Hence it results, that of three possible conditions under which a miracle may be supposed to offer itself to our knowledge, two are excluded from the view of Hume's argument. SECTION III. WHETHER THE SECOND OF THESE CONDITIONS IS NOT EXPRESSLY NOTICED BY HUME. It may seem so. But in fact it is not. And (what is more to the purpose) we are not at liberty to consider it any accident that it is not. Hume had his reasons. Let us take all in proper order: 1st, that it seems so; 2dly, that in fact it is not so; and 3dly, that is no accident, but intentional. 1st. Hume seems to contemplate such a case, the case of a miracle witnessed and attested by a multitude of persons, in the following imaginary miracle which he proposes as a basis for reasoning. Queen Elizabeth, as every body will remember who has happened to read Lord Monmouth's Memoirs, died on the night between the last day of 1602 and the first day of 1603: this could not be forgotten by the reader, because, in fact, Lord M., who was one of Her Majesty's nearest relatives (being a younger son of her first cousin Lord Hunsdon), obtained his title and subsequent preferment as a reward for the furious ride he performed to Edinburgh (at that time at least 440 miles distant from London), without taking off his boots, in order to lay the earliest tidings of the great event at the feet of her successor. In reality, never did any death cause so much posting day and night over the high roads of Europe. And the same causes which made it so interesting has caused it to be the best dated event in modern history; that one which could least be shaken by any discordant evidence yet discoverable. Now, says Hume, imagine the case, that, in spite of all this chronological precision--this precision, and this notoriety of precision--Her Majesty's court physicians should have chosen to propagate a story of her resurrection. Imagine that these learned gentlemen should have issued a _bulletin_, declaring that Queen Elizabeth had been met in Greenwich Park, or at Nonsuch, on May-day of 1603, or in Westminster, two years after, by the Lord Chamberlain when detecting Guy Faux--let them even swear it before twenty justices of the peace; I for one, says Hume, am free to confess that I would not believe them. No, nor, to say the truth, would we; nor would we advise our readers to believe them.