A few theologians, not well acquainted with history, see another
miraculous interposition in the fourth century, when Christianity was
established; and the Roman Catholic--in the intellectual rear, as
usual--believes in hundreds of miraculous interpositions, in small
matters, as late as the year 1914. But in order to take a broad view of
the matter we may leave these controversies with the more reactionary on
one side. The history of Europe for the last fifteen centuries at least
is now entrusted to able laymen, and it has been purged of divine
interpositions. Innumerable myths and legends, often based on what are
now acknowledged to be spurious documents, have been cast out of the
science, and we are presented with a quite continuous and purely natural
sequence of events. Religious historians like Bishop Creighton or Lord
Bryce do not find their periods broken by divine interpositions; the
writers of the Cambridge History do not occasionally arrest us before
some great event and warn us that the chain of human causation seems to
be obscure or discontinuous. There are, of course, problems of history,
but they are not obscurities which, like the obscure places in science,
tempt the theologian to enter and claim a divine interposition. The
story is from beginning to end--to use Nietzsche's phrase--"human, all
too human." On the whole, as it has been hitherto written, it is a story
of wars, and, though patriotic piety puts its gloss on the issue of a
war here and there, the historian does not find any serious problem in
them. No French historian will now claim divine action in the Napoleonic
wars, and assuredly few of us are prepared to see the finger of God in
the fortunate issue of Prussia's many campaigns since Frederick the
Great.

Whatever we may think of the cosmic process generally, the human part of
that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is