This is the prejudication we would resist. For to this length does a
modern objection to miracles go, viz., that no human testimony can in
any case render them credible. I think the reflection above stated,
that, if there be a revelation, there must be miracles, and that, under
the circumstances in which the human species are placed, a revelation is
not improbable, or not to any great degree, to be a fair answer to the
whole objection.

But since it is an objection which stands in the very threshold our
argument, and, if admitted, is a bar to every proof, and to all future
reasoning upon the subject, it may be necessary, before we proceed
further, to examine the principle upon which it professes to be founded;
which principle is concisely this, That it is contrary to experience
that a miracle should be true, but not contrary to experience that
testimony should be false.

Now there appears a small ambiguity in the term "experience," and in the
phrases, "contrary to experience," or "contradicting experience," which
it may be necessary to remove in the first place. Strictly speaking, the
narrative of a fact is then only contrary to experience, when the fact
is related to have existed at a time and place, at which time and place
we being present did not perceive it to exist; as if it should be
asserted, that in a particular room, and at a particular hour of a
certain day, a man was raised from the dead, in which room, and at the
time specified, we, being present and looking on, perceived no such
event to have taken place. Here the assertion is contrary to experience
properly so called; and this is a contrariety which no evidence can
surmount. It matters nothing, whether the fact be of a miraculous
nature, or not. But although this be the experience, and the