o a dangerous extent.

No one who has not felt it knows the fearful agony caused by doubt to the
earnestly religious mind. There is in this life no other pain so
horrible. The doubt seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one
steady gleam of happiness "on the other side" that no earthly storm could
obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
that may verily be felt. Fools talk of Atheism as the outcome of foul
life and vicious thought. They, in their shallow heartlessness, their
brainless stupidity, cannot even dimly imagine the anguish of the mere
penumbra of the eclipse of faith, much less the horror of that great
darkness in which the orphaned soul cries out into the infinite
emptiness: "Is it a Devil who has made this world? Are we the sentient
toys of an Almighty Power, who sports with our agony, and whose peals of
awful mocking laughter echo the wailings of our despair?"

VII.

On recovering from that prostrating physical pain, I came to a very
definite decision. I resolved that, whatever might be the result, I would
take each dogma of the Christian religion, and carefully and thoroughly
examine it, so that I should never again say "I believe" where I had not
proved. So, patiently and steadily, I set to work. Four problems chiefly
at this time pressed for solution. I. The eternity of punishment after
death. II. The meaning of "goodness" and "love" as applied to a God who
had made this world with all its evil and its misery. III. The nature of
the atonement of Christ, and the "justice" of God in accepting a
vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious righteousness from the
sinner. IV. The meaning of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the
reconciliation of the perfection of the author with the blunders and the
immoralities of the work.

Maurice's writings now came in for very careful study, and I read also
those of Robertson, of Brighton, and of Stopford Brooke, striving to find
in these some solid ground whereon I might build up a new edifice of
faith. That ground, however, I failed to find; there were poetry, beauty,
enthusiasm, devotion; but there was no rock on which I might take my
stand. Mansel's Bampton lectures on "The Limits of Religious Thought"
deepened and intensified my doubts. His arguments seemed to make
certainty impossible, and I could not suddenly turn round and believe to
order, as he seemed to recommend, because proof was beyond reach. I could