of miracle or revelation in his action than when he discovers the use of steam or of aluminium or of the spectroscope. His mind expands and his ideals rise. It is a little incongruous to suppose that some infinitely wiser and affectionate parent was looking on all the time and giving no assistance. In the dialogue between Mephistopheles and God which Goethe prefixes to his Faust, the devil obviously scores. In the sight of such an intelligence man must have made a pretty fool of himself during the last 1500 years. We human beings are more charitable. Take the whole story as the gradual development of human intelligence and emotion under unfavourable political conditions, hampered by a despotic and perverse clergy, and it seems natural enough.
This is the impression one gets from history, and the nearer history is to our own time and the better we know it, the less it suggests a divine guidance. There is something parochial or rural about the average Christian way of looking at events. One day the German Christian goes to church to thank God for driving the Russians out of East Prussia; the next day the English Christian thanks the same God for killing or wounding 20,000 Germans at Neuve Chapelle—with the help of 350 guns. Yet such things as these are the only claims we have offered to us of the action of God in human events. Neither the steps that man takes onward nor the steps that he takes backward are ascribed to divine influence. All that is claimed is that when a ship goes down, for instance, he saves the saved, and "permits" the rest to be drowned; when a war has been raging for a few months by his "permission," he puts a stop to it when one army is worn out. The unbeliever is really
