Skeptical Doubts: How You May Solve Them
My object in this address is, to relieve the doubts on religious subjects which meet a young man on setting out in life. Such doubts have been very common. Nor is it to be wondered at. With some, to doubt is constitutional. They are not able to give easy credence to any tidings. With others, the very stupendousness of religious subjects causes the mind to pause in doubtfulness; the revelations of Christianity are so transcendent, that thought wavers before their very grandeur. There may be doubt, yet again, from those appalling miseries of human life which it is the mission of Christianity to heal; and no less from the strangely unchristian lives of Christian men. All such doubts are to be treated tenderly. There are thousands of such doubters among young men at this hour; and they are not to be denounced, but helped.
On the other hand, you will, I trust, agree with me, that there is a pretence of doubting which is the simple outgrowth of flippant indifference or conceit. We hear Tennyson quoted, that there “lives more faith in honest doubt, than that in half the creeds.” Let me, however, remind you, that Mr. Tennyson did not mean resting in doubt; he meant an “honest doubt,” that was bent upon inquiry, and was open to conviction. He therefore speaks in this same passage of one:
“He fought his doubts, and gathered strength;
He would not make his judgment blind;
He faced the spectres of his mind,
And laid them: thus he came at length
“To find a stronger faith his own,
And power was with him in the night
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone.”2
Observe, a great character is not built up by doubting. There is weakness, not strength, in doubts. Nor is it necessarily a mark of intelligence to doubt. Any scanty mind may doubt, just as a fool may hold a penny-piece to his eye, and say he has hidden the sun. On the subject of Christianity, there is a very common mistake which I would guard you against. Christian faith is not a mere assent to an orthodox creed; not a mere acceptance of a speculative system of opinion. Christian faith is a thing of will, of ingenuousness, of candor, and of loyalty. The unbelief that will be visited with judgment at the last day is, the wilful, stubborn, uncandid, prevaricacious, unpersuadable unbelief. Easiness of temper does not make a just man; no more does easiness of credence make a believing man.
Conceiving then that you are honestly anxious to arrive at truth, I will endeavor in this address to meet some of the difficulties which once perplexed my own mind. The being of God, or the mystery attaching to the Divine existence, not unnaturally disturbs the mind upon the very threshold of religious inquiry. Assuredly a God eternal, all-knowing, and everywhere present is a mystery; but to stand in the midst of a universe with endless marks of a designing hand, and to say there is no God, would be a greater and more appalling mystery. Lord Bacon says: “I had rather believe all the fables of the Talmud and Koran than that this universal frame is without a mind.” May you not exaggerate this difficulty? Have you not the image of God in nature? Look at the light of the sun. It sends its rays through every cottage, every stream, and over every living thing, and yet it never contracts a stain, and takes no soil. It awakens the germs of life in organic nature, and they emerge in an endless variety of forms; it clothes the forests with a robe of verdure, paints the fields with countless flowers, and calls forth the song of thousands of birds. It unchains from their icy bands the mountain-snows, and sends myriad rills to make music through the valleys. It makes the gladness of childhood, and cheers the gloom of age. At the same time, it can photograph every mental emotion and every change of moral feeling. No subtlety can deceive it; it pierces beyond the false look; it images the character with startling justice. It is no labor to the sun to do this. Endow this sun with mind; conceive that its rays not only pervade and photograph every object, but do so consciously. Have you not here an emblem of Him who takes this image of light?
