now Sinai's thunders, now Calvary's gales of
grace, would give majesty and tenderness to his voice!

Such is the way back to certainty, if certainty in any of us have been
lost for a little while. Yet, even as we name it, there comes again to
our ears the old enquiry so often heard as an explanation of durance in
Doubting Castle:--How does all this accord with the advice constantly
given to men to seek to win each a creed for himself? Is it not a
man's duty to make his inherited beliefs and the things which are told
him the subjects of his individual inquiry and of his own personal
judgment and proof? Yes; all this is true but other things are true as
well.

The first of them is surely this:--That a man should have won this
creed for himself before he set out to provide a creed for other
people. Once more, preaching is not a public inquiry after truth but a
declaration of it. The man who has not got beyond the stage of inquiry
has no right to be in the pulpit at all. Some preachers are always
making confessions as to their difficulties. It ought to be seen that
the people do not come to hear of the preacher's difficulties, but to
be helped in their own. Another thing that is true is this:--That it
is surely not the best way of winning a creed to begin by doubting the
truth of everything in order to get at the truth of _something_, as
many seem to do. Surely it is not the best way of winning a belief of
one's own to conduct an inquiry with the object of finding how much is
false of the things we have been taught. Why not begin with the
purpose of finding out how much is true? Why not seek for
confirmations as well as for contradictions? It is surely something to
the credit of the things instilled into us as children that unnumbered
generations of great and holy and thoughtful men have found in them
their spiritual sustenance and salvation. It might have a helpful
effect to ask why it should be left to you or me, so late in time as
the beginning of the twentieth century, to make the discovery that the
faith which has inspired "saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs," which
has saved its millions, satisfying the deepest longings of the heart
and the highest demands of the intellect; the faith which has inspired
the purity, the benevolence, the courage and endurance of a long, long
past--is only in a very limited and partial degree the truth of God. A
due appreciation of the significance of history ought, it mi