Nihil Obstat: Edward A. Cerny, SS, DD
Censor librorum

Imprimatur: Michael J. Curley, DD
Archbishop of Baltimore and Washington

Printed in the United States of America
By J. J. Little & Ives Company, New York

Uxor vivamus ut viximus et teneamus nomina quae primo sumpsimus in thalamo; nec ferat ulla dies, ut commutemur in aevo, quin tibi sim juvenis tuque puella mihi. Nestore sim quamvis provectior aemulaque annis vincas Cumanam tu quoque Deiphoben, nos ignoremus quid sit matura senectus, scire aevi meritum, non numerare decet.

Introduction
I. The Scientific Approach To The Miraculous
II. Modern Miracles
III. The Gospels. The External Evidence
IV. The Gospels. The Internal Evidence
V. The Vindication Of St. Luke
VI. The Fourth Gospel
VII. The Claim
VIII. The Proof
IX. The Collective Hallucination Hypothesis
X. The Empty Tomb
XI. The Testimony Of St. Paul
XII. Christianity Without Miracles
XIII. Miracles Without Christianity
XIV. Conclusion
Notes And Translations

My father, the late Sir Henry Lunn, was a devout Methodist and a life-long Liberal. Shortly before his death in March 1939 he said to me: "When I was a young man life was very simple. One went to a political meeting and looked at the hats outside. The big hats were the hats of Liberals because Liberals have big brains. The small hats were the hats of Conservatives, with their stupid loyalty to the "status quo." One does not need brains to stand still. In those days continental Liberals, groaning beneath foreign tyrants, looked to us for help and encouragement. Garibaldi in Italy, and Kossuth in Hungary asked for nothing better than to wrest a constitution, patterned on ours, from the autocratic rulers of their countries. When Garibaldi set out from Sicily, the Cabinet sent him a book on the British Constitution. You think that funny. So do I—now. But I didn't then, for London was then the spiritual capital of Liberalism just as Rome is of Roman Catholicism. In those days 'to be young was very Heaven', provided that you were a young Liberal. I was confident that the extension of the franchise and of educational facilities and free trade and the universal adoption of the British Parliamentary system would solve all the major problems both of war and of peace, and usher in a new era of peace and social justice...."

He paused and added sadly "I have lived on, as an old man, to see country after country repudiating with disgust Parliamentary democracy, and the tyrannies and brutalities of a pagan world returning to an enslaved Europe".

The irrelevance of religion was the great heresy of the nineteenth century. Many good Christians believed, as my father certainly believed, that the moral standards which Christianity had imposed on the world would survive the repudiation of the Christian creed. We who have watched the tragic experiment of national apostasy in two great European countries, Russia, which officially adopted atheism as her state philosophy, and Germany, where the Nazis strove to substitute the worship of race for the worship of Christ, have no excuse for illusions. We know that it does matter what a man believes.

My father was not wholly uninfluenced by the prevailing belief that religion was essentially an individual matter He looked to the Churches to make men good, and to the State to make them happy, and was convinced that Liberalism was the key to our secular problems in this world and a reunited Church to the problems of the world to come. He certainly did not realize that all our controversies are, as Cardinal Manning somewhere says, primarily theological, that the English way of life has its roots in the Christian faith, and that the nobler ideals of Liberalism were a by-product of the Christianity which many Liberals in this country, and most Liberals abroad, had already repudiated.

My father was a great student of ancient and modern history, and, though uninterested in Art, he was not unaware of certain aspects of that cultural decline which always coincides with a religious decline, but being an incurable optimist he would have allowed the appeal from facts to faith and given his verdict against that great scientist and Nobel Prize winner, the late Alexis Carrel.

The supremacy of matter and the dogmas of industrial religion", writes Carrel, "have destroyed culture, beauty, and morals, as they were understood by the Christian civilization, mother of modern science. Unintelligence is becoming more and more general in spite of the excellence of the courses given in the schools, colleges, and universities. Strange to say it often exists with advanced scientific knowledge. Moral sense is almost completely ignored by modern society. We have, in fact, suppressed its manifestations".

The flight from faith, the flight from morals and the flight from beauty are coincident phenomena.

"Today", adds Alexis Carrel, who was an American of French background, "France despises the majestic remnants of her past and even destroys her natural beauties. The descendants of the men who conceived and erected the monastery of Mount Saint-Michel no longer understand its splendor. They cheerfully accept the indescribable ugliness of the modern houses in Normandy and Brittany, and especially in the Paris suburbs. Like Mount Saint-Michel and the majority of the French cities and villages, Paris has been disgraced by a hideous commercialism. During the history of a civilization, the sense of beauty, like moral sense, grows, reaches its optimum, declines, and disappears." (Italics mine).

The great culture of Christendom was born, as every great culture was born, in an age of faith. The Art, Architecture and Literature of the great centuries was the outcome of an attempt to translate into paint, stone or words the vision of eternal beauty and timeless truth. We are living today in the winter of our Western civilization. Faith has been eroded by skepticism, and though works of beauty are still being produced, creative genius finds expression not in art but in engineering achievements, of which the Bomber, V.[1] and V.[2] are the most notable. The age of Nihilism can only destroy the legacy of beauty which we have inherited from the age of Faith. "We can learn all we wish to know", writes the greatest non-Christian philosopher of modern times, Oswald Spengler, "about the art-clamor which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of the new style', of 'unsuspected possibilities', theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists . . . the unabashed farce of Expressionism.... Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. What do we possess today as 'art'? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a faked painting, full of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form—wealth of millennia some new 'style', which is, in fact no style at all, since everyone does as he pleases; a lying plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently...."

It is not only Art which declines as religion declines but also compassion. "Cruelty and the abuse of power" wrote Dickens, "are the twin bad passions of human nature". Now men did not cease to be cruel and tyrannical merely because they were baptized, but the compassion of Christ armored the merciful with the supreme argument for mercy. Christians were alternately incited to reform by the appeal of saints and goaded into reform by the taunts of skeptics, for there was no answer to the contrast between the compassion which Christ preached and the cruelties which Christians practiced. Slowly Catholics ceased to burn Protestants in Spain, and Protestants ceased to rack and hang Catholics in England, but all these hard-won gams of the Christian spirit have been lost in the countries whose rulers have explicitly or implicitly repudiated Christianity. One has only to contrast the worst atrocities proved, or alleged, against the Kaiser's Germany with the torture chambers of the Gestapo, in Paris, and elsewhere, to realize the tragic consequences of apostasy.

Men fought bravely before Christ was born, and heroism will continue to flower on the battlefields even though the Church returns to the Catacombs, but the whole nature of war will be transformed for the worse if the flight from Christianity be not arrested. In his "Life" of the great Duke of Marlborough, Mr. Churchill quotes a Royal Proclamation at the outbreak of the war in 1709 to the effect that enemy subjects "who shall demean themselves dutifully to us shall be safe in their persons and estates" Mr. Churchill adds, "This passage will jar on the modern mind. We see how strong was the structure of Christendom in those times, and with what restraints even warring nations acted. Of course, nowadays, with the many improvements that have been made in international morals and behavior, all enemy subjects—as in every other state based on an educated democracy—would be treated within twenty-four hours as malignant foes, flung into internment camps, and their private property stolen to assist the expenses of war. In the twentieth century mankind has shaken itself free from all those illogical, old-world prejudices, and achieved the highest efficiency of brutal, ruthless war." And Mr. Churchill proceeds to give other instances of the "archaic doctrine" which was accepted as self-evident when "the structure of Christendom" was still unimpaired, the inevitable armistice at the end of battle to rescue the wounded "instead of leaving them to perish inch by inch in agony in No Man's Land", the courtesies extended to the enemy passports to traverse hostile territory, ". . no hatred, apart from military antagonism was countenanced . . mob violence and mechanical propaganda had not yet been admitted to the adjustments of international disputes."

The French Revolution initiated the new age, for the Revolution was a revolt not only against the nobility but also against Christianity, a revolt in the course of which, as Burke complains, the Jacobins destroyed "that mode of civilized war which, more than anything else, has distinguished the Christian religion".

One need not be a Christian to realize the relationship between religion and morals. There is nothing new in that decline of morality and common honesty which the late Archbishop of Canterbury so often deplored. Polybius, the Greek historian, was a septic but he was an intelligent septic, and his explanation of Greek dishonesty was similar to that advanced by Archbishop Temple.

The Romans", said Polybius, "were more honest than the Greeks because of their scrupulous fear of the gods. It was therefore not without purpose or at random that our forefathers introduced among the common people those beliefs about gods and the punishments in Hades. Indeed, I think that men nowadays are very foolish and rash to reject them. And it is for this reason that Greek statesmen if entrusted with a single talent, though protected by ten checking-clerks, ten seals and twenty witnesses, cannot be induced to keep faith; whereas, among the Romans, men of their magistracies and embassies are entrusted with large sums of money, and keep faith from pure respect of their oaths."

It is not only honesty and morality that decline as religion declines. If man be nothing more than first cousin to the chimpanzee, he has no logical ground of complaint if he is put behind bars. "Christianity" as Mr. Walter Lippmann reminds us "anchored the rights of man in the structure of the universe. It set those rights where they were apart from human interference. Thus the pretensions of despots became heretical. And since that Revelation, though many despots have had the blessings of the clergy, no tyranny has possessed a clear title before the tribunal of the human conscience, no slave has had to feel that the hope of freedom was for ever closed. For in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence—that is an immortal soul—which only God can judge, a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men." And, it is, as Mr. Lippmann insists, no accident that "the only open challenge to the totalitarian state has come from men of deep religious faith".

But as "deep religious faith" declines, slavery returns. The repudiation of one "in whose service is perfect freedom" inevitably leads to the Tyrant State.

The Atlantic Charter, even if we are sanguine enough to suppose that it will be implemented, will fail as the League of Nations failed. There can be no collective security without collective Christianity. It may be that we are entering an age of Imperialistic wars, separated by brief and uneasy armistices.

Nothing but a religious revival, of which for the moment there is little evidence, can re-integrate a dying civilization born, as all great civilizations have been born, in an age of faith, for the end of atheism is death. When men cease to believe in God, they cease to believe in themselves. When religion dies, man loses his belief in the significance of life, and too bored to reproduce himself lies down to die amid the mechanical marvels of a materialistic civilization. Every great culture begins, as Spengler says, with a strong affirmation of life, and ends with a metaphysical turning towards death. "Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence."

Spengler was a determinist. He offered us only the consolation of understanding the inevitable decline of our Western civilization, but to the Christian there are no irreversible tendencies. Courage and faith in England saved us in 1940. Courage and faith in Christ may yet prove Spengler a false prophet.

In the spring of 1944 I was invited to address a group of undergraduates of London University, and I chose for my theme the bankruptcy of secularism. I have reproduced the substance of my talk in the preceding pages. When I had finished my friend and chairman, Dr. C. E. M. Joad, said: "We have listened to a profoundly depressing talk, but I don't find it easy to refute Lunn's thesis". After the lecture Joad said to me, "you formulated thoughts which I have carefully kept at the back of my mind for some time, and which I was reluctant to admit".

The undergraduates took me up on minor points, but there was little attempt to dispute the main thesis. One of them came up to me at the end of the meeting and said that if I had given the same talk before the war, I should have met with lively opposition, but that most of them felt rather at sea, and had nothing positive to fall back on.

The truth is that the Nazi-Russian pact and the attack on Finland shattered the faith of the few genuine idealists who had sought in Marxism a substitute for religion. Whereas in the nineties many intelligent people were convinced that Christianity was dying, and that the attack of so-called scientific materialism was irresistible, today it is the heresies of the nineteenth century which are on their death bed. Materialism was like a vicious dog, and its bite was painful, but "the dog it was that died".

