1. Thomas was a man of positive temperament, thoughtfulness, and caution: he was unwilling, with a not improper unwillingness, to accept any fact except upon sufficient evidence. Nor indeed do we find any strong condemnation of his attitude from Christ's own lips-certainly not the sharp censure with which, once and again, He had rebuked Peter, James, and John. He does not dismiss him from His presence; He does not tell him that the spirit which inspires his conduct is an unrighteous spirit; He does not even turn upon him a look of sorrowful reproach. On the contrary, as though admitting the naturalness and justice of his demand, He gives the proof required, only adding, as if those piercing eyes were looking out over the centuries to far-distant times, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Thomas's scepticism was due simply to the fact that the evidence offered him was not, in his judgment, satisfactory; when stronger evidence was given, we read that his scepticism at once disappeared.
He is called the doubter because he alone of the eleven Apostles questioned the fact of his Lord's resurrection. But he was the only one who had not seen the risen Christ. For anything we know to the contrary, if he had been present, he would have been convinced; and for anything we know to the contrary, if any one of the others had been absent, that disciple would have been equally sceptical. As it is, none of them had believed the reports of previous appearances. What the women said appeared to them all but idle tales, and the appearance to Peter had only filled the rest with perplexity. It was Christ's appearance to them that convinced the Ten; on the next occasion, Thomas being present, he too was convinced. In all this, then, they seem to have been on a level as to previous unbelief and the belief that came with the first sight of Christ. It may be that Thomas's different position was due only to the accident of circumstance. He was exceptional in not being present. Therefore he was also exceptional in not believing. How much scepticism and even unbelief on which the Church has looked so sternly is really due to some misfortune of environment! how much peaceable acquiescence in established convictions has no merit, because it has been nursed in favourable circumstances that have made it seem quite natural and simple and without any difficulties!
2. The truth is, that doubt is a stream with many sources. There is the doubt of indifference, and there is the doubt of pretentiousness. There is also the doubt of deep earnestness, of jealous affection, of intense agonizing love of truth.
(1) There is the doubt of the indifferent-that which finds its type in the man who said, “What is truth?” That is, who knows? Who cares? What does it matter? That which in strict accuracy is the simple absence of all care, all interest, and all conviction. Such was not the doubt of Thomas.
I remember talking to a nice young fellow in Bethnal Green. “Well, now,” I said, “what do you think about religion?” “Well, Mr. Ingram,” he replied, “to tell you the truth, I never think of it from one end of the year to the other.” He was a Bethnal Green boy, hardly grown up. We cannot blame him; he was never brought up to anything better, but we taught him something better later on. If any of you have given up prayer, and have come to church to-day for the first time perhaps for many years, and long ago gave up your Communion (even supposing you ever came to Communion); if you never kneel down and say a prayer at home, I ask you, brother, in all love, Can you wonder that the face of God has gone farther and farther from you, and that Jesus Christ has become a far-off figure in the distance? and that the Holy Spirit who is so strong to help you, to heal you, to cleanse you, and guide you in life, has less and less power over you every year? and that your conscience now scarcely speaks to you at all? Of course, you doubt; it is the doubt of blank indifference.1 [Note: A. F. W. Ingram, A Mission of the Spirit, 152.]
(2) Then there is shallow scepticism; and you can always tell the shallow sceptic first by his conceit. He is rather proud of being a doubter, he is rather proud of being a little more knowing than other people, he is rather proud of sneering at his brother's or sister's faith. You know him by the almost certain mark that he knows very little about that at which he is sneering. As Bacon so beautifully says, “A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.” The shallow sceptic is irreverent; he does not realize the sanctity of life or the awfulness of death, he does not realize what the issues are; and while he is in that state of shallow scepticism he will not see the light. He may be brought to his knees, by God's mercy, by being face to face with death; he will see, perhaps, his nearest and dearest cut down before his eyes; he will see, perhaps, his wife or his child at the point of death, because God will use almost any means if only He can bring the truth to a soul before it is too late. But the shallow sceptic, as he does not want the light, will not get the light.
It is perfectly true that no true man can really avoid altogether the gravest spiritual issues, and that when he is in contact with these issues, especially when he is dealing with the personal issue of right or wrong for his own will, he begins to realize the meaning of the unseen world in the very sense in which the Christian apostles and evangelists realized it, and then perhaps he knows what religious certainty means. But the meaning and measure of certainty in that region are very different from the meaning and measure of certainty in that world of understanding in which so large a part of the better human life is now passed. And I do not hesitate to say that, quite apart from the intrinsic difficulties of religious questions, one of the chief bewilderments of modern life in relation to religion is this-that men have learnt most of their tests of certainty in a region which is not spiritual at all, and in which certainty hardly involves the inward judgment of the true man, but only, at most, a kind of shadow of the Man_1:1 [Note: R. H. Hutton, Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought, 29.]
(3) But Thomas, to use a phrase of Plato's, “doubted well.” His was the doubt of deep earnestness. He realized what was involved in his doubts: there was not a grain of affectation about him. He was not like the dilettante doubters we sometimes meet to-day, who brush the whole thing lightly aside with the superior air of those who have outlived old-fashioned superstitions; he was in dead earnest. He knew perfectly well that if this Sun set no other sun was likely to rise; he knew perfectly well that if this Man failed him he would never have the heart to trust another; and he was quite aware, in his grim and silent way, that what he doubted was life or death, not only to himself but also to a dying world.
And then, again, Thomas doubted well because he was loyal, not only to Christ but also to the Church. He was found with all the rest of the disciples, in spite of his doubt, at the next meeting: he was not one of those who at the first difficulty fling off their old friends, throw over their Communions, and turn their back on the Church. He had a steadier judgment; he knew there must be difficulties in religion, and, painful as they were, the place where he would be most likely to have them solved would be where he had received so much help and light before; and because he kept with the Church Jesus found His friend in his old place when He came to help him.
