The following is the testimony of B.H. Carroll who turned from the Christian faith of his youth to infidelity and found therein nothing but emptiness: “In the hour of my darkness I turned unreservedly to infidelity. This time I brought it a broken heart and a disappointed life, asking for light and peace and rest. It was now no curious speculation; no tentative intellectual examination. It was a stricken soul, tenderly and anxiously and earnestly seeking light. ... I brought a broken and bleeding, but honest heart to every reputed oracle of infidelity. I did not ask life or fame or pleasure. I merely asked light to shine on the path of right. Once more I viewed the anti-Christian philosophies, no longer to admire them in what they destroyed, but to inquire what they built up, what they offered to a hungry heart and a blasted life. There now came to me a revelation as awful as when Mokanna, in Moore’s ‘Lalla Rookh,’ lifted his veil for Zelica. Why had I never seen it before? How could I have been blind to it? These philosophies, one and all, were mere negations. They were destructive, but not constructive. They overturned and overturned and overturned; but, as my soul liveth, they built up nothing under the whole heaven in the place of what they destroyed. I say nothing; I mean nothing. To the unstricken, curious soul, they are as beautiful as the aurora borealis, shining on arctic icebergs. But to me they warmed nothing and melted nothing. No flowers bloomed and no fruit ripened under their cheerless beams. They looked down on my bleeding heart as the cold, distant, pitiless stars have ever looked down on all human suffering. Whoever, in his hour of real need, makes abstract philosophy his pillow, makes cold, hard granite his pillow. Whoever looks trustingly into any of its false faces, looks into the face of a Medusa, and is turned to stone. They are all wells without water, and clouds without rain. ... a cloud without rain is any form of infidelity to the soul in its hour of need. Who then can conjure by the name of Voltaire? Of what avail in that hour is Epicurus or Zeno, Huxley or Darwin?” (excerpted from B.H. Carroll, “My Infidelity and What Became of It,” Sermons and Life Sketch, 1893). (Friday Church News Notes, September 28, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, [email protected], 866-295-4143) Comments are closed.
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