ght as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was
suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a
man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the
century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe
in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he
can believe in any miracle in any age. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing. A
materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a
materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian Scientist of the
twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth
century. It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore in
dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was
given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question.
And the more I thought about when and how Christianity had come into the
world, the more I felt that it had actually come to answer this
question.

It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite
indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as if there had
never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on which
any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them. They represent that
the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to
preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and sincerity. They
will think me very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that the
remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach
Christianity. Its peculiarity was that it was peculiar, and simplicity
and sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind.
Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered
after a long talk. Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper
of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its
armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of
bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner
Light. Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world
specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an
exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last
Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in
the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care
for others, their