Nor is the case different when, for a _possibility_ which the arithmetician can represent by figures, we substitute the _miracle_ proper. Neither Hume nor La Place ever attempted to show that miracles could not take place; they merely directed their argument against a belief in them. The wildest sceptic must admit, if in any degree a reasonable man, that there _may_ exist a God, and that that God _may_ have given laws to nature. No _demonstration_ of the non-existence of a Great First Cause has been ever yet attempted, nor, until the knowledge of some sceptic extends over all space, ever _can_ be rationally attempted. Merely to _doubt_ the fact of God’s existence, and to give reasons for the doubt, must till then form the highest achievements of scepticism. And the God who _may_ thus exist, and who _may_ have given laws to nature, _may_ also have revealed himself to man, and, in order to secure man’s reasonable belief in the reality of the revelation, _may_ have temporarily suspended in its operation some great natural law, and have thus shown himself to be its Author and Master. Such seems to be the philosophy of miracles; which are thus evidently not only _not_ impossibilities, but even not _improbabilities_. Even were we to permit the sceptic himself to fix the numbers representative of those several _mays_ in the case, which I have just repeated, the chances against them, so to speak, would be less by many thousand times than the chances against the hundred dice of La Place’s illustration all turning up aces. The existence of a Great First Cause is at least as probable—the sceptic himself being judge in the matter—as the _non_-existence of a Great First Cause; and so the probability in this first stage of the argument, instead of being, as in the case of the single die, only one to six, is as one to one. Again,—in accordance with an expectation so general among the human family as to form one of the great instincts of our nature,—an instinct to which every form of religion, true or false, bears evidence,—it is in no degree less probable that this God should have revealed himself to man, than that he should _not_ have revealed himself to man; and here the chances are again as one to one,—not, as in the second stage of the calculation on the dice, as one to thirty-six. Nor, in the third and last stage, is it less probable that God, in revealing himself to man should have given miraculous evidence of the truth of the revelation, so that man “might believe in Him for His work’s sake,” than that He should _not_ have done so; and here yet again the chances are as one to one,—not as one to two hundred and sixteen. No rational sceptic could fix the chances lower; nay, no rational sceptic, so far as the _existence_ of a Great First Cause is concerned, would be inclined to fix them so low: and yet it is in order to annihilate all belief in a possibility against which the chances are so few as to be