And if the privilege of scepticism is hope, the essence of it is questioning and questing. There is a doubt which, in its despair of ultimate truth, is content to trifle, to beguile the misery of life with jest and play and momentary diversion. Or there is the doubt in deeper matters which, as with Darwin, turns to eager, assiduous investigation of the mere, fascinating detail of the external world. But there is also a doubt which lives in passionate, perpetual earnestness and the unfailing, unyielding, indomitable effort to find out God, being assured that without Him the universe, with all its splendor and all its endless evolving glory, is nothing, merely nothing. Such doubt will express itself in words like those of the modern poet:
‘Day and night I wander widely through the wilderness of thought,
Catching dainty things of fancy most reluctant to be caught.
Shining tangles leading nowhere I persistently unravel,
Tread strange paths of meditation very intricate to travel.
Gleaming bits of quaint desire tempt my steps beyond the decent.
I confound old solid glory with publicity too recent.
But my one unchanged obsession, whereso’er my feet have trod,
Is a keen, enormous, haunting, never-sated thirst for God.’
THE END