How many times I have gone to church bewildered, utterly wretched, my soul crying out for the living God, and listened to a cheap, well-meant discourse against “Ingersoll, Emerson, and all other unbelievers in the inspired Word of God,” with an earnest exhortation to refrain at our peril from “searching into what are the hidden mysteries.”
I understood the preacher’s standpoint, poor soul! I respected him and his effort, but oh, how helpless he was to do anything for me who could detect the sophistry and lack of discrimination in all this talk!
Oh, if I could help those who have been driven to question the whole of truth, when they thus find out a part of it to have been crude or false! And I pity almost as much the many timid ones who, like myself, are longing to stay in the mother church, to that end being sorely tempted to quibble with creeds, but who find no place either in or out of the church which would exactly express their true religious attitude.
How strange all this must seem to you, who used to feel that heaven and earth might fall, but that I should never give up my faith.
No, please God, I shall never give up faith, nor hold less faithfully to the eternal verities which alone make life worth living. Never have I felt more deeply than to-day the truth of the old words of the catechism, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” But I do not hold that keeping the faith is an adherence to any creed or an absolute acceptance of any book, even if it be the Book of books.
I have come to feel that the teaching of my childhood which made historic facts, or what were assumed to be historic facts, of equal importance with the eternal and immutable laws of moral and spiritual growth,—I have come, I say, to feel that his was false. Ah me, the pity of it!
I write you all this because I want you to know the strongest reason that has prevented me from following in your footsteps and, as I once dreamed of doing, giving myself up either at home or abroad to the grand missionary work which still seems to me the most satisfying kind of work in the world. No, I cannot be a missionary; I think I shall never dare to teach any one; I don’t know how; but, thank God, I have come to see a little more clearly some truths to which I think it is possible for the human mind to attain. The vision thus gained, though still at times a fleeting one, has, I firmly believe, placed me forever beyond the reach of the nightmare of doubts and mortal terrors which first assailed me after I dared trust myself to think and question.
No one, not bred in a New England home with all the Puritan traditions imbibed with every breath, can realize the fever and despair that I have felt more than once after I dared to think and face the result of my thought. But that torture can never come again. Not that I have relapsed into indifference or have heeded the pleadings of my devout friends to “only believe,” that so I might dread my doubts as impious and accept without question the creed of my fathers. No! Kant, Hegel, and Fichte, Carlyle and Emerson, Robertson, Stanley, Phillips Brooks, and, more than all, the unprejudiced study of the Bible itself, have kept me from that.
I no longer tremble at the question whether the record of the miracles be fact or no; it touches not my spiritual life. The baby born next door yesterday is a greater miracle to me than Lazarus raised from the dead; the morning’s breakfast turned into vital force that guides this hand as marvelous as water changed to wine. Whether the resurrection of Jesus be literal fact or not, it in no wise affects my immortality. My faith rests on something surer than the accuracy of any historic fact.
Are you shocked? Yes, doubtless, for so should I have been once. I do not expect you to understand me yet, unless you too have been climbing up to the light by the same path in which I have been led. You will think that I have been venturing on dangerous ground, but I could not write to you without granting your request to tell you how it was with me in my inmost self.