DOUBTING THOMAS!

Lake County Mail, Issue 30, 17 December 1947, Page 4

DOUBTING THOMAS!

The expression which is the title to_ this article conies to us from the fact that on the first Easter Day one of the eleven apostles doubted that our Lord had risen from the dead. You can read the story in the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of St. John. The apostle’s nam' 1 was Thomas. For three years he had been a constant companion of our Lord, but he had been so shocked and shaken he thought the bottom had fallen out of his life on Good Friday when they crucified Jesus Christ, that he could do nothing but mope. He did not find is possible to mix with others, and he missed the opportunity of being present when bur Lord revealed Himself to the apostles. He would not accept hearsay evidence; he must see Him for himself. He did a week later, and fell at Christ’s feet in humble adoration! —“ My Lord and my God.” Like Tomas, there are some honest 1 doubters in tthe world today—men and women who want to believe in Christ, but the news is “ too good to be true! ” Yes, they study the Christian Gospel, they are willing and do try to carry out the ethical commands of Christ, but they need some visibles proof that what they have heard is \ true. So long as they persevere they will find Christ, and He will say to them as He said to St. Thomas, “Be not faithless, but believing.” Time and again, at the turn of the century, there were scientists who put forward theories and tried to persuade people that Christianity and the Bible was disproved by science, but time and again these same scientists came to a knowledge and faith in Christ through their investigations. To quote one modern example, C. S. Lewis, a don of Oxford, was an atheist, but he found Christ in and through the moral law, and now uses his many talents to spread Christianity, Saul, of Tarus, found it difficult to believe, and he was antagonistic to the Gospel, until he found Christ on the road to Damascus and became the greatest missionary of the Gospel to the Heathen races of the then known world. People to-day crave for materialistic proofs of spiritual truths. I do not deny that material things point to Christ and lead up to Christ and belief in Him, as reason leads on to, faith, but two worlds are ours, and the material, is of, lower order than the spiritual. Many people would sooner die than think, and some of them do. We must reason out our faith, we must study the grounds for our belief. Not only must we be gentle as doves, but also as wise as serpents. God has given us brains, let us use them, and we will find that all things point to God. When a person says “ I don’t believe,” it generally means that he won’t believe because he will not think for himself. He takes the immature and unproved theories,. of Darwin for example, and „says, “ That’s what I think,” without studying the life of Darwin or the more mature and later developments of his theory. It is like taking a text out of the Bible and proving one’s own pet theories from it, ignoring the rest. That is just what Bishop Barnes has done, or tried to do. He has his theory and makes his Bible to suit his theories. If there is anything in the Bible that he thinks might contradict his theories, he says that it is not authentic. I have a lot of time for the “Honest doubting Thomas,” who really tries to study and reason things out for himself—l know that he will come to a full faith in God. What is so prevalent is the superficial doubting Thomas, who is so slothful that he never bothers to think or study what he believes and why. Which are you? PHILIP C. WILLIAMS.