Let me, my friend, guard you against the young man who whispers in your ear that he does not believe in God. You will mostly find one of two things—either that the creed of the atheist has been adopted by him without two hours’ reflection on the matter, or is an after-thought to make him comfortable in sin. How unreasonable would a man appear to you who should have come home from the Paris exhibition of industry, affirming that the edifice itself, its pictures, fountains, and manifold products were the falling together of chance, or self-developed. But he would be wise in comparison with the man who should see the myriad proofs of design in the atmosphere, the soils, the foliage, and his own frame, and affirm that there was no Almighty Designer. Out of ten thousand proofs equally remarkable, let me mention one or two. Think of the egg of a bird, so made that wherever it is placed the chick shall float uppermost, so as to be near the warm bosom of its mother. Think of the adaptation of the camel to its life in the desert. Its feet, not like the hoofs of a horse, but cushioned with elastic pads, that do not sink into the sand, but spread over it; its stomach set round with water-sacs, from the supplies of which it can journey for days without coming to fresh water; its eyes overhung with eyebrows, and nostrils that can be firmly closed, whereby it is not incommoded with either the hot sand-clouds or the glare of the desert. Think of a gulf-stream, sixty miles broad and three thousand feet deep, which comes from the tropics every winter, which secures an equable temperature for the fishes, and prevents the seas at Stockholm and Norway from becoming a block of ice. While this is so, there is a polar current which rises in Greenland, and hastens to cool the tropics. These are single evidences of design out of millions. And these myriad evidences in the heavens and earth, in every bird and insect, every flowering shrub and blade of grass justify the assertion that a man is a “fool” who says there is no God. I indeed admit to you that, to men oppressed with sin and darkness, it is difficult to know and trust God as the Creator. His immeasurable vastness seems to place him far from us; but I shall soon show to you that God is made known to his creatures through Christ. He who has not thought it unworthy to unfold to man in the heavens the magnificence of his works, has not thought it unworthy of himself to win back his creatures’ obedience and love by sending his Son as a man. Christ has interpreted God to us. We understand God in him. We know how to seek him, to find him, to trust him, to love him.
After the existence of God, that of an immortal spirit, possessed by every human being, lies at the basis of all religion. The argument would be too metaphysical to prove here the immortality of the soul. I can only suggest to you one or two considerations. There has been a universal consent among the wisest philosophers of all times and nations, that the soul remains after the body. “The consent of all,” said Cicero on this subject, “is the voice of nature.” Observe also, that it is by the soul we know of the existence of a universe. All sensation is the recognition of effects on our senses, but that recognition is through consciousness or mind. Note also, that the body changes, but the spirit remains. A man may lose his hands or eyes, and the loss may have no effect whatever on the soul. Consider again, that matter never perishes. If there is one axiom in philosophy that is certain, it is this, that while particles of matter may pass into new combinations, they never cease to have existence. You may well, then, ask with Dr. Young:
“Can it be,
Matter immortal, and shall spirit die?
Above the nobler shall less noble rise?
Shall man alone, for whom all else revives,
No resurrection know? Shall man alone,
Imperial man, be sown on barren ground,
Less privileged than grain on which he feeds?”
Observe once more on this subject, there are manifold proofs that the soul has in this state only the dawn of its being. The animals reach perfection in a few years but men, at death, are only beginning to use their faculties. The principle of thought, reason, and hope within them has here only glimpses, outreachings, and aspirations of a higher life. Are not these yearnings, this sense of incompleteness, prophecies of a future life? Our lives here are not the tones of perfect harmony, but rather like stringed instruments being attuned for celestial melody. And, alas, what inequalities, what sufferings, what wrongs have some to endure here that require another state for vindication and rectification also! If, therefore, you find one argument against the immortality of the soul, you will readily find a hundred for it.
A further source of doubt is, a false impression respecting holy scripture. You may have thought that the Bible, being called a revelation from God, would be like a book written in heaven, and altogether different from human works. But, in infinite wisdom and mercy, this has not been God’s mode of revelation. He has condescended to reveal his mind through the history, the follies, the virtues, the sins, and struggles of men. This history is both human and superhuman. It is human, for the men who wrote it carried into it the peculiarities of their age and their culture. It is superhuman, for it truly and faithfully tells the dealings of God with the first races of men, and afterwards through Christ.
In the Old Testament history you have records of men who lived in an earlier and ruder period of humanity; but the writing or the compilation of these records has been controlled so as to teach the awfulness of sin, the safety of righteousness, and the faithfulness of Jehovah. Dreadful is it to be told of the incest of Lot; but it is merciful that we have a justification of the warnings against the licentious nations of Moab and Ammon, whose origin is thus narrated. It is painful to follow the history of Saul, but it is merciful that we have such a vivid picture of the miserable fruits of a self-love that poisoned otherwise noble impulses. Through all the records of men in the Old Testament, you are taught, as in the life of Jacob, that every wrong act has a seed of evil in it, whose bitter fruits the doer has to eat, and that God’s providence is perpetually controlling the good and the evil for the education of men and of nations.
