CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION: DIVINE IMMANENCE . . . . . . . . . . 11
I. SOME PROBLEMS OF IMMANENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
II. PANTHEISM: THE SUICIDE OF RELIGION . . . . . . . . 41
III. THE ETHICS OF MONISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
IV. MONISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
V. THE DIVINE PERSONALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
VI. EVIL versus DIVINE GOODNESS . . . . . . . . . . . 87
VII. EVIL versus DIVINE GOODNESS (cont.) . . . . . . 101
VIII. THE DENIAL OF EVIL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
IX. DETERMINISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
X. MORALITY AS A RELIGION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
XI. PROBLEMS OF PRAYER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
XII. IMMORTALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
{11}
INTRODUCTION
DIVINE IMMANENCE
The doctrine of Divine immanence is in a very special and unmistakeable manner the re-discovery of the nineteenth century. Nothing could be more remote from fact than to call that doctrine a new—or even an old—heresy. Old it certainly is, but heretical in itself it as certainly is not; it can point to unquestionable warranty in Holy Scripture, where such is demanded, and it has never been repudiated by the Christian Church. But just as a law, without being repealed, may fall into desuetude, so a doctrine, without being repudiated, may for a time fade out of the Church's consciousness; and in the one case as in the other any attempt at revival will arouse a certain amount of distrust and opposition. There would no doubt be a measure of truth in the statement that the suspicion and antagonism with which the recent re-enunciation of this particular doctrine or idea was attended in some quarters, exemplified this general attitude of the human mind towards the unaccustomed; and yet such a statement, made without qualification, {12} would be only a half-truth. The fact is, and it cannot be stated too soon or too clearly, that if the antagonism and suspicion exhibited have been exceptionally strong, there have been exceptional causes to justify both. Alarm, and that of a very legitimate nature, has been called forth by one-sided and extravagant statements of the idea of Divine immanence on the part of ill-balanced advocates; and in this book we shall be almost continually occupied with the task of disengaging the truth of immanence from what appear to us mischievous travesties of that truth. That such a task is a necessary one, we are firmly convinced; for if, as Principal Adeney says, "among all the changes in theology that have been witnessed during the last hundred years this"—i.e., the re-discovery of the principle of Divine immanence—"is the greatest, the most revolutionary," it must certainly be of paramount importance that we should understand and apply that principle aright. Confessedly, it denotes a great and far-reaching change; can we, then, in the first instance, briefly and plainly state what this change is from, what it involves, and in what respect it is supposed to help us in dealing with the problem of religion?
It has to be borne in mind, to begin with, that the very term "immanence" had for a long time ceased to be in current use, and had thus become strange to the average believer; it has equally to be remembered that in theology as {13} in other matters we have not yet altogether passed the stage where hostis means both "stranger" and "foe"—that, in fact, to many minds, the unfamiliar is, as we said, eo ipso the suspect. But immanence means nothing more abstruse than "indwelling"; and the renewed emphasis which, from the time of Wordsworth onward, began to be laid upon the Divine indwelling, the presence of God in the Universe, represented in the first place the reaction of the human spirit against the cold and formal Deism of the eighteenth century, which thought of God as remote, external to the world, exclusively "transcendent." According to the deistic notion, God was known to man only by reason of a revelation He had given once and for all in the far-off past—a revelation which in its very nature excluded the idea of progress; as against this conception that of the immanence of God declares that He is not far from each one of us, that in Him we live and move and have our being, that He is over all and through all and in all—the Life of all life, the Energy behind all phenomena, the Presence from which there is no escaping, unceasingly and progressively—though by divers portions and in divers manners—revealed in the universe, in nature and in man.
Thus expressed, the doctrine of God's nearness and indwelling will probably commend itself to most thoughtful religious people; but in {14} re-emphasising an aspect of truth there is always the danger of over-emphasising it, of claiming it as the whole and sole truth—of falling, in a word, from one extreme into the other. To that rule the present case offers no exception; it is, on the contrary, very distinctly one of the pendulum swinging as far in one direction as it previously swung to the other. Let us then at once state the thesis which many of the following pages will serve to elaborate: when the indwelling of God in the universe is interpreted as meaning His identity with the universe; when the indwelling of God in man is taken to mean His identity with man, the whole structure of religion is gravely imperilled. For in the identity of God with the world and with man—which is the root-tenet of Pantheism—there is inevitably involved the surrender of both the Divine and the human personality. We shall have occasion to see how much such a surrender signifies; for the moment it suffices to say plainly that Pantheism, the doctrine which denies the transcendence of God, is by no means the same as that which affirms His immanence, nor does it logically follow from that affirmation. The mistake so frequently made lies in regarding the Divine immanence and the Divine transcendence as mutually exclusive alternatives, whereas they are complementary to one another. A one-sided insistence on the immanence of God, to the exclusion of His transcendence, leads to {15} Pantheism, just as a one-sided insistence upon His transcendence, to the exclusion of His immanence, leads to Deism; it is the two taken together that result in, and are necessary to, Theism. Thus it cannot be too well understood, and it should be understood at the very outset, that we have not to make anything like a choice between immanence and transcendence—that these two can never be separated, but are related to each other as the less to the greater, as the part to the whole. One naturally shrinks from employing a diagram in dealing with such a topic as this; but perhaps recourse might without offence be had to this method—necessarily imperfect as it is—on account of its essential simplicity, and because it is calculated to remove misapprehensions. If we can think of a very large sphere, A, and, situated anywhere within this, of a very small sphere, a—then the relation of the smaller to the greater will be that of the sphere of immanence to the sphere of transcendence. The two are not mutually separable, but the one has its being wholly within the other.
Nevertheless it is quite true that there has been within recent years a distinct shifting of the centre of gravity from the one doctrine to the other, a growing disposition to regard the immanence of God as the fundamental datum, the basis of the modern restatement of religious belief. How will this conception help us to {16} such an end? The answer to that question may be given in the words of Dr. Horton, who says, "The intellectual background of our time is Agnosticism, and the reply which faith makes to Agnosticism is couched in terms of the immanence of God." [1] Dr. Horton's meaning will grow clearer to us if we once more glance at our imaginary diagram, letting the smaller figure a, the sphere of immanence, stand for our universe. If the sphere of God's being lay altogether outside the universe, i.e., outside the radius of our knowledge—if He, in other words, were merely and altogether transcendent—He would also be merely and altogether unknowable, exactly as Agnosticism avers. His transcendent attributes, all that partakes of infinity, cannot—and that of necessity—become objects of immediate knowledge to finite minds; if He is to be known at all to us, He can only be so known by being manifested through His presence within, or action upon, the finite and comprehensible sphere. In other words, it is primarily as He is revealed in and through the finite world, that is to say as immanent, that God becomes knowable to us; all that is included under His transcendence is of the very highest importance for us—religion would be utterly incomplete without it—but it is an inference we make from His immanence. It is, to give an obvious illustration, only to a transcendent God that we can offer prayer—God {17} over all whom the soul needs, to enter into relations withal; but it is also true that we gain the assurance of His transcendence through His immanence, and that
The God without he findeth not,
Who finds Him not within.
In a word, the Divine immanence is not the goal of our quest of God, but it is the indispensable starting-point.
A simple reflection will serve to place this beyond doubt. Against the old-fashioned Deism which continued to bear sway till far into the last century, the agnostic had an almost fatally easy case; he had but to reject the revelation alleged to have been given once for all in the dim past—to reject it on scientific or critical grounds—and who was to prove to him that the universe had been created a few thousand years ago by a remote and external Deity? As for him, he professed, and professed candidly enough, that he could see nothing in nature but the operation of impersonal forces; there was natural law, and there was the process of evolution, but beyond these——? Now the only really telling reply that can be made to those who argue in this fashion is that which reasons from the Divine immanence as its terminus a quo—the doctrine which beholds God first of all present and active in the world, and sees in natural law not a possible substitute for Him, but the working of His sovereign Will. From this point of view, the orderliness of the cosmos, {18} the uniformity and regularity of nature, attest not the unconscious throbbing of a soulless engine, or a blind Power behind phenomena, but a directing Mind, a prevailing Will. The world, according to this conception, was not "made" once upon a time, like a piece of clockwork, and wound up to run without further assistance; it is not a mechanism, but an organism, thrilled and pervaded by an eternal Energy that "worketh even until now." In Sir Oliver Lodge's phrase, we must look for the action of Deity, if at all, then always; and this thought of the indwelling God, revealing Himself in the majestic course and order of nature, not only rebuts the assaults of Agnosticism, but compels our worship. And as natural law speaks to us of the steadfastness and prevailing power of the Divine Will, so evolution speaks of the Divine Purpose, and proclaims that purpose "somehow good," since evolution means a steady reaching forward and upward, an unfolding and ascent from less to more.
We take a step higher up when we come to the further revelation of God as seen dwelling in man; a step higher up because on any sane view immanence is a fact admitting of very various degrees, so that God is more fully revealed in the organic than in the inorganic world, more in the conscious than in the unconscious, far more in man than in lower creatures. We speak of God's indwelling in man in the {19} same sense in which there is something of an earthly parent's very being in his children; indeed, rightly considered, the Divine Parenthood is the only rational guarantee of that human brotherhood which is being so strongly—or, at least, so loudly—insisted on to-day. Man, that is to say, is not identical with God, any more than a son is identical with his father; but man is consubstantial, homogeneous, with God, lit by a Divine spark within him, a partaker of the Divine substance. As in nature we discern God revealed as Power, Mind, Will, Purpose, so in man's moral nature, and his inner satisfaction or dissatisfaction according as he does or does not approach a certain moral standard, we discern Him as Righteousness; and, more than all, since men, beings in whom "the Spirit of God dwelleth," are persons, it follows that God also is at least personal, since there can be nothing in an effect that is not in the cause producing it. Thus the doctrine of Divine immanence throws at least a ray of light upon one of the problems which press with peculiar weight upon many modern minds—and which we shall consider at greater length hereafter—viz., the Divine Personality.
There remains, however, a still further step to be taken along the line which we have been pursuing. We are not fully satisfied when we know God even as personal, even as righteous; the assurance which alone will satisfy the awakened human spirit is that which tells us {20} that God is Love, and that His truest name is that of Father. How could such a culminating assurance come to us? We conceive that this end could only be achieved through a complete manifestation of the Divine character on a finite scale, i.e., through His indwelling in an unparalleled measure in a unique and ethically perfect being; and such an event, we hold, has actually taken place in what is known as the Incarnation. In the words of Dr. Horton, "the doctrine of the immanence of God, the idea that God is in us all, leads us irresistibly to the conclusion that 'God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.'" "This argument," he says—viz., from Divine immanence—"becomes more and more favourable to the doctrine of Christ's Divinity." [2] The highest and truest knowledge of God, that which it most concerns us to possess, could have become ours only through One in whom the fulness of Godhead dwelt bodily, in whom we saw Divinity in its essence and without alloy. To bring us this perfect revelation was, indeed, the very reason of Christ's advent. We come to the Father through the Son, because there is no other Way. We have seen the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, the very Image of His Substance. Divine Love, mighty to save, full of redemptive power, longing for the soul with infinite affection—in fine, Fatherhood—this is what constitutes {21} religion's ultimate; and this revelation we have in the Incarnate Son, in whom the Spirit dwelt without measure—who, i.e., stands forth as the supreme and unparalleled illustration of the Divine immanence.
Here, then, we have a first, preliminary survey of the meaning of this much-discussed, much-misunderstood term—a mere outline sketch which, needless to say, requires a great deal of filling in, such as will be attempted in subsequent pages of this book. So much should be clear from what has been said, that the nineteenth century, in practically restoring this fruitful and far-reaching conception to a Church which had largely forgotten it, made a contribution of the utmost importance to theology and religion; indeed, the value of that contribution could hardly be more strongly stated than in the utterances of Dr. Horton which we have quoted above. Such a factor, however, cannot be introduced, or re-introduced, into our theological thinking without necessitating a good deal of revision, nor without causing a certain measure of temporary confusion and dislocation; it will accordingly be the principal object of the following chapters to clear up misapprehensions which have arisen in connection with the idea of immanence, to assign to it its approximately proper place in Christian thought, and to safeguard an important truth against the injury done to it—and {22} so to all truth—by a zeal that is not according to knowledge. Corruptio optimi pessima: in unskilled hands this doctrine is certainly apt to become a danger to religion itself; nevertheless, rightly applied, there is probably no more potent instrument than this to help us in that reconstruction of belief which is admittedly the urgent business of our age. It is true, as Raymond Brucker said, that "the answer to the riddle of the universe is God—the answer to the riddle of God is Christ"; but it is also true, we hold, that the most effective key for the unlocking of the riddle is the idea of Divine immanence.
[1] My Belief, p. 107.
[2] Op. cit.; pp. 108, 109.
{23}
CHAPTER I
SOME PROBLEMS OF IMMANENCE
It used to be said of a famous volume of apologetics—with what justification this is not the place to discuss—that it raised more difficulties than it professed to settle; and a somewhat similar charge has more than once been brought against the doctrine of Divine immanence, viz., that if it succeeded in throwing light upon some problems, it created new ones of a particularly insoluble character. The old deistic notion which interposed a distance between the Creator and His creation, and in particular represented God as there and man as here, might be untenable in philosophy, but it was at least intelligible and practically helpful to ordinary minds; but does not the idea of God's immanence in the world and in man tend to efface that distinction, and thus to introduce confusion where confusion is least to be desired?
In the present chapter we shall attempt to glance at some of the main questions which arise in connection with this doctrine; and, to begin with, we may state with the utmost frankness that nothing is easier than to interpret the {24} conception of Divine immanence in such a manner as to make it appear either ludicrous or hateful or simply meaningless—in any case repulsive from the religious point of view. This, to come straight to the point, is what is bound to happen when God's indwelling in man is explained as meaning that man is de facto one with his Maker. What could the general reader think when he was told with vehemence, "You are yourself the infinite"—"You are yourself God; you never were anything else"? If that reader was lacking in mental balance, he was likely to be swept off his feet by such a declaration, and to accept, with all its implications, a view so flattering to human vanity; if, on the other hand, he was a person of soberly religious outlook and experience, he inquired what was the doctrine in whose name such a proposition was offered to him for acceptance—and on learning that the name of that doctrine was the unfamiliar one of "immanence," straightway set it down as the worst of brain-sick heresies. Thus, not for the first time, has a cause or truth been wounded and discredited by injudicious advocacy.
For the purpose which we have in view we cannot do better than state what we consider the fundamental misinterpretation of this doctrine in the considered words of one of its most popular exponents, who expresses it as follows: "God in man is God as man. There is no real Divine Immanence which does not imply the {25} allness of God." [1] It is not too much to say that this brief statement contains the fons et origo of all the misunderstandings with which the re-enunciation of this idea has been attended; it is this assumption of the allness of God which underlies and colours quite a number of modern movements, and will be seen to lead those who accept it into endless and inextricable tangles.
If God is all, then what are we? Granted the basal axiom of this type of immanentism, it follows with irresistible cogency that our separate existence, consciousness, volitions and so forth are merely illusions. We can be "ourselves God" only in the sense that we are individually nothing; the contrary impression is simply an error, which we shall have to recognise as such, and to get rid of with what speed and thoroughness we can. This, it is true, is more easily said than done, for our whole life both of thought and action bears incessant witness to the opposite; there are, however, those to whose temperament such a complete contradiction, so far from being distressing, is positively grateful because of its suggestion of mystery and mysticism. Sometimes a Tertullian voices this abdication of the reasoning faculty defiantly—certum est quia impossibile est; but more often perhaps the same position {26} is expressed in the spirit of Tennyson's well-known lines, which, indeed, bear directly upon our immediate theme:—
We feel we are nothing—for all is Thou and in Thee;
We feel we are something—that also has come from Thee;
We know we are nothing—but Thou wilt help us to be.
We submit, however, that while such a contemplation of, or oscillation between, mutually destructive tenets may for a time minister to some kind of aesthetic enjoyment, the healthy mind cannot permanently find satisfaction while thus suspended in mid-air; nor are we appreciably advanced by the temper which, after pointing out some alleged fundamental antinomy, "quietly accepts"—i.e., in practice ignores—it. Problems of this description are not solved by what Matthew Arnold called a want of intellectual seriousness; is it true, we ask, that the "mystical view of the Divine immanence" compels us to believe in the allness of God, and so to deny our individual existence?
