Catholic doctrine is and always has been
that there are two 'orders'--the natural and the supernatural--on the
same plane, and distinguishable from each other. The Catholic theologian
is prepared to define what occurrences in the lives of the Saints are
natural, and what supernatural. Miracles are of frequent occurrence, and
are established by ordinary evidence. Three miracles have to be placed
to the credit of each candidate for canonisation before he or she is
entitled to bear the title of saint, and the evidence for these miracles
is sifted by a commission. This theory has been practically abandoned in
the English Church. There are few among our ecclesiastics and
theologians who would spend five minutes in investigating any alleged
supernatural occurrence in our own time. It would be assumed that, if
true, it must be ascribed to some obscure natural cause. The result is
that the miracles in the Creeds, or in the New Testament, are isolated
as they have never been before. They seem to form an order by
themselves, a class of fact belonging neither to the world of phenomena
as we know it, nor to the world of spirit as we know it. From this
situation has arisen the tendency, increasingly prevalent both in the
Roman Church and in Protestant Germany, to distinguish 'truths of faith'
from 'truths of fact,' The former, it is said, have a representative,
symbolic character, and are only degraded by being placed in the same
category as physical phenomena. This contention is open to very serious
objections, but it at least indicates the actual state of the problem,
viz. that to most educated men the miraculous element in Christianity
seems to float between earth and heaven, no longer essentially connected
with either, while on the other hand the majority of religious people,
including a few men of high intelligence, find it difficult to realise
their faith without the help of the miraculous. Supernaturalism, which
from the scientific point of view is the most unsatisfactory of all
theories, traversing as it does the first article in the creed of
science--the uniformity of nature--gives, after all, a kind of crude
synthesis of the natural and the spiritual, by which it is possible to
live; it is, for many persons, an indispensable bridge between the world
of phenomena and the world of spirit. But when the heavy-handed
dogmatist requires a categorical assent to the literal truth of the
miraculous, in exactly the same sense in whic