and stood for a long time looking down at the water, debating with himself whether he
should jump in and end it all.
Years later, Father told me that the only reason he didn't jump was because of my
mother's deep, abiding, and joyous belief that if we loved God and kept His
commandments everything would come out all right. Mother was right. Everything did
come out all right in the end. Father lived forty-two happy years longer, and died in
1941, at the age of eighty-nine.
During all those years of struggle and heartache, my mother never worried. She took all
her troubles to God in prayer. Every night before we went to bed, Mother would read a
chapter from the Bible; frequently Mother or Father would read these comforting words
of Jesus: "In my Father's house are many mansions. ... I go to prepare a place for you ...
that where I am, there ye may be also." Then we all knelt down before our chairs in that
lonely Missouri farmhouse and prayed for God's love and protection.
When William James was professor of philosophy at Harvard, he said: "Of course, the
sovereign cure for worry is religious faith."
You don't have to go to Harvard to discover that. My mother found that out on a Missouri
farm. Neither floods nor debts nor disaster could suppress her happy, radiant, and
victorious spirit. I can still hear her singing as she worked:
Peace, peace, wonderful peace,
Flowing down from the Father above,
Sweep over my spirit for ever I pray
In fathomless billows of love.
My mother wanted me to devote my life to religious work. I thought seriously of
becoming a foreign missionary. Then I went away to college; and gradually, as the years
passed, a change came over me. I studied biology, science, philosophy, and
comparative religions. I read books on how the Bible was written. I began to question
many of its assertions. I began to doubt many of the narrow doctrines taught by the
country preachers of that day. I was bewildered. Like Walt Whitman, I "felt curious,
abrupt questionings stir within me". I didn't know what to believe. I saw no purpose in
life. I stopped praying. I became an agnostic.
I believed that all life was planless and aimless. I believed that human beings had no
more divine purpose than had the dinosaurs that roamed the earth two hundred million
years ago. I felt that some day the human race would perish-just as the dinosaurs had. I
knew that science taught that the sun was slowly cooling and that when its temperature
fell even ten per cent, no form of life could exist on earth. I sneered at the idea of a
beneficent God who had created man in His own likeness. I believed that the billions
upon billions of suns whirling through black, cold, lifeless space had been created by
blind force. Maybe they had never been created at all. Maybe they existed for ever-just
as time and space have always existed.
Do I profess to know the answers to all these questions now? No. No man has ever
been able to explain the mystery of the universe-the mystery of life. We are surrounded
by mysteries. The operation of your body is a profound mystery. So is the electricity in
your home. So is the flower in the crannied wall. So is the green grass outside your
window. Charles F. Kettering, the guiding genius of General Motors Research
Laboratories, has been giving Antioch College thirty thousand dollars a year out of his
own pocket to try to discover why grass is green. He declares that if we knew how grass