n birth of our Lord are fables. When
we ask, why is there such a feeling? the only answer is that the modern
man has become suspicious of the supernatural. Has there anything been
found in the way of evidence, we ask, which reflects upon the truth of
the story in S. Luke? No, we are told; the story stands where it always
did, its evidence is what it always was. What has changed is not the
story or the evidence for it but the human attitude toward that and all
such stories. The modern mind does not attempt to disprove them, it just
disapproves of them, and therefore declines to believe them. It sets
them aside as belonging to an order of ideas with which it no longer
has any sympathy.

It is no doubt true that we reach many of our conclusions, especially
those which govern our practical attitude towards life, from the ground
of certain hardly recognised presuppositions, rather than from the basis
of thought out principles. The thought of to-day is pervaded by the
denial of the supernatural. It insists that all that we know or can know
is the natural world about us. It rules out the possibility of any
invasions of the natural order and declines to accept such on any
evidence whatsoever. All that one has time to say now of such an
attitude is that it makes all religion impossible, and sets aside as
untrustworthy all the deepest experiences of the human soul. If I were
going to argue against this attitude (as I am not able to now) I should
simply oppose to it the past experience of the race as embodied in its
best religious thought. I should stress the fact that what is noblest
and best in the past of humanity is wholly meaningless unless humanity's
supposition of a life beyond this life, and of the existence of
spiritual powers and beings to whom we are related, holds good. No
nation has ever conducted its life on the basis of pure materialism,
save in those last stages of its decadence which preluded its downfall.

But without going so far as to reject the supernatural and reject the
truth of the immediate intervention of God in life, there are multitudes
of men and women whose whole life never moves beyond the natural order.
They have no materialistic theory; if you ask them, they think that
they are, in some sense not very well defined, Christians. But they have
no Christian interests, no spiritual activities of any sort. For all
practical purposes God and the spiritual order do not exist for them.
They are not for the