I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial production; I see some who are extravagant and yet contemptible creatures of luxury, and some leading lives of shame and indignity; . . . I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers, martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility, fills me with a passionate desire to end waste, to create order. (p. 99.)
But why, we ask, should Mr. Wells feel this passionate desire, if all the failures and uglinesses of life are "necessary and important"? How, on this assumption, are existing social ills to be remedied—nay, whyshouldthey be remedied, why should they be stigmatised as ills, seeing that "everything is right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a mark of "unbelief."
Mr. Wells, however, while his influence is a very considerable one, utters his teaching from outside the Christian Church, and very properly disavows the Christian name; what must give us pause is to find the monistic ethics being preached and taught by official exponents of the Christian religion. What,e.g., can we think of a statement like the following, which we quote from the columns of a religious journal?
There are people who think it is an evidence of superior Culture to show themselves pained by certain things; but it is not really that; they are pained because they are not cultured enough, or in the right way. . .
Nothing is good or illBut thinking makes it so.
They think it desirable to dislike things because they dislike them; if they thought it desirable not to dislike them, they would not dislike them.
Again, no one will accuse this writer of want of frankness; according to him, there is simply no such thing as objective evil—acts and individuals have no moral qualities or characters, but are such as we think them, and our business is so to think of them that they will not pain us. {60} If we only knew aright, we should not regard anything as bad. If we are pained by the thought of fifty thousand hungry children in London elementary schools, or by the condition of Regent Street at night, it is because we are not "cultured" enough—we have not the rightgnosis. When we reflect that anyone who consistently believes that "nothing is good or ill, but thinking makes it so," will inevitably, first or last, apply that comforting maxim to his own acts, we can see in what direction the ethics of Monism—in reality a return to the ultra-subjectivism of the Sophists, who made man the measure of all things—are likely to lead men. And yet, if the monistic presuppositions are valid—if the universe in all its phases expresses only one will—we do not see how these conclusions can be repelled.
But it is, perhaps, our last illustration, drawn from yet another writer of the same school, which will exhibit both the teaching under discussion and its practical dangers in the clearest light. We are told that—
There is no will that is not God's will. I do not mean that yours is not real, or that any man's is not real, but I do mean that nothing can happen to any of God's children—no matter how evil the intention of the person who does it, or how seemingly meaningless the calamity that causes it—which is not in some way the sacrament of God's love to us, and His call upon our highest energies. In a true and real sense, therefore, it is God's own doing and meant for our greater glory; . . . I believe in the infinitude of wisdom and love;there is nothing else.
{61}
Those who will take the moderate trouble of translating these words from the abstract into the concrete will need no further demonstration of the moral implications of this type of Monism. "There is no will"—not even the most brutalised or the most debauched—"that is not God's will." "Nothing can happen to any of God's children"—say, to the natives of the Congo or to a Jewish community during a Russianpogrom—but is God's call upon their highest energies: wherefore they ought, assuredly, to be thankful to King Leopold's emissaries and the Tsar's faithful Black Hundreds! But let us apply this thesis to yet another case, which will bring out its full character: if an English girl—one of God's children—is snared away by a ruffian, under pretext of honest employment, to some Continental hell, then we are to understand that the physical and moral ruin which awaits the victim is "in some way the sacrament of God's love" to her—"in a true and real sense it is God's own doing," and meant for her greater glory! We have no hesitation in saying that such teaching strikes us as fraught with infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love;there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there is a great deal else—sin, and shame, and remorse, and heartbreak, and despair; against the first of which we need to be warned, in order that we may escape the rest.
We are quite prepared to be told that our anxieties are groundless, because "no one will ever draw such inferences as these." To this we reply, firstly, that these are the logical and legitimate inferences from the principles enunciated; and secondly, that we do not at all share the particular kind of optimism which trusts that good luck will prevent the application of these theories to practical life. We are living in an age of wide-spread intellectual unsettlement, an age presenting the difficult problem of a vast half-educated public, ready to fall an easy prey to all manner of specious sophistries, especially when they are dressed up in the garb of a pseudo-mysticism; we must above all remember that human nature is habitually prone to welcome whatever will serve as an excuse for throwing off the irksome restraints of moral discipline. That is why we repeat that the one real danger religion has to face to-day is the danger arising from the spread of a false philosophy, whose tenets are ultimately incompatible with Christian morals. The worst heresies are moral {63} heresies; and of the views we have been discussing we say roundly that their falseness is sufficiently proved by their ethical implications. "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; therefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Against all the insidious attempts that are made to-day to minimise or explain away moral evil—attempts with which we shall deal in greater detail at a later stage—we have to reaffirm the reality and exceeding sinfulness of sin; more particularly, in combating the preposterous notion of man's oneness with God as something already realised, we have to insist with renewed emphasis that salvation, so far from being self-understood, is a prize only to be won by a hard struggle, nor shut the door upon the dread possibility of that prize being missed. There are perhaps few truths to which it is more desirable that we should pay renewed attention than that expressed in the saying, "When belief waxes unsound, practice becomes uncertain." Certainly, the ethics of Monism supply a case in point.
{64}
When Tennyson, inLocksley Hall, wrote the line declaring that "the individual withers and the world is more and more," he might have been inditing a prophecy summing up those modern tendencies which have engaged our attention in preceding chapters. And there are perhaps few more important questions before us to-day than this—whether Tennyson's prophecy is to be fulfilled, whether the individual is to be allowed to "wither," and the world to become more and more. There are those who hold that such a consummation is devoutly to be wished; there are those who regard any movement making in such a direction with something more than suspicion.
Let us say at once that in discussing the status of the individual, we are not referring—at least, not directly—to the struggle between Individualism and Socialism. We know that individualists express the fear that under a socialistrégimethere would be an end to individual initiative, while socialists retort that the chief sin of the competitive system is {65} that it crushes and destroys individuality; but between the contentions of these rival schools of economics we are not attempting to adjudicate. Perhaps we cannot better indicate the scope of our subject than by quoting from two recent theological works, written from such widely differing points of view as Professor Peake'sChristianity: Its Nature and its Truth, and Professor Bousset'sThe Faith of a Modern Protestant:—
"It is only in it"—viz., in Christianity—says the learned Primitive Methodist theologian, "that the individual has received his true place. In antiquity the worth of the individual was greatly under-estimated; he was unduly subordinated to the community. But the Christian religion, by insisting on the infinite value of each human soul, and by asserting the greatness of its destiny, supplied an immense incentive to the attainment by each of the highest within reach. The doctrine of the worth of man is, to all who accept it, a powerful stimulus in the struggle to a fuller and deeper life. An interest in mankind in the mass is compatible with heartless indifference to the lot of individuals" (p. 88).
"The Gospel," declares the Göttingen modernist, "announces a God who seeks and desires above all else the individual human soul. It unites, in a security and closeness hitherto unknown, belief in God with the importance of the individual human life. It {66} is the religion of religious individualism raised to its highest point." (p. 36).
