RELIGIOUS.

New Zealand Times, Volume LVIX, Issue 2875, 18 July 1896, Page 2 (Supplement)

RELIGIOUS.

Our Lay Senna i] FOR Sunday Rhadin£. TUB MISSION OF DOUBT. A good rnf«n, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith." —Acts xi., 24. Everybody has doubts, just as every ladder has rungs. As the rungs suggest climbing, and at the same time furnish the opportunity of doing so, so doubts suggest tho possibility ot reaching the grandest truths, and are frequently the means by which we attain them. When a young man tells you of his doubts you may be sure that he has begun to think seriously, lie has simply put his ladder in place, and has his foot on the first rung. Doubts are nothing more than a dark passage, at the other end of which is eternal light. They are what antennae are to the insect—the instruments which nature has provided, and which decide whether it is safe to take the next step or not. If a man has never entertained a doubt his opinion is not worth asking for, for a doubt is tho first expression of the intellect when it begins to make a theory of the universe. Doubt is a dark passage leading to tho light, but it is exceedingly unfortunate when a man his way in the passage and never roaches tho light. Such a ono is to be greatly pitied, because at the end of life ho will have missed its most beautiful experiences. No ono can possibly enjoy himself as thoroughly amid the sombre shadows of unbelief, or of non-belief, or_ of what is called agnosticism, as when basking in tho warm sunshine of a reasonable faith. If the doubt is the end of it all, and there is nothing else to come, the situation is as unsatisfactory as that of a man who should spend his whole life in climbing the ladder, never reaching the higher lavol against which the upper end of the ladder rests. Human nature is so constituted that faith is absolutely necessary to happiness, and your doubts are nothing more Chan tho sifting or winnowing process by which you separate the chaff from the wheat. In other words, your doubts examine all statements with a critical eye, and so carefully suprintend your constructive work that when you say positively, “ I believe/’ it means that your faith is wholly reasonable. This appetite, or hunger, or craving for faith, is everywhere visible. If we were to lose confidence in the commercial honour of our fellow-men the wheels of industry would suddenly come to a standstill and tho hum of enterprise would be bushed. It is a strange thing that the commerce of the world rests—and securely, too—on tho simple belief that every man will meet his obligations. If we enter the inner circle of our civilisation we find that the sanctified products of home Ufa depend on tho loyal and unselfish love of father and mother. Throw a doubt of that loyalty into the home and it is like hitting a piece of fine porcelain with a hammer. The fire on the hearth-stone is kindled by faith and kept alivo by faith. Faith in each other is the central idea of home, and it is as impossible to have a home where that idea does not prevail as it is to make a cheerful blaze from wet and wood. As in commerce and in the home, so in your religious life you must have faith. In commerce the lack of faith will produce an immediate panic ; in tho homo the lack of faith moans misery and broken hearts; in religion—bub there can be no religion without faith, and a community without religion is like a man who tries to warm his hands on a block of ice. It was Voltaire who said that if there were no God it would bo necessary to invent one. It is belief in God’s existence and faith in His wisdom which furnish all the noblest motives that actuate us, giving us a key with which to unlock mysteries, and the resignation of cheerful submission when the waves of misery dash over us. But that kind of faith comes from the victory we have won over our doubts. To begin with doubts is simply to whet your appetite for truth; to end with doubts is to give that whetted appetite no food to eat, and so to die of starvation. It is faith, after all, which produces all tho magic in our lives, for it is just as necessary to our personal happiness to lift up our hands to heaven *in the belief that unseen beings will lead us through the falling night as it is for a. child to believe that its father will protect it in the coming storm. We are so made that if we ask for the best things they must come down from above. Your doubts have a mission, and if they accomplish that mission all will go well; if they do not, all will go ill, They serve an admirable purpose when they are simply wayside inns wherein you take rest and lunch while on'the journey, and then push forward to something better. But you cannot live comfortably in a wayside inn, and you cannot live happily in a doubt. Faith is not an inn, but a home, whose roof will shelter you, and every man knows that home and heaven are closely related to each other.