or I hope
we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted in the mere
recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or trick miracles. That
is not an argument at all, good or bad. A false ghost disproves the
reality of ghosts exactly as much as a forged banknote disproves the
existence of the Bank of England--if anything, it proves its existence.

Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur (my evidence
for which is complex but rational), we then collide with one of the
worst mental evils of the age. The greatest disaster of the nineteenth
century was this: that men began to use the word "spiritual" as the same
as the word "good." They thought that to grow in refinement and
uncorporeality was to grow in virtue. When scientific evolution was
announced, some feared that it would encourage mere animality. It did
worse: it encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to think that so
long as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel. But
you can pass from the ape and go to the devil. A man of genius, very
typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly. Benjamin
Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of the angels. He was
indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels. He was not on the side
of any mere appetite or animal brutality; but he was on the side of all
the imperialism of the princes of the abyss; he was on the side of
arrogance and mystery, and contempt of all obvious good. Between this
sunken pride and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must
suppose, spirits of shapes and sizes. Man, in encountering them, must
make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering any other
varied types in any other distant continent. It must be hard at first to
know who is supreme and who is subordinate. If a shade arose from the
under world, and stared at Piccadilly, that shade would not quite
understand the idea of an ordinary closed carriage. He would suppose
that the coachman on the box was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind
him a kicking and imprisoned captive. So, if we see spiritual facts for
the first time, we may mistake who is uppermost. It is not enough to
find the gods; they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the
gods. We must have a long historic experience in supernatural
phenomena--in order to discover which are really natural. In this light
I find the history of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins,
quite