The true Christian, for
instance, will begin by regarding miracles as probable; he will either
believe he has experienced them in his own person, or hope for them
earnestly; nothing will seem to him more natural, more in consonance
with the actual texture of life, than that they should have occurred
abundantly and continuously in the past. When he finds the record of
one he will not inquire, like the rationalist, how that false record
could have been concocted; but rather he will ask how the rationalist,
in spite of so many witnesses to the contrary, has acquired his fixed
assurance of the universality of the commonplace. An answer perhaps
could be offered of which the rationalist need not be ashamed. We
might say that faith in the universality of the commonplace (in its
origin, no doubt, simply an imaginative presumption) is justified by
our systematic mastery of matter in the arts. The rejection of
miracles _a priori_ expresses a conviction that the laws by which we
can always control or predict the movement of matter govern that
movement universally; and evidently, if the material course of history
is fixed mechanically, the mental and moral course of it is thereby
fixed on the same plan; for a mind not expressed somehow in matter
cannot be revealed to the historian.
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