an who wishes to increase that
number. It always means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came
out of His grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his
own aunt came out of her grave. It is common to find trouble in a parish
because the parish priest cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water;
yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman says
that his father walked on the Serpentine? And this is not because (as
the swift secularist debater would immediately retort) miracles cannot
be believed in our experience. It is not because "miracles do not
happen," as in the dogma which Matthew Arnold recited with simple faith.
More supernatural things are _alleged_ to have happened in our time than
would have been possible eighty years ago. Men of science believe in
such marvels much more than they did: the most perplexing, and even
horrible, prodigies of mind and spirit are always being unveiled in
modern psychology. Things that the old science at least would frankly
have rejected as miracles are hourly being asserted by the new science.
The only thing which is still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is
the New Theology. But in truth this notion that it is "free" to deny
miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them. It is
a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was
not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism.
The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection
because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved
in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe
it. Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth-century man, uttered one of the
instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was
faith in their honest doubt. There was indeed. Those words have a
profound and even a horrible truth. In their doubt of miracles there was
a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the
incurable routine of the cosmos. The doubts of the agnostic were only
the dogmas of the monist.

Of the fact and evidence of the supernatural I will speak afterwards.
Here we are only concerned with this clear point; that in so far as the
liberal idea of freedom can be said to be on either side in the
discussion about miracles, it is obviously on the side of miracles.
Reform or (in the only tolerable sense) progress means simply the
gradual c