miracles ? This is the assumption of unbelief. And
on what is this assumption founded ? " On experience/''
is the answer. And what now is this boasted experi-
ence? Is human experience the measure of divine
power? Can a limited experience set bounds to possi-
bility ? What is this life's experience, but a childhood
amidst the ages of eternity ? Suppose that we were
hereafter to be placed, for the correction of some mental
errors, in a scene of being where all should be miracle,
all change; where every thing should reveal the
immediate action of the Almighty Power. Where
would be experience then ? Or, to illustrate the same
point, let us revert to the truly philosophical, the
primitive, experience. Suppose that the first man had
been created before the heavens were spread forth, or
the earth hung in the empty space, and that he had
beheld those awful effects of Omnipotence. Would he,
at the close of the first day of his existence, find it
difficult to believe in miracles? Why then, should the,
experience of forty years, amidst regular successions
of events, make him forget that miracles might again
be a part of the course of nature? The experience
that makes a man feel as if there could be no more
miracles, seems to me narrow, and if I may say so,
provincial; like that which makes an ignorant and
home-bred rustic feel as if every thing in the great
world must be just like what he had seen in his
father's house, and fills him with astonishment,
amounting to incredulity, at every thing new and
extraordinary.