The answer is that this soi-disant "mystical view" is simply a distorted view of what immanence means. We are not really called upon to do violence to the collective facts of our experience, which rise up in unanimous and spontaneous testimony against the monstrous fiction that we are either nothing or God. The fallacy upon which this fiction rests is not a {27} very subtle one. When we speak of God's indwelling in man, we predicate that community of nature which the writer of Gen. ii expresses by saying that God created man in His own image; we predicate, i.e., what we already called homogeneity—likeness of substance—and not identity, which is a very different thing. We do not commit ourselves to the proposition that "God in man is God as man." Parent and child are linked together by a precisely analogous bond to that subsisting between God and man, but they are nevertheless distinct individualities.
"But," it will be objected, "the analogy does not hold, for parent and child are both finite; how can a similar separateness be so much as thought to exist between God and man, seeing that God is infinite?" It will be seen that the objection merely restates the allness of God under a different form; and this brings us to the very heart of the matter. We must at length face the one conclusion which does not land us in self-contradiction—viz., that in the act of creation God limits His own infinity, no matter to how infinitesimal an extent. On the alternative supposition we have ultimately to think of God and man either as All plus something or All plus zero—which is absurd. Mr. Chesterton has rendered useful service by insisting that in creating the world God distinguishes Himself from the world, as a poet is distinct from his poem—a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just spoken of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no longer a billion, so infinity itself, limited though it be but by a hair's-breadth, is no longer, strictly speaking, infinite. Once we admit this Divine self-limitation as a working theory, we shall no longer be troubled by the unreal difficulty of having to reconcile the principle of Divine immanence with the fact of individual existence. The Divine spark may burn in man, brightly or dimly as the case may be, and yet be separate from the central and eternal Fire whence it has been flung forth; in other words, man may be a partaker of the Divine nature without being "himself God." If we are to be able to believe in either a universe or a humanity which, though the scene of Divine immanence, are not identical with God, it seems to us that such a view of creation as we have just propounded is inevitable; and unless this non-identity can be maintained—unless, that is to say, we definitely repudiate the idea of the "allness" of God—religion itself is reduced to a misty and ineffective theosophy.
The issues involved in the acceptance or rejection of this view appear to us of such importance that, at the risk of seeming to labour our point unnecessarily, we are anxious to make it perfectly plain. In the phase through which {29} religious thought is passing to-day there are few things more urgently needed than to dispel that interpretation of immanence which obliterates the line of demarcation between God and man. We may decline the mechanical dualism which placed the Creator altogether outside the universe, and yet embrace a view which for want of a better name might be called spiritual dualism, and which maintains the distinction of which we are speaking. What happens when that distinction is lost, is sufficiently apparent from a statement like the following, actually addressed to a miscellaneous audience: "If there is an eternal throne, you are on it now; there has never been a moment when you were not on it." Such downright extravagance is most suitably met with a bald contradiction: man is not on the eternal throne, and there has never been a moment when he was on it. It is this fact which makes worship so much as possible; it is, in short, the transcendent God with whom we are concerned in the exercise of religion, for as Mr. Chesterton puts it in his own manner, "that Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones."
Let us see what follows if we once seriously persuade ourselves that we are "on the eternal throne," or, to extract its meaning from that picturesque phrase, that the presence of God is already perfectly realised in us. We cannot but think we shall carry the reader {30} with us in saying that such a belief is in itself indicative of spiritual danger; indeed, there can hardly be a greater danger than that which is directly encouraged by the idea that we have already attained, and that all is well with us, seeing that we are one with the All-good. On such a supposition, why pray—for even were there One other than ourselves to pray to, what is there to pray for? Or, to quote the actual question of a believer in this kind of immanence, Why ask outside for a strength which we already possess? What a naïve question of this calibre reveals only too plainly is that self-complacency which is the most deadly foe of the spiritual life. One is reminded of the American story in which a bright and intelligent wife asks her cultured but indifferent husband, "Is it true that God is immanent in us all?" "I suppose so," he answers; "but it does not greatly matter." The question is, Do we already possess the strength for which we ask? Or rather, Does not the very fact that we ask for it prove that we do not possess it, and that He from whom we ask it is not ourselves? Is not the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Divine invasion of the soul, a fact of experience, and is it not also a fact that that gift is only to be had for the asking, only given in response to earnest and persevering prayer, and that it effects in those who receive it a change of thought and feeling?
All these are facts resting on irrefragable evidence; the apparent problem is, to {31} harmonise them with the affirmation of the divinity existing in man. If God be truly "in us all," then in what sense or to what purpose can we pray for a consummation which, it will be urged, is ex hypothesi an accomplished fact at the time that we ask for it? We reply that the Divine indwelling in man is of the nature of a capacity for striving rather than of an attainment, a potentiality rather than an actuality, a prophecy rather than a fulfilment. Man's longing for communion with God, as for an unrealised good, is the longing of like for Like, but it is only through struggle and effort that the goal can be reached. The Eternal is indeed the Life of all life, and to that extent it is true that all life expresses Him; nevertheless our original divine endowment is no more than the material which has to be shaped and wrought into "the type of perfect." Without this divinity of substance as it might be called, we should never have the finished product, divinity of character; but the latter can only be achieved through arduous and persevering endeavour. Without a genuinely divine element—without the Spirit breathed into man by his Creator—we could not even realise our failure, nor aspire after a fuller portion of that same life-giving Spirit; it is what we have that tells us of what we lack, and directs us to Him who alone can supply our want out of His inexhaustible fulness.
And if we have thus found an answer to the question, "How, from the point of view of {32} Divine immanence, can there be anything but God?" we have at the same time received a hint indicating where we shall have to look for the answer to another query of even more directly practical interest, viz., "How, from the same point of view, can there be anything but good—how can there be any real evil, physical or moral?" Put in that extreme form, this problem, like the one with which we have just dealt, arises from the erroneous assertion of the allness of God; but as the whole subject of the reality of evil will come up for treatment at a later stage, we need not now enter into its discussion. At one aspect, and one only, of this vast and complex theme we may, however, be permitted to glance for a moment before we pass on. If God dwells in us, it is frequently asked, whence comes what Paul so pathetically calls "the law of sin which is in our members"—whence come the wrongful desires and harmful passions of whose power we are so painfully conscious? That is an entirely legitimate and even inevitable query, but the solution of the enigma is not past finding out, though we must content ourselves with a mere suggestion. We have, in the first place to keep our hold of the fact, disregarding all pleas to the contrary, that sin is a reality, and not a phantasm of our imagination; we shall then diagnose its nature as the misuse, the unfaithful administration, of the power which God has conferred upon us for employment in His holy service; and then, {33} lastly, we shall grow aware that the very pain, the sense of unhappiness and moral discord by which the consciousness of guilt is ever accompanied, is the protesting voice of that which is the deepest reality within ourselves—the indwelling Divine.
But when we have shown that the doctrine of Divine immanence does not, as some of its advocates would have us believe, swallow up human individuality—a subject to which we shall return—we are faced with yet another difficulty. The question is asked—again, quite naturally and inevitably—In what sense can we speak of God as immanent in the inorganic world? How, e.g., does a stone embody or express His essence?—and yet, if it is not somehow a manifestation of Him, what is this cold, lifeless, ponderable substance we call a stone? Nor do matters grow simpler when we ascend in the scale: we may trace the immanent Deity in all that is good and fair in nature, in all its smiling and beneficent moods—but what of nature's uglinesses and cruelties? Is God expressing Himself in the ferocity of the tiger, the poisonous malice of the cobra, the greed of every unclean carrion-bird? If He is such as religion represents Him, how can He be present in these? We may quote with rapture the familiar lines in which the poet tells us:—
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts. . .
{34} But the world which is the dwelling of that something "far more deeply interfused" of which Wordsworth sings, does not consist exclusively of
the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky. . .
—it contains also dismal, fever-breeding swamps, dreadful deserts, dreary wastes of eternal ice, plunged into darkness half the year; are we going simply to ignore these realities when we speak of the Divine indwelling in the world? And, once more, shall we assert this doctrine when we remember the cold cunning of the spider, or the delight in torture displayed by the domestic cat?
It depends, we answer, what we mean by "this doctrine"; if we construe immanence to signify "allness," we may as well admit first as last that there is no way of escape from the difficulties which these queries suggest. In that case it is not for us to pick and choose—to say that God is the beauty of the beautiful, but not the ugliness of the ugly; the compassion of the compassionate, but not the cruelty of the cruel: if He is all, He is both, and for that very reason is neither. That is the real inwardness of a conception of the Deity which represents Him, with Omar Khayyam, as One—
Whose secret Presence, through Creation's veins
Running, Quicksilver-like eludes your pains;
Taking all forms from Màh to Màhi; and
They change and perish all—but He remains.
{35} Such a doctrine can only mean that the Divine Substance, under a myriad-fold variety of appearances, is equally diffused through all creation, like the universal ether of science; and such a conception of the Eternal, whatever else it may be, ceases ipso facto to be religiously helpful. The counterpart of the theoretical allness would be the practical nothingness of God.[2] But having quite definitely declined to place such a construction upon immanence, we are preserved from the absurdities which flow from it. We may and do hold that all the works of the Lord manifest Him in some manner and in some measure; but, as we already stated in our introductory chapter, not all do so in the same manner or the same measure, and not any of them nor all of them are He. To the specific inquiry, What, if not part of God, is this stone?—we can, indeed, only answer in the words of Tennyson that if we knew what the least object was in itself, we "should know what God and man is." But, dealing with the question more generally, we may say that what inorganic nature shows forth of the indwelling God is His prevailing Power and abiding Law; looking upon the works of Him who "stretcheth out the north over empty space, and hangeth the earth upon {36} nothing," we can but feel that awed admiration of His wisdom and might which is expressed over and over again in the Book of Job. And this impression deepens when we pass upward from the inorganic to the organic creation; for not only do we behold the entire vast spectacle thrilled through and through by one Life, but we are also enabled to discern something of the august Purpose which progressively realises itself in all the phases of the cosmic process. That the God revealed by the universe must transcend the universe in order to be in any real sense its Creator, is self-evident; but that it is His own Energy which pervades it, a present Power operating from within—in other words, that He is immanent in the world, as well as transcendent—is a thought from which we cannot legitimately escape.
When we speak of the immanence of God in nature, therefore, we mean principally immanence of Power; and due weight should be given to this qualification, since its effect is to remove the obstacles we have enumerated above. For it ought to be plain, though in popular discussion it is constantly overlooked, that God cannot be ethically present in the unethical, nor personally present in the impersonal. And here, it seems to us, we go to the root of our present problem, viz., by re-emphasising what is indispensable to a right conception of this whole doctrine—that immanence is of necessity a matter of degrees. Nature is not moral, {37} and hence does not reveal God's moral character to us; nature is not personal, and therefore, while its operations point with irresistible cogency to personal directivity, does not show forth the Divine Personality as indwelling.
As soon as we grasp this obvious truth, we shall be led to find the answer to that question which, as we saw, presents a stumbling-block to many minds, namely, in what sense it is permissible to affirm the Divine immanence in the animal world. How can God be in the denizens of the jungle, we ask, feeling that to make such an statement concerning Him is to empty the idea of God of all its meaning. Natural, however, as such reasoning is, reflection will show it to be faulty. To use a simple, if necessarily imperfect, illustration, something of man's own being is in all his organs, but not all that makes him man is in every one of them; certainly, his higher faculties are not displayed in the organs designed to fulfil the lower functions of the organism. To proceed to the obvious application—animals are not moral beings, but act, with the occasional exception of such of their number as have been humanised by contact with men, from instinct and not from conscious choice; and for that reason we are not called upon to reconcile the loving-kindness and tender mercy of God with the habits and general behaviour of the lower creation. In ascribing all sorts of moral qualities to animals we simply exhibit the same {38} tendency which leads children to endow lifeless objects both with life and purposiveness. Moral attributes, however, whether good or bad, presuppose conscious choice, a faculty of weighing and if necessary repelling motives; and with such a faculty we have no reason for crediting animals. No doubt, our incurable habit of reading the facts of our own moral nature into the actions of beasts and birds accounts for the vogue alike of Aesop's Fables and of such works as the Jungle Books; but what strikes us as cruelty in the tiger is not a moral quality at all, any more than it is a motive of heroism that impels the mongoose to fight cobras. The tiger and the cobra are no more deliberately "cruel" than they could be conceived as deliberately "benevolent"; they are below the ethical level, expressing no character at all, and least of all the character of God.
But if God is immanent in the cosmos as its pervading and sustaining Power and Life; if He is immanent in man as that moral and spiritual principle which reaches out after fuller communion with the Most High: where shall we say that He Himself is personally present, since He is not so present either in nature or in man? And assuming that such a supreme and full revelation of God has been given in history, shall we not do well to distinguish in some manner between it and every lesser manifestation of immanence? Mr. W. L. Walker has admirably pointed out that while {39} God is personally present to everything, and entirely absent from nothing, yet it is certainly false to imagine that He is "personally inside of everything." "Nothing can happen wholly apart from Him—He is in some measure in everything and being"; but where shall He Himself be found, where shall we look for His very fulness? "He cannot," says Mr. Walker—and we shall not attempt to better his words—"be personally present in anything, or in any being, till there is a being present in the world capable of containing and expressing Him in His essential truth; and that we do not have till we come to Jesus Christ."
And thus we may perhaps claim to have shown, however briefly, in what direction we must look for the solution of our problem of universal immanence—a problem unnecessarily complicated by a plausible but false construction of that doctrine. We conclude that every portion of the cosmos, including our conscious selves, manifests so much, and such aspects, of God as it has the capacity to manifest—His Power, His Purpose, His moral Law, which vindicates its sanctity upon whosoever would violate it; but His own Essence, His Character, could be revealed only in One whose soul harboured no single element at variance with the Divine Goodness, One who could be described as "God manifest in the flesh"—even that unique Son whose oneness with the Father was {40} undimmed and unbroken by any diversity of will. It required the perfect Instrument to give forth the perfect Harmony.
And here a final but important point arises. If the Incarnation of God in Christ is in one sense the highest example of Divine immanence—just as man represents the highest form of animal life—yet in another sense it transcends mere immanence just as truly as humanity transcends the animal creation. We leave this as a suggestion which the reader may develop for himself. So much is certain, that in Christ alone does the edifice of faith reach its culminating point—in Him our questionings receive their complete and final answer, because what we see in Him is not a stray hint or broken gleam, but the pure and quenchless light of God's own Presence. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him."
[1] The Rev. R. J. Campbell, M.A., in a paper on Divine Immanence and Pantheism. For the phrase and the Idea of the "allness of God" see also Rudimental Divine (i.e. Christian) Science, by Mary Baker Eddy, p. 10.
[2] We cannot forbear quoting two pungent lines of Mr. Hamish Hendry's, in which the outcome of such theosophising seems to be not altogether unjustly described as—
A kind o' thowless Great First Cause, Skinklin' thro' vapour.
{41}
CHAPTER II
PANTHEISM: THE SUICIDE OF RELIGION
In speaking of Deism, the theory which explicitly denies the Divine immanence, we already had occasion to acknowledge that quality of intelligibleness which makes this doctrine easy of assimilation, and accounts, e.g., for the success of Islam, the deistic religion par excellence, as a propagandist creed. There is, however, another aspect of Deism, none the less real because it is not always recognised at first sight, which perhaps an illustration will serve to bring home to us. We all know what is likely to happen to an estate in the owner's prolonged or permanent absence—it deteriorates; his active interest and personal supervision are wanting, and the results are visible everywhere. Sloth and mismanagement, which his presence would check, go uncorrected, the daily duties are indifferently performed or remain undone, and soon the property as a whole bears unmistakeable traces of neglect. There is always the possibility of the master's return some day, when he will exact an account from his servants; but {42} the long interval which has elapsed since such a visit took place has deprived that mere possibility of any wholesome terror which it might inspire, so that matters drift steadily from bad to worse.
