n multiplied a
hundredfold. Each new step is still a very short one: it is generally
found that several investigators have independently arrived at the
verge of a new discovery, and it is often a matter of chance which of
them first crosses the line and is lucky enough to associate his name
with the completed achievement. All this means that to-day, as from
the beginning, man has to wring her secrets from Nature in the sweat
of his brain, and without the smallest assistance from any Invisible
King or other potentate. To-day there are doubtless beneficent secrets
under our very noses, so to speak, which one word of a still small
voice might enable us to grasp, but which may remain undiscovered, to
our great detriment, for centuries to come. There is, in short, no
single point, either in history or in contemporary life, where "the
light of the world" can be shown, or plausibly conjectured, to have
lighted us to any practical purpose. And it is futile to urge, I
repeat, that it could not have done so without a miraculous
disturbance of the order of nature. The influence of mind upon mind,
however conveyed, is the most natural thing in the world; and, short
of transplanting mountains, inhibiting earthquakes, and teaching
people to subsist on air, there is nothing that mind cannot do.

Besides, when we come to think of it, why this prejudice against
miracles? Why is Mr. Wells so sternly opposed to the bare idea of
Providence? "Fear and feebleness," he says, "go straight to the
Heresies that God is Magic or that God is Providence" (p. 27)--as
though it were disgracefully pusillanimous to prefer a well-governed
to an ungoverned world. God, in the ordinary sense of the word, the
sense we all understand, is unquestionably magic, whether we like it
or not. He is none the less magic because he works through one great
spell, and not through a host of minor, petti-fogging miracles. Upon
the matter of fact we are all agreed, Mr. Chesterton only dissenting;
but Mr. Wells writes as if it were an essentially godlike thing, and
greatly to the credit of any and every God, to give Nature its head,
and take no further trouble about the matter. I cannot share that
view. My only objection to Providence is that it manifestly does not
exist. If it did exist, and made the world an appreciably better place
to live in, why should we grudge it a few miracles? There is a touch
of the sour-grapes philosophy in the rationalist attitude on this
matter