When you feel you are in the deepest and gloomiest doubt, pray the prayer of desperation; cry out, “Lord, if Thou dost exist, let me know that Thou dost exist! Guide my mind by a way that I know not into Thy truth,” and God will deliver you.
Letters and Memories.
Sad as your letter was, it gave me pleasure; for it is always a pleasure to see life springing out of death, health returning after disease, though, as doctors know, the recovery from asphyxia or drowning is always as painful as the temporary death itself was painless. Faith is born of doubt. “It is not life, but death, where nothing stirs.” Take all these doubts and struggles of yours as simply so many signs that your Father in heaven is treating you as a father, that He has not forsaken you, is not offended with you, but is teaching you in the way best suited to your own idiosyncracy, the great lesson of lessons, “Empty thyself and God will fill thee.” Take your sorrows to your Father in heaven. If that name Father mean anything, it must mean that He will not
turn away from His wandering child in a way that you would he ashamed to turn away from yours. If there be pity, lasting affection, patience in man, they must have come from God. They above all things must be His likeness. Believe that He possesses them a million times more fully than any human being.
St. Paul knew well at least the state of mind in which you are. He said that he had found a panacea for it. And his words, to judge from the way in which they have taken root and spread and conquered, must have some depth and life in them. Why not try them? Just read the first nine chapters of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, taking for granted that they mean the simplest and most obvious sense which can be put upon them.
Letters and Memories.
When the hour of temptation comes, go back, go back if you would escape, to what you were taught at your mother’s knee concerning the grace of God; for that alone will keep you safe, or angel, or archangel, or any created being safe, in this life, and in all lives to come.
Sermons on David.
What does it all mean? I cry. Night and day the heavens have been black to me. You may think it sinful to have such thoughts. My experience is that when they come, one must do battle with them; one must face them; do battle with them deliberately; be patient if they worst one for a while. By all such things men live; in these is the life of the spirit. Only by going down into hell can one rise the third day. I have been in hell many times in my
life, therefore, perhaps, I have had some small power of influencing human hearts. But I never have looked hell so close in the face as I have been doing of late. Wherefore, I hope thereby to get fresh power to rise and to lift others heavenward.