back from faith; causes for which God, in His Justice and His Mercy, will make, we may be sure, due allowance. Such are an unhappy education, perhaps by unbelieving parents or guardians, or intimacy with unbelievers of great mental ability, or a constitutional frivolity of judgment, and not unfrequently, though this is little suspected, a morbidly active imagination which cannot acquiesce in the idea of fixed and unalterable truth. Not least among these causes, too, is unconscious ignorance.

Men who reject Christianity often do not know what the case for it really is. They have been familiar with Christian language, with the language of the Bible, it may be, for years; and they mistake this familiarity for real knowledge. They do not reflect upon it, so as to see its harmonies, its ample moral justification, its depths beyond depths of interconnected truth. Living as they do upon the surface, they are impressed by apparent difficulties about it; they ask to put their hands into the print of the nails if they are to receive it. He Who stood before Thomas waits to appear, by His grace, in the centre of their souls. But whether they will adore Him if He does is an anxious question.

Doubt of the truth of Christianity is more common now than it was twenty-five years ago; and there are writers and speakers who would fain persuade themselves and others that, far from being a misfortune, such doubt is a healthy and interesting condition of mind. hear quoted these lines of the Laureate―

"There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds."

We often

Doubt is treated as a symptom of intellectual activity, while faith is assumed to mean stagnation; doubt is described as mental life, faith almost as mental death;

doubt is the herald of progress, faith the symptom of uninquiring adherence to the errors of the past.

My friends, this is not the language of whatever is best and most thoughtful among us. In the early years of manhood, when spirits are buoyant and health is unimpaired, when as yet no dark shadow has fallen across the path of life, and the sun shines so brightly that it seems as if it might shine on for ever, it is possible to sing in these lyrical strains the apotheosis of doubt. But pass a few years of life, till the first great gap has been made by death in the home circle, and the first great heartache has settled on the soul; till some sharp shock of illness has laid bare the frailty of the tenure by which we hold to life, and has opened before the mind's eye the illimitable vistas of that eternity which lies beyond the tomb. Ask yourselves then, whether it is better that the hand which lays hold on the Unseen, on the promises of the Eternal God, on the work of the Crucified, on the grace of His Spirit and His Sacraments, should quiver and tremble, than that it should grasp its Object with a firm and unyielding hold.

No, brethren, doubt is not health, it is disease; it is not strength, it is weakness. It is moral weakness, and it is religious weakness. Moral weakness, because it shivers or paralyzes those great convictions which impel men to act virtuously, and which sustain them during the stress and pain of action. No man acts with decision upon a motive which one half of his mind accepts, while the other questions or rejects it. As St. James says, a man with two souls or minds is unstable in all his ways." He cannot make up his mind, for he has no one mind to make up. And while he is balancing

helplessly between the conflicting views which in their

a St. James i. 8.

equipoise produce the doubt, the time for decisive action passes, and nothing has been done.

Doubt is moral weakness, then; but much more is it religious weakness! Religion is only possible when the soul lays hold upon One on Whom it depends, and to Whom it is, and feels itself to be, bound by the double tie of love and submission. But when the soul's grasp of the Perfect Being is weakened, loosened, if not forfeited, by doubt, then Religion correspondingly dies away, and the soul sinks down from the high contemplation of what is above it, into the embraces of that material world which awaits its fall, in order to complete its degradation. Faith, believe me, is the leverage of our nature; and doubt shatters the lever. Do not let us waste compliments upon what is, after all, only the disease and weakness of our mental constitution; like those savages who make a fetish of the animals or reptiles from whose ravages they suffer. Let us resist, let us conquer it. And if we quote those lines of the Laureate already referred to, and which are not altogether free from a touch of paradox, let us remember that his hero, if he passed through the pain of doubt, yet

"Fought his doubts and gathered strength:
He would not make his judgment blind;

He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length

"To find a stronger faith his own." a

As you leave this Cathedral, you would have seen, in the North-West Chapel, if the light had sufficed, a painted window which represents the subject of to-day; the Incredulity of St. Thomas. That window has been erected within the last year to the memory of the late Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. Mansel; and, as it has seemed to me,

a In Memoriam.

Dean Mansel claims a special place in the thoughts and prayers of those who knelt beside him of old, in this his Cathedral, on St. Thomas's Day. Each of us has his appointed work in life and in the Church of God; and the achievement by which Dean Mansel is best known to the educated world is his application of the principles of the so-termed Philosophy of the Unconditioned to the solution of some difficulties supposed to lie against the claims of Revelation. That particular enterprise, brilliant as it was, roused at the time a storm of controversy, and the discussions to which it gave rise have not yet died away; nor, indeed, considering the enduring interest of the subject for serious thinkers, are they likely to do so. But his greatest work was wider than this, and, we may dare to say, of more certain and absolute value. No man probably in this generation had explored more perfectly the capacities of the human mind, considered as a reasoning instrument, than our late Dean; no man certainly knew better how to turn it to account; as we read him, there is a combination of strength and delicacy in his method of handling abstract argument which marks one of the princes of the world of thought. And yet the truth which he felt most keenly, and which he laboured in a hundred ways to impress upon others around him, was the very limited range of our mental powers when dealing with the vast subjects that surround us; with the heights and depths, the immeasurable and eternal things which form the subject-matter of Religion. He had no patience as a reasoner with the preposterous demands for unattainable kinds of proof in those awful regions, or with the puny and self-confident logic which essays to scale and storm the Throne of Christ, only because it has not yet discovered the measure of its own prowess. And thus he himself could enter the courts of

the Kingdom of Heaven, because he had learnt that the temper of a little child, was not less dictated by right reason than by religion. Eight years have passed since he was laid in his grave; since he entered into that life where no duty is assigned to faith because souls gaze incessantly on faith's Everlasting Object. One by one, each in his turn, we shall follow him; and hereafter, perhaps, in that unending world, some of us will bless the Giver of all good gifts for His servant's work in showing us, during this our earthly pilgrimage, that "they who have not seen, and yet have believed," have learnt what is due to a true estimate of the powers of man's reason, as well as to the authority of the Voice of God.

B