_occasions_ which are the _reason_ of their being performed: a
Miracle, they say, does not happen every day, because a Revelation is
not given every day. It would be foreign to the present purpose to
seek for arguments against this answer; I leave it to those who are
engaged in the controversy, to find a reply to it; but my present
object is, to point out that this solution does not at all apply in
the present case. Where is the peculiarity of the _occasion_? What
sufficient _reason_ is there for a series of events occurring in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which never took place before?
Was Europe at that period peculiarly weak, and in a state of
barbarism, that one man could achieve such conquests, and acquire such
a vast empire? On the contrary, she was flourishing in the height of
strength and civilization. Can the persevering attachment and blind
devotedness of the French to this man, be accounted for by his being
the descendant of a long line of kings, whose race was hallowed by
hereditary veneration? No; we are told he was a low-born usurper, and
not even a Frenchman! Is it that he was a good and kind sovereign? He
is represented not only as an imperious and merciless despot, but as
most wantonly careless of the lives of his soldiers. Could the French
army and people have failed to hear from the wretched survivors of his
supposed Russian expedition, how they had left the corpses of above
100,000 of their comrades bleaching on the snow-drifts of that dismal
country, whither his mad ambition had conducted him, and where his
selfish cowardice had deserted them? Wherever we turn to seek for
circumstances that may help to account for the events of this
incredible story, we only meet with such as aggravate its
improbability.[15] Had it been told of some distant country, at a
remote period, we could not have told what peculiar circumstances
there might have been to render probable what seems to us most
strange; and yet in _that_ case every philosophical sceptic, every