ow I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel,
the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political
impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask,
and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this
incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth
like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying
civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead;
this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry
with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask,
while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island
of the Empire can actually help itself?"

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 civilizations 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 civilization 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 unt