VIII.

_THE GRADATIONS OF DOUBT._

PSALM lxxiii.

I am going to ask you to study with me this morning the 73rd Psalm.

Before I read the Psalm I had better tell you what it is about; then you

will follow the line of thought in it with greater ease. The central

faith of the Hebrew religion was that God governs this world according

to the principles of morality, that He is on the side of goodness, and

against wickedness. The facts of life clashed with that dogma of Hebrew

faith. Good men in those old times found it as hard to believe in God

and goodness as we do, and they got just as little, or just as much,

supernatural help as we do. Therefore they could nowhere find an

absolute certainty; they nowhere received from heaven a supernatural and

complete explanation of the enigmas of life. God, because He loved them,

deliberately left them to fight their battle for faith with the actual

facts and the actual difficulties. He left them constantly trying to

find a complete intellectual solution of the problem, and failing to do

that, just as we fail; and so He shut them up to discovering a

resting-place for faith in the heart when they could not get it in the

head. A great many psalms have welled out of men's hearts, just like

fountains away among the hills, and valleys, and slopes. This 73rd Psalm

is brimful of human thoughts, and duties, and longings, pains, and

battles, and victories, just like bits of your life when you were all

alive to the real grandeur of your human existence, when your heart

longed to think loftily of life, and to hold fast to God, and precisely

because your heart was all alive you found it was not easy. I am going

to ask you to follow this man's struggle against doubt, to watch the

steps by which he descended into the valley of real questioning of God's

goodness and of God's government of the world, and then to trace the

steps by which he climbed back again to a hill-top of serene and

tranquil certainty.

I have already indicated to you that I do not think that anywhere in the

Old Testament, or in the New Testament, or in all Christian theology or

philosophy, does there exist a complete demonstration of the fact that

God is good, and that He is on the side of goodness. Whether that is

true or not every intelligent believer will admit that this 73rd Psalm

is no complete theodicy. It will not hold its own as a logical

demonstration that the government of this world is moral or just. The

man's certainty that there is a good God, and that God takes sides with

good men, rests not upon sight, but upon faith; it is a solution of the

heart, not of the head. Thank God! that is the universal law of

religious experience. One thing I want to point out to you at the

beginning, especially to those of you who are thinkers, and who study

the various religions of the world. There is a very simple

characteristic about the fashion in which the problem of life is dealt

with in those Psalms, when we compare them, say, with the very finest of

Greek devotion and Greek religion. In all Greek philosophy there is only

one fixed quantity—that is, the world. The problem of Greek thought is

this: Given the world, the clear, solid, certain fact, to find the God

that made it. They took life as it stood, and from its elements and

components they tried to determine what kind of a Maker this world has

had. Now, at the very outset, all through Hebrew religious thought and

philosophy, you find two fixed quantities. There is the world, but over

against it there is God—God, holy, just, righteous; and therefore, while

the Greek problem was always, Given the world, to construct God, the

Hebrew problem is, Given the world as it exists, and given God as He

exists, can those be reconciled? It is a very simple and striking

contrast. I will tell you the picturesque aspect that it gives to the

two literatures. Greek thought is all philosophical, speculative—great

minds rising back to the First Cause, from this actual world; and this

world being what it is, no wonder that at one time they reached iron

Fate, at another time Materialism, at another time Pantheism, at another

time Manichæism. Hebrew thought does not sway about in that fashion; it

is simply concerned with this—the vindication of God's character; and

there is the striking contrast. In Greek poetry, in all Pagan poetry,

you will find warm-hearted, large-minded men contemplating life, with

all its great wrongs, injustices, pains, sorrows, disappointments, and

then breaking into pity and compassion for men. In Hebrew poetry, in

Hebrew religion, you will everywhere find the same dark aspects of life

fearlessly held up, acknowledged, and confronted; but what do you think

is the supreme pain that breaks in upon the hearts of the Hebrew sages

and seers as they contemplate the world's enigmas? It is anxiety for the

character of God. It is not pity for poor men and women, ground under

the wheels of this earth, but a terribly agonising question, "How can we

defend God and God's goodness when the world is so evil and so dark?"

Ah, you want to prove what the Bible is by its own light, to show that

it has a right to be spoken of as a revelation and as inspired! Do not

go to all the trivial Mediæval theories and doctrines about it; go to

the book itself, and go to the world. It can hold its own, without

claiming anything outside to buttress it up. Set the heart-life in it

against the heart-life of any other religion, and you will see that it

has the blue of God's heaven in it—unsullied, splendid, perfect. Now, I

am going to take this one Psalm—to take one glimpse into that long,

painful chemistry of revelation, as God came into human hearts with pain

and perplexity, with struggle, with triumph, with glory, and made those

hearts know Him, not through explanations, but by His indwelling in

them, His life, His love, His holiness, echoing and throbbing into their

heart life.

