Piccadilly, that shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary closed carriage.  He would suppose that the coachman on the box was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking and imprisoned captive.  So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time, we may mistake who is uppermost.  It is not enough to find the gods; they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods.  We must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena—­in order to discover which are really natural.  In this light I find the history of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins, quite practical and clear.  It does not trouble me to be told that the Hebrew god was one among many.  I know he was, without any research to tell me so.  Jehovah and Baal looked equally important, just as the sun and the moon looked the same size.  It is only slowly that we learn that the sun is immeasurably our master, and the small moon only our satellite.  Believing that there is a world of spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the world of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good.  Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water, and comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity, where I am literally at home.  And there is only one such place to be found.

I have now said enough to show (to any one to whom such an explanation is essential) that I have in the ordinary arena of apologetics, a ground of belief.  In pure records of experiment (if these be taken democratically without contempt or favour) there is evidence first, that miracles happen, and second that the nobler miracles belong to our tradition.  But I will not pretend that this curt discussion is my real reason for accepting Christianity instead of taking the moral good of Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism.

I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme.  And that is this:  that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one.  It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow.  Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre.  One fine morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven.  Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.  Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more.  But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song.  The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man