Such concurrence of testimony from two such different quarters is as remarkable as it is significant; and this brings us to our point. The question with which we are confronted to-day, and which our civilisation must either answer aright or perish, is not whether an individualist or a socialist state would be more conducive to the individual's self-realisation, but whether Christianity is right or wrong in its doctrine of the individual's paramount importance. The issue, as we shall try to show, lies between Christianity on the one hand and Monism on the other. From the Christian point of view the individual matters supremely; from that of Monism the beginning of wisdom is that the individual should recognise and acquiesce in his utter insignificance.
As in our last chapter we glanced at the monistic ethics, so in the present one we propose to inquire briefly first into the social and then into the religious implications of this theory, which it must be remembered is receiving a good deal of support, and meeting with a large measure of acceptance just now. Turning, then, to the social side first of all, no one, of course, would say that Socialism as such was monistic; on the other hand it is easy to understand the attraction of Socialism for those whose philosophy is Monism. They will embrace the economic teachings of Collectivism the more {67} eagerly in exact proportion to their root-conviction that the only thing that matters is the totality of things, while the individual,per se, does not count at all. That is the conception which underlies the Socialism of a writer like Mr. Wells, who is in nothing more emphatic than in asserting that the individual as such has no value at all. "Our individualities," he says, "are but bubbles and clusters of foam upon the great stream of the blood of the species." "The race is the drama, and we are the incidents." "In so far as we are individuals . . . we are accidental, disconnected, without significance." And when we ask for what we should strive and labour, if not for the good of individual men and women, his answer is that we ought to work for the Species, for the Race, for what he calls a great physical and mental being, to wit, Mankind.
Now we believe that this philosophy, consistently embraced, is utterly devoid of the dynamic which can generate any great social reform. The smallest and forlornest actual slum baby appeals to our sympathy immeasurably more than a vast, dim aggregate of indistinguishable items called the Race; for we have actually met the slum-baby, and we have never met—what is more, we shall never meet—the Race. This tendency to treat the individual as negligible is as futile as it is inhuman; in the long run it will be found that he who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love {68} the Race which he hath not seen. No matter by how many times we multiply nothing, the result is still—nothing. If the individuals do not count, neither can the species which is made up of such individuals. Or, if "the Race is the drama, and we are the incidents," it must be observed that no great and noble drama can be strung together out of trivial and unmeaning incidents. All the talk about Mankind as the greater being, "the great and growing Being of the Species," "the eternally conscious Being of all things," is only the old, thin, unsatisfying idolatry of Positivism. If we wish to be social reformers in earnest we must take care of the individuals, and the race will take care of itself.
That the monistic denial of all individual significance should lead to the denial of a future life is only what we should expect; for if man, as such, does notmatter, why should hesurvive? On the other hand, the more we care for the individual, refusing to regard him merely as "an experiment of the species for the species," the more irresistibly shall we be impelled to believe that this life is not all. It is the inestimable achievement of Christianity, by its insistence on the infinite value of the soul, to have given the strongest impetus and support to belief in personal immortality. That, however, is an aspect of our subject which demands, and will subsequently come up for, separate treatment.
{69}
What, for the present, we must yet once more point out, as we did in the preceding chapter, is this—that wide as is the influence of a non-Christian writer like Mr. Wells, the danger of such teaching is intensified when it is given by those who profess Christianity. Doubtless, Bousset is right when he points to the closer contact between East and West as one of the causes of the growth in our midst of a type of religion in which "the human ego is put on one side and almost reduced to zero." Doubtless, also, he is correct in saying "the adherents of this kind of religion will be chiefly found in circles where people do not regard religion seriously, where they desire and accept religion as aesthetic enjoyment." Nevertheless, the evil attending this type of teaching is, to our thinking, great and serious, designed to undermine selfhood and to set up a species of dry-rot at the very centre.
Let us again show what we mean by quoting from an actual utterance: "God," we read, "is supposed to be thinking more about us than about anything else—a rather arrogant assumption when we come to think of it, considering what specks of dust we are amid these myriads of stars and suns whirling through space like motes in a ray of light—and the great object of His solicitude is to get us individually to toe the mark of Christ-likeness." If this view be the true one, the writer went on to ask, why do questions like unemployment, the Budget, {70} the uprising of nationalism in Turkey, etc., bulk so largely in our thought? These topics, he says, have "little or no relation to the question of saving the individual soul, as commonly understood." How, he demands, does the actual life of every day fit into "that view of the scheme of things which bids us believe that the silent God above us is principally anxious about just one thing, the moral recovery and ingathering of these individual souls one by one"? The answer is given with characteristic confidence: "It does not fit into it at all;if God be as anxious about that as we are assured He is, He has a queer way of showing it."
Here we have a conception of man and his place in the sum of things fundamentally at one with that of Mr. Wells, and as utterly irreconcilable with that of Christianity. Not only does the individual not matter in himself; he does not even matter to God. The idea of the soul's infinite value to God is held up to derision, and so is the idea of God's interest in individual character; man, the atom, must not think that the Creator is specially anxious for his fate, and is bidden to measure his insignificance against the vastness of the heavenly bodies; and in conclusion we are pertly told that if God really cares about the individual as such, "He has a queer way of showing it." In this view—the view of Monism—it is indeed true that "the individual withers, and the world is more and more."
{71}
We say that the issue is plain; it lies between Monism and Christianity; if the one is true, the other must be rejected. On which side shall we cast our verdict? For a warning example we have only to glance at the case of Buddhism, in which, the value of human individuality having been steadily lowered, "the other main factor is religion, belief in God, was likewise lost" (Bousset). But, turning to a more detailed examination of the statement just quoted, it is hardly necessary to discuss the astounding suggestion that man must not take himself too seriously by the side of the immensities of suns and stars. Such a view merely betrays a spiritual perception miles below that of the Psalmist, who saw man, to all appearance a negligible speck, yet in reality made by the Almighty little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour. Neither need we combat at length the strangely superficial notion that such questions as unemployment, the Budget, etc., have little or no relation to that of saving the individual soul, as commonly understood. If they have no relation tothatsubject, they are hardly worth considering; but the fact is that the regulation of industry, the distribution of wealth—these and all other questions derive their importance solely from the manner in which they affect individual men, women and children, fitting or unfitting them for the life that now is and that which is to come. A good deal might be said of {72} the temper which makes fun of the idea of God's "solicitude to get us individually to toe the mark of Christ-likeness"; but we may leave that unhappy phrase to be its own comment.