The great heresy of the nineteenth century which infected even good Christians like my father, was the belief in the inevitability of progress. "Progress", wrote Herbert Spencer, "is not an accident but a necessity. What we call evil and immorality must disappear. It is certain that man must become perfect." "Viewed from Mount Vernon Street", writes Henry Adams of Boston society in 1848, "the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked—Suffrage, Common Schools and the Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection. Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy".

My father, as I have shown, was inclined to believe that Parliamentary democracy, compulsory education and free trade would solve all secular difficulties, leaving the Church to provide spiritual remedies for spiritual diseases. If the world had steadily improved in proportion as Christianity declined, the task of the Christian apologist would be difficult, but as the exact reverse is the case, the Christian can, at least, console himself with the reflection that whereas "Dawnism" has proved to possess no prediction value, whereas the secular optimism of the nineteenth century has been refuted by events, the realism of Christianity has been vindicated by history. Ours is a philosophy which explains history, and, come what may, we can say with Clough "It fortifies my soul to know That though I perish truth is so".

Or, as the great eighteenth-century Anglican, Bishop Butler, said: "Things are what they are, and the consequences will be what they will be. Why then should we deceive ourselves?"

The confident "Dawnism" of the nineteenth century has given way to disillusion. Even before this war Mr. Belloc noted, as one of the characteristics of the modern world, the rising tide of despair.

And therein lies our opportunity. The rival philosophies have been exposed for the shoddy substitutes which they are, but one great obstacle to a Christian revival still remains to be overcome, the traditional reluctance of ninety-nine Christians out of a hundred to make the slightest effort to convert their non-Christian neighbors.

Most of those who yield, as every Christian must yield at least nominal assent to the belief that Christianity is the most important of all beliefs, habitually act on the assumption that it is an irrelevance with no real influence on the practical business of life. Even good Christians behave as if they believed that the maladies of this distracted planet are due to political rather than to religious causes.

The defense of Christianity is left to the priests and to a few eccentric laymen, regarded with good-humored amusement by most of their fellow-Christians, but the defense of our political panaceas is assumed to be the business of Mr. Everyman. As the elections approach, thousands of good Christians, who would be horrified at the suggestion that they should canvass for Christ, will canvass with great enthusiasm for the political party of their choice. "Nobody is ever converted by argument" is a formula as popular with Christians as it is unknown among politicians and political canvassers.

There is an increasing tendency among Christians to forget that a just social order is a by-product of a Christian society, and that it is vain to hope for the by-products once we have lost the thing itself. We must, of course, continue to work for social justice but we must not confuse political panaceas which are, at best, drugs to alleviate the pain with that organic treatment of the disease which is involved in the Christianization of society. It is a question not of competition but of priorities. We must put first things first, instead of relegating apologetics to a very secondary position, for if there be no return to Christianity, it is certain that our society will perish. "There will always be an England" provided and provided only that England is re-converted to Christianity. If not, "our finest hour" in 1940 will also prove to be our sunset hour.

Many years ago I was asked to read a document which purported to describe the circumstances under which a Jesuit Mission in South America had buried gold and precious stones of fabulous value. An enterprising and plausible gentleman had invited two friends of mine to invest money in a company formed to hunt for this buried treasure and to join the expedition which was being organized for this purpose. My advice was asked, and I gave it as my opinion that the document was a fake. One of my friends took my advice. The other invested his money and was repaid in the dividend of adventure, the adventure incidental to the search for non-existent treasure in the remote regions of South America.

I often recall the passionate intensity with which we debated the authenticity of this document, for there are few things which people will examine with greater care than a project which promises to make their fortune. Cynics have asserted that there is no more searching test of the genuineness of a man's beliefs than his readiness to invest money in support of them. Political questions interest us because they touch our pocket. We are all amateur doctors because health means even more to us than wealth, and a man who claimed to know of a cure for the common cold would be listened to with eager attention and blamed if he did not propagate his recipe among his friends. Christians are alleged to value spiritual health above physical health and there are some who do, but most of us are paralyzed by shyness in our approach to those who are suffering from something more serious than the common cold. If Christianity be true, we have the key not only to eternal happiness in the world to come but also to the secular maladies of this distracted planet, but do we act as if we believed that we alone possessed the one sovereign remedy for the disorders of the world? If I were convinced that I found the cure for cancer, I should master the evidence in favor of the cure and propagate my knowledge by all means in my power, but most Christians might be compared to a man who, knowing a cure for cancer, thought it indecent to mention the fact to a friend dying of the disease, but rational to spend hours arguing the merits of the Beveridge cold cure or the "New Deal" headache pills.

The collapse of moral standards is causing such concern that proposals are being discussed to improve the religious education in our Secondary and Elementary schools, but the revolt against dogma has gone so far that it is more than probable that Christianity will be represented as nothing more than humanitarianism flavored by religiosity. "La religiosita e vaga," said Croce, "la religione e precisa." Religiosity is vague, religion is precise, and it is only the precision of traditional Christianity which can save us.

Religious education should begin with the New Testament. Is the New Testament fact or fiction? Was St. Luke written by St. Luke or by some second-century forger? Precise questions which the prophets of religiosity may be forgiven for evading but which should be faced and discussed in any scheme of Christian education.

"Testament" means "will", and the first thing which we do to a will is to prove it. Can we prove that the New Testament is what it purports to be—God's legacy to man? I am not, of course, suggesting that the authenticity of the Gospels could ever provoke among normal people the same intense interest as the authenticity of a document purporting to describe the location of buried treasure in South America. I have not forgotten the first principle of all good advocacy, moderation. "Est modus in rebus," but I am rash enough to suppose that an odd hour or two at the end of a boy's school life might not be unprofitably spent in armoring him against the half-baked dupes of ill-informed secularists who will assure him that the Gospels were written in the fourth century. It would have made a considerable difference to me had I been told as a boy that whereas for all works of classical antiquity we have to depend on manuscripts written long after their original composition (350 years for Virgil, 500 for Horace, no less than 1300 for Euripides), our great "velum unciais" of the New Testament were copied some 250 years after the date when Gospels were first written. And since my boyhood papyrus fragments of St. John have been found dating back to the beginning of the second century. All these facts, and many more, can be found in "The Story of the Bible," by Sir Frederic Kenyon, for many years Keeper of the Manuscripts in the British Museum. "The Story of the Bible" is quite a small book, 130 pages of pre-war economy printing, and perhaps even more suitable for use as a school textbook than those little books about Soviet Russia and Karl Marx which some enthusiasts are trying to force upon our Secondary Schools. Of course, it is very important that we should know more (a great deal more) about our Russian ally, but even if the Gospel of Christ were to vanish as completely from the world as the gospel of Karl Marx has, in effect, vanished from Russia, it would still be essential for those with any pretensions to culture to know something of the great religion which gave Europe her noblest architecture and art.

No such knowledge was regarded as essential in the school in which I was educated, and yet Edwardian Harrow certainly provided any boy who had an appetite for knowledge with the basis of a humanist culture, but one thing which was not taught at Harrow was the rational argument for the religion which was preached in the School Chapel.

I entered Harrow in 1902. The Boer war, which had faintly disturbed the serene complacency of the Victorians was drawing to a close. The dominant philosophy of the age was the belief in the perfectibility of man and the inevitability of progress. The Church of England appeared to be fighting a rearguard action against a confident secularism. Agnosticism was becoming fashionable. Lady Monkswell in the seventies recorded in her diary the horror of "Aunt Ena" at the thought that her sister-in-law should marry the infidel Leslie Stephen. "Mo says 'how horrid, he is a brute.' But Lady Young says, 'he has such a tender heart, and he is obliged to turn a rough side to the world.'" The Hon. E. C. F. Collier, the editor of "A Victorian Diarist" (Mary, Lady Monkswell) adds, "The trouble here was that Mr. Leslie Stephen (later Sir Leslie Stephen) who had been in holy orders, had not only given them up, but had actually become an 'unbeliever'. The heinousness of this, in the eyes of that generation, can scarcely now be imagined. It placed one utterly beyond the pale."

But not for long. The Athenaeum is the favorite club of the Anglican Hierarchy, and both Leslie Stephen who popularized and T. H. Huxley who invented the word "Agnostic" were elected to the Athenaum under Rule 11; "distinguished Eminence in science, literature or the arts".

Every head master from the foundation of Harrow in the Elizabethan age to the end of the first World War had been in Holy Orders. The last of this line of clerical head masters, The Rev. Lionel Ford, was a very devout Christian. It was even alleged that in his attitude to the staff he allowed himself to be influenced by their interest in religion. I do not think that any such charge could have been substantiated against my own head master, the Rev. Joseph Wood, DD; one of the handsomest men I have ever met, a fine scholar and a genial wit. It was his habit to invite the monitors in rotation to supper. "I have just had a letter", he remarked to me when I supped with him, "from a parent who asks anxiously whether we have capital punishment at Harrow. I have replied, not as yet but when I introduce it I shall begin with the masters."

Now Dr. Wood would have urbanely agreed had you remarked that spiritual health was more important than physical health, but though he would never have relaxed the rules, which forbade a boy to return to school if he was still in quarantine for an infectious disease, he would have been faintly amused had he been challenged to make some effort to inoculate Harrovians against the contagion of infidelity. He would, no doubt, have murmured polite assent had you insisted that the disintegration of Christianity would produce results even more disastrous than those of the Black Death, but he would have firmly resisted any attempt to adapt the curriculum of a Christian school to the needs of a new age, in which Christianity was the subject of bitter and persistent attack.

The Harrow table of work (Classical side) for 1902 lies before me as I write. Excluding home work we devoted about fifteen hours a week to the classics, and twelve to history, English, mathematics and modern languages, and two hours to "Scripture". On Sunday afternoon we yawned over the Kings of Israel and Judah, and on Monday morning we construed the Greek Testament. There was not the least reason why a conscientious agnostic should have hesitated to take the Scripture classes, for a man can teach Hebrew history and New Testament Greek without revealing his beliefs or disbeliefs, and those that did not believe were discreet. Once, it is true, after a boy had finished translating St. Luke's story of the earthquake that loosened the bonds of the prisoners, and thus freed Paul and Silas, the form master remarked sardonically, "in point of fact, it is not the function of earthquakes to facilitate the escape of convicts", but that was the only revealing comment which I heard.

"Apologetics", that is, the rational defense of Christianity, was not included among the subjects which we studied at Harrow. My Father was a Methodist, my Mother a member of the Church of England, and I was brought up as an Anglican. I was prepared for confirmation by Sir Arthur Hort. Sir Arthur was the son of the Rev. Fenton Hort, a famous New Testament scholar and a founder of the Alpine Club. And it was, of course, only in this latter capacity that I heard of him. Sir Arthur took me through the catechism, and made all the remarks which the occasion called for on the special temptations of youth, but said nothing which could be classified as "apologetics". My brother was more fortunate. His tutor hinted at the existence of people who did not believe in God. "But of course", he said, "that's absurd. There's a reason for everything. We eat beef and the cows eat grass and God made the grass."

Sir Arthur Hort had not inherited his father's interest in New Testament criticism, but he was an enthusiastic Shakespearean. He encouraged me to enter for a Shakespeare prize, which I won, and as a result I left Harrow aware of the reasons for supposing that the last act of Henry VIII was not written by Shakespeare, but unaware of the reasons for supposing that the Fourth Gospel was written by St. John. Of the many sermons which I heard in the school chapel, one or two made an impression on me at the time, but I do not remember a single occasion on which a preacher gave us any reason to believe that Christianity was true.

