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not overcome the alleged repugnance of the fact to the laws of nature , and render it credible . Is he justified in that opinion ? With deference to the judgment of so able a writer , we humbly conceive not . Under the circumstances supposed , it seems impossible that testimony should be false . Are we then to admit a suspension of the uniformity of causation—in other words , an effect without a cause ? Most assuredly not : but we submit that ,
in this case , our knowledge of the laws of the human mind lies more within our compass , and must be more complete , than our knowledge of the laws and agencies of nature ; and that if an effect , like the one supposed , were actually attested in the way supposed , it must have arisen from some unknown cause having been called into operation , some new element or principle having been introduced into the foregoing circumstances , which had changed their character , but which had escaped the attention of the observers . To adopt any other conclusion , would seem to imply that there could be no laws of nature , no modes of divine agency , but what had fallen under our own notice , to bind the Deity by rules that we had deduced from a narrow survey of his works , and to measure the possibilities of creation by the limited results of our own experience . It is true , that the fixed and constant uniformity of causation is what first leads us to the acknowledgment of a Supreme Intelligence ; but , when we have thus arrived at the knowledge of that First Cause , when the regularity and harmony of creation have compelled us to have recourse to a Creator , we can reason downwards from God to his works and his laws , and instead of supposing them to
subsist in their present order and connexion from any inherent necessity , can view them as the spontaneous effects and voluntary combinations of his comprehensive wisdom and universal providence . That there is in some minds , and in certain periods of society , an unthinking and incautious proneness to rely on human testimony , is at once admitted ; but there has also existed , and there still exists , in the world—perhaps the result of a resiliency against the former state of mind , and one of the collateral effects of a too exclusive
cultivation of the exact sciences and the inductive philosophy—as unreasonable an incredulity in the best attested facts that have not chanced to coincide with the actual tenor of recorded experience . Testimony does not spring up of its own accord ; it results from determinate causes , and is governed by determinate laws ; nor are we at liberty to dispute the facts , to the existence of which it clearly and sfeadily points , though we may be unable to account satisfactorily for their origin .
Let us now consider the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus . We assume , without hesitation , the authenticity and general credibility of the books of the New Testament . Whatever view be taken of the miraculous in their narratives , no rational doubt can any longer be entertained by persons of competent information , that those books have come down from the first age
of Christianity , and that they contain a faithful representation of the character and teachings of Christ , and of the testimony borne to him by the apostles . The genuineness of the writings of John and of most of the Kpistles of Paul , is universally admitted . The Acts of the Apostles is unanimously ascribed to Luke , and may be traced back to the apostolic age . Should we even admit that the three first gospels are not independent authorities , but have drawn their materials from a common source , yet that common source is referred by Eichhorn , the most fearless and sagacious of inquirers , to the very commencement of the Christian dispensation , and is supposed by him to have contained all the leading incidents of the public ministry of Jesus , including Iris resurrection ^ and our Lord ' s prophetic an-
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On the Evidence of the Resurrection . 147
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1831, page 147, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2595/page/3/
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