on for the hope
that is in me.

My religious views of fifteen years ago are too familiar to you to need
any exposition at my hands at this time. Suffice it to say that the
religion of the Bible, as taught by the churches, to my mind appeared to
be self-contradictory and confusing, and their explanations failed to
explain. During the next eleven years my convictions underwent little
change. I read everything that came in my way that had any bearing upon,
or pretended in any degree to explain, the problem of life; and while I
gained some knowledge of a general nature, I was no nearer the solution of
life's problem than when I began my investigations years ago, and I had
given up all hope of ever being able to come to a knowledge of the truth,
or a satisfactory explanation of the enigma of life.

In all my intellectual wanderings I had never lost my belief in a great
First Cause, which I was as well satisfied to call God as anything else;
but the orthodox explanations of His or its nature and power were to my
mind such a mixture of truth and error, that I could not tell where fact
left off and fancy began. The whole effort of the pulpit being put forth,
seemed directed to the impossible task of harmonizing the teachings of
Jesus Christ with the wisdom of the world; and the whole tendency of our
religious education was to befog the intellect and produce scepticism in a
mind that presumed to think for itself and to inquire into the why and the
wherefore. I fully believe that the agnosticism of yourself and myself was
produced by the futile attempt to mix and harmonize the wisdom of the
world with the philosophy of the Christ.

In my investigations into the researches of the savants and philosophers I
found neither any satisfactory explanation of things as they seemed to
exist, nor any solution of the great and all-absorbing question, "What is
Truth?" Their premises appeared to be sound, and their reasonings
faultless; but in the nature of things, no final conclusion of the whole
matter could be reached from premises based wholly on material knowledge.
They could explain "matter" and its properties to their own satisfaction,
but the intelligence that lay behind or beyond it, and which was
manifested in and through it, was to them as much of a mystery as it was
to the humblest of God's creatures. They could prove pretty conclusively
that many of the generally accepted theories had no basis in fact; but
they left us as much i