Apologetics, not unnaturally, never intruded into the sermons which we heard in the school chapel, all of which assumed the truth of Christianity, but it is only fair to add that the Bishop who confirmed me mentioned the existence of unbelievers, and provided us with yet another variant of the argument from design, a variant only slightly more persuasive than the man-cow-grass thesis with which my brother's tutor had endeavored to armor him against the arrows of unbelief. "At the Universities you will find men who openly deride the Christian faith. As I was coming up Harrow hill today I heard a bird sing, and I felt more convinced than ever of the existence of a loving Father. Tell them that". I did not tell them that, perhaps, because the Confirmation address had confirmed not my faith but my doubts. If that was the best that could be said for Christianity, it was time to see what could be said on the other side. I revered Leslie Stephens as the author of the most moving of all mountain books, "The Playground of Europe," and I invested sixpence in a cheap reprint of his book, "An Agnostic's Apology." The strong negations of the mountaineer soon drowned the twitterings of the Bishop's bird.

My Father could not help me, for he was not a rationalist. In defiance of his faith he appealed, not to reason but to personal experience. Prayer had enabled him to overcome temptation. I should have been impressed, if not converted, had he said to me "The Resurrection is one of the most firmly established facts in history. Christianity can be proved to be true, and because Christianity is true it is necessary to resist temptation in its most seductive form." Unattracted as I was by the consequences which he invoked to justify his premise, and convinced that Christianity was irrational, I naturally declined to mortify my reason in order the more effectively to mortify my flesh. I owe a great debt to my house master, the Rev. E. C. E Owen who lent me at this critical juncture two books which made an impression on me, William James's admirable lecture on "Immortality" and his "The Will to Believe." Agnostics may be divided into two classes, those who deny the possibility of religious knowledge and those who are content to assert that they have no such knowledge. "Ignoramus et ignorabimus" sums up the negations of the former; "ignoramus" of the latter.

Thanks to William James and to the difficulty of reconciling the quasi-mystical emotions evoked by mountain beauty with materialism, I had, at least, enough interest in religion to read the leading works, as they appeared, of the modernists, such as Loisy, Lilley, the Liberal Jew Montefiore, Schweizer and George Tyrrell. Tyrrell had been educated at an Irish school of which my grandfather, Canon Moore, was the head master, and this fact sent me to his fascinating autobiography. I still think that his "Reflections on Catholicism," written before his formal breach with Rome, is one of the most effective contributions to Catholic apologetics that I know. As Editor of "The Isis," the undergraduate paper, I coaxed review copies of these books out of the publishers, and a review of J. M. Thomson's "Jesus according to St. Mark" led to an acquaintance with the talented chaplain of Magdalen whose book had just been enthusiastically welcomed by Anglican modernists.

I accepted with uncritical faith the assumptions implicit in modernist literature, first that miracles are unthinkable, and secondly that modernists welcome, whereas traditionalists repudiate the assured results of modern scholarship. The first book which forced me to re-examine these assumptions was Bishop Lightfoot's rejoinder to "Supernatural Religion." I was twenty-eight at the time. I was exploring Mr. Coolidge's library at Grindelwald, when something prompted me to open Lightfoot's book. The author of "Supernatural Religion," published in 1877, was a modernist before the word modernism was invented. He did his best to discredit miracles, and to represent himself as a scholar of immense erudition. "This book", writes Salmon, "obtained a good deal of notoriety by dint of enormous puffing, great pains having been taken to produce a belief that Bishop Thirlwall was the author. The aspect of the pages bristling with learned references, strengthened the impression that the author must be a man of immense reading. The windbag collapsed when Bishop Lightfoot showed that the supposed Bishop Thirlwall did not possess even a schoolboy acquaintance with Greek." In the same library I found a copy of Dr. George Salmon's "A Historical Introduction to the study of the Books of the New Testament." Salmon was a brilliant mathematician and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also a brilliant New Testament scholar.

I have always been interested in the aesthetics of controversy, for controversy is one of the minor arts, and a well built argument, like a well-built cathedral, is characterized by balance and proportion. I was delighted by the skill with which Lightfoot routed his opponent and the talent with which Salmon defended an indefensible case. But was his case indefensible? By the time I had finished his book, I was beginning to have my doubts. My edition of Salmon, the seventh, is dated 1894, and the years that have passed since then have reinforced many of his arguments by the evidence of the papyrus fragments discovered in Egypt but have failed to produce any new fact to shake his conclusions. Salmon did not convince me but he stimulated my curiosity and encouraged me to continue my researches. Among the many books which I read, as the result of this initial impetus, I should like to signal out for special mention those works of Sir William Ramsay quoted in the pages that follow, and "Who Moved the Stone?" the author of which spent some years searching in vain for a natural explanation of the events of the first Easter Sunday.

The prejudices aroused in my mind by modernist apologetics survived the discovery that the traditionalists had by far the better of the argument, and of these prejudices none resisted more stubbornly the pressure of fact than the favorite modernist assumption that modernists have the monopoly of exact and honest scholarship, and that Catholic contributions to New Testament criticism are vitiated by the need to conform to the decisions of the Church. As a result of this prejudice I never read the contributions of Catholic scholars to the study of the Gospels until long after I had come to the conclusion that Christ rose from the dead. I have quoted sparingly in the pages that follow from Catholic writers, because my principal object in writing this book is to convert non-Christians to Christianity, and many of the readers who will, I hope, read this book will be the victim of prejudices very similar to mine, but it would be ungracious not to acknowledge my own debt to Catholic scholars such as Dom John Chapman, whose little book "The Four Gospels" is one of the best short introductions to the subject, The Rev. M. J. Lagrange, O.P., the Rev. J. P. Arendzen, DD, and Pere de Grandmaison, S.J. Of Pere de Grandmaison's famous book "Jesus Christ," an Anglican scholar, the Rev. H. P. V. Nunn, M.A., writes that he "cannot too highly commend this book to scholarly readers. It will soon be completely translated into English. It disproves completely the allegation that the Roman Catholic Modernists were brutally thrust out of the Church by mere authority. This book, and the similar works of M. Lepin and Father Lagrange show that Modernism was fairly met in the French Church by courteous refutations and shown to be what it really is—nothing more nor less than a rehash of German theories with a dash of sentiment thrown in."

"Nobody is ever converted by argument" is a popular slogan with Christian appeasers, but unilateral disarmament is as foolish in theological as in international disputes. Communists and atheists do not act on the principle that no Christian can ever be perverted by argument.

Nobody, of course, is ever wholly converted by argument, but if we exclude supernatural factors, argument is the decisive factor in many cases. It certainly was so in mine. I did not pray for guidance because I had abandoned, with relief, the practice of prayer while at Harrow. The Empty Tomb was a fascinating problem but—to me at that time—less interesting than those problems of snow and avalanche craft which I was trying to solve. My writings on snowcraft have emerged with credit from the test of scientific research, conducted in the main by Gerald Seligman, because I tried to practice what Huxley preached in the famous maxim "an assertion which outstrips the evidence is not only a blunder but a crime", and for the same reason I was slow to commit myself to any definite theory about the Resurrection. The problems of snowcraft were scientific, the problem of the Empty Tomb historical, and in the latter case as in the former I tried to reach a solution by means of rational deductions from the available evidence. The mental process in both cases seemed to me much the same.

Whatever may be the influence of rational argument on conversion, it is certain that lack of rational argument is an important factor in perversion. Had I known what I now know I should not, as a boy, have been perverted by the specious arguments of Leslie Stephen's "An Agnostic's Apology" (Faber and Faber). I have just reread a symposium, "Public School Religion," which I edited and to which the Bishop of Bradford, and the head masters of Eton and Westminster contributed. Many of the points discussed would have been equally relevant in a wider setting than the public schools, as for instance the ingrained resistance of the average boy to anything which is taught as a school subject. But experience proves that where apologetics is intelligently taught, a surprisingly large number of boys are thereby inspired to propagate the faith. In the final essay of this symposium, Christopher Hollis, at that time master at Stonyhurst, writes as follows:

"There is a class in apologetics. In such a class, just as in a class for trigonometry or for the reading of Catullus, there will be a few boys who are enthusiastically interested, a few to whom the subject is repugnant, the majority who accept the task to be done without fuss but also without enthusiasm. The proportions will vary with the liveliness of the master. Those boys who can take a delight in their work will rejoice, but the rest will not be such fools as to imagine that the primary question is whether their work—this particular work at any rate—'interests' them. They understand that they are taught apologetics not because they are interesting but because they are true....

"About two-thirds of the upper boys belong to the voluntary Catholic Evidence Guild. The purpose of the Catholic Evidence Guild is to train speakers to defend the Catholic Faith in public speeches, and boys from the school do speak under its auspices both during the summer term at neighboring towns and during the holidays. But, in order to qualify themselves to speak, they have first to join a group, or class, presided over by a master, there to learn their subject and to pass a test in it."

I have taught apologetics at the great University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and I am unimpressed when people talk about the difficulty of interesting youth in the propagation of the faith. One of my pupils, a born evangelist, made over twenty converts, most of them from materialism, within three years of leaving Notre Dame.

If apologetics be properly taught, even the idlest of pupils will at least discover that there is a rational case for religion, a case which can be defended with serene confidence against all opposition. There is a world of difference between leaving school ignorant of how to present the case for Christianity, and leaving school ignorant that such a case exists.

The omission of apologetics, where apologetics is omitted, is defended on the ground that the curriculum is already over-crowded. It would be more honest to assert that Christianity does not matter, than to suggest that it is not unreasonable that Christ should be crowded out of a Christian education. "Because there was no room for him in the Inn", but that particular Innkeeper was not a humbug. He did not advertise that he made a special effort to cater for Christian clients.

I do not wish to belittle the difficulties. Schools which are in earnest about apologetics have to compete with those which are not. Apologetics is only a part, if the most important part of religious instruction, but whatever else has to be cut down, the evidence for the central event in all human history should not be scamped.

"I think", writes Christopher Hollis, "that no Catholic teacher would deny that by far the most difficult part of his case" (for Catholicism) "is the demonstration of the divinity of Christ, and that once demonstrated, the rest of the apologetic is hardly more than formal.... I suppose there can hardly be any single person in England today, if there be one, who was brought up to believe in the Infallibility of the Pope and who has subsequently rejected Infallibility, but still retains the Incarnation. If there is, it would be interesting to know his name. That being so, it is but natural that the Catholic schoolmaster holds that the essential part of his apologetics is to persuade his pupils of the truth of the Incarnation, and that accomplished, the rest can almost be left to look after itself."

Modernism is merely a new name for a very old thing, Unitarianism, and Unitarianism is only dynamic when allied to a militant nationalism, as in the case of Mohammedanism. The Unitarianism of New England, for instance, is a mental climate rather than a religion. "Nothing quieted doubt so completely", wrote Henry Adams, "as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston, who controlled society and Harvard College were never excelled. They proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no doctrine, but taught, or tried to teach the means of leading a virtuous, useful, unselfish life, which they held to be sufficient for salvation. For them difficulties might be ignored; doubts were waste of thought; nothing exacted solution. Boston had solved the universe; or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out.

"Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, the disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it."

The honest Unitarian who describes himself as such is no danger to Christianity so long as he attacks the Church from without, but the camouflaged Unitarian is the most effective of all allies of anti-Christ. In Latin countries people who repudiate the deity of our Lord do not describe themselves as Christians, and are consequently far less dangerous than those who rob the word "Christian" of all meaning by annexing it for an anti-Christian theology. In the Latin south the enemies of Christianity often make their position clear by burning a church. In England we don't burn churches; we empty them. We solve our problems by ignoring them and are more loyal to names than to principles, with the result that many a man who repudiates the basic dogmas of Christianity would be most incensed if you denied his right to the Christian name. Let me quote in this connection an unsigned article in the Church Times (Dec. 15, 1944) entitled "Trinitarians or Unitarians."

