He complied with my request; and in the course of conversation informed me of many circumstances which had formed steps in that slow gradation by which he had reached his present state of mind; a state which he did not affect to conceal. But still I felt sure there were other causes which he did not mention.
At length I said, "You must give me the title of an old friend, —a father, Harrington, I might almost say,"—and the tears came into my eyes,—"to talk hereafter fully with you of your so certain uncertainty about the only topics which supremely affect the happiness of man."
I told him, and I spoke it in no idle compliment, that I was convinced he was far enough from being one of those shallow fools who are inclined to scepticism because they shrink from the trouble of investigating the evidence; who find so much to be said for this, and much for that, that they conclude that there is no truth, simply because they are too indolent to seek it. "This," said I, "is the plea of intellectual Sybarites with whom you have nothing in common. And as little do you sympathize with those dishonest, though not always shallow thinkers, who take refuge in alleged uncertainty of evidence, because they are afraid of pursuing it to unwelcome conclusions; who are sceptics on the most singular and inconsistent of all grounds, presumption. I know you are none of these."
"I am, I think, none of these," said he quietly.
"You are not: and your manner and countenance proclaim it yet more strongly than your words. The only genuine effect of a sincere scepticism is and must be, not the complacent and frivolous humor which too often attaches to it, but a mournful confession of the melancholy condition to which, if true, the theory reduces the sceptic himself and all mankind."
Of all the paradoxes humanity exhibits, surely there are none more wonderful than the complacency with which scepticism often utters its doubts, and the tranquillity which it boasts as the perfection of its system! Such a state of mind is utterly inconsistent with the genuine realization and true-hearted reception of the theory. On such subjects such a creature as man cannot be in doubt, and really feel his doubts, without being anxious and miserable. When I hear some youth telling me, with a simpering face, that he does not know, or pretend to say, whether there be a God, or not, or whether, if there be, He takes any interest in human affairs; or whether, if He does, it much imports us to know; or whether, if He has revealed that knowledge, it is possible or impossible for us to ascertain it; when I hear him further saying, that meantime he is disposed to make himself very easy in the midst of these uncertainties, and to await the great revelation of the future with philosophical, that is, being interpreted, with idiotic tranquillity, I see that, in point of fact, he has never entered into the question at all; that he has failed to realize the terrible moment of the questions (however they may be decided) of which he speaks with such amazing flippancy.
It is too often the result of thoughtlessness; of a wish to get rid of truths unwelcome to the heart; of a vain love of paradox, or perhaps, in many cases, (as a friend of mine said,) of an amiable wish to frighten "mammas and maiden aunts." But let us be assured that a frivolous sceptic,—a sceptic indeed,—after duly pondering and feeling the doubts he professes to embrace, is an impossibility. What may be expected in the genuine sceptic is a modest hope that he may be mistaken, a desire to be confuted; a retention of his convictions as if they were a guilty secret; or the promulgation of them only as the utterance of an agonized heart, unable to suppress the language of its misery; a dread of making proselytes,—even as men refrain from exposing their sores or plague-infected garments in the eyes of the world. The least we can expect from him is that mood of mind which Pascal so sublimely says becomes the Atheist … "Is this, then, a thing to be said with gayety? Is it not rather a thing to be said with tears as the saddest thing in the world?"
The current of conversation after a while, somehow swept us round again to the point I had resolved to quit for this evening. "But since we are there," said I, "I wish you would in brief tell me why, when you doubted of Christianity, you did not stop at any of those harbours of refuge which, in our time especially, have been so plentifully provided for those who reject the New Testament? You are not ignorant, I know, of the writings of Mr. Theodore Parker, and other modern Deists. How is it that none of them even transiently satisfied you? An ingenious eclecticism founded on them has satisfied, you see, your old college friend, George Fellowes, of whom I hear rare things. He is far enough from being a sceptic,"
"Why," said he, laughing, "it is quite true that George is not a sceptic, He has believed more and disbelieved more, and both one and the other for less reason, than any other man I know. He used to send me the strangest letters when I was abroad, and almost every one presented him under some new phase. No, he is no sceptic. If he has rejected almost every thing, he has also embraced almost every thing; at each point in his career, his versatile faith has found him some system to replace that he had abandoned; and he is now a dogmatist par excellence, for he has adopted a theory of religion which formally abjures intellect and logic, and is as sincerely abjured by them. If the difficulties he has successively encountered had been seen all at once, I fancy he would have been much where I am. Poor George! 'Sufficient unto the day,' with him, is the theology 'thereof'! I picture him to myself going out of a morning, with his new theological dress upon him, and, chancing to meet with some friend, who protests there is some thing or other not quite 'comme il faut,' he proceeds with infinite complacency to alter that portion of his attire; the new costume is found equally obnoxious to the criticism of somebody else, and off it goes like the rest."
This was a ludicrous, but not untrue, representation of George Fellows's mind; only the "friend" in the image must be supposed to mean his own wayward fancy; for he is not particularly amenable (though very amiable) to external influences. So dominant, however, is present feeling and impulse, or so deficient is he in comprehensiveness, that he often takes up with the most trumpery arguments; that is, for a few days at a time. Yet he does not want acuteness. I have known him shine strongly (as has been said of some one else) upon an angle of a subject; but he never sheds over its whole surface equable illumination. Where evidence is complicated and various, and consists of many opposing or modifying elements, he never troubles himself to compute the sum total, and strike a fair balance. He stands aghast in the presence of an objection which he cannot solve, and loses all presence of mind in its contemplation. He seldom considers whether there are not still greater objections on the other side, nor how much farther, if a principle be just, it ought to carry him. The mode in which he looks at a subject often reminds me of the way in which the eye, according to metaphysicians, surveys an extensive landscape. It sees, they say, only a point at a time, punctum visibile, which is perpetually shifting; and the impression of the whole is in fact a rapid combination, by means of memory, of perceptions all but coexistent; if the attention be strongly fixed upon some one object, the rest of the landscape comparatively fades from the view. Now George Fellowes seemed to me, in a survey of a large subject, to have an incomparable faculty of seeing the minimum visibile, and that so ardently, that all the rest of the landscape vanished at the moment from his perceptions.