Now, from the deistic point of view, the world may not unfairly be compared to such an estate. God is remote—He may look down upon the terrestrial scene from His far-off heaven, but He does not actively interfere, except by an occasional miracle, which is not the same as direct hour-by-hour superintendence: is it any wonder that the ground should bring forth weeds and brambles rather than flowers and fruit? Is it a wonder that this God-less world should be a dismal place and full of misery, and that human nature, left to itself, should have "no health" in it? It would be matter for wonder if it were otherwise; and thus Deism is well in accord with those gloomier forms of religious thought which for a long time were the generally predominating ones.
The distance between this conception and that which flows from the doctrine of Divine immanence can hardly be measured; it certainly cannot be bridged. The soul to which, through whatever experience, there has come the revelation that God is closer to us than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet, looks out upon a new heaven and a new earth. Once it is understood that God is really and truly in His universe, that He is not infinitely far {43} and inaccessible but infinitely nigh, an encompassing Presence, a fresh light falls upon nature and human nature alike. Viewed in that light, and from the standpoint of this illuminating truth, "the world's no blot for us, nor blank," but the scene of Divine activity and unceasing revelation; for all nature's forces are seen to be the expression of the Divine Energy, and all nature's laws the manifestation of the Divine Will. If God Himself is the Life that stirs within all life, the Reality underlying all phenomena—if we live and move and have our being in Him, and His Spirit dwelleth within us—the direct outcome of such a belief should be a sacred optimism, an assurance that the cosmos "means intensely, and means good."
There can, we think, be little doubt as to the beneficial effects which have accompanied the re-affirmation of this idea in recent times. It is only too true as yet, in the case of many, that "the past, which still holds its ground in the back chambers of the brain, would persuade us that 'tis a demon-haunted world, where not God but the devil rules; we are not yet persuaded that this is a cheerful, homely, well-meaning universe, whose powers, if strict in their working, are nevertheless beneficent and not diabolic." Against these phantasmal fears the doctrine of God's immanence, rightly understood, offers the best of antidotes, and here lies its unquestionable value. At the same time it has already become apparent {44} to us that the suddenness of the stress laid upon that idea has brought new dangers in its train. The temptation is ever to swing round from one extreme to its opposite; and in the present case not a few have carried—or been carried by—the reaction against the belief in God's remoteness so far as to forget, in contemplating the truth that He is "through all and in all," the complementary and equally necessary truth that He is also God over all. Because something of His Mind and Will is expressed by the universe, they not only, as we saw in the previous chapter, conclude that the universe is identical with Him, but that He is no other than the universe which reveals Him. "All is God, and God is All," they exclaim, adding the doctrine of the Godness of all to that of the allness of God; the universe, in their view, is the one Divine and Eternal Being of which everything, including ourselves, is only a phase or partial manifestation; as it is the Divine life which pulses through us, so it is the Divine consciousness which our consciousness expresses, the Divine nature which acts through ours. Here we are face to face with Pantheism full-grown: let us see what is involved in its assumptions, and why the Christian Church must resolutely refuse to make terms with this teaching.
No one would deny that the pantheistic theory, which identifies God with the universe and ourselves with God, has its fascination and {45} glamour—a fascination which is not ignoble on the face of it. The modern founder of Pantheism, Benedict Spinoza, was a man of pure and saintly character, a gentle recluse from the world, lovable and blameless. Nevertheless, we have no hesitation in avowing our belief that the glamour of Pantheism is utterly deceptive; that those who set foot on this inclined plane will find themselves unable—in direct proportion to their mental integrity—to resist conclusions which mean the practical dissolution of religion, in any intelligible sense of that word; and that in the present transitional state of religious opinion it is particularly necessary that the truth about Pantheism should be clearly stated. The test of a theory is not whether it looks symmetrical and self-consistent in the seclusion of the study, but whether it works. If it fails in actual life, it fails altogether; and the one fatal objection to this particular system is that it does not work. Nothing could be more significant than the admission of so representative an exponent of Pantheism as Mr. Allanson Picton, who tells us that one, if not more, of Spinoza's fundamental conceptions "have increasingly repelled rather than attracted religious people." [1] It is the object of the present chapter to show why this must be the case, wherever the implications of his teaching are understood.
{46} Pantheism declares—it practically begins and ends with the declaration—that the universe is God, and that God is the totality of being. Now, try as we will, such a conception can never take the place of the thought of God as our Father, and that for the simple reason that the universe is not even what we mean by personal. As Schopenhauer shrewdly remarked, "To call the universe 'God' is not to explain it, but merely to burden language with a superfluous synonym for the word 'universe.' Whether one says 'the universe is God' or 'the universe is the universe' makes no difference." It is when people no longer know what to do with a Deity, he continues, that they transfer His part to the universe—"which is, properly speaking, only a decent way of getting rid of Him." [2] A totality of being is not the same as a personal God, but the very contrary. Nor is it any consolation to be told that this totality, though not personal, is "super-personal." Such a super-personal Absolute or Whole, to quote Dr. Ballard's penetrating criticism, "is devoid of just those elements which for human experience constitute personality. To our power of vision it matters nothing whether we say that the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum are super-visible or invisible. The pertinent truth is that they are not visible. So, too, that which is not 'merely' personal is not really personal. {47} If the Absolute of philosophy be the super-personal, it is not, in plain truth, personal at all." [3]
Now, a God who is not what we mean by personal can be of no help to us in our religious life. When a congregation of modern worshippers is appealed to in these terms—"Do not, I beseech you, think of God any more as a personal being like yourself, though immeasurably greater"—they are really being asked to commit spiritual suicide. For we cannot hold communion except with a person; we cannot pray to the universe. We can neither give thanks to the universe, nor supplicate it, nor confess to it, nor intercede with it. But a God to whom we cannot pray, with whom we cannot enter into communion, is for all practical purposes no God at all. The only God with whom we can stand in personal, conscious, spiritual relationship must be one who is not identical with the universe, but One in whom, on the contrary, the universe has its being. It is the transcendent God with whom we have to deal in religion; such a God Pantheism does not acknowledge.
But not only is the universe not personal; this god of Pantheism is not ethical either. This "totality" is neither good nor bad, but made up indifferently of all manner of components, and according to Pantheism all of them—the evil as much as the good—are {48} necessary to the perfection of the whole. Thus the pantheist's god has no moral complexion, and such a god is of no use to us. So far as religion is concerned, he—or it—might just as well be non-existent as non-moral. The only Deity whom we can worship is One who stands above the world's confusion, its Moral Governor and Righteous Judge.
But Pantheism identifies not only God with the universe, but ourselves with God. Now if this view is accepted, if there is no real dividing line between man and God, then we can only once more point out that we have no personality either; we are mere fragmentary expressions of God's life, without selfhood or self-determination, no more responsible for our acts than a violin for the tune that is played on it. Mr. Picton, speaking with authority, tells us that "to the true pantheist" man is "but a finite mode of infinite Being"; that human personality is only "seeming" [4] and that, from the pantheistic standpoint, the self must be "content to be nothing." That is to say that the consistent pantheist must be a consistent determinist. Logical Pantheism rules out the possibility of sin against man or God—"for who withstandeth His will," seeing that He is the only real Existence? Let a further quotation make this plain. "What," asks Mr. Picton, "are we to say of bad men, the vile, the base, the liar, the murderer? Are they {49} also in God and of God? . . . Yes, they are." [5] And this amazing conclusion—amazing, though involved in his fundamental outlook—is sought to be defended on the ground that we have "no adequate idea" "of the part played by bad men in the Divine Whole"! In other words, the pantheist god expresses himself in a St. Francis, but he also does so in a King Leopold; he is manifested in General Booth and in Alexander Borgia; Jesus Christ is a phase of his being, and so is Judas Iscariot. A sentimental Pantheism may say that God is that in a hero which nerves him to heroism, and that in a mother which prompts her self-sacrifice for her children, for there is none else. But that is only one-half of the truth; arguing from the same premises, we must also say that God is that in the sinner which succumbs to sin, and in the wrong-doer that which takes pleasure in wrong, for there is none else. Once we rub out the distinction between God and man, we rub out all moral distinctions as well. If we are not other than He is, how can we act other than He wills? If we hold that the soul is only "a finite mode of God's infinite attribute of thought," part of "the necessary expression of the infinite attributes of eternal Being," the sense of sin can be no more than an illusion.
Or shall we be told that, whatever a man's theoretical Determinism, in practice he will {50} always be conscious of his freedom? The answer is, Yes, perhaps, provided his moral instincts are sound; but the average mortal, when he has to choose between the hard duty and the easy indulgence, will be sorely tempted to find a reason for yielding in his determinist philosophy. And is a doctrine likely to be true which, the moment it is seriously applied, undermines the very foundation of morality, and of which the best that can be said is that people do not consistently apply it? M. Bourget's Le Disciple is not a book for everyone; but in it the distinguished author has drawn an instructive picture of the effect of Determinism as a theory upon a self-indulgent man's practice. As Mr. Baring-Gould aptly says, "Human nature is ever prone to find an excuse for getting the shoulder from under the yoke."
Pantheism, as a matter of fact, whichever way we travel, is ultimately compelled to deny the qualitative distinction between good and evil, declaring both to be equally necessary, and thus arrives once more at its conception of a Deity who, though said to be "perfect"—presumably in some "super-moral" sense—is not good, and hence cannot be a possible object of worship for us. How little the pantheist's God can mean to us will be understood when it is stated that, according to Spinoza, man "cannot strive to have God's love to him." [6] Indeed, how could the universe "love" one of {51} its mere passing phases? Is it a wonder that this cheerless creed has "increasingly repelled rather than attracted religious people" when once they have understood its inwardness? We ask for bread and receive—a nebula; we call for our Father, and are told to content ourselves with a totality of being!
And when Pantheism has thus despoiled us of our religious possessions one by one, so far as this life is concerned, what is its message concerning the future? This, that when we die there is an end even of our seeming self-hood; we are once more immersed in the All, the Whole—like a thimbleful of water drawn from the ocean and poured back into the ocean again. This is what Mr. Picton calls "the peace of absorption in the Infinite"; would it not be simpler to call it annihilation, and have done with it? Dissolve a bronze statue and merge it in a mass of molten metal, and it is gone as a statue; dissolve a soul and merge it in the sum of being, and as a soul it is no more. That is not immortality, but a final blotting out—a fit conclusion from those pantheistic premises which, consistently worked out, mean the end of religion, the end of morality, the end of everything.
Pantheism goes about under a variety of aliases to-day, and therein lies an additional danger; for whatever its assumed name or disguise, its essence is always the same, and its very speciousness calls for all our vigilance and {52} determination to fight it. We must not weary of challenging its root-assumption, or of exposing its insidious tendencies; we must not weary of reiterating the truth that God is not identical with the universe, but to be worshipped as the One who is over all; we must insist that His nearness to us and our likeness to Him are not identity with Him—nay, that it is His otherness from us which makes us capable of seeking and finding Him, of experiencing His love, and loving Him in return. From the inhuman speculations of Pantheism we turn with unspeakable gratitude to the revelation of the personal God in the Person of Jesus Christ His Son, whom having seen, we have beheld the Father, and whose are the words, not of annihilation, but of eternal life.
[1] Pantheism, p. 15.
[2] Parerga, vol. ii., pp. 101-102.
[3] The True God, p. 118.
[4] Op. cit., p. 15.
[5] Ibid, p. 69.
[6] J. Allanson Picton, Spinoza, p. 213.
{53}
CHAPTER III
THE ETHICS OF MONISM
To say that religious thought is passing to-day through a period of peculiar stress is to utter a commonplace so threadbare that one apologises for repeating it. Even the man in the street—or perhaps we ought to say even the man in the pew, the average member of a Christian Church—is aware that certain potent forces have been for some time past directing a series of sustained assaults upon what were until recently all but unquestioned beliefs; nor, if he is capable of appreciating facts, will he deny—though he may deplore it—that to all seeming these attacks have been attended by a considerable measure of success. If, however, our man in the pew were asked to specify what forces he had in his mind, he would probably in nine cases out of ten point to two such, and two alone, viz., natural science and Biblical criticism, which, he would tell us, had between them created an atmosphere in which the old views of Scriptural authority found it more and more difficult to maintain themselves.
{54}
Such an estimate of the situation would be true so far as it went; yet it would omit to take account of a third factor, a solvent far less obvious in its workings, but far more disintegrating in its effects. The factor to which we are referring is philosophy; while science and criticism have overthrown certain traditional ramparts, a type of philosophy has sprung up, slowly undermining the very foundations; or, to vary the simile, while the former two have captured certain outworks, the latter has made its way to within striking distance of the citadel, and that the more unobserved because attention has been focussed almost exclusively upon the more imposing performances of the critic and the biologist.
As a matter of fact, religion never had, nor could have, anything to fear from these two quarters, which—as we can now see—could not in any way touch the essence of religious faith, as distinguished from some of its temporary forms; on the other hand, that very essence might be imperilled by a false but plausible philosophy, and grave practical consequences in the domain of conduct might arise from its spread. For if it is accurate to say that behind every ethic there stands—whether avowed or unavowed—a certain metaphysic, the converse holds true no less; every philosophy, in the exact proportion in which it is ex animo accepted, will tend to produce its ethical counterpart. What we {55} submit in all seriousness is that the only real danger to religion that is to be apprehended to-day—a danger to which it is impossible to blind ourselves—is that involved in a certain metaphysical outlook, whose continued growth in popularity cannot but ere long produce its own results in the field of practice.
The philosophy in question is intimately related to that Pantheism at some of whose implications we were glancing in our last chapter; if we refer to it here and subsequently by the name of Monism, under which it has of late obtained a considerable vogue in this country, it must be understood that we do not mean what Dr. Ballard calls _Theo_monism, but a far less carefully thought-out and tested theory of life, which at the present time is making a successful appeal to multitudes of inexact thinkers. The fundamental idea common to this school is that the universe, including our individualities or what we think such, constitutes only one being, and manifests only one will, which all its phenomena express. Separateness of existence, according to such a view—which, after all, represents only the extreme logic of Pantheism—is, of course, a chimaera, and so, a fortiori, must separate volition be. The only real will—i.e., the will of the universe—is regarded as good and right; and since there is no other will but that one, and seeing that none resists or inhibits it, it is ever being carried out, continuously operative. {56} To call this will even "prevailing" would be a misuse of language, since there is no other will for it to prevail against.
Now, regarded merely in the abstract, this conception might be treated as a harmless eccentricity or speculative aberration, and is likely to be so treated by the ordinary "practical" man, with his contempt for "theories," and his pathetic conviction that speculation does not matter; let us, however, see what is implied in this particular speculative theory. From the primary assumption of this philosophy it follows with an irresistible cogency that there is no such thing as real, objective evil. Sin, if the term be retained at all, can at most be only a blunder. Evil is only an inexact description of a lesser good, or good in the making. Indeed, properly considered—i.e., from the monistic standpoint—evil is a mere negation, a shadow where light should be; or to be quite logical, evil is that which is not—in other words, there is no evil, except to deluded minds, whose business is to get quit of their delusion. The one and only cosmic will being declared good, it follows that for the monist "all's right with the world," in a sense scarcely contemplated by Browning when he penned that most dubious aphorism. We propose briefly to show how this creed works out—what is its ethical counterpart or issue—not by arguing in vacuo what it must be, but by presenting to the reader three {57} selected illustrations taken from the writings of as many exponents of this type of Monism.
In his volume First and Last Things—a work which he significantly calls "a confession of faith and rule of life"—Mr. H. G. Wells avows himself a believer in the "Being of the Species," and, prospectively at least, in "the eternally conscious Being of all things." The individual as such is merely an "experiment of the species for the species," and without significance per se; we are "episodes in an experience greater than ourselves," "incidental experiments in the growing knowledge and consciousness of the race." Mr. Wells's fundamental act of faith is a firm belief in "the ultimate rightness and significance of things," including "the wheel-smashed frog on the road, and the fly drowning in the milk." In other words, all is just as it has to be; regrets, remorses and discontents exist only for the "unbeliever" in this truth, while, speaking for himself, the author frankly says, "I believe . . . that my defects and uglinesses and failures, just as much as my powers and successes, are things that are necessary and important." "In the last resort," he concludes his book, "I do not care whether I am seated on a throne, or drunk, or dying in a gutter. I follow my leading. In the ultimate I know, though I cannot prove my knowledge in any way whatever, that everything is right, and all things mine."