The article, which was an attempt to discover what nominal Christians" believe, was based on several thousand questions asked about religion by members of the Services.

"Time and again I have met men and women who regard themselves as nominal members of a Christian denomination either Anglican or Nonconformist, and yet have denied that Jesus Christ was the son of God . . . few such critics show any sign of knowing that their heretical views place them outside the tenets of the faith they claim to hold." And he points out that the Churches which claim thousands of nominal members in the Services "ignore the fact that many of their adherents repudiate categorically essential doctrines. They are self-styled Trinitarians with Unitarian convictions. Here is one of the fundamental reasons why the churches remain empty—why this huge army of young people never show any desire to enter the House of God."

(Italics mine).

The Anglican who wrote this article would have had no grievance against an honest Unitarian who described himself as such, but he is justly angered by those disciples of Humpty Dumpty who misuse the great word "Christian". "'When I use a word', Humpty Dumpty said in a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'" And there are many people who seem to think that they can make the word "Christian" mean "a man who reveres in Jesus a liberal-minded progressive, who taught that there is a lot to be said for loving one's neighbor, and who went about healing people who had nothing much the matter with them."

The trouble with Unitarianism is that it has no standing. It has neither Cathedrals, nor endowments, neither historical traditions, nor social prestige. But though Unitarians have no hope of competing successfully against, they need not despair of annexing, the National Church. Their "Trojan Horse technique" has succeeded all too well in Continental Protestantism, where the prestige of the Christian name and the associations of the Christian centuries have been successfully exploited to promote a rival firm.

When the Catholic Church excommunicated the Unitarians who described themselves as modernists, she was denounced not only for her intolerance but for her folly in driving such eminent scholars as Loisy into the wilderness. It is, of course no more "intolerant" of a Church to excommunicate those who repudiate her basic doctrines than for a political party to exclude those who repudiate the party platform. Nobody would accuse Dr. Inge of ultra-conservative tendencies in doctrine. He is a modernist, but a modernist with a difference, for his theology is Christo-centric. After summarizing the views of Loisy and other modernists he adds, "What more, it may well be asked, have rationalist opponents of Christianity ever said, in their efforts to tear up the Christian religion by the roots, than we find here admitted by Catholic apologists? What is left of the object of the Church's worship if the Christ of history was but an enthusiastic Jewish peasant whose pathetic ignorance of the forces opposed to Him led Him to the absurd enterprise of attempting a "coup d'etat" at Jerusalem?"

"L'historien", writes Loisy, "n'a pas a s'inspirer de l'agnosticisme pour ecarter Dieu de l'histoire; il ne l'y rencontre jamais." "It would be more accurate", Dr. Inge remarks, "to say that, whenever the meeting takes place 'the historian' gives the other the cut direct."

During fifty years of religious decline the only religious communion in the United Kingdom which has increased its regular communicants is the Catholic Church, and it is no coincidence that the Catholic Church is the one Church which is completely immune from the Unitarian microbe. If further evidence be needed of the destructive influence of this infection, all that is necessary is to contrast the comparative strength of Anglicanism which is still predominantly Trinitarian, with the moribund condition of Continental Protestantism. My father convened many Reunion Conferences at Grindelwald and Murren, and amongst those who attended were representatives of German, Swiss and French Protestants. I have met hundreds of Swiss, German and French skiers and mountaineers who would enter themselves on a census form as Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians but, as it happens, I have never met a young skier or mountaineer who is a regular attendant at any Protestant place of worship. The Continental pastors, whom I met at Murren and elsewhere, reminded me of the battalions that Kerensky tried to form when the Russian army was disintegrating, battalions composed solely of officers.

The same tendencies which sterilized Continental Protestantism may be observed in Anglicanism, and efforts are being made to endow Unitarianism at the expense of the taxpayer in a country in which Christianity is the established religion.

In The Christian of September 23rd, 1943, a letter appeared which was signed "G. Wilson."

"I have just returned", wrote Mr. Wilson, "from a special Divinity course for schoolteachers and others at Oxford University and beg to be allowed to draw the attention of your readers to the true nature of this course, which is recognized by the Board of Education as the means of further qualifying teachers to take their part in the new 'Religion in Schools' campaign. The course was openly used as a means of propagating the doctrines of 'Higher Criticism' and by the end of the week the orthodox Christian faith was denuded of its fundamentals. We were informed that modern scholarship had entirely altered traditional Christianity. There was no Virgin Birth. The Resurrection of Christ and the Appearances were only 'spiritual' not physical, and the question of the empty tomb could be explained by the fact that the women and the disciples probably returned to the wrong tomb, but in any case, the Body would disintegrate very quickly in such a climate and little trace would be left in three days!"

(And this is the kind of rubbish solemnly taught by people who invent an imaginary conflict between Christianity and Science in order to engineer a bogus reconciliation.)

"There were about eighty teachers from all parts of the country attending the Course and a great many appeared to accept this travesty of Christian belief without question. If, therefore, these unsound doctrines are soon to be propagated throughout the schools of the country, one wonders whether it would not be better to advocate the abolition of the Scripture lesson entirely."

Three head masters who attended the course signed a declaration that the statements in this letter were correct.

One need not be an Anglican to realize what this country would lose if Anglicanism were destroyed from within by the Trojan horse of Unitarianism.

Fortunately the Church of England, like England, has unsuspected powers of recuperation. Her position in the middle of the eighteenth century seemed desperate. "It has come I know not how", wrote the eighteenth-century Bishop Butler, "to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much a subject of inquiry; but that it is, now at length, discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all persons of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by reprisals, for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world."

A few years later John Wesley, the greatest Englishman of the eighteenth century, laid the foundations of the Methodism which re-Christianized multitudes who had drifted away from the national Church.

Deism was an even greater danger to the Church of England in the eighteenth century than modernism in the twentieth. "The Church as it now is", wrote Dr. Arnold in the early years of the nineteenth century, "no human power can save." Within a few years the Oxford Movement had revolutionized the situation, and refuted the pessimists.

When I was a boy Anglican and Nonconformist churches were fuller than they are today, and there was far less open repudiation of Christian doctrine and morals among those who never attended a place of worship, but I do not think that the number of genuinely convinced Christians was much larger. It was still the fashion to go to church, but many of those who did were secretly convinced that science had disproved miracles. Today the old bogey, the alleged conflict between science and religion, only survives in the writings of people like Mr. Harold Laski who are out of touch with modern thought. A popular modern line is to insist that miracles are so common that they prove nothing. When I was a boy many Christians were infected by defeatism and doubt, and materialism appeared triumphant. Today it is the materialists, the Dawnists and the Utopians who are fighting a desperate rearguard action, and as a result many who have rejected Christianity are prepared to re-examine the case for religion. The substitutes for Christianity have failed. Hedonism has not made men happy. Utopianism has not brought Utopia any nearer. The Dawn's delay has disappointed the Dawnists, and Humanitarianism has not made men humane, and high-minded secularism has not made them good.

Herein lies our opportunity, an opportunity which is a test of courage. Nothing is to be gained by appeasement. Those who are anxious to adapt their beliefs to every changing fad and fashion of political and pseudo-scientific thought make no converts. The Church has, of course, not only the right but the duty to proclaim the social consequences of Christianity and to denounce social injustice, but over-emphasis on the secular implications of Christianity is always (and rightly) interpreted as lack of confidence in the supernatural foundation. First things must come first. "The British Weekly" describes itself as "A Journal of Social and Religious Progress" which reverses the proper order of priority, for social progress is the consequence of the progress which consists in the approach to God and there can be no social progress in an age of religious regress.

The Church is not competing with secular politicians for our support. Christ does not ask for our support. He demands our obedience. Christians have been far too defensive, and I agree with an Anglican, Prebendary E. Moore Darling, who wrote to me as follows. "May I add that we do too much defense. Our work should begin with a full-blooded attack: 'The appalling difficulties of unbelief'."

Courage is the basic virtue, and the man with the courage of his convictions will always command respect, and sometimes assent—even when he asks for sacrifices instead of offering bribes. Of the few, the tragically few, speeches by democratic politicians that are immortal, the greatest was that in which a Prime Minister of England offered his countrymen, not security, nor a higher standard of living but "blood, sweat and tears". To such an appeal the best in man will always respond.

"On a tort de parler des consolations de la religion, dit Ensenat. On doit dire: les terribles verites chretiennes." An exaggeration, for it is right to speak of the consolations of religion, but wrong to ignore the "terrible Christian truths". And of these truths none is more terrible than the fact that the individual or the country which rejects what God proposes for our belief must inevitably perish.

In his remarkable book "The Religious Prospect," Canon V. A. Demant writes: "The Christian religion is primarily a religion of redemption, a gospel. It is good news, not a philosophy, or good advice." The first question which we ask about news is whether it is reliable, and the most important thing about Christianity is that it is true. "If Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith also is vain." A generation which has tasted the I bitter fruits of a false philosophy is readier than its grandfathers to re-examine the great question. Did Christ rise from the dead? It is the truth of Christianity, rather than its social consequences which excites increasing interest.

I recently spent half an hour examining the books displayed on a railway bookstall in a big industrial town. Mr. C. F. Lewis' books were prominently displayed. The popularity of his admirable works of Christian apologetics is clear evidence of an increasing demand for undiluted Christianity. The bookstall also catered for all those who were anxious to be well informed about Soviet Russia. There were no books by our Christian appeasers.

In my experience people who attack the Church for the alleged alliance with the rich are not looking for the truth. They are looking for a scrap. The genuine inquirer knows that the Church is a mixed bag, not an exclusive club from which Tories are blackballed and to which only Progressives are admitted. The genuine inquirer is not much interested in the politics of ecclesiastics, and is as unlikely to take his own politics from a Primate as his religion from a Prime Minister. He is in search of something very different, of the answer to the ultimate problems. Does God exist? Is life nothing but a futile flicker of uneasy consciousness between the darkness of the womb and the darkness of the tomb? Did Christ rise from the dead? It is the bankruptcy of Utopianism and the Dawn's delay which are forcing so many people to reconsider the Christian claims. The churches which are full are those in which men are promised not Utopia on earth, but those in which they are reminded that the inescapable sufferings of this life are as nothing compared to the happiness which God has prepared for those who love him.

And now all that remains is to record my gratitude to those who have helped me, to Father T. J. Crompton, S.J., a great expert on the New Testament, for his kindly verdict on the manuscript, submitted to him by the publishers, and for some very helpful suggestions, and to Lt. Col. B. W. Bowdler, C.M.G., D.S.O. who has read the proofs of this book and found them, I hope, a pleasant change from the proofs of the "British Ski Year Book" which owe so much to his careful reading.

Believing, as I do, that footnotes should be reduced to a minimum I have relegated to the end of the book references, translations of such passages as are not included in the text, including a translation of the dedicatory poem, and also notes. Points of secondary interest are relegated to the notes, as are also some popular "difficulties", such as the alleged resemblance between Christianity and Buddhism.

If I were in danger of doubting the increasing interest in religion my postbag would soon convince me. I have had no secretary since the war, but I have answered every letter I have received with the exception of those from lunatics, those which are purely abusive, and those which I have lost. I am not the tidiest of men, and letters have a way of drifting off the edge of my table into the wastepaper basket. My conscience is tortured by the memory of letters mislaid before I could reply to them, and I am therefore more than grateful to kind people who send stamped and addressed envelopes, for I seldom lose both the letter and the envelope enclosed for the reply.

