* * * * *
MY DEAR A----: Your letter has moved me deeply. Yes, we are
almost alone. Of all the dear group that used to gather in the
old school-house, and play upon the common, and stroll along the
river-banks in summer and skate upon its solid surface in winter, you
and I are nearly all that remain. The Southern sea has poor H----;
W----, the leader of our sports, fell (under another name, I think)
with Custer's band in the wild tragedy of Montana; B---- and S----
won their honors, and were buried with them, on the battlefield;
K---- lives a wreck in mind and body. The rest are scattered. The old
homes are all changed; the inmates are gone from them for ever.
And you are changed. No recollections of the past that your letter
has called up have impressed me more sadly than the change you speak
of in yourself. You have lost the faith of your childhood. It is true
you do not speak of it as a loss: you think you have gained by it.
Your early beliefs oppressed you, and you have escaped the burden by
rejecting belief in God and in a future life.
Let me claim the liberty of an old friend--it may be for the last
time, for we shall soon both be away--and ask if you are _sure_ of
your ground. The questions are too momentous, the interests involved
are too great and too lasting, to be risked on an uncertainty. You
are not, indeed, sure that there is no God, but you are sure that no
man can prove that there is; and you are equally certain that there
can be no future state of suffering for any. Your final conclusions
you have reached through the influence of Mr. ----, and you admit
that his hold on you and on others has come largely through his
passionate denials of the doctrine of future retribution. I have no
doubt this is so. But, after all, is this decisive? Are Mr. ----'s
doubts and denials more to be relied on than the positive beliefs
of as intelligent and good men as the world has ever seen? I do not
press this as proof one way or the other, but it is something worth
thinking of before you give up for ever your respect for Christianity
and the Bible.
Your letter has called up memories that will not down at the bidding.
You remember your mother; you remember her life; you remember her
death. The day after her burial we were sitting, you and I, under the
old willow on the bank of the river--it is all before me now--and you
told me how she died with her hand on your head, and how before she
died you promised to meet her again. Was it all a delusion? Did she
go out in final darkness? And was your promise the folly of childhood?
Will you bear with me if I recall another and a later scene? The
days of childhood were behind us. We had drifted apart. You remained
among the old home-scenes; I was making my way among strangers. Then
one went from you who had become dearer to you than a mother. I
have before me a letter that came to me out of the shadows of that
bitter trial; I know you will not misjudge me if I quote its words
now. Thus you wrote: "I am sure such a life cannot have ended; the
possibilities of it cannot yet be finished. That soul, with all its
sweetness and beauty and brightness, cannot have been quenched like
a spark on the ocean.... Her last words were, 'I go with Him who has
brought life and immortality to light, and who has opened the kingdom
of heaven to all believers.'" I would not recall these early views
and faiths unkindly. If they were wrong, of course you are right in
parting with them; but is it certain they were wrong? And in giving
them up have you found something better and more sure to take their
place?
One important point I presume you have not overlooked: whatever
doubts there may be as to the existence of God, _atheism can never be
proved_. No man can ever be sure that there is _not_ a God; he may
deny that the proof of divine existence satisfies _him_, but that is
all he can do. Somewhere in the universe, after all, God may be. No
man has explored all its recesses; none has pierced its limitless
heights; none has threaded all its dark abysses and found that in it
all there is no God. A man must himself have the attributes of God to
know that there is no God. And suppose I cannot prove that there is a
God? If I live as if there were one and it should happen that there
is not, I am safe; I lose nothing. But if I live as if there were no
God and it should come to pass at last that there is, where am I? Of
two untraveled paths, it is wisest to take that which is _known_ to
be safe.
But suppose it to be a question of probabilities. Suppose you have
to choose between an endless succession of finite causes, as a man,
an oak, a flower, a dewdrop--not one of which is adequate to its own
existence--and one infinite, eternal self-existent, almighty and
allwise Cause of all things (and some such choice sooner or later you
must make), which is the better? Which is the more reasonable? If you
think through these questions at all, either you must at last admit a
God or you must make something for yourself that will do the work of
God; and the God you make _must do what actually is done now_; what
he will do hereafter, who can say? Your friend, Mr. ----, tells you
that "all there is is all the God there is"--that "the universe is
all there is or was or will be." This is pantheistic atheism; it is a
mere assertion without a particle of proof; and if true, it can give
us no relief for the future, as I hope to satisfy you.
