Nothing is more common than the assertion that at certain periods of history, mankind have been ignorant that there is an order in nature; and that this ignorance has given these faculties such unbounded play as to render all reports of supernatural occurrences unworthy of credit, notwithstanding any amount of evidence which may be alleged in their favour. It is urged that, if men are ignorant that there is an order in nature, to such a state of mind nothing would be really supernatural; but every event, whether supernatural or otherwise, would be viewed as a matter of ordinary occurrence. To this state of mind a miracle would convey no meaning, and therefore it would be valueless as evidence of a divine revelation. In other words, it has been affirmed that there have been certain conditions of mankind in which the love of the marvellous has been so powerful, and the action of reason so weak, as to destroy all sense of the distinction between a natural and a supernatural occurrence. I reply that the Christian revelation was not addressed to such a condition of the human mind. On the contrary, it was made after a long course of preparation for its introduction. After the whole course of previous history, under the controlling providence of God, had prepared the way for His Advent, Jesus Christ appeared. The Gospel was not preached to men in the lowest state of barbarism, but to civilized man. What may have been the ideas of degraded savages, at some early period of the history of our race, it will be needless to inquire. With mankind in such a condition we have nothing to do in the present controversy, but with the state of thought in the Roman Empire during the first century of our era. This was no period of mental darkness or of boundless credulity. In the early ages, when every phenomenon of nature was viewed as due to the action of some capricious god, the belief in an order of nature must have been in a high degree vague and uncertain. But such a state of things, whatever it might once have been, had long since passed away. The period of history now under consideration was one of widespread intelligence, varying greatly in different parts of the empire, but still one of intelligence and civilization. It is impossible for men to attain a degree of progress necessary for the existence of civilization, and still to remain ignorant that a large class of natural occurrences follow an order which does not admit of deviation. Civilization would be impossible unless this were generally recognized. It is in fact founded on its recognition. At the same time, there is a class of phenomena which are not recognized by the ordinary mind as following a definite order. It is within this alone that the beliefs of current supernaturalism exert their activity. But the supernatural occurrences narrated in the New Testament do not belong to this ambiguous order of events, and are therefore unaffected by them.