In this same section on miracles, there are repeated protests against the reader assuming that the writer is arguing against the Christian faith. Against some Catholic miracles, which were asserted to be proved by testimony as strong as that which attested the miracles of our Saviour, he says, "As if the testimony of man could ever be put in the balance with that of God himself, who conducted the pen of the inspired writers!" and again, "Our most holy religion is founded on _faith_, not on reason; and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to such a trial as it is by no means fitted to endure." These protests however were made briefly and coldly, and in such a manner as made people feel, that if Hume believed in the doctrines they announced, he certainly had not his heart in them. Hence, although, since the origin of rationalism, evangelical Christians have frequently had recourse to the arguments of Hume, there was long in that quarter a not unnatural reluctance to appeal to them. It is perhaps one of the most remarkable warnings against hasty judgments on the effects of efforts of subtle reasoning, that, according to later scientific discoveries, no two things are in more perfect unison than Hume's theory of belief in miracles, and the belief that miracles, according to the common acceptation of the term, have actually taken place. The leading principle of this theory is, in conformity with its author's law of cause and effect, that where our experience has taught us that two things follow each other as cause and effect by an unvarying sequence, if we hear of an instance in which this has not been the case, we ought to doubt the truth of the narrative. In other words, if we are told of some circumstance having taken place out of the usual order of nature, we ought not to believe it; because the circumstance of the narrator having been deceived, or of his designedly telling a falsehood, is more probable than an event contradictory to all previous authenticated experience. It is a rule for marking the boundary and proper application of the inductive system, and one that is highly serviceable to science. But, in applying it to use, we must not be led away by the narrow application, in common conversation, of the word experience. There is the experience of the common workman, and there is the experience of the philosopher. There is that observation of phenomena which makes a ditcher know that the difficulty of pulling out a loosened stone with a mattock indicates it to be so many inches thick; and that observation, fully as sure, which shows the geologist that the stratum of the Pennsylvanian grauwacke is upwards of a hundred miles thick. The experience and observation of the husbandman teach him, that when the opposite hill is distinct to his view, the intervening atmosphere is not charged with vapour; but observation, not less satisfactory, shows the astronomer that Jupiter and the Moon have around