^ We do not say there are no others to help our unbelief. There are books and teachers and pastors and friends who help our unbelief. A Cambridge professor once declared that no student of his ever left the university without being permanently influenced by the study of Butler's Analogy. Walker's Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation has been useful in dissipating doubt and stimulating faith in many a student's life. When Phillips Brooks died, a great company of men rose up to call him blessed, to testify that when, in crises of their lives, they went to him, they found light and leading. If anywhere within your reach there is a man of firm faith, a man like Tennyson's friend who " fought his doubts and gathered strength," one who has faced the spectres of the mind and laid them, one whose faith is refreshing and con- tagious, and who knows how to prove that " the soul has reasons that Eeason cannot know," go to that friend, that teacher, and say, " Help thou mine unbelief." Not to the doubter, to compare your doubts or to confirm them, lest you be like a sick man who seeks advice of fellow-patients in a hospital, but to the believer who has a well-reasoned creed and the capacity to vindicate it, to him go with the request, " Help thou mine unbelief." But the skill of all such men is feeble compared with His to whom, at this or any moment, we may appeal with the absolute cei-tainty that He will speak to us the one word we most need to hear.
0 Thou! unseen by me, that like a child Tries in the night to find its mother's heart. And weeping, wanders only more apart,
Not knowing in the darkness that she smiled —
ST. MARK 219
Thou, all unseen, dost hear my tired cry,
As I, in darkness of a half belief,
Grope for Thy heart, in love and doubt and grief : O Lord ! speak soon to me — " Lo, here am I ! " ^
3. He kept his mind in vital touch with the little that he was already assured of. — ^All wholesome faith, whether religious or otherwise, is a growth, a process of vital expansion from below upward, and the maintenance of that growth is made possible only by a careful observance of the laws of growth. If you have a bud on your rose-bush that you want to blossom, the last device you would think of resorting to would be to detach the bud from the stalk and to toss it into the air. And yet that is precisely what hosts of young men and young women are doing who are not merely questioning, — which is perfectly proper, — but are nipping the fibre of connection that would unite what they do doubt with what they do not doubt ; and so of course their doubts never become faith, cannot become faith. Buds of doubt do not blossom and become conviction when separated from the live stalk of assurance, any more than rose- buds become rose blossoms when cut from the living stalk of the bush. It makes very little difference how small a man's con- viction is :f only it is conviction, and if only he will stand to it and be true to it in his thought and in his life, and make that conviction the basis of his thinking, the support of his inquiring, and the law of his conduct.
^ The heathen philosopher, Plato, said, " My son, many have ere now doubted of the existence of the gods, but no man ever passed from youth to age without at some time or other believing." ^
^ When Horace Bushnell was in college he lost his belief in God as God is usually understood. All that remained to him from his previous conviction was a belief in the abstract principle of right. That was not much of a God, but it was something, and that something he held to. Instead of entangling himself in the intricacies of the darkened realm of mystery in which he could so easily have become enslaved and submerged, and thus letting his splendid career of Christian faith and service be sacrificed, he simply held his ground inside the very small area of assurance remaining to him. Instead of dissipating his religious energies by roaming aimlessly in a world where nothing
^ Margaret Deland. * B. JowetC.
220 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
oJBfered to him a basis of firm support, he kept simply and unswervingly to his confidence in the abstract principle of right, and not simply kept to it, but knelt down and prayed to it. " A dreary prayer," he said it was, but it was a prayer ; it was the best he could do, and it was honest, and, as he afterwards told the students at Yale, the God that he had lost came back to him in his act of trying faithfully and sincerely to worship the small fraction of God that had survived to him.^
*[[ Constrained at the darkest hour to confess humbly that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitude that I would confess His aid before men. A silence as of death was round about me ; it was midnight ; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and worn with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.^