"I dare not; I am not fit. I know father wanted it, and prayed for it, and nothing would be such a joy to mother, but——"
My uncle gave a shrewd, sidelong glance on me.
"I suppose you are like a good many fellows; an education gives them a general shaking up, and all their beliefs break from their lashings and go rolling and tumbling about like spars and oil-casks in a storm on ship-board."
"I can't say that is true of all my beliefs; but yet a great many things that I tried to regard as certain are untied. I have too many doubts for a teacher."
"Who hasn't? I don't know anything in heaven or earth that forty unanswerable questions can't be asked about."
"You know," answered I, "Tennyson says,
'There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.'"
"H'm! that depends. Doubt is very well as a sort of constitutional crisis in the beginning of one's life; but if it runs on and gets to be chronic, it breaks a fellow up, and makes him morally spindling and sickly. Men that do anything in the world must be men of strong convictions; it won't do to go through life like a hen, craw-crawing and lifting up one foot, and not knowing where to set it down next."
"But," said I, "while I am passing through the constitutional crisis, as you call it, is the very time I must make up my mind to teach others on the most awful of all subjects. I cannot and dare not. I must be a learner for some years to come, and I must be a learner without any pledges, expressed or implied, to find the truth this way or that." "Well," said my uncle; "I'm not so greatly concerned about that—the Lord needs other ministers besides those in the pulpit. Why, man, the sermons on the evidences of Christianity that have come home to me most have been preached by lay preachers in poor houses and lonely churches, by ignorant men and women, and little children." "There's old Aunt Sarah there," he said, pointing with his whip to a brown house in the distance, "that woman is dying of a cancer, that slowly eats away her life in lingering agony, and all her dependence is the work of a sickly, consumptive daughter, and yet she is more than resigned to her lot, she is so cheerful, so thankful, so hopeful, there is such a blessed calm peace, and rest, and sweetness in that house, that I love to go there. The influence of that woman is felt all through the village—she preaches to some purpose."