employed. He enters Russia with a prodigious army, which is totally
ruined by an unprecedented hard winter; (everything relating to this
man is _prodigious_ and _unprecedented_;) yet in a few months we find
him intrusted with another great army in Germany, which is also
totally ruined at Leipsic; making, inclusive of the Egyptian, the
third great army thus totally lost: yet the French are so good-natured
as to furnish him with another sufficient to make a formidable stand
in France; he is, however, _conquered, and presented with the
sovereignty of Elba_; (surely, by the bye, some more _probable_ way
might have been found of disposing of him, till again wanted, than to
place him thus on the very verge of his ancient dominions;) thence he
returns to France, where he is received with open arms, and enabled to
lose a fifth great army at Waterloo; yet so eager were these people to
be a sixth time led to destruction, that it was found necessary to
confine _him_ in an island some thousand miles off, and to quarter
foreign troops upon _them_, lest they should make an insurrection in
his favour?[13] Does any one believe all this, and yet refuse to
believe a miracle? Or rather, what is this but a miracle? Is it not a
violation of the laws of nature? for surely there are moral laws of
nature as well as physical; which though more liable to exceptions in
this or that particular case, are no less _true as general rules_ than
the laws of matter, and therefore cannot be violated and contradicted
_beyond a certain point_, without a miracle.[14]

Nay, there is this additional circumstance which renders the
contradiction of Experience more glaring in this case than in that of
the miraculous histories which ingenious sceptics have held up to
contempt: all the advocates of miracles admit that they are rare
exceptions to the general course of nature; but contend that they must
needs be so, on account of the rarity of those extraordinary