{58}
Certainly, this is uncompromising candour; but it is also,—though Mr. Wells, strangely enough, calls himself a believer in freewill—the most uncompromising Determinism conceivable. And this Determinism follows quite inevitably from Mr. Wells's monistic premises—belief in a cosmic "scheme" every part of which is ultimately right. An end in the gutter or on the gallows may be as necessary to that scheme's perfection as a life spent in strenuous goodness. Whatever is, is right. It can be hardly necessary to point out that such a belief, consistently entertained, puts an end to all moral effort; we "follow our leading"—i.e., we do not drive, but drift. Arguing from his own premises, it is absolutely vain for Mr. Wells to wax indignantly eloquent over social abuses, as when he says:—
I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial production; I see some who are extravagant and yet contemptible creatures of luxury, and some leading lives of shame and indignity; . . . I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers, martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility, fills me with a passionate desire to end waste, to create order. (p. 99.)
But why, we ask, should Mr. Wells feel this passionate desire, if all the failures and uglinesses of life are "necessary and important"? How, on this assumption, are existing social ills to be remedied—nay, why should they be remedied, why should they be stigmatised as ills, seeing that "everything is right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a mark of "unbelief."
Mr. Wells, however, while his influence is a very considerable one, utters his teaching from outside the Christian Church, and very properly disavows the Christian name; what must give us pause is to find the monistic ethics being preached and taught by official exponents of the Christian religion. What, e.g., can we think of a statement like the following, which we quote from the columns of a religious journal?
There are people who think it is an evidence of superior Culture to show themselves pained by certain things; but it is not really that; they are pained because they are not cultured enough, or in the right way. . .
Nothing is good or ill
But thinking makes it so.
They think it desirable to dislike things because they dislike them; if they thought it desirable not to dislike them, they would not dislike them.
Again, no one will accuse this writer of want of frankness; according to him, there is simply no such thing as objective evil—acts and individuals have no moral qualities or characters, but are such as we think them, and our business is so to think of them that they will not pain us. {60} If we only knew aright, we should not regard anything as bad. If we are pained by the thought of fifty thousand hungry children in London elementary schools, or by the condition of Regent Street at night, it is because we are not "cultured" enough—we have not the right gnosis. When we reflect that anyone who consistently believes that "nothing is good or ill, but thinking makes it so," will inevitably, first or last, apply that comforting maxim to his own acts, we can see in what direction the ethics of Monism—in reality a return to the ultra-subjectivism of the Sophists, who made man the measure of all things—are likely to lead men. And yet, if the monistic presuppositions are valid—if the universe in all its phases expresses only one will—we do not see how these conclusions can be repelled.
But it is, perhaps, our last illustration, drawn from yet another writer of the same school, which will exhibit both the teaching under discussion and its practical dangers in the clearest light. We are told that—
There is no will that is not God's will. I do not mean that yours is not real, or that any man's is not real, but I do mean that nothing can happen to any of God's children—no matter how evil the intention of the person who does it, or how seemingly meaningless the calamity that causes it—which is not in some way the sacrament of God's love to us, and His call upon our highest energies. In a true and real sense, therefore, it is God's own doing and meant for our greater glory; . . . I believe in the infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else.
{61}
Those who will take the moderate trouble of translating these words from the abstract into the concrete will need no further demonstration of the moral implications of this type of Monism. "There is no will"—not even the most brutalised or the most debauched—"that is not God's will." "Nothing can happen to any of God's children"—say, to the natives of the Congo or to a Jewish community during a Russian pogrom—but is God's call upon their highest energies: wherefore they ought, assuredly, to be thankful to King Leopold's emissaries and the Tsar's faithful Black Hundreds! But let us apply this thesis to yet another case, which will bring out its full character: if an English girl—one of God's children—is snared away by a ruffian, under pretext of honest employment, to some Continental hell, then we are to understand that the physical and moral ruin which awaits the victim is "in some way the sacrament of God's love" to her—"in a true and real sense it is God's own doing," and meant for her greater glory! We have no hesitation in saying that such teaching strikes us as fraught with infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there is a great deal else—sin, and shame, and remorse, and heartbreak, and despair; against the first of which we need to be warned, in order that we may escape the rest.
We are quite prepared to be told that our anxieties are groundless, because "no one will ever draw such inferences as these." To this we reply, firstly, that these are the logical and legitimate inferences from the principles enunciated; and secondly, that we do not at all share the particular kind of optimism which trusts that good luck will prevent the application of these theories to practical life. We are living in an age of wide-spread intellectual unsettlement, an age presenting the difficult problem of a vast half-educated public, ready to fall an easy prey to all manner of specious sophistries, especially when they are dressed up in the garb of a pseudo-mysticism; we must above all remember that human nature is habitually prone to welcome whatever will serve as an excuse for throwing off the irksome restraints of moral discipline. That is why we repeat that the one real danger religion has to face to-day is the danger arising from the spread of a false philosophy, whose tenets are ultimately incompatible with Christian morals. The worst heresies are moral {63} heresies; and of the views we have been discussing we say roundly that their falseness is sufficiently proved by their ethical implications. "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; therefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Against all the insidious attempts that are made to-day to minimise or explain away moral evil—attempts with which we shall deal in greater detail at a later stage—we have to reaffirm the reality and exceeding sinfulness of sin; more particularly, in combating the preposterous notion of man's oneness with God as something already realised, we have to insist with renewed emphasis that salvation, so far from being self-understood, is a prize only to be won by a hard struggle, nor shut the door upon the dread possibility of that prize being missed. There are perhaps few truths to which it is more desirable that we should pay renewed attention than that expressed in the saying, "When belief waxes unsound, practice becomes uncertain." Certainly, the ethics of Monism supply a case in point.
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CHAPTER IV
MONISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL
When Tennyson, in Locksley Hall, wrote the line declaring that "the individual withers and the world is more and more," he might have been inditing a prophecy summing up those modern tendencies which have engaged our attention in preceding chapters. And there are perhaps few more important questions before us to-day than this—whether Tennyson's prophecy is to be fulfilled, whether the individual is to be allowed to "wither," and the world to become more and more. There are those who hold that such a consummation is devoutly to be wished; there are those who regard any movement making in such a direction with something more than suspicion.
Let us say at once that in discussing the status of the individual, we are not referring—at least, not directly—to the struggle between Individualism and Socialism. We know that individualists express the fear that under a socialist régime there would be an end to individual initiative, while socialists retort that the chief sin of the competitive system is {65} that it crushes and destroys individuality; but between the contentions of these rival schools of economics we are not attempting to adjudicate. Perhaps we cannot better indicate the scope of our subject than by quoting from two recent theological works, written from such widely differing points of view as Professor Peake's Christianity: Its Nature and its Truth, and Professor Bousset's The Faith of a Modern Protestant:—
"It is only in it"—viz., in Christianity—says the learned Primitive Methodist theologian, "that the individual has received his true place. In antiquity the worth of the individual was greatly under-estimated; he was unduly subordinated to the community. But the Christian religion, by insisting on the infinite value of each human soul, and by asserting the greatness of its destiny, supplied an immense incentive to the attainment by each of the highest within reach. The doctrine of the worth of man is, to all who accept it, a powerful stimulus in the struggle to a fuller and deeper life. An interest in mankind in the mass is compatible with heartless indifference to the lot of individuals" (p. 88).
"The Gospel," declares the Göttingen modernist, "announces a God who seeks and desires above all else the individual human soul. It unites, in a security and closeness hitherto unknown, belief in God with the importance of the individual human life. It {66} is the religion of religious individualism raised to its highest point." (p. 36).
Such concurrence of testimony from two such different quarters is as remarkable as it is significant; and this brings us to our point. The question with which we are confronted to-day, and which our civilisation must either answer aright or perish, is not whether an individualist or a socialist state would be more conducive to the individual's self-realisation, but whether Christianity is right or wrong in its doctrine of the individual's paramount importance. The issue, as we shall try to show, lies between Christianity on the one hand and Monism on the other. From the Christian point of view the individual matters supremely; from that of Monism the beginning of wisdom is that the individual should recognise and acquiesce in his utter insignificance.
As in our last chapter we glanced at the monistic ethics, so in the present one we propose to inquire briefly first into the social and then into the religious implications of this theory, which it must be remembered is receiving a good deal of support, and meeting with a large measure of acceptance just now. Turning, then, to the social side first of all, no one, of course, would say that Socialism as such was monistic; on the other hand it is easy to understand the attraction of Socialism for those whose philosophy is Monism. They will embrace the economic teachings of Collectivism the more {67} eagerly in exact proportion to their root-conviction that the only thing that matters is the totality of things, while the individual, per se, does not count at all. That is the conception which underlies the Socialism of a writer like Mr. Wells, who is in nothing more emphatic than in asserting that the individual as such has no value at all. "Our individualities," he says, "are but bubbles and clusters of foam upon the great stream of the blood of the species." "The race is the drama, and we are the incidents." "In so far as we are individuals . . . we are accidental, disconnected, without significance." And when we ask for what we should strive and labour, if not for the good of individual men and women, his answer is that we ought to work for the Species, for the Race, for what he calls a great physical and mental being, to wit, Mankind.
Now we believe that this philosophy, consistently embraced, is utterly devoid of the dynamic which can generate any great social reform. The smallest and forlornest actual slum baby appeals to our sympathy immeasurably more than a vast, dim aggregate of indistinguishable items called the Race; for we have actually met the slum-baby, and we have never met—what is more, we shall never meet—the Race. This tendency to treat the individual as negligible is as futile as it is inhuman; in the long run it will be found that he who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love {68} the Race which he hath not seen. No matter by how many times we multiply nothing, the result is still—nothing. If the individuals do not count, neither can the species which is made up of such individuals. Or, if "the Race is the drama, and we are the incidents," it must be observed that no great and noble drama can be strung together out of trivial and unmeaning incidents. All the talk about Mankind as the greater being, "the great and growing Being of the Species," "the eternally conscious Being of all things," is only the old, thin, unsatisfying idolatry of Positivism. If we wish to be social reformers in earnest we must take care of the individuals, and the race will take care of itself.
That the monistic denial of all individual significance should lead to the denial of a future life is only what we should expect; for if man, as such, does not matter, why should he survive? On the other hand, the more we care for the individual, refusing to regard him merely as "an experiment of the species for the species," the more irresistibly shall we be impelled to believe that this life is not all. It is the inestimable achievement of Christianity, by its insistence on the infinite value of the soul, to have given the strongest impetus and support to belief in personal immortality. That, however, is an aspect of our subject which demands, and will subsequently come up for, separate treatment.
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What, for the present, we must yet once more point out, as we did in the preceding chapter, is this—that wide as is the influence of a non-Christian writer like Mr. Wells, the danger of such teaching is intensified when it is given by those who profess Christianity. Doubtless, Bousset is right when he points to the closer contact between East and West as one of the causes of the growth in our midst of a type of religion in which "the human ego is put on one side and almost reduced to zero." Doubtless, also, he is correct in saying "the adherents of this kind of religion will be chiefly found in circles where people do not regard religion seriously, where they desire and accept religion as aesthetic enjoyment." Nevertheless, the evil attending this type of teaching is, to our thinking, great and serious, designed to undermine selfhood and to set up a species of dry-rot at the very centre.
Let us again show what we mean by quoting from an actual utterance: "God," we read, "is supposed to be thinking more about us than about anything else—a rather arrogant assumption when we come to think of it, considering what specks of dust we are amid these myriads of stars and suns whirling through space like motes in a ray of light—and the great object of His solicitude is to get us individually to toe the mark of Christ-likeness." If this view be the true one, the writer went on to ask, why do questions like unemployment, the Budget, {70} the uprising of nationalism in Turkey, etc., bulk so largely in our thought? These topics, he says, have "little or no relation to the question of saving the individual soul, as commonly understood." How, he demands, does the actual life of every day fit into "that view of the scheme of things which bids us believe that the silent God above us is principally anxious about just one thing, the moral recovery and ingathering of these individual souls one by one"? The answer is given with characteristic confidence: "It does not fit into it at all; if God be as anxious about that as we are assured He is, He has a queer way of showing it."
Here we have a conception of man and his place in the sum of things fundamentally at one with that of Mr. Wells, and as utterly irreconcilable with that of Christianity. Not only does the individual not matter in himself; he does not even matter to God. The idea of the soul's infinite value to God is held up to derision, and so is the idea of God's interest in individual character; man, the atom, must not think that the Creator is specially anxious for his fate, and is bidden to measure his insignificance against the vastness of the heavenly bodies; and in conclusion we are pertly told that if God really cares about the individual as such, "He has a queer way of showing it." In this view—the view of Monism—it is indeed true that "the individual withers, and the world is more and more."
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We say that the issue is plain; it lies between Monism and Christianity; if the one is true, the other must be rejected. On which side shall we cast our verdict? For a warning example we have only to glance at the case of Buddhism, in which, the value of human individuality having been steadily lowered, "the other main factor is religion, belief in God, was likewise lost" (Bousset). But, turning to a more detailed examination of the statement just quoted, it is hardly necessary to discuss the astounding suggestion that man must not take himself too seriously by the side of the immensities of suns and stars. Such a view merely betrays a spiritual perception miles below that of the Psalmist, who saw man, to all appearance a negligible speck, yet in reality made by the Almighty little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour. Neither need we combat at length the strangely superficial notion that such questions as unemployment, the Budget, etc., have little or no relation to that of saving the individual soul, as commonly understood. If they have no relation to that subject, they are hardly worth considering; but the fact is that the regulation of industry, the distribution of wealth—these and all other questions derive their importance solely from the manner in which they affect individual men, women and children, fitting or unfitting them for the life that now is and that which is to come. A good deal might be said of {72} the temper which makes fun of the idea of God's "solicitude to get us individually to toe the mark of Christ-likeness"; but we may leave that unhappy phrase to be its own comment.
The attitude of Christianity to our question is perfectly clear. Christianity, in teaching each frailest, poorest human unit to address God as Father, affirms in unmistakeable accents the Eternal's personal interest in and care for the individual soul, and by so doing ennobles every human life that falls under the sway of the Gospel. It is Christianity's master-thought that to the Father from whom all fatherhood is named each one of His children is personally dear, and that His desire is for the salvation of each one. To the cheap and ugly sneer that God has a "queer way" of manifesting His concern for us as individuals, the Christian consciousness has its own answer; how, in any case, such a sneer could come from the same source from which we previously quoted the statement that "nothing can happen to any of God's children which is not in some way the sacrament of God's love to us," we do not profess to understand. We are not mere individual organ-stops, each without use or significance apart from the rest, waiting for our mutual dissonances to be swallowed up in some "music of the whole," but members of a family, each with a place in the Parent's heart and thought. Finally, to the Christian there is one last, {73} crowning proof of the soul's value for God, and God's yearning for the soul; that proof is Calvary. To the Christian there is one experience which settles this problem fully and finally for him; it is the experience which Paul embodied in the cry, "He loved me, and gave Himself for me."
For Monism the individual is a mere surface ripple on an infinite ocean, alike impermanent and impersonal; for Christianity the soul is a child of the Father of all souls, loved with an everlasting love. Between these two conceptions we have to choose, remembering that each utterly excludes the other. There is no third alternative.
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CHAPTER V
THE DIVINE PERSONALITY
While in our last three chapters we have been dealing with certain theories which implicitly or explicitly deny the Divine Personality, and while an impersonal God can be, as we have already seen, of no value for religion, there is no mistaking the fact that this very question—whether, i.e., it is possible and legitimate for us to think of God as personal—constitutes one of the most typical of modern "difficulties." It is probably correct to say that this difficulty, like others we have reviewed, dates practically from the collapse of Deism, a creed which possessed a certain hard lucidity satisfying to many for the very reason that it required no very profound insight for its understanding. That a Deity localised in a far-away heaven, seated on a celestial throne and surrounded by an angelic court, should be a person, like any other sovereign, presented no problem to the understanding; but if God was not merely transcendent but also immanent—not merely somewhere but in some indefinable manner everywhere—then to predicate personality of {75} such a One seemed a very paradox. In one of Feuillet's novels there occurs a phrase which sums up in a few expressive words a very common spiritual misadventure: the hero says, "J'avais vu disparaître parmi les nuages la tête de ce bon vieillard qu'on appelle Dieu"—"I had seen the head of that good old man called God disappear amongst the clouds." His naïve material conception of the Eternal had dissolved—and dissolved into nothingness. May we not surmise that nine times out of ten this is precisely what has happened when we hear the question asked, "But how can God be personal?"
