But I have rather wandered from my point. Doubt has now run its course, completed its curriculum. The question is often raised, Does it matter what a man believes? No, not what he believes about the abstract theories or explanations either of philosophy or theology—it will not matter much what he thinks about these abstruse questions; but it matters infinitely and eternally what he thinks about God, and goodness, and life. Ah, there a man's heart-faiths make his life-conduct! It was so with the poet here, when those dark, demon doubts had filled his soul, when his mind was in a ferment, when his heart was pricked and bitter within him, when he heard good men—men that were good once—round him saying, "Does God know?" and when he felt himself in a God-forsaken world, where there was nothing but each man snatching the best he could get, where everything was given over to wickedness and evil. Ah, then, such a man does not stop at theoretical atheism and scepticism! he goes farther. "Surely in vain have I kept my hands clean; I have been a fool to deny myself forbidden joys and pleasures; I have been punished, I have been injured; those that were unscrupulous, and impure, and dishonest have had the best of it; I have done with being a fool; I am going to have my share too." Now doubt has reached its most dangerous point; it is going to hurry into forbidden action. It was at this moment that the recoil came. I will tell you how. If a man has got any heart at all, he can go any length in his own head with his doubts and questions about whether there is a God or a heaven, or whether it is worth while trying to be holy, and pure, and honest; but if he has any heart at all, the moment that he says, "I am going to be pure no longer, but I am going to be foul," then there is something in him that draws him back. He sees himself, or rather he feels, that he is not doing harm to any one with those doubts that are in his own intellect, but the moment he says, "I am going out into the world, in the train, in the town, in the warehouse, and I am going to tell it, right and left, that I count it an old wife's fable that there is a God and heaven, that I count the man an idiot who denies himself any fleshly joy that he can get without coming within the grasp of the law"—I say, if he has any heart at all, he suddenly thinks to himself, "If I say that to my younger brother, if I say that to that innocent maiden, I shall be doing a cruel wrong to the generation of God's people." Oh, there is an eternal, immovable fact! Doubt may have all logic on its side, but doubt and the denial of God and of virtue are the world's damnation. It may be an advantage to a man to cheat and steal, but it cannot be an advantage to his neighbours. Take the worst man in the City, and ask him if he would wish that all goodness, all virtue, all religion should be so crushed out that every man should become a thief, a robber, a burglar. No; he does not want that. Even in the case of an