order as the highest evidence of its original perfection, need find (as it seems to me) no abstract difficulty in the conception that the author of Mature can, if he will, occasionally depart from it. And hence, as I deem it presumptuous to deny that there might be occasions which in his wisdom may require such departure, I am not conscious of any such scientific "prepossessions" against miracles as would prevent me from accepting them as facts, if trustworthy evidence of their reality could be adduced. The question with me, therefore, is simply, "Have we any adequate historical ground for the belief that such departure has ever taken place?"
Now, it can scarcely be questioned that, while the scientific probability of uniform sequence has become stronger, the value of testimony in regard to departures from it has been in various ways discredited by modern criticism. It is clear that the old arguments of Lardner, and the modern reproduction of them by Prof. Andrews Norton (Boston, New England), which in my early days were held as demonstrating the "genuineness of the Gospels," no longer possess their former cogency. For the question has now passed into a phase altogether different from that which it presented a century or two ago. It was then, "Are the narratives genuine or fictitious? Did the narrators intend to speak the truth, or were they constructing a tissue of falsehoods? Did they really witness what they narrate, or were they the dupes of ingenious story-tellers?" It is now, "Granting that the narrators wrote what they firmly believed to be true, as having themselves seen (or thought they had seen) the events they recorded, or as having heard of them from witnesses whom they had a right to regard as equally trustworthy with themselves, is their belief a sufficient justification for ours? What is the extent of allowance which we are to make for 'prepossession'—1. As modifying their conception of each occurrence at the time; and 2. As modifying their subsequent remembrance of it? And 3. In cases in which we have not access to the original records, what is the amount of allowance which we ought to make for the accretion of other still less trustworthy narratives around the original nucleus?"
Circumstances have led me from a very early period to take a great interest in the question of the value of testimony, and to occupy myself a good deal in the inquiry as to what is scientifically termed its "subjective" element. It was my duty for many years to study and to expound systematically to medical students the probative value of different kinds of evidence; and my psychological interest in the curious phenomena which, under the names of mesmerism, odylism, electro-biology, psychic force, and spiritual agency, have been supposed to indicate the existence of some new and mysterious force in Nature, led me, through a long series of years, to avail myself of every opportunity of studying them that fell within my reach. The general result of these inquiries has been to force upon me the conviction that, as
