most part what any one would call bad people;
though there seems no intelligible meaning of the word in which they can
be called _good_. The best that one can say of them is that they have a
certain usefulness in the present social order though they are not
missed when they fall out of it. They can be replaced in the social
machine much as a lost or broken part can in an engine. And just as the
part of an engine which has become useless where it is, can have no
possible usefulness elsewhere, so we are unable to imagine them as
capable of adaptation to any other place than that which they have
filled here. Perhaps that is what we mean by hell--incapacity to adapt
oneself to the life of the future.

All this implies a temper of mind and soul that has rendered itself
incapable of vision. For just as our ordinary vision of the beauty of
this world depends not only on the existence of the world but on a
certain capacity in us to see it, so that the beauty of the world does
not at all exist for the man whose optic nerve is paralysed; so the
meaning and beauty, nay, the very existence of the supernatural order
depends for us upon a capacity in us which we may call the capacity of
vision. The sceptic waves aside our stories of supernatural happenings
with the brusque statement, "Nobody to-day sees angels. They only appear
in an atmosphere of primitive or mediaeval superstition, not in the
broad intellectual light of the twentieth century." But it may be that
the fact (if it be a fact) that nobody sees angels in the twentieth
century is due to some other cause than the non-existence of the angels.
After all, in any century you see what you are prepared to see, what in
other words, you are looking for. It is a common enough phenomenon that
the man who lives in the country misses most of the beauty of it. In his
search for the potato bug he misses the sunset, and disposes of the
primrose on the river's brim as a common weed. It is true that in order
to see we need something beside eyes, and to hear we need something
beside ears. When on an occasion the Father spoke from heaven to the Son
many heard the sound, and some said, "It thundered"; others got so far
as to say, "An Angel spake to him."

Let us then in the presence of narratives of supernatural happenings ask
our _how_ with a good deal of reverence and a good deal of modesty, not
as implying a sceptical doubt on our part, but as a wish that we may be
admitted deeper into t