley's representation, and find with him, that it is no great result for miracles to accomplish, merely to be accepted by, and retain authority over, a succession of ignorant and superstitious ages, "because it is easy to satisfy those who do not inquire." It is necessary that we should now refer to the circumstance that all the arguments which we have hitherto considered in support of miracles, whether to explain or account for them, have proceeded upon an assumption of the reality of the alleged phenomena. {207} Had it been first requisite to establish the truth of facts of such an astounding nature, the necessity of accounting for them might never have arisen. It is clear, therefore, that an assumption which permits the argument to attain any such position begs almost the whole question. Facts, however astounding, which, it is admitted, did actually occur, claim a latitude of explanation, which a mere narrative of those alleged facts, written by an unknown person some eighteen centuries ago, could not obtain. If, for instance, it be once established as an absolute fact that a man actually dead, and some days buried, upon whose body decomposition had already made some progress,(1) had been restored to life, the fact of his death and of his subsequent resuscitation being so absolutely proved that the possibility of deception or of mistake on the part of the witnesses was totally excluded--if such conclusive evidence be supposed possible in such a case--it is clear that an argument, as to whether such an occurrence were to be ascribed to known or unknown laws, would assume a very different character indeed from that which it would have borne if the argument merely sought to account for so astounding a phenomenon of whose actual occurrence there was no sufficient evidence. It must not be forgotten, therefore, that, as the late Professor Baden Powell pointed out: "At the present day it is not _a miracle_, but the _narrative of a miracle_, to which any argument can refer, or to which faith is accorded."(2) The discussion of miracles, then, is not one regarding miracles actually performed within our own knowledge, but merely regarding miracles said to have been performed eighteen hundred years ago, the reality of {208}