reasoning which he brings forward against the miraculous element in
Christianity in answer to Dr Mozley and Dean Mansel falls to the ground
when this proposition is assumed. His arguments prove nothing, because
they prove too much: for they are equally efficacious, or equally
inefficacious, against the doctrine of a Divine providence or of human
responsibility, as they are against the resurrection of Christ. The
truth is, that when our author closes his work, he cannot face the
conclusions to which his premisses would inevitably lead him. They are
too startling for himself, as well as for his readers, in their naked
deformity; and with a noble inconsistency he clutches at these 'dogmas'
to save himself from sinking into the abyss of moral scepticism.

Mr J.S. Mill's inexorable logic may not be without its use, as holding
up the mirror to such inconsistency. On his own narrow premisses this
eminent logician builds up his own narrow conclusions with remorseless
rigour. Our author in his first part adopts this same narrow basis, and
truly enough finds no resting-place for Christianity upon it, as indeed
there is none for any theory of a providential government. But at the
conclusion he tacitly and (as it would seem) quite unconsciously assumes
a much wider standing-ground. If he had not done so, he himself would
have been edged off his footing, and hurled down the precipice. A whole
pack of 'pursuing wolves' [29:1] is upon him, far more ravenous than any
which beset the path of the believers in revelation; and he has left
himself no shelter. If he had commenced by defining what he meant by
'Nature' and 'Supernatural,' he might have avoided this inconsistency,
though he must have sacrificed much of his argument to save his creed.
As it is, he has unconsciously juggled with two senses of Nature. Nature
in the first part, where he is arguing against miracles, is the
aggregate of external phenomena--the same Nature against which Mr Mill
prefers his terrible indictment for its cruelty and injustice. But