It is not the church in a village that is the source of the mischief, but the rectory. I would not touch a church from one end of England to the other. iv Christianity is only seriously pretended by some among the idle, bourgeois middle-classes. The working classes and the most cultured intelligence of the time reach by short cuts what the highways of our schools and universities mislead us from by many a winding bout, if they do not prevent our ever reaching it. v It is not easy to say which is the more obvious, the antecedent improbability of the Christian scheme and miracles, or the breakdown of the evidences on which these are supposed to rest. And yet Christianity has overrun the world. vi If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this that a man should back his own opinion against the world’s—and this is a very risky and immoral thing to do, but the Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy. vii Christianity is true in so far as it has fostered beauty and false in so far as it has fostered ugliness. It is therefore not a little true and not a little false. viii Christ said he came not to destroy but to fulfil—but he destroyed more than he fulfilled. Every system that is to live must both destroy and fulfil. Miracles They do more to unsettle faith in the existing order than to settle it in any other; similarly, missionaries are more valuable as underminers of old faiths than as propagators of new. Miracles are not impossible; nothing is impossible till we have got an incontrovertible first premise. The question is not “Are the Christian miracles possible?” but “Are they convenient? Do they fit comfortably with our other ideas?” Wants and Creeds As in the organic world there is no organ, so in the world of thought there is no thought, which may not be called into existence by long persistent effort. If a man wants either to believe or disbelieve the Christian miracles he can do so if he tries hard enough; but if he does not care whether he believes or disbelieves and simply wants to find out which side has the best of it, this he will find a more difficult matter. Nevertheless he will probably be able to do this too if he tries. Faith i The reason why the early Christians held faith in such account was because they felt it to be a feat of such superhuman difficulty. ii You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it. iii We are all agreed that too much faith is as bad as too little, and too little as bad as too much; but we differ as to what is too much and what too little. iv It is because both Catholics and myself make faith, not reason, the basis of our system that I am able to be easy in mind about not becoming a Catholic. Not that I ever wanted to become a Catholic, but I mean I believe I can beat them with their own weapons. v