Look at the book of Psalms, the liturgy of prayers and praises for all ages, the sacred ballads for humanity. There is much that is human in these Psalms; but if God had sent down to us songs composed by the angels, they would have been valueless by the side of those in this incomparable book. While I am in this world of fierce temptation, of suffering, and of moral weakness, what I want is, not so much angelic musings and raptures, as the prayers of a man tempted, struggling, suffering, fallen as I am; and yet a man ever reaching with such sobs of penitence and intense heart-cries after God. I mourn David’s sin and sufferings, but I feel grateful that the Scriptures have preserved to me his Psalms, which interpret the fiercest beatings of my heart, the lowliest confessions of my moral besetments, and the deepest aspirations of my nature.
Look again at the epistles of the New Testament: you have here the records of churches which fell, some into one error, others into another. But these errors are such as are common to humanity. Admirable, therefore, is the wisdom whereby inspired doctrines and consolations are conveyed, not in any abstract method, but in their relation to the very tendencies of our nature. Your objection, therefore, to the Bible, that it is so human, is from an utterly mistaken impression of the mode in which revelation could be best made to men, and from forgetfulness of its deep, profound, and most precious adaptation to human life.
And here I cannot help adverting to the moral unfairness of infidelity. In a recent conference of working-men, one of them told the meeting that the history of the fall of man, in the second chapter of Genesis, was so improbable that he rejected all which came after. Perhaps the narrative is improbable to a mind intensely literal, unused to eastern modes of thought, and which cannot find the truth under those partially allegorical representations which most effectually teach the vast bulk of the human race. The same objections are urged against the sun standing still in the book of Joshua, and to the history of Jonah. I am not going to reply to these objections. Infidels do not want a reply. If they did, they would find scores. But what shall be said of the candor of a man who, because of such objections, rejects the Old Testament, which abounds in passages of the tenderest sympathy for the poor and for the suffering, which demands the most exact rectitude between man and man, and which taught a morality in those early days to which there is nothing at all approaching in the annals of Egypt, Greece, and Rome? Let me recommend you to turn to Leviticus 19:9, 10; Deuteronomy 24:13, 19-22.
See how the slavery of the nations was mitigated among the Hebrews by the enforcement of the principle—which the Grecian and Roman law denied—that it was the duty of the master to treat his servants as men, to instruct them in his own religion, and to count them members of his household. Shame on men who have in the Bible such consideration for the toilers and such rebukes of oppressors, but who ignore all this, and hold up the Old Testament to scorn because of one or two difficulties to their understanding.3 Nothing so loudly proclaims that such infidelity is not a thing of “honest” doubt, but of a bad mind and of a bad heart. Difficulties there are in the Bible. I have studied most of those difficulties, and confess with gratitude that they have one by one disappeared. This I doubt not will be the case with them all. But to me it seems that I should deserve the contempt of man and the indignation of my Maker, if because of these difficulties, in times so remote and in usages so different from modern customs, I set aside the book which tells me of God’s profound interest in my race, which reveals my relation to a spiritual world, which has purified the lives and pacified the consciences of millions, and which has made just and considerate their treatment of others.
Miracles which bear witness to divine revelations are made an occasion for doubt by some. Let us examine this objection candidly. Why are miracles not believed? “They contradict experience.” A few years ago M. Boutigny, at a meeting of the British Association, caused ice to be produced from a red-hot crucible. Surely this contradicted experience. “They are incredible to reason.” So is the fact that the sea once covered the beds of sea-shells on the tops of the highest mountains. “The enemies of Jesus attributed miracles to magic.” The very proof they were wrought; else they would have denied the facts, and not resorted to this pretence. “They are impossible, for they suspend inflexible laws of nature.” To this modern objection I reply, there are no laws of the universe except the direct agency of God. If, then, he interposes to arrest a subject-law, there is no suspension of the law of nature; the supreme law is still in operation. For example: By the inflexible law of gravitation, a ball dropped from the top of a tower falls to the earth. But suppose a man catches it in his hand, is the law of gravitation suspended? Not at all. A controlling law is brought into operation, to which, that law is obedient. Thus you have the agency of God in miracles. Do not, I implore you, be swayed by writers who find it the easiest of all things to multiply objections when they are utterly indifferent about finding replies. Remember that in the first ages miracles must have been worked, else Christianity, with the tremendous sacrifices it demanded, could not have gained a footing in the earth, much less have changed the religion of the Roman empire. Gibbon tried his strength to dispute this, but never did a man so signally fail.
