There is an answer:  it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance.  The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilisations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese.  Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume.  All other societies die finally and with dignity.  We die daily.  We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics.  It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life:  it could be explained as a supernatural life.  It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse.  For our civilisation ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome.  That is the weird inspiration of our estate:  you and I have no business to be here at all.  We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about.  Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body.  And Europe has had a strange life—­it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps—­ever since.

I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order to convey the main contention—­that my own case for Christianity is rational; but it is not simple.  It is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic.  But the ordinary agnostic has got his facts all wrong.  He is a non-believer for a multitude of reasons; but they are untrue 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