I am now tempted to break off here for a moment, and say to you what

always strikes me when I look at that aspect of this revealed, inspired

Bible—that it does seem just possible that the good Christian Church we

belong to in our time is not in quite the right way of thinking about

religious doubt. I am not talking about doubt of the head, the

intellect, and the schools—intellectual fence, that sort of triviality;

let it alone, it is not worth taking notice of. But the real doubt of

any age, the doubt of any man's heart and head—what are we to think of

that? Are we to stamp it as devilish? Are we to denounce it, and

excommunicate it? Why, we might be fighting against God. If I read my

Bible aright, real, genuine, patient struggle for faith means just the

birth-throes of God's revelation of Himself in men's hearts. Now come to

this point, and see what it reveals to you that is sacred, pathetic,

instructive in the heart of a man dead hundreds of years ago. Look into

his heart, and you may learn a great deal about your own heart. The

problem that confronts him is the fact that has always been very evident

in every age, that honesty is not by any means always the best policy,

if by that you mean that it pays you best. I am putting it in homely

language. It is a big question. Do the world's good things go

predominantly to the good men? or do they go to the clever and

unscrupulous men? In the professions is it your honest, truthful man, of

modest merit, that succeeds best, or your humbug, impostor, flatterer,

self-advertiser? In the State, in politics, is it your honest man, that

speaks truths to the people, that is lauded and flattered? or is it your

skilful adventurer? In the City does strict honour make a man's fortune?

or are profits bigger in proportion as a man can wink at things?

Anywhere on the large scale are the virtuous classes the most

prosperous? Are the powers of this world raised up to their lofty

elevation by goodness, or rather in spite of badness? Is God on the side

of goodness? or does He not care? or is He rather on the side of

violence, and wrong, and wickedness? Now, this point is the real

struggle in the poet's heart, to solve that difficulty of life. I am

going to read it to you, giving you the headings of the various parts of

it, the steps of emotion and of thought through which his heart has

passed.

He begins, first of all, with the point at which he ends. This is the

right result of that struggle of doubt and faith within him; he believes

that God is on the side of goodness. But there is a curious little word,

very difficult to reproduce in English, that expresses how the firm

conviction that he has of goodness having God backing it was reached

through painful conflict. "Surely"—yes, after all—"God is good to His

people, good to such as are pure in heart." Then we come to the history

of doubt, the progress of doubt, in the man's soul. That you have in the

first fourteen verses. The first step of it was his recognition of the

fact of prosperous wickedness. It is a little difficult to divide the

Psalm exactly, and I do not give you the divisions that I am choosing as

certainly the precise, original structure of the poem, but roughly they

bring out the outstanding thoughts. The first division would be verses 2

to 5—the fact of prosperous wickedness: "But as for me, my feet were

almost gone; my steps had well-nigh slipped. For I was envious at bad

men—at successful bad men—when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For

they have no barriers, no entanglements; they are never tripped up on to

the time of their death"—that, I think, is the real translation—"but

their success remains firm. They are not in trouble like other men;

neither are they plagued like other men."

That is the first step of doubt. Then comes the second, the effect upon

themselves: "Therefore pride is like a golden chain round their neck;

violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness;

they have more than heart could wish. They scoff, and in wickedness

utter oppression, pour forth oppressive taunt; they speak loftily. They

have set their mouth in the heaven, and their tongue stalketh through

the earth."

Then there is a third step of doubt, the effect upon good men:

"Therefore God's people are prevented that way, and the waters of a full

cup are drained by them. They say, How can God know? and is there

knowledge in the Most High? Behold, these are the wicked; and being

always secure, they heap up wealth."

Then there is the effect on the poet himself: "Surely in vain have I

cleansed my heart, and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day

long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning." You see here the

doubt reaching its last full result.

Then we come to the recoil, the restoration of faith. That also is set

in three steps. The first is the perception of the fact of retribution.

Verse 15: "Had I made up my mind, I will speak thus; behold, I should

have dealt treacherously with the generation of Thy children. When I

thought how I might know this—how to read this riddle—it was too hard

for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God, and considered the last

end of them. Surely Thou didst set them in slippery places; Thou hast

hurled them down to destruction. How are they become a desolation in a

moment! They are utterly consumed with terrors. As a nightmare when one

awaketh, so, O Lord, when Thou awakest Thou dost despise [flout] the

presentment of them."

Then there is the next step, the perception of his own stupidity: "My

mind was in a ferment, and I was pricked in my heart. How brutish I was,

and how ignorant! I was no better than a proud beast before Thee; and I

am continually with Thee, held by Thy right hand."

Then there is the last step, the perception of the immeasurable joy, the

intrinsic superiority, of goodness. "Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and

there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and my

heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for

ever. For, lo, they that are far from Thee shall perish; thou hast

destroyed all them that go straying away from Thee. But it is good for

me to draw near to God: I have made the Lord my refuge, that I may tell

all Thy works."

Now, for our own help and instruction, let us follow, step by step, the

struggle of that good man's heart. Is it evident on the face of things

that goodness has the best of it in this world? Now, I am going to say

to you a thing that perhaps many of you will think little of me for

saying, but I cannot help thinking that the poet exaggerated the actual

facts; and I am quite persuaded that a great many people who think

themselves very wise, and are very wise, at the present day, make far

too much of the external material advantage gained by dishonesty. I am

quite prepared to admit that goodness often keeps a man back from

earthly joy. I am quite prepared to admit that the prizes of this world

go far too much to men that possess no real right to them. There are

endless social wrongs and individual wrongs. Things are not rightly

adjusted, either in the Church or in the world, in professions or in

business. All that is true. Nevertheless, I rather think that the amount

of it is exaggerated. I do not think that is the predominant aspect of

life. It is only when a man is morbid, when existence is pressing too

hard on himself, when he is sharply injured and wronged, that he would

take upon him to say that evil out and out, clearly and without

question, has the best of it. I am talking, of course, of our society

nowadays; but I rather think that in all states of society it could

never have been the case that wickedness absolutely had the best of it.

I will tell you why: Because this world cannot stand without a good deal

of love and a good deal of faith, a good deal of honesty, a good deal of

mutual trust. Why, if business were the utter mass of cheating and

unscrupulosity that some men would have us believe, you would have an

end of all credit, of all business. There must be some brotherliness;

there must be a certain trustworthiness; there must be a considerable

amount of honesty. It is the very salt of the world; it maintains it;

the world would come to an end without it. But all the same, I am

willing to admit that that is the superficial aspect of existence, and

that it is a very staggering blow to men's faith, especially faith that

is inherited from one's father, that is not a man's own; it is a thing

to make a young man's heart bitter; it is a thing to make him hesitate

and doubt whether he ought to hold to the pathway of honour. It is not,

I think, the paramount, the predominant aspect of life, looked at calmly

and dispassionately, quite apart from religious faith, but certainly it

is a very prominent aspect—prominent because it is superficial. Well,

then, that fact of successful wrong-doing is the cause of religious

doubt, but not by any means a very dangerous cause.