An exaggerated estimate of the strength of literary skepticism has been another source of doubt in these days. There are three writers especially to whom this remark applies. The first is Dr. Colenso. He was believed to be a learned theological scholar. Never was an estimate more false; never did a more pedantic theologian take pen in hand. What pretensions had such a man to be a guide, who more recently tried to prove that there were no accredited prayers to Christ in the Bible, nor in the Prayer-book, nor in the Presbyterian Psalter? Thirty-four instances of direct prayer to Christ were at once pointed out in the Psalter; more than twelve prayers to the Saviour were quoted as sanctioned by apostolic practice in the New Testament, and passages of prayer to the “Lamb of God” were appealed to in the Liturgy. If young men are to doubt, let not a literary blunderer like this have weight with them. At the time that the bishop of Natal’s work came out, a gentleman was commiserated on the alleged overthrow of the Bible. “The Scriptures will be extinguished now,” said the man of the world. The shrewd Yorkshireman replied: “Well, you see I have lived long enough to hear many prophecies of this nature; but the extinguisher has always been a wooden one, which the light has burnt through.” My friend’s figure has remarkably come true. Dr. Colenso had a reputation as an arithmetician; but this has well nigh gone, and his theological books are marked sixpence on back book-stalls.
In like manner have the two other critics failed to get into the world’s thought. Some years ago, Dr. Strauss sent forth a so-called “Life of Jesus.” The greater part of the gospel narratives were resolved into myths. More recently another edition came out, and facts which in the first edition were called fabulous were now given as veritable history. Is the “critical faculty” of such a man a safe guide to young men?
Later still, M. Renan, acknowledging that it was impossible to doubt the substantial genuineness of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, presumed to patronize Christ and Christianity. And what was his conclusion? Do not start when I tell you: The Frenchman professes to believe that thousands of the most bigoted Jews, and of enlightened Greeks and Romans, renounced the venerable institutions of their fathers and embraced a religion which demanded the severest sufferings and sacrifices, because a woman under a love-spell of hallucination had fancied she had seen a young Galilean rabbi alive who was really dead! Just conceive what would now be the effect on Europe of a new religion whose fundamental fact had such puerile support. Why was it different on educated Romans? Do not say I am deceiving you when I tell you that M. Renan professes to believe that the apostle Paul abandoned prejudice, station, privilege, prospects, and braved scorn, appalling sufferings, and a martyr’s death, because he had been frightened in a thunder-storm! Talk about credulity, was there ever credulity like this? Alas, what monstrous absurdities will men believe rather than the plain testimony of Scripture! Woe to the dupes of a literary skepticism which changes its creed every five years!
It may be in addressing you, my friend, on the spirit of doubt which taints and enfeebles this age, that you have been influenced by what is deemed the attitude of scientific men towards Christianity. A flagrant and most mischievous impression is abroad that scientific men in our times are infidels. Very confidently do I affirm that it is not so. I have attended meetings of learned societies in London, and of the British Association in the country, and have heard these meetings spoken of as atheistic, when out of hundreds of scientific men there were not a dozen whose language could have justified such an imputation. Such distinguished leaders of science as Professor Owen, Professor Phillips of Oxford, and Sir Roderick Murchison, would indignantly repudiate the charge of seeking to undermine the faith of England in Christianity; and in this they would have the sympathy of an overwhelming majority of scientific men in the British Isles. Your danger is not so much in the facts science has established, as in the false notions which have been caught up of these facts. A scientific discussion would be beside the object of this address; but note these accordances between one science and the Bible: Scripture affirms the late date of man upon the earth; so does geology—Sir C. Lyell says, “No discovery has shaken our belief in the extremely modern date of the human era.” Scripture teaches that the world was once covered by water; so does geology: “It is concluded as a fundamental maxim in geology,” says Professor Phillips, “that the whole area now occupied by dry land was once covered by sea.” Scripture teaches that God made the dry land to appear; and geology affirms that the rocks, or dry land, have been upheaved from the waters. Scripture teaches that the beasts were created after their kind; that is, each group made up of a number of species; so does geology. The Bible, written for an unscientific age, has thus these marvellous agreements with science in its most recent developments. You perhaps hear of a solitary scientific mind tracing back man to a sea-shell; but another says, “The idea that a mollusk could become a fish, or a lizard a man, is worthy only of a madman, and gives but poor evidence of the progress of civilization at the present time.”4 Indeed, there is no utterance that looks adverse to Scripture which is not met by a decided divergence of opinion equally scientific.
