Page:From Rome to Rationalism (1896).djvu/5

Rh difficult to make an act of faith in teachers whose own knowledge they could not gauge, and against whom were arrayed some of the deepest and sincerest thinkers of the age—men whose minds were trained in the school of mathematics and physical science, and who had drunk most deeply of the Pierian Spring of our most recent knowledge. A man was born into a world that seethed with religious controversy; scores of conflicting sects claimed his exclusive allegiance, deafening the ear with their mutual anathemas, and the religious problem had become a veritable labyrinth, repulsive to enter.

It is not surprising, then, that thousands in every land are quietly abandoning all hope of finding peace and permanence in any religious establishment, and are devoting themselves to more solid and tangible work in moral and social science—the sciences that deal with those aspects of human life which do unquestionably demand our regulation. Numbers are still struggling in the field of conflict, giving expression, in the melancholy note that marks contemporary fiction and poetry, to the pain and weariness of the barren discussion. Nothing is more persistently depicted in literature than the wrestling of a strong soul with a vanishing belief; nothing, we may infer, touches more deeply the great heart of humanity that loves to see itself reflected in literature. However, the purpose of the following pages is not so much to survey and summarize the results of modern thought in its bearings upon the religious question as to trace out the progress of an individual mind in its long search after truth on religious matters. The story is familiar enough now-a-days, but it seems not unwelcome at any time, and in the writer’s case it would seem to be attended by circumstances that lend it a peculiar interest. It is the history of a mind that has traversed painfully the whole field of religious controversy, having moved from the most dogmatic of existing sects to a purely negative or agnostic attitude; of one, moreover, who has been placed in a particularly advantageous position for surveying the field of controversy, and whose only ambition it was, for years, to become an apologist for the creed he has been forced to abandon. And the change has been wrought, strange to say, almost exclusively from the study of religious evidences in themselves, without the aid of antagonistic writers, whose works are jealously excluded under the narrow-minded despotism of the Church of Rome. A few autobiographical details will perhaps make the position clearer.

The shades of doubt fell upon my mind at the early age of sixteen. Living under the shadow of the Franciscan church at Manchester, I had taken the resolution of becoming a member of the Order of St. Francis, and had just adopted the costume of that fraternity. The quiet atmosphere of the cloister, at least that portion of it which novices breathe, had exerted its peculiar influence over me, flooding my being