"You Ask Me What Cured Me of Being an Infidel"

ACCORDING to the etymology of his name an infidel is a man who does not believe in God nor in Jesus Christ whom God hath sent. An infidel is an odious name in your ears I know, but I am not to employ that name in any odious sense to-night nor am I to speak to-night about any odious man. I know that there are infidels who are far better men than I am. Indeed, if they were worse men than they are, I would have far more hope than I have of their speedy and entire conversion to faith in God and in their Redeemer. At the same time, while I am not here to cast odium on any unbelieving man, I hold most firmly that every unbelieving man is in a most odious condition of mind and heart and life. And I feel sure the day is fast coming when all our infidels will see and will confess and will flee from the unspeakably odious and impossible position that they have taken up toward God and toward His divine Son, Jesus

Christ. ‘ Wherefore, God hath highly exalted Him; and hath given Him a name which is above every name; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’

‘You ask me what cured me of being an infidel, writes a great believer and a great preacher. And I will give you his answer to that in his own ancient and identical words. “Nov. 14th, 1641. I felt overnight much darkness and unbelief. And next morning I saw this mistake that I was making. This mistake, that I believed what I did believe because I saw it to be agreeable to my limited reason; and so I made my limited reason to be my last resolution of all my doubts. And I began to think how it should be otherwise. So I saw that I was to receive the things that God spake in their agreement with reason indeed; but I was not to make this the last resolution of my doubts, though always one resolution. But, then, when I had seen things to be agreeable to reason, yet I was to look upon God’s testimony of them in Holy Scripture as the last and the chief light and ground of my settlement. Not to believe that such and such things are true because I think I see them at present to be true; but to believe that God sees things more clearly than I see. For if I believe anything to be true because I see it to be true; much more because God sees it to be true, Who sees it better than I do, and Whose word stakes me down and confirms me in the truth of what I there read.’

And again: ‘I did groan under the burden of infidel thoughts, looking up and sighing to the Lord that, if He really existed, as His works and His word did declare Him to exist, He would be pleased to reveal Himself to me by His own beams, and would thus infallibly persuade my heart of His divine existence. Which if He would do, I should account it His greatest mercy to me. And thus it was that after many distressses of mind, such as almost drove me to be mine own executioner, He came between the bridge and the water, and so manifested Himself that I came to see a glory, and a majesty, and a mystery, and a depth in Holy Scripture, which, all taken together, fully persuaded me; a persuasion that is not wholly lost to this day. So much so, that when infidel thoughts come and knock at my door, I send them away with this answer: Why should I question that truth which I have both seen and known in better days?’ And again, May 29th of next year: ‘I saw with a great persuasion that Jesus Christ really 1s, and really tives, and really quickens with His own life all those for whom He died. I saw that God pip five, because He spake to me and quickened me, and did work a divine work in me. He was then the living God to me when I heard His voice and felt His hand; and to want that persuasion and assurance and experience was to be estranged from all life and all peace and all strength in my soul.’

So far deeply experienced Shepard. But to fortify him in his answer to his correspondent and to enlarge and enrich his answer let us go on to put the same question to some other ductoresdubitantiwm and to record their answers. And to give Pascal his well-deserved pre-eminence. ‘ The Gospel to me,’ says that towering spiritual genius, ‘is simply irresistible. Being the man I am; being full of lust, and pride, and envy, and malice, and hatred, and falsehood, and all accumulated and exasperated misery, to me the Gospel of the grace of God, and the redemption of Christ, and the regeneration and sanctification of the Holy Ghost, that Gospel is to me simply irresistible. And I cannot understand why it is not equally irresistible to every mortal man born of woman.’ Let Pascal be read continually by all those men who have mind enough, and heart enough, and sin and misery enough, to understand that masterly man of French letters and of experimental religion.

One who is, to my mind, the greatest of our Scottish experimental divines — and that is saying much — writing on the same subject of unbelief, has this prayer among his private papers: ‘O Lord, if Thou indeed be the Lord, then Thou art almighty, and almighty, surely, to save me. Wilt Thou then condescend to convince me of the reality of Thy divine existence? Wilt Thou give me some sure proof, and this very night, to convince me that there is a God, and that Thou art He, and that all that which Thy Word says about Thee is absolutely true? O Lord, be not too much offended at this my peremptoriness, for I can bear my unbelief about Thee no longer. Determine Thou Thy way Thyself; only, in Thy mercy, hear my prayer. O, give me a sign, and to-night, in my soul that Thou art and that Thou art the Hearer of prayer.’ Could you have believed it, my brethren, that such a great saint as that could be assaulted when so far on in the divine life with atheistical and unbelieving thoughts such as these? But at this point and in this connection, some class-member present will remember Bishop Butler’s appropriate passage which runs thus: ‘The chief temptations of the generality of men are the ordinary motives to injustice or to sensual sin. But there are other men who are without this shallowness of soul; men of a deeper sense as to invisible and eternal things. Now, these rare persons have their temptations set them in the high region of faith, and in the deep region of doubt.’ The profound bishop means that while their appetites and their tempers are the great temptations of most men, the grand problems of natural and revealed and experimental religion are the trials and the triumphs of other men; other men such as Shepard, and Pascal, and Brea, and Bunyan, yes and Bunyan. For you will remember that Bunyan’s pilgrim — who, all the time, is Bunyan himself — was neither assaulted nor was even ry)

approached by Atheist at the beginning of his journey. ‘That enemy of God and man did his best to ruin Bunyan’s soul when he was almost within sight of the celestial city.

To pass by many names of great interest and of great experience and of great power and of great authority, and to come to a name that combines all these elements as no other name has combined them in our day. We find the author of the Grammar of Assent, and the Sermons and the Apologia, and the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in all these publications and indeed in all that he has published, always and everywhere confessing that it is his conscience which keeps him absolutely and completely cured of all atheism and all infidelity. Were this the time and the place the whole hour could be filled up with his all-commanding proofs of the existence of God, and of God’s personal government of all men; all-commanding proofs drawn from the divine nature and the divine judgments of conscience; and all that set forth in a language stately and noble and irresistible almost as the voice of conscience itself. Amid all his changes of Churches and creeds the one thing that cured Dr. Newman of all atheism and all unbelief and kept him all his days near the cross and near the mercy-seat was the overpowering voice of his Maker and Redeemer and Judge speaking to him in his conscience and in his imagination and in his heart; but in his conscience most of all. So that if you had asked him what it was that cured him and kept him from being an infidel he would have answered you that it was his conscience; the all-commanding and the all-overpowering voice of God speaking to him in his conscience. But to come home to ourselves. Do you ask us in this house to-night who are evangelical believers what it was that so cured us of all possibility of our ever being infidels. If you seriously and teachably ask us that, then I will frankly and fully tell you. And first; this has been our frequent and it is still our ever-increasing experience, that the very things which seem to have made some other men infidels, and even atheists, these very same things have ended in making us more resolute and more absolute believers. ‘The greatest sorrows of our lives, the sorest crosses of our lives, the complete shipwreck of all our hopes and expectations in our lives, the great errors, transgressions, and even the alldesolating sins of our lives, the dark providences of God, and the hitherto unanswered prayers of our lives, bad men and bad causes flourishing like the green bay tree, and good men and good causes defeated to death; these things, and things like these, of which this present life of ours is full, have overthrown the faith of many men till they have given themselves up to nothing short of blank atheism. ‘My evidencies and my certainties,’ wrote Halyburton, ‘ were not answerable to the weight I was compelled to lay upon them.’ But by the grace of God to that great man of God, that faith which is always the gift of God came and rescued Halyburton from all — his unbeliefs and uncertainties and transformed him into one of the noblest believers, both intellectually and spiritually, that ever lived the life of faith in old evangelical Scotland. And the same triumphant faith has been given of God to some of ourselves till we are able to say with Paul himself that neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, shall ever separate us from our faith in Christ and from our love to God. And to say with Shepard: Nil tam certum quam quod de dubio certum, that is to say, in his own free translation, ‘ Happy is the man all whose doubtings end in establishments.’ ‘ But,’ he adds, ‘when men settle in scepticism as the last issue of all the debates of their minds, and all the tossings of their hearts, it had been better for such men that they had never been born.”

Then again what Atheist in the Pilgrim’s Progress calls ‘ the tediousness’ of the pilgrimage, that has had a great hand in making some halfin-earnest men doubters and sceptics, if not actual scoffers like Atheist. But the very tediousness of the spiritual life; the very slowness standstillness and even the backslidingness of their sanctification, all that only shuts up some other men the more to what remains of their pilgrimage toward holiness of heart and toward everlasting life. When in their agony they are tempted to say: Doth God know my sufferings of heart, and is there such knowledge with the

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Most High? then they recollect themselves and find the place where this is written, ‘ Why sayest thou that thy way is hid from the Lord, and thy judgment is passed over from thy God. Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that there is no searching of His understanding? Yes; the very tediousness, and slowness, and perplexity, and danger of the Christian life, only make the true people of God to say the more to whom can we go? and to whom can we look? and to whom can we cry? but unto Thee, O my God and Saviour!

Then again do you ask us what it is that has cured us of a cold and a shallow and a superficial faith and has made us evangelical and spiritual and New Testament believers? What could it be but our increasing experience of the depth and the strength and the malignity of our indwelling sin? The sinfulness of our sins, the - corruption of our hearts, and our divinely implanted hunger for holiness — all that has made us to be apostolical and evangelical and spiritual believers. Our unspeakable sinfulness of heart has completely cured us of all merely surface sense of spiritual experience and Gospel holiness and has shut us up to a life of evangelical and experimental faith in Jesus Christ, in His work, and in His word, and in His Spirit for our salvation.

To sum up our answer in one word as to what it is that is curing us ourselves of all our infidelity. Well in one word it is just our faith. Faith, and every day more faith, is our divinely-appointed way of cure. Come and join us then and practise — faith with us at all divine times and in all divine — things. Practise a great faith in God every hour you live; and in His Son your Saviour, and in His Holy Spirit your sanctifier and your comforter. And above all your books keep reading your — Bible; really reading it; secretly and regularly reading it. For your Bible is God’s own Book which He has had written out for all true believers and has put into your hand. And His divine Book has His divine seal set upon it so that it will make all its readers true believers; that is to say all who give God’s own Book its proper oppor- — tunity. Just sit down to it and see. For your

Bible is guaranteed of God to make the most

doubting of you assured and strong believers.

And the most fainting and staggering of you

confirmed believers. Aye and the most corrupt

and polluted of you accepted and sanctified

believers. No man ever became or long remained

an infidel who did full justice to his Bible. And

no believer but grew in grace and in strength and

in holiness who constantly read his Bible, and

who believed what he read in his Bible, and who honestly practised what he believed.