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 most part what any one would call bad people; though there seems no intelligible meaning of the word in which they can be called good.  The best that one can say of them is that they have a certain usefulness in the present social order though they are not missed when they fall out of it.  They can be replaced in the social machine much as a lost or broken part can in an engine.  And just as the part of an engine which has become useless where it is, can have no possible usefulness elsewhere, so we are unable to imagine them as capable of adaptation to any other place than that which they have filled here.  Perhaps that is what we mean by hell—­incapacity to adapt oneself to the life of the future.

All this implies a temper of mind and soul that has rendered itself incapable of vision.  For just as our ordinary vision of the beauty of this world depends not only on the existence of the world but on a certain capacity in us to see it, so that the beauty of the world does not at all exist for the man whose optic nerve is paralysed; so the meaning and beauty, nay, the very existence of the supernatural order depends for us upon a capacity in us which we may call the capacity of vision.  The sceptic waves aside our stories of supernatural happenings with the brusque statement, “Nobody to-day sees angels.  They only appear in an atmosphere of primitive or mediaeval superstition, not in the broad intellectual light of the twentieth century.”  But it may be that the fact (if it be a fact) that nobody sees angels in the twentieth century is due to some other cause than the non-existence of the angels.  After all, in any century you see what you are prepared to see, what in other words, you are looking for.  It is a common enough phenomenon that the man who lives in the country misses most of the beauty of it.  In his search for the potato bug he misses the sunset, and disposes of the primrose on the river’s brim as a common weed.  It is true that in order to see we need something beside eyes, and to hear we need something beside ears.  When on an occasion the Father spoke from heaven to the Son many heard the sound, and some said, “It thundered”; others got so far as to say, “An Angel spake to him.”