The attitude of Christianity to our question is perfectly clear. Christianity, in teaching each frailest, poorest human unit to address God as Father, affirms in unmistakeable accents the Eternal's personal interest in and care for the individual soul, and by so doing ennobles every human life that falls under the sway of the Gospel. It is Christianity's master-thought that to the Father from whom all fatherhood is named each one of His children is personally dear, and that His desire is for the salvation of each one. To the cheap and ugly sneer that God has a "queer way" of manifesting His concern for us as individuals, the Christian consciousness has its own answer; how, in any case, such a sneer could come from the same source from which we previously quoted the statement that "nothing can happen to any of God's children which is not in some way the sacrament of God's love to us," we do not profess to understand. We are not mere individual organ-stops, each without use or significance apart from the rest, waiting for our mutual dissonances to be swallowed up in some "music of the whole," but members of a family, each with a place in the Parent's heart and thought. Finally, to the Christian there is one last, {73} crowning proof of the soul's value for God, and God's yearning for the soul; that proof is Calvary. To the Christian there is one experience which settles this problem fully and finally for him; it is the experience which Paul embodied in the cry, "He loved me, and gave Himself for me."
For Monism the individual is a mere surface ripple on an infinite ocean, alike impermanent and impersonal; for Christianity the soul is a child of the Father of all souls, loved with an everlasting love. Between these two conceptions we have to choose, remembering that each utterly excludes the other. There is no third alternative.
{74}
While in our last three chapters we have been dealing with certain theories which implicitly or explicitly deny the Divine Personality, and while an impersonal God can be, as we have already seen, of no value for religion, there is no mistaking the fact that this very question—whether,i.e., it is possible and legitimate for us to think of God as personal—constitutes one of the most typical of modern "difficulties." It is probably correct to say that this difficulty, like others we have reviewed, dates practically from the collapse of Deism, a creed which possessed a certain hard lucidity satisfying to many for the very reason that it required no very profound insight for its understanding. That a Deity localised in a far-away heaven, seated on a celestial throne and surrounded by an angelic court, should be a person, like any other sovereign, presented no problem to the understanding; but if God was not merely transcendent but also immanent—not merely somewhere but in some indefinable manner everywhere—then to predicate personality of {75} such a One seemed a very paradox. In one of Feuillet's novels there occurs a phrase which sums up in a few expressive words a very common spiritual misadventure: the hero says, "J'avais vu disparaître parmi les nuages la tête de ce bon vieillard qu'on appelle Dieu"—"I had seen the head of that good old man called God disappear amongst the clouds." His naïve material conception of the Eternal had dissolved—and dissolved into nothingness. May we not surmise that nine times out of ten this is precisely what has happened when we hear the question asked, "But howcanGod be personal?"
In by far the greater number of cases, that is to say, the problem arises simply and solely from the questioner's failure to dissociatepersonalityfrommateriality; a "person" suggests to him a tangible, visible, ponderable form, with arms and legs and organs of sense—and when he has reflected sufficiently to understand that such a description cannot apply to God, he concludes thatthereforeGod cannot be personal. The next step is usually that, having seen this visibly outlined Deity disappearparmi les nuages, he passes into absolute unbelief; for somehow an impersonal "Power," while it may possibly inspire awe, cannot move us to worship, cannot present to us a moral imperative, cannot, above all, either claim our love or give us its affection. It is really the identical difficulty, stated a little {76} more pretentiously, which the "rationalist" author ofThe Churches and Modern Thoughtpresents to us by remarking that in all our experience that which makes up personality is "connected with nerve structures," so that we cannot attribute such a quality to "a Being who is described to us as devoid of any nerve structure." "I know of no answer," he quaintly adds, "that could be called satisfactory from a theistic standpoint." [1] It is evident that Mr. Vivian does not remember the famous passage in theEssay on Theismwhere John Stuart Mill explains that "the relation of thought to a material brain is no metaphysical necessity, but simply a constant co-existence within the limits of observation," and concludes that although "experience furnishes us with no example of any series of states of consciousness" without an accompanying brain, "it is as easy to imagine such a series of states without as with this accompaniment." [2] According to Mill—hardly a champion of orthodoxy—there is no reason in the nature of things why "thoughts, emotions, volitions and even sensations" should be necessarily dependent upon or connected with "nerve structures "; so that Mr. Vivian's argument palpably fails.
But what about this popular notion which identifies personality with materiality, and {77} therefore denies the former attribute to God? One would think that even the most circumscribed experience, or reflection on such experience, must suffice to dispose of such a misapprehension; let us use the most obvious of illustrations for showing where the error lies. We have only to imagine one of those everyday tragedies that make a short newspaper paragraph—say, the case of a man passing a house in process of erection, and being killed on the spot by a piece of falling timber. He is left as a material form; he is decidedly not left as a person. Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled—his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense:withthese he was a person;withoutthem, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that constitutehumanpersonality, is it not rather childish to argue that, unless God possesses a body of some sort, theDivinePersonality is a contradiction in terms? If we can validly affirm in the Deity qualities corresponding to those which in human beings we call consciousness, intelligence, etc., we shall obviously be compelled to assign personality to Him; the question is, Have we sufficient grounds for making such an affirmation?
But before we are allowed to answer that question, we have to meet another preliminary {78} objection; for it seems that we are in conflict with philosophy—or, to be more exact, with a certain philosophy which, while no longer perhaps in the heyday of its influence with students, still enjoys a good deal of popular vogue. We are, of course, referring to the Spencerian system, in which the word "Absolute" is used as a synonym for what we should call the Deity; but, argues the Spencerian, since "Absolute is that which exists out of all relation," [3] whereas "even intelligence or consciousness itself is conceivable only as a relation," it follows that "the Absolute cannot be thought of as conscious." But if God cannot even be thought of as conscious, how much less can He be thought of as personal!
Such an inference would, indeed, be irresistible if only the premises on which it rests were sound. But is it legitimate, we ask, to identify God with "the Absolute," or is not this merely a way of begging the question? "Absolute is that which exists out of all relation," we were just told, and such a genuine Absolute would be genuinely "unknowable," because its very existence could not be so much as guessed at; but the Spencerian Absolute is the most certain of certainties, described by Professor Hudson as "the one Eternal Reality, the corner-stone of all our {79} knowledge"—otherwise as "the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed." But the corner-stone of all our knowledge can be such only because, so far from being unknowable, it is intimately related to all our experience—which is tantamount to saying that it is not absolute at all; and again, if God be the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed, that Energy must be thought of as related to all things—in other words, it is the very reverse of absolute. And hence the imaginary impossibility of thinking of the Deity as conscious and intelligent vanishes at one stroke. If God were really absolute, in the sense of the definition quoted above, it would certainly be, as Professor Hudson says, "from the standpoint of philosophical exactness" quite inadmissible "to speak of the Divine Will, or a Personal Creator, or an intelligent Governor of the universe"; but as we have seen that this absoluteness is purely fictitious, it follows that we may legitimately inquire whether consciousness, intelligence, will—and hence personality—are predicable of God, without heeding a veto which rests on imaginary foundations.
It is true Professor Hudson raises two further objections; these, however, will not long detain us. We are informed in the first place that "the further progress of thought 'must force men hereafter to drop the higher anthropomorphic characters given to the First {80} Cause, as they have long since dropped the lower'"; but since our guide, a few pages later, quotes with approval the dictum that "unless we cease to think altogether, wemustthink anthropomorphically," we may be pardoned for declining to believe that "the further progress of thought must force men hereafter" to "cease to think altogether." Such a suicide of thought would furnish an odd comment upon philosophic "progress." We shall, of course, continue to think anthropomorphically of God; our thought will thus inevitably fall short of the Reality, but it will be truer than if we did not think of Him at all. Again, Divine Personality is declared to be a self-contradiction because
"Personality implies limitation, or it means nothing at all. To talk of an Infinite Person, therefore, is to talk of something that is at once infinite and finite, unconditioned and conditioned, unlimited and limited—an impossibility."