Arnold Lunn.
Christmas Day, 1944

Sir William Ramsay was a convinced anti-miraculist when he began his great career as an archaeologist in Asia Minor, but unlike most anti-miraculists his mind was not closed to evidence which conflicted with his prejudices. In the opening chapter of his book, "Luke the Physician," which embodied the results of thirty-four years of research he writes as follows. "The question 'Shall we hear evidence or not?' presents itself at the threshold of every investigation into the New Testament. Modern criticism for a time entered on its task with a decided negative. Its mind was made up, and it would not listen to evidence on a matter that was already decided...."

To the question "Shall we hear evidence or not?" Strauss, Zola and the modernists reply with an unhesitating negative, so far at least as the evidence for miracles is concerned.

"Wherever anything occurs", Ramsay continues, "that savors of the marvelous in the estimation of the polished and courteous scholar, sitting in his well-ordered library and contemplating the world through its windows, it must be forthwith set aside as unworthy of attention and as mere delusion. That method of studying the first century was the method of the later nineteenth century. I venture to think that it will not be the method of the twentieth century. If you have ever lived in Asia you know that a great religion does not establish itself without some unusual accompaniments. The marvelous result is not achieved without some marvelous preliminaries." The sentence which I have italicized contains a prediction which I believe to be in the process of verification. The attitude of the twentieth century to supernatural and supernormal phenomena differs even now, and will probably differ to an even greater degree, from the attitude of the nineteenth century.

The alleged cause of the anti-miraculist attitude of the nineteenth century was the progress of science. Christians and anti-Christians were keenly interested in the alleged conflict between science and religion. The truth is that every advance of science has reinforced, if only indirectly, the case for miracles. It is, for instance, because our knowledge of medical science is increasing that we can assert with increasing confidence that certain cures at Lourdes are inexplicable within the framework of natural causes. The greater our knowledge of natural agencies, the greater our ability to isolate and recognize the effects produced by supernatural agencies.

Man, animals, vegetables and the inanimate forces of nature, such as sun, frost, running water are natural agencies. Is the world in which we live, and are the terrestrial phenomena which we observe, solely due to natural agencies? Or are there some phenomena which are due to supernatural agencies?

The determination to exclude miracles from the field of research, which Ramsay maintains to have been characteristic of the nineteenth century, was in no way the result of a devotion to science. On the contrary it was, as we shall see, a recrudescence in a modern form of certain tendencies which effectively hampered the advance of science in the middle ages.

The Church, except in the case of Galileo, never came into conflict with scientists on a scientific issue. It was the petrifying influence of Aristotle that obstructed research. Aristotle himself was a great naturalist, but though the observation of nature in general and of the animal kingdom in particular was the basis of his conclusions, those conclusions had constantly to be readjusted to suit the requirements of certain dogmas which Aristotle made no attempt either to prove by reason, or to check by observation.

Thus the Aristotelian system of physics had to accommodate itself to the following dogmas. All matter is made up of four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. The earth is the center of the Universe. Circular movement is the most perfect conceivable, and therefore the stars and planets move in concentric circles round the earth.

That it was not the influence of the Church but the influence of a mode of thinking which can be traced back to Aristotle which impeded the advance of science can be proved, among other things, by the type of error which is so common in the writings of that great Protestant Lord Bacon. For example, he gravely assures us that wooden arrows without an iron point penetrate farther into wooden substance than the same arrows pointed with iron, owing to "similitude of substance". And it was not the fear of ecclesiastical censure which prevented Caesar Cremonini looking through Galileo's telescope but the fear of finding Aristotle's physics were wrong. Again and again the pioneers of astronomy in Europe, as Mr. Hinks points out in his book "Astronomy" ("Home University Library)," were met "with the objection that Aristotle said so and so. Now what Aristotle said was founded upon the vaguest kind of information. Planets must move in circles because the circle is the only 'perfect' figure. Seven is a perfect number, and therefore if you have found seven of a thing you need not waste time looking for an eighth".

The alleged perfection of the circle and of the figure seven conform not to a scientific but to an aesthetic criterion, and aesthetic criteria play a much greater part in the shaping of scientific hypotheses than scientists would be prepared to admit.

Kepler's career bridges the mediaeval and the modern attitude to science. He was, at first, greatly influenced by aesthetic criteria. At that time only six planets had been discovered, and Kepler was immensely elated when he discovered that "five regular solids" could be inserted between the spheres of the six planets. He believed that this fact, which even if it were true, we should regard as absolutely irrelevant, was a sufficient explanation of the planets being six in number. And because the circle was more "perfect" than the ellipse he made eighteen successive attempts to adapt the planetary movements to a circular orbit before he finally adopted ellipses. In the end observation triumphed over aesthetic prejudices.

Why was the circle considered more perfect than the ellipse? Probably because it was simpler. Simplicity has not only an aesthetic attraction but an obvious appeal to all those oppressed by the complexity of phenomena. It is always tempting to search for a short cut to a solution by eliminating as many unknown factors as possible. "It is impossible", as Mr. A. G. Tansley remarks, "to overemphasize the overmastering desire of the human mind for some kind of unification—for having a single consistent or seemingly consistent scheme which appears to include and reconcile contradictory things." It is, indeed, a natural and human weakness to hope that all difficulties of life will yield to some simple panacea. In politics we are invited to abandon the complexity of the democratic solution reasonably fair to all classes, in favor of the dictatorship of one particular class, the proletariat. In biology Darwin tries to explain evolution by the sole agency of Natural Selection. The materialist explains all phenomena in terms of matter; the Christian scientist in terms of mind, the Freudian in terms of sex.

It is this desire to simplify a complex problem, this urge towards unification which explains the prejudice of the anti-miraculist, for if all phenomena could be explained solely in terms of natural agencies, the task of the scientists would be simplified. The aesthetic criterion invoked in one age to prove that planets must move in circles is invoked a few centuries later to prove that miracles do not occur, for miracles are untidy and unpredictable intrusions into a neat and orderly universe, ugly discords in the beautiful uniformity of nature. The mediaeval outlook effectively prevented astronomical discovery. The neo-mediaevalism of the anti-miraculist sterilizes research in a field of inquiry infinitely more important than that in which Galileo and Kepler achieved fame.

Are terrestrial phenomena influenced by supernatural agencies? Is there any evidence for life beyond the grave? Questions such as these are infinitely more important than those with which Kepler was concerned, but the conventional scientists of the nineteenth century when invited to investigate supernormal phenomena refused to admit that the reality of supernatural or supernormal agencies was a proper subject for scientific research. Huxley, for instance, when invited to examine the curious phenomena produced by the medium Home, reacted precisely as did Cremonini when asked to look through Galileo's telescope at the moons of Jupiter whose existence conflicted with Aristotle's physics.

The anti-miraculist fashion might have been less influential but for the fact that it was in accord with political fashion. Deism, the belief that God may have created the universe but never interferes in the processes of creation, originated in England at the time of the "Glorious Revolution" which substituted a limited for an absolute monarch. The King of England has a theoretical right to veto laws which have been approved by Parliament. The God of Deism has a theoretical right to veto the laws of nature, but neither the King of England nor the King of Kings would be so unconstitutional as to exercise these rights. Deism might be defined as constitutional Theism. Miracles are as objectionable to the Deist as the arbitrary acts of a constitutional monarch to the Liberal. In the sphere of economics constitutional Theism found expression in the doctrines of "laissez-faire" Liberalism. God might reign, but he could not rule. Malthus, a kindly Anglican clergyman, explained that if children were born in excess of the requirements of the labor market, then both parents and children should be left to starve. Even God, it seemed, could not veto the laws of political economy.

There is no sounder approach to the problem of miracles than the method which led to the discovery of the planet Neptune. The orbit of a planet is determined by the interplay of the major attraction exerted by the sun and the lesser pulls of the other planets. In spite of the complexity of the problem the course of a planet can be accurately predicted. Now, before the discovery of the planet Neptune, astronomers were bewildered by certain "perturbations" in the planetary orbits, that is, by their deviations from the orbits as predicted. Le Verriere subjected these "perturbations" to a searching analysis and came to the conclusion that they could not be explained in terms of known agencies, that is, as the consequence of the forces exerted by the sun and by the planets known, at that time, to exist. He therefore assumed that the perturbations must have been due to the action of an unknown agency, an undiscovered planet. As a result of his calculations the planet Neptune was located on September 23rd, 1846, within a degree of the point where Le Verriere had announced that the undiscovered planet would be found.

Note that Le Verriere's discovery began by the proof of a purely negative conclusion, the conclusion that the orbits of the planets could not be wholly explained in terms of known agencies. The method of Le Verriere can be employed to solve a problem of infinitely greater importance than the problem of planetary perturbations.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a miracle as a "marvelous event due to some supernatural agency". Let us define a miracle, provisionally, as a "perturbation inexplicable in terms of natural agencies".

The true scientist will start his investigation unhampered by negative dogmas. He will not assume the nonexistence of supernatural agencies, but he will make every effort to explain terrestrial phenomena in terms of natural agencies. Like Le Verriere, he will attempt to exhaust the possibility that a given phenomenon has been caused by known agencies before considering the possibility that it has been caused by an unknown agency.

The scientific approach to this problem is less uncommon in scientific circles than was the case in the nineteenth century, but the man in the street is still influenced by the negative dogmatism of the old-fashioned secularist who repeated with simple faith Matthew Arnold's remark, "miracles don't occur".

The nineteenth-century secularist did not test his conclusions by the evidence; he tested the evidence by its conformity to his beliefs. Thus Strauss, author of the notorious "Life of Jesus," laid down as a canon of New Testament criticism the principle, "in the person and acts of Jesus there was nothing supernatural", and he accordingly dates the gospels on the assumption that miracles must be a later interpolation. Zola, like Strauss, accepted with simple faith the unproved and unprovable dogma that the natural world is a closed system, and that supernatural agencies do not exist. Zola's negative faith was proof against the stubborn fact of the two miracles which he himself witnessed at Lourdes, of which the first was the sudden cure of an advanced stage of lupus. Zola describes Marie Lemarchand's condition as he saw her on the way to Lourdes. "It was", writes Zola, "a case of lupus which had preyed upon the unhappy woman's nose and mouth. Ulceration had spread and was hourly spreading and devouring the membrane in its progress. The cartilage of the nose was almost eaten away, the mouth was drawn all on one side by the swollen condition of the upper lip. The whole was a frightful distorted mass of matter and oozing blood." Zola's account is incomplete, for the patient was coughing and spitting blood. The apices of both lungs were affected, and she had sores on her leg. Dr. d'Hombres saw her immediately before and immediately after she entered the bath. "Both her cheeks, the lower part of her nose, and her upper lip were covered with a tuberculous ulcer and secreted matter abundantly. On her return from the baths I at once followed her to the hospital. I recognized her quite well although her face was entirely changed. Instead of the horrible sore I had so lately seen, the surface was red, it is true, but dry and covered with a new skin. The other sores had also dried up in the piscina." The doctors who examined her could find nothing the matter with the lungs, and testified to the presence of the new skin on her face. Zola was there. He had said "I only want to see a cut finger dipped in water and come out healed". "Behold the case of your dreams, M. Zola," said the President, presenting the girl whose hideous disease had made such an impression on the novelist before the cure. "Ah no!" said Zola, "I do not want to look at her. She is still too ugly", alluding to the red color of the new skin. Before he left Lourdes Zola recited his credo to the President of the Medical Bureau. "Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle."

The modern skeptic is less dogmatic than Zola. Many such skeptics would admit the fact that inexplicable cures take place at Lourdes, but refuse to believe that they are due to supernatural agencies. Thus Professor J. B. S. Haldane, F.R.S., the distinguished biologist, who exchanged letters with me which were published under the title "Science and the Supernatural," and who attacked not only Christianity but theism in the course of our correspondence, wrote as follows: "Still, one or two of the more surprising Lourdes miracles, such as the immediate healing of a suppurating fracture of eight years' standing, seem to me to be possibly true, and, if so, very remarkable and worth investigating, although if they were shown to be true they would not prove the particular theory of their origin current at Lourdes" (p. 13). Haldane contends that sooner or later science will explain such alleged miracles in terms of natural law.

