. It was the uprising of
an outraged conscience that made me a rebel against the Churches and
finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on record, because the
progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes against
unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies
of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the
educated conscience and of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm
itself with a loftier ethic and a grander philosophy than its opponent,
it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger
generation.

CHAPTER V.

THE STORM OF DOUBT.

My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of
orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of my time, and
our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a
scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of
Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon,
Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as
I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature
of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the
real meeting and solving of them. For the problem was: Given a good
God, how can He have created mankind, knowing beforehand that the vast
majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given
a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have
inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that
evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as
long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of
the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God
_could_ be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world
unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a
Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery,
or weak enough to be unable to stop it. The old dilemma faced me
incessantly: "If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He
wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not almighty." I racked my
brains for an answer. I searched writings of believers for a clue, but
I found no way of escape. Not yet had any doubt of the existence of
God crossed my mind.

Mr. D