Our Lady Saint Mary. J. G. H. Barry
therefore outside the reach of our understanding. Such acts have no doubt their laws, but they are not the laws in terms of which we are wont to think.
The question of S. Mary was not a question which implied doubt. It is therefore the proper question with which to approach all God's works. There is a stress with which such questions may be asked which implies on our part unbelief or at least hesitation in belief. It is a not uncommon accent to hear to-day in questions as to divine mysteries. Our recitation of the creed is not rarely invaded by restlessness, shadows of doubt, which perhaps we brush aside, or perhaps let linger in our minds with the feeling that it is safer for our religion not to follow these out. I am afraid that there are not a few who still adhere to the Church who do so with the feeling that it is better for them to go on repeating words that they have become used to rather than to raise questions as to their actual truth; who feel that the faith of the Church rests on foundations which in the course of the centuries have been badly shaken, but that it is safer not to disturb them lest they incontinently fall to pieces.
In other words there is a wide-spread feeling that such stories as this of the Annunciation and of the Virgin birth of our Lord are fables. When we ask, why is there such a feeling? the only answer is that the modern man has become suspicious of the supernatural. Has there anything been found in the way of evidence, we ask, which reflects upon the truth of the story in S. Luke? No, we are told; the story stands where it always did, its evidence is what it always was. What has changed is not the story or the evidence for it but the human attitude toward that and all such stories. The modern mind does not attempt to disprove them, it just disapproves of them, and therefore declines to believe them. It sets them aside as belonging to an order of ideas with which it no longer has any sympathy.
It is no doubt true that we reach many of our conclusions, especially those which govern our practical attitude towards life, from the ground of certain hardly recognised presuppositions, rather than from the basis of thought out principles. The thought of to-day is pervaded by the denial of the supernatural. It insists that all that we know or can know is the natural world about us. It rules out the possibility of any invasions of the natural order and declines to accept such on any evidence whatsoever. All that one has time to say now of such an attitude is that it makes all religion impossible, and sets aside as untrustworthy all the deepest experiences of the human soul. If I were going to argue against this attitude (as I am not able to now) I should simply oppose to it the past experience of the race as embodied in its best religious thought. I should stress the fact that what is noblest and best in the past of humanity is wholly meaningless unless humanity's supposition of a life beyond this life, and of the existence of spiritual powers and beings to whom we are related, holds good. No nation has ever conducted its life on the basis of pure materialism, save in those last stages of its decadence which preluded its downfall.
But without going so far as to reject the supernatural and reject the truth of the immediate intervention of God in life, there are multitudes of men and women whose whole life never moves beyond the natural order. They have no materialistic theory; if you ask them, they think that they are, in some sense not very well defined, Christians. But they have no Christian interests, no spiritual activities of any sort. For all practical purposes God and the spiritual order do not exist for them. They are not for the most part what any one would call bad people; though there seems no intelligible meaning of the word in which they can be called good. The best that one can say of them is that they have a certain usefulness in the present social order though they are not missed when they fall out of it. They can be replaced in the social machine much as a lost or broken part can in an engine. And just as the part of an engine which has become useless where it is, can have no possible usefulness elsewhere, so we are unable to imagine them as capable of adaptation to any other place than that which they have filled here. Perhaps that is what we mean by hell--incapacity to adapt oneself to the life of the future.
All this implies a temper of mind and soul that has rendered itself incapable of vision. For just as our ordinary vision of the beauty of this world depends not only on the existence of the world but on a certain capacity in us to see it, so that the beauty of the world does not at all exist for the man whose optic nerve is paralysed; so the meaning and beauty, nay, the very existence of the supernatural order depends for us upon a capacity in us which we may call the capacity of vision. The sceptic waves aside our stories of supernatural happenings with the brusque statement, "Nobody to-day sees angels. They only appear in an atmosphere of primitive or mediæval superstition, not in the broad intellectual light of the twentieth century." But it may be that the fact (if it be a fact) that nobody sees angels in the twentieth century is due to some other cause than the non-existence of the angels. After all, in any century you see what you are prepared to see, what in other words, you are looking for. It is a common enough phenomenon that the man who lives in the country misses most of the beauty of it. In his search for the potato bug he misses the sunset, and disposes of the primrose on the river's brim as a common weed. It is true that in order to see we need something beside eyes, and to hear we need something beside ears. When on an occasion the Father spoke from heaven to the Son many heard the sound, and some said, "It thundered"; others got so far as to say, "An Angel spake to him."
Let us then in the presence of narratives of supernatural happenings ask our how with a good deal of reverence and a good deal of modesty, not as implying a sceptical doubt on our part, but as a wish that we may be admitted deeper into the meaning of the event. Scepticism simply closes the door through which we might pass to fuller knowledge. The questioning of faith holds the door open. To those who have not closed the door upon the supernatural it is evident that it is permeated with forces and influences which are not material in their origin or their effects; that God acts upon the world now as He has ever acted upon it. If we cannot believe this I do not see that we can believe in God at all in any intelligible sense. There is to me one attitude toward the supernatural that is even more hopeless than the attitude of materialistic scepticism which says, "Miracles do not happen"; and that is the attitude which says, "Miracles happened in Bible times, but have never happened since." As the one attitude seems to imply that God made the world, but after He had made it left it to go on by itself and no more expresses any interest in it; so the other implies that after God put the Christian religion in the world He left that to go on by itself and no longer pays any attention to it. Either to me is wholly unintelligible and inconceivable.
And what is worse, is wholly out of touch with the revelation of God made in Holy Scripture. That displays God working in and through the material universe, and it displays God working in and through the spirit of man; and it in no place implies that either the material world or the human order is so perfect as to need no further divine action. Revelation implies the constant presence and action of God in nature and in the Church; it implies that both have a forward look and are not ends in themselves but are moving on toward some ultimate perfection. "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth … waiting for the adoption, that is, the redemption of our body." We look for a new heaven and a new earth; and human society looks to a perfect consummation in the fellowship of the saints in light.
Looking out on life from the spiritual point of vantage, we may hopefully ask our how, and there will be an answer. To blessed Mary S. Gabriel replied: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God."--An answer that was full of light and of deepest mystery. The immediate question--the mode of her conception--was cleared up; it would be through the direct action of God the Holy Spirit: but the nature of the Child to be born is filled with mystery. We can imagine S. Mary in the days to come finding her child-bearing quite intelligible in comparison with the mystery that brooded over His nature.
This is the common fact in our dealing with God. We express it when we say that we never get beyond the need of faith. We pray that one thing may be made clear, and the result of the clearing is the deepened sense of the mystery of the things beyond, just as any increase in the power of the telescope clears up certain questions which had been puzzling the astronomers only to carry their vision into vaster depths of space, opening new questions to tantalize the imagination. We find it so always. The solution of any question of our spiritual lives does not lead as perhaps we thought it would lead to there being no longer any questions to perplex us and to draw on our time and our energy;