But while all these views are correct in their affirmations, it is perilous to exalt one element in religious experience lest we slight others of equal moment.  There is danger in being fractionally religious.  No man really finds God until he seeks Him with his whole nature.  Some persons are sentimentally believers and mentally skeptics; they stand at the door of the sanctuary with their hearts in and their heads out.  Writing as an old man, Coleridge said of his youth, “My head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John.”  An unreasoning faith is sure to end in folly; it is a mind all fire without fuel.  A true religious experience, like a coral island, requires both warmth and light in which to rise.  An unintelligent belief is in constant danger of being shattered.  Hardy, in sketching the character of Alec D’Uberville, explains the eclipse of his faith by saying, “Reason had had nothing to do with his conversion, and the drop of logic that Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation.”

Others, at the opposite extreme, are merely convinced without being converted.  They are appealed to by the idea of God, rather than led into actual fellowship of life with Him.  A striking instance is the historian, Edward Gibbon, who, at the age of sixteen, unaided by the arguments of a priest and without the aesthetic enticements of the Mass, was brought by his reading to embrace Roman Catholicism, and had himself baptized by a Jesuit father in June, 1753.  By Christmas of 1754 he had as thoughtfully read himself out of all sympathy with Rome.  He was undoubtedly sincere throughout, but his belief and subsequent unbelief were purely matters of judgment.  The bases of our faith lie deeper than our intelligence.  We reach God by a passionate compulsion.  We seek Him with our reason only because we have already been found of Him in our intuitions.

Still others use their brains busily in their religion, but confine them within carefully restricted limits.  Outside these their faith is an unreasoning assumption.  Their mental activity spends itself on the details of doctrine, while they never try to make clear to themselves the foundations of their faith.  They have keen eyes for theological niceties, but wear orthodox blinders that shut out all disturbing facts.  Cardinal Newman, for example, declared that dogma was the essential ingredient of his faith, and that religion as a mere sentiment is a dream and a mockery.  But he was so afraid of “the all-corroding, all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries” that he placed the safeguard of faith in “a right state of heart,” and refused to trust his mind to think its way through to God.  Martineau justly complained that “his certainties are on the surface, and his uncertainties below.”  We are only safe as believers when, besides keeping the heart clean, we

      press bold to the tether’s end
  Allotted to this life’s intelligence.