th, and down among very fantastical
deep-sea fishes. They could hardly feel certain even about the fish
that swallowed Jonah, when they had no test except the very true
one that there are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it.
Logically they would find it quite as hard to draw the line
at the miraculous draught of fishes. I do not mean that they,
or even I, need here depend on those particular stories;
I mean that the difficulty now is to draw a line, and a new line,
after the obliteration of an old and much more obvious line.
Any one can draw it for himself, as a matter of mere taste in probability;
but we have not made a philosophy until we can draw it for others.
And the modern men of science cannot draw it for others.
Men could easily mark the contrast between the force of gravity
and the fable of the Ascension. They cannot all be made to see
any such contrast between the levitation that is now discussed as a
possibility and the ascension which is still derided as a miracle.
I do not even say that there is not a great difference between them;
I say that science is now plunged too deep in new doubts
and possibilities to have authority to define the difference.
I say the more it knows of what seems to have happened, or what is
said to have happened, in many modern drawing-rooms, the less it
knows what did or did not happen on that lofty and legendary hill,
where a spire rises over Jerusalem and can be seen beyond Jordan.

But with that part of the Palestinian story which is told in the
New Testament I am not directly concerned till the next chapter;
and the matter here is a more general one. The truth is that through
a thousand channels something has returned to the modern mind.
It is not Christianity. On the contrary, it would be truer
to say that it is paganism. In reality it is in a very special
sense paganism; because it is polytheism. The word will startle
many people, but not the people who know the modern world best.
When I told a distinguished psychologist at Oxford that I differed
from his view of the universe, he answered, "Why universe?
Why should it not be a multiverse?" The essence of polytheism is
the worship of gods who are not God; that is, who are not necessarily
the author and the authority of all things. Men are feeling more
and more that there are many spiritual forces in the universe,
and the wisest men feel that some are to be trusted more than others.
There will be a tendency,