To this plea there are, however, two answers. The first may be made in the unprejudiced words of Mr. Vivian, who observes,[4]
"We must not forget that in philosophy and theology the word 'person' simply implies 'a nature endowed with consciousness,' and does not involve limits."
But secondly, without committing ourselves to Professor Hudson's dictum that personality implies limitation, we have to point out that we are not concerned to defend any inference that might be drawn from the infinity, in the sense {81} of the "allness" of God. We do not deny, but on the contrary affirm, that in the act of creation God imposes limitations upon Himself; so that this last obstacle also is disposed of.
So far, then, we have dealt with thea prioriarguments against the Personality of God, and have seen why none of these—neither that from His non-materiality, nor from His alleged absoluteness or infinity—raises any real bar to His being thought of as personal. We are now in a position to inquire positively whether there is sufficient ground for regarding Him as conscious, intelligent and purposive; if He possesses these qualities, we repeat that He certainly possesses that of personality.
The method by which we must proceed is obvious, and will at once occur to the reader who recalls our opening chapter; the question resolves itself simply into this—Are the phenomena of nature such as to indicate intelligence and directivity in their Cause? We submit that incontrovertible proof of theabsenceof such directive intelligence would be furnished, if the world were, as a matter of fact, chaotic—if it disclosed neither regularity nor continuity—if, in a word, we could never be sure what would happen next. True, in such a state of things life itself could not be sustained, for life is only possible in a world of orderly sequences and uniform laws; but seeing that as a matter of fact such orderly sequences and uniform laws meet us everywhere {82} in nature, is not the inference fairly inevitable? Let us be quite clear on one point: there are two ways, and two only, in which any phenomenon can be accounted for—design or chance; what is not purposed must be accidental. Does, then, nature impress us as the outcome of chance? If we saw a faultlessly executed mathematical diagram illustrating a proposition in Euclid, should we really be satisfied with the statement that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order, beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one other alternative—design, purpose, guidance. Professor Fiske quotes a quaint observation of Kepler's illustrating this very point, which we may be allowed to reproduce:—
Yesterday, when weary with writing and my mind quite dusty with considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and a salad was set before me. "It seems then," said I aloud, "that if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of oil and vinegar, and slices of eggs, had been floating about in the air from all eternity, it might at last happen by chance that there would come a salad." "Yes," says my wife, "but not so nice and well-dressed as mine is!"
Mrs. Kepler's shrewd, homely remark gives its last touch of absurdity to the suggestion {83} that a world which we see to be pervaded by unfailing law has come together by sheer, incalculable accident. Not so much as a salad of respectable calibre could be accounted for upon such a theory; how much less credible is it that the universe began with a cosmic dance of unconscious atoms whirled along by unconscious forces, and happening so to combine as to produce order and sequence, life and consciousness, will and affection!
But not only does the universe exhibit a sublime order which is the very contrary of what we can associate with the blind workings of chance; not only do the circling immensities of the stars and the microscopic perfections of the snow-crystals alike point to a shaping and directing Mind and Will: what nature reveals—what is implied in the very term evolution—is not merely order but progress. As Fiske has it, "Whatever else may be true, the conviction is brought home to us that in all this endless multifariousness there is one single principle at work, thatall is tending towards an end that was involved in the very beginning." In other words, the supreme certainty brought home to us by the researches of modern science is that all creation is thrilled through by an all-encompassing Purpose. We really ask for no more than such an admission; that, in short, is our case. We can clinch the whole argument with one quiet sentence of Mr. Chesterton's: "Where there is a purpose, {84} there is a person." If Mr. Spencer's "Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed" is purposive, that is equivalent to saying that God is what we mean by personal.
But ought we not to have shown first of all that He is conscious? No, for the greater includes the less, and purpose is unthinkable apart from consciousness. In saying this we are aware that a philosopher like Eduard von Hartmann speaks of "the wisdom of the Unconscious," of "the mechanical devices which It employs," of "the direction of the goal intended by the Unconscious," etc., etc.; but this, we are bound to say, is to empty words of their meaning. To intend, to direct anything requires at least that the one so doing should be conscious of what it is he is doing. And consciousness, intelligence, directivity are constituents never found apart from personality. But, we are told, "the choice lies, not between personality and something lower, but between personality and something inconceivably higher." [5] We reply that we have already made the acquaintance of this idea of a "super-personal" Deity, and found that for all practical—i.e., religious—purposes the super-personal is simply the impersonal under another name.[6] And when we remember that the "inconceivably higher than personal" ultimate Reality of the agnostic possesses neither {85} consciousness, nor will, nor intelligence, we simply fail to see how a Power lacking these attributes could be even personal, to say nothing of its beingmorethan personal. Be this, however, as it may, the decisive fact remains that we are persons, and therefore personality is the highest category under which we can think; and if we, the children of the Eternal, are endowed with personality, it is sufficient for us to know that a cause must be at least adequate to produce the effects that have flowed from it. Nothing can be evolved but what was first involved. On this ground alone, whatever else God may be, He is at least personal; and that is all we were anxious to establish.
That is all—but it is also all-important; for it cannot be too emphatically insisted that without a personal God religion simply ceases to be. It is a strange and delusive fancy on Professor Hudson's part, and that of a good many people, that "the religious emotions" will survive the de-ethicising, depersonalising of the Deity, and that men will remain "deeply religious" even when it is recognised that the "Great Enigma," the "eternal and inscrutable energy," the "ultimate Reality" cannot be spoken of as "a Personal Creator, or an intelligent Governor of the universe." For our own part, we find it difficult to believe that such a forecast could have been framed by anyone possessing a first-hand knowledge of what "the religious {86} emotions" are; we say with the utmost confidence that no such emotions can be felt towards a Power which "cannot be thought of as conscious," let alone as benevolent or personally interested in us. We well know that we can be nothing to such a Power—nor can It be anything to us; for a God who does not care, does not count. We cannot commune with this chill and awesome Unknown; we can only pray to One who hears; we can only love One who has first loved us. In the last analysis, an "impersonal Deity" such as one hears occasionally spoken of, is a mere contradiction in terms, the coinage of confused and inaccurate thought. Where the meaning of personality is so much as understood, doubt as to the Divine Personality vanishes; and least of all will that truth be doubted by those who see the supreme revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He, the Incarnate Son, has shown us, not a Power but a Person—the Person of the Father—and, to-day as of old, "it sufficeth us."
[1]The Churches and Modern Thought, by Philip Vivian, p. 231.
[2]Three Essays on Religion, R.P.A. reprint, p. 85.
