(a) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God, but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for example, the revelation of God's perfection, and the probation and happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.
(b) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for the fallen.
The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish which they have devoured. Rom. 8:20-22—“For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation [the irrational creation] groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”; 23—our mortal body, as a part of nature, participates in the same groaning. 2 Cor. 4:17—“our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.” Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and insignificant.” John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings, earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man's body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.
It was Darwin's judgment that in the world of nature and of man, on the whole, “happiness decidedly prevails.” Wallace, Darwinism, 36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.” Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203 sq.—“In the struggle for life there is no hate—only hunger.” Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is simply nature's exuberance.” Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has entered for life's sake.”These utterances, however, come far short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection between [pg 403]death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.”This seems like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn: “Suffering is God's protest against sin.”
Wallace's theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson: “Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.” William James: “Our dogs are in our human life, but not of it. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.” The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.
This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell's idea of “anticipative consequences,” and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man's sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.” Perowne refers Ps. 96:10—“The world also is established that it cannot be moved”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation; cf. Heb. 12:27—“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain”; Rev. 21:1, 5—“a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new.”
Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana: “It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!” Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that of Rom. 8:20, 21—“the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it”—i. e., by reason of the first man's sin—“in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered.”
Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world where suffering was not meant to be?” Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that God is good.” And Sir Henry Taylor's words: “Pain in man Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis surely piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man's fall—suffers not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting it. Pascal: “Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply bought.” The pain and imperfection of the world are God's frown upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar, Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154; Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.