urch.

Old, old scene in the history of Man--the trial of his Doubt by his
Faith: strange day of judgment, when one half of the human spirit
arraigns and condemns the other half. Only five persons sat in that
room--four men and a boy. The room was of four bare walls and a
blackboard, with perhaps a map or two of Palestine, Egypt, and the
Roman Empire in the time of Paul. The era was the winter of the year
1868, the place was an old town of the Anglo-Saxon backwoodsmen, on the
blue-grass highlands of Kentucky. But in how many other places has that
scene been enacted, before what other audiences of the accusing and the
accused, under what laws of trial, with what degrees and rigors of
judgment! Behind David, sitting solitary there in the flesh, the
imagination beheld a throng so countless as to have been summoned and
controlled by the deep arraigning eye of Dante alone. Unawares, he
stood at the head of an invisible host, which stretched backward
through time till it could be traced no farther. Witnesses all to that
sublime, indispensable part of man which is his Doubt--Doubt respecting
his origin, his meaning, his Maker, and his destiny. That perpetual
half-night of his planet-mind--that shadowed side of his
orbit-life--forever attracted and held in place by the force of Deity,
but destined never to receive its light. Yet from that chill, bleak
side what things have not reached round and caught the sun! And as of
the earth's plants, some grow best and are sweetest in darkness, what
strange blossoms of faith open and are fragrant in that eternal umbra!
Sacred, sacred Doubt of Man. His agony, his searching! which has led
him always onward from more ignorance to less ignorance, from less
truth to more truth; which is the inspiration of his mind, the sorrow
of his heart; which has spoken everywhere in his science, philosophy,
literature, art--in his religion itself; which keeps him humble not
vain, changing not immutable, charitable not bigoted; which attempts to
solve the universe and knows that it does not solve it, but ever seeks
to trace law, to clarify reason, and so to find whatever truth it can.

As David sat before his professors and his pastor, it was one of the
moments that sum up civilization.

Across the room, behind them also, what a throng! Over on that side was
Faith, that radiant part of the soul which directly basks in the light
of God, the sun. There, visible to the eye of imagination, were those
of all