reign of Tiberius the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of
the Roman Empire, was involved in a praeternatural darkness of three
hours. Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the
wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without
notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime
of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate
effects, or received the earliest intelligence, of the prodigy. Each of
these

[165] philosophers in a laborious work has recorded all the great
phenomena of nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which
his indefatigable curiosity could collect. Both the one and the other
have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye
has been witness since the creation of the globe.” How “shall we excuse
the supine inattention of the pagan and philosophic world to those
evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their
reason, but to their senses?”

Again, if every believer is convinced of the reality of miracles, every
reasonable man is convinced of their cessation. Yet every age bears
testimony to miracles, and the testimony seems no less respectable than
that of the preceding generation. When did they cease? How was it that
the generation which saw the last genuine miracles performed could not
distinguish them from the impostures which followed? Had men so soon
forgotten “the style of the divine artist”? The inference is that
genuine and spurious miracles are indistinguishable. But the credulity
or “softness of temper” among early believers was beneficial to the
cause of truth and religion. “In modern times, a latent and even
involuntary scepticism adheres to the most pious dispositions. Their