How, let us suppose, would David Hume—the greatest thinker of which infidelity can boast—have greeted the auxiliary who could have brought him such an _argument_ as a contribution to the cause? “Your objection, so far as you have stated it,” the philosopher might have said, “amounts simply to this:—Creation by direct act is a miracle; whereas all that exists is _propagated_ and _maintained_ by natural law. Natural laws—to vary the illustration—were in full operation at the period when the Author of the Christian religion was, it is said, engaged in working his miracles. When, according to our opponents, he walked upon the surface of the sea, Peter, through the operation of the natural law of gravitation, was sinking into it; when he withered, by a word, the barren fig-tree, there were other trees on the Mount thriving in conformity with the vegetative laws, under the influence of sun and shower; when he raised the dead Lazarus, there were corpses in the neighboring tombs passing, through the natural putrefactive fermentation, into a state of utter decomposition. In fine, at the time when he was engaged, as Reid and Campbell believe, in working miracles in violation of law, the laws of which these were a violation actually existed, and were every where actively operative; or, to employ your own words, when the New Testament miracles were, it is alleged, in the act of being wrought, ‘all the common operations of the physical world were going on in their usual simplicity, obeying that order which we still see governing them.’ Such is the portion of your statement already made; what next?” “It is surely very unlikely,” replies the auxiliary, “that in such a complex mass of phenomena there should have been two totally distinct modes of the exercise of the Divine power,—the mode by miracle and the mode by law.” “Unlikely!” rejoins the philosopher; “on what grounds?” “O, just _unlikely_,” says the auxiliary;—“unlikely that God should be at once operating on matter through the agency of natural laws, of which _man knows much_, and through the agency of miraculous acts, of the nature of which _man knows nothing_. But I have not thought out the subject any further: you have, in the statement already made, my entire _argument_.” “Ay, I see,” the author of the “Essay on Miracles” would probably have remarked; “you deem it unlikely that Deity should not only work in part, as he has always done, by means of which _men_,—clever fellows like you and me—think they know a great deal but that he should also work in part, _as he has always done_, by means of which they know nothing at all. Admirably reasoned out! You are, I make no doubt, a sound, zealous unbeliever in your private capacity, and your argument may have great weight with your own mind, and be, in consequence, worthy of encouragement in a small way; but allow me to suggest that, for the sake of the general cause, it should be kept out of reach of the enemy.