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Updated: May 12, 2025
No waverer could face the terrors of that mighty gathering of infernal powers. And the Nicene age was a time of unsettlement and change, of half-beliefs and wavering superstition, of weakness and unclean frivolity. Above all, society was heathen to an extent we can hardly realise. The two religions were strangely mixed.
The fact that this or that writer speaks of a conception of human nature in which he is ceasing to believe as 'abstract' or 'ideal' may seem to be of merely academic interest. But such half-beliefs produce immense practical effects.
Doubts and wonderings and half-beliefs fill his mind. What if by any shadow of possibility the prediction of the strange Teacher has been fulfilled, that he should return from the dead on the third day? Finding his way to Joseph's garden, Quintus stands by an empty sepulcher. There is a group of wondering visitors near, and among them is one whose inviting face leads Quintus to accost him.
They regard Unitarianism as the next to nothing in its requirement of belief, losing all sight of the fact that even one real belief exceeds, and may be more difficult than, many half-beliefs and hundreds of make-beliefs, and that a Unitarian church made up of those who have discarded all they thought they believed and became Unitarian for its bald negations is to be pitied and must be patiently nurtured.
Half-doubts and half-beliefs crisscrossed and interlaced at every point. One day's doctrine was the next day's error. It was well-nigh impossible to draw a straight line, no matter how short, and take one's stand upon it, and say out boldly I believe, and then add just as boldly I shall keep on believing. After all, though, that was what he professed to do.
In the vast mass of literature which he has bequeathed to us there is no scamped work, and every competent judge has recognised the untiring and conscientious accuracy with which he verified and sifted the minutest fact. His standard of truthfulness was extremely high, and one of his great quarrels with his age was that it was an age of half-beliefs and insincere professions.
And when he had related the circumstance of Father Moran's visit and the storm, he sought to excuse his half-beliefs that these were part of God's providence sent to warn him against leaving his parish. 'Only time can rid us of ideas that have been implanted in us in our youth, and that have grown up in our flesh and in our mind.
The young man sharpened his wits as far as possible for Hester's and his friend's sake, and came presently to the conclusion that it was one of those violent, intermittent half-beliefs which, in the service of hatred and party spirit, can be just as effective and dangerous as any other.
But it was little more than a remote possibility. Distance lends a rosy color of reality to our most absurd imaginings, but, like the haze that tints a far-off landscape, it dissolves upon approach. Now that Rosa was here, in sight of the ruined quinta itself, her hopes and half-beliefs faded.
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