The Eclipse of Faith; Or, A Visit to a Religious Sceptic. Henry Thomas Rogers
other, "makes you happy—whether you were not as happy in your old faith—whether there are not thousands of Christians who are as happy with their faith (they would say much happier, and I should say so too, if they not only say they believe it, but believe it and practise it.), I will not inquire; that my want of faith does not make me happy is a sad truth, which I do not think it worth while to deny; though I must confess that there have been many who have shared in my scepticism who have not shared in my misery. It is just because they have not realized what they did not believe; even as there are thousands of soi-disant Christians who do not realize what they say they do believe; neither the one nor the other are the happier or the more sorrowful for their pretended tenets. This is simply because they stand in no need of the admirable correctives supplied by your new theology; the present engrosses their solicitudes and affections; and the mere talk of the belief or the no-belief suffices to hush and tranquillize the heart in relation to those most momentous subjects, on which if man has not thought at all, he is a fool indeed. In either case the 'future' and the 'eternal' seem so far removed that they seem to be an 'eternal futurity.' Such parties look at that distant future much as children at the stars; it is a point, an invisible speck, in the firmament. A sixpence held near the eye appears larger; and brought sufficiently close shuts out the universe altogether. But let us also forget the future, and have a little talk of the past."
They resumed their conversation on subjects indifferent as far as this journal is concerned, and I bade them good night.
—
July 5. We were sitting in the library after breakfast. The two college friends soon fell into chat, while I sat writing at my separate table, but ready to resume my capacity of reporter, should any polemical discussion take place. I soon had plenty of employment. After about an hour I heard Harrington say:—
"But I shall be happy, I assure you, to fill the void whenever you will give me something solid wherewith to fill it."
It was impossible that even a believer in the doctrine that no "creed" can be taught, and that an "external revelation" is an impossibility, could be insensible to the charm of making a proselyte.
"What is it," said Fellowes, "that you want?"
"What do I want? I want certainty, or quasi-certainty, on those points on which if a man is content to remain uncertain, he is a fool or a brute; points respecting which it is no more possible for a genuine sceptic—for I speak not of the thoughtless lover paradox, or the queer dogmatist who resolves that nothing is true—to still the soul, than nakedness can render us insensible to cold; or hunger cure its own pangs by saying, 'Go to, now; I have nothing to eat.' The generality of mankind are insensible to these questions only because they imagine, even though it may be falsely, that they possess certainty. They are problems which, whenever there is elevation of mind enough to appreciate their importance, engage the real doubter in a life-long conflict; and to attempt to appease restlessness of such a mind by the old prescriptions—the old quackish Epicurean nostrum of 'Carpe diem,'—'Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow die,'—'We do not know what the morrow may bring—is like attempting to call back the soul from a moral syncope by applying to the nostrils a drop of eau de Cologne. 'Enjoy to-day, we do not know what the morrow will bring!' Why, that is the very thought which poisons to-day. No, a soul of any worth cannot but feel an intense wish for the solution of its doubts, even while it doubts whether they can be solved."
"'Carpe diem' certainly would not be my sole prescription," said
Fellowes; "you have not told me yet what you want."
"No, but I will. The questions on which I want certainty are indeed questions about which philosophers will often argue just to display their vanity, as human vanity will argue about any thing; but they are no sooner felt in their true grandeur, than they absorb the soul."
"Still, what is it you want?"
"I want to know—whence I came; whither I am going. Whether there be, in truth, as so many say there is, a God—a tremendous personality, to whose infinite faculties the 'great' and the 'little' (as we call them) equally vanish—whose universal presence fills all space, in any point of which he exists entire in the amplitude of all his infinite attributes—whose universal government extends even to me, and my fellow-atoms, called men—within whose sheltering embrace even I am not too mean for protection;—whether, if there be such a being, he is truly infinite; or whether this vast machine of the universe may not have developed tendencies or involved consequences which eluded his forethought, and are now beyond even his control;—whether, for this reason, or for some other necessity, such infinite sorrows have been permitted to invade it;—whether, above all, He be propitious or offended with a world in which I feel too surely, in the profound and various misery of man, that his aspects are not all benignant;—how, if he be offended, he is to be reconciled;—whether he is at all accessible, or one to whom the pleasures and the sufferings of the poor child of dust are equally subjects of horrible indifference;—whether, if such Omnipotent Being created the world, he has now abandoned it to be the sport of chance, and I am thus an orphan in the universe;—whether this 'universal frame' be indeed without a mind, and we are, in fact, the only forms of conscious existence;—whether, as the Pantheist declares, the universe itself be God—ever making, never made—the product of an evolution of an infinite series of 'antecedents' and 'consequents'; a God of which—for I cannot say of whom—you and I are bits; perishable fragments of a Divinity, itself imperishable only because there will always be bits of it to perish;—whether, even upon some such supposition, this conscious existence of ours is to be renewed; and, if under what conditions; or whether, when we have finished our little day, no other dawn is to break upon our night;—whether the vale, vale in eternum vale, is really the proper utterance of a breaking heart as it closes the sepulchre on the object of its love."
His voice faltered; and I was confirmed in my suspicions, that some deep, secret sorrow had had to do with his morbid state of mind. In a moment, he resumed:—
"These are the questions, and others like the them, which I have vainly toiled to solve. I, like you, have been rudely driven out of my old beliefs; my early Christian faith has given way to doubt; the little hut on the mountain-side, in which I thought to dwell in pastoral simplicity, has been scattered to the tempest, and I am turned out to the blast without a shelter. I have wandered long and far, but have not found that rest which you tell me is to be obtained. As I examine all other theories, they seem, to me, pressed by at least equal difficulties with that I have abandoned. I cannot make myself contented, as others do, with believing nothing, and yet I have nothing to believe; I have wrestled long and hard with my Titan foes—but not successfully. I have turned to every quarter of the universe in vain; I have interrogated my own soul, but it answers not; I have gazed upon nature, but its many voices speak no articulate language to me; and, more especially, when I gaze upon the bright page of the midnight heavens, those orbs gleam upon me with so cold a light, and amidst so portentous a silence, that I am, with Pascal, terrified at the spectacle of the infinite solitudes—'de ces espaces infinis.' I declare to you that I know nothing in nature so beautiful or so terrible as those mute oracles."
"They are indeed mute," said Fellowes; "but not so that still voice which whispers its oracles within. You have but to look inwards, and you may see, by the direct gaze of 'the spiritual faculty,' bright and clear, those great 'intuitions' of spiritual truth which the gauds and splendors of the external universe can no more illustrate than can the illuminated characters of an old missal;—just as little can any book teach these truths. You have truly said, the stars will shed no light upon them; they, on the contrary, must illumine the stars; I mean, they must themselves be seen before the outward universe can assume intelligible meaning; must utter their voices before any of the phenomena of the external world can have any real significance!"
"How different," said Harrington, "are the experiences of mankind! You well described those internal oracles, if there are indeed such, as whispering their responses; if they utter them at all, it is to me in a whisper so low that I cannot distinctly catch them. Strange paradoxes! the soul speaks, and the soul listens, and the soul cannot tell what the soul says. That is, the soul speaks to itself, and says, 'What have I said?' I assure you that the ear of my soul (if I may so speak) has often ached with intense effort to listen