Whilst minister of the Evangelical Union Church at Bathgate, Fairbairn went through a spiritual crisis, in which, as he said, “My faith broke down.” In his despair, he went abroad, where he studied for a year, and where he came to realize doubt was not sin, but rather a growing pain of the soul, a means to a wider outlook and a clearer faith.… What he learned in Germany and the change it produced in his relation to the problems of religious thought may best be stated in his own words: “(1) The doubts which had been hidden like secret sins lost their power to harm, and ceased to cause shame. Freedom of expression had taken from them their sting. And with freedom there had come a new personal conviction. So (2) a simple and wonderful thing happened: theology changed from a system doubted to a system believed. But the system believed was not the old system which had been doubted. (3) And so a third and more wonderful thing happened: theology was reborn and with it a new and higher faith. God seemed a nobler and more majestic Being when interpreted through the Son: the Eternal Sonship involved Eternal Fatherhood. Since God had created out of love, He could not so suddenly turn to hate. Since His grace was His glory, He could not and would not use the ill-doing of ignorance or inexperience to justify His dislike. (4) Nor could the old narrow notion which made salvation rather an affair of a future state than of this life survive on the face of those larger ideas. Redemption concerned both the many and the one, the whole as well as the parts, the unity as much as the units. I believed then what I still believe, that the Christ I had learned to know represents the largest and most gracious truth God has ever communicated to man.”1 [Note: W. B. Selbie, The Life of Andrew Martin Fairbairn, 39.]
With Clough this sort of large, half-genial suspense of judgment, that looks upon natural instincts with a sort of loving doubt, and yields with cautious hand a carefully stinted authority to human yearnings in order not wholly to lose a share in the moving forces of life, was unfortunately not supplemented by any confident belief in a Divine answer to those vague yearnings, and consequently his tone is almost always at once sweet and sad. It is saturated with the deep but musical melancholy of such thoughts as the following, whose pathos shows how much more profoundly and deeply Clough thirsted for truth than many of even the most confident of those of us who believe that there is a living water at which to slake our thirst:-
To spend uncounted years of pain,
Again, again, and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here;
To gather facts from far and near,
Upon the mind to hold them clear,
And, knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one's latest breath to fear
The premature result to draw-
Is this the object, end, and law,
And purpose of our being here?2 [Note: R. H. Hutton, Literary Essays, 305.]
3. But the fact remains, says the conventional Christian apologist, that he doubted, and that, then as now, doubt is sinful Is that quite so? We remember with what gentleness and strength Tennyson resisted the same suggestion as it came to him from his sister, who was to have been Arthur Hallam's bride. Read the 96th canto of In Memoriam, especially these lines:
He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone.
It can be readily conceived how a serious student like Flint, possessed of a wealth of knowledge exceptional for his years, with powers of thought equal to his learning, impelled by moral earnestness and with a conscience quick to take offence at the slightest deviation from truth, was bound to come into conflict with the official orthodoxy of his day; and that is what really happened. Before he reached his twentieth year he had to fight his battle of the soul, and he did not conquer without experiencing those mental pangs which have been the lot of all earnest spirits that have passed through similar troubles. What the particular nature of the conflict was, we do not exactly know. He has left no record. But in an address which he delivered to the Young Men's Christian Association, in connection with the East Church, when he was on the eve of leaving Aberdeen, he thus refers to this time of mental conflict:
“Almost ever since I can remember, the great spiritual questions which agitate society, which harass young men most of all, sometimes even under seeming levity of disposition, have been of vital interest to me; and whatever of solid footing in Divine truth I seem to myself to have found has been gained with a struggle and a pain which I thank God devoutly for; so that with the deeper trials of young and earnest spirits I do feel in sympathy through every fibre of my being.”
Now it seems to me that these are words which those who knew Flint in after years, when he was regarded as the “Defender of the Faith,” might well ponder. A tradition had grown up round him which shadowed him forth as one who from earliest years had his feet planted firmly on the foundations of truth, and who had never felt these foundations sinking under him. While many have admired, and others have been grateful for, the masterly way in which he re-establishes the main doctrines of religion, very few were aware that his power was the fruit of a great conflict which raged in his student days, and that the firm land on which he stood had been reached only after struggling through the breakers.1 [Note: D. Macmillan, The Life of Robert Flint, 64.]
When I think of Thomas I always think of an incident of a Methodist, a man with a bright, joyous experience, in the North of England, a man who could shout with gladness:
O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer's praise!
who never had the slightest difficulty in reading “his title clear to mansions in the sky.” He married a wife who had a great deal of difficulty in all these things, and who could not follow him in his Methodist raptures. She was greatly troubled because of her lack of experience, and he was greatly troubled because of her lack of experience and her good character, and he was not able to reconcile the two. She came to die, and when she was dying he was in great distress. He knelt by her bedside and prayed that God would give her some revelation of His love that she might have an experience like his joyous experience. He turned to her and asked her whether she could not leave some testimony behind of God's love, but her only reply was “It's very dark! It's very dark!” The man was in an anguish by her bedside, and pleaded with God that light might come, but she only said, “It's very dark! It's very dark!” He said, “Your character is beautiful. Everybody knows you are better than I am, and I certainly know the joy of the Lord and have experienced His pardoning love. Why is it? Why should He leave you in this dimness and mist and darkness?” but she only replied, “It's very dark!” Then just before the light of life went out altogether, she clasped his hand and said, “It's very dark, but God sometimes puts His children to sleep in the dark, and they wake up in the morning.”2 [Note: J. E. Rattenbury, The Twelve, 200.]