Turn from these questionings to the history of Jesus Christ as contained in the four gospels. The most consummate learning of the enemies of the faith cannot invalidate these gospels. Their genuineness has borne every critical test of the most advanced scholarship. The evidence for their absolute truthfulness is immeasurably greater than for the authenticity of any secular book which the past has transmitted to us. You believe that eight hundred years ago a conqueror landed in England who abolished the Saxon monarchy. On testimony better than that for the belief in William the Conqueror have you the fact confirmed to you, that eighteen hundred years ago, in a strip of fair and sunny land in Asia—a land which for two thousand years had been the theatre of events which marked it out as the scene for some grand evolvement of historic import—there appeared a Teacher from Galilee, just rising into the maturity of manhood. He unites in Himself the most unusual varieties of character. He has vast intellect and the tenderest sensibility; the calmest judgment and the keenest feeling. He is lowly, but always magnanimous; He is meek, and yet majestic; He is most compassionate to human frailty, but abhors human vice; He is despised, but never fretted; insulted, but never ruffled; never is He charged with sin, yet by a strange and precious sympathy He draws to Himself the sinful and the outcast. He is essentially human; is found at the marriage feast and the evening meal. He speaks parables which childhood can understand, and over which genius wonderingly lingers. His teaching is so profound, wise, and novel, that it for ever shades all the teaching of the wise men of antiquity. He did works which no other man had ever done. He invited all heavy-laden ones to come to him for rest, and announced that He was “the Light of the world.” During a brief ministry, over five hundred men and women so believed in Him, that afterwards many of them laid down their lives for His sake. Very soon after His death upon the cross, when he startled his enemies by the loud cry, “It is finished,” a “vast multitude” in Rome itself enrolled themselves as His disciples. This fact comes to us on the testimony of the heathen historian Tacitus; and Gibbon admits it must be received as unquestionably genuine.
This Jesus Christ we affirm to be the Son of man and the Son of God. He is the Revealer of God. He pierced to the core of human misery, while he wielded the resources of omnipotence; he wound about his heart human sympathies, but now sits at the right hand of God exalted. My brother, I solemnly tell you that to refuse to believe in Christ after the evidence afforded will violate your candor, will trample on the rectitude of your reasoning, and will bring on you consequences which you will eternally deplore. I cannot utter words that deserve comparison with those of Christ himself: “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth in me should not abide in darkness.” “He that rejecteth me hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.”
You may ask, Can a man be lost for sincere doubt? If a man clings to this doubt, if he will not candidly inquire, if he refuses to receive testimony, he will be lost; not because of his doubt, but because of his obstinacy. This talk of sincere doubting is often very unreasonable talk. A man may sincerely doubt whether it is well to sow corn in the autumn or spring, and he may sow his fields in July; but his sincerity will not save him from bankruptcy or the workhouse. A schoolboy may sincerely doubt the necessity of learning Euclid, history, and geography—he may refuse the testimony of wiser heads; but his sincerity will not save him from going into mercantile or professional life a dunce, and the chances are that he will rue his so-called sincere doubt to the end of his days. You, my brother, will soon pass into a world shrouded with impenetrable darkness. There is but one voice which can tell you of a way whereby your spirit hereafter may reach a region of light and felicity. Should you close your ear to that voice, and nurse your doubts, and refuse to investigate, then let me tell you that there can be nothing for you at the last day but “shame and everlasting contempt.”
Observe also, if you want demonstration that will overbalance all difficulties, you will never find it. In the affairs of this life men act on the preponderance of evidence. If there should appear twenty reasons for a course of action and only five against it, he would be reckoned a fool who became swayed by the five, and refused to inquire further. In mercantile life, the men who will never decide and act till they have reasons which exclude all doubt, are left behind in the progress of society, and become the poor and despised. Your condition in this world is a test whether you will be true and docile. If you want light, there is abundance to guide you; if you choose darkness, God will not compel your belief.