Now the question we are seeking to solve is whether supernatural agencies exist. This is the subject of our research. Clearly we may as well abandon the research if all evidence which suggests supernatural agencies is to be explained away as the result of our ignorance. There must be something wrong with a method which starts by assuming the non-existence of an agent whose existence or non-existence is the occasion of our research. This is merely Strauss' formula in a modern dress. "In the phenomena of this terrestrial planet no supernaturalism shall be allowed to remain."

Had Le Verriere adopted this method he would never have discovered Neptune. It is our ignorance, he would have argued, which is responsible for the attribution of these perturbations to an unknown planet. Sooner or later science will resolve the apparent discrepancies, and prove that these tiresome perturbations are wholly consistent with our belief that the planetary system, as we know it, is a closed system subject to no external influences.

Clearly, if the Haldane criterion be accepted, all further investigation is futile. Even if supernatural agencies exist we are absolved from recognizing their existence, for we can always appeal to the science of the future to explain the "perturbations" in terms of the agencies which we already know. According to pious legend St. Denis is alleged to have carried his head in his hands after he had been decapitated. Had Haldane met St. Denis, he would perhaps have remarked "very remarkable and worth investigating, but science will one day explain the fact that certain unusual pathological types can survive decapitation for an appreciable time". Similarly Le Verriere, had he accepted the obligation to explain all planetary perturbations in terms of the planets which were known to him, might have appealed to the science of the future to explain the unaccountable deviations of planets from their predicted courses without prejudice to the accepted hypothesis that the planets then known constituted a closed system. But there must be something wrong with a method of research which effectively debars the investigator from discovering an unknown agent, the nature and reality of which is the subject of research.

"How can the assumption", writes Mr. Malcolm Grant, "of unknown laws or of unknown natural causes be better science than the determination to abide by recognized, fundamental, so-to-say necessary and obvious laws, to abide by careful observation and

by enlightened failure."

"Enlightened" because the failure to discover natural agents throws light on the existence of supernatural agents.

Mr. Grant would not accept the Catholic explanation of the Lourdes miracles, but the quotation which I have taken from his book "A New Argument for God and Survival" (Faber and Faber) continues. "The 'rationalist' who denies the reality of, for instance, all well-attested cures at Lourdes (cures of organic diseases) is a fool; but what shall we call the man who assumes, and keeps on assuming even after careful study, that they are natural events?"

Finally, there are those who contend that God is not included in the scientist's terms of reference, and that the scientist cannot reasonably be asked to express a scientific opinion on the miracles at Lourdes, or elsewhere. His task is to interpret phenomena in terms of natural agents and natural law.

The word Science is derived from "scientia," which means knowledge. A correct explanation of a given phenomenon which enlightens us as to its cause is "scientific", be that cause a natural or a supernatural agent. There is not the least scientific justification for the belief that a particular group of agents must be excluded from the field of research. This is as if Le Verriere had been restricted by his terms of reference to explaining all planetary "perturbations" in terms of planetary agents known to, and classified by, astronomers.

The scientist is not asked for a positive verdict in support of the existence of supernatural agencies. His more modest role is to answer the question "Can this phenomenon be explained in terms of natural agencies?" All that we demand from the scientist is an answer to a question which is within his competence to decide.

There are no doubt some survivors of the Victorian Rationalists who continue to assert that science has disproved the possibility of miracles. This happens to be the exact reverse of the truth. It is only because we believe in science that we believe in miracles. It is only because we have faith in the account which the scientist gives of natural phenomena that we dare to assert that a particular phenomenon was not caused by natural agents. "What makes it difficult for us to believe in miracles", writes Mgr. R. A. Knox, "is not human science; it is human nescience." It is because our knowledge of the laws of nature is limited that in case after case which looks like a miracle we cannot be quite certain that those laws have been modified or suspended by a supernatural Power. Even of the best attested Lourdes miracles we do not say that a "miracle iS theologically certain; we only say that it is, so far, the best account we can give of the facts. We differ from our critics only in this," Mgr. Knox continues, "that we say, 'It may be a miracle or it may not,' whereas they say, 'whatever it is, it certainly is not a miracle'. Which side approaches the subject with an open mind, and in a spirit of inquiry? which side approaches the subject encumbered with the burden of dogmatic prepossession? which side faces the facts?"

Finally, there is the so-called historical argument. "The historical argument", writes Haldane, "appeals to me. In primitive societies, such as those of West and Central Africa, all phenomena not understood, e.g., all non-violent deaths, are put down to the activity of spirits. As knowledge increases, more and more of them are explained in other ways. There are now rather few left over in which the intervention of spirits is in the least plausible."

If phenomena may be divided into two classes, those which are directly caused by a supernatural agent, and those which are caused by a natural agent, the mistake of incorrect classification is admittedly more likely to be made by a primitive savage than by a modern scientist,, and the transference of some phenomena from the supernatural to the natural class is a probable result of the advance of science. And yet this sequence of events which is inevitable if miracles occur is cited by Haldane as an argument against the occurrence of miracles. "If A is true, then B must happen," is our case. "But B happens, therefore A is untrue," replies Haldane. His argument is neither historical nor logical.

People who appeal to the so-called "historical argument" often fail to distinguish between the reactions of primitive savages and mediaeval men to the miraculous. All those who were born before the scientific age are assumed to have been equally credulous and to have lived in a constant expectation of miracles. This is very far from being the case. Miracles occurred in the Middle Ages as they occur today, but the overwhelming majority of Christians then as now, lived and died without witnessing a phenomenon which they believed to be miraculous. History is, in the main, the record of the exceptional, and consequently we are tempted to assume that miracles were more common in past ages than our own, a common illusion among the pious. St. Gregory, for instance, writing within six centuries of the Crucifixion, raises this same complaint, and looks back with much the same regret to the Apostolic Age.

"Ah, but if a mediaeval man", retorts the septic, "had been transported forward through the centuries he would have attributed the voice of the BBC announcer emerging from a portable wireless to some supernatural agency." Would he? Some would and others wouldn't. The proportion of the credulous to the critical was no greater in the thirteenth than in the twentieth century. Professor F. M. Powicke, the eminent mediaevalist, endorses and makes his own the remark that "never in the whole history of the world did so many people believe so firmly in so many things, the authority for which they could not test, as do Londoners today". And in any case what concerns us is not the cause of error in classification which leads the uncritical to classify natural events as miracles, or the proportion of people in every age who fall into this error, but whether, in point of fact, there is a basic distinction between those marvels of modern science which we owe to the ingenuity of man, and those miracles, such as the miracles of healing at Lourdes, which the ingenuity of man can neither duplicate nor explain.

Haldane's assumption that there has been a continuous transference of phenomena from the allegedly supernatural to the admittedly natural class is unhistorical. Every century contributes its quota to the class of phenomena which resists all attempts at explanation in terms of natural agents. Furthermore, the process of transferring doubtful cases from one class to another is not a one-way process. Seventy years ago it was the fashion in scientific circles to write as if, eventually, all phenomena which had once been classified as supernatural would, in the course of time, be explained by science within the framework of her accepted categories, but there are few scientists today who would assert that all supernormal phenomena can be explained as the result of fraud, hallucination or inaccurate observation. It is materialism, not supernaturalism. which is fighting today a desperate rearguard action against enlightened science.

God normally works through secondary causes. The seed is sown, the wheat shoots up and matures, and the baker converts the wheat into bread. But in rare and exceptional instances God suspends for a moment the operation of those laws of nature which owe their existence and validity to him alone, and expresses his will more directly, and performs without the aid of secondary causes what he is continually doing by means of secondary causes. "Just in the millionth instance he multiplies bread instead of multiplying the wheat", and feeds the five thousand without the intervention of secondary causes.

A miracle is not the violation of a law of Nature. An apple falls from the branch of a tree towards the grass immediately below. Science insists that this apple will inevitably reach the ground unless an agent arrests its passage through the air. I put out my hand and catch the apple. No law of Nature is violated. The law of gravitation, for instance, continues to operate, and produces on my outstretched hand the sensation of weight, as the hand checks the downward flight of the apple. All that has happened is that my human will has modified some of the effects which normally follow when an apple falls to the ground.

A miracle might be defined as the modification of the normal course of Nature by divine will. That there is no "a priori" objection to miracles is conceded by the eminent agnostic, John Stuart Mill. "The interference", he writes, "of human will with the course of Nature is not an exception to law: and by the same rule interference by the divine will would not be an exception, either."

A miracle is a form of divine creative activity. "The 'a priori' arguments against theism, and, given a deity, against the possibility of creative acts," wrote T. H. Huxley, "appear to me devoid of reasonable foundation."

If then there be a God, neither science nor philosophy forbid us to believe in the possibility of miracles. We must not, of course, equate the absence of "a priori" arguments against the existence of God or against the possibility of miracles with the evidence which we require to prove that God exists and that miracles occur, but at least we can begin our researches unhampered by the negative dogmas of old-fashioned secularists. The question as to whether miracles are possible has been decided in the affirmative. The question as to whether miracles happen can be decided, and can only be decided, by examining the evidence for alleged miracles in accordance with the exacting standards of historical and scientific research.

I propose to devote this chapter to an examination of the better attested modern miracles, that is, the miracles at Lourdes. It is possible to admit that cures, inexplicable by science, have been observed at Lourdes, and yet to deny the existence of God. This would seem to be the position adopted by Professor J. B. S. Haldane, F.R.S. Again it is possible to accept these miracles as evidence of the interference by divine will with the course of Nature and yet refuse to accept the Catholic interpretation of these miracles, and it is, of course, also possible for old-fashioned obscurantists to leave unexamined the evidence for these miracles on the ground that it is impossible to reconcile the reality of miracles with the dogmas of their reactionary sects.

The alleged miracles of Lourdes have a special claim to scientific consideration for two reasons. First, because the cures are examined by a specially constituted committee of doctors. Christian Scientists are notoriously unfriendly to medical scrutiny, but doctors, irrespective of religion or nationality, are invited to serve on the medical Bureau des Constatations which was established in 1882 to test the alleged miraculous cures at Lourdes. In peace-time a yearly average of about 500 doctors visit Lourdes and as many as sixty doctors have been present at the examination of an alleged miracle. The record office of the Bureau keeps the case-sheet of those whose cures it has studied, and the certificates brought by the patients from their own doctors are deposited with the reports of the examining doctors at Lourdes. The permanence of the cure is only conceded if the subsequent history of the cure has been recorded for a period of years.

In the second place the evidence for supernormal cures at Lourdes is of quite a different character to the evidence for alleged "Faith cures", such as those claimed by the Christian Scientists. The British Medical Association appointed in 1909 a committee of doctors and clergymen to examine the claims of Christian Science, and this committee reported in 1914 that there was no evidence for the cure of organic diseases. The Christian Scientists who replied that an unbiased tribute to the effectiveness of cures wrought without medical assistance could hardly be expected from a committee of doctors, should refer to the findings of the committee of doctors at Lourdes, and to the classic work "Preuves Medicales du Miracle" by Dr. Le Bec, the senior surgeon of a Paris hospital who was president for many years of the Bureau des Constatations. The Rev. F. Woodlock's pamphlet, "The Miracles at Lourdes," from which the following cases are taken is a useful summary of the more important cases mentioned by Dr. Le Bec.

Among the more remarkable cures cited by Dr. Le Bec the following may be cited.

