156 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
it inevitably must in active minds, those forms which are part and parcel of that system must share in the recon struction. Hence arises religious doubt. If, as sometimes happens, the intellect in its reconstituted system of ideas repudiates entirely these forms and undertakes by itself to give an account of all reality, the result is a rationalistic phi losophy, which inevitably leaves the deeper cravings of the heart unsatisfied. Such a system cannot long endure. The heart will make its demands heard. On the other hand ; if the heart demands that the forms in which its postulates have been clothed by the intellect shall never be altered, one of two results will inevitably follow either intellectual growth will be arrested, or else the old forms will be filled with a new content of meaning.
The struggle between the head and the heart is one of the most significant phenomena of our times. In some persons their reconcilation is never effected. The most notable ex ample, perhaps, of this refusal of the head and the heart to co-operate was Herbert Spencer. There is a singular pathos in the following words near the end of his Auto biography. After discussing the vastness and the manifold mystery of the universe, and declaring the impotency of the intellect to comprehend it, he adds : " And along with this rises the paralyzing thought what if, of all that is thus incomprehensible to us, there exists no comprehension any where? No wonder that men take refuge in authoritative dogma! . . . Thus religious creeds, which in one way or other, occupy the sphere which rational interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the more, the more it seeks, I have come to regard with sympathy based on com munity of need ; feeling that dissent from them results from inability to accept the solutions offered, joined with a wish that solutions could be found." He was only a distinguished member of that large, and probably growing, community of souls whose hearts require a religious interpretation of the universe, but whose intellectual systems are in disagreement with any such interpretation as has been offered.
�� �
