on from Schaller a cleft in the soul through which thought
steals away what the heart desires. The guilt or innocence of
doubting depends on the spirit in which it is done. There are two
attitudes of mind and moods of feeling before propositions and
evidence. One is, "I will not believe unless I see the prints of
the nails and lay my finger in the marks of the wounds." The other
is, "Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief." In abstract logic
or rigid science the former may be appropriate and right. The
latter alone can be justifiable in moral and religious things. If
a man sorrowfully and humbly doubts, because he cannot help it, he
shall not be condemned. When he is proud of his doubts,
complacently swells with fancied superiority, plays the fanfaron
with his pretentious arguments, and sets up as a propagandist of
disbelief, being all the while in reality "Most ignorant of what
he is most assured, His glassy essence," his conduct is offensive
to every good man, and his spirit must receive the condemnation of
God. A missionary of atheism and death, horridly eager to destroy
those lofty thoughts which so much help to make us men, is a
shocking spectacle. Yet a few such there are, who seem delighted
as by their dismal theory they bury mankind in an iron tomb of
materialism and inscribe on the irrevocable door the solitary
words, Fate and Silence.

The more attentively one dwells on the perishable physical side of
life, the more prone he will be to believe in an absolute death;
the more prevailingly he ponders the incorruptible psychical side,
the more prepared he will be to credit immortality. The chemist
who confines his studies exclusively within his own province, when
he reflects on the probable sequence of life, will speculatively
see himself vanish in his blowpipes and retorts. Whoso devotedly
dabbles in organisms, nerves, and bloods may easily become
skeptical of spirit; for it everywhere balks his analysis and
eludes his search. The objects he deals with are things. They
belong to change and dissolution. Mind and its proper home belong
to a different category of being. Because no heaven appears at the
end of the telescope, and no soul is seen on the edge of the
dissecting knife, and no mind is found at the bottom of the
crucible, to infer that therefore there is neither heaven, nor
soul, nor mind, is as monstrous a non sequitur as it would be to
infer the non existence of gravity because it cannot be distilled