He was a skeptic.  Bred to the profession of medicine and surgery, he became bogged in the depths of materialistic doubt.  The microscope drew his thoughts downward until he could not see beyond second causes.  The soul, the seat of which the scalpel could not find, he feared did not exist.  The action of the brain, like that of the heart and lungs, seemed to him to be functional; and when the organ perished did not its function cease forever?  He doubted the fact of immortality, but did not deny it.  This doubt clouded his life.  He wanted to believe.  His heart rebelled against the negations of materialism, but his intellect was entangled in its meshes.  The Great Question was ever in his thought, and the shadow was ever on his path.  He read much on both sides, and was always ready to talk with any from whom he had reason to hope for new light or a helpful suggestion.  Did he also pray?  We took many long rides and had many long talks together.  Pausing under the shade of a tree on the highway, the hours would slip away while we talked of life and death, and weighed the pros and cons of the mighty hope that we might live again, until the sun would be sinking into the sea behind the Santa Cruz Mountains, whose shadows were creeping over the valley.  He believed in a First Cause.  The marks of design in Nature left in his mind no room to doubt that there was a Designer.

“The structure and adaptations of the horse harnessed to the buggy in which we sit, exhibit the infinite skill of a Creator.”

On this basis I reasoned with him in behalf of all that is precious to Christian faith and hope, trying to show (what I earnestly believe) that, admitting the existence of God, it is illogical to stop short of a belief in revelation and immortality.

The rudest workman would not fling The fragments of his work away, If every useless bit of clay He trod on were a sentient thing.

And does the Wisest Worker take Quick human hearts, instead of stone, And hew and carve them one by one, Nor heed the pangs with which they break?

And more:  if but creation’s waste, Would he have given us sense to yearn For the perfection none can earn, And hope the fuller life to taste?

I think, if we most cease to be, It is cruelty refined To make the instincts of our mind Stretch out toward eternity.

Wherefore I welcome Nature’s cry, As earnest of a life again, Where thought shall never be in vain, And doubt before the light shall fly.

My talks with him were helpful to me if not to him.  In trying to remove his doubts my own faith was confirmed, and my range of thought enlarged.  His reverent spirit left its impress upon mine.

“McCoy is a more religious man than either you or I, Doctor,” said Tod Robinson to me one day in reply to a remark in which I had given expression to my solicitude for my doubting friend.

Yes, strange as it may seem, this man who wrestled with doubts that wrung his soul with intense agony, and walked in darkness under the veil of unbelief; had a healthful influence upon me because the attitude of his soul was that of a reverent inquirer, not that of a scoffer.