VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God's moral attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the Scripture declaration that the work of God's hand was“very good”(Gen. 1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured.Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation[the irrational creation]groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”;23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning.2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.”John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole,“happiness decidedly prevails.”Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.”Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.”Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between[pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:“Suffering is God's protest against sin.”Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson:“Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.”William James:“Our dogs areinour human life, but notofit. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.”The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of“anticipative consequences,”and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.”Perowne refersPs. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation;cf.Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”;Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana:“It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!”Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that ofRom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?”Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.”And Sir Henry Taylor's words:“Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal:“Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.”The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.[pg 404]2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation is both wise and free.As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin'sQuia voluitis not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—seeRom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”;1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.”But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say inIs. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten).“All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.”But we might retort:“Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.”See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God:Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.”Homer:“There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.”Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron:“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.”But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.[pg 405]G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.”Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought,‘The inmost life of all things is one,’with the Hindoo insight,‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress“represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.”Strauss:“If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book:“Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.”Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God's transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christforus on the Cross and Christinus by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God's heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress.Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”;8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?”Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”;Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.”Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth,[pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible“Let the day perish wherein I was born”(3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all thingsaregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things areworking togetherfor good. Reverie in Asolando:‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’Balaustion's Adventure:‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos:‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’Pippa Passes:‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul:‘All's love, but all's law.’Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.”Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him:“Do you believe in a devil now?”But Emerson replied:“I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.”On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered:“I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.”The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as“a depraved little insect.”She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying:“There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!”He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.”On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265sq.Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.”On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows:“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”He should[pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?”LivespellsEvil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?”Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution:“When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.”A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil:“(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”4. To Providence and Redemption.Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God's absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheisticdictaof Fichte:“The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel:“God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss:“Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing anotherwhich is not another. The creation ishis, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and loveanother. But in loving thisother, God is only loving himself.”We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.[pg 408]Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents theconfoundingof God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents theseparationof God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.”See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God's act of creation, and thus God's personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.(a) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God's appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time[lit.“at the end of days”]it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”;Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark;Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”;cf.Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”;Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf.verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed:Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce:“Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.”But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words:“A day of rest.”The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called“the day of rest for the heart,”but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week:“Subattuin Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.”Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.”We[pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need.Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made[by God]for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day.Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.Origen, in Homily 23 onNumbers(Migne, II:358):“Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.”Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether“the Lord's day”was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley:“In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said:“Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.”But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is“the core of our civilization.”Charles Sumner:“If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.”Oliver Wendell Holmes:“He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.”In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day[pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to“a Sabbath rest”that“remaineth,”and to“another day”taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:“On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon“the first day of the week”(Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became“the Lord's day”(Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. onPs. 92(Migne, V:1191, C):“Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”Justin Martyr, First Apology:“On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.”This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was“received up”only after“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”(Acts 1:2).The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. onGen. 2:“If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.”(Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”;Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. onMat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath.Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?
VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God's moral attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the Scripture declaration that the work of God's hand was“very good”(Gen. 1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured.Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation[the irrational creation]groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”;23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning.2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.”John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole,“happiness decidedly prevails.”Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.”Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.”Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between[pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:“Suffering is God's protest against sin.”Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson:“Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.”William James:“Our dogs areinour human life, but notofit. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.”The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of“anticipative consequences,”and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.”Perowne refersPs. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation;cf.Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”;Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana:“It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!”Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that ofRom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?”Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.”And Sir Henry Taylor's words:“Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal:“Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.”The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.[pg 404]2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation is both wise and free.As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin'sQuia voluitis not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—seeRom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”;1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.”But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say inIs. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten).“All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.”But we might retort:“Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.”See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God:Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.”Homer:“There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.”Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron:“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.”But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.[pg 405]G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.”Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought,‘The inmost life of all things is one,’with the Hindoo insight,‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress“represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.”Strauss:“If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book:“Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.”Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God's transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christforus on the Cross and Christinus by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God's heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress.Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”;8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?”Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”;Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.”Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth,[pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible“Let the day perish wherein I was born”(3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all thingsaregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things areworking togetherfor good. Reverie in Asolando:‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’Balaustion's Adventure:‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos:‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’Pippa Passes:‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul:‘All's love, but all's law.’Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.”Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him:“Do you believe in a devil now?”But Emerson replied:“I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.”On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered:“I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.”The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as“a depraved little insect.”She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying:“There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!”He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.”On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265sq.Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.”On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows:“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”He should[pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?”LivespellsEvil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?”Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution:“When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.”A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil:“(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”4. To Providence and Redemption.Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God's absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheisticdictaof Fichte:“The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel:“God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss:“Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing anotherwhich is not another. The creation ishis, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and loveanother. But in loving thisother, God is only loving himself.”We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.[pg 408]Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents theconfoundingof God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents theseparationof God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.”See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God's act of creation, and thus God's personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.(a) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God's appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time[lit.“at the end of days”]it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”;Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark;Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”;cf.Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”;Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf.verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed:Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce:“Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.”But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words:“A day of rest.”The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called“the day of rest for the heart,”but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week:“Subattuin Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.”Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.”We[pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need.Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made[by God]for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day.Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.Origen, in Homily 23 onNumbers(Migne, II:358):“Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.”Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether“the Lord's day”was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley:“In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said:“Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.”But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is“the core of our civilization.”Charles Sumner:“If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.”Oliver Wendell Holmes:“He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.”In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day[pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to“a Sabbath rest”that“remaineth,”and to“another day”taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:“On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon“the first day of the week”(Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became“the Lord's day”(Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. onPs. 92(Migne, V:1191, C):“Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”Justin Martyr, First Apology:“On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.”This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was“received up”only after“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”(Acts 1:2).The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. onGen. 2:“If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.”(Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”;Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. onMat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath.Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?
VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God's moral attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the Scripture declaration that the work of God's hand was“very good”(Gen. 1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured.Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation[the irrational creation]groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”;23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning.2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.”John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole,“happiness decidedly prevails.”Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.”Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.”Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between[pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:“Suffering is God's protest against sin.”Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson:“Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.”William James:“Our dogs areinour human life, but notofit. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.”The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of“anticipative consequences,”and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.”Perowne refersPs. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation;cf.Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”;Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana:“It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!”Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that ofRom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?”Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.”And Sir Henry Taylor's words:“Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal:“Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.”The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.[pg 404]2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation is both wise and free.As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin'sQuia voluitis not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—seeRom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”;1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.”But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say inIs. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten).“All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.”But we might retort:“Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.”See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God:Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.”Homer:“There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.”Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron:“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.”But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.[pg 405]G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.”Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought,‘The inmost life of all things is one,’with the Hindoo insight,‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress“represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.”Strauss:“If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book:“Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.”Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God's transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christforus on the Cross and Christinus by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God's heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress.Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”;8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?”Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”;Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.”Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth,[pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible“Let the day perish wherein I was born”(3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all thingsaregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things areworking togetherfor good. Reverie in Asolando:‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’Balaustion's Adventure:‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos:‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’Pippa Passes:‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul:‘All's love, but all's law.’Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.”Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him:“Do you believe in a devil now?”But Emerson replied:“I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.”On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered:“I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.”The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as“a depraved little insect.”She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying:“There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!”He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.”On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265sq.Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.”On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows:“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”He should[pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?”LivespellsEvil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?”Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution:“When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.”A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil:“(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”4. To Providence and Redemption.Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God's absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheisticdictaof Fichte:“The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel:“God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss:“Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing anotherwhich is not another. The creation ishis, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and loveanother. But in loving thisother, God is only loving himself.”We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.[pg 408]Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents theconfoundingof God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents theseparationof God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.”See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God's act of creation, and thus God's personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.(a) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God's appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time[lit.“at the end of days”]it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”;Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark;Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”;cf.Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”;Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf.verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed:Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce:“Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.”But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words:“A day of rest.”The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called“the day of rest for the heart,”but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week:“Subattuin Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.”Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.”We[pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need.Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made[by God]for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day.Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.Origen, in Homily 23 onNumbers(Migne, II:358):“Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.”Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether“the Lord's day”was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley:“In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said:“Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.”But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is“the core of our civilization.”Charles Sumner:“If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.”Oliver Wendell Holmes:“He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.”In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day[pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to“a Sabbath rest”that“remaineth,”and to“another day”taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:“On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon“the first day of the week”(Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became“the Lord's day”(Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. onPs. 92(Migne, V:1191, C):“Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”Justin Martyr, First Apology:“On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.”This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was“received up”only after“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”(Acts 1:2).The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. onGen. 2:“If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.”(Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”;Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. onMat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath.Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?
VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God's moral attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the Scripture declaration that the work of God's hand was“very good”(Gen. 1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured.Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation[the irrational creation]groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”;23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning.2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.”John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole,“happiness decidedly prevails.”Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.”Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.”Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between[pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:“Suffering is God's protest against sin.”Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson:“Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.”William James:“Our dogs areinour human life, but notofit. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.”The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of“anticipative consequences,”and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.”Perowne refersPs. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation;cf.Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”;Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana:“It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!”Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that ofRom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?”Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.”And Sir Henry Taylor's words:“Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal:“Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.”The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.[pg 404]2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation is both wise and free.As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin'sQuia voluitis not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—seeRom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”;1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.”But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say inIs. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten).“All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.”But we might retort:“Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.”See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God:Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.”Homer:“There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.”Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron:“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.”But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.[pg 405]G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.”Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought,‘The inmost life of all things is one,’with the Hindoo insight,‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress“represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.”Strauss:“If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book:“Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.”Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God's transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christforus on the Cross and Christinus by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God's heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress.Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”;8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?”Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”;Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.”Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth,[pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible“Let the day perish wherein I was born”(3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all thingsaregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things areworking togetherfor good. Reverie in Asolando:‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’Balaustion's Adventure:‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos:‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’Pippa Passes:‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul:‘All's love, but all's law.’Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.”Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him:“Do you believe in a devil now?”But Emerson replied:“I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.”On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered:“I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.”The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as“a depraved little insect.”She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying:“There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!”He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.”On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265sq.Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.”On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows:“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”He should[pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?”LivespellsEvil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?”Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution:“When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.”A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil:“(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”4. To Providence and Redemption.Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God's absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheisticdictaof Fichte:“The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel:“God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss:“Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing anotherwhich is not another. The creation ishis, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and loveanother. But in loving thisother, God is only loving himself.”We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.[pg 408]Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents theconfoundingof God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents theseparationof God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.”See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God's act of creation, and thus God's personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.(a) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God's appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time[lit.“at the end of days”]it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”;Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark;Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”;cf.Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”;Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf.verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed:Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce:“Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.”But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words:“A day of rest.”The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called“the day of rest for the heart,”but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week:“Subattuin Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.”Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.”We[pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need.Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made[by God]for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day.Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.Origen, in Homily 23 onNumbers(Migne, II:358):“Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.”Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether“the Lord's day”was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley:“In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said:“Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.”But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is“the core of our civilization.”Charles Sumner:“If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.”Oliver Wendell Holmes:“He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.”In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day[pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to“a Sabbath rest”that“remaineth,”and to“another day”taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:“On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon“the first day of the week”(Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became“the Lord's day”(Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. onPs. 92(Migne, V:1191, C):“Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”Justin Martyr, First Apology:“On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.”This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was“received up”only after“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”(Acts 1:2).The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. onGen. 2:“If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.”(Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”;Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. onMat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath.Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?
VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God's moral attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the Scripture declaration that the work of God's hand was“very good”(Gen. 1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured.Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation[the irrational creation]groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”;23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning.2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.”John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole,“happiness decidedly prevails.”Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.”Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.”Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between[pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:“Suffering is God's protest against sin.”Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson:“Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.”William James:“Our dogs areinour human life, but notofit. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.”The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of“anticipative consequences,”and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.”Perowne refersPs. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation;cf.Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”;Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana:“It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!”Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that ofRom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?”Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.”And Sir Henry Taylor's words:“Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal:“Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.”The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.[pg 404]2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation is both wise and free.As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin'sQuia voluitis not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—seeRom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”;1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.”But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say inIs. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten).“All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.”But we might retort:“Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.”See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God:Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.”Homer:“There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.”Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron:“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.”But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.[pg 405]G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.”Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought,‘The inmost life of all things is one,’with the Hindoo insight,‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress“represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.”Strauss:“If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book:“Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.”Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God's transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christforus on the Cross and Christinus by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God's heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress.Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”;8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?”Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”;Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.”Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth,[pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible“Let the day perish wherein I was born”(3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all thingsaregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things areworking togetherfor good. Reverie in Asolando:‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’Balaustion's Adventure:‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos:‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’Pippa Passes:‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul:‘All's love, but all's law.’Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.”Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him:“Do you believe in a devil now?”But Emerson replied:“I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.”On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered:“I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.”The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as“a depraved little insect.”She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying:“There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!”He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.”On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265sq.Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.”On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows:“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”He should[pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?”LivespellsEvil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?”Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution:“When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.”A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil:“(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”4. To Providence and Redemption.Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God's absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheisticdictaof Fichte:“The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel:“God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss:“Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing anotherwhich is not another. The creation ishis, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and loveanother. But in loving thisother, God is only loving himself.”We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.[pg 408]Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents theconfoundingof God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents theseparationof God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.”See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God's act of creation, and thus God's personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.(a) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God's appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time[lit.“at the end of days”]it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”;Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark;Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”;cf.Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”;Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf.verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed:Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce:“Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.”But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words:“A day of rest.”The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called“the day of rest for the heart,”but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week:“Subattuin Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.”Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.”We[pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need.Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made[by God]for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day.Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.Origen, in Homily 23 onNumbers(Migne, II:358):“Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.”Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether“the Lord's day”was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley:“In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said:“Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.”But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is“the core of our civilization.”Charles Sumner:“If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.”Oliver Wendell Holmes:“He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.”In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day[pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to“a Sabbath rest”that“remaineth,”and to“another day”taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:“On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon“the first day of the week”(Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became“the Lord's day”(Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. onPs. 92(Migne, V:1191, C):“Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”Justin Martyr, First Apology:“On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.”This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was“received up”only after“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”(Acts 1:2).The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. onGen. 2:“If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.”(Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”;Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. onMat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath.Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?
VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God's moral attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the Scripture declaration that the work of God's hand was“very good”(Gen. 1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured.Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation[the irrational creation]groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”;23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning.2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.”John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole,“happiness decidedly prevails.”Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.”Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.”Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between[pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:“Suffering is God's protest against sin.”Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson:“Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.”William James:“Our dogs areinour human life, but notofit. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.”The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of“anticipative consequences,”and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.”Perowne refersPs. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation;cf.Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”;Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana:“It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!”Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that ofRom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?”Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.”And Sir Henry Taylor's words:“Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal:“Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.”The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.[pg 404]2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation is both wise and free.As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin'sQuia voluitis not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—seeRom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”;1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.”But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say inIs. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten).“All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.”But we might retort:“Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.”See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God:Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.”Homer:“There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.”Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron:“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.”But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.[pg 405]G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.”Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought,‘The inmost life of all things is one,’with the Hindoo insight,‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress“represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.”Strauss:“If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book:“Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.”Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God's transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christforus on the Cross and Christinus by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God's heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress.Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”;8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?”Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”;Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.”Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth,[pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible“Let the day perish wherein I was born”(3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all thingsaregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things areworking togetherfor good. Reverie in Asolando:‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’Balaustion's Adventure:‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos:‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’Pippa Passes:‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul:‘All's love, but all's law.’Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.”Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him:“Do you believe in a devil now?”But Emerson replied:“I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.”On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered:“I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.”The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as“a depraved little insect.”She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying:“There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!”He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.”On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265sq.Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.”On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows:“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”He should[pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?”LivespellsEvil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?”Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution:“When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.”A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil:“(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”4. To Providence and Redemption.Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God's absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheisticdictaof Fichte:“The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel:“God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss:“Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing anotherwhich is not another. The creation ishis, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and loveanother. But in loving thisother, God is only loving himself.”We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.[pg 408]Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents theconfoundingof God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents theseparationof God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.”See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God's act of creation, and thus God's personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.(a) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God's appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time[lit.“at the end of days”]it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”;Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark;Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”;cf.Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”;Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf.verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed:Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce:“Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.”But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words:“A day of rest.”The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called“the day of rest for the heart,”but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week:“Subattuin Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.”Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.”We[pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need.Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made[by God]for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day.Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.Origen, in Homily 23 onNumbers(Migne, II:358):“Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.”Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether“the Lord's day”was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley:“In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said:“Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.”But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is“the core of our civilization.”Charles Sumner:“If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.”Oliver Wendell Holmes:“He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.”In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day[pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to“a Sabbath rest”that“remaineth,”and to“another day”taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:“On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon“the first day of the week”(Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became“the Lord's day”(Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. onPs. 92(Migne, V:1191, C):“Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”Justin Martyr, First Apology:“On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.”This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was“received up”only after“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”(Acts 1:2).The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. onGen. 2:“If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.”(Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”;Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. onMat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath.Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?