In by far the greater number of cases, that is to say, the problem arises simply and solely from the questioner's failure to dissociate personality from materiality; a "person" suggests to him a tangible, visible, ponderable form, with arms and legs and organs of sense—and when he has reflected sufficiently to understand that such a description cannot apply to God, he concludes that therefore God cannot be personal. The next step is usually that, having seen this visibly outlined Deity disappear parmi les nuages, he passes into absolute unbelief; for somehow an impersonal "Power," while it may possibly inspire awe, cannot move us to worship, cannot present to us a moral imperative, cannot, above all, either claim our love or give us its affection. It is really the identical difficulty, stated a little {76} more pretentiously, which the "rationalist" author of The Churches and Modern Thought presents to us by remarking that in all our experience that which makes up personality is "connected with nerve structures," so that we cannot attribute such a quality to "a Being who is described to us as devoid of any nerve structure." "I know of no answer," he quaintly adds, "that could be called satisfactory from a theistic standpoint." [1] It is evident that Mr. Vivian does not remember the famous passage in the Essay on Theism where John Stuart Mill explains that "the relation of thought to a material brain is no metaphysical necessity, but simply a constant co-existence within the limits of observation," and concludes that although "experience furnishes us with no example of any series of states of consciousness" without an accompanying brain, "it is as easy to imagine such a series of states without as with this accompaniment." [2] According to Mill—hardly a champion of orthodoxy—there is no reason in the nature of things why "thoughts, emotions, volitions and even sensations" should be necessarily dependent upon or connected with "nerve structures "; so that Mr. Vivian's argument palpably fails.
But what about this popular notion which identifies personality with materiality, and {77} therefore denies the former attribute to God? One would think that even the most circumscribed experience, or reflection on such experience, must suffice to dispose of such a misapprehension; let us use the most obvious of illustrations for showing where the error lies. We have only to imagine one of those everyday tragedies that make a short newspaper paragraph—say, the case of a man passing a house in process of erection, and being killed on the spot by a piece of falling timber. He is left as a material form; he is decidedly not left as a person. Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled—his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: with these he was a person; without them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that constitute human personality, is it not rather childish to argue that, unless God possesses a body of some sort, the Divine Personality is a contradiction in terms? If we can validly affirm in the Deity qualities corresponding to those which in human beings we call consciousness, intelligence, etc., we shall obviously be compelled to assign personality to Him; the question is, Have we sufficient grounds for making such an affirmation?
But before we are allowed to answer that question, we have to meet another preliminary {78} objection; for it seems that we are in conflict with philosophy—or, to be more exact, with a certain philosophy which, while no longer perhaps in the heyday of its influence with students, still enjoys a good deal of popular vogue. We are, of course, referring to the Spencerian system, in which the word "Absolute" is used as a synonym for what we should call the Deity; but, argues the Spencerian, since "Absolute is that which exists out of all relation," [3] whereas "even intelligence or consciousness itself is conceivable only as a relation," it follows that "the Absolute cannot be thought of as conscious." But if God cannot even be thought of as conscious, how much less can He be thought of as personal!
Such an inference would, indeed, be irresistible if only the premises on which it rests were sound. But is it legitimate, we ask, to identify God with "the Absolute," or is not this merely a way of begging the question? "Absolute is that which exists out of all relation," we were just told, and such a genuine Absolute would be genuinely "unknowable," because its very existence could not be so much as guessed at; but the Spencerian Absolute is the most certain of certainties, described by Professor Hudson as "the one Eternal Reality, the corner-stone of all our {79} knowledge"—otherwise as "the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed." But the corner-stone of all our knowledge can be such only because, so far from being unknowable, it is intimately related to all our experience—which is tantamount to saying that it is not absolute at all; and again, if God be the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed, that Energy must be thought of as related to all things—in other words, it is the very reverse of absolute. And hence the imaginary impossibility of thinking of the Deity as conscious and intelligent vanishes at one stroke. If God were really absolute, in the sense of the definition quoted above, it would certainly be, as Professor Hudson says, "from the standpoint of philosophical exactness" quite inadmissible "to speak of the Divine Will, or a Personal Creator, or an intelligent Governor of the universe"; but as we have seen that this absoluteness is purely fictitious, it follows that we may legitimately inquire whether consciousness, intelligence, will—and hence personality—are predicable of God, without heeding a veto which rests on imaginary foundations.
It is true Professor Hudson raises two further objections; these, however, will not long detain us. We are informed in the first place that "the further progress of thought 'must force men hereafter to drop the higher anthropomorphic characters given to the First {80} Cause, as they have long since dropped the lower'"; but since our guide, a few pages later, quotes with approval the dictum that "unless we cease to think altogether, we must think anthropomorphically," we may be pardoned for declining to believe that "the further progress of thought must force men hereafter" to "cease to think altogether." Such a suicide of thought would furnish an odd comment upon philosophic "progress." We shall, of course, continue to think anthropomorphically of God; our thought will thus inevitably fall short of the Reality, but it will be truer than if we did not think of Him at all. Again, Divine Personality is declared to be a self-contradiction because
"Personality implies limitation, or it means nothing at all. To talk of an Infinite Person, therefore, is to talk of something that is at once infinite and finite, unconditioned and conditioned, unlimited and limited—an impossibility."
To this plea there are, however, two answers. The first may be made in the unprejudiced words of Mr. Vivian, who observes,[4]
"We must not forget that in philosophy and theology the word 'person' simply implies 'a nature endowed with consciousness,' and does not involve limits."
But secondly, without committing ourselves to Professor Hudson's dictum that personality implies limitation, we have to point out that we are not concerned to defend any inference that might be drawn from the infinity, in the sense {81} of the "allness" of God. We do not deny, but on the contrary affirm, that in the act of creation God imposes limitations upon Himself; so that this last obstacle also is disposed of.
So far, then, we have dealt with the a priori arguments against the Personality of God, and have seen why none of these—neither that from His non-materiality, nor from His alleged absoluteness or infinity—raises any real bar to His being thought of as personal. We are now in a position to inquire positively whether there is sufficient ground for regarding Him as conscious, intelligent and purposive; if He possesses these qualities, we repeat that He certainly possesses that of personality.
The method by which we must proceed is obvious, and will at once occur to the reader who recalls our opening chapter; the question resolves itself simply into this—Are the phenomena of nature such as to indicate intelligence and directivity in their Cause? We submit that incontrovertible proof of the absence of such directive intelligence would be furnished, if the world were, as a matter of fact, chaotic—if it disclosed neither regularity nor continuity—if, in a word, we could never be sure what would happen next. True, in such a state of things life itself could not be sustained, for life is only possible in a world of orderly sequences and uniform laws; but seeing that as a matter of fact such orderly sequences and uniform laws meet us everywhere {82} in nature, is not the inference fairly inevitable? Let us be quite clear on one point: there are two ways, and two only, in which any phenomenon can be accounted for—design or chance; what is not purposed must be accidental. Does, then, nature impress us as the outcome of chance? If we saw a faultlessly executed mathematical diagram illustrating a proposition in Euclid, should we really be satisfied with the statement that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order, beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one other alternative—design, purpose, guidance. Professor Fiske quotes a quaint observation of Kepler's illustrating this very point, which we may be allowed to reproduce:—
Yesterday, when weary with writing and my mind quite dusty with considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and a salad was set before me. "It seems then," said I aloud, "that if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of oil and vinegar, and slices of eggs, had been floating about in the air from all eternity, it might at last happen by chance that there would come a salad." "Yes," says my wife, "but not so nice and well-dressed as mine is!"
Mrs. Kepler's shrewd, homely remark gives its last touch of absurdity to the suggestion {83} that a world which we see to be pervaded by unfailing law has come together by sheer, incalculable accident. Not so much as a salad of respectable calibre could be accounted for upon such a theory; how much less credible is it that the universe began with a cosmic dance of unconscious atoms whirled along by unconscious forces, and happening so to combine as to produce order and sequence, life and consciousness, will and affection!
But not only does the universe exhibit a sublime order which is the very contrary of what we can associate with the blind workings of chance; not only do the circling immensities of the stars and the microscopic perfections of the snow-crystals alike point to a shaping and directing Mind and Will: what nature reveals—what is implied in the very term evolution—is not merely order but progress. As Fiske has it, "Whatever else may be true, the conviction is brought home to us that in all this endless multifariousness there is one single principle at work, that all is tending towards an end that was involved in the very beginning." In other words, the supreme certainty brought home to us by the researches of modern science is that all creation is thrilled through by an all-encompassing Purpose. We really ask for no more than such an admission; that, in short, is our case. We can clinch the whole argument with one quiet sentence of Mr. Chesterton's: "Where there is a purpose, {84} there is a person." If Mr. Spencer's "Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed" is purposive, that is equivalent to saying that God is what we mean by personal.
But ought we not to have shown first of all that He is conscious? No, for the greater includes the less, and purpose is unthinkable apart from consciousness. In saying this we are aware that a philosopher like Eduard von Hartmann speaks of "the wisdom of the Unconscious," of "the mechanical devices which It employs," of "the direction of the goal intended by the Unconscious," etc., etc.; but this, we are bound to say, is to empty words of their meaning. To intend, to direct anything requires at least that the one so doing should be conscious of what it is he is doing. And consciousness, intelligence, directivity are constituents never found apart from personality. But, we are told, "the choice lies, not between personality and something lower, but between personality and something inconceivably higher." [5] We reply that we have already made the acquaintance of this idea of a "super-personal" Deity, and found that for all practical—i.e., religious—purposes the super-personal is simply the impersonal under another name.[6] And when we remember that the "inconceivably higher than personal" ultimate Reality of the agnostic possesses neither {85} consciousness, nor will, nor intelligence, we simply fail to see how a Power lacking these attributes could be even personal, to say nothing of its being more than personal. Be this, however, as it may, the decisive fact remains that we are persons, and therefore personality is the highest category under which we can think; and if we, the children of the Eternal, are endowed with personality, it is sufficient for us to know that a cause must be at least adequate to produce the effects that have flowed from it. Nothing can be evolved but what was first involved. On this ground alone, whatever else God may be, He is at least personal; and that is all we were anxious to establish.
That is all—but it is also all-important; for it cannot be too emphatically insisted that without a personal God religion simply ceases to be. It is a strange and delusive fancy on Professor Hudson's part, and that of a good many people, that "the religious emotions" will survive the de-ethicising, depersonalising of the Deity, and that men will remain "deeply religious" even when it is recognised that the "Great Enigma," the "eternal and inscrutable energy," the "ultimate Reality" cannot be spoken of as "a Personal Creator, or an intelligent Governor of the universe." For our own part, we find it difficult to believe that such a forecast could have been framed by anyone possessing a first-hand knowledge of what "the religious {86} emotions" are; we say with the utmost confidence that no such emotions can be felt towards a Power which "cannot be thought of as conscious," let alone as benevolent or personally interested in us. We well know that we can be nothing to such a Power—nor can It be anything to us; for a God who does not care, does not count. We cannot commune with this chill and awesome Unknown; we can only pray to One who hears; we can only love One who has first loved us. In the last analysis, an "impersonal Deity" such as one hears occasionally spoken of, is a mere contradiction in terms, the coinage of confused and inaccurate thought. Where the meaning of personality is so much as understood, doubt as to the Divine Personality vanishes; and least of all will that truth be doubted by those who see the supreme revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He, the Incarnate Son, has shown us, not a Power but a Person—the Person of the Father—and, to-day as of old, "it sufficeth us."
[1] The Churches and Modern Thought, by Philip Vivian, p. 231.
[2] Three Essays on Religion, R.P.A. reprint, p. 85.
[3] This and subsequent quotations are taken from pp. 108-119 of Prof. Hudson's Introduction to the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer.
[4] Op. cit., p. 231.
[5] Hudson, op. cit., p. 116.
[6] Supra, p. 46.
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CHAPTER VI
EVIL versus DIVINE GOODNESS
That the renewed emphasis upon the Divine immanence must have for one of its effects that of raising the problem of evil afresh, and in a particularly acute form, will be obvious to anyone who has thought out for himself the implications of that doctrine. Dark and pressing enough before, this particular problem has, in appearance at least, been both complicated and accentuated by the displacement of Deism. If, as we have argued on a previous occasion, there is a certain causal connection between Deism and a somewhat sombre outlook upon the world, on the other hand the existence of evil seemed to fit in better with a view of God which represented Him as outside the universe than with one which insists upon His indwelling in creation. If the earth was the scene and playground of undivine agencies which work their will while the Divine control is withdrawn, then many things became comparatively easy of comprehension; indeed, there was a certain consolation in the thought that—
All the things that had been so wrong
After all would not last for long,
{88} but that ultimately God would resume the supreme control He had temporarily abandoned, while the Power of darkness would be bound and cast into the abyss. If, however, we must think of Him as omnipresent and for that reason directly and uninterruptedly cognisant of all, then the plain man can only ask himself with a deepening wonder why an all-good and unimaginably powerful Being should permit evils of every description to lay waste His own creation. "No one can enter into the house of the strong, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong"; and since a direct overpowering of God by Satan is out of the question, is not the assumption to which we are driven this—that the Strong One is absent while His goods are being spoiled, and that it is this very absence of which the spoiler has taken advantage? Somehow, we feel, if He were really present—as present as the doctrine of immanence would have us believe—He would actively assert Himself against wrongs and abuses; and when we think of the blood and tears that are shed the world over as the result of disordered desire, industrial greed and political misrule, we find it difficult not to echo the words of psalmist and prophet, "Why standest Thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest Thou Thyself in times of trouble?" "Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself."
In saying this we do not suggest that such an attempt to explain the phenomena of evil {89} by God's supposed absence from the world is defensible; we do say that the belief in His all-encompassing nearness makes those phenomena even more difficult of explanation than they were before. The devout deist could always comfort himself with the thought that, however mysterious God's standing afar off might be, by and by, when He drew nigh again, He would deal out even-handed justice to all; but such comfort is not open to those who explicitly deny God's remoteness, but on the contrary assert that He is the Presence from which there is no escaping. And the fact of evil, physical and moral, is precisely the chief and most fruitful source of religious scepticism; it is not the abstract question whether there is a God, but the practical and insistent problem whether the Divine goodness can be reconciled with the facts of life and experience, that is agitating men's minds, and sways their decision for or against religion.
Everyone knows that this is what Mr. Mallock some time ago called "the crux of Theism"; that "crux," to use his own language, is not "the existence of intelligent purpose in the universe," which may be freely conceded, but whether the processes of nature are or are not consistent with "a God possessing the character which it is the essence of Theism to attribute to Him, and which alone could render Him an object of religion, or even of interest, to mankind." Sometimes in accents of wistful {90} wonder, sometimes in tones of revolt and defiant unbelief, the question is asked:—Why does God allow dire calamity, painful disease, earthquakes and shipwrecks, and accidents of the mine? Why does He permit war, or vivisection, or poverty, or vice—in fact any of "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to"? We should stop these things if we could; why does not He? One is reminded of Mr. William Watson's passionate arraignment of the Powers of Europe at the time of the Armenian massacres:—
Yea, if ye could not, though ye would, lift hand—
Ye halting leaders—to abridge Hell's reign. . .
If such your plight, most hapless ye of men!
But if ye could and would not, oh, what plea,
Think ye, shall stead you at your trial, when
The thundercloud of witnesses shall loom
At the Assizes of Eternity?
The application of these burning lines is painfully obvious. It would be a positive relief were it thinkable that the Eternal would, but cannot, stem
the flood that rolls Hoarser with anguish as the ages roll;
or if one might, with a modern novelist, compare the case to that of "a practitioner doing his best for a wilful patient, with poor appliances and indifferent nursing." But if He could and will not—oh, what plea?
