In the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark it is related how a man brought unto Jesus his son who was possessed by a dumb spirit, and wheresoever the spirit took him it tore him, causing him to foam and gnash his teeth and pine away, wherefore he sought to bring him to Jesus that he might cure him.  And the Master, impatient of those who sought only for signs and wonders, exclaimed:  “O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me” (ver. 19), and they brought him unto him.  And when the Master saw him wallowing on the ground, he asked his father how long it was ago since this had come unto him and the father replied that it was since he was & child.  And Jesus said unto him:  “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth” (ver. 23).  And then the father of the epileptic or demoniac uttered these pregnant and immortal words:  “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!”—­Pisteyo, kyrie, boethei te hapistia mou (ver. 24).

“Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!” A contradiction seemingly, for if he believes, if he trusts, how is it that he beseeches the Lord to help his lack of trust?  Nevertheless, it is this contradiction that gives to the heart’s cry of the father of the demoniac its most profound human value.  His faith is a faith that is based upon incertitude.  Because he believes—­that is to say, because he wishes to believe, because he has need that his son should be cured—­he beseeches the Lord to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effected.  Of such kind is human faith; of such kind was the heroic faith that Sancho Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quijote de la Mancha, as I think I have shown in my Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho; a faith based upon incertitude, upon doubt.  Sancho Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a true man, and he was not stupid, for only if he had been stupid would he have believed, without a shadow of doubt, in the follies of his master.  And his master himself did not believe in them without a shadow of doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid.  He was at heart a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my above-mentioned book.  And because he was a man of an heroical despair, the hero of that inward and resigned despair, he stands as the eternal exemplar of every man whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire.  Our Lord Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is based upon uncertainty, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts his own reason.

Tormented by torturing doubts, August Hermann Francke resolved to call upon God, a God in whom he did not believe, or rather in whom he believed that he did not believe, imploring Him to take pity upon him, upon the poor pietist Francke, if perchance He really existed.[34] And from a similar state of mind came the inspiration of the sonnet entitled “The Atheist’s Prayer,” which is included in my Rosario de Sonetos Liricos, and closes with these lines: