Jesus is the most iniquitous and disgraceful. One of the
fashions of the day which is most rapidly extending and which many of us
have opportunity to resist is the fashion of infidelity. Much of the
strongest and best-trained intellect of the country ranges itself
against Christianity--that is, against Christ. No doubt the men who have
led this movement have adopted their opinions on conviction. They deny
the authority of Scripture, the divinity of Christ, even the existence
of a personal God, because by long years of painful thought they have
been forced to such conclusions. Even the best of them cannot be
acquitted of a contemptuous and bitter way of speaking of Christians,
which would seem to indicate that they are not quite at ease in their
belief. Still, we cannot but think that so far as any men can be quite
unbiassed in their opinions, they are so; and we have no right to judge
other men for their honestly formed opinions. The moral cowards of whom
we speak are not these men, but their followers, persons who with no
patience or capacity to understand their reasonings adopt their
conclusions because they seem advanced and are peculiar. There are many
persons of slender reading and no depth of earnestness who, without
spending any serious effort on the formation of their religious belief,
presume to disseminate unbelief and treat the Christian creed as an
obsolete thing merely because part of the intellect of the day leans in
that direction. Weakness and cowardice are the real spring of such
persons' apparent advance and new position regarding religion. They are
ashamed to be reckoned among those who are thought to be behind the age.
Ask them for a reason of their unbelief, and they are either unable to
give you any, or else they repeat a time-worn objection which has been
answered so often that men have wearied of the interminable task and let
it pass unnoticed.

Such persons we aid and abet when we do either of two things: when we
either cleave to what is old as unreasoningly as they take up with what
is new, refusing to look for fresh light and better ways and acting as
if we were already perfect; or when we yield to the current and adopt a
hesitating way of speaking about matters of faith, when we _cultivate_ a
sceptical spirit and seem to connive at if we do not applaud the cold,
irreligious sneer of ungodly men. Above all, we aid the cause of
infidelity when in our own life we are ashamed to live godly, to ac