limp uncertainty which gives up without a struggle. It is far and away better than the easy, glib, conventional faith which utters all the great words of religious belief without realizing how much they mean. Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and we do not know the way, but let's go!

Here we are, many of us, perhaps, in the same plight! We do not know exactly what will happen to us on the road here and hereafter, as we make our way through life. All the more important then that we should be walking steadfastly in the best way in sight! We do not know exactly what will be the final outcome of fidelity to duty. All the more important, then, that we act for the best, hope for the best, and be ready to take what comes!

If the horrible outcome predicted by Bertrand Russell and his group of materialists, should turn out to be true and death should end everything, we could not meet it better than to be found doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly in the presence of the highest we see. It is the spirit of Thomas which leads men on all the hard-fought

fields of daily life to pack up their doubts and their troubles in their old kit-bags, and, with eyes front, to say, "Let's go."

"Greatly begin! Though thou have time,

But for a line, be that one line forever sublime—
Not failure, but low aim, is crime."

In the third place this man of moods finally beat his music out-he faced his doubts and slew them. When Thomas said frankly that he could not be lieve in the Resurrection unless he could put his fingers in the print of the nails, Jesus did not meet him, as I said in an earlier paragraph, with censure and impatient scorn for his unbelief. He met him with sympathy, with guidance, with evidence. "Reach hither thy hand," he said, "and be not faithless, but believing."

It is not a happy disposition which craves that sort of proof. Jesus said to him a moment later, "Thomas, thou hast seen and believed-blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed!" There is a higher form of faith than that which rests chiefly upon the evidence of one's fingers.

In that same hour Thomas himself felt that it was so. When the offer was made, there is nothing in the record to indicate that he availed himself of the privilege of putting his fingers in the print of the nails. He looked into the face of Christ and saw there the glory of the Eternal. He heard those words fall from the lips of Christ which were to him the words of One having authority. It was enough. He fell upon his knees and said, "My Lord, my God." Having seen the risen Christ, he felt that he had seen the Father and it sufficed him. By his sense of fellowship with the living Christ he was no more faithless, but believing.

When we see this splendid outcome, we are thankful that there was a doubting Thomas among the apostles. Renan, the French skeptic, said once, "We owe the Resurrection story to Mary Magdalen, a highly emotional woman." How wide of the mark was this hasty judgment! Leaving out of the account the Apostle Paul, who was no intellectual dunce unable to discriminate between fact and fancy; leaving out of the account

all the rest of them, here was a man living eighteen hundred years before Renan was born, saying to himself, "Except I put my fingers into the print of the nails, I will not believe." Study the record and you will be convinced that the religion of Christ had to win its way repeatedly in the face of questioning uncertainty.

The men in the early church were not a lot of credulous simpletons. They were not like a bunch of spiritualists at a seance in a darkened room, believing that they see what they go to see, what they are determined to see, and what, as a matter of fact, they do see in their own minds. The twelve apostles were sturdy, outdoor men, farmers, fishermen, peasants and the like. They had a keen sense of fact; they lived close to the ground and were not excitable nor flighty. Read what they said and study what they did, if you think otherwise. And here among them was one man who was particularly strong on the critical side. He was like the man who said to his friend, who was of a dogmatic turn of mind, "I wish I could be as sure of anything as you seem to be of everything." How much it means, therefore, that

the religion of Jesus won such complete devotion from this man who was a doubter!

He faced his doubts and slew them, not by accepting the dogmatic pronouncement of some external religious authority. He did it on the basis of competent evidence. He had seen the Lord after He was risen from the dead, and that experience changed his entire life. Here the final appeal must always be made! the evidence! The Christian religion must stand or fall upon the ground of a personal experience of those verities which are unseen and eternal.

To the law and to

When Charles Bradlaugh, the well known infidel, was making his attacks upon Christianity in the city of London, he challenged Hugh Price Hughes, a Methodist preacher who was at that time at the head of the West End Mission, to debate with him the truth of the Christian faith. Hugh Price Hughes accepted instantly. He was more than ready to give a reason for the faith that was in him to any one who asked.

In accepting the challenge of Mr. Bradlaugh he said: "The courts, as a rule, in rendering their