lf?"

There is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from
outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of
a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due
to the great human civilisations such as the old Egyptian or the
existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that
only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal
recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest
facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with
dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost
indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is
in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained
as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life
working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilisation _ought_
to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the
Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our
estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all
_revenants_; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just
as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon,
something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life--it
is not too much to say that it has had the _jumps_--ever since.

I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order to
convey the main contention--that my own case for Christianity is
rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts,
like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic
has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a multitude of
reasons; but they are untrue reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages
were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but
it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks
were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but
they are particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale,
but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colours and gay with gold;
because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it
isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a
railway train.

But among these million facts all flowing one way there is, of course,
one question sufficiently solid and separate to be treated br