1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God's moral attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the Scripture declaration that the work of God's hand was“very good”(Gen. 1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured.Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation[the irrational creation]groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”;23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning.2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.”John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole,“happiness decidedly prevails.”Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.”Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.”Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between[pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:“Suffering is God's protest against sin.”Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson:“Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.”William James:“Our dogs areinour human life, but notofit. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.”The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of“anticipative consequences,”and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.”Perowne refersPs. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation;cf.Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”;Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana:“It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!”Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that ofRom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?”Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.”And Sir Henry Taylor's words:“Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal:“Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.”The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.
Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God's moral attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the Scripture declaration that the work of God's hand was“very good”(Gen. 1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:
(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.
(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.
The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured.Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation[the irrational creation]groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”;23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning.2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.”John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole,“happiness decidedly prevails.”Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.”Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.”Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between[pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:“Suffering is God's protest against sin.”Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson:“Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.”William James:“Our dogs areinour human life, but notofit. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.”The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of“anticipative consequences,”and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.”Perowne refersPs. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation;cf.Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”;Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana:“It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!”Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that ofRom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?”Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.”And Sir Henry Taylor's words:“Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal:“Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.”The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.
The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured.Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation[the irrational creation]groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”;23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning.2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.”John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.
It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole,“happiness decidedly prevails.”Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.”Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.”Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between[pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:“Suffering is God's protest against sin.”
Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson:“Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.”William James:“Our dogs areinour human life, but notofit. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.”The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.
This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of“anticipative consequences,”and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.”Perowne refersPs. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation;cf.Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”;Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”
Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana:“It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!”Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that ofRom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”
Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?”Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.”And Sir Henry Taylor's words:“Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal:“Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.”The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.
2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation is both wise and free.As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin'sQuia voluitis not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—seeRom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”;1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.”But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say inIs. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten).“All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.”But we might retort:“Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.”See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God:Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.”Homer:“There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.”Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron:“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.”But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.[pg 405]G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.”Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought,‘The inmost life of all things is one,’with the Hindoo insight,‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress“represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.”Strauss:“If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book:“Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.”Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.
No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation is both wise and free.
As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin'sQuia voluitis not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—seeRom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”;1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.”But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say inIs. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten).“All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.”But we might retort:“Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.”See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God:Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.”Homer:“There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.”Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron:“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.”But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.[pg 405]G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.”Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought,‘The inmost life of all things is one,’with the Hindoo insight,‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress“represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.”Strauss:“If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book:“Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.”Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.
As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed and sufficient to himself. God's perfection therefore requires, not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered, the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.
But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product of God's will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 241; and Pope's Essay on Man. For the better form of optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653; Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March, 1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin'sQuia voluitis not the last answer. We could have no heart for such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen man, formal controls real.”
Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are warranted in saying that the universe at present existing, considered as a partial realization of God's developing plan, is the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short, that all is for the best,—seeRom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good”;1 Cor. 3:21—“all things are yours.”
For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes, 1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419, 432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism, 227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless depth of the infinite God.”But we reply that a wisdom which does not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God's abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and holiness. Hence God can say inIs. 5:4—“what could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”
The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten).“All life is summed up in effort, and effort is painful; therefore life is pain.”But we might retort:“Life is active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore life is pleasure.”See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien, 95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer's heartlessness, cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by disappointment and forgetful of God:Eccl. 2:11—“all was vanity and a striving after wind.”Homer:“There is nothing whatever more wretched than man.”Seneca praises death as the best invention of nature. Byron:“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be.”But it has been left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a united and universal act of suicide.
G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence. Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing. Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, is nothing.”Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos., 253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant's thought,‘The inmost life of all things is one,’with the Hindoo insight,‘The life of all these things, That art Thou.’To him music shows best what the will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice. Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a pessimist.”
Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress“represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.”Strauss:“If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.”Hawthorne, Note-book:“Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.”
On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.”Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic.
3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God's transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christforus on the Cross and Christinus by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God's heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress.Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”;8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?”Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”;Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.”Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth,[pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible“Let the day perish wherein I was born”(3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all thingsaregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things areworking togetherfor good. Reverie in Asolando:‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’Balaustion's Adventure:‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos:‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’Pippa Passes:‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul:‘All's love, but all's law.’Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.”Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him:“Do you believe in a devil now?”But Emerson replied:“I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.”On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered:“I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.”The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as“a depraved little insect.”She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying:“There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!”He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.”On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265sq.Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.”On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows:“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”He should[pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?”LivespellsEvil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?”Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution:“When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.”A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil:“(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”
Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God's transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christforus on the Cross and Christinus by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God's heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.
Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress.Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”;8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?”Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”;Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.”Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth,[pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible“Let the day perish wherein I was born”(3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all thingsaregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things areworking togetherfor good. Reverie in Asolando:‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’Balaustion's Adventure:‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos:‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’Pippa Passes:‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul:‘All's love, but all's law.’Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.”Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him:“Do you believe in a devil now?”But Emerson replied:“I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.”On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered:“I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.”The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as“a depraved little insect.”She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying:“There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!”He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.”On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265sq.Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.”On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows:“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”He should[pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?”LivespellsEvil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?”Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution:“When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.”A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil:“(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”
Christ's Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ's judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress.Rom. 3:25—“whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God”;8:32—“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?”Heb. 2:8, 9—“we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor”;Acts 17:31—“he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.
G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.”Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth,[pg 406]was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible“Let the day perish wherein I was born”(3:3). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.Rev. 4:11—“Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.”Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God's mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world's history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.
Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts that all thingsaregood; Christian optimism asserts that all things areworking togetherfor good. Reverie in Asolando:‘From the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’Balaustion's Adventure:‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’Browning endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the monologue of Caliban on Setebos:‘Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.’Pippa Passes:‘God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.’But how is this consistent with the guilt of the sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved, only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man. Saul:‘All's love, but all's law.’Carlyle forms a striking contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought moreover in a foreign cause. God's cause is not ours. Duty is a menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and there is no love.”Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums at midnight and asked him:“Do you believe in a devil now?”But Emerson replied:“I am more and more convinced of the greatness and goodness of the English people.”On Browning and Carlyle, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.
Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living, replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered:“I would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make oranges and bananas grow further north.”The lady who was bitten by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the creature as“a depraved little insect.”She was told that this would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten him, he crushed the insect, saying:“There! I'll show you that there is a God in Israel!”He identified the mosquito with all the corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress, 22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke's History of the Popes, denied all religious progress.”On Huxley's account of evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265sq.
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer's time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.”On the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes, and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view as follows:“The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”He should[pg 407]have added that pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will pass away.
Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?”LivespellsEvil, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”
Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?”Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution:“When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.”F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.”A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil:“(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”
4. To Providence and Redemption.Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God's absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheisticdictaof Fichte:“The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel:“God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss:“Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing anotherwhich is not another. The creation ishis, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and loveanother. But in loving thisother, God is only loving himself.”We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.[pg 408]Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents theconfoundingof God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents theseparationof God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.”See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.
Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.
But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God's absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.
The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheisticdictaof Fichte:“The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel:“God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss:“Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”
Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing anotherwhich is not another. The creation ishis, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and loveanother. But in loving thisother, God is only loving himself.”We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.[pg 408]Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents theconfoundingof God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents theseparationof God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.”See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.
Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God's nature to create. Creation is God's positing anotherwhich is not another. The creation ishis, belongs to his being or essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love, Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune God. Love must create and loveanother. But in loving thisother, God is only loving himself.”We have already, in our discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is pantheistic in tendency.
Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism takes its place.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents theconfoundingof God with the world. The declaration that the Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was developed under the continuous operation of God's laws and presence, prevents theseparationof God from the world. Thus pantheism and deism are both avoided.”See Kant and Spinoza contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of the false philosophy of our time.
5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God's act of creation, and thus God's personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.(a) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God's appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time[lit.“at the end of days”]it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”;Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark;Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”;cf.Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”;Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf.verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed:Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce:“Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.”But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words:“A day of rest.”The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called“the day of rest for the heart,”but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week:“Subattuin Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.”Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.”We[pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need.Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made[by God]for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day.Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.Origen, in Homily 23 onNumbers(Migne, II:358):“Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.”Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether“the Lord's day”was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley:“In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said:“Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.”But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is“the core of our civilization.”Charles Sumner:“If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.”Oliver Wendell Holmes:“He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.”In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day[pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to“a Sabbath rest”that“remaineth,”and to“another day”taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:“On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon“the first day of the week”(Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became“the Lord's day”(Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. onPs. 92(Migne, V:1191, C):“Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”Justin Martyr, First Apology:“On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.”This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was“received up”only after“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”(Acts 1:2).The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. onGen. 2:“If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.”(Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”;Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. onMat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath.Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?
