The rudest workman would not fling The fragments of his work away, If every useless bit of clay He trod on were a sentient thing.
And does the Wisest Worker take Quick human hearts, instead of stone, And hew and carve them one by one, Nor heed the pangs with which they break?
And more: if but creation's waste, Would he have given us sense to yearn
For the perfection none can earn, And hope the fuller life to taste?
I think, if we most cease to be, It is cruelty refined To make the instincts of our mind Stretch out toward eternity.
Wherefore I welcome Nature's cry, As earnest of a life again, Where thought shall never be in vain, And doubt before the light shall fly.
My talks with him were helpful to me if not to him. In trying to remove his doubts my own faith was confirmed, and my range of thought enlarged. His reverent spirit left its impress upon mine.
"McCoy is a more religious man than either you or I, Doctor," said Tod Robinson to me one day in reply to a remark in which I had given expression to my solicitude for my doubting friend.
Yes, strange as it may seem, this man who wrestled with doubts that wrung his soul with intense agony, and walked in darkness under the veil of unbelief; had a healthful influence upon me because the attitude of his soul was that of a reverent inquirer, not that of a scoffer.
The admirable little treatise of Bishop McIlvaine, on the "Evidences of
Christianity," cleared away some of his difficulties. A sermon of Bishop
Kavanaugh, preached at his request, was a help to him. (That wonderful
discourse is spoken of elsewhere in this volume.)
A friend of his lay dying at Redwood City. This friend, like himself; was a skeptic, and his doubts darkened his way as he neared the border of the undiscovered country. McCoy went to see him. The sick man, in the freedom of long friendship, opened his mind to him. The arguments of the good Bishop were yet fresh in McCoy's mind, and the echoes of his mighty appeals were still sounding in his heart. Seated by the dying man, he forgot his own misgivings, and with intense earnestness pointed the struggling soul to the Saviour of sinners.