BELIEF 157
There is a still larger number who have not repudiated all religious interpretations, leaving their hearts in naked want, but are more or less conscious of lack of harmony between their systems of thought and these interpretations, and yet strive to hold on to both. They can take refuge on neither horn of the dilemma. There is lack of unity in their inner lives. The sense of uncertainty hangs like a discouraging shadow over their mental life, not wholly par alyzing but relaxing the nerve of religious belief. Their mental equilibrium, so far as religion is concerned, is very unstable. Religious belief has a very insecure support in in tellectual forms. It stands like a tree clinging with a few roots to the bank of the stream whose waters have nearly deprived it of sustaining earth.
As preachers we must face the immensely significant fact that we are living in an era of doubt. The age is dynamic, changeful. Modes of life are constantly and rapidly chang ing; so are points of view. New discoveries are made al most every year, some of them seeming to call for profound alterations in our conceptions of the world. Radical the ories are ever and anon propounded, and some of them with apparent foundation in facts. No sooner are funda mental questions supposed to be settled than they are re opened. Men s heads grow dizzy. Nor is it possible to foresee a time when it will be otherwise. Rather the tumult of intellectual change seems on the increase. But in the meantime the instinctive hunger of the soul abides. How shall we find a way to keep secure the postulates of the heart and harmonize them with the conclusions of the intellect? We cannot afford to set ourselves against the increase of knowledge or the process of intellectual reconstruction. That would stultify us and would not preserve our vital as surance of the essential spirituality of the universe.
But before we proceed to consider the relation of the preacher to the religious doubt of this age, we should note the fact that there is a species of doubt which originates in personal inclinations. Feeling may generate doubt as well
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