Wellington's life, may really have said to an officer who complained to him that General Sherman had threatened to shoot him, exactly what the Duke said to an officer who complained to him that General Picton had threatened to hang him: "I do not know anyone more likely to keep his word."

(15) "When a whimsical puerile 'miracle' is related as gravely, and supported as strongly, as others in the same series which both in character and results may correspond ever so well to our conception of what a miracle ought to be, a reductio ad absurdum is established, and the whole narrative, as far (but only as far) as its miraculous portions are concerned, is utterly incredible."

(16) "If there is a series of miracles not put out of court either by the unscientific credulity of the witnesses or the intrinsic childishness and absurdity of the events themselves, and if irresistible evidence has forced us to concede that one of them is really a miracle, then superhuman agency throughout the series is a vera causa, and not a gratuitous hypothesis."

(17) "But when there is the faintest shadow of possibility that every one of the results attributed to miraculous agency could have been produced by what are termed 'secondary causes,' means,' agency of a non-miraculous kind, we may stoutly deny in toto the superhuman and the supernatural."

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Thus the evidence is complete for the instantaneous cure of Pascal's niece in the Jansenist convent of Port Royal; but all Ultramontanes and Jesuits agree with Protestants in assertingwithout any facts at all to go upon that the whole thing must have been got up by a certain nun named Flavie Passart, who is known to have been an artful

woman.

St. Bernard's success may be accounted for by his own extraordinary eloquence and reputation for sanctity; by the motives he appealed to, and the rewards he promised; and by the rumours of his miraculous powers. Any cures he really effected may be unhesitatingly classed with the results always to be looked formedical annals abound in them -from excitement and imagination.

In this view we may record the events as extraordinary, and yet not miraculous. But if abnormal conditions of excitement and imagination be classed as supernatural, then their results may fairly be designated as miraculous.

The necessity of escaping from the Toulouse floods of 1875 completely cured the paralysis of a woman who had been bedridden for years. A physician of our own acquaintance was about to administer an anæsthetic to a sensible middle-aged gentleman, who was suffering such torture that the required operation could not be performed, when the patientthinking, from the preparations, that it had already been given -suddenly lost all his pain, and expressed his grateful amazement at its efficacy; whereupon the medical man, at once recognising the phenomenon, and knowing that imagination had completely counterfeited the effects of the anæsthetic, proceeded with the operation, and performed it with perfect success. We have no right to ridicule such a power of the imagination as this; we have but to regret that we know so little of the laws of its working, and of the methods of its control.

The rapid spread of Mormonism -in spite of its childish "sacred history" and monstrous doctrines, in spite of the martyrdom of its founder, and the sufferings,

miseries, and exile of the first generations of Mormons-can only be accounted for by a rough, offhand assertion that there is no limit to the marvellous results of religious imposture and religious fanaticism; of popular ignorance and love of novelty; of the universal longing for an earthly paradise, and of female longfemale longing for sympathy and companionship.

(18) "When the supposed superhuman agency sometimes fails, under conditions of its Own choosing, conditions under which it sometimes'succeeds,' or conditions absolutely necessary in order to preclude imposture; and again when the superhuman agency can be suppressed by human opposition (not counting, however, want of faith, since 'faith' may be a condition of success), there is clearly no miracle in the higher sense of the word." But this test is very difficult of application, the question arising, in case of assertion of conditions being identical on two separate occasions, whether all the conditions are fully known and understood. There are scientific experiments to which very delicately prepared conditions, as to waves of light, temperature, electricity, &c., &c., are a necessary preliminary

to success.

With regard to the miracles of healing at the tomb of the Abbé Paris, there is perhaps no flaw in the positive evidence for the cures that did take place. But some sick persons went away disappointed; and, above all, the king (Louis XIV.), annoyed by the crowd and tumult, closed the churchyard gates, to which was soon after affixed the famous pasquinade, a reductio ad absurdum of the superstition:

De part du roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracles dans ce lieu,

Similarly there are two suspicious sentences in the ten eye-witnesses' account of St. Bernard's miracles. Once they hint at a disappointment : "The crowds were SO tumultuous at his entrance into this city that the miraculous power did not exhibit itself abundantly, though it was not altogether inactive." Again we read: "He touched many blind persons, some of whom were cured immediately, while as to the others he felt persuaded that they would soon get well."

If we grant an extraordinary power in such a case, we ought not to account it miracle, while so uncertain and limitary in its results.

