22 July 2025

The Queen didn’t think that Alice had enough practice at believing impossible things. ‘When I was your age,’ she said, ‘I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!’

‘Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible!’ Well, that’s not true. But it was one of Scotland’s greatest scientists who said it. I don’t know whether Lord Kelvin lived to rue the day but he made his statement when he was President of the Royal Society in 1895.

‘Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances.’ Who said that? Lots of us. But now Dr. Lee de Forest seems a fool for having said it too. But he was no fool! He was the inventor of the vacuum tube and the father of television.

The world is changing all the time. It seems to  me that impossible things are happening all the time before and after breakfast. What would Lewis Carroll, the White Queen and Alice in Wonderland make of all our impossible things?

In this context, the impossible things which fill the Gospels and the life of Christ don’t seem to be so impossible afterall – the transformation of six stone jars of water into wine, the feeding of five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead!

As we have seen, it is in the nature of human experience that with the passage of time, the impossibilities declared at a nineteenth century breakfast table became the possibilities of a twenty-first century chat around the cornflakes box!