[3] This and subsequent quotations are taken from pp. 108-119 of Prof. Hudson'sIntroduction to the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer.
[4] Op. cit., p. 231.
[5] Hudson,op. cit., p. 116.
[6]Supra, p. 46.
{87}
EVILversusDIVINE GOODNESS
That the renewed emphasis upon the Divine immanence must have for one of its effects that of raising the problem of evil afresh, and in a particularly acute form, will be obvious to anyone who has thought out for himself the implications of that doctrine. Dark and pressing enough before, this particular problem has, in appearance at least, been both complicated and accentuated by the displacement of Deism. If, as we have argued on a previous occasion, there is a certain causal connection between Deism and a somewhat sombre outlook upon the world, on the other hand the existence of evil seemed to fit in better with a view of God which represented Him as outside the universe than with one which insists upon His indwelling in creation. If the earth was the scene and playground of undivine agencies which work their will while the Divine control is withdrawn, then many things became comparatively easy of comprehension; indeed, there was a certain consolation in the thought that—
All the things that had been so wrongAfter all would not last for long,
{88} but that ultimately God would resume the supreme control He had temporarily abandoned, while the Power of darkness would be bound and cast into the abyss. If, however, we must think of Him as omnipresent and for that reason directly and uninterruptedly cognisant of all, then the plain man can only ask himself with a deepening wonder why an all-good and unimaginably powerful Being should permit evils of every description to lay waste His own creation. "No one can enter into the house of the strong, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong"; and since a direct overpowering of God by Satan is out of the question, is not the assumption to which we are driven this—that the Strong One is absent while His goods are being spoiled, and that it is this very absence of which the spoiler has taken advantage? Somehow, we feel, if He were really present—as present as the doctrine of immanence would have us believe—He would actively assert Himself against wrongs and abuses; and when we think of the blood and tears that are shed the world over as the result of disordered desire, industrial greed and political misrule, we find it difficult not to echo the words of psalmist and prophet, "Why standest Thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest Thou Thyself in times of trouble?" "Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself."
In saying this we do not suggest that such an attempt to explain the phenomena of evil {89} by God's supposed absence from the world is defensible; we do say that the belief in His all-encompassing nearness makes those phenomena even more difficult of explanation than they were before. The devout deist could always comfort himself with the thought that, however mysterious God's standing afar off might be, by and by, when He drew nigh again, He would deal out even-handed justice to all; but such comfort is not open to those who explicitly deny God's remoteness, but on the contrary assert that He is the Presence from which there is no escaping. And the fact of evil, physical and moral, is precisely the chief and most fruitful source of religious scepticism; it is not the abstract question whether there is a God, but the practical and insistent problem whether the Divine goodness can be reconciled with the facts of life and experience, that is agitating men's minds, and sways their decision for or against religion.
Everyone knows that this is what Mr. Mallock some time ago called "the crux of Theism"; that "crux," to use his own language, is not "the existence of intelligent purpose in the universe," which may be freely conceded, but whether the processes of nature are or are not consistent with "a God possessing the character which it is the essence of Theism to attribute to Him, and which alone could render Him an object of religion, or even of interest, to mankind." Sometimes in accents of wistful {90} wonder, sometimes in tones of revolt and defiant unbelief, the question is asked:—Why does God allow dire calamity, painful disease, earthquakes and shipwrecks, and accidents of the mine? Why does He permit war, or vivisection, or poverty, or vice—in fact any of "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to"? We should stop these things if we could; why does not He? One is reminded of Mr. William Watson's passionate arraignment of the Powers of Europe at the time of the Armenian massacres:—
Yea, if ye could not, though ye would, lift hand—Ye halting leaders—to abridge Hell's reign. . .If such your plight, most hapless ye of men!But if ye could and would not, oh, what plea,Think ye, shall stead you at your trial, whenThe thundercloud of witnesses shall loomAt the Assizes of Eternity?
The application of these burning lines is painfully obvious. It would be a positive relief were it thinkable that the Eternal would, but cannot, stem
the flood that rolls Hoarser with anguish as the ages roll;
or if one might, with a modern novelist, compare the case to that of "a practitioner doing his best for a wilful patient, with poor appliances and indifferent nursing."But if He could and will not—oh, what plea?
What frankly appals men and freezes the worshipful instinct in their hearts is the {91} apparent Divine indifference, the silence of God, in the presence of so much human wretchedness. If one could only feel that He cared for and sympathised with His suffering creatures, it would be a help, like the sympathetic pressure of the hand from a friend, which does not lessen the actual calamity that may have befallen us, but makes it easier to bear; but anindifferentGod is equivalent to no God at all—or, as we have previously expressed it, a God who does not care, does not count. The mere sense that He was sorry for us would lighten the stroke of fate which He had not been able to avert; but if the truth is that He might have averted it by the simple exercise of His will, but refused to do so, coldly looking on at our grief—not from afar, but close by—then we can only say that no God at all were better than that. It seems, then, as though, in order to escape from palpable inconsistency between theory and fact, we should have to make a surrender either of His immanence, or His omnipotence, or His benevolence, or the reality of evil.
To surrender the Divine immanence will not really solve our problem. Near or far, closer to us than breathing or dwelling beyond the furthest star, God is still the Author of our being, the Framer of the world and all that therein is, the Cause without which there would have been no effects. If, after creating the world, He withdrew from it to an inconceivable {92} distance, it is none the less His handiwork; if it is in and through His absence that the cosmic mechanism has got out of gear, it is yet He who willed to be so absent, well knowing what results would supervene; if a power other than He and hostile to Him has usurped the place and title of Prince of this world, such usurpation would have been impossible but for His acquiescence, and personified Evil, playing with human happiness, would still be His licensed agent. Evidently, the solution of which we are in search does not lie along that way.
We turn, therefore, to the second possible explanation, strongly put forward by Mill, according to whom natural theology points to God as "a Being of great but limited power."
Those who have been strengthened in goodness by relying on the sympathising support of a powerful and good Governor of the world (he says) have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always saved His goodness at the expense of His power. They have believed . . . that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to His intention.[1]
To the question, "Of what nature is the limitation of His power?" he returns the tentative answer that it
probably results either from the qualities of the material—the substances and forces of which the universe is composed not admitting of any arrangements by which His purposes could be more completely fulfilled; or else, the purposes might have been more fully attained, but the Creator did not know how to do it; creative {93} skill, wonderful as it is, was not sufficiently perfect to accomplish His purposes more thoroughly.[2]
Such an answer, we need scarcely say, could only have been given by a thinker who had grown up in the intellectual atmosphere of Deism; the Deity which he contemplates is One who works upon the world purelyab extra, who cannot be spoken of as the Creator, except by courtesy; in reality He merely shapes and adapts materials over which He has only an incomplete control, and which, therefore, so far from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He reallycreatedthe raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still to answer the question, What is that real First Cause, theUrgottwho created theUrstoff, matter in its most elementary form, and endowed it with qualities some of which were destined to serve, while others resisted and frustrated, the sub-Divinity's intentions?