Before she left for Lourdes Joachine was given a certificate that she was suffering from a dislocated right hip-joint, contraction of the tibial muscles so as to produce the effect of a club-foot, and an ulcer covering two-thirds of the external surface of the right calf. Suppuration was free and the pus extremely foul. The bone was necrosed.

Joachine's ulcer was perfectly cured at the second bath; the foot, the hip-joint, and the knee cured on the following day. She weighed four stone three pound on arriving at Lourdes; a few years later she weighed eleven stone ten pound.

Suffering from consumption in the final stage, evening temperatures 102 and 105. Daily blood spitting, and many lung cavities. The girl's condition was elaborately described by Zola who traveled to Lourdes with her. She is "La Grivotte" of his novel. Zola saw her restored to health after her first bath. Her restoration to health was attested by the declaration of thirty doctors. I have already described Zola's reaction to the miraculous cure of Marie Lemarchand, and quoted his characteristic reaction: "were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle". In his novel Zola falsifies the facts about Mlle. Lebranchu, for, though he knew that there had been no relapse, his "La Grivotte" has a relapse and dies.

There are over three hundred cases of the cure of consumption in the records of the office. There are many instances of the cure of blindness, full details of which are given in Le Bec's book.

A remarkable case reported in the Faith Healing number of the British Medical Journal in 1910 is the case of Marie Borel.

Marie Borel arrived at Lourdes after having been confined to bed for thirty months with ankylosed vertebral column, purulent cystitis of the bladder, and six pyostercoral fistulae. For five months the entire waste product of her body passed through these fistulae. In the course of a day at Lourdes these six fistulae closed up spontaneously with no treatment beyond the application, with prayer, of a little spring water. The purulent cystitis of the bladder was cured at the same time.

De Rudder was a Belgian farm laborer whose left leg was shattered in 1867 by the fall of a tree. Seven years passed and the bones had not united. De Rudder's doctors advised amputation but De Rudder determined to ask our Lady of Lourdes, venerated at the shrine of Oostacker, near Ghent, to cure his leg. His doctor, Van Hoestenberghe, who returned to the Faith as a result of the miracle, had given up the case. He testified to De Rudder's condition before the cure in the following words.

"I declare on my conscience and on my soul:

"1. I have examined De Rudder a dozen times and my last visit was two or three months before the cure.

"2. Each time I was able to make the ends of the bones come out of the wound: they were deprived of their periosteum, there was necrosis, the suppuration was fetid and abundant and has passed along the tendons....

"3. At each examination I introduced two fingers to the bottom of the wound, and always felt a separation of 4 to 5 centimeters between the broken parts, and this right across their breadth. I was able to turn them about easily.

"4. A large sequestrum had come away at the beginning and little bits of bone often came away during these years."

This testimony was confirmed by witnesses who saw De Rudder a few days before the cure, and on the way to Oostacker. The driver of the train on which he traveled to Oostacker observed the broken leg swinging to and fro and remarked "there goes a man who is going to lose his leg". De Rudder entered the Grotto and began to pray. Suddenly he felt a strange sensation. He rose, forgetting his crutches, without which he had not taken a single step for eight years, knelt before the statue of Our Lady, and, rising unaided, walked three times round the Grotto. He was cured. He was immediately taken to a neighboring chateau. The restored limb was examined; the two wounds had healed up, leaving two scars. The broken bones had suddenly been united. There was no shortening of the leg, in spite of the fact that De Rudder had lost substantial pieces of bone. The cure was attested by the entire village. The case was examined and re-examined by various doctors, and the bones, when exhumed, after De Rudder's death, fully support the above history of the case.

Haldane, after reading the Catholic Truth Society pamphlet, "A Modern Miracle," wrote: "I think the odds are that the bones were united, and the septic wounds healed, in a few hours, the most probable alternative being a pious fraud enacted by a large number of people. The only remarkable element in the cure is its speed."

This is much as if someone were to remark "the only remarkable fact about the Resurrection was that Christ rose from the dead." Medical science can no more explain the instantaneous mending of a fracture which had defied the doctors for years than the resurrection of a man who has died.

I am only concerned for the moment to establish the fact that cures, inexplicable by medical science, have taken place at Lourdes. Cures take place at Lourdes which cannot be explained as the results of "suggestion". Small children and babies, incapable of profiting by "mental" treatment, have been cured at Lourdes of organic diseases, as for example the cure of a double club-foot in a two-year-old child, the miracle occurring as the father, Dr. Aumaitre, held the child's feet in the water. Men have been cured when unconscious, or asleep.

The Lourdes water has been analyzed and is ordinary spring-water with no radio-activity. Many cures occur without its intervention.

Let me conclude with a quotation from a remarkable book, "Man the Unknown," which created a sensation in the U.S.A., for Alexis Carrel is one of the most distinguished of modern scientists, a Nobel prize-winner, and one of the more eminent members of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. There are many passages in his book which no convinced Catholic could write, but Carrel is descended from French Catholic stock and he approaches these problems without the provincial limitations of those scientists who are all influenced by the materialistic fashion of the nineteenth century.

"The author knows", writes Carrel, "that miracles are as far from scientific orthodoxy as mysticity.... But science has to explore the entire field of reality.... He (Carrel) began this study in 1902, at a time when documents were scarce, when it was difficult for a young doctor, and dangerous for his future career, to become interested in such a subject.[1]

"In all countries, at all times, people have believed in the existence of miracles.... But after the great impetus of science during the nineteenth century, such belief completely disappeared. It was generally admitted, not only that miracles did not exist, but that they could not exist. As the laws of thermodynamics make perpetual motion impossible, physiological laws oppose miracles. Such is still the attitude of most physiologists and physicians. However, in view of the facts observed during the last fifty years this attitude cannot be sustained. The most important cases of miraculous healing have been recorded by the Medical Bureau of Lourdes. Our present conception of the influence of prayer upon pathological lesions is based on the observation of patients who have been cured almost instantaneously of various affections, such as peritoneal tuberculosis, cold abscesses, osteitis, suppurating wounds, lungs, cancer, etc. The process of healing changes little from one individual to another. Often, an acute pain. Then a sudden sensation of being cured. In a few seconds, a few minutes, at the most a few hours, wounds are cicatrized, pathological symptoms disappear, appetite returns.... The only condition indispensable to the occurrence of the phenomenon is prayer. But there is no need for the patient himself to pray, or even to have any religious faith. It is sufficient that someone around him be in a state of prayer. Such facts are of profound significance. They show the reality of certain relations, of still unknown nature, between psychological and organic processes. They prove the objective importance of the spiritual activities, which hygienists, physicians, educators, and sociologists have almost always neglected to study. They open to man a new world"[2] (italics mine).

"Science", writes Carrel, "has to explore the entire field of reality." "There are few among our ecclesiastics and theologians", writes Dr. Inge, "who would spend five minutes in investigating any alleged supernatural occurrence in our own time. It would be assumed that, if true, it must be ascribed to some obscure natural cause.... There is still enough superstition left to win a certain vogue for miraculous cures at Lourdes."

It is interesting to contrast the verdict of the scientists with the verdict of the theologians. Haldane, as we have seen, believes that some of the Lourdes miracles are "possibly true and worth investigating". Alexis Carrel began to investigate them in 1902, and came to the conclusion that many of the Lourdes miracles were genuine. Dr. Inge, who professes great reverence for the scientific method, approves the refusal to "waste five minutes in investigating" an alleged miracle.

1. Man The Unknown. New York: Harper 8: Bros., 1935. P. 148 footnote.

2. Ibid., pp. 148-50.

In the first two chapters I have shown:—

1. That there is no scientific or philosophic reason which forbids us to believe in miracles.

2. That there exists unimpeachable evidence for certain modern miracles.

It is important to establish the reality of modern miracles, before discussing the evidence for the Resurrection, because the principal obstacle to the universal acceptance of the Resurrection is not any defect in the evidence, but the unconscious or conscious acceptance of a negative dogma; the dogma that miracles do not happen. If there were several cases, universally admitted, of men rising from the dead, no historian would hesitate for one moment to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. And for my part I am prepared to concede that if the Resurrection were the only, case of a miracle in all history, I might be tempted to return a verdict of "Non proven".

Our next task is to examine the documents which record the Resurrection. Our approach to the problems of authorship and dates must be determined by the exacting standards of scientific history. It is, of course, vain to demand a scientific approach to these problems from those who are determined to reject all facts which conflict with their preconceived dogmas. The pietists of secularism who accept with uncritical faith the basic dogma of their cult, the impossibility of miracles, examine the gospels not to discover when and by whom they were written but to prove a particular thesis. Miracles do not occur and therefore any account of a miracle which purports to be by an eye-witness must be a later interpolation. Of the nineteenth-century critics who adopted this criterion D. F. Strauss (1808-1874) was the most notorious. His "Life of Jesus for the German People," was published in 1864. That there was nothing supernatural either in the person or in the work of Jesus was the basic principle which Strauss accepted with uncritical faith, "believing where we cannot prove", as Tennyson remarked in a somewhat different connection. Strauss began life as a Lutheran pastor, and his negative faith in the impossibility of miracles was a form of Lutheranism, "justification by faith" rather than justification by argument. Strauss, indeed, was one of the founders of neo-Lutheranism.

Let us begin our study of the New Testament with the admitted facts which even Strauss does not dispute. "It is certain, writes Strauss, "that, towards the end of the second century, the same four Gospels which we still possess were recognized by the Church, and repeatedly quoted as the writings of those Apostles and of those disciples of the Apostles, whose names they bear, by the three most eminent ecclesiastical teachers—Irenaeus in Gaul, Clement in Alexandria, and Tertullian in Carthage."

Irenaeus, who was Bishop of Lyons about the year A.D. 180, is at great pains to explain why there are exactly four Gospels, no more and no less. The Church extends throughout the whole world, and the world has four quarters. The Gospel is the divine breath, or wind of life, and there are four winds and therefore four gospels. There is a great deal more to the same effect, but Irenaeus' conviction that the fourfold character of the Gospels was divinely arranged is only of interest to us as decisive evidence for the fact that the pre-eminence of the four Evangelists had been long established when Irenaeus began to write. Strauss himself admits that the "seltsame Beweisfuhrung" peculiar argument) with which Irenaeus proves the divine necessity for the fourfold character of the Gospel, is evidence of the "vorzuglichen Credit" (outstanding credit) which these four Gospels enjoyed in his day. "It is plain", writes Dr. Salmon, "that the evidence of Irenaeus, even if we had no other, takes us back a long way behind his own time. Books. newly come into existence in his time could not have been venerated as he venerated the Gospels . . . we may fairly conclude that the time of their appearance was beyond then living memory."

In his youth Irenaeus had known Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna. "I can recall", he writes in the "Epistle to Florinus," "the very place where Polycarp used to sit and teach, his manner of speech, his mode of life, his appearance, style of his address to the people, his frequent references to St. John, and to others who had seen our Lord, His miracles, and His teaching; and how, being instructed himself by those who were eye-witnesses of the life of the Word, there was in all he said a strict agreement with the Scriptures."

There are critics who affect to believe that St. John's Gospel was written somewhere about 150, but if this were so what would have been Irenaeus' reaction to so patent a forgery? "No, no!" he would have exclaimed, "this cannot be the work of St. John, for had St. John written a Gospel, my beloved master Polycarp, his disciple, must have known of that Gospel. Polycarp used to repeat from memory the discourses which he had from John, and could not possibly have been silent about a Gospel which would have been St. John's most precious legacy to the Church."

Polycarp died a martyr's death at the age of 86, and in the year 155. Had the Fourth Gospel made its first appearance in 150, Polycarp would have rejected it with contempt as an obvious forgery. Irenaeus' unquestioning acceptance of the Fourth Gospel as the work of St. John is only plausible on the assumption that St. John's disciple Polycarp had never questioned the Joannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel.

