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 æsthetic 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.