We come to the second source of doubt and questioning—an infinitely more

subtle and hazardous one. It is the perception that successful ill-doers

do not seem to be miserable. You know how we are all taught that bad men

have such terribly evil consciences, that harpies are always behind

them, that their hearts are gnawed with dread and anxiety, that they

cannot sleep at night, that remorse haunts them. Not a bit of it. You go

into the world and pick out men who have gained their wealth, who have

wrung it out of the heart's blood of their fellow-men—got it by

downright dishonesty; their eyes stand out with fatness, they roll about

in their carriages, they have splendid houses, and everybody bows down

to them and makes much of them; their faces are wreathed with smiles of

self-satisfaction; you sit at their tables, and they tell you how

successful they have been; they expect you to envy them; they are not

humble and miserable. Then the deadly question comes to you, Where,

then, is God? Ah, one can quite understand God letting the external

world run its own course! One might explain in some way that God allows,

to try men, the prizes of wealth and the joys of life to go to men that

do not deserve them. As a good man once said to me, "It is plain that

God does not think much of money—why, look at the kind of people he

gives it to!" That is so; but the one thing you would believe is this,

that in that strange inner world of the human heart, the mind, the

conscience God could not keep still. If He gives them the external gift,

if He sends them the desire of their flesh, He will send leanness into

their soul. Why do you not see their faces haggard? Why can you not

trace the lines of care? Why does not shame and degradation sit upon the

wealthy man's face who gained his wealth by cheating and lying, by

dishonour and meanness? Oh, they seem so happy, so contented, so

pleased, so proud, so arrogant! Why does their tongue reach up to

heaven, in its pride, and haughtiness, and complacency? Well, you would

think that that is a deadly enough doubt to be gnawing at a good lad's

heart; but there is a still deadlier one. Here you have the deadliest

cause of doubt, when a man, pressed hard by the great fact of prosperous

ill-doing, staggered by that blow, does not see the inner, ethical,

moral vengeance of God stamped on it. He looks round for confirmation to

the good men in the Church; he looks at religious Christian society, he

falls back on it, to let it support him, to let it help him; and what

does he discover when his eyes pierce through and penetrate? In the

heart within him he begins to recognise the hearts of others. Everywhere

the Church is secretly doubting too; good men are longing for a share in

the ill-gotten gain—ay, tampering with their consciences, themselves

turning into the same direction, drinking of the waters of the same cup,

and then some of them, more reckless or more honest, speaking straight

out: "Yes, I was brought up, like you, to believe in virtue, in honesty,

in God, and in goodness; but I have seen throughout that this world is

not governed by a good God. If there is a good God, He does not know or

does not care; He does not step in; it is the wicked that have the best

of it in this world; I am going to take that course." Ah, the moral

perversion, the tainted breath of the base, selfish, greedy,

unscrupulous world! that detected in the heart of his own father, the

good elder, the church member; that detected in his own mother, not

valuing or choosing for the society of her home the honourable, the

pure, the good, the true, but the people with money, and tainted

reputations, and all the rest of it; that is the deadliest thing; that

makes the real doubt, the real unbelief; that carries a lad, not to

books of philosophy—he will never take much harm from them, even if he

has head enough to understand them—but carries him clean away from

religion, into shady company too, and takes the virtue and morality out

of him, making him sell himself for money in life's sacredest

relationships: it is that—the perversion of good. Oh, how much we

Christian men and women have to answer for when we denounce sceptics and

worldlings, the ungodly young men who stop going to church, and all

that! Ay, poor souls, they will have to answer for it! but how much

shall we have to answer for it too? The Church, is it not tainted by

worldliness? Do we go and take the bravest, the most patient, the most

loyal, the most prayerful, the most devout Sunday-school teacher, a

working man, and put him in the chair of our Sunday-school assemblies in

Exeter Hall? No, no; it is not pure goodness. I do not know that we can

help it, but it would be worth while trying that system, instead of the

Church, for want of faith, making so very much of the world, of social

position, and of purse power.

But I have rather wandered from my point. Doubt has now run its course,

completed its curriculum. The question is often raised, Does it matter

what a man believes? No, not what he believes about the abstract

theories or explanations either of philosophy or theology—it will not

matter much what he thinks about these abstruse questions; but it

matters infinitely and eternally what he thinks about God, and goodness,

and life. Ah, there a man's heart-faiths make his life-conduct! It was

so with the poet here, when those dark, demon doubts had filled his

soul, when his mind was in a ferment, when his heart was pricked and

bitter within him, when he heard good men—men that were good once—round

him saying, "Does God know?" and when he felt himself in a God-forsaken

world, where there was nothing but each man snatching the best he could

get, where everything was given over to wickedness and evil. Ah, then,

such a man does not stop at theoretical atheism and scepticism! he goes

farther. "Surely in vain have I kept my hands clean; I have been a fool

to deny myself forbidden joys and pleasures; I have been punished, I

have been injured; those that were unscrupulous, and impure, and

dishonest have had the best of it; I have done with being a fool; I am

going to have my share too." Now doubt has reached its most dangerous

point; it is going to hurry into forbidden action.

It was at this moment that the recoil came. I will tell you how. If a

man has got any heart at all, he can go any length in his own head with

his doubts and questions about whether there is a God or a heaven, or

whether it is worth while trying to be holy, and pure, and honest; but

if he has any heart at all, the moment that he says, "I am going to be

pure no longer, but I am going to be foul," then there is something in

him that draws him back. He sees himself, or rather he feels, that he is

not doing harm to any one with those doubts that are in his own

intellect, but the moment he says, "I am going out into the world, in

the train, in the town, in the warehouse, and I am going to tell it,

right and left, that I count it an old wife's fable that there is a God

and heaven, that I count the man an idiot who denies himself any fleshly

joy that he can get without coming within the grasp of the law"—I say,

if he has any heart at all, he suddenly thinks to himself, "If I say

that to my younger brother, if I say that to that innocent maiden, I

shall be doing a cruel wrong to the generation of God's people." Oh,

there is an eternal, immovable fact! Doubt may have all logic on its

side, but doubt and the denial of God and of virtue are the world's

damnation. It may be an advantage to a man to cheat and steal, but it

cannot be an advantage to his neighbours. Take the worst man in the

City, and ask him if he would wish that all goodness, all virtue, all

religion should be so crushed out that every man should become a thief,

a robber, a burglar. No; he does not want that. Even in the case of an

infidel, if he be a man of fine conscience and fine heart—I have known

such—not for his life would he tell his doubts to a child, not for his

life would he say a word to stop that mother teaching her boy to pray. I

have known such men who told me that they were thankful that the mother

of their children kept on doing it. Yes, that Psalm is far away from our

theoretical theologies or intellectual apologies and the rest of it. See

how intensely human it is—that recognition that doubt held within the

intellect is not very harmful, but let it go out into the world, and it

will do unspeakable mischief; it is that that gives the doubter check.