Clearly, this notion also will not do; but while we may reject Mill's theory as to thenatureof the limitations of Divine power, there {94} is distinct force in his shrewd contention that religious people generally—professions to the contrary notwithstanding—have never really believed God to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. This contention we believe, indeed, to be almost self-evidently true; for on the contrary supposition nothing can happen contrary to God's will—all things and beings would necessarily be carrying out that will, and sin,e.g., would become an utterly meaningless term. But if omnipotence is limited—which sounds, we admit, a contradiction in terms—we ask once more, In what way and by whom? To that question we have no other reply than the one given in our first chapter,viz., that when we predicate limitation of the Deity, we must mean self-limitation. In creating the universe, we said, God made a distinction between His creation and Himself, and to that extent limited His Being—for the universe is not identical with God; we now add that in endowing man with an existence related to, but distinct from, His own, He limited not only His infinite Being, but also His infinite Power, delegating some portion thereof to us—for man's will is not identical with God's will, but capable of resisting, though also capable of co-operating with it. Without such individual initiative, without such an individual faculty of choosing between alternatives of action, man could never have been a moral agent; but moral liberty to choose and act aright or amiss implies also {95} moral responsibility for such choice on the part of the chooser.
This neglected truth of God's self-limitation of His power needs to be far more explicitly avowed than has generally been the case. Only so shall we get clear of the confusion and uncertainty with which the subject of human freedom is so largely surrounded; only so shall we be enabled to place the burden of responsibility for sin, the cause of so immense a proportion of the world's suffering, upon the right shoulders—i.e., man's, not God's. It is urgently necessary to disperse the common fallacy according to which God, being the Author of all, is the causative Agent answerable for all the happenings in His universe, for all human pain and all human sin. Where freedom is,thereis responsibility. For let us bring the matter down from the abstract to the concrete: if a dreadful railway accident is caused through the momentary mental lapse of a signalman who has been overtaxed by excessive working hours, how is the responsibility God's? It obviously belongs to those who imposed a task involving the safety of human lives on a man who was not in a fit condition to fulfil such a duty. If an explosion in a coal-mine, accompanied by terrible loss of life, is caused through some miner striking a match, or carrying a naked light, in defiance of well-known regulations of safety, how is God responsible? He has endowed us with intelligence whereby to {96} discover His laws, and with freedom to obey or disobey them: the use or misuse of that freedom rests with ourselves.
But now it may be asked—Was it the act of a benevolent Deity to entrust this terribly two-edged weapon of liberty to our unskilful hands, in which it was bound to work so vast an amount of injury? And this opens up the larger and more general question, Must we, in view of the facts of life, surrender the idea of the Divine benevolence? It is quite true that the evidence of purpose discernible in the whole structure of the universe proclaims the Deity to be personal; but, as Mr. Mallock says, "the theistic doctrine of God is not a doctrine that the supreme mind acts with purpose, but a doctrine that it acts with purpose of a highly specialised kind"—viz.,benevolentpurpose.
Let us once more state the problem in the partial but very pertinent form in which it arises in connection with man's faculty of freedom. To bestow upon His creatures a gift which He must have known they would use in such a manner as to work infinite harm to themselves and to each other, seemsprima facieno more compatible with kindly intentions than it would be to leave children to play with sharp tools, loaded firearms and deadly poisons; since disaster was bound to ensue from such a course, does not responsibility for the disaster rest with the one who deliberately provided the {97} elements for it? But such a comparison, while superficially plausible, upon reflection is seen to be beside the mark. We really cannot plead such inexperience of right and wrong, such ignorance of moral safety and moral danger, as would furnish a true parallel between playing with temptation and playing with cyanide of potassium. In setting before us "life and good, and death and evil," God has as distinctly placed within our hearts the moral intuition which, says, "Therefore choose life." But why, the questioner proceeds, have made sin even possible? Because, we answer, not to have done so would have made morality impossible. It cannot be too often, or too plainly, pointed out that just as the only alternative to purpose is chance, so the only alternative to liberty is necessity. That is to say, God could no doubt have made us automata instead of free agents; but even He could not have made us free tochoosethe right, yet not free to choose its contrary. Choice that is not willed is not choice at all; goodness by compulsion is not goodness, but merely correctitude—the behaviour of a skilfully-devised mechanism, but possessing nomoralquality whatever. We are not at present concerned with the view of those who maintain that men arede factono more than such "cunning casts in clay" a contention which will occupy us at a later stage; we merely state the commonplace that in making us free God Himself could not also {98} make us impeccable, insusceptible to temptation, immune against the possibility of sin.
The real question, then, shapes itself as follows: Can we discern the nature of the purpose which expresses itself in the bestowal of this gift of freedom? Stated in that form, we see that the question has already been answered by implication; for if there could be no morality without liberty, it is fair to make the inference that the very object of God in allowing us to choose between alternatives of conduct was to make morality so much as possible. Was that a good and beneficent object? We submit that even those who impeach the Deity for opening the door to sin would on second thoughts confess that morally free—and therefore peccable—beings stand on a higher level than marionettes, however faultlessly contrived to perform certain evolutions. The truth of the matter is set forth with poetic insight in Andersen's story of the Nightingale—the immeasurable difference between the artificial bird and the real songster, whose melodious raptures somehow touched a chord in the listener which all the nicely-calculated trills and cadences of the ingenious mechanical toy failed to set in motion. In like manner we repeat that the power to determine his own course raises man to a plane incomparably higher than he could have occupied as an automaton. The same faculty of free choice which in its abuse makes the sinner, in its right {99} exercise furnishes forth the saint. All that we mean by moral progress, by "the steady gain of man," his rise to more exalted ideals, his conquest of baser appetites—all that makes the history of the race a thrilling and uplifting drama—is bound up with his possession of liberty; it is this supreme gift which makes him "a little lower than the angels," and "crowns him with glory and honour." Alone of all earthly beings, man is not only an effect but a cause; his freedom—not unlimited but quite real within its not inelastic confines—is the noblest of all his faculties, even though for that very reason it is capable of being most ignobly perverted. What its bestowal tells us is that God does not call us into servitude, but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us with the power to choose for ourselves He has made us His potential fellow-workers. May we not ask—Who, after all, would prefer the safety of automatism to the glory of this Divine adventure?
In all this we are not shutting our eyes to what is involved in the misuse of liberty—the dread nature of wilful sin and its ghastly harvest of wrecked and ruined lives; we do not say that the price of freedom is not a heavy {100} one, nor do we pretend that the subject is free from painful mystery. It could not be otherwise; that we, with our limited vision and circumscribed understanding, should be able to solve that mystery with any completeness, is not even to be imagined. Nevertheless, we may claim that we have at least obtained a glimpse of the purpose of God in conferring upon the race this fateful power; for this and no other was the appointed means by which man was to ascend to his true place as a moral and spiritual being. If we can admit that purpose to be in harmony with the Divine benevolence, we may the more hopefully turn to other aspects of our problem.
[1]Three Essays on Religion, p. 22.