By the side of this utterance of Mr. ---- let me put the words of
that king in the realm of science, Professor Joseph Henry. They are
found in the last letter that he ever wrote, and may be taken as the
final summing up of all those vast researches that have made his
name the heritage of the world. They are entitled to some weight
as against the statements of men who, if they can follow in his
footsteps at all, must follow afar off. These are his words: "After
all our speculations and an attempt to grapple with the problem of
the universe, the simplest conception which explains and connects
the phenomena is that of the existence of one spiritual Being
infinite in wisdom, in power and all divine perfections." That is,
the simplest and the best explanation of the facts of the universe
is found in the existence of God. This is testimony accepted by the
highest scientific authority both in this country and in Europe. I
do not say that it proves there is a God, but it does prove that
belief in God is consistent with the highest intellectual power. To
disbelieve is no proof of a great mind.
Mr. ---- eulogizes Thomas Paine as one of the greatest and best men
of his age--a man "whose writings carry conviction to the dullest."
Now, Paine, though a bitter enough infidel, as we all know, never so
parted from his reason or his reverence as to deny the existence of
God. He says with a force that, according to Mr. ----, must "carry
conviction to the dullest:" "I know I did not make myself, and yet
I have existence; and by searching into the nature of other things
I find no other thing could make itself, and yet millions of other
things exist; therefore it is that I know by positive conclusions
resulting from this search that there is a power superior to all
these things, and that power is God." Paine believed in God; he
believed in a future life; he believed in the person of Christ, of
whom Mr. ---- so far takes leave of all historic judgment, and even
of all respectable infidel judgments, as to say we do not know that
he ever existed!
This suggests a word in regard to your questions whether I have heard
Mr. ---- and whether he can be fairly answered. I have never heard
him on the subjects of which you speak, but I have read enough, I
think, to judge him fairly. I recognize his brilliant gifts, his
wit, his rhetorical power, but I am surprised that one of your
natural clearness of mind should not see that he deals most unfairly
with the questions of religion. His representation of Christianity
is a caricature, and it takes great charity not to believe it is
an _intentional_ caricature. His treatment of the Scriptures is
inexcusably unfair. If a Christian were to deal with an infidel book
as Mr. ---- deals with the Bible, there would be no bound to the
charges of outrageous misrepresentation and perversion. His abuse
of Christians and Christianity is often more like the raving of a
madman than like the calm judgment of a fair-minded reasoner. What
are we to think of a man who can sit down and deliberately write
and send out to the world such words as these?--"Hundreds, and
thousands, and millions, have lost their reason in contemplating the
monstrous falsehoods of Christianity;" "Nine-tenths of the people in
the penitentiaries are believers;" "The orthodox Christian says that
if he can only save his little soul, if he can barely squeeze into
heaven, ... it matters not to him what becomes of brother or sister,
father or mother, wife or child. He is willing that they should burn
if he can sing." This is enough. But what shall be said of such
ravings? Suppose Mr. ---- finds imperfections in the Church; suppose
he finds a multitude of professed Christians that are not what they
should be, just as Christ has given us reason to expect,--does that
settle the real nature of Christianity? Suppose "nine-tenths of the
people in the penitentiaries" were American citizens,--does that
prove that American citizenship is a bad thing or make it worth while
for a man to spend his life in denouncing our Constitution? Mr. ----
knows there is a very different kind of citizen, and he knows that
these men are in the penitentiary, not because they have kept the
laws of their country, but because they have broken them. So, even if
the monstrous assertion were true that nine-tenths of the occupants
of the penitentiaries are Christian professors, they are there, not
on account of Christianity, but in spite of it. True Christianity
never sent them there, and every honest man knows that. Christianity
is founded on Christ, and the required fruit of it is holiness,
rectitude with man and purity before God. This is a fact that any man
who _wants_ to know the truth can understand by an hour's study of
the teachings of Christ and his apostles.
To your question whether Mr. ---- can be answered, I say deliberately
he has been answered a hundred times. I do not think that in all
his assaults on the Bible he has advanced a respectable argument or
objection that has not been urged and answered again and again long
before he was born. The Christian Church has not the least fear for
herself from his attacks; indeed, she understands them so well, and
has repelled them so often, that she is perhaps too indifferent to
anything he may say. The danger is not to the Church, but to those
_who want to be convinced that the Bible is not true, and who want
to be assured that, however they may live in this life, they have
nothing to fear in a life to come_.