The Only Proof Of Any Miracle Is The Interpretation The
Witness Or Witnesses Put Upon What They Have Seen.
(Traditional miracles - miracles that others have been told,
that others have seen - we need not trouble our heads about.)
What that proof has been worth hitherto has been commented
upon too often to need attention here.
Nor does the weakness
of the evidence for miracles depend solely on the fact that
it rests, in the first instance, on the senses, which may be
deceived; or upon inference, which may be erroneous. It is
not merely that the infallibility of human testimony
discredits the miracles of the past. The impossibility that
human knowledge, that science, can ever exhaust the
possibilities of Nature, precludes the immediate reference to
the Supernatural for all time. It is pure sophistry to
argue, as do Canon Row and other defenders of miracles, that
'the laws of Nature are no more violated by the performance
of a miracle than they are by the activities of a man.' If
these arguments of the special pleaders had any force at all,
it would simply amount to this: 'The activities of man'
being a part of nature, we have no evidence of a supernatural
being, which is the sole RAISON D'ETRE of miracle.
Yet thousands of men in these days who admit the force of
these objections continue, in spite of them, to pray.
Huxley, the foremost of 'agnostics,' speaks with the utmost
respect of his friend Charles Kingsley's conviction from
experience of the efficacy of prayer.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 210 of 404
Words from 55102 to 55359
of 106633
