Believing. Horton Davies
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of which Ann Frank was a cruel victim. Anxiety stretches from a foolish worry about, let us say, whether we look respectable at a social function, to the neurotic obsession of a Governor Long that the whole of the administration of the State of Louisiana is in league against him. Assurance ranges from the certainty of love to the intolerable cockiness of the self-made man who worships his maker. These cannot be measured, cannot be predicted but they are really there, grandly real or sordidly real. The belief in God and the balance of faith and the direction they give are every bit as genuine a part of the human enterprise as space satellites.
What I want to concentrate our thoughts on is not just that the scientist has faith or even that his impressive picture of the world is only part of it. It is rather that there are two kinds of skepticism, which I shall call dishonest and honest doubt. I think every man who calls himself an agnostic, that is, one who isn’t sure about God, ought to inquire very seriously whether his doubts are motivated by a desire to know God and serve him (that, I call honest doubt) or whether he secretly hopes that he will find convincing arguments to disprove God, to laugh at other Christians as fools, and thus be left alone to make hay while the sun shines (that, I call dishonest doubt).
I believe that the plague of our age is doubting for doubting’s sake. I would like to quote the words of Katherine Mansfield, an imaginative genius who died young, written in a letter shortly before her death:
I am so sick of all this modern seeking which ends in seeking. Seek by all means. But the text goes on “and ye shall find.” Of course there can be no ultimate finding. There is a kind of ultimate finding by the way which is enough, is sufficient. But these seekers in the looking-glass, these half-female frightened writers of today—you know, they remind me of the green-fly in roses, they are a kind of blight.
The novelist was right: there is a kind of blight in the world of thought which is sentiment, dramatizing oneself as a superior kind of person who prefers wandering and wondering to finding and believing. It was another genius, and scientist, Blaise Pascal who said:
There are only two kinds of people who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all their hearts because they know Him; and those who seek Him with all their hearts because they do not know Him yet.
The difference between dishonest and honest doubt has been superbly dramatised in two novels that appeared about seventy years ago, when the struggle between revelation and scientific reason was at its height. The first is the American novelist, Harold Frederic and his book The damnation of Theron Ware, or Illumination. Its subtitle might be Dishonest Doubt. The hero or villain of the story is a Methodist minister of good intelligence, poor education, and a searing ambition, put down in a backwoods parish among a group of sincere but narrow Christians. The novelist contrasts the venerable elders of Methodism, those giants of the frontier who were men of faith and courage, who lived the frugal, compassionate lives of their Master, and did not know where to lay their heads, circuit riders of Christ. He contrasts them with the conceit and vanity of this ministerial puppy. He finds the morning newspaper more important than the Bible; he eagerly devours the latest rationalist literature and prides himself on his superiority to his unlearned congregation.
As his faith weakens, so does his sense of obligation. It is now his wife who is unworthy of him and he throws her off in a rude approach to Celia, a Titianesque female, who gabbles about the higher “gospel” of the Greeks, which she interprets as the life of the senses, of unrestrained freedom, actually license. I will not “trouble” you with the stages of his fall nor with the irony that it is simple-hearted Methodist layfolk who rescue him from degradation. But when the book ends, we see him taking a train for the State of Washington, imaging the crowds spellbound by the speeches of the future Senator for Washington, arrogant to the last peroration!
The moral is clear: let a man cultivate doubts for their own sake, and however noble his calling, released from the ultimate commitment to God and his neighbor, he is only an intelligent beast. The only point in having a mind, like having a mouth, is to close it on something solid: the meat of the Gospel.
The other novelist, Mrs. Humphry Ward, wrote Robert Elsmere, out of a profound belief that faith becomes firmly based after undergoing the purification of honest doubt. She gives the agonising story of how an Oxford don leaves his college to become the Vicar of a Southern English church, and there, although no man is more assiduous in caring for his parishioners, educating their children, fighting their landlord for improved housing, and praying for them in their sorrows. Yet he finds it impossible to repeat the creed of the church because he cannot accept it or many parts of it. In the end, like the honest man he is, he looks for a church with the image of the purely human Christ, not the eternal Son of God, but the son of man, the model and mirror of compassion. He links himself with a group of Unitarians who are engaged in settlement work in the teeming slums of industrial London. He organizes a new society, a new Company of Jesus.
This was a deeply practical religion; much of it seems shallowly liberal by our own standards of today and in comparison with classical Christianity. But at one point Elsmere showed genius. He transformed the midday meal in the workman’s cottage into a simple sacrament. Let me read you a description of the noon meal in the carpenter’s home:
Inside was a curious sight. The table was spread with the midday meal. Round the table stood four children, the eldest about fourteen and the youngest six or seven. At one end of it stood the carpenter himself in his working apron, brawny . . . bowed a little by his trade. Before him was a plate of bread, and his horny hands were resting on it . . .
Something in the attitude of all concerned reminded me, kept me where I was silent.
The father lifted his right hand.
“The Master said, Do this in remembrance of Me!”
The children stooped for a moment in silence. Then the youngest said slowly, in a little softened cockney voice that touched me extraordinarily, “Jesus, we remember Thee always.” It was the appropriate response.
Robert Elsmere had to rethink the traditional faith, as his honesty required him to do, but he was satisfied with no mere negations or denials.
So my advice is two-fold. First see whether those doubts are honest or dishonest. If they are dishonest, then there is nothing that can be done until God, by some tragedy in your life, shows you the superficiality of materialism. If there is also the least admixture of honest doubt, then the true response is: “Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief.” Build upon the faith you have, use all the means of grace: the Bible as the record of God’s gracious dealings with men, the encouragement of friends who have been humble enough to put their hands in the hand of God, the lives of the great servants of God, and the greatest of all Christian services, which God is to share, the Communion.
the hidden god
Verily Thou art a God that hidest thyself.
—Isaiah 45:15
Belief in God is easy when the sun is shining, but not when the blinds in the house are all drawn. Sorrow, misfortune, pain come and we cry: “Where is God?” He is hidden, or so it seems to us, and we say in despair: “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself.”
We feel this doubly so in war-time. Twenty-five years ago saw the close of a world catastrophe, the Great War, with its ten million dead and its four years of mental and physical agony. Where was God then? Where is God today? Did H. G. Wells speak for the majority when he said: “If I thought there was a God who looked down on battles and death. . . . able to prevent these things . . . I would spit in His empty face”?
I. Why God Hides Himself
(1) His purposes are greater than our imaginings. He is the high and holy One dwelling in light unapproachable. His ways are higher than our ways; his thoughts than our thoughts. God is perfect holiness and we have sinned against the light.
(2) Because of his respect for human personality, he will not thrust himself upon men. If he did, he would undo his own work in us: he would take from us the most precious thing that we have—our freedom of choice and will.
In