A Negative Creed Unsatisfactory.
THE instinct of skepticism is a little like the instinct of hunting, there is more or less of it in every human being. Many a man enters upon the pursuit, not that he cares for the game—not that he wishes to prove that there is no God; not that he would satisfy himself that he is nothing; going nowhere, but for the enjoyment, the zest of the pursuit. To a brave man the keenest intellectual pleasure comes from what he calls the pursuit of truth—the hunting of truth to its lair; the attempt to measure the ways, and perhaps the thoughts of the first cause. But, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord;” and if the man gets bewildered and lost, and at last seems to himself to be nothing, gone nowhere, he has arrived at a conclusion or a destination that he did not seek to arrive at in the beginning—a conclusion and a destination that is far from being satisfactory. Lives there a skeptic who deep down in his own heart would not believe in the simplest forms of Christianity if he could? The saddest, the most pathetic utterances, are the utterances of men who, with the farthest and subtlest reach of thought, grasp only negatives. A man can no more live on negatives than he can live on stones; a negative creed is the creed of death.