Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/506

490 is one of the attributes of His power, and quite consistent with our notions of the liberty of His will, unrestrained by any laws which it may be His pleasure to promulgate for the government of the universe.

"Opera mutat, consilia non mutat," says St. Augustin. Miracles may be, for anything we know to the contrary, phenomena of a higher order of God's laws, superior to, and, under certain conditions, controlling the inferior order known to us as the ordinary laws of nature.

The great difficulty in the consideration of miracles is, that being in the nature of things incapable of verification, the evidence which would be sufficient to establish the truth of an ordinary event within the sphere of natural phenomena would not be sufficient to command our assent in the case of a miracle. And this does not arise from a miracle being opposed to nature, but on account of the infirmity of our nature; for we are always liable to be deceived, not only by others, but even by our own senses.

The extraordinary character of an event, although it does not necessarily render the truth of its existence incredible, should, nevertheless, put us upon our guard, and render us particularly cautious in examining the evidence upon which its truth is asserted. We should even examine with care and caution the evidence of phenomena of the most ordinary character before we yield our complete assent to the apparent truth of their manifestation; and à fortiori in the examination of the evidence which sustains extraordinary phenomena we should require much stronger evidence, and such as rebuts the possibility of being deceived by other persons, or even by our senses.

But we must be careful to discriminate between our own incapacity to test truth and the necessary improbability of an event. It is plain that from our ignorance of the remote spheres of God's action we cannot judge of His works removed from oar experience; but a fact is not necessarily doubtful because it cannot be reached by our ordinary senses. To recapitulate, we may lay down the following propositions:—