THE ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD Without airing my private theology I earnestly request the most sceptical reader of this book to assume that miracles in a Biblical sense have occurred.

Let him take it for granted in the fashion of the strictly aesthetic commentator who writes in sympathy with a Fra Angelico painting, or as that great modernist, Paul Sabatier, does as he approaches the problems of faith in the life of St.Francis.Let him also assume, for the length of time that he is reading this chapter if no longer, that miracles, in a Biblical sense, as vivid and as real to the body of the Church, will again occur two thousand years in the future: events as wonderful as those others, twenty centuries back.

Let us anticipate that many of these will be upon American soil.

Particularly as sons and daughters of a new country it is a spiritual necessity for us to look forward to traditions, because we have so few from the past identified with the six feet of black earth beneath us.
The functions of the prophet whereby he definitely painted future sublimities have been too soon abolished in the minds of the wise.

Mere forecasting is left to the weather bureau so far as a great section of the purely literary and cultured are concerned.