3. But there is a dark side to all this : for just those wider views of things which produce tolerance are apt to produce also a sceptical spirit, which weakens the springs of manly energy. We are not able to split life in two with a hatchet as our fathers did, or to see all white on one side, and all black on the other ; and therefore we are apt to lose the consciousness that there is a real battle between good and evil going on in the world, and find it hard to realize that we are called to take up arms on one side or the other. The complexity of life, the difficulty of seeing our way clearly, the constant discussion which tends to awaken doubt as to every course that can be taken, and the fact that good men are ranged on both sides in almost every controversy — all these things seem to offer excuses to the man who shrinks from the decisive choice that would make him the servant of any one cause or principle, and who prefers, in the old phrase, " to cultivate his garden," that is, to devote his main energies to looking after his own interests, and in other things to drift with the current that is strongest.
^ When you find it difficult to come to a decision, said he, take a sheet of white paper and divide it into two columns. Write in one of these columns all the reasons you have for acting and in the other all the reasons you have for abstaining. As in algebra we cancel similar quantities, strike out the reasons that balance one another, and decide according to the reasons that remain.
424 HALTING BETWEEN TWO OPINIONS
This method is not suited to Serenus, and he never employs it. Serenus would exhaust all the papyrus and all the waxen tablets in the world, he would use up all the reeds of the Nile, and his steel stylus as well, before he would have exhausted the reasons that his subtle intellect would suggest to him, and, finally, he would not decide that any one of them was better or worse than the other.
Is it necessary then to act ? Beyond question it is.^
^ When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free ; and the service it will do you will be twice as good.^
If I lay waste, and wither up with doubt
The blessed fields of Heaven where once my faith
Possessed itself serenely safe from death;
If I deny the things past finding out ;
Or if I orphan my own soul of One
That seemed a Father, and make void the place
Within me where He dwelt in power and grace,
What do I gain by that I have undone?^
4. There is, further, the moral difficulty of taking the un- popular side. The God of this world is custom, and has therefore the majority with him; the followers of the true God are a remnant. In every age there is a remnant, a holy seed, who defy the custom of the world, and cleave to God. It is the remnant, the ten righteous men, the aristocracy of virtue, who save a nation and redeem a time; and they do so in defiance of the many, who cheerfully go to their damnation and refuse to be saved. It is here, again, that this subject is so intensely modern, and teaches eternal truths. The priests of Baal are four hundred ; they have spread their toils so carefully that the people do not want to be redeemed; the force of habit, the dignity of royal sanction, the spells of passion, all are with them; and when that great voice cries, "I, even I only, am left a prophet of the Lord," the people answer not a word. Is not this true still ?
^ Elijah was a man who felt keenly his solitariness in conflict. He felt this specially on Carmel : " I, even I only, am left a
^ Anatole France, On Life and Letters, 12.
' William James. * Williara Dean Howells.
I KINGS XVIII. 21 425
prophet of the Lord ; but Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men." Even in that terrible reaction which he experienced when under the juniper tree he emphasized the same conviction — a mistake, doubtless ; but the mistake of a conscientious man who had already been made to realize keenly his loneliness in the conflict on Carmel. On this occasion we see how the man stands practically alone, for any voice that is lifted up in his defence ; and few can realize how keenly he felt it. The men whom God raises up to stand alone are not men who do not feel it greatly. They are men of delicate touch ; men who readily respond to sympathy, who feel acutely the sting of reproof. Elijah the prophet was one of these ; a man who felt the burden of solitari- ness and the pain of having no human companion who shared his convictions and feelings.^
^ Yet to do anything because others do it, and not because the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is to resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself, and go post-haste to the devil with the greater number. The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer the man, the more will he require this support ; and any positive quality relieves him, by just so much, of this dependence.^