Men and women occupied with the common work of life—who are earning
their bread in the sweat of their brows, and marrying, and bringing up
children, and struggling, and sinning, and repenting—feel that certain
questions which school-men are discussing are somehow their questions.
Not indeed in form, for not one in a thousand of the persons whose
minds are thus disturbed care to make themselves acquainted with the
forms and modes of theological controversies. If they try to do so,
they soon throw them aside with impatience. They feel, “No, it is not
this. We care not what may be said about ideology, or multitudinism,
or evidential views, or cogenogonies. At the bottom of all this we
suspect—nay, we know—there is a deeper strife, a strife about the very
foundations of faith and human life. We want to know from you learned
persons, whether (as we have been told from our infancy) there is a
faith for mankind, for us as well as for you, for the millions of our
own countrymen, and in all Christian and heathen lands, who find living
their lives a sore business, and have need of all the light they can
get to help them.”
It cannot be denied. The sooner we face the fact, the better. This is
the question, and it has to be answered now, by us living Englishmen
and Englishwomen; the deepest question which man has to do with, and
yet—or rather, therefore—one which every toiling man must grapple with,
for the sake of his own honesty, of his own life.