After all it is a question of evidence. If a man say "I won't believe in anything super-natural whatever the evidence may be," it is best to leave him to his folly. If he will accept the evidence that would pass muster in a court of law, then you have a common ground, you can weigh evidence. To me the evidence for spiritual appearances is overwhelming looking at it from the strictly legal angle of vision.
In years gone by the scientific genius began with the assertion that everything must have had a beginning, and to assert that there was a spiritual Being with no beginning was nonsense. To the dim indistinct crowd such appeared to be clever reasoning. But our very consciousness insists that there is something which had no beginning, and Reason adds, "else there could be nothing now." For example, Space could not have had a beginning, that Duration could not, that Truth could not, that somehow, somewhere these Three Eternals must have been co-eternal, incomprehensible. And in this Trinity "none is afore or after the other," which recalls the Athanasian Creed.
I cannot prove that Truth had no beginning, yet my consciousness tells me at no period was it laid down as something new, that the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line. No mathematician has ever proved that there is no boundary to space, but something within me tells me that there can be no such boundary. Even Reason tells me that an impassable boundary would only serve to indicate the unlimited extension beyond.
In all ages we have the mystic. Now the mystic is common to all religions. He is the man who has felt the touch of spiritual beings, the call of Heavenly things, and we have to explain him. In seeking to do this we shall realize some of the truth of the things soldiers see which we have called "The Weird in War."
The evidence for the existence and the appearance of angels does not rest on the testimony merely of men who fought at Mons. But even that evidence which is accepted by the talented author of _The Bowmen_ requires some explaining away and he admits that there is a difficulty in ignoring it. But there is the accumulating evidence of the ages. When we have explained away the soldiers' delusions, we have to confront those of the world's wisest sons--giants in thought. We have to confront the fact that all great religions have the theory of angels.