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.
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