It made me feel forlorn and homesick for a while. I like the strength, sincerity, and earnestness which the old faith gave, and I cannot lightly break away from it. I hate the lukewarmness and apathy of many of the more radical faith, and I cannot make up my mind to cast my lot with them. Besides, I have a half fear that, after all, they have not begun, even intellectually, to probe to the bottom these great historic beliefs on which the church has stood for ages. I fear that they treat them too cavalierly, too superficially. I find about as much intolerance among the so-called liberals as among the conservatives. To me sin is not an ailment to be cured with sugared plums. The Puritanism in me rebels at the weakness and flabbiness of many who have left the old faith for a broader one. However much my mind is forced to accept their doctrine, my sympathies abide with the men of moral earnestness who still think it their business to be “saving souls.” To me the doctrine of the Trinity is something more than a mathematical absurdity, as the men of one party say; and, on the other hand, something more than an inscrutable mystery to be accepted without deep philosophic study, as the men of the other party hold. I pity and long to help the poor souls groping for some solution of the religious problems peculiar to our day. There are thousands of them—more than any one knows—inside the fold of the church itself, fed, but not nourished, and famishing for the kind of food which their good pastors know not how to give. How many times I have gone to church bewildered, utterly wretched, my soul crying out for the living God, and listened to a cheap, well-meant discourse against “Ingersoll, Emerson, and all other unbelievers in the inspired Word of God,” with an earnest exhortation to refrain at our peril from “searching into what are the hidden mysteries.” I understood the preacher’s standpoint, poor soul! I respected him and his effort, but oh, how helpless he was to do anything for me who could detect the sophistry and lack of discrimination in all this talk! Oh, if I could help those who have been driven to question the whole of truth, when they thus find out a part of it to have been crude or false! And I pity almost as much the many timid ones who, like myself, are longing to stay in the mother church, to that end being sorely tempted to quibble with creeds, but who find no place either in or out of the church which would exactly express their true religious attitude. How strange all this must seem to you, who used to feel that heaven and earth might fall, but that I should never give up my faith.