Have any of you ever known this acutest anguish of the human spirit,--those appalling moments of doubt, when for a moment the whole citadel of truth seems to rock to its foundations,--when the soul becomes a dungeon with grated bars, or in which the light of heaven is transmitted through distorted glass, and the finger of unbelief is pointed inwards, with the old sneer, "Where is the God you were wont to boast of in your day of prosperity? Where is there evidence that one prayer you ever offered has been heard--one blessing you ever supplicated been granted--one evil you ever deprecated been averted or removed? Where one evidence of His hand in your allotments in life? These heavens have never broken silence! Hundreds of years have elapsed since His voice was last heard. Moreover, you have only some old parchment leaves written by converted Pharisees and Galilean fishermen to tell that Deity ever gave audible utterances out of the thick darkness. May not His very _being_ be after all a fiction, a delusion--His Bible a worn-out figment which superstition and priestcraft have successfully palmed upon the world? Or if you do believe in a God and in a written revelation, have you not good reason, at all events, to infer from His adverse dealings that He cares nothing for _you_. He has proved Himself deaf to your cries. Where is the mercy in such an affliction as yours? He has crossed your every scheme, blasted your fairest gourds. His appointments are surely arbitrary. He takes useful lives, and leaves useless ones. He takes the wheat, and leaves the chaff. The chairs he empties are those of the kind and good, the loving and beloved. He leaves the wicked, and proud, and selfish, and profligate. Can there be a God on the earth? Where is the justice and judgment which are 'the habitation of His throne'--where the 'mercy and the truth' that are said to 'go before His face?'"
Such, you may say, are awful imaginations--too awful to speak of. But such there are! It is the horror of great darkness--spirits from the abyss sent to trouble the pools of ungodly thought, and stir them from their depths.
Ye who are thus assaulted, do you ever think, in the midst of these horrible insinuations, of ONE who had to bear the same? Think of that challenge which wrung a spotless human soul in the hour of its deepest anguish--"_He trusted on the Lord that He would deliver him: let Him deliver him, seeing he delighted in Him_." (Ps. xxii. 8.) It was the same taunt in _His_ case as in yours! It was the cruel, poignant sneer, that He had, during all his lifetime of confiding filial love, been trusting to a falsehood,--that if God had really been His Father and He His Son, ten thousands of legions of angels would have been down now by the side of His cross to unbind His cords and set the Victim free!