eans yet certain that they have
lost serviceableness as, at least, outworks of the stronghold. While the
doctrine of the virgin birth seems to be threatened by atrophy, the
doctrine of the bodily resurrection, though retired from primary to
secondary rank, seems to be waiting rather for clarification by further
knowledge.

Something of an objective nature certainly lies at its basis;
_something_ of an external sort, not the product of mere imagination,
took place. To the fact thus indefinitely stated, that hallowing of
Sunday as a day of sacred and joyful observance which is coeval with the
earliest traditions, and antedates all records, is an attestation as
significant as any monumental marble. No hallucination theory, no
gradual rise and growth of hope in the minds of a reflective few, can
account for that solid primeval monument. But _what_ occurred, the
reality in distinctness from any legendary accretions, we shall be
better able to conclude, when the truth shall have been threshed out
concerning the reality, at present strongly attested, and as strongly
controverted, of certain extraordinary but occult psychical powers.[46]

A point of high significance for those who would cultivate a religious
faith not liable to be affected by changes of intellectual outlook or
insight is, that this lower valuation of miracle observable among
Christian thinkers has not been reached through breaches made by
sceptical doubts of the reality of a supernatural Revelation. They
have, of course, felt the reasonableness of the difficulties with which
traditional opinions have been encumbered by the advance of knowledge.
But so far from giving way thereupon to doubts of the reality of divine
Revelation, they have sought and found less assailable defences for
their faith in it than those that sufficed their fathers. And their
satisfaction therewith stands in no sympathy with those who hold it a
mark of enlightenment to assume with Matthew Arnold, that "miracles do
not happen." It has resulted rather from reaching the higher grounds of
religious thought, on which supernatural Revelation is recognized in its
essential character as distinctively moral and spiritual.

The true supernatural is the _spiritual_, not the miraculous, a higher
order of Nature, not a contradiction of Nature. The Revelation of Jesus
was altogether spiritual. It consisted in the ideas of God which he
communicated by his ministry and teaching, by his character and li