To a Skeptical World…

“No man adequate to do anything,” said Carlyle, “but is first of all in right earnest about it; what I call a sincere man. I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic . . . He must have truth; truth which he feels to be true. How shall he stand otherwise? . . . Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man’s mind . . . Doubt, truly is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rush out, clutch up the first thing we find, and straightway believe that! All manner of . . . inquiry . . . about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind . . . [But] truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into skepticism, . . . into insincerity; . . . For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so fatal? . . . For Skepticism is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul . . . It seem to me you lay your finger here on the heart of the world’s maladies when you call it a Skeptical World . . . It is out of this . . . that the whole tribe of social pestilences . . . have derived their being . . . Do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched God-forgetting Unbelief . . . ” man lives by believing something . . .”

So said Carlyle, and this we would add: The world, the universe, is a living, moving, ever present evidence of a Creator, an Intelligence beyond any or all of ours. Life cannot be explained away, nor can causes and consequences, nor all of nature’s marvelous manifestations⎯nor man, nor his mind. “If a clock proves the existence of a clockmaker,” said Voltaire, “and the world does not prove the existence of a Supreme Architect, then I consent to be called a fool.” To certain learned Frenchmen who have proved “by all manner of logic that there could not be a God, Napoleon, looking up at the stars, remarked, “Very ingenious, Gentlemen, but who made all that?”

With all this before us, God grant us the blessing of believing, for the world does exist, and so does the universe, and so do we, and so do our loved ones, and life itself. This is no whim or delusion⎯and the reality of all this is reason enough for humility, for goodness, for reverence, for respect; for living earnestly, preparing ourselves fully, for keeping the commandments, and for holding to faith in the future.