Within the limits of my space I can only mention the more important of the many second-century writers who refer to, or who quote from, the four Gospels, such as Justin Martyr, whose "Apology", written about 150 and addressed to the heathen, contains a summary of the Life of Our Lord, and is full of doctrinal and verbal agreements with St. John. Justin tells his heathen readers that he is quoting from the "memories" of Our Lord, known as "Gospels—which were composed by the Apostles and by those who followed them." He does not, it is true, mention the names of the authors, but then the heathen whom he was addressing would not be interested in such details.

Tatian, who was Justin's pupil, wrote a harmony of the four Gospels which he called "Diatessaron". The earliest extant mention of the names of Matthew and Mark as recognized authors of Gospels is to be found in some fragments of Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis early in the second century. It is Papias who is our authority for the fact that Mark was the interpreter of Peter and "wrote down accurately all that he remembered of the things which were either said or done by Christ". Papias also tells us that Matthew "wrote the oracles in Hebrew and each one interpreted them as he could".

Other second-century witnesses of the Gospels are mentioned in the notes on this chapter.

The positive arguments for Christianity are more than sufficient to support the Christian conclusion, but it is only when we consider rival theories that the full strength of our case emerges, and for this reason the Christian apologist should never be content merely to answer the objections of the septic, he should challenge the septic to defend his solution. We believe, for instance, that St. John wrote the Fourth Gospel not only because the evidence for his authorship is very strong, but also because no septic has ever succeeded in producing a plausible theory to account for the acceptance by the second-century Church of a second-century forgery bearing St. John's name.

The trouble with most skeptics is that they are defective in historical imagination. They approach the problem of the Gospels as if the solution could be found by juggling with texts. They never visualize the conditions under which the Gospels were written and distributed. They never emerge from the valley of the dry bones, and the dry bones of their arguments are never clothed with flesh and blood. They fiddle about with texts, rejecting this passage or that as an "interpolation", but never envisage the "interpolator" as a human being, or produce a plausible theory to account for the success of the "interpolator" in imposing his forgery on the faithful.

You cannot coerce belief. Lunacy, as Chesterton points out, has its own water-tight logic. The fact that a man is in a lunatic asylum does not disprove his thesis that he is the King of England, for if he were the King of England the usurper might be tempted to immure him in a lunatic asylum. His explanation fits some facts as well as yours, but it fits far fewer facts.

Similarly, the faddist who objects that the "Matthew" and "Mark" mentioned by Papias are not necessarily the same works as the Gospels which we now attribute to those Apostles, is as proof against probabilities as the lunatic His position is as impregnable to direct assault as would be that of a critic who maintained that the works of Virgil and Horace, referred to by Juvenal—who tells us that these works were in the hands of the schoolboys of his time—were not the works which we now ascribe to those authors. And yet, as Salmon justly says, it would be infinitely easier to alter secular works in private circulation than to effect revolutionary changes in sacred books read Sunday by Sunday in the Churches. We are asked to believe not only that the old Gospels which Papias ascribed to Matthew and Mark disappeared without trace, but also that no bishop, presbyter or layman observed that new Gospels had been substituted in their place. It would be easier to believe that Soviet Russia could have substituted the new national anthem for the old "International" without a single Russian being aware of the change.

The theory of new Gospels substituted for old is not only inherently improbable, but is not supported by a shred of evidence. We know from Eusebius that there was controversy in his time, the first half of the fourth century, about the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistle to the Corinthians, but Eusebius never discusses the authorship of the four Gospels, for the good reason that he had never heard the traditional authorship challenged. The absence of any tradition as to the manner of the first publication of the Gospels is in itself proof of their antiquity, but more impressive—at least to those who see this problem in terms of human beings rather than of manuscripts—is the fact that the missionary activities of the early Church would have been impossible without some authorized record of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. We know from Justin Martyr's account of the Sunday meetings of Christians that the reading of the story of Jesus Christ was an established tradition at the weekly meetings of the Christians. So long as a Church was presided over by Apostles, their personal recollections would suffice, but the first requirement of the elders ordained by the Apostles to preside over the churches entrusted to their care was a written and authoritative record of our Lord's life and teaching.

But once we admit the necessity for Gospels in the primitive Church, we have gone a long way to prove that the Gospels which we now possess are the Gospels which were in use in the early years of the Church, for it is impossible to produce a plausible explanation for any substantial alteration of or addition to these Gospels. Nobody has explained how a forger could have obtained credence for a forgery. Theophilus of Antioch, writing about A.D. 180, says: "Writers ought either to have been eye-witnesses themselves of the things they assert, or at least have accurately learned them from those who had seen them." "The feeling here expressed is so natural", writes Salmon, "that I cannot believe that those who were in possession of narratives, supposed to have been written by men of such rank in the Church as Matthew, Mark, and Luke, could allow them to be altered by inferior authority. Little do those who suppose such an alteration possible know of the conservatism of Christian hearers. St. Augustine, in a well-known story, tells us that, when a bishop, reading the chapter about Jonah's gourd, ventured to substitute St. Jerome's 'hedera' for the established 'cucurbita,' such a tumult was raised, that if the bishop had persevered he would have been left without a congregation. The feeling that resents such a change is due to no later growth of Christian opinion. Try the experiment on any child of your acquaintance. Tell him a story that interests him; and when next you meet him tell him the story again, making variations in your recital, and see whether he will not detect the change, and be indignant at it. I do not believe, in short, that any Church would permit a change to be made in the form of evangelical instruction in which its members had been catechetically trained unless those who made the change were men of authority equal to their first instructors.... If a bishop of the age of Papias had presumed to innovate on the Gospel as it had been delivered by those 'which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word', I venture to say that, like the bishop of whom St. Augustine tells, he would have been left without a congregation."

The septic begins his study of the Gospels by making an act of faith in the impossibility of the supernatural. His verdict on the authorship and dates is an unscientific deduction from an unproved and false premise. The Christian conclusion is, on the other hand, a scientific induction from the facts. The septic begins with dogma, the dogma that miracles do not occur, and adjusts the facts to that dogma. The Christian begins with the facts and ends with the dogmas which are alone consistent with and imposed by the facts. The septic begins with a prejudgment that miracles do not occur. The Christian ends with the post-judgment that miracles have been proved to occur. The conflict between the Christian and the septic is a conflict between post-judice and prejudice.

If it were not for the unscientific prejudice against miracles, nobody would waste time attempting to disprove that the Gospels were written by the Apostles and disciples of the Apostles whose names they bear. "If we were to apply", writes Salmon, "to the remains of classical literature the same rigor of scrutiny that is used towards the New Testament, there are but few of them that could stand the test."

The Jesuit Hardouin tried to prove that the Odes of Horace and other classical books were written by Benedictine monks in the dark ages, but it would not be easy to refute this theory decisively by producing quotations from the Odes by any writer who lived within two centuries of the poet's death, and later testimony would not be thought worth looking at in the case of a New Testament book. "The Roman History of Velleius Paterculus", writes Salmon, "has come down to us in a single very corrupt manuscript, and the book is only once quoted by Priscian, a grammarian of the sixth century, yet no one entertains the smallest doubt of its genuineness. The first six books of the Annals of Tacitus are also known to us only through a single manuscript which came to light in the fifteenth century. Not long ago an elaborate attempt was made to show that all the books of Annals were forged in that century by an Italian scholar, Poggio. And it was asserted that 'no clear and definite allusion to the Annals can be found until the first half of the fifteenth century.' The latest editor of the Annals Mr. Furneaux . . . in answer to the assertion just quoted, can only produce one allusion by no means 'clear and definite' and that of a date 300 years later than the historian . . . where external proof is most abundant in the case of the profane authors, it falls considerably short of what can be produced in support of the chief books of the New Testament."

That the Gospels were written in the fourth century is a popular error due to a confusion between date of authorship and date of the earliest complete manuscripts.

In the early centuries of our era manuscripts were still, for the most part, written on papyrus, a frail material compared to vellum which began to take the place of papyrus in the third century. Fragments of papyrus have been recovered from the dry Egyptian soil, many areas of which are virtually rainless, but hardly a contemporary papyrus survives from Greece, Italy, Gaul or Spain. There are many other reasons why the earlier papyrus Gospels should have disappeared. A special effort was made by the persecutors of the Church to search for these manuscripts and to destroy them. The Christians themselves, in so far as they were influenced by the expectation of an immediate second coming, would have made no special efforts to preserve them for the benefit of posterity. And even in more modern times the guardians of priceless manuscripts have often been incredibly careless trustees. Thus we owe the preservation of the famous Codex Sinaiticus of the New Testament to pure chance. A German professor, Tischendorf by name, discovered forty-three leaves of an ancient manuscript in a basket full of paper intended for the stove to which the monks of Mount Sinai consigned their debris. Tischendorf obtained these for the asking and secured the rest of the Codex some years later.

The case for tradition has been immensely reinforced in recent years by the discovery of the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri in 1930. The papyri found in a Coptic graveyard, enclosed in one or more jars, near the Nile, include fragments of the Gospels, written in a small hand which palaeographers assign to the first half of the third century. More recently a small fragment of a papyrus codex containing parts of St. John xviii, 31-33, 37, 38, were discovered by Mr. C. H. Roberts among the papyri in the John Rylands Library at Manchester. Palaeographers assign this fragment to the first half of the second century, a conclusive proof of the early date of the Fourth Gospel, a Gospel which, as we shall see, has been the object of sustained attack. Sir Frederic Kenyon of the British Museum sums up the result of these discoveries in his book "The Story of the Bible." "It will now be realized", he writes, "what an epoch-making addition to our knowledge of the history of the Bible has been made by this discovery. Instead of our evidence for the text of the Greek Bible beginning with the fourth century, we now have several witnesses from the third century, and one even from the beginning of the second...."

"For all the works of classical antiquity we have to depend on manuscripts written long after their original composition. The author who is in the best case in this respect is Virgil, yet the earliest manuscript of Virgil that we now possess was written some 350 years after his death. For all other classical writers, the interval between the date of the author and the earliest extant manuscript of his works is much greater. For Livy it is about 500 years, for Horace 900, for most of Plato 1,300, for Euripides 1,600. On the other hand the great vellum uncials of the New Testament were written perhaps some 250 years after the date when the Gospels were actually composed, while we now have papyrus manuscripts which reduce the interval by a hundred years. And while the manuscripts of any classical author amount at most to a few score, and in some cases only to a few units, the manuscripts of the Bible are reckoned by thousands."

The case for the traditional authorship and dates of the four Gospels is indeed so overwhelmingly strong that there would be little scope for controversy but for the fact that the Gospels record miracles.

Had the Rylands fragment been discovered a century ago we should have been spared libraries of books, all of which can now be relegated to the limbo of exploded theories. Pere F. M. Braun, O.P. "L'Evangile devant les temps presents" reminds us—"la chose est assez piquante pour etre relevee"—that shortly before these papyrus fragments were discovered Loisy had decided that the Fourth Gospel was written between 135 and 140 and that Couchod had suggested A.D. 150 as the date when St. Luke's gospel was written. Pere Lagrange writing in 1936 in "La Revue Biblique" remarked dryly that critics such as these "ont mal soutenu cette annee meme le choc d'un petit fragment de papyrus."

No responsible critic maintains that the Gospels are the work of eye-witnesses who deliberately set down what they knew to be untrue. Those who reject the miraculous element in the Gospels either maintain that the Gospels were written by eye-witnesses who mistook for miracles phenomena which were capable of a natural explanation, or that the Gospels were written many years after the events which they described by men who were not eyewitnesses of those events. Paulus (1761-1851) adopted the former hypothesis in his "Life of Christ," published in 1828. There was