ore obvious arena. Here I am only
giving an account of my own growth in spiritual certainty. But I may
pause to remark that the more I saw of the merely abstract arguments
against the Christian cosmology the less I thought of them. I mean that
having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense,
I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the
Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense. In case the argument
should be thought to suffer from the absence of the ordinary apologetic
I will here very briefly summarise my own arguments and conclusions on
the purely objective or scientific truth of the matter.

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in
Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an
intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it
quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in
that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged
demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous
facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to
Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such
scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well
be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book,
one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the
things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that
they all point to one conclusion. Now, the non-Christianity of the
average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up
of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences
for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences
against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I
simply discover that none of them are true. I discover that the true
tide and force of all the facts flows the other way. Let us take cases.
Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the
pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that
men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very
much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that
primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have
blighted societies with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian
arguments are very different; but they are all quite log