Some otherwise perfectly decent and courageous people are fearful of admitting their desire for magic, so affect and perhaps even achieve conviction on the theological plane.
For example, Martyn Skinner, Ruth Pitter, and many others round and about the Inklings, to say nothing of the Inklings themselves, are simultaneously or at first drawn to those "thickets of dream" where I. A. Richards located the hiding place of Walter de la Mare, while also holding or at last arriving at orthodox Christianity.
They wanted to believe in faeries, but this was not socially respectable, and in any case while the powers of imps and sprites and such are most certainly unearthly and supernatural their benevolence is at best intermittent. God on the other hand could be plausibly imagined as not only supreme in power, but also as having a reliable and Fatherly warmth; and this assumption was approved by tradition and beyond reproach.
The proposition taken as a whole was and for many still is irresistible: one can believe in the biggest and best faerie of them all and no one will laugh.