“‘That is a question which cannot be rightly answered by a “yes” or “no,”’ he replied; ‘for neither answer would be true. I was brought up, as perhaps you were, to look upon all these matters without the slightest discrimination; to think a disbelief in Jonah’s whale synonymous with the disbelief in the divine inspiration of any part of the Bible; to think a disbeliever in the Bible necessarily a disbeliever in God; and to count a disbeliever in immortality on a par with a bigamist or a horse-thief.
“‘When I dared trust myself to think and read this book, or rather collection of books, with a calm, unprejudiced eye, I was amazed to find how much I had been taught to claim for them which they never claim for themselves. They became utterly new books to me, as if I had never read them before; wonderfully rich and helpful and inspiring and full, as I believe, of the truest religious inspiration, but not always a guide for me in history and science, and not infallible as to fact.
“‘Who shall find any authority for the doctrine that inspiration ceased with the last one of those sixty-six books? No, Miss Brewster,’ said Mr. Everett, looking at me earnestly, his shoulders thrown back, his head erect, ‘God reveals himself to man to-day just as truly in this new world as ever he did thousands of years ago to Hebrew seers.
“‘You ask why I should crave any deeper reasons for my belief in God, free will, and immortality than these writings give. Simply this: I must. At first I fought against it, fearing it to be a temptation of the devil. But I came to see that this fear, for me at least, was cowardice and folly. The command was laid upon my soul to give an adequate reason for the faith that I held, and I could not be recreant to this call of conscience. I had been told to believe the Bible because it was God’s Word, and then, following in a circle, to believe that there was a God because God’s Word proved it. It did not take me long to see the childishness of this, and though I put it off again and again, my conscience would not be stilled until I had systematically set myself to see whether or not anything could really be known, or whether inference, conjecture, and hope were all that God had vouchsafed to the creature made in his image.
“‘I suppose few women ever feel this necessity. I do not say that it is necessary for you or for any one to probe to the bottom of these things, if you are content without doing so. I think, however, that it is of the utmost importance for the thousand bewildered spirits in our day, who long to know but who cannot themselves study, to come to see that knowledge on the questions which are most vital to us all is to be had by every rational being who has time and patience and follows the right path of inquiry; and that in these matters, if we are willing to pay the cost of time and labor, we may in truth see and know.
“‘There are few who have the time or taste for any deep philosophic study. There are fewer still who have any faith in the outcome of such study, and of these few but a handful who get started on the right road and persist until they attain results. Moreover, as truly in philosophy as in religion must one be “born again”; and, unlike religious birth, it cannot be instantaneous, for it is not a matter of will. It takes years to bring about this new and deeper insight.
“‘I rarely find a person whom I would advise to study philosophy, for here, if anywhere, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and one is maddened by the superficial talk of those who have not learned its a-b-c, but yet presume to argue as if they had mastered everything from Aristotle to Schelling. I have come to find that there are very few people who even dream of what philosophy is. The average man fancies that speculative philosophy must be simply guess-work or some vague theorizing, unworthy of a Christian man who has any practical work to do in this world in the way of earning his living and helping to hasten the kingdom of God.
“‘But the average Christian is largely materialistic in his thought. His heaven, his hell, are localities; his God a huge, anthropomorphic being, and the universe a kind of vast machine, guided by some external Power; or a sort of precipitate or sediment, as it were, of the eternal thought.
“‘If this is true of a man who professes and in some measure accepts a real spiritual faith, how much more true is it of the average worldly man of common sense! He looks upon the ground he walks on as something real. It is something that appeals to his senses, and he smiles with calm contempt if you tell him that an idea is far more real than the earth beneath his foot; that it is thought, and thought alone, that sustains this planet; and that all the things that he considers real are in fact mere passing phenomena, absolutely nothing in themselves, except as they exist in relation to other things.’
“I looked up somewhat perplexed at this and was about to ask a question, but Mr. Everett was too preoccupied with his own thought to notice this. Leaning his head against a gray tree-trunk, he looked with absent eyes far off at the purple hills. Presently he went on: