The principles which I have laid down in a former chapter fully meet the chief points raised in these objections. A few additional observations on them, therefore, are all that will be necessary. First: the assertion that every marvel or narrative of supernatural interference seemed a matter of course to the superstitious credulity of the age, is inaccurate. If they had been of habitual or constant occurrence, they would have ceased to be marvels at all. In such a case the trade of the impostor would have gone, for it would not have paid him. The entire plausibility of such reasonings arises from confounding under a common name phenomena wholly different in character. I ask emphatically, did the current supernaturalism of any age or nation accept as matters of course such events as the resurrection of Christ, or the cure of a blind man, or a man full of leprosy, by a word or a touch? Have not heathen writers pronounced actual resurrections from the dead to be impossibilities? Were such occurrences ever believed to be within the power of magic to effect? Belief in the possibility of such occurrences became current only under the influence of Christianity. 2. It is not correct to assert that the belief in miracles has been confined to ages of ignorance. Will it be affirmed that the most flourishing period of Grecian literature was an age of ignorance? Yet a belief in a current supernaturalism prevailed in it. Was the Augustan age an age of ignorance? Both ages were ignorant of physical science: but during few periods has the human intellect been equally active. Each age contained men endowed with common sense sufficient to make them adequate judges whether the supernatural occurrences above referred to were possible or not. 3. It is inaccurate to affirm that the Christian miracles are interposed between two similar series of supernatural occurrences. There is only one point in common between them; the claim to be supernatural. As I have proved, in every other respect they are strongly contrasted. It is, therefore, by no means extraordinary that a series of supernatural occurrences, which have the highest moral impress, and possess other distinguishing characteristics, should be true; and that the others, one of which took place before and the other after that in question, and which are stamped with the very opposite characteristics, should be false.