But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth.  It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced.  It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced.  He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it.  But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it.  He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.  And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up.  Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, “Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?” he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, “Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen.”  The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex.  It has done so many things.  But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.  The belief is so big that it takes a long time to get it into action.  And this hesitation chiefly arises, oddly enough, from an indifference about where one should begin.  All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never get there.  In the case of this defence of the Christian conviction I confess that I would as soon begin the argument with one thing as another; I would begin it with a turnip or a taximeter cab.  But if I am to be at all careful about making my meaning clear, it will, I think, be wiser to continue the current arguments of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of these mystical coincidences, or rather ratifications.  All I had hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it.  I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen; and I cannot understand any one passing the age of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a question.  I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity.  But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that, even in that point, He had an advantage over some of His modern critics.  I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time—­all of it, at least, that I could find written in English and lying about; and I read nothing else; I mean I read nothing else on any other note of philosophy.  The penny dreadfuls which I also read were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity; but I did not know this at the time.  I never read a line of Christian apologetics.  I read as little as I can of them now.  It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back