What frankly appals men and freezes the worshipful instinct in their hearts is the {91} apparent Divine indifference, the silence of God, in the presence of so much human wretchedness. If one could only feel that He cared for and sympathised with His suffering creatures, it would be a help, like the sympathetic pressure of the hand from a friend, which does not lessen the actual calamity that may have befallen us, but makes it easier to bear; but an indifferent God is equivalent to no God at all—or, as we have previously expressed it, a God who does not care, does not count. The mere sense that He was sorry for us would lighten the stroke of fate which He had not been able to avert; but if the truth is that He might have averted it by the simple exercise of His will, but refused to do so, coldly looking on at our grief—not from afar, but close by—then we can only say that no God at all were better than that. It seems, then, as though, in order to escape from palpable inconsistency between theory and fact, we should have to make a surrender either of His immanence, or His omnipotence, or His benevolence, or the reality of evil.
To surrender the Divine immanence will not really solve our problem. Near or far, closer to us than breathing or dwelling beyond the furthest star, God is still the Author of our being, the Framer of the world and all that therein is, the Cause without which there would have been no effects. If, after creating the world, He withdrew from it to an inconceivable {92} distance, it is none the less His handiwork; if it is in and through His absence that the cosmic mechanism has got out of gear, it is yet He who willed to be so absent, well knowing what results would supervene; if a power other than He and hostile to Him has usurped the place and title of Prince of this world, such usurpation would have been impossible but for His acquiescence, and personified Evil, playing with human happiness, would still be His licensed agent. Evidently, the solution of which we are in search does not lie along that way.
We turn, therefore, to the second possible explanation, strongly put forward by Mill, according to whom natural theology points to God as "a Being of great but limited power."
Those who have been strengthened in goodness by relying on the sympathising support of a powerful and good Governor of the world (he says) have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always saved His goodness at the expense of His power. They have believed . . . that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to His intention.[1]
To the question, "Of what nature is the limitation of His power?" he returns the tentative answer that it
probably results either from the qualities of the material—the substances and forces of which the universe is composed not admitting of any arrangements by which His purposes could be more completely fulfilled; or else, the purposes might have been more fully attained, but the Creator did not know how to do it; creative {93} skill, wonderful as it is, was not sufficiently perfect to accomplish His purposes more thoroughly.[2]
Such an answer, we need scarcely say, could only have been given by a thinker who had grown up in the intellectual atmosphere of Deism; the Deity which he contemplates is One who works upon the world purely ab extra, who cannot be spoken of as the Creator, except by courtesy; in reality He merely shapes and adapts materials over which He has only an incomplete control, and which, therefore, so far from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He really created the raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still to answer the question, What is that real First Cause, the Urgott who created the Urstoff, matter in its most elementary form, and endowed it with qualities some of which were destined to serve, while others resisted and frustrated, the sub-Divinity's intentions?
Clearly, this notion also will not do; but while we may reject Mill's theory as to the nature of the limitations of Divine power, there {94} is distinct force in his shrewd contention that religious people generally—professions to the contrary notwithstanding—have never really believed God to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. This contention we believe, indeed, to be almost self-evidently true; for on the contrary supposition nothing can happen contrary to God's will—all things and beings would necessarily be carrying out that will, and sin, e.g., would become an utterly meaningless term. But if omnipotence is limited—which sounds, we admit, a contradiction in terms—we ask once more, In what way and by whom? To that question we have no other reply than the one given in our first chapter, viz., that when we predicate limitation of the Deity, we must mean self-limitation. In creating the universe, we said, God made a distinction between His creation and Himself, and to that extent limited His Being—for the universe is not identical with God; we now add that in endowing man with an existence related to, but distinct from, His own, He limited not only His infinite Being, but also His infinite Power, delegating some portion thereof to us—for man's will is not identical with God's will, but capable of resisting, though also capable of co-operating with it. Without such individual initiative, without such an individual faculty of choosing between alternatives of action, man could never have been a moral agent; but moral liberty to choose and act aright or amiss implies also {95} moral responsibility for such choice on the part of the chooser.
This neglected truth of God's self-limitation of His power needs to be far more explicitly avowed than has generally been the case. Only so shall we get clear of the confusion and uncertainty with which the subject of human freedom is so largely surrounded; only so shall we be enabled to place the burden of responsibility for sin, the cause of so immense a proportion of the world's suffering, upon the right shoulders—i.e., man's, not God's. It is urgently necessary to disperse the common fallacy according to which God, being the Author of all, is the causative Agent answerable for all the happenings in His universe, for all human pain and all human sin. Where freedom is, there is responsibility. For let us bring the matter down from the abstract to the concrete: if a dreadful railway accident is caused through the momentary mental lapse of a signalman who has been overtaxed by excessive working hours, how is the responsibility God's? It obviously belongs to those who imposed a task involving the safety of human lives on a man who was not in a fit condition to fulfil such a duty. If an explosion in a coal-mine, accompanied by terrible loss of life, is caused through some miner striking a match, or carrying a naked light, in defiance of well-known regulations of safety, how is God responsible? He has endowed us with intelligence whereby to {96} discover His laws, and with freedom to obey or disobey them: the use or misuse of that freedom rests with ourselves.
But now it may be asked—Was it the act of a benevolent Deity to entrust this terribly two-edged weapon of liberty to our unskilful hands, in which it was bound to work so vast an amount of injury? And this opens up the larger and more general question, Must we, in view of the facts of life, surrender the idea of the Divine benevolence? It is quite true that the evidence of purpose discernible in the whole structure of the universe proclaims the Deity to be personal; but, as Mr. Mallock says, "the theistic doctrine of God is not a doctrine that the supreme mind acts with purpose, but a doctrine that it acts with purpose of a highly specialised kind"—viz., benevolent purpose.
Let us once more state the problem in the partial but very pertinent form in which it arises in connection with man's faculty of freedom. To bestow upon His creatures a gift which He must have known they would use in such a manner as to work infinite harm to themselves and to each other, seems prima facie no more compatible with kindly intentions than it would be to leave children to play with sharp tools, loaded firearms and deadly poisons; since disaster was bound to ensue from such a course, does not responsibility for the disaster rest with the one who deliberately provided the {97} elements for it? But such a comparison, while superficially plausible, upon reflection is seen to be beside the mark. We really cannot plead such inexperience of right and wrong, such ignorance of moral safety and moral danger, as would furnish a true parallel between playing with temptation and playing with cyanide of potassium. In setting before us "life and good, and death and evil," God has as distinctly placed within our hearts the moral intuition which, says, "Therefore choose life." But why, the questioner proceeds, have made sin even possible? Because, we answer, not to have done so would have made morality impossible. It cannot be too often, or too plainly, pointed out that just as the only alternative to purpose is chance, so the only alternative to liberty is necessity. That is to say, God could no doubt have made us automata instead of free agents; but even He could not have made us free to choose the right, yet not free to choose its contrary. Choice that is not willed is not choice at all; goodness by compulsion is not goodness, but merely correctitude—the behaviour of a skilfully-devised mechanism, but possessing no moral quality whatever. We are not at present concerned with the view of those who maintain that men are de facto no more than such "cunning casts in clay" a contention which will occupy us at a later stage; we merely state the commonplace that in making us free God Himself could not also {98} make us impeccable, insusceptible to temptation, immune against the possibility of sin.
The real question, then, shapes itself as follows: Can we discern the nature of the purpose which expresses itself in the bestowal of this gift of freedom? Stated in that form, we see that the question has already been answered by implication; for if there could be no morality without liberty, it is fair to make the inference that the very object of God in allowing us to choose between alternatives of conduct was to make morality so much as possible. Was that a good and beneficent object? We submit that even those who impeach the Deity for opening the door to sin would on second thoughts confess that morally free—and therefore peccable—beings stand on a higher level than marionettes, however faultlessly contrived to perform certain evolutions. The truth of the matter is set forth with poetic insight in Andersen's story of the Nightingale—the immeasurable difference between the artificial bird and the real songster, whose melodious raptures somehow touched a chord in the listener which all the nicely-calculated trills and cadences of the ingenious mechanical toy failed to set in motion. In like manner we repeat that the power to determine his own course raises man to a plane incomparably higher than he could have occupied as an automaton. The same faculty of free choice which in its abuse makes the sinner, in its right {99} exercise furnishes forth the saint. All that we mean by moral progress, by "the steady gain of man," his rise to more exalted ideals, his conquest of baser appetites—all that makes the history of the race a thrilling and uplifting drama—is bound up with his possession of liberty; it is this supreme gift which makes him "a little lower than the angels," and "crowns him with glory and honour." Alone of all earthly beings, man is not only an effect but a cause; his freedom—not unlimited but quite real within its not inelastic confines—is the noblest of all his faculties, even though for that very reason it is capable of being most ignobly perverted. What its bestowal tells us is that God does not call us into servitude, but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us with the power to choose for ourselves He has made us His potential fellow-workers. May we not ask—Who, after all, would prefer the safety of automatism to the glory of this Divine adventure?
In all this we are not shutting our eyes to what is involved in the misuse of liberty—the dread nature of wilful sin and its ghastly harvest of wrecked and ruined lives; we do not say that the price of freedom is not a heavy {100} one, nor do we pretend that the subject is free from painful mystery. It could not be otherwise; that we, with our limited vision and circumscribed understanding, should be able to solve that mystery with any completeness, is not even to be imagined. Nevertheless, we may claim that we have at least obtained a glimpse of the purpose of God in conferring upon the race this fateful power; for this and no other was the appointed means by which man was to ascend to his true place as a moral and spiritual being. If we can admit that purpose to be in harmony with the Divine benevolence, we may the more hopefully turn to other aspects of our problem.
[1] Three Essays on Religion, p. 22.
[2] Ibid, p. 79.
[3] The Laws, vii, 803: [Greek] "Theou ti paignion memechanmenon." Compare also Browning's unhappy phrase, "God, whose puppets, best and worst, are we."
{101}
CHAPTER VII
EVIL versus DIVINE GOODNESS (Continued)
There is probably no more serious aspect of the popular philosophy which declares so confidently, "There is no will that is not God's will," than that, while professing to be a Gospel of sweetness and light, it in reality plunges us into the very depths of pessimism by making God Himself "ultimately responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world." From such a position, from such premises as these, there is only one step to such conclusions as have been actually drawn:—
It is His world, remember; He made it, and He is omnipotent. . . If creation does not please the Creator, why did He not make it better? If it is wayward and intractable, it can be no more than He expected, or ought to have expected. Wherein consists His right to punish us for our transgressions? Suppose we challenge it; what will He say in defence?
We may shrink with distaste from such wild and whirling words; but if it be true that "there is no will that is not God's will"—if whatever takes place in the universe expresses that almighty will—they are as rational in their very vehemence as Omar's lines are rational in their melancholy:—
{102}
O Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestin'd Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!
O Thou, who man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd—Man's forgiveness give—and take!
It is only when we clearly recognise that man is other than a mere phase or mode of the one Eternal Being; that he has been endowed with individual existence and individual will, and therefore with individual responsibility—and that for the express purpose of realising his highest potentialities: it is only when we accept such a reading of the facts as this that we escape from that worst of nightmares which reaches its climax in hurling its foolish defiance at the Most High, challenging His right to punish the instruments of His own will, those "helpless pieces of the game He plays," impotent items in that unending spectacle—
Which for the pastime of Eternity
He doth Himself contrive, enact, behold.
But if it is true that God bestowed freedom upon us because only as free agents could we learn to love and do the right for its own sake; if it is true that the struggle which we have to wage against our lower impulses has the wholly benevolent object of enabling us to achieve the glory of a perfected character, it has also to be borne in mind that under no {103} circumstances can character be conceived otherwise than as the "result" of growth. That is to say, God Himself could not call moral perfection into being ready-made, by a mere fiat, and that for the same reason which precludes omnipotence itself from making two straight lines to enclose a space, i.e., because the idea involves a self-contradiction. So true is this that we read even of our Saviour that "though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered," and in this manner was "made perfect." Character in its very definition is the result of many deliberate exercises of a free will; and if the evolution of character was an object dearer to God than the highest mechanical or animal perfection, that object could have been secured in no other way than by this particular endowment.
And here we shall also find the reply to the very natural inquiry why God does not, as He might, intervene or frustrate the evil designs of wrong-doers. Why does a good God allow His intentions to be set at defiance by those whom the prophet described as drawing iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope? It would not matter so much, we sometimes bitterly reflect, if the sinner injured only himself by his wickedness; but how often are the innocent made to suffer by the devices of the unscrupulous and selfish! Why, we repeat, this strange non-intervention of the Most High on behalf of His own cause? {104} On this it must be remarked in the first place that those who accept God's transcendence will be careful not to rule out a priori the possibility of such Divine action as, regarded from our point of view, would have to be described as intervention; the question whether such action has ever taken place, is a question of fact, and the view that at particular junctures God has thus actively "intervened" is at any rate capable of being strongly argued. But admitting, as we think we must, that ordinary life does not show any instances of such supernatural interposition—that a reckless financier is allowed to enrich himself by cornering the wheat supply and sending up the price of the people's bread; that a band of reactionaries may arrest the course of reform and plunge a country back into darkness; that a beneficent act of the legislature may be defeated by greedy cunning—must we despair of solving the general problem which such cases suggest?
We think, on the contrary, that the explanation may be legitimately sought in what we conceive to have been the Divine intention in making man free; that intention, the making of character, would obviously suffer defeat by God throwing His weight—if we may use such a phrase—into this scale as against that, furthering here and checking there, for character, as we just said, can only result from the free exercise and interplay of will with will. We may well imagine God's mode of action to {105} resemble that of a human parent who entrusts a growing child with a growing measure of liberty and responsibility, well knowing that in the use of it he will have many a slip and stumble, and occasionally hurt himself; such a parent will carefully refrain from interference, preferring that the child should learn his own lessons from his own mistakes, well knowing that we profit only by the experience for which we ourselves have paid. No one will, of course, pretend that such a reconciliation of the facts of sin with the axiom or intuition of Divine all-goodness is other than incomplete; we merely urge that, having regard to the magnitude and the complexity of the subject it could not be otherwise. A theory, without accounting for all the facts, may be true so far as it goes, correctly indicating the way which, if we could pursue it further, would lead us into more and fuller truth. No doubt, when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part will be done away; but pending the advent of a complete explanation, a partial one is not without all value.
Indeed, the very inadequacy of our instruments, resulting in that incompleteness of which we just spoke, should once more suggest a reflection which, while in no wise original or startling, is specially relevant to the subject under discussion: for if God's knowledge necessarily and immeasurably transcends ours, if He knows more than we, does it not follow {106} with equal certainty that He knows better? Granted that we do not understand how this or that dispensation of Providence fits in with the general belief in His perfect goodness, our failure to understand no more disproves that goodness than the similar failure of a child to comprehend why such and such irksome tasks are imposed upon him by his parent, disproves the wisdom and goodness which prompt the parent's act. The child cannot understand; but where the relations are at all normal he acquiesces, being on general grounds convinced that the parental commands aim at his welfare, and that his parents, after all, know better than he. Is the application so far to seek?
In the second place—turning now from the subject of sin to that of evil generally—it may be worth while to remind ourselves of a fact which seems to be forgotten by some of the impetuous arraigners of the Deity, viz., that, after all, the problem is not a new one, which they have suddenly discovered by dint of superior sagacity. What we mean is this: the problem of evil as such is of anything but an abstruse or remote nature, nor one requiring unusual philosophical penetration to bring to light; on the contrary, pain and sorrow, privation, adversity, death—these are experiences that have come within the cognisance of all. If, then, the facts are neither so remote nor so inconsiderable that men could have simply {107} forgotten to take them into account in framing their estimates of the Divine character, how is it, we ask, that they have arrived at and clung to the belief in the benevolence of God at all? If the proof to the contrary was so overpowering, why, as a matter of fact, has it not overpowered them? Why should an unknown Hebrew singer have given expression to this extraordinary sentiment, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him"—and why has that sentiment been re-echoed by millions of men and women acquainted with grief and affliction? The early Christians did not exactly live lives of luxury or even security, sheltered from contact with tragedy and horror; yet the keynote of primitive Christianity is the note of joy, while the background of early Christian experience is a radiant conviction of the Divine benevolence. And when we remember that the same holds true of so many eminently spiritual souls in all ages, who have combined a keen sensitiveness to evil and suffering of every kind with an unshakeable trust in the lovingkindness of God, we shall scarcely accuse all this cloud of witnesses of having simply drugged themselves and refused to accept the evidence of their own senses. If men and women suffering from anything rather than moral blindness or moral anaesthesia could, and can, nevertheless believe with all their hearts in the Divine Fatherhood, is not such a recurring circumstance significant in itself? {108} Evidently, granting all the facts, more than one reading of the facts is possible; not cloistered mystics, or anchorites withdrawn from the world, but heroes engaged in fighting its ills, have steadfastly proclaimed that God is good; is it an altogether unreasonable hypothesis that their faith, if it outsoars ours, may be the result of a deeper insight?
