I want to believe in God, but I can't

Romanes, at the height of his unbelief, describing what it was like to want what he could not hold — the posthumous Thoughts on Religion records his deliberate journey back:

“When at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it, — at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible.”

For Tolstoy, belief did not arrive as a lightning bolt but as slowly as it had left:

“Just as imperceptibly and by degrees as my force of life had waned, and I had arrived at the impossibility of living, at the arrest of life, at the necessity of suicide, just so by degrees and imperceptibly did that force of life return to me.”

Fifteen centuries earlier, Augustine had named the restlessness itself — the most quoted sentence in spiritual autobiography:

“Thou hast prompted him, that he should delight to praise thee, for thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.”

The Japanese convert Kanzo Uchimura spent years trying to believe his way to peace by sheer moral effort — his student diary records the evening the mechanism finally reversed:

“And this “death to sin” can be accomplished, not by looking into my sinful heart, but by looking up to Jesus crucified. I can be more than a conqueror through Him that loved me. The thought was extremely refreshing, and all the burdens of the day were entirely forgotten.”