rue reasons. He doubts because
the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is
demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they
do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because
nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because
Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly
bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving
away from the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the
supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train.

But among these million facts all flowing one way there is,
of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be
treated briefly, but by itself; I mean the objective occurrence
of the supernatural. In another chapter I have indicated the fallacy
of the ordinary supposition that the world must be impersonal because it
is orderly. A person is just as likely to desire an orderly thing
as a disorderly thing. But my own positive conviction that personal
creation is more conceivable than material fate, is, I admit,
in a sense, undiscussable. I will not call it a faith or an intuition,
for those words are mixed up with mere emotion, it is strictly
an intellectual conviction; but it is a PRIMARY intellectual
conviction like the certainty of self of the good of living.
Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical;
the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that miracles
have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe
in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America.
Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires
to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary
idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them
coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only
in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way.
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they
have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them
(rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman
when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old
apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain,
popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost
exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about