And this, in turn, suggests another thought, simple enough in itself, yet not always borne in mind in connection with this particular theme—viz., that we are never dealing with facts per se, but with facts plus our interpretation of them, which may be right or wrong, but which, right or wrong, helps to decide in a very large measure what the facts themselves shall mean to us. Our attitude towards the events which befall us makes all the difference. If men have been ruined by success, it is as true that men have been made by failure. If men have deteriorated through ease and plenty, men have been stimulated to effort through hardship and poverty. In a word, if there is much in the burden, there is as much in the shouldering. But for Dante's consecration of sorrow, the world would have lost the Commedia Divina. But for a painful and permanently disabling accident, the English Labour Movement would not have had one of its principal leaders in Mr. Philip Snowden. And as for the influence of outward events and environment generally, Mr. Chesterton may exaggerate in {109} suggesting that everything good has been snatched from some catastrophe, but he is certainly right when he says that "the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment." On the other hand, of an environment the reverse of commodious, it has been observed:—
Logic would seem to say, "If God brings great pain on a man, it must make the man revolt against God." But observation of facts compels us to say, "No, on the contrary, nothing exercises so extraordinary an influence in making men love God as the suffering of great pain at His hands." Scientific thinking deals with facts as they are, not with a priori notions of what we should expect. And in this matter, the fact as it is, is that goodness is evolved from pain more richly than from any other source.[1]
We may think such a statement too absolute, and point to cases where the effect of physical suffering has been altogether different; but if it is true that in certain well-authenticated and not merely exceptional instances such visitations have resulted in strengthened faith and heightened goodness, our main contention is proved, namely, that the attitude of the individual himself towards the events of his life has much to do with determining what those events are to mean to him. Instead of "Was the gift good?" we should more often ask, "Was the recipient wise?" Pain is pain, and disaster is disaster; but the spirit in which we meet them matters immensely.
{110}
But now we are confronted with a more fundamental question: Could not God have obviated the phenomenon of pain altogether? Could He not have made us incapable of feeling any but pleasant sensations? Mill, who in his essay on Nature devotes some—for him—almost vehement pages to this subject, reaches the conclusion that "the only admissible moral theory of Creation is that the Principle of Good cannot at once and altogether subdue the powers of evil" [2]; and in dealing with the same topic in the essay on Theism, while admitting that "appearances do not indicate that contrivance was brought into play purposely to produce pain," he holds to the view that its very existence shows the power of God to be limited ab extra, by the material conditions under which He works:—
The author of the machinery is no doubt accountable for having made it susceptible to pain; but this may have been a necessary condition of its susceptibility to pleasure; a supposition which avails nothing on the theory of an omnipotent Creator, but is an extremely probable one in the case of a Contriver working under the limitation of inexorable laws and indestructible properties of matter.[3]
Such a view of the case, as we have already said in our previous chapter, is purely deistic; but we must now proceed to point out, with great respect for so great an intellect as Mill's, that the supposition which, he says, "avails nothing {111} on the theory of an omnipotent Creator"—viz., that susceptibility to pleasure involves susceptibility to pain—seems to us to fit and cover the facts precisely; for a capacity for pain and a capacity for pleasure are not two different things which could conceivably exist apart from each other, but are only different manifestations of one and the same capacity, viz., for experiencing sensations of any kind whatsoever. We could no more be capable of feeling pleasure, while _in_capable of feeling pain, than we could be sensitive to musical harmonies, while _in_sensible to musical discords; besides which, monotony of sensation annihilates sensation. On this point we may invoke against the pre-evolutionist Mill a modern scientific authority like Professor Fiske, who expresses himself to the effect that "without the element of antagonism there could be no consciousness, and therefore no world." "It is not a superficial but a fundamental truth," he observes, "that if there were no colour but red, it would be exactly the same thing as if there were no colour at all. . . If our ears were to be filled with one monotonous roar of Niagara, unbroken by alien sounds, the effect upon consciousness would be absolute silence. If our palates had never come in contact with any tasteful thing save sugar, we should know no more of sweetness than of bitterness. If we had never felt physical pain, we could not recognise physical pleasure. For {112} want of the contrasted background, its pleasurableness would cease to exist. . . We are thus brought to a striking conclusion, the essential soundness of which cannot be gainsaid. In a happy world there must be sorrow and pain." [4] And this necessity, we would add, does not follow from God's failure to overcome any "inexorable laws and indestructible properties of matter," but is implied in the inexorable laws of thought—in that eternal right reason which makes it impossible for Deity to do what is self-contradictory or absurd.
But if the necessity of pain be thus admitted—a most important admission—we may now take a step further ahead. Even Mill, as we just saw, expressly disclaimed the notion of attributing physical evil to malign intention on the Creator's part; what separates us from Mill is that in our view the laws of nature, in inflicting pain, do not act independently of God, but are His laws. Do those, it may be asked, who allege His "indifference" in not interfering with the operation of the forces of nature when they injure us, frame a very clear notion of the way in which they think that God should, or might, manifest His "interest"? On reflection it will be found that what they ask for—the only possible alternative to an unbroken natural order—is such constant miraculous interposition as would make that order non-existent. But assuming that there {113} were no regular sequence or uniformity to speak of—if we never knew whether the course of nature might not be interrupted at any moment on somebody's behalf—should we really be so much better off? Would humanity be happier if chaos was substituted for order? Without seeking to mitigate the suffering entailed by the unhindered action of nature's forces, it is still certain that the sheer confusion of a world in which law had been abrogated would be infinitely worse. Indeed, this is to understate the case; for the fact is that in such a world all the activities of life would be completely paralysed, and hence life itself, as we have already had occasion to point out, could not be carried on. But if the reign of natural law thus represents the only set of conditions under which life is even possible; and if at the same time this law, which operates all the time and never relaxes its hold, is the expression of the will of God, how can we charge Him with indifference? The truth is, on the contrary, that He is exercising His care, not intermittently, by performing a miracle whenever things go wrong, but continually, and without any interruption whatsoever. Were His law other than steadfast, were there occasional or frequent departures from it, were it possible to defy nature with impunity just now and again, the results of such irregular action would be disastrous in the extreme; it is because His will is constant, and His decrees without {114} variableness, that we are able to learn and obey them, and by obeying to master nature.
"But, after all, He made the laws, and He could have made different ones." Certainly; but a moment's reflection will show that He could not have made laws of any kind, disobedience to which would have had the same consequences as obedience. He might—for all we can say to the contrary—have made strychnine nutritious, and wheat deadly to us; but even in that case an indulgence in wheat would have brought about the unpleasant effects at present associated with an overdose of nux vomica. He might have made a raw, damp atmosphere, with easterly winds, the most conducive to health; but even then it would have been rash to take up one's residence in a warm, dry climate. Pain is an indication that the processes of life are suffering some more or less serious disturbance; given, therefore, any set of natural laws, and the necessity of obeying them as the condition of life itself, and we see that disobedience to them would always and inevitably mean pain. We repeat that God might have made different laws; but whatever they were, their breach must have recoiled upon the breaker.
Yet even if reflections like these demonstrate to us the necessity for pain, we are still left to face those greater calamities and disasters which sweep away human lives by the hundred and thousand, catastrophes like the Sicilian {115} earthquakes, that are marked by an appalling wantonness of destruction; must not such events as these also be attributed to God, and how are they to be reconciled with His alleged benevolence? Certainly, no one would attempt to minimise the horrors of the Sicilian tragedy; the human mind is overwhelmed by the suddenness, no less than the magnitude, of an upheaval of nature resulting in the blotting-out of whole flourishing communities. And yet we venture to say, paradoxical though it sounds, that it is, partly at least, owing to a certain lack of imagination that such an event looms so immense in our thoughts. Most of us do not make the ordinance of death in itself an accusation against the Most High; we are not specially shocked or outraged by the thought that the whole population of the globe dies out within quite a moderate span of time, nor even by the reflection that several hundred thousand persons die every year in the United Kingdom alone. We know quite well that every one of those who perished in Messina must have paid his debt to nature in, at most, a few decades. So, then, the whole point in our arraignment is this—It would not have been cruel had these deaths been spread over a period of time, but it is cruel that they should have taken place simultaneously; it would not have been cruel had the victims of the earthquake died of illnesses—in many cases prolonged and painful—but it is cruel {116} that death should have come upon them swiftly, instantaneously, without menace or lingering pain; it would not have been cruel had children survived to mourn their parents, husbands their wives, brother the loss of brother, as in the ordinary course—but it is cruel that by dying in the same hour they were spared the pang of parting. We repeat that it is because we ordinarily use our imaginations too little that we are so apt to lose our balance and sense of proportion in the presence of these catastrophes; and it may be permissible to point out that there is probably, quality for quality, and quantity for quantity, more grey, hopeless suffering, more wretchedness and tragedy, in London to-day than was caused by the Sicilian catastrophe—suffering and wretchedness that are due not to nature, but to sin, though not necessarily on the sufferer's part.
And there is, in justice, something more to be said when we speak of these dire visitations. While every instinct of humanity inspires us with sympathy for the victims buried under the ruins of Messina and Reggio, it is, of course, a matter of common knowledge that the soil on those coasts is volcanic, and liable to such commotions; if men will take the risk of living in such localities, we may pity them when the disaster comes, but we cannot very fitly impeach Providence. There is a village near Chur in Switzerland, which has twice been wiped out by avalanches, yet each time re-built {117} on the same spot; year by year material is visibly accumulating for a third deadly fall, and when it takes place, as take place it will, men will speak of the dispassionate cruelty of nature. Time after time the lava from Mount Vesuvius has overwhelmed the localities that nestle on its slopes, but human heedlessness proves incurable. If the Sicilians, knowing the nature of the soil, had built their towns of isolated, one-storied, wooden structures, at a reasonable distance from the shore, the effects of earthquake and tidal wave would not have been one hundredth part as terrible; yet Messina is being re-built on its former site, and apparently in the old style of architecture—a proceeding which simply invites a repetition of the same kind of disaster. It is literally true that these greater calamities are in nearly every instance capable of being averted or their incidence minimised; to give an obvious instance, one is almost weary of seeing it repeated that the famines and consequent epidemics which visit India could be immensely reduced by a wise and generous expenditure on irrigation, the improved cultivation of the land, the enlargement of the cultivable area, and so forth. But men find it easier to turn accusing glances to the sky than to bestir themselves and to use more wisdom, foresight and energy in directing and subduing the forces of nature.
We are well aware that what has been written in the pages of this chapter is no {118} more than a series of scattered hints; we do not for a moment imagine that, in the aggregate, they amount to more than a most fragmentary resolution of the difficulty presented by the reality of evil—indeed, we have already expressed our belief that a full solution must in the nature of things lie beyond our ken. But if it should appear from the foregoing considerations that some aspects of our problem—such as the existence of sin and of pain—are not as irreconcilable with the goodness of God as may have seemed to be the case, reflection should lead us to the reasonable hope that if we understood more, we should receive fuller and fuller proof of the truth that God is Love. And when we remember that that Love shines out most brightly from the Cross, and that the world's greatest tragedy has been the world's greatest blessing, the turning-point in the history of the race, we may well hush our impatience, refrain over-confident criticisms, and commit ourselves to the Father's hands even while we can only see His purposes as in a glass, darkly. We may believe, with the psalmist of old, that by and by we "shall behold His face in righteousness; we shall be satisfied, when we awake, with His likeness."
[1] R. A. Armstrong, God and the Soul, pp. 161-162.
[2] Op. cit., p. 21.
[3] Ibid, p. 82.
[4] Through Nature to God, pp. 36, 37.
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CHAPTER VIII
THE DENIAL OF EVIL
We closed our last chapter with a confession and an appeal—a confession of the incompleteness of our answers to the questions suggested by the fact of evil, and an appeal for patience in recognising that that incompleteness is inevitable, having regard to our constitutional limitations. "There is," as Newman said, "a certain grave acquiescence in ignorance, a recognition of our impotence to solve momentous and urgent questions, which has a satisfaction of its own." [1] That, however, is an attitude to which all will not resign themselves. If a knot cannot be unravelled, their one idea of what to do is to cut it; if evil cannot be explained, it can at any rate be denied. Thus we find a distinguished living essayist, with a large constituency of cultured readers, writing as follows:—
The essence of God's omnipotence is that both law and matter are His and originate from Him; so that if a single fibre of what we know to be evil can be found in the world, either God is responsible for that, or He is {120} dealing with something He did not originate and cannot overcome. Nothing can extricate us from this dilemma, except that what we think evil is not really evil at all, but hidden good.
If the views of Divine power and responsibility set forth in this book are true—if, i.e., we are justified in having recourse to a theory of Divine self-limitation—it will be clear that Mr. Benson's "dilemma" is, to say the least, overstated; but were that dilemma as desperate as he depicts it, it has strangely escaped him that his suggested mode of extrication is more desperate still. For what he asks us to do is quite simply to abdicate our judgment in respect of both physical and ethical phenomena—not merely to withhold our decision upon this or that particular occurrence, but to admit in general terms that evil is only apparent and not real. But see to what such an admission commits us: if we have no grounds for saying that evil is evil, we can have no grounds either for saying that good is good; if our faculties are incompetent to diagnose the one kind of phenomena accurately, they cannot be any more competent to diagnose and deliver reliable verdicts upon the other kind. It is quite a mistake to think that by getting rid of the reality of evil we preserve or affirm the more emphatically the reality of good; if we confidently pronounce our experience of evil an illusion, what value can there attach to our finding that our {121} experience of its opposite is a fact? Such is the Nemesis which waits on remedies of the "heroic" order.
Nevertheless this particular remedy seems to be enjoying a considerable popularity at the present time; indeed, in discussing some aspects of the doctrine which affirms the "allness" of God, and the allied one of Monism, we have already seen that where these are professed, evil must be explicitly or implicitly denied. This denial is common to the various confused movements—all of them the outcome of a misconceived idealism—which under the names of "New Thought," "Higher Thought," "Joy Philosophy," "Christian Science," etc., etc., find their disciples chiefly amongst that not inconsiderable section of the public which has been aptly described as dominated by a "longing to combine a picturesque certainty devoid of moral discipline with unlimited transcendental speculations." All these cults combine a vague optimism with an extravagant subjectivity; all would have us believe that so far from things being what they are, they are whatever we may think them to be; all with one accord treat evil in its various manifestations as unreal, and maintain, as it has been neatly phrased, that "the process of cure lies in the realisation that there is nothing to be cured." The attraction of such a doctrine for that large number of persons who dislike strenuous effort—either intellectual or {122} moral—is easily accounted for. Evil as a fact is not conducive to the comfort of those who contemplate it—how pleasant to be told that it exists only in disordered imaginations; the sense of sin has always interfered with the enjoyment of life—what a relief to learn that it is merely a chimaera; pain is grievous indeed—what benefactors are those who teach us how to conjure it away by the simple process of declaring that there is no such thing! A creed promising to accomplish such desirable objects could be sure of votaries, if proclaimed with sufficient aplomb; here, we may surmise, is the main explanation of the welcome given to those monistic ethics to which we referred in an earlier chapter, and of the vogue of so-called "Christian Science," which invites consideration as the most typical and important of a whole group of movements.
