The question of S. Mary was not a question which implied doubt.  It is therefore the proper question with which to approach all God’s works.  There is a stress with which such questions may be asked which implies on our part unbelief or at least hesitation in belief.  It is a not uncommon accent to hear to-day in questions as to divine mysteries.  Our recitation of the creed is not rarely invaded by restlessness, shadows of doubt, which perhaps we brush aside, or perhaps let linger in our minds with the feeling that it is safer for our religion not to follow these out.  I am afraid that there are not a few who still adhere to the Church who do so with the feeling that it is better for them to go on repeating words that they have become used to rather than to raise questions as to their actual truth; who feel that the faith of the Church rests on foundations which in the course of the centuries have been badly shaken, but that it is safer not to disturb them lest they incontinently fall to pieces.

In other words there is a wide-spread feeling that such stories as this of the Annunciation and of the Virgin 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.