Skeptical Doubts:
HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM.
My object in this address is, to relieve the doubts on religious subjects which meet a young man on setting out in life. Such doubts have been very common. Nor is it to be wondered at. With some, to doubt is constitutional. They are not able to give easy credence to any tidings. With others, the very stupendousness of religious subjects causes the mind to pause in doubtfulness; the revelations of Christianity are so transcendent, that thought wavers before their very grandeur. There may be doubt, yet again, from those appalling miseries of human life which it is the mission of Christianity to heal; and no less from the strangely unchristian lives of Christian men. All such doubts are to be treated tenderly. There are thousands of such doubters among young men at this hour; and they are not to be denounced, but helped.
On the other hand, you will, I trust, agree with me, that there is a pretence of doubting which is the simple outgrowth of flippant indifference or conceit. We hear Tennyson quoted, that there “lives more faith in honest doubt, than that in half the creeds.” Let me, however, remind you, that Mr. Tennyson did not mean resting in doubt; he meant an “honest doubt,” that was bent upon inquiry, and was open to conviction. He therefore speaks in this same passage of one:
“He fought his doubts, and gathered strength;
He would not make his judgment blind;
He faced the spectres of his mind,
And laid them: thus he came at length