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I READ much these days about skepticism among the young; and young girls often call on me whose frivolous attitude towards spiritual questions troubles me deeply.

What we believe is a serious matter, even if there were no life beyond the grave. Young girls make a great mistake to think that it is clever to doubt everything and assume a cynical outlook on life. They are like foolish virgins carrying lamps without oil to the House of the Next Generation. They are unconsciously jeopardizing the spiritual light which alone can guide themselves and their children through the increasingly difficult days of a changing world.

It is necessary only to listen to the talk of young people to realize that the more serious-minded among them are perplexed as to what to believe and what to reject. The dense materialism of today raises almost insurmountable obstacles to spiritual expansion, it narrows experience and sympathy, and cripples the imagination.

This is very different from doubting dogma and authority. One may doubt constructively and try to make one's thoughts conform to truth and the spiritual needs of the present. There is nothing more harmful to one's development than to sink into a welter of hypocrisy and cant.

I have much more sympathy for those who cannot believe all the circumstances of Jesus's life recorded in the Gospels -- His birth and resurrection and the miracles He wrought -- than for those who believe in all these details and in His teachings, and yet trample them under-foot when they interfere with material gain. The belief in immortality involving the survival of personality and individual recognition, while a source of joy to me, may be a stumbling-block to others. There are those who passionately believe in the Divine ordering of the universe; others that mankind is slowly emerging from the slough of ignorance through human knowledge of good and evil, and onward to ultimate choice of the good. One may believe that by God's Good Grace humanity shall one day become perfect if this faith ennobles one's life. It is then like a golden mesh in the fabric of character. Certainly one should not believe what one cannot understand or live.

To change from one faith to another or from habitual doubt to an earnest attitude towards the problems of the spirit is not easy. Progress towards any new expressions of faith may bring distress to somebody near us, but we must each read the riddle of the universe and answer it in her own way. What is deadly is indifference or insincerity. Youth can be forgiven everything else. Almost everyone has an honest respect for white-hot convictions. It is the lukewarm mind in religious faith that leaves us cold.

Hypocrisy is our national sin. We profess one thing and do another. In fact, our most sacred shibboleths are words of a thousand meanings or meanings of a thousand words. We have acquired a pharisaic morality. More and more we are forgetting the Law of Life. The red tide of crime flows on in the dark places of our cities. The cruel passions that create war are still unrestrained. Divorces are multiplying, child labor, lynching and mob violence remain to dishonor our civilization. Bigotry, racial hatred and political cant still put an appalling distance between us and the really united, progressive nation we can become.

Does not all this prove that young women need to believe genuinely in something great and to live it with all their strength, heart and mind if they wish to see the next generation freer, happier, going forward to higher achievement? Young women here and everywhere need less dogma and fewer observances, more religion of the head and the heart, a stronger social unity to make their country great in the future.

One thing personal religion should never do is to fetter the mind with fears. Fear can take us only a little way in character-forming. The most it can do is to fill life with inhibitions. Positive goodness demands a more adequate motive. Love is the strongest motive between man and God as well as between man and man. When love has become the dominant force of a human life without hypocrisy, without pose or pretense, without false sentimentality, we have found the true religion.