Here you have a sufficiently amusing exhibition of inconsistency and ignorance; but this seems to me of infinitely little concern where I am dealing not with matters that fall within the range of experience, but with spiritual and supernatural things that belong to the realm of faith, hope, and aspiration. I could just as easily turn inside out my cross examiner if he undertook to give me a scientific theory on the origin of the world. No doubt he might prefer having no theory about the origin of the world, and might recommend me to imitate him by having no theory about the origin of Evil, or about the nature of the Supreme Good. But my answer would be as follows: “I have a certain work to do in the world, and I cannot go on with my work without having some theories on these subjects. Most men feel with me that they must have some answer to these stupendous problems of existence. As the senses are intended to be our guide in matters of experience, so our faculty of faith seems to me intended to guide us in matters quite beyond experience.” There is another answer which I hardly like to give because it seems brutal; but I believe it to be true, and it is certainly capable of being expressed in the evolutionary dialect so as to commend itself to the scientific mind: “An agnostic nation will find itself sooner or later unsuited for its environment, and will either come to believe in some solution of these spiritual problems or stagnate and perish. And something of the same result will follow from agnosticism in the family and in the individual.”
From this doctrine of Christ then I am not to be dislodged by any philosophic analysis demonstrating that good and evil so run into one another that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. “Is all pain evil? Is it an evil that a sword’s point pains you? Would it not be a greater evil that a sword should run you through unawares because it did not pain you? Is not the pain of hunger a useful monitor? Has not pain in a thousand cases its use as a preservative? Is not what you call ‘sin’ very often misplaced energy? If a child is restless and talkative and consequently disobedient, must you consequently bring in Satan to account for the little one’s peccadilloes? If a young man is over-sanguine, reckless, rash, occasionally intemperate, must all these faults be laid upon the back of an enemy of mankind? Is animal death from Satan, but vegetable death from God? And is the death of a sponge a half and half contribution from the joint Powers? And when I swallow an oyster, may I give thanks to God? but when a tiger devours a deer, or an eagle tears a hare, or a thrush swallows a worm, are they doing the work of the Adversary? Where are you to begin to trace this permeating Satanic agency? Go back to the primordial atom. Are we to say that the Devil impelled it in the selfish tangential straight line, and that God attracts it with an unselfish centripetal force, and that the result is the harmonious curve of actuality? If you give yourself up to such a degrading dualism as this, will you not be more often fearing Satan than loving God? Will you not be attributing to Satan one moment, what the next moment will compel you to attribute to God? Where will you draw the line?” To all this my answer is very simple: “I shall draw the line where the spiritual instinct within me draws it. Whatever I am forced to pronounce contrary to God’s intention I shall call evil and attribute to Satan.” Herein I may go wrong in details, and I may have to correct my judgments as I grow in knowledge; but I am confident that, on the whole, I shall be following the teaching of Christ. My spiritual convictions accord with the teaching of that ancient allegory in the book of Genesis, which tells us that Satan, not God, brought sin and death into the world. There was a Fall somewhere, in heaven perhaps as well as on earth—“war in heaven” of the Evil against the Good—a declension from the divine ideal, a lapse by which the whole Universe became imperfect. It has been the work of God, not to create death, but upon the basis of death to erect a hope and faith in a higher life; not to create sin, but out of sin, repentance, and forgiveness, to elicit a higher righteousness than would have been possible (so we speak) if sin had never existed. Similarly of disease, and pain, and the conflict in the animal world for life and death: good has resulted from them; yet I cannot think of them, I cannot even think of change and decay, as being, so to speak, “parts of God’s first intention.” Stoics, and Christians who imitate Stoics, may call these things “indifferent:” I cannot. And even if I could, what of the ferocity, and cruelty, and exultation in destruction, which are apparent in the animal world? “Death,” say the Stoics, “is the mere exit from life.” Is it? I was once present at a theatre in Rouen where the hero took a full quarter of an hour to die of poison, and the young Normans who sat round me expressed their strenuous disapprobation: “C’est trop long,” they murmured. I have made the same remonstrance in my heart of hearts, ever since I was a boy and saw a cat play with a mouse, and a patient stoat hunt down and catch at last a tired-out rabbit: “It is too long,” “It is too cruel.” “Did God ordain this?”—I asked: and I answered unhesitatingly “No.” These are but small phenomena in Nature’s chamber of horrors: but for me they have always been, and will always remain, horrible. I believe that God intends us to regard them with horror and perhaps to see in them some faint reflection of the wantonly destructive and torturing instinct in man.
