SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 June 1916, Page 6

SUNDAY READING.

DOUBTS AND DOUBTERS'. | SERMON PREACHED BY REV. A. H. OOLVILE, M.A., at St. Mary's 1 Church, New Plymouth, on Sunday, ' ' May 28. "I will not believe" (St. John xx., 25); i "Help thou mine unbelief" (St. Mark ■ xix., 24), I have brought these sentences together, not because I intend to deal with the incidents in which they occur, but because they are the expression of two different attitudes of mind towarde religion which are just as common among the men of our own day as they were among those with whom our Lord dealt personally when He was on the earth. Last Sunday evening I was speaking of the tremendous importance of having a spiritual certainty in the life, a certainty which cannot be shaken by intellectual questions or arguments or theories because it lias its root in actual experience. We decided, I think, that those who possess this certainty, this "blessed limit," are on firm' ground and have a sure guiding principle amid the difficulties and complications of life. But I want to think to-night of those others who do not possess it, who have no spiritual certainty at all, whose inner lives are made up of theories, speculations, faint hopes, big disappointments, and who cannot say confidently arid decisively "one thing X know," the men and women who doubt and are sad because they doubt, who come to church, perhaps, hoping vaguely that God will have a word to say to them that will help them to a certainty, and who over and over again go away disappointed. You remember the challenge of Easter Day, "Relievest thou this"? Now on the last of Easter Sundays let us think of those who cannot respond to the challenge with a confident "Yes," but whose attitude towards religion is rather expressed in that appeal, that cry frora the heart, "Help thou my unbelief." But before we think of these honest doubters, often inarticulate, who are passing under- God's discipline, whose attitude is expressed by the prayer I have just quoted, we will just glance at those other forms of doubt which are not under the guiding hand of God, but which arc the outcome of a false attitude towards life and towards religion, that obstinate little kink in the nature which ' keeps down, Jie spiritual instinct and which says lightly or deliberately or in- 1 differently, "I will not believe." First tliere is what might be called 1 "flippant doubt," the doubt that finds an easy and glib expression, feels no pain 1 and demands no sympathy. The doubt : that readily discusses the truths of re- ' ligion onl.v to dismiss them with cheap '• sneers and contemptuous ridicule. The 1 doubt that is dangerous only to very young people, who shrink from ridicule '

and are quickly imposed on by smart Italic and an easy assumption of superiority; the doubt tliat says lightly, "I f "'ill not believe," and finds a kind of i pleasure in that attitude. Yes, to some | people there is a kind of unholy excitement in attacking the cherished beliefs |of the young and inexperienced. There • are doubters who take a kind of vicious -pleasure in removing their neighbor's j landmark. Tiic-e are not- under God's i discipline at all, and how ever clever j they may think themselves they are on ja far lower plane both morally and spiritually than their victims,' niuch further back on the road of progress .than those young travellers whom they ] have sent off to wander in the wilderj ness. j Then there is what can be described las ''interested doubters." These are men who deliberately cultivate a hostile attitude towards religion in order to find excuse for a slack or vicious life. With calculated deliberation they say to themselves, "I will not believe. I want to have my pleasure, to enjoy my sin, to live for material tilings, and I don't want to be bothered; I will not believe." The i Bishop of London has a story of a young officer who would come down to breakfast in the morning and break out into violent diatribes against the Christian j faith, which lasted until his colonel said to him drily, "What were you up to last night?" That spiked his guns. And many apparently formidable pieces of artillery are just as vulnerable.\l shall : never forget the man whose first words to j me on recovering from delirium tremens i were, "After all, I don't believe in a God." We shall often find, my friends, that behind an apparently convinced unbelief is tii is motive, a resolute clinging, not- always to sin, mind, but to a slack, material life; and the clearing up of such doubt as that can only come by the way of penitence and definite confession of definite sin. But the most common sort of false doubt is that to which we may apply the epithet "stolid." It is very common in this parish, and perhaps stil more common in a bigger town like Auckland. It is the attitude of the comfortably-off middle-aged man who repeats vaguely but emphatically that "there is nothing in it." If pressed, he explains the existence of the Church as a big business proposition which the clergy support in the interests of their own pockets. If lie happens to be a gentleman he only says this aloud when the clergy are -not present; but the thought is there, and it seems quite enough to put 'him off religion. Sometimes you can trace this stolid doubt to a persona! grievance. His vicar hasn't paid him enough attention, or some other man who goes to church has got the better of him in a business deal. But generally it seems to me that you can only explain that stolid, impenetrable doubt on the supposition of Philistinism pure and simple, incapacity for the spiritual; the man simply doesn't feci the need of religion, and says so in a mirttcr-of-fact way. He takes up as a rule the very same sort of attitude towards literature, art and poetrv, and is not the least little bit ashamed of that attitude. Your modern is not as a rule great on poetry. Ho doesn't ''go in for that sort of thing." Bnt there is onp quotation from Tennyson which is often on his lips, which, to tell the truth, I a-m rather tired of hearing":

