I

AN AGE OF DOUBT

HERE is one point in which all men resem

TH

ble each other: it is that they are all different. But their differences are not fixed and immutable. They are variable and progressive. Types of character survive or perish, like the forms of animal life.

Thus it comes to pass that underneath all the diversities of individual life, we may discern vaguely the features of a Zeitgeist, a spirit of the time. Generations differ almost as much as the men who compose them. There is a personal equation in every age.

To know this is a necessity for the preacher. Even as the physician must apprehend the idiosyncrasy of his patient, and the teacher must recognize the quality of his pupil, so must the preacher be in touch with his age.

In endeavouring to arrive at this knowledge, contact with the world is of the first consequence. For one who desires to make men and women what they ought to be, nothing can take the place of an acquaintance with men and women as they are.

One means of obtaining this acquaintance is through literature,—not that highly specialized and more or less technical variety of literature which is produced expressly for certain classes of readers, but literature in the broader sense, including contemporary history and criticism, poetry and fiction, popular philosophy and diluted science. This kind of literature is the expression of the Zeitgeist. It is at once a product, and a cause, of the temperament of the age. In it we see not only what certain men have written by way of comment on the movement of the times, but also what a great many men are reading while they move. It expresses, and it creates, a spirit, an attitude of mind. "I do not imagine," says Paul Bourget, "that I am announcing an altogether novel truth in affirming that literature is one of the elements of the ethical life, the most important perhaps; for in the decline, more and more evident, of traditional and local influences, the book is taking its place as the great initiator."

A course in modern novels and poetry might well be made a part of every scheme of preparation for the ministry. The preacher who does not know what his people are reading does not know his people. He will miss the significance of the current talk of society, and even of the

daily comments of the newspapers, (a cheap substitute for conversation,) unless he has the key to it in the tone of popular literature. It is from this source that I have drawn many of the illustrations for this lecture. If they appear unfamiliar or out of place in a theological seminary, I can only say that they seem to me none the less, but perhaps the more, significant and valuable on that account. For I think that one of the causes by which, as John Foster wrote seventy years ago, "Evangelical Religion has been rendered unacceptable to persons of cultivated taste," has been a certain ill-disguised contempt on the part of persons of orthodox opinions for what they are pleased to call, "mere belles-lettres. The preacher who wishes to speak to this age must read many books in order that he may be in a position to make the best use of what Sir Walter Scott called "the one Book." He must keep himself in touch with modern life by studying modern literature, which is one of its essential factors.

I

As soon as we step out of the theological circle into the broad field of general reading we see that we are living in an age of doubt. [1896.] I do not mean to say that this is the only

feature in the physiognomy of the age. It has many other aspects, from any one of which we might pick a name. From the material side, we might call it an age of progress; from the intellectual side, an age of science; from the medical side, an age of hysteria; from the political side, an age of democracy; from the commercial side, an age of advertisement; from the social side, an age of publicomania. But looking at it from the spiritual side, which is the preacher's point of view, and considering that interior life to which every proclamation of a gospel must be addressed, beyond a doubt it stands confessed as a doubting age.

There is a profound and wide-spread unsettlement of soul in regard to fundamental truths of religion, and also in regard to the nature and existence of the so-called spiritual faculties by which alone these truths can be perceived. In its popular manifestations, this unsettlement takes the form of uncertainty rather than of denial, of unbelief rather than of disbelief, of general scepticism rather than of specific infidelity.

It is not merely that particular doctrines, such as the inspiration of the Bible, or the future punishment of the wicked, are attacked and denied. The preacher who concentrates

his attention at these points will fail to realize the gravity of the situation. It is not that a spirit of bitter and mocking atheism, such as Bishop Butler described at the close of the last century, has led people of discernment to set up religion "as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisal for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world." The preacher who takes that view of the case now will be at least seventy years too late. He will fail to understand the serious and pathetic temper of the age.

The questioning spirit of to-day is severe but not bitter, restless but not frivolous; it takes itself very seriously and applies its methods of criticism, of analysis, of dissolution, with a sad courtesy of demeanour, to the deepest and most vital truths of religion, the being of God, the reality of the soul, the possibility of a future life. Everywhere it comes, and everywhere it asks for a reason, in the shape of a positive and scientific demonstration. When one is given, it asks for another, and when another is given, it asks for the reason of the reason. The laws of evidence, the principles of judgment, the witness of history, the testimony of consciousness, -all are called in question. The answers which have been given by religion to the most difficult