I remind you, again, that no man has ever grown wise or good, or left a permanent impression on his age, as a doubter. The heroes of all times have been men of faith. Read the Book itself. The Bible is a locked treasure to prejudice, but it never fails to satisfy candor. As you stand outside one of our ancient cathedrals, and look up at its chancel window, all looks cold, unmeaning, and uninteresting. But, as has been well said, when on a sunny morning you have entered that chancel, “how changed is that window! It is now gorgeous in beauty, and glows with life. Cold and dreary outside, it is warm and radiant within. Instead of being incomprehensible and obscure, it is full of meaning and glorious harmony?” Such is the difference between reading the Bible as a doubter or as a critic, and going to it as one interested in its contents and willing to be taught.
Follow for a moment the course of two young men. Your acquaintance will supply the sketch readily. See one coming in the morning from the chamber where he has looked with affection and trust into the face of his Saviour; has supplicated strength to meet the day’s duties and temptations; and has pondered the words, “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word.” He enters the family circle to meet the mother’s smile, a brother’s greeting, and a sister’s cheery welcome. His father, with proud joy, consults him as an equal. He is a firm link in the family chain of happiness. See him as he stands on the floor of the warehouse with uprightness. The tricky trader, when he cannot cheat him, respects his honor. He chooses friendships that are elevating. No profane scorner walks by his side; no impure profligate soils the atmosphere of his home. He spends his evenings amid cheerful enjoyments, ennobling elevations, or useful ameliorations.
Contrast the other. He rises from a prayerless bed; drags down stairs his wearied frame at the latest possible moment; the older members of the family have gone off to their several duties. As for him, the debauch of the last night makes every thing wrong: the coffee is thick; the servant slow; the very cat’s quietness upon the hearth irritates him, and with a kick he relieves his pent-up discontent. To his mother he is rude; the younger children have scampered away at his approach, saying their “big brother is so sulky.” The clock sounds; he is off to business. The whole day he is confused and hindered by the remembrance of the last night’s pollution, or the planning for the coming evening’s pleasure. When the evening has come, he goes where he will degrade young women in a way which would arouse his direst indignation should another do the same to his sister; or he enters scenes where he would die with shame if his mother or sister could follow him. And this is the young man whose law is a miserable and hateful selfishness, or who on a Sunday afternoon reads an infidel book for five minutes, and then says, “Ah, I knew the Bible was false, and Christians all hypocrites.” Poor pitiable wretch! as if the judgment of such a man was of the slightest value against Scripture.
And observe, the end will come. A nurse very recently was summoned to a sick-bed in Paris. The invalid was a young Englishman. Before she would enter upon her duties, she asked if the sufferer was a Christian. Upon being answered in the affirmative, she said: “I have seen such horrible sights, and heard such wailings in the dying chambers of ungodly and dissolute men, that I dare not now undertake to nurse another such a one.” Tronchan, in his memoirs of Voltaire, says: “I wish that those who had been perverted by his writings had been present at his death. It was a sight too horrid to witness.” These are awful facts and foreshadowings after a life of infidel pleasure.
Let me add a test of your sincerity. One of the most accomplished and gifted of authoresses has told us that dark doubts on divine subjects once shrouded her spirit. As she looked up at midnight to the vault of the heavens, and saw the stars moving in serenity and order, the thought came over her troubled spirit, “The Creator of those orbs must take an interest in me, his rational creature. I hold to nothing but a dim hope of his existence. I will take my dark mind to him, and ask him for light. Prayer shall be with me the ‘test of truth.’” To that sincere cry the answer came. Her heart, intellect, and conscience, found rest in Christ; the Bible became to her an exhaustless fount of wisdom; in mathematical culture and in musical taste she became distinguished, and her life became signally useful. Two eminent men were lifted out of their doubts by the promise in Luke 11:13. “If the Bible be true,” they reasoned, “the Lord will give his Spirit to them that ask him. We will put this promise to the proof.” The one—John Newton—became the most influential preacher of the gospel in the British metropolis; the other—William Wilberforce—became one of the best, most useful, and most honored of statesmen.
My brother, let this be the test of your sincerity. Will you earnestly and perseveringly ask God to fulfil this promise in you?
I shall close this address with twelve articles, which may be termed the creed of the infidel.
