Doubt About Religion
The Bishop of Oxford, in one of his eloquent Sermons upon the Temptation to Doubt about Religion, thus describes one class of doubts, and, by implication, of doubters:
“There are the doubts which are the fruits of an evil life, which come forth as the obscene creatures of the night come forth—because it is the night; because the darkness is abroad, and they are the creatures of the darkness. These are, for the most part, self-chosen doubts, bred of corruption and of fear; of a clinging to sin and yet of a fear of its punishment; of a conscious resistance to the ways and the works of a God of purity and truth; of an evil interest which men have in finding revelation to be false, because it is a system which, if true, is fatally opposed to them. Men pursued by these doubts are a fearful spectacle. The terrors which at times shake them are often appalling to witness; and yet even these are less awful than the forced grimace with which they try to laugh them off; vaunting their doubts, like the lonely wanderer who sings noisily to conceal or overcome his fear of the darkness, that they may, if possible, scatter by the loudness of their laugh the besetting crowd of their alarms.”
Another class of doubts the Bishop describes are those which address themselves to specific and clearly-revealed points in the revelation, which yet, as a whole, the doubting man does not disbelieve. Against these doubts he would utter his warning, because he believes that their presence, and even their indulgence, is at this moment by no means rare; because their true character is often disguised under the most specious forms; because the young, and among the young the generous, the ardent, the thoughtful, and the inquiring, are often their special victims; and because their cause is one of weakness, both intellectual and spiritual, while their end, when they triumph, is misery here, and, too often, everlasting loss hereafter. Having observed that there must be room for doubts and questions such as these,22 the Bishop proceeds:
“It may often seem that these doubts are the pauses of modesty, and these questions the interrogations of an inquiring faith. Thus the doubts are cherished and encouraged under the garb of piety, until a habit is formed in the mind of subjecting the written word and the authoritative declarations of faith to the scrutiny of each man’s intellectual faculties; and, according to their decision, of his accepting, modifying, or rejecting them. Now, such a mode of dealing with revelation is exceeding attractive. It promises to make the faith so rational—to give every man a reason for the hope that is in him—to be so free from all forcing of doctrines on him, that it naturally wins to itself young and ardent minds. Yet it is against this that I would so earnestly warn you, and that for the weightiest reasons—for no less a reason than this, that in its very first principle it is subversive of all true faith, and that it is therefore in its consequences full of ruin to the soul.”
The relation of the Christian revelation to nature, the Bishop thus intelligibly points out:
“The Christian revelation teaches nothing merely to gratify our curiosity. In this respect it is the very opposite of nature. The handwriting of the Creator in the works of nature seems to be imprinted on them for the very purpose of stimulating our curiosity and training and rewarding our powers of investigation and discovery. In the Christian revelation, on the contrary, nothing is revealed for the sake merely of its being known, but that the degree of knowledge given us may in some way or other affect our moral and spiritual training.”
An Undergraduate of Oxford, in bearing testimony to the influence of these Sermons upon him at the time they were preached, describes the Free Inquiry of the present day as working in three classes of men. With some it was hailed as a relief from the annoyance of a conscience which told them that if the “old paths” were the true ones, there was certainly an ill look-out for them; and it was a pleasure, therefore, to hear those who ought to know say that the hard things (such as eternal punishment, &c.) which had been told them from their cradles were matters, to say the least, of considerable doubt. With others it was adopted with the gratifying feeling that thus they showed themselves “wiser than their sires,” and as intellectual champions “in the foremost files of time,” superior to all old wives’ fables. With others it was entertained, in a spirit eager for truth, with a painful sense of perplexity—the distress of men who feel that, while they have conscientiously left the old way as a way averse to all true progress, they neither know nor like to contemplate the issue of the new.
Of these three classes of “free inquirers,” the first two were of course contemptible, but the third could not be passed by unheeded; and after a vehement effort to stand up for truths hitherto on his part unquestioned, the writer felt that he was more or less with them. He then acknowledges to reading the Essays and Reviews through three times, which gave him a new freedom, with which he felt self-satisfied: still, he was miserable with uncertainty, for he had nothing beneath his feet but his own private judgment; and he asks, what was that as regards the truth, when he saw that no two men arrived at the same conclusion? In the midst of all this he went, with others, to hear these sermons: instead of hearing the Bishop steer between conflicting opinions in this matter, our Undergraduate was influenced by these sermons to feel that reverence must go hand-in-hand with knowledge, in order that the true harmony may exist between mind and soul; that a man’s reason and judgment alone are a poor support and comfort, and the kingdom of God must be received in the spirit of a little child.23
The Bishop concludes an earnest deprecation of the habit of doubting, with the following awful picture of the death-bed of a victim to this pernicious practice:
“It is not from imagination that I have drawn this warning. I can tell you of an overshadowed grave which closed in on such a struggle and such an end as that at which I have glanced. In it was laid a form which had hardly reached the fulness of earliest manhood. That young man had gone, young, ardent, and simply faithful, to the tutelage of one, himself I doubt not a believer, but one who sought to reconcile the teaching of our Church, in which he ministered, with the dreams of Rationalism. His favourite pupil learnt his lore, and it sufficed for his needs while health beat high in his youthful veins: but on him sickness and decay closed early in, and as the glow of health faded, the intellectual lights for which he had exchanged the simplicity of faith began to pale; whilst the viper brood of doubts which almost unawares he had let slip into his soul, crept forth from their hiding-places and raised against him their fearfully envenomed heads. And they were too strong for him. The teacher who had suggested could not remove them: and in darkness and despair his victim died before his eyes the doubter’s death.”