never now take this
miserable man's way out of the tedium of the Christian life, yet most
bitterly feel it. Whether that tedium is inherent in that life, and
inevitable to such men as we are who are attempting that life; how far
that feature belongs to the very essence of the pilgrim life, and how far
we import our own tedium into the pilgrimage; the fact remains as Atheist
puts it. As Atheist in this book says, so the Atheist who is in our
hearts often says: We are like to have nothing for all our pains but a
lifetime of tedious travel. Yes, wherever the blame lies, there can be
no doubt about it, that what this hilarious scoffer calls the tediousness
of the way is but a too common experience among many of those who,
tediousness and all, will still cleave fast to it and will never leave
it.

Then, again, great trials in life, great straits, dark and
too-long-continued providences, prayer unanswered, or not yet answered in
the way we dictate, bad men and bad causes growing like a green bay tree,
and good men and good work languishing and dying; these things, and many
more things such as these, of which this world of faith and patience is
full, prove quite too much for some men till they give themselves up to a
state of mind that is nothing better than atheism. "My evidences and my
certainty," says Halyburton, "were not answerable to the weight I was
compelled to lay upon them." A figure which Goodwin in his own tender
and graphic way takes up thus: "Set pins in a wall and fix them in ever
so loosely, yet, if you hang nothing upon them they will seem to stand
firm; but hang a heavy weight upon them, or even give them the least jog
as you pass, and the whole thing will suddenly come down. The wall is
God's word, the slack pin is our faith, and the weight and the jog are
the heavy burdens and the sudden shocks of life, and down our hearts go,
wall and pin and suspended vessel and all."

When the church and her ministers, when the Scriptures and their
anomalies, and when the faults and failings of Christian men are made the
subject of mockery and laughter, the reverence, the fear, the awe, the
respect that all enter so largely into religion, and especially into the
religion of young people, is too easily destroyed; and not seldom the
first seeds of practical and sometimes of speculative atheism are thus
sown. The mischief that has been done by mockery and laughter to the
souls, especially of the young and the inexp