was that in the modern world, Christian orthodoxy has not been supplanted by reason, as the naïve advocates of enlightenment had hoped, but by diffuse forms of credulousness. In the Father Brown stories, the priest' stands out for being the worldly one, dogged in his insistence on rational explanations for mysterious occurrences that others too hastily attribute to supernatural causes.
Skepticism could only injure faith not supplant it, and from that injury issued the half-baked paganism that defines modern "spirituality."