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe mo, than, in half the creeds.' So says the Philistine who has shut God out of his life, and starved his own capa- - city for the spiritual. Argument 'Won't , touch him. Appeals pass like an express i train through the passage lie has exca- , vated between one ear and the other. Having no sense of sin he feels no need of God. So he lives on his life upside down, -before that little seed' sown in. him by God could have a chance of development. We can all pray for such men, but we should not allow ourselves to be. infected by them. Stolidity, though it is a dead weight hanging round the neck of a parish, has no magnetism about it. Personally I should have no ■hesitation in praying for such a man a,fcreat ghgsls might «o.«s utfoh*

life. He must see the print of the nails ' in his own life, the cross set up in the midst of his stolid, comfortable existence before that obstinate "I will not believe" can be changed to the attitude of penitence and hope—"Help thou mine unbelief." And now, having glanced at the vari- • ous forms of false doubts, or rather of i blank unbelief, I will go on to speak of t that doubt which is really part of God's discipline, which brings real pain and trouble wifli.it, and which can onlj be touched with' the lightest hand and with the most heartfelt sympathy. Picture to yourselves, if you have never experienced it, the, pain ot that inarticulate doifbt that comes perhaps to some member of an orthodox religious family. It , never finds utterance because of' the grief that it will cause to those by whom it cannot be understood, but it grows ; and rubs and frets and gives a sense of insecurity, and almost of hypocrisy, which is both morally and spiritually depressing and demoralising. The young man—boy, perhaps—doesn't like to tell his mother, because he knows that it would hurt her; he'won't tell his father, because often, unfortunately, he feels his father is not sufficiently interested and would dismiss it lightly as of no importance; he doesn't go to a clergyman, because lie feels sometimes that lie couldn't express his thoughts clearly, and sometimes because he is s% of the professional standpoint. Htfw, what have wo to say of trouble 1 such as this, real trouble, trouble that comes to people who do not easily find a means of selfexpression, trouble that casts A'slmdow over life, and sots you, so to speak, on edge with all your surroundings? Now, the trouble of silent doiijit is not only a very real one, but a very dangerous one, particularly if young men and women have got it into theii heads, or ■have been trained to believe, as so many were' under the teaching of the. great religious lights of the last century, that" doubt is always born of the devil. Mrs. Annie Besant tells us how when she was a young girl she went to Pusey, the great Oxford tractarian, with her doubts, but hardly had she begun to talk when he stopped her with a shudder, "Don't say that; you mustn't ray that; the very thought is a terrible sin. It is the devil prompting you." My friends, if that conviction Jias entered into one's blood, and has grown into one's habitual thought, then the trouble is enhanced tenfold, .or if this harassing doubt is to prove that one is necessarily wicked or one wouldn't have it, then the more conscientious the doubter the greater the misery. Oh! if the honest doubter could only believe that the time of trial through which he is going is part of God's discipline, part of God's design, then though pain and ■ depression might still be his, there would not, be that feeling of utter gloom and despair which paralyses life and blocks progress and forbids the cry, "Help thou my unbelief." For think if the deep pain of the soul, be only born of the devil, how did it become the last trial of God's own Son ? How was it that the last cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou l forsaken me?''