[2]Ibid, p. 79.
[3]The Laws, vii, 803: [Greek] "Theou ti paignion memechanmenon." Compare also Browning's unhappy phrase, "God, whose puppets, best and worst, are we."
{101}
EVILversusDIVINE GOODNESS (Continued)
There is probably no more serious aspect of the popular philosophy which declares so confidently, "There is no will that is not God's will," than that, while professing to be a Gospel of sweetness and light, it in reality plunges us into the very depths of pessimism by making God Himself "ultimately responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world." From such a position, from such premises as these, there is only one step to such conclusions as have been actually drawn:—
It is His world, remember; He made it, and He is omnipotent. . . If creation does not please the Creator, why did He not make it better? If it is wayward and intractable, it can be no more than He expected, or ought to have expected. Wherein consists His right to punish us for our transgressions? Suppose we challenge it; what will He say in defence?
We may shrink with distaste from such wild and whirling words; but if it be true that "there is no will that is not God's will"—if whatever takes place in the universe expresses that almighty will—they are as rational in their very vehemence as Omar's lines are rational in their melancholy:—
{102}
O Thou, who didst with pitfall and with ginBeset the Road I was to wander in,Thou wilt not with Predestin'd Evil roundEnmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!
O Thou, who man of baser Earth didst make,And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:For all the Sin wherewith the Face of ManIs blacken'd—Man's forgiveness give—and take!
It is only when we clearly recognise that man is other than a mere phase or mode of the one Eternal Being; that he has been endowed with individual existence and individual will, and therefore with individual responsibility—and that for the express purpose of realising his highest potentialities: it is only when we accept such a reading of the facts as this that we escape from that worst of nightmares which reaches its climax in hurling its foolish defiance at the Most High, challenging His right to punish the instruments of His own will, those "helpless pieces of the game He plays," impotent items in that unending spectacle—
Which for the pastime of EternityHe doth Himself contrive, enact, behold.
But if it is true that God bestowed freedom upon us because only as free agents could we learn to love and do the right for its own sake; if it is true that the struggle which we have to wage against our lower impulses has the wholly benevolent object of enabling us to achieve the glory of a perfected character, it has also to be borne in mind that under no {103} circumstances can character be conceived otherwise than as the "result" of growth. That is to say, God Himself could not call moral perfection into being ready-made, by a merefiat, and that for the same reason which precludes omnipotence itself from making two straight lines to enclose a space,i.e., because the idea involves a self-contradiction. So true is this that we read even of our Saviour that "though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered," and in this manner was "made perfect." Character in its very definition is the result of many deliberate exercises of a free will; and if the evolution of character was an object dearer to God than the highest mechanical or animal perfection, that object could have been secured in no other way than by this particular endowment.
And here we shall also find the reply to the very natural inquiry why God does not, as He might, intervene or frustrate the evil designs of wrong-doers. Why does a good God allow His intentions to be set at defiance by those whom the prophet described as drawing iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope? It would not matter so much, we sometimes bitterly reflect, if the sinner injured only himself by his wickedness; but how often are the innocent made to suffer by the devices of the unscrupulous and selfish! Why, we repeat, this strange non-intervention of the Most High on behalf of His own cause? {104} On this it must be remarked in the first place that those who accept God's transcendence will be careful not to rule outa priorithe possibility of such Divine action as, regarded from our point of view, would have to be described as intervention; the question whether such action has ever taken place, is a question of fact, and the view that at particular junctures God has thus actively "intervened" is at any rate capable of being strongly argued. But admitting, as we think we must, that ordinary life does not show any instances of such supernatural interposition—that a reckless financier is allowed to enrich himself by cornering the wheat supply and sending up the price of the people's bread; that a band of reactionaries may arrest the course of reform and plunge a country back into darkness; that a beneficent act of the legislature may be defeated by greedy cunning—must we despair of solving the general problem which such cases suggest?
We think, on the contrary, that the explanation may be legitimately sought in what we conceive to have been the Divine intention in making man free; that intention, the making of character, would obviously suffer defeat by God throwing His weight—if we may use such a phrase—into this scale as against that, furthering here and checking there, for character, as we just said, can only result from the free exercise and interplay of will with will. We may well imagine God's mode of action to {105} resemble that of a human parent who entrusts a growing child with a growing measure of liberty and responsibility, well knowing that in the use of it he will have many a slip and stumble, and occasionally hurt himself; such a parent will carefully refrain from interference, preferring that the child should learn his own lessons from his own mistakes, well knowing that we profit only by the experience for which we ourselves have paid. No one will, of course, pretend that such a reconciliation of the facts of sin with the axiom or intuition of Divine all-goodness is other than incomplete; we merely urge that, having regard to the magnitude and the complexity of the subject it could not be otherwise. A theory, without accounting for all the facts, may be true so far as it goes, correctly indicating the way which, if we could pursue it further, would lead us into more and fuller truth. No doubt, when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part will be done away; but pending the advent of a complete explanation, a partial one is not without all value.
Indeed, the very inadequacy of our instruments, resulting in that incompleteness of which we just spoke, should once more suggest a reflection which, while in no wise original or startling, is specially relevant to the subject under discussion: for if God's knowledge necessarily and immeasurably transcends ours, if He knowsmorethan we, does it not follow {106} with equal certainty that He knowsbetter? Granted that we do not understand how this or that dispensation of Providence fits in with the general belief in His perfect goodness, our failure to understand no more disproves that goodness than the similar failure of a child to comprehend why such and such irksome tasks are imposed upon him by his parent, disproves the wisdom and goodness which prompt the parent's act. The childcannotunderstand; but where the relations are at all normal he acquiesces, being on general grounds convinced that the parental commands aim at his welfare, and that his parents, after all, know better than he. Is the application so far to seek?
In the second place—turning now from the subject of sin to that of evil generally—it may be worth while to remind ourselves of a fact which seems to be forgotten by some of the impetuous arraigners of the Deity,viz., that, after all, the problem is not a new one, which they have suddenly discovered by dint of superior sagacity. What we mean is this: the problem of evil as such is of anything but an abstruse or remote nature, nor one requiring unusual philosophical penetration to bring to light; on the contrary, pain and sorrow, privation, adversity, death—these are experiences that have come within the cognisance of all. If, then, the facts are neither so remote nor so inconsiderable that men could have simply {107} forgotten to take them into account in framing their estimates of the Divine character, how is it, we ask, that they have arrived at and clung to the belief in the benevolence of God at all? If the proof to the contrary was so overpowering, why, as a matter of fact, has itnotoverpowered them? Why should an unknown Hebrew singer have given expression to this extraordinary sentiment, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him"—and why has that sentiment been re-echoed by millions of men and women acquainted with grief and affliction? The early Christians did not exactly live lives of luxury or even security, sheltered from contact with tragedy and horror; yet the keynote of primitive Christianity is the note of joy, while the background of early Christian experience is a radiant conviction of the Divine benevolence. And when we remember that the same holds true of so many eminently spiritual souls in all ages, who have combined a keen sensitiveness to evil and suffering of every kind with an unshakeable trust in the lovingkindness of God, we shall scarcely accuse all this cloud of witnesses of having simply drugged themselves and refused to accept the evidence of their own senses. If men and women suffering from anything rather than moral blindness or moral anaesthesia could, and can, nevertheless believe with all their hearts in the Divine Fatherhood, is not such a recurring circumstance significant in itself? {108} Evidently, granting all the facts, more than one reading of the facts is possible; not cloistered mystics, or anchorites withdrawn from the world, but heroes engaged in fighting its ills, have steadfastly proclaimed that God is good; is it an altogether unreasonable hypothesis that their faith, if it outsoars ours, may be the result of a deeper insight?