Ay, and there is reason in it, rationality. When a man recognises that

fact he has got to go farther. If doubt manifestly would harm the world,

if the denial of God, and goodness, and the earth's moral government

would damage human society, then there must be something wrong in the

reasoning that leads up to that denial. The facts cannot be as I have

fancied, or else my inferences are wrong; for never, never can it be

evil to know the truth. Therefore that denial of mine that there is a

good God, or that if there be a God He governs this world by goodness,

must be false. Now all things appear to the man in a new light. Why?

Because he has got up to a great elevation. Suddenly it darts upon him,

"Before, I was looking at this world out of my little self; I judged

everything by its effect upon my own personality, my own life. I was

suffering, and therefore all things must be wrong." What a poor little

aspect that is! Now he has risen up to a point where he stands as God

stands; he looks at the big world out of himself, and he sees that the

doubt, the denial, would destroy all that is best in the world. And he

looks farther; he has reached to God's sanctuary. Now his eyes travel

over wider reaches of human story. Before he was like a man down in a

valley where there is a winding river, and just where he stood the river

seemed to flow in one direction, and he went away and proclaimed to men

that the river ran north. Now he has travelled away up the mountain, and

he is able to look over the whole extent, and he sees that there was a

winding and twisting in the stream, but observes that its great ultimate

course is to the southern seas. The man stands up above this world of

ours, he looks over the great spread of its course and history, and what

is the absolute conclusion? That everywhere in the end immorality has

death in it; that violence, wickedness, selfishness ruin themselves;

that oppressive dynasties have fallen, and corrupt peoples have been

struck down; that sin everywhere has God's vengeance set in it, and ends

in death. Everywhere in the end virtue does triumph and survive,

goodness proves superior. That is a fact which the evolutionist tells

us. This world seeks and reaches the moral, the good, the true, the

noble in intellect, heart, and soul. It was made, the religious man

says, by a good God, and it is making for goodness. Yes; but there comes

another revelation. For the good man says to himself, "Now, how came it

that I could not see that before?" and suddenly an overwhelming shame

falls upon him. "How could I not see that before? Oh, because I was such

a little soul, because I lived in such a despicable, little world! I

failed to see the truth because I was as base as those bad men. What

makes them forsake God and goodness? Because they count earthly gain the

supreme thing. Why was I so bitter against their getting the earthly

gain? Because I counted it the supreme thing. I, a man made in God's

image, a man held by God's hand, a man whose will was being

overshadowed, and led, and guided by God's Spirit, through all was so

ignorant and so brutish that I thought God's best gift that He had to

give to His children was money, or fleshly pleasure, or earthly

adulation. I was no better than a brute beast. To the brute beast God

can give nothing more than meat, and drink, and fleshly sensual delight;

but that a man held in God's hand, loved by God, should have great joy

about these things! Ah, my doubt grew not out of the world's enigmas

alone! it grew out of my own low morals." Now he stands in a new

position. He sees as God sees, and he says to himself, "Ah, let this

world grow as ill as it may; even if it were the case that money, power,

social ambition, earthly rewards did go predominantly to wickedness,

what then? Here am I, a man loving honour, truth, justice, mercy,

purity, God; shall I hesitate for one moment if I must lose all the

world? Can I hesitate for one moment? No; goodness alone, with no

earthly reward, is heaven, and far more precious than all worldly gain."

Why? Because goodness has in it the very breath of God, the throb of His

Spirit, the echo of His heart. The good man has God in him, loving him,

continually with him, he continually with God; and this world lies

beneath him, and death beneath his feet. Ah, the best this world can

give trembles before death and the grave, and breaks and is gone! but in

goodness the human heart clasps God, and doubt is at an end.

Oh, how much our world to-day wants that supreme daring faith in

goodness just for itself, and that close fellowship with God, that

defies all questionings, all doubts, that would stand if all the

evidences about our Gospels and Epistles were swept away, still sure

that God is up there, that God loves men, and that God draws them to

Himself to make them holy, as their Father in heaven is holy!