Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/233

186 true. It requires only to be understood to be accepted. It is a matter of direct and positive knowledge, dependent on no outside authority, while the Christian miracles are, at best, but a matter of testimony, and therefore of secondary and indirect knowledge. The thing to be proved is notoriously true; the alleged means of proof notoriously uncertain. Is it not better, then, to proceed to Religion at once? for when this is admitted to be as true as the demonstrations and axioms of science, as much a matter of certainty as the consciousness of our existence, then miracles are of no value. They may be interesting to the historian, the antiquary, or physiologist, not to us as religious men. They now hang as a mill-stone about the neck of many a pious man, who can believe in Religion, but not in the transformation of water to wine, or the resurrection of a body.