revealed to all His brethren that He, the perfect Man Himself, went through that experience which is still so often the chief triat of some of God's beloved children? Many of us, as I have said, know nothing of this pain. AVe have never doubted what we have been brought up to believe. We have the great spiritual certainty of our lives. But while we thank God for bavin" spared us this part of the discipline of life, we must not assume that we are necessarily in a better position than those who doubt. For, my friends, there is a far worse than that of honest doubt, and that is a state of passive acquiescence in the forms and language of religion, without really caring about the essence of it, a state of self-satisfaction and smooth self-content. There are some people for whom one could almost find it in one's heart to pray that they should come under this part of God's discipline; that such a man should begin to question, because it would show that at least he had begun to think about his religion, that it had ceased to be a form.

My friends, so easy is it to be misunderstood from the pulpit, that I am actually afraid of Someone carrying away with "him the impression that I have said that doubt is better than belief. It is very far from my intention to convey that. Faith, when it means openness to God aiid a strong trust in Him, when it means one great spiritual certainty, is a hundred times more blessed than doubt. But doubt, when it is really thoughtful, and not shallow, is more blessed than a meeha.nicn.l unthinking acquiescence. That is the comfort I want to give the doubter. Your doubt is not born of the devil. It is part of God's discipline; a stage through which yoii arc passing, a stage through which He will guide you, if only you will not give Him up, nor cut yourself off from the opportunities given' you by tho Church, nor take refuge from your "trouble in flippancy or contempt or stolidity, nor -bar out from yourself the prayer, "Help thou mine unbelief'; and for us, my friends, -who believe, let us remember that if God is to us only a name, if His voice is never listened 'for, if Communion with Him is a thing unknown, then assuredly that doubt is heavenborn that rouses us out of the sleep of indifference. Let m remember, doubters and believers alike, that no amount of orthodoxy, or good churchmanship or -punctilious observance of religious duties will make up for the absence of a personal relationship with God. . And any such discipline as this, through which the souls of men'may go, accomplishes its purpose if it enables them to say to others, "Now wo believe, not because of thy saying, for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ."

Only we must struggle towards the light even when the darkness is greatest. We must not be content with an acquiescent attitude in doubt any more than in belief. We all know that the great practical antidote to doubt is unselfish service to others. If a man doubts about fiod and His love, let Him go and grapple with evil at close quarters. Let him try to make one life better, happier, and his doubts will weaken. It is narrowness of thinking, a,] d selfishness of living that causes' many a mnn to doubt. 'Lot Mm get out of his own little backwater into the full stream of life; let him get away from himself and his own narrow outlook upon things, anil I e will get away from his doubts as well, and the Holy Spirit of God will help him out of his unbelief. And lastly, for us, my friends, who believe, it only remains to recognise tlic greatness of our responsibility. Many men remain in a state of half-belief, not because of the difficulties of religion, but because of the inconsistencies ofVChrist-' ians, waiting, longing, hoping to find someone to whom God is a reality and not a name, who does own Christ as Master, who does reflect the gifts of the ■Spirit. .That you and I may 'become such guides to others must be'our daily prayer. We may have no intellectual arguments wherewith to convince, but can create an atmowhera of faith

which will affect all who come near us. Men may -write volumes of evidence, of the Christian faith, hut no evidence is so strong and so moving as the evidence of a Christ-like life—which is strong in the assurance of a great certainty, yet ever presses forward, ever cries humbly to the Master, "Help thou mine unbelief.''