1. That Book is to him an imposture and pretended revelation, which furnishes the only explanation ever offered of human misery, suffering, and death; which responds to man’s universal craving for immortality, and throws the clearest light upon a future state; which presents the sublimest views of the compassion of the Creator; which paints a picture of man which has had an exact transcript in the history of all nations, and on behalf of which myriads rise up to testify that it has been a ceaseless impulse to aspirations, a comfort in their trials, and has taken away the fear of death.
2. He believes that the earlier narratives of the Bible were fabrications intended to glorify the Jewish nation: but somehow these fabrications are totally unlike the legendary traditions of Greece and Rome; for instead of making their ancestors gods and heroes, they make them slaves, and tell a history of Jacob and his sons which covers their progenitors with infamy; and strange to say, these fabrications imposed upon later prophets, who were the sternest denouncers of falsehood, and are now imposing upon six millions of Jews, who, with a tenacity unparalleled and sacrifices ceaseless, cling to the ritual and history of their ancestors.
3. He believes that by some unaccountable species of literary deception, unlettered or fanatical men have pretended to give four narratives of the founder of Christianity, which the greatest modern critics confess are “the very gold of simplicity, integrity, and truthfulness,” and which present an image of Jesus Christ that brings most vividly into view the very perfection of humanity, that has furnished a model for the noblest spirits among men, and that surpasses in beauty and grandeur all that poetry ever sung of human genius ever conceived.
4. He believes that the writers of the New Testament were either knaves or fools; and yet they taught the purest, wisest, most elevated, and most self-sacrificing system of morals the world has ever seen.
5. He believes that in the most enlightened and skeptical age of the Roman Empire, thousands of men were such arrant fools as to give credence to a history of Christ which was full of lies, and to a record of miracles which had never been worked, and this at a time so near to the events, that an imposture could not have escaped detection for an hour.
6. He believes that “a vast multitude” of Romans, Greeks, and Jews deserted, for a fanatical superstition, the splendid temples of their fathers, the schools of philosophy of which they had been proud, and the religion of their ancestors, which had been enriched by the grandest historical associations.
7. He believes that the early propagators of Christianity, and the believers in it, acted altogether contrary to ordinary motives of weak or bad men; they embraced a creed which, instead of gaining them aught, exposed them to the most diabolical cruelties, and held to their testimony in the face of tortures, banishment, and a shameful death.
8. He believes that, although Christianity is a lying system of priestism or fanaticism, it nevertheless, according to irrefutable testimony, abolished the ferocious deeds of the amphitheatre, overthrew the horrid rites of paganism, introduced an era of benevolence, and marked a new starting-point of progress for the human race.
9. He believes that twelve obscure, penniless Jews, with a higher wisdom than was claimed by Socrates, Cicero, or Plato, taught the only religion which has been proved to be adapted to every country and every condition of man on the surface of the wide globe.
10. He believes that the Christian Sabbath, or the weekly seventh-day rest, is an institution indispensable to the present physical condition of men and animals; that without it modern civilization would bring to myriads of men and beasts unbroken toil, disease, and premature death; but that this seventh-day rest is a purely human institution, having come, he scarcely knows how, from men who were foisting on the world false and illiterate traditions under the name of divine revelations.
11. He believes that the writings of the Christian Scriptures, although an ill-constructed collection of falsehoods, have never been proved false by the subtlest ingenuity of their enemies, but have been most firmly held to be true by men of the profoundest intellect, of the most resolved and persevering investigation—the very scholars, thinkers, and master-spirits of humanity, such as Newton, Bacon, Milton, Boyle, Locke, Pascal, Davy, Chalmers, and a host besides.
12. He believes that those great nations of Europe which are immensely in advance of all the nations of antiquity, and of all the heathen and Mohammedan nations of Asia at this time, and which are distinguished for their liberty, wealth, culture, arts, schools, asylums, charity, and beneficence, have become so while under the sway of a miserable system of religious superstition, which a few unlettered fanatics palmed upon the world eighteen centuries ago.
Skeptic, is this thy creed? Then, O man, great is thy credulity!
Trifler, who callest the Bible “weak folly,” take heed! thy despising of Christianity may be shown to be thy folly and culpable weakness, which will have to be deplored by thee for ever.
My doubting brother, you may turn the tables when reproached with the beliefs of Christians, and point to the absurdities involved in the credulity of infidelity.