We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God's act of creation, and thus God's personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.
(a) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God's appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.
Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time[lit.“at the end of days”]it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”;Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark;Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”;cf.Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”;Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf.verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed:Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce:“Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.”But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words:“A day of rest.”The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called“the day of rest for the heart,”but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week:“Subattuin Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.”Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.”We[pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.
Gen. 2:3—“And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”Our rest is to be a miniature representation of God's rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:Gen. 4:3—“And in process of time[lit.“at the end of days”]it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Jehovah”;Gen. 8:10, 12—Noah twice waited seven days before sending forth the dove from the ark;Gen. 29:27, 28—“fulfil the week”;cf.Judges 14:12—“the seven days of the feast”;Ex. 16:5—double portion of manna promised on the sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (cf.verses 20, 30). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the original institution of the Sabbath at man's creation. Moses in the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and observed:Ex. 20:8—“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”
The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation; see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften, ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce:“Seven was a sacred number descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil. As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular honor.”But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and following it are the words:“A day of rest.”The restrictions are quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is called“the day of rest for the heart,”but of the gods, on account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.
S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week:“Subattuin Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose. A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.”Hutton, Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God's mind a spring of eternal rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as well as the law of labor.”We[pg 409]may question, indeed, whether this doctrine of God's rest does not of itself refute the theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.
(b) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.
Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need.Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made[by God]for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day.Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.Origen, in Homily 23 onNumbers(Migne, II:358):“Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.”Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether“the Lord's day”was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley:“In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said:“Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.”But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is“the core of our civilization.”Charles Sumner:“If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.”Oliver Wendell Holmes:“He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.”In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.
Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental human need.Mark 2:27—“The Sabbath was made[by God]for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”The Puritan restrictions are not essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England Fast-day.Nehemiah 8:12, 18—“And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance”—seems to include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.
Origen, in Homily 23 onNumbers(Migne, II:358):“Leaving therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be done.”Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it uncertain whether“the Lord's day”was weekly or annual. The observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley:“In my opinion St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient reason.”
According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday. Martin Luther said:“Keep the day holy for its use's sake, both to body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty.”But the most liberal and even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its observance is“the core of our civilization.”Charles Sumner:“If we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.”Oliver Wendell Holmes:“He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.”In Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they would become blind. So men's spiritual sight will fail them if they do not weekly come up into God's light.
(c) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ's example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ's resurrection, and so the day when God's spiritual creation became in Christ complete.
No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day[pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to“a Sabbath rest”that“remaineth,”and to“another day”taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:“On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon“the first day of the week”(Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became“the Lord's day”(Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. onPs. 92(Migne, V:1191, C):“Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”Justin Martyr, First Apology:“On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.”This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was“received up”only after“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”(Acts 1:2).The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. onGen. 2:“If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.”(Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”;Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. onMat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath.Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?
No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a seventh-day[pg 410]Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894, asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the seventh to the first, in the references to“a Sabbath rest”that“remaineth,”and to“another day”taking the place of the original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:“On the Lord's Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and break bread.”
The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been due to the resurrection of Christ upon“the first day of the week”(Mat. 28:1), to his meeting with the disciples upon that day and upon the succeeding Sunday (John 20:26), and to the pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks after (Acts 2:1—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by Christ's own example and by apostolic sanction the first day became“the Lord's day”(Rev. 1:10), on which believers met regularly each week with their Lord (Acts 20:7—“the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”) and brought together their benevolent contributions (1 Cor. 16:1, 2—“Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come”). Eusebius, Com. onPs. 92(Migne, V:1191, C):“Wherefore those things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected, the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord's day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”
Justin Martyr, First Apology:“On the day called Sunday all who live in city or country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun (Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you for your consideration.”This seems to intimate that Jesus between his resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance of the first day of the week. He was“received up”only after“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom he had chosen”(Acts 1:2).
The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ's resurrection. The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world; the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the world in Christ, in which God's work in humanity first becomes complete. C. H. M. onGen. 2:“If I celebrate the seventh day it marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in the new creation in Christ.”(Gal. 4:10, 11—“Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain”;Col. 2:16,17—“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's.”) See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord's Day; Hessey, Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood, Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3: 321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord's Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. onMat. 12:3. For the seventh-day view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the Sabbath.Per contra, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or Sunday?