Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/254

Rh suit to reason. Reason’s investigations of its own nature are not partisan affairs conducted for the sake of effect; nor does reason seek, like a demagogue, to get a popular “vindication,” but solely to reach the deepest possible insight into its own absolute truth. Hence we refuse utterly to have the following regarded as in any narrower sense an “apology” for any religious truth, since the defensive or apologetic attitude in presence of religious problems is once for all an insult to genuine religion. If there is truth absolute, we desire to know the same, and if we ever get a glimpse of it, doubtless it will need very little apology from us. But meanwhile we propose to doubt fearlessly and thoroughly. If our limits prevent here the proper exhaustive search for all the actual difficulties of the views that we present, still we want to have, and as far as may be to show, the spirit of honest, determined, conscientious skepticism. A clerical friend of the author’s impressed him very much in early youth by the words: “God likes to have us doubt his existence, if we do so sincerely and earnestly.” These words are almost a truism; they surely ought to be a truism. Yet they have been forgotten in many a controversy. Surely if God exists, he knows at least as much about philosophy as any of us do; he has at least as much appreciation for a philosophic problem as we can have. And if his own existence presents a fine philosophic problem, he delights therein at least as much as we do. And he then does not like to see that problem half-heartedly handled by timid, whining, trembling men, who constantly apologize to God because the