Our Age of Doubt
The intellect of the present generation is usually acknowledged to have gone off on quite a different tack from that of its predecessor. Not belief, but doubt, is the present fashion. Now, belief and doubt, both of them, have their uses. Each of them has its good and its bad side. Doubt is the more daring and impressive; but belief, even if sometimes rather illogical, is decidedly the more amiable. Let a negative system be true, and a positive system be false; still the positive system will call out some of the best qualities of our nature in a way that the negative system cannot. It is certain that the present generation is growing up in a spirit of greater independence and self-reliance, of less deference to age, to tradition, to authority of all kinds, than was in vogue twenty years since. The change may be for the better or for the worse, but the fact of the change is undeniable. Probably, if minutely examined, it has both its good and its bad side. The young men of the present day have gained something in wideness of view, and at least apparent worldly knowledge; but they have certainly lost much that was very attractive in their predecessors. On the other hand, acts of petty persecution are doing all that can be done to enlist their best feelings on the side on which it is wished that they should not be enlisted. If any man, especially one of the most conscientious and hard-working officers of the University, is proscribed and insulted on account of his opinions, those opinions are at once put in an attractive light to every generous mind. Men in authority are slow to believe it, but there is no policy so foolish as that of making martyrs.—From the Saturday Review.
Mr. Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, has this striking passage upon what he terms “the Faithlessness of our Age:”
“A Red Indian, or Otaheitan savage, has more sense of a Divine existence round him, or government over him, than the plurality of refined Londoners and Parisians; and those among us who may in some sense be said to believe are divided almost without exception into two broad classes, Romanist and Puritan; who, but for the interference of the unbelieving portions of society, would, either of them, reduce the other sect as speedily as possible to ashes; the Romanist having always done so whenever he could, from the beginning of their separation, and the Puritan at this time holding himself in complacent expectation of the destruction of Rome by volcanic fire.... Hence nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers: the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can what practical work lies ready in their hands. Most of our scientific men are in this last class; our popular authors either set themselves definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and benevolence, or give themselves up to bitter and fruitless statement of facts, or surface-painting, or careless blasphemy, sad or smiling. Our earnest poets and deepest thinkers are doubtful and indignant.”