As a common-sense conclusion, such as those to which we come about sex or about midnight (well knowing that many details must in their own nature be concealed) I conclude that miracles do happen.  I am forced to it by a conspiracy of facts:  the fact that the men who encounter elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen, farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious; the fact that we all know men who testify to spiritualist incidents but are not spiritualists; the fact that science itself admits such things more and more every day.  Science will even admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation, and will very likely admit the Resurrection when it has thought of another word for it.  I suggest the Regalvanisation.  But the strongest of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of materialist dogmatism—­I may say materialist mysticism.  The sceptic always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed.  For I hope we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted in the mere recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or trick miracles.  That is not an argument at all, good or bad.  A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England—­if anything, it proves its existence.

Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur (my evidence for which is complex but rational), we then collide with one of the worst mental evils of the age.  The greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this:  that men began to use the word “spiritual” as the same as the word “good.”  They thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in virtue.  When scientific evolution was announced, some feared that it would encourage mere animality.  It did worse:  it encouraged mere spirituality.  It taught men to think that so long as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel.  But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil.  A man of genius, very typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly.  Benjamin Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of the angels.  He was indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels.  He was not on the side of any mere appetite or animal brutality; but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the princes of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery, and contempt of all obvious good.  Between this sunken pride and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose, spirits of shapes and sizes.  Man, in encountering them, must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering any other varied types in any other distant continent.  It must be hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate.  If a shade arose from the under world, and stared at