Now there are some, and they are many, who would decry the discussion of such a thing as doubt, for they see only danger ahead. Doubt they compare with death or disease, and to dwell upon any of these is idle, unnatural, morbid. Why not let such things alone, and look only to what is pleasant, to what is good and true and beautiful? Then, too, doubt, the confession of doubt, is the royal entrance to philosophy and the risk of an entanglement with philosophy, which seems to them the source of much that is harmful, the essence of all that is impractical, is altogether too great. Doubt for them is even less to be played with than fire, with which already it has been compared here. Again, as others in matters political and industrial, so they in matters intellectual and spiritual resent anything that appears likely in any way to disturb the standing credit of the country. To doubt is just to join the opposition, and the opposition is made up of heretics and agents generally of mere destruction. To treat doubt as real and positively significant, as having any true worth in human experience, as being even a proper object of will, is to stop permanently, not the wheels of commerce and industry, but the wheels of the present life in all its phases. In a word, perhaps one of the words of the hour, Christian Science has not wished to be more inhospitable to the reality of disease than have these believers to the reality and usefulness of doubt. Yet all who feel in this way are short-sighted. Their contentions, like those of their cousins, perhaps [p.003] their country cousins, the Christian Scientists, may have worth for being corrective, but at very best they are only one-sided. In a fable, never in real life, a man might get the smell of burning wood in his house and refuse to recognize the danger because of the inevitable delay to his business which the alarm of fire would involve; but doubt is not less real nor less dangerous, nor even less capable, when under control, of useful applications. Any danger, too, squarely faced is at least half met. Why, then, be so impracticable, so like characters in fables, as to overlook or turn one's back upon the doubt of the day, refusing it a place and a part in real life? The negative things of life can be so only relatively. Death itself cannot possibly be absolute, and doubt, not unlike death, indeed perhaps only one of death's messengers, must be even a gift, or an agent, of the gods. Some things, dangerous when hidden, are wonderfully serviceable, when recognized and controlled. Sometimes men really have entertained angels unawares.