" "What!" our opponents will perhaps
reply, * * * "Was it not by miracles that the prophets (some of them)
testified their authority? Do you not believe these facts?" Yes, my
friends, I do most entirely believe them, &c.
There is so much of truth in all this reasoning on miracles, that I feel
pain in the thought that the result is false,--because it was not the
whole truth. But this is the grounding, and at the same time pervading,
error of the Swedenborgians;--that they overlook the distinction between
congruity with reason, truth of consistency, or internal possibility of
this or that being objectively real, and the objective reality as fact.
Miracles, 'quoad' miracles, can never supply the place of subjective
evidence, that is, of insight. But neither can subjective insight supply
the place of objective sight. The certainty of the truth of a
mathematical arch can never prove the fact of its existence. I
anticipate the answers; but know that they likewise proceed from the
want of distinguishing between ideas, such as God, Eternity, the
responsible Will, the Good, and the like,--the actuality of which is
absolutely subjective, and includes both the relatively subjective and
the relatively objective as higher or transcendant realities, which
alone are the proper objects of faith, the great postulates of reason in
order to its own admission of its own being,--the not distinguishing, I
say, between these, and those positions which must be either matters of
fact or fictions.
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