The effect of this kindness on the part of Dr. Cooke was, not only to free my mind from any remains of hurtful feelings towards him, but to dispose me, and enable me, to review the claims of Christianity and the Bible in a spirit of greater fairness and candor, and so to make it possible for me to become, what I had long believed I never could become, a hearty believer in the religion of Christ.
CHAPTER XIX.
SOME OF THE STEPS BY WHICH I CAME TO FAITH IN CHRIST.
I am not certain that I can state the exact process by which I passed from doubt and unbelief to faith in Christ, but the following, I believe, is very near the truth.
1. There was, first, a sense of the cheerlessness of unbelief—the sadness and the sorrow resulting from the loss of trust in God and hope of immortality, and from the wretched prospect of a return to utter nothingness.
2. Then came the distressing feeling of inability to comfort my afflicted or dying friends—my utter helplessness in the presence of sorrow, grief and agony.
3. And then I found myself unable to account for the wonderful marks of design appearing in nature, and especially in my own body, without the acknowledgment of an intelligent Deity. The wonderful perfection and beauty of a flower or a feather would confound me; while mysterious adaptations in my own frame would fill me with amazement. Darwin's theory of development relieved me for a time; but I soon came to see that some of his explanations of natural phenomena were erroneous, and that none of his facts proved the truth of his theory. Still later I found that Darwin himself acknowledged that the evidences of design in the methods by which certain species of plants were fertilized, were not only overpowering, but startling.
4. Then came dissatisfaction with the theories by which unbelievers sought to account for the existence and order of the universe. They supposed the universe to be eternal, and attributed the production of plants, and animals, and man to the blind unconscious working of lifeless matter. They attributed to dead matter the powers which believers attributed to a living God. They were obliged to believe that senseless atoms could produce works transcending the powers of the mightiest minds on earth. To reconcile their belief in the eternity of the universe, and in the unchanging properties of matter, with the phenomena of change and progress, they supposed an infinite succession of worlds, or of beginnings and endings of the same world, and imagined the earth running exactly the same course, and having exactly the same history, every time it came into existence. Hence it became with them an article of faith, that we had ourselves lived an infinite number of times, and should live an infinite number of times more in the future, repeating always exactly the same life, with exactly the same results. It was also an article of faith that we were mere machines, governed by powers over which we had no control; that our ideas of liberty, and our feelings of responsibility, or of good and ill desert, were all delusions; that all the errors, and crimes, and miseries of our race were inevitable, and were to be eternally repeated; and that a change for the better was eternally impossible. But time would fail me to mention all their theories. It is enough to say that the wild and unsatisfactory nature of these dreams helped to drive me back to Christianity.
5. There was, of course, no tendency in unbelief to promote virtue, or to check vice. Its natural tendency was to utter depravity. And Christianity retained such an influence over me, even to the last, that I could never reconcile myself to a vicious life.