(19) "Since it was a matter of probability that miracles should be attributed to every founder of a religion, and to religious heroes. in general; since men destitute of science so easily and honestly make miracles out of marvels-as is shown by the indiscriminate use of the two words (i.e., of their equivalents in ancient languages) up to a very recent date; since, in short, our difficulty is that wellattested miracles are so numerous, there ought to be a broad and undeniable-not arbitrary and hairdrawn-distinction between the evidence we reject and the evidence we accept. Moreover, the distinction must not consist in the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of the teaching supported by this or that miracle."

The Jesuits had no excuse for doubting the reality of the Jansenist miracles. They were warranted by the same kind of evidence as all Roman Catholic miracles; and the process of excluding them-like the process of separating the infallible utterances of the Pope from those which cannot have been infallible simply because they have been falsified or repudiated-re

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sembles nothing so much threading the mazes of a labyrinth, there being no conceivable reason for taking the path on which lies the clue, except that (by the mere whim of the constructor) all the others bring you to a wrong end. Knowing the clue to one labyrinth is no help at all towards threading the next. But the principles which solve one historical problem must hold good in all similar problems; else they are not principles, canons demanding universal assent, but arbitrary rules, which any other person may take or leave as he likes.

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Yet it is not to be deemed that there is a very great strain on the private judgment of any historical inquirer, however scientifically he may set to work. No two historical events are exactly alike, or rest upon exactly the same external evidence and intrinsic probability. In investigating the credibility of any one alleged fact, we must apply, as best we can, the principles of logic in general, and the teachings of experience as to the laws of human nature in the matter of furnishing and using the materials of history. The most important of these laws have been mentioned or alluded to in the course of this paper; but we have not attempted to treat the subject fully or systematically. It is a special study. It is a "vulgar error" to suppose that those great historical problems, which have a practical interest to us all, can easily be settled by any sensible man alike to his own satisfaction and to the satisfaction of every other sensible man.

In this, as in every branch of knowledge, the "principle of contradiction" will be of infinite service. The inquirer must not believe any alleged fact which is really inconsistent with any estab

lished fact, nor accept any statement on evidence that equally warrants another statement (equally probable in itself) which he is determined to reject.

But when no contradiction exists, he must make a list of the reasons for and against belief-the pros and cons; and then, if such cases exist, a list of events, for which the pros and cons were the same, but which have somehow been verified. The odds in favour of the fact under investigation will of course be furnished by the proportion of those events that were found to be true. Thus, to take a simple instance, our only reason for believing various details in the life of Agesilaus may be that they were mentioned by Plutarch. But the same author gives in his life of Alexander the Great many similar details that can be tested by other evidence. And as these are true in (say) nine cases out of ten, we can reckon the probability as nine to one in favour of everything, not impossible in itself, that he tells us about Agesilaus.

But if our reasons for believing an event are not found in conjunction elsewhere, then we must calculate the separate value of each (i.e. the percentage of cases in which it holds good), and combine them according to arithmetical rules.

It is only a shallow objection to the method that no historical investigator ever does figure out a thing in this way. Logic has no wish to trespass on the domain of conscience, or private judgment, or common sense, or instinct. Everybody may form his own opinion for any sons he likes, and may put his own value upon those reasons, and go about insisting that they are most convincing, or amply sufficient, or worthy of the most serious consideration, or that they evidently

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outweigh all the reasons advanced upon the other side; these vague phrases are public property, and have a different meaning in every mouth. But logic is bound to furnish standard weights and measures, such as will settle all disputes as to the worth of any argument; and the only way to get rid of the ambiguities of language is to employ mathematical symbols instead of words, and argue by means of geometrical diagrams, algebraical signs, or arithmetical figures. One may feel sure that one's belief about a historical event is more probable than another's, and perhaps, like Niebuhr, may by long practice have gained a faculty of historical divination; but it can never be thus proved that the fact is so, or in any way but by representing each argument for and against it as a fraction-the correctness of figures being first established-and then adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing these fractions so as to find the exact chances, the mathematical probability.

We need not conclude without a

gleam of consolation for those who want to confute an opponent without the help of Vulgar Fractions. When two articles differ considerably in weight, there is no need to produce the scales; everybody who takes up into his hands first one and then the other, will give the same verdict. Just so, one solution of a historical problem may rest on arguments so nearly amounting to demonstration, and so superior to all the counter arguments, as to obtain the decisive approval of every educated reader. And, as has been hinted more than once already, we can often fall back upon the argumentum ad hominem, and "hoist the engineer with his own petard." No two cases are exactly alike, yet the difference may be manifestly unimportant. And if an opponent believes here and disbelieves there, we can convict him of inconsistency, that is, of violating his own laws of thought, though we cannot convict him of irrationality or illogi cality (to coin a word), that is, of defying the laws of thought common to all mankind.