And this, in turn, suggests another thought, simple enough in itself, yet not always borne in mind in connection with this particular theme—viz., that we are never dealing with factsper se, but with factsplusour interpretation of them, which may be right or wrong, but which, right or wrong, helps to decide in a very large measure what the facts themselves shall mean to us. Our attitude towards the events which befall us makes all the difference. If men have been ruined by success, it is as true that men have been made by failure. If men have deteriorated through ease and plenty, men have been stimulated to effort through hardship and poverty. In a word, if there is much in the burden, there is as much in the shouldering. But for Dante's consecration of sorrow, the world would have lost theCommedia Divina. But for a painful and permanently disabling accident, the English Labour Movement would not have had one of its principal leaders in Mr. Philip Snowden. And as for the influence of outward events and environment generally, Mr. Chesterton may exaggerate in {109} suggesting that everything good has been snatched from some catastrophe, but he is certainly right when he says that "the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment." On the other hand, of an environment the reverse of commodious, it has been observed:—
Logic would seem to say, "If God brings great pain on a man, it must make the man revolt against God." But observation of facts compels us to say, "No, on the contrary, nothing exercises so extraordinary an influence in making men love God as the suffering of great pain at His hands." Scientific thinking deals with facts as they are, not witha priorinotions of what we should expect. And in this matter, the fact as it is, is that goodness is evolved from pain more richly than from any other source.[1]
We may think such a statement too absolute, and point to cases where the effect of physical suffering has been altogether different; but if it is true that in certain well-authenticated and not merely exceptional instances such visitations have resulted in strengthened faith and heightened goodness, our main contention is proved, namely, that the attitude of the individual himself towards the events of his life has much to do with determining what those events are to mean to him. Instead of "Was the gift good?" we should more often ask, "Was the recipient wise?" Pain is pain, and disaster is disaster; but the spirit in which we meet them matters immensely.
{110}
But now we are confronted with a more fundamental question: Could not God have obviated the phenomenon of pain altogether? Could He not have made us incapable of feeling any but pleasant sensations? Mill, who in his essay onNaturedevotes some—for him—almost vehement pages to this subject, reaches the conclusion that "the only admissible moral theory of Creation is that the Principle of Goodcannotat once and altogether subdue the powers of evil" [2]; and in dealing with the same topic in the essay onTheism, while admitting that "appearances do not indicate that contrivance was brought into play purposely to produce pain," he holds to the view that its very existence shows the power of God to be limitedab extra, by the material conditions under which He works:—
The author of the machinery is no doubt accountable for having made it susceptible to pain; but this may have been a necessary condition of its susceptibility to pleasure; a supposition which avails nothing on the theory of an omnipotent Creator, but is an extremely probable one in the case of a Contriver working under the limitation of inexorable laws and indestructible properties of matter.[3]
Such a view of the case, as we have already said in our previous chapter, is purely deistic; but we must now proceed to point out, with great respect for so great an intellect as Mill's, that the supposition which, he says, "avails nothing {111} on the theory of an omnipotent Creator"—viz., that susceptibility to pleasure involves susceptibility to pain—seems to us to fit and cover the facts precisely; for a capacity for pain and a capacity for pleasure are not two different things which could conceivably exist apart from each other, but are only different manifestations of one and the same capacity,viz., for experiencing sensations of any kind whatsoever. We could no more be capable of feeling pleasure, while _in_capable of feeling pain, than we could be sensitive to musical harmonies, while _in_sensible to musical discords; besides which, monotony of sensation annihilates sensation. On this point we may invoke against the pre-evolutionist Mill a modern scientific authority like Professor Fiske, who expresses himself to the effect that "without the element of antagonism there could be no consciousness, and therefore no world." "It is not a superficial but a fundamental truth," he observes, "that if there were no colour but red, it would be exactly the same thing as if there were no colour at all. . . If our ears were to be filled with one monotonous roar of Niagara, unbroken by alien sounds, the effect upon consciousness would be absolute silence. If our palates had never come in contact with any tasteful thing save sugar, we should know no more of sweetness than of bitterness. If we had never felt physical pain, we could not recognise physical pleasure. For {112} want of the contrasted background, its pleasurableness would cease to exist. . . We are thus brought to a striking conclusion, the essential soundness of which cannot be gainsaid.In a happy world there must be sorrow and pain." [4] And this necessity, we would add, does not follow from God's failure to overcome any "inexorable laws and indestructible propertiesof matter," but is implied in the inexorable lawsof thought—in that eternal right reason which makes it impossible for Deity to do what is self-contradictory or absurd.
But if the necessity of pain be thus admitted—a most important admission—we may now take a step further ahead. Even Mill, as we just saw, expressly disclaimed the notion of attributing physical evil to malign intention on the Creator's part; what separates us from Mill is that in our view the laws of nature, in inflicting pain, do not act independently of God, but are His laws. Do those, it may be asked, who allege His "indifference" in not interfering with the operation of the forces of nature when they injure us, frame a very clear notion of the way in which they think that God should, or might, manifest His "interest"? On reflection it will be found that what they ask for—the only possible alternative to an unbroken natural order—is such constant miraculous interposition as would make that order non-existent. But assuming that there {113} were no regular sequence or uniformity to speak of—if we never knew whether the course of nature might not be interrupted at any moment on somebody's behalf—should we really be so much better off? Would humanity be happier if chaos was substituted for order? Without seeking to mitigate the suffering entailed by the unhindered action of nature's forces, it is still certain that the sheer confusion of a world in which law had been abrogated would be infinitely worse. Indeed, this is to understate the case; for the fact is that in such a world all the activities of life would be completely paralysed, and hence life itself, as we have already had occasion to point out, could not be carried on. But if the reign of natural law thus represents the only set of conditions under which life is even possible; and if at the same time this law, which operates all the time and never relaxes its hold, is the expression of the will of God, how can we charge Him with indifference? The truth is, on the contrary, that He is exercising His care, not intermittently, by performing a miracle whenever things go wrong, but continually, and without any interruption whatsoever. Were His law other than steadfast, were there occasional or frequent departures from it, were it possible to defy nature with impunity just now and again, the results of such irregular action would be disastrous in the extreme; it is because His will is constant, and His decrees without {114} variableness, that we are able to learn and obey them, and by obeying to master nature.