Or, to borrow an instance which will be familiar to every one of
my readers, if the late Mr. Howard had undertaken his labours and
journeys in attestation, and in consequence of a clear and sensible
miracle, I should have believed him also. Or, to represent the same
thing under a third supposition; if Socrates had professed to perform
public miracles at Athens; if the friends of Socrates, Phaedo, Cebes,
Crito, and Simmias, together with Plato, and many of his followers,
relying upon the attestations which these miracles afforded to his
pretensions, had, at the hazard of their lives, and the certain expense
of their ease and tranquillity, gone about Greece, after his death, to
publish and propagate his doctrines: and if these things had come to our
knowledge, in the same way as that in which the life of Socrates is now
transmitted to us through the hands of his companions and disciples,
that is, by writings received without doubt as theirs, from the age in
which they were published to the present, I should have believed this
likewise. And my belief would, in each case, be much strengthened, if
the subject of the mission were of importance to the conduct and
happiness of human life; if it testified anything which it behoved
mankind to know from such authority; if the nature of what it delivered
required the sort of proof which it alleged; if the occasion was adequate
to the interposition, the end worthy of the means.
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