We repeat that the nature of the Christian Science appeal largely explains the rapid spread of this cult. Christian Science is quite unlike other religions in this, that while they promise at most salvation—an intangible boon—Mrs. Eddy promises her followers health, relief from bodily pain and sickness, and thus addresses herself to a universally and urgently felt want. A merely spiritual message may fail to obtain listeners; but—to state the truth baldly—a person need not be particularly spiritually-minded in order to be drawn towards Christian Science. The natural man would much rather {123} be made well than made good, and a creed which professes to be able to do the former will touch him in his most sensitive part. Certainly, this was one of the difficulties of Christ's public ministry, viz., that the people flocked to Him to be cured rather than to be taught. But while He declined to place the emphasis on His works of healing—while He left Capernaum by Himself before sunrise in order to escape the importunities of the mob, and refused Peter's request that He should return thither with the words, "Let us go elsewhere into the next towns that I may preach there also; for to this end came I forth"—Christian Science addresses its sure appeal to man's material nature. The contrast is significant.
And yet the true essence of Christian Science is not "faith-healing" in the ordinary sense. It does not say, e.g., "Here is a case of genuine, unmistakeable rheumatism or consumption, but faith is able to dispel it"; on the contrary, it says, "This alleged rheumatism or consumption is a mere illusion, a phantasm of the imagination; and the way to be cured is for the 'patient' to discover his mistake. There are no maladies—there are only malades imaginaires." Mrs. Eddy states in plain words that "Mortal ills are but errors of thought" [2]; it is from this point of view that Christian Science as a system has to be approached and understood.
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With the fantastic exegesis of Scripture on which this creed professes to be based, we are not directly concerned; else something might be said of the method of interpretation which is to be found in the official text-book of the movement—a method which sees in the serpent the symbol of malicious animal magnetism, which identifies the Holy Ghost and the New Jerusalem with Christian Science, and the little book brought down from heaven by the mighty angel with Mrs. Eddy's own magnum opus, Science and Health. As Mr. Podmore drily remarks, "In these holy games each player is at liberty to make words mean what he wants them to mean"; at the same time, these grotesque and arbitrary constructions are not precisely calculated to inspire the confidence of balanced minds.
Let us, however, turn at once to the fundamental axioms of Christian
Science:—
(1) God is All in all.
(2) God is Good. Good is Mind.
(3) God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter.
(4) Life, God, Omnipotent Good, deny death, evil, sin, disease.
In other words, Christian Science begins—and, for the matter of that, ends—with the categorical statement that the one and only Reality is Mind, Goodness, God, all three of which terms it uses synonymously and interchangeably. So much being granted, the rest follows "in a concatenation according"; the {125} possible permutations are many—the result is always one. God is All: hence, says Mrs. Eddy, "All is God, and there is naught beside Him"; but God is Good, and as He is All, it follows that All is Good; and if all is good, there can be no evil. Again, Mrs. Eddy propounds the following three propositions: God is Mind; Good is Mind; All is Mind; therefore, once more, all is good, all is God, and there can be no evil. Or, to introduce another variation—God is All, and God is Mind; therefore Mind is all; therefore there is no matter. Grant the Christian Science premises, and there is no escaping the Christian Science conclusions.
But do we grant these premises—do we grant Mrs. Eddy's fundamental pantheistic assumption of "the allness of God" [3]? We have shown again and again why we do not; and with the rejection of the basal tenet of Christian Science the superstructure follows. But now let us show how all Mrs. Eddy's juggling with words, all her assertions of the goodness of all and the allness of good, do not help her to get rid of evil. Granting for argument's sake that Mind is the only reality, then the test of reality must be this—that something exists in or for a mind; in so far, {126} then, as evil, pain, and so forth exist, as Christian Science tells us, "only" in some mind—in so far as "disease is a thing of thought" [4]—evil, pain, disease, etc., must pro tanto be real, nay, the most real of realities, for where except in mind could they exist? And even if we can successfully annihilate them by denying their existence, whence did they come in the first place? From "malicious animal magnetism"? But if God is All in all, and All-good, what is that malicious animal magnetism which is somehow not God and not good? Does not this whole tangle serve yet once more to illustrate the futility of that doctrine of Divine allness which we have seen successfully masquerading as Divine immanence?
Let us test the worth of these speculations in yet another way. Christian Science declares evil to be non-existent, illusory, an "error of thought." But that which is true of a species must be true of all its genera; if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, it follows that Socrates is mortal; if evil as a whole is nonexistent, that which applies to the general phenomenon must equally apply to each and all of its manifestations. But error is undoubtedly a form, and even a serious form, of evil; from which it would follow that if evil is not real, error is not possible—and in that case one opinion is as good as its opposite, and black and white are only different {127} descriptions of the same thing. But if that is so, if one thing is as true as another, we shall conclude that, e.g., the rejection of Christian Science is no more erroneous than its affirmation. Will Christian Scientists acquiesce in that inference? And if they will not, by what means do they propose to show that it is not a legitimate deduction from their own axiom, the unreality of evil? If error is a real fact, evil must be so to that extent; on the other hand, how can it be an error to believe that evil is real, if error, being an evil, must itself be illusory?
But it is time we turned from our examination of the principles of Christian Science to their application. So far as the wholesale declaration of the illusoriness of physical evil—the ravages and tortures of disease—is concerned, the implicit belief extended to the pretensions of this creed to master all such ills is proof, if proof were wanted, of the success which rewards those who act on the maxim, "de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!" Given the right kind and amount of faith, we are assured, Christian Science treatment will prove effective in a case of double pneumonia, or compound fracture, or malignant tumour, without the assistance of the physician—above all, without "drugs," which are pronounced taboo by Mrs. Eddy; "and that," to quote Mr. Podmore again, "is a postulate which can never be contradicted by experience, for failure can always be {128} ascribed—as it is, in fact, ascribed by the Christian Scientist to-day—to want of faith or 'Science' on the part of the sufferer." Nothing could be more entirely simple or unanswerable: if the patient improves or recovers, the credit goes to Christian Science; if he gets worse or dies, the unfortunate result is debited to his lack of faith. The only thing Christian Science fails to answer is, as we have already seen, the preliminary question, viz., what caused the disease—or at any rate the semblance, the malignant hallucination of disease—in the first instance. If God is all and all is God; if God is Mind and there is nothing but Mind; if all therefore is mind and all is good—whence in a good Mind comes even the hallucination of pain and evil? "The thoughts of the practitioner," says Mrs. Eddy, "should be imbued with a clear conviction of the omnipotence and omnipresence of God; . . . and hence, that whatever militates against health . . . is an unjust usurper of the throne of the Controller of all mankind." [5] But if God is omnipresent, His presence must be displayed in the disease; if He is omnipotent, how can there be a usurper on His throne? If He is All, how can there be aught beside Him? These are points on which we wait in vain for enlightenment from the Boston mysteriarch.
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We shall be told, however, that whatever flaws there may be in the theory of Christian Science, this cult could not possibly have obtained its vogue if it were all promise and no performance; and as a matter of fact, testimonies to the curative effect of the treatment abound, furnished by those who say they have been restored to health by these methods, and as convincing as such testimony can be. We use the latter phrase advisedly; it is impossible to read these documents without being convinced of the entire good faith of the writers in relating what they themselves believe to be true; it is impossible not to be convinced by the perusal of their accounts that cures of some sort took place: the one thing of which it is possible to remain quite unconvinced is the fundamental contention of Christian Science, viz., that there was no disease to be cured. Speaking quite generally, if one is going to be impressed by testimonials there is of course, no patent pill of respectable advertising power which cannot produce such by the wastepaper-basketful; and perfectly sincere and unsolicited testimonials, too. What these prove, however, is neither that the patients have been cured of the particular diseases they may name—and in the diagnosis of which they may very likely be mistaken—nor above all that it is the taking of a particular preparation to which they owe their cures; they prove the enormous power of suggestion and auto-suggestion, in {130} virtue of which many ailments yield to the patient's firm assurance that by following a certain course he will get better. Everyone knows that a manner which inspires confidence, a happy blend of cheerfulness and suave authority, is of at least equal value to a physician as his skill and diplomas; and it is probably true, approximately at any rate, that a man can no more be cured of a serious illness unless he believes in his curability, than he can be hypnotised against his will. But between the recognition of such a fact, and the description of a cancer as an obstinate illusion, or a crushed limb as an "error of thought," there is just the difference which separates sanity from extravaganza.
In short, that which is of truth in Christian Science is not peculiar to it; while what is peculiar to its teaching, the denial of the reality of shattered legs, wasted lungs, diseased spines, etc., is not true. The power of mind over body, the possibility of healing certain diseases by suggestion, is not the discovery of Mrs. Eddy; the assumption on the other hand, that all diseases are susceptible to such treatment is characteristic of the school of which she is the latest and best-known representative—only it is false. "All physicians of broad practice and keen observation realise that certain pains may be alleviated or cured, and that certain morbid conditions may be made to disappear, provided a change in the mental {131} state of the patient can be brought about. . . . It does not require special learning to build up a psychotherapeutic practice based upon the observation of such cases; and the Christian Science healers, narrowly educated and of narrow experience, have done just this thing, resting upon the theory that the mental influence of the healer is the effective curative agent. It is easy to see how a development of this theory would lead to the assumption that all kinds of diseases may be curable by mental influence emanating from a healer, this leading to the practice of the so-called 'absent-treatment,' with all its follies and dangers." [6] When it is added that the Christian Science healer is a professional person, and that the cost of "absent-treatment" may come to as much as ten dollars an hour, we need say no more about the "dangers" alluded to.[7] That the quasi-religious formulas of Christian Science may prove extremely effective in bringing about such a change in the mental state of certain patients as will cause pains {132} to be alleviated or cured, and morbid conditions to disappear, one need have no hesitation in believing; moreover, as the medical author just quoted acutely observes, it is quite possible that some patients would not be cured unless they were "allowed to believe that their cures are due to some mysterious or miraculous agency." But even such an admission does not mean that Christian Science does more than apply the principle of suggestion, increasing its efficacy by utilising the religious faculty of the patient; nor, above all, does it give countenance to the root-contention of the creed, viz., that pain and disease are unreal. Once more, if mind be the only reality, then pain, seeing that it can only be experienced by a mind, is real in exact proportion as it is intense.
It might seem unnecessary to add anything more to what has been said in refutation of the claims of Christian Science so far as physical healing is concerned; but one or two very simple considerations will complete our case without greatly detaining us.
In stating categorically and without qualification that "mortal ills are but errors of thought," Mrs. Eddy seems to have overlooked two classes of patients to whom it would be somewhat difficult to apply this sweeping generalisation. We wonder, for instance, how this theory could be made to cover the large category of infantile ailments. How, we are {133} entitled to ask, would Christian Science deal with the teething-troubles which attend babyhood? Is it seriously suggested that a feverish, wailing child is merely the victim of an hallucination—and how would the Christian Scientist undertake to convince him of his illusion? On the face of it, such an enterprise does not look hopeful. But further, it so happens that human beings are not the only sufferers from pain and sickness; animals are subject to diseases, and often to the same diseases as men. We disclaim all intention of treating the subject otherwise than seriously—but if a man's rheumatism is an illusion, what causes the same affection in a dog or a chimpanzee? And if an embrocation may be used with good effects in the latter case, why may it not be used in the former? We need not press these questions; they will serve as they stand to show once more how this whole pretentious philosophy about the unreality, the imaginary nature, of pain breaks down as soon as we subject it to simple tests. So also with the Christian Science attitude towards "drugs," the prescribing of which Mrs. Eddy places in the same category as the denial of God.[8] An obvious comment suggests itself: If drugs cannot cure, it follows that they cannot hurt; will some adherent to this teaching show his consistency in the faith by swallowing a small, but sufficient quantity {134} of oxalic acid? And so, finally, with Mrs. Eddy's singularly futile question, "As power divine is in the healer, why should mortals concern themselves with the chemistry of food?" [9] Without unkindliness, one feels tempted to reply that this kind of language will begin to be convincing when Christian Scientists show their readiness and ability to sustain life on substances chemically certified to be without nutritive properties.
But it is not its denial of physical evil that makes this and allied movements a real menace; dissent as we may from the Christian Science theory of bodily illness, and deplore as we must the fatal results of which we read every now and again when a patient has been persuaded to substitute the Christian Science "healer" for the trained physician—these results concern, to put it rather bluntly, no one but the sufferer and his immediate friends. But when we remarked that the natural man desired to be made well rather than to be made good, we were not merely thinking of one side of Christian Science teaching; we were bearing in mind that the author of Science and Health declares the illusoriness of pain only as part of the illusoriness of all evil, moral as well as physical. Christian Science explicitly denies the reality of sin: and that denial follows with inexorable logic from its first principle—that {135} God is All, and All is Good. And here rather than in the material domain lies the danger we have to face; this is the side of Mrs. Eddy's doctrine which, the moment it is attractively presented to, and grasped by, half-educated and unstable minds, will, we fear, exercise a fatal fascination over large numbers. For one person who will seriously persuade himself that there is no matter, or that his sore throat is imaginary, there will be a number to welcome the good tidings that what they had hitherto regarded as sin wears in reality no such sinister complexion—that, as Mrs. Eddy openly states, what seems "vice" is to be explained as "illusions of the physical senses." That is precisely what every sinner would like to believe. "I have done that, says my memory. I cannot have done that, says my pride, and remains obdurate. In the end, my memory gives in." So wrote Nietzsche, keenly and cynically observant of his kind. As a matter of fact, men would give almost anything to be able to convince themselves that they "have not done that"—not necessarily from pride, but in order to be rid of shame, of remorse, of self-contempt; will not many of them only too eagerly accept this fatal anodyne when it is offered to them in the pretended name of religion?
We have but one comment to urge, one protest to make. It has taken long ages to develop and heighten man's sensitiveness to {136} the distinction between good and evil; we say with the most solemn emphasis that anything calculated to dull that sensitiveness, to wipe out that distinction, to drug the conscience, is nothing less than a crime of high treason against humanity. Better call evil an unfathomable mystery, so long as we also regard it as a dread reality, a foe we must conquer or be conquered by; but to solve the problem by denying its existence, to get over the fact of evil by declaring that all is good—that way not only madness but moral disaster lies. Let us at least understand what this doctrine is, which is being so energetically pressed upon us to-day; and if we see the direction in which that ill-digested pseudo-revelation is likely to lead those who consistently accept it, let us meet this insidious propaganda with equal energy and better arguments. Our first and simplest duty in dealing with the specious doctrine which asserts that evil is "not-being"—a mere illusion which, like the idols spoken of by the Apostle, is "nothing in the world"—is to point out promptly and uncompromisingly that whatever such a reading of the facts may be, and from whatever quarter it may be offered, it is not Christian, but at the furthest remove from Christianity. Shall we be told that "the question is not whether these opinions are dangerous, but whether they are true?" We reply that we are well aware that truth is the highest expediency; but we are not {137} acquainted with any other test of the truth of an opinion save this—whether and how it works. If a speculative theory, when carried into practice, should appear to make straight for pernicious results, in what intelligible sense of the word can it be "true"?
It is the immense merit of Christianity that it has spoken out with no uncertain voice upon this subject; it has never sought to minimise or explain away the fact of moral evil; on the contrary, it has consistently pointed to the true nature of sin, by connecting it vitally and causally with the sacrificial death of the Son of God: tanta molis erat (if we may slightly vary the immortal line) humanam solvere gentem. A gospel which lightly dismisses this terrible reality, and seeks to hide its hideousness behind a rose-coloured mist of fine words,—such an emasculated gospel is not a message of life, but has the answer of death within itself. That in the past, in a doctrine such as that of man's total depravity, the fact of sin has been over-emphasised, may be readily granted; but in the present all the symptoms indicate that the peril we have to meet is its under-emphasis. Against this whole tendency we must resolutely re-assert the Christian standpoint and attitude. Christianity is that religion which affirms in unfaltering accents the reality of evil—but it sets over against it the greater Reality of atoning Love; it proclaims unsparingly the sinfulness and deadliness {138} of sin, but offers us the victory over sin and death through Jesus Christ our Lord.
"O Timotheus, guard your trust, and eschew the irreverent empty phrases and contradictions of a mis-called 'Science,' professing which some have missed their true aim in regard to the faith."