I have often to complain that too little attention is paid by commentators to the history and particular period in which certain speeches were delivered, or words written. Could St. Peter with propriety have introduced the truth to a prejudiced audience with its deepest mysteries? Must he not have begun with the most evident facts? Ib. Disc. VIII. The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity vindicated. Were I a Clergyman, the paragraphs from p. 366 to p. 370, both inclusive, of this Discourse should form the conclusion of my Sermon on Trinity Sunday,--whether I preached at St. James's, or in a country village. Ib. pp. 374-378. As a reason why we should doubt our own judgment, it is quite fair to remind the objector, that the same difficulty occurs in the scheme of God's ordinary providence. But that a difficulty in a supposed article of revealed truth is solved by the occurrence of the same or of an equivalent difficulty in the common course of human affairs--this I find it hard to conceive. How was the religious, as distinguished from the moral, sense first awakened? What made the human soul feel the necessity of a faith in God, but the apparent incongruity of certain dispensations in this world with the idea of God, with the law written in the heart? Is not the reconciling of these facts or 'phænomena' with the divine attributes, one of the purposes of a revealed religion? But even this is not a full statement of the defect complained of in this solution. A difficulty which may be only apparent (like that other of the prosperity of the wicked) is solved by the declaration of its reality! A difficulty grounded on the fact of temporal and outward privations and sufferings, is solved by being infinitely increased, that is, by the assertion of the same principle on the determination of our inward and everlasting weal and woe. That there is nothing in the Christian Faith or in the Canonical Scriptures, when rightly interpreted, that requires such an argument, or sanctions the recourse to it, I believe myself to have proved in the Aids to Reflection. For observe that "to solve" has a scientific, and again a religious sense, and that in the latter, a difficulty is satisfactorily solved, as soon as its insolvibility for the human mind is proved and accounted for. Ib. (Disc. XIV. pp. 500-502.) Christianity proved by Miracles. I cannot see and never could, the purpose, or 'cui bono', of this reasoning. To whom is it addressed? To a man who denies a God, or that God can reveal his will to mankind? If such a man be not below talking to, he must first be convinced of his miserable blindness respecting these truths; for these are clearly presupposed in every proof of miracles generally.