The doubter who refuses or hesitates to speak the name of God may thus be a protestant, but plainly he is no atheist. A mere name, in any case, is quite as likely to obscure as to illumine the reality; the chiaroscuro effect must ever belong to it. Doubt is no road to atheism. As a way to theism it may be beset with hardship, and its goal may be quite beyond the horizon; but the doubter is not by nature an atheist; quite the contrary. As no other, feeling dependent, he is a seeker, and even a confident seeker after what is perfect. He truly and confidently seeketh, for he seeketh after what hath neither visible form nor body, what is without habitation or name, what, like the Son of Man, hath not where to lay its head. He seeketh, what his very seeking itself is, not a God, but the life of the God.
The general facts about doubt are now before us, and although much needs yet to be said in explanation, and a further fact is reserved for a concluding chapter, still not so darkly as it began this first chapter in our confession of doubt has come, perhaps somewhat abruptly, to an end. We have next, entering more fully and critically into the conditions of our human experience, to scrutinize closely our ordinary habits of mind, those common-sense views of things that on the whole prevail among men. In these ideas, impulsive, unreasoning, above all often flatly contradictory, we shall find some of the strongest reasons for our doubting nature.
[1] Mental Development of the Child and the Race. Methods and Processes. By James M. Baldwin. Macmillan, 1895.
[2] Let me add, that if certain people, struggling in the present maze of educational theory, and objecting, with a zest and a combativeness that fairly belie their contentions, to the use of interest as the primal educational motive, if these people would only recognize change as always a part of interest, their greatest trouble would be removed. They refuse to have education easy or pleasant; interest, they insist, must make it so; and doubtless the advocates of interest are in part to blame for this view; but change, which to my mind is involved in all interest, includes resistance and struggle; change is ever a challenge to effort; and, such being the case, an education led by interest is not necessarily easy or idly pleasant. The real meaning of the interest theory, at least as I have to understand it, is simply (1) that the natural child or the natural man always has something to do, and (2) that education should promote that something. It is far from meaning that there should be no compulsion or discipline, no pain or self-denial. Whoever honestly over expected to do, or ever did any thing without these? The interest theory, then, would not eliminate hardship or discipline, but, to my understanding, by making education serve actual life, would substitute a natural for an artificial and externally imposed hardship. Not hardship, but real achievement makes the educated man.
III.
DIFFICULTIES IN OUR ORDINARY VIEWS OF THINGS.
If the doubter were brought into court under indictment for his offences against common sense, against ordinary experience and belief, and the jury of his peers sitting upon the case were composed, as of course it would be likely to be, of faithful believers chosen at random from the different walks of practical life, no better defence could possibly be offered than a simple statement of the incongruities which the consciousness of ordinary life is constantly addicted to. True, for some reason lying deep in human nature, a defence that ends by convicting the jury of error, is hardly likely to lead to the immediate discharge of the prisoner; judges or jurymen are not in the habit of taking a rebuff in that way; but in course of time the prisoner will be justified, and his justification, however tardy, is all that now concerns us. To his defence, therefore, and the discomfiture of his judges, but to the latter without any malice, we turn at once.
And where shall we begin? Our predicament in this defence is something like that of the small boy, bewildered over the task of "picking up" his nursery. "I can't do it," he says. "There are so many things; I can't tell which to take first." Poor little fellow! If he halts now, what will he do when the littered room—I had almost said the littered playroom—of his later life confronts him? Contradictions under foot everywhere are certainly not less confusing than blocks, horses, papers, trains, marbles, picture-books, and the like—or unlike—scattered over a nursery floor.