which it is impotent. It cannot receive an impression from without that is not conveyed in accordance with law, and perceived by an exquisitely ordered organism, in every part of which law reigns supreme; nor can it communicate from within except through channels equally ordered by law. A slight injury may derange the delicate mechanical contrivances of eye, ear, and vocal chords, and may further destroy the reason and paralyze the body, reducing the animated being, by the derangement of those channels to which physical law limits its action, to a mere smouldering spark of life, without consciousness and without expression. The "laws of life" act amongst the laws of matter, but are not independent of them, and the action of both classes of law is regulated by precisely the same principles. Dr. Mozley's affirmation, that _antecedently_ one step on the ground and an ascent to heaven are alike incredible, does not help him. In that sense it follows that there is nothing that is not antecedently incredible, nothing credible until it has happened. This argument, however, while it limits us to actual experience, prohibits presumptions with regard to that which is beyond experience. To argue that, because a step on the ground and an ascent to heaven are antecedently alike incredible, yet as we subsequently make that step, therefore the ascent to heaven, which we cannot make, from incredible becomes credible, is a contradiction in terms. If the ascent be antecedently incredible, it cannot at the same time be antecedently credible. That which is incredible cannot become credible because something else quite different becomes credible. It is apparent that such an argument is vicious. Experience comes {44} with its sober wisdom to check such reasoning. We believe in our power to walk because we habitually exercise it: we disbelieve in bodily ascensions because all experience excludes them. The step is part of the recognised order of nature, and has none of the elements in it of the miraculous. But if we leap into the air on the brink of a precipice, belief in an ascent to heaven is shattered to pieces at the bottom to which the law of gravitation infallibly drags us.