I am a rationalist.
I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.
If I am treating man as a fallen being it is an intellectual
convenience to me to believe that he fell; and I find, for some odd
psychological reason, that I can deal better with a man's exercise
of freewill if I believe that he has got it. But I am in this matter
yet more definitely a rationalist. I do not propose to turn this
book into one of ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be glad
to meet at any other time the enemies of Christianity in that more
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 discov