Again, it is stated “that the highest effect contemplated by the supposed revelation is to bring man into harmony with law; and this is insured by law acting on intelligence, and even on instinct.” Where, I ask, is the proof of this derived from the history of man? Is the moral condition of the races above referred to higher than it was three thousand years ago? Did the moral condition of the Greek race progress or retrograde during the four centuries which preceded the Advent? Which was the more elevated condition of Roman morality, that of the century which preceded and followed the conquest of Italy, or that of the empire and its crumbling institutions? Again, we are told that “there is not in reality a gradation of breach of law that is not followed by an equivalent gradation of punishment.” This may be the case in some Utopia in which the author lives, but it certainly neither is nor ever has been the condition of this world. Does villany, I ask, always receive adequate punishment in this world? It has been the all but universal opinion of mankind that it does not. Did not Fouché die quietly in his bed, possessed of wealth and honours, and a darkened conscience? Did not Philip II. of Spain, after all his crimes, die under the delusions of self‐approbation? In a controversy like this the most confident assertions will not supply the want of facts on which to ground our reasonings. It follows, therefore, that the assertion that the Christian argument involves reasoning in a circle, or else that it assumes the point at issue, is disproved. CHAPTER IX. DEMONIACAL MIRACLES—GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. It has been objected that the admission which the New Testament is alleged to make as to the reality of demoniacal miracles weakens, if it does not destroy, the value of miracles as an attestation of a revelation. In order to do full justice to the force of this objection I will state it in the words of the author of “Supernatural Religion:”— “The necessity of asserting the dependence of miracles on doctrines is thrust upon divines by the circumstance, that the Bible narrates so many cases of false miracles, and contains so many warnings against them.” “The first thought which must occur to any unprejudiced mind is amazement that an Almighty God should select as a guarantee of his supposed communications signs and wonders which can be so easily imitated by others, that there must always be a doubt whether the message be from the kingdom of heaven, or from the kingdom of lies. It seems _à priori_ absolutely incredible that a divine revelation which is so important, and which it is intended that man should believe, should be made in such obscure language, and with such doubtful attestation. That heaven should condescend to use the same arguments as hell, and with so little difference in the degree of the power exhibited, that man can scarcely, if at all, discriminate between them, is a theory of the most startling description.”