by ordinary evidence.  Three miracles have to be placed to the credit of each candidate for canonisation before he or she is entitled to bear the title of saint, and the evidence for these miracles is sifted by a commission.  This theory has been practically abandoned in the English Church.  There are few among our ecclesiastics and theologians 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.  The result is that the miracles in the Creeds, or in the New Testament, are isolated as they have never been before.  They seem to form an order by themselves, a class of fact belonging neither to the world of phenomena as we know it, nor to the world of spirit as we know it.  From this situation has arisen the tendency, increasingly prevalent both in the Roman Church and in Protestant Germany, to distinguish ‘truths of faith’ from ‘truths of fact,’ The former, it is said, have a representative, symbolic character, and are only degraded by being placed in the same category as physical phenomena.  This contention is open to very serious objections, but it at least indicates the actual state of the problem, viz. that to most educated men the miraculous element in Christianity seems to float between earth and heaven, no longer essentially connected with either, while on the other hand the majority of religious people, including a few men of high intelligence, find it difficult to realise their faith without the help of the miraculous.  Supernaturalism, which from the scientific point of view is the most unsatisfactory of all theories, traversing as it does the first article in the creed of science—­the uniformity of nature—­gives, after all, a kind of crude synthesis of the natural and the spiritual, by which it is possible to live; it is, for many persons, an indispensable bridge between the world of phenomena and the world of spirit.  But when the heavy-handed dogmatist requires a categorical assent to the literal truth of the miraculous, in exactly the same sense in which physical facts are true, a tension between faith and reason cannot be avoided.  And it is in this literal sense that Bishop Gore requires all his clergy to assent to the miracles in the Creeds.

The fact is that the Catholic party in the Church are in a hopeless impasse with regard to dogma.  They cannot take any step which would divide them from ‘the whole Church,’ and the whole Church no longer exists except as an ideal—­it has long ago been shivered into fragments.  The Roman Church is in a much better position.  The Pope may at any time ‘interpret’ tradition in such a manner as to change it completely—­there is no appeal from his authoritative pronouncements; but for the High Anglican there is no living authority, only the dead hand, and a Council which can never meet.  It is much as if no important legislation could be passed in this country without a joint session of our Parliament and the American Congress.  It is difficult to see any way of escape, except by accepting the principle of development in a sense which would repudiate the time-honoured ‘appeal to antiquity.’