There exists a very touching and remarkable book by Sir Francis Younghusband called “Within.” [Williams and Norgate, 1912.] It is the confession of a man who lived with a complete confidence in Providence until he was already well advanced in years.  He went through battles and campaigns, he filled positions of great honour and responsibility, he saw much of the life of men, without altogether losing his faith.  The loss of a child, an Indian famine, could shake it but not overthrow it.  Then coming back one day from some races in France, he was knocked down by an automobile and hurt very cruelly.  He suffered terribly in body and mind.  His sufferings caused much suffering to others.  He did his utmost to see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a fine essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he could not do so.  His confidence in the benevolent intervention of God was altogether destroyed.  His book tells of this shattering, and how labouriously he reconstructed his religion upon less confident lines.  It is a book typical of an age and of a very English sort of mind, a book well worth reading.

That he came to a full sense of the true God cannot be asserted, but how near he came to God, let one quotation witness.

“The existence of an outside Providence,” he writes, “who created us, who watches over us, and who guides our lives like a Merciful Father, we have found impossible longer to believe in.  But of the existence of a Holy Spirit radiating upward through all animate beings, and finding its fullest expression, in man in love, and in the flowers in beauty, we can be as certain as of anything in the world.  This fiery spiritual impulsion at the centre and the source of things, ever burning in us, is the supremely important factor in our existence.  It does not always attain to light.  In many directions it fails; the conditions are too hard and it is utterly blocked.  In others it only partially succeeds.  But in a few it bursts forth into radiant light.  There are few who in some heavenly moment of their lives have not been conscious of its presence.  We may not be able to give it outward expression, but we know that it is there.” . . .

God does not guide our feet.  He is no sedulous governess restraining and correcting the wayward steps of men.  If you would fly into the air, there is no God to bank your aeroplane correctly for you or keep an ill-tended engine going; if you would cross a glacier, no God nor angel guides your steps amidst the slippery places.  He will not even mind your innocent children for you if you leave them before an unguarded fire.  Cherish no delusions; for yourself and others you challenge danger and chance on your own strength; no talisman, no God, can help you or those you care for.  Nothing of such things will God do; it is an idle dream.  But God will be with you nevertheless.  In the reeling aeroplane or the dark ice-cave God will be your courage.  Though you suffer or are killed, it is not an end.  He will be with you as you face death; he will die with you as he has died already countless myriads of brave deaths.  He will come so close to you that at the last you will not know whether it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be swallowed up in his victory.