the danger of extending this admission beyond its proper limits, of supposing ourselves adequate judges of the _tendency_ of doctrines; and, because unassisted Reason informs us what is moral and immoral in our own case, of attempting to decide on the abstract morality of actions;... These remarks are in nowise inconsistent with using (as was done in a former section) our actual knowledge of God's attributes, obtained from a survey of nature and human affairs, in determining the probability of certain professed Miracles having proceeded from Him. It is one thing to infer from the experience of life, another to imagine the character of God from the gratuitous conceptions of our own minds."(1) Although Dr. Newman apparently fails to perceive that he himself thus makes reason the criterion of miracles and therefore incurs the condemnation with which our quotation opens, the very indecision of his argument illustrates the dilemma in which divines are placed. Dr. Mozley, however, still more directly condemns the principle which we are discussing--that the doctrine must be the criterion of the miracle--although he also, as we have purposes for which it never was intended, and is unfitted. To rationalise in matters of Revelation is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed; to stipulate that those doctrines should be such as to carry with them their own justification; to reject them, if they come in collision with our existing opinions or habits of thought, or are with difficulty harmonised with our existing stock of knowledge" (Essays, Crit. and Hist., 1872, vol. i. p. 31); and a little further on: "A like desire of judging for one's self is discernible in the original fall of man. Eve did not believe the Tempter any more than God's word, till she perceived «the fruit was good for food '" (76., p. 33). Dr. Newman, of course, wishes to limit his principle precisely to suit his own convenience, but in permitting the rejection of a supposed Revelation in spite of miracles, on the ground of our disapproval of its morality, it is obvious that the doctrine is substantially made the final criterion of the miracle. {22} seen, elsewhere substantially affirms it. He says: "The position that the revelation proves the miracles, and not the miracles the revelation, admits of a good qualified meaning; but taken literally, it is a double offence against the rule, that things are properly proved by the proper proof of them; for a supernatural fact _is_ the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine; while a supernatural doctrine, on the other hand, is certainly _not_ the proper proof of a supernatural fact"(1)