WHATEVER else may be recorded of the period through which religious thought is now passing, it is sure to be referred to as an age of skepticism. Never before in all the Christian centuries have things both secular and sacred been subjected to such ungloved investigation. It is a time when neither age, nor dignity, nor traditional authority is spared, and the resulting clamor and confusion may well alarm those who are standing for undemonstrated propositions.
An enumeration of the causes of this skepticism would certainly include impatience with the restraints of the moral law, the discontent of material sense under the rebuke of the ideal. It would also include the self-justification of ignoble instincts, the impulses of the caviler and the cynic, the identification of religious faith with the statements of religious dogma, and the inconsistency and unworthiness of the lives of professed Christians. The religious doubt which results from all these things is indeed an enemy of mankind, for it leads to negation, inaction, unprogressiveness, unspirituality, death. It is that "cold, monotonous surf of unbelief" which is mentally debilitating and altogether profitless, and it makes good the old-time saying, "'Tis doubt that's damned the world."
On the other hand, it is a most interesting fact that history's every great intellectual, moral, and religious advance has been preceded by a period of so-called "irreverent questioning," an era when the teaching of the long honored has not only been questioned but resisted, and it is to this relation of the skepticism which stimulates analytical inquiry, to intellectual and spiritual progress, that Macaulay undoubtedly refers when he says in his celebrated essay on Lord Bacon, "The true philosophical temperament may, we think, be described in four words, Much hope, little faith; a disposition to believe that anything, however extraordinary, may be done; an indisposition to believe that anything extraordinary has been done."
