go on, to make most absolute assertions about God's
foreknowledge, and foreordination, and triune personality; and the
eternal punishment of the wicked, and the double nature and
pre-existence of Christ,--things not only vague and inconsistent, but
contradictory to our sense of justice and right. It must go on to make
manifold assertions about the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the
Bible and the details of the future life and the fall of human nature,
which are utterly incredible to rational minds. And the worst of it
is, that all these things are bound up in one great theological
system, and poor, anxious inquirers are told that they must either
take all or none; and so (soon coming face to face with some palpable
inconsistency or incredibility) they not unnaturally give up the
whole. Trace out the religious history of the great sceptics,--the
Voltaires, the Bradlaughs, the Ingersolls, the Tom Paines,--and you
will see that the origin of their scepticism has almost always been in
a reaction from the excessive assumptions of the ecclesiastics
themselves. It is too fine spun and arrogant orthodoxy that is itself
responsible for half of the heterodoxy of which it complains.

Let the Church, then, be honest, and claim no more than it ought. Let
it respect and encourage honesty in every man in these sacred matters.
The Church itself should say to the inquirer: You are unfaithful to
your God if you go not where He, by the candle of the Lord (i. e., the
reason and conscience he has placed within you), leads you. And when a
man in this reverent and sincere spirit pursues the path of doubt, how
often does he find it circling around again toward faith and
conducting him to the Mount of Zion! The true remedy for scepticism is
deeper investigation. As all sincere doubt is at bottom a cry of the
deeper faith that only that which is true and righteous is divine, so
all earnest doubt, thought through to the end, pierces the dark cloud
and comes out in the light and joy of higher convictions. It lays in
the dust our philosophic and materialistic idols and brings us to the
one Eternal Power, the ever-living Spirit, manifested in all, that
Spirit whose name is truth, whose word is love.

You remember, perhaps, the story of the climber among the Alps, who,
having stepped off a precipice, as he thought, frantically grasped, as
he fell, a projecting root and held on in an agony of anticipated
death, for hours, until, utterly exhauste