DOUBTS ABOUT HIS DOUBTS
In the later years of his life Robert Louis Stevenson was a man of deep and profound faith. It was not always like that, however. Like many young people he rebelled against his upbringing. He was raised in Scotland in a very strict Calvinist home. As a college student he quickly shed his rigid upbringing, which he called “the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on a man,” and adopted a thoroughly sinful lifestyle. He called himself a “youthful atheist.” As he became older, however, he began to have “doubts about his doubts.” He came to see that for all its claim to wisdom, the world had no satisfying answers to the deepest questions of life. Later Robert Louis Stevenson would write, “There is a God who is manifest for those who care to look for him.” Still later he would describe his own religious outlook as a “cast iron faith.”
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