I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles.  For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them.  Why, I cannot imagine, nor can anybody tell me.  For some inconceivable cause a “broad” or “liberal” clergyman always means a man who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that number.  It always means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came out of His grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came out of her grave.  It is common to find trouble in a parish because the parish priest cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water; yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman says that his father walked on the Serpentine?  And this is not because (as the swift secularist debater would immediately retort) miracles cannot be believed in our experience.  It is not because “miracles do not happen,” as in the dogma which Matthew Arnold recited with simple faith.  More supernatural things are alleged to have happened in our time than would have been possible eighty years ago.  Men of science believe in such marvels much more than they did:  the most perplexing, and even horrible, prodigies of mind and spirit are always being unveiled in modern psychology.  Things that the old science at least would frankly have rejected as miracles are hourly being asserted by the new science.  The only thing which is still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New Theology.  But in truth this notion that it is “free” to deny miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them.  It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism.  The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it.  He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it.  Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth century man, uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was faith in their honest doubt.  There was indeed.  Those words have a profound and even a horrible truth.  In their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos.  The doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist.

Of the fact and evidence of the supernatural I will speak afterwards.  Here we are only concerned with this clear point; that in so far as the liberal idea of freedom can be said to be on either side in the discussion about miracles, it is obviously on the side of miracles.  Reform or (in the only tolerable sense) progress means simply the gradual control of matter by mind.  A miracle simply means the swift control of matter by mind.  If you