Those are fine-sounding lines, those of Cleanthes:—
οἰδέ τι γίγνεται ἔργον ἐπὶ χθονὶ σου δίχα, δαῖμον,
πλὴν ὅποσα ῥέζουσι κακοὶ σφετέρῃσιν ἀνοίαις.[[6]]
I should like to agree with them; but I cannot. The picture of the cat and the mouse appears—fertile in suggestions. “This at least,” I say, “was not wrought by ‘evil men in their folly;’ and yet it did not come direct from God.” Isaiah pleases me better with his prediction, physiologically absurd, but spiritually most true: “The lion shall eat straw like a bullock.” That is just the confession that I need: it comes to me with all the force of a divine acknowledgment, as if God thereby said: “Death and conflict must be for a time, but they shall not be for ever: it was not my intention, it is not my will, that my creatures should thrive by destroying each other.”
Applying this theory to Evolution, I believe that Satan, not God, was the author of the wasteful and continuous conflict that has characterized it; but that God has utilized this conflict for the purposes of development and progress. This is what I had in my mind when I said that Evolution diminished the difficulties in the way of acknowledging the existence of a God. The problems of death, destruction, waste, conflict and sin, are not new; they are as old as Job, perhaps as old as the first-created man; but it is new to learn that good has resulted from those evils. In so far as Evolution has taught this, it has helped to strengthen, not to weaken, our faith. But then, if we are to use this language, we must learn to think, not of “Evolution by itself,” but of “Evolution with Satan.” “Evolution without Satan” would appal us by the seeming wastefulness and ubiquity of conflict and the indirectness of its benefits; but “Evolution with Satan” enables us to realize God as our refuge and strength amid the utmost storms and tempests of destruction.
If any one says that the belief in Satan is inexpedient, I am ready to give him a patient hearing; but I find it difficult to listen patiently to what people are pleased to call arguments against it. For example, “Duty can exist only in a world of conflict;” to which the reply is obvious, “But God might have made men for love and harmonious obedience, and not for duty and conflict.” This, of course, is a very presumptuous statement, such as Bishop Butler would have condemned; but it is a fitting reply to a still more presumptuous implied statement. God has revealed Himself as Righteousness and Goodness without internal conflict; He has also revealed His purpose to conform us to Himself; and the Bible speaks of Him as being opposed by an Adversary who caused men for a time to differ from the divine image; is it not then a very presumptuous thing to imply that “God could not have created men but for conflict and duty,” or, in other words, “God could not have made us better than we are, even had there been no Adversary opposing His will?” Again, we hear it said that, “An evil Spirit contending against a good Spirit must needs have produced two distinct worlds, and not the one progressive world of which we have experience:” to which the answer is equally obvious, “The orbit of every planet, or the path of any projectile, shows that two different forces may result in one continuous curve.”
The only consistent and systematic way of rejecting a belief in the existence of Satan is to reject the belief in the existence of sin. Then you can argue thus, “The notion of a Satan arises from the false and sharp antagonism which our human imaginations set up between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ whereas what we call ‘evil’ is really nothing but an excess of tendencies good in themselves and only evil when carried to excess. The difference therefore between good and evil is only a question of degree.” That theory sounds plausible; but it ignores the essence of sin, which consists in a rebellion against Conscience. It is not excess, or defect, the more, or the less; it is the moral disorder, the subversion of human nature, which is so frightful to contemplate that we cannot believe it to have proceeded from God. But perhaps you reply, “That very disorder is merely the result of energy out of place or in excess.” Well, in the same way, when gas is escaping in a room in which there is a lighted candle, there is first a quiet and inoffensive escape of the gas, and secondly a violent and perhaps calamitous explosion; and you might argue similarly, “The difference was only one of degree; the explosion was merely the result of a useful element out of place and in excess.” But I should answer that no sober and sensible householder would justify himself in this way for allowing a lighted candle and escaping gas to come together; and so I cannot believe that God is willing that men should justify Him for tolerating theft, murder, and adultery, on the ground that these things are “only questions of degree.” I think we please Him better, and draw closer to Him, when we say, “An Enemy hath done this.” And besides, for our own sakes, if we are to resist sin with our utmost force, it seems to me we are far more likely to do so when we regard it as Christ and St. Paul regarded it than when we give it the name of “misplaced energy,” or “an excessive use of faculties, in themselves, good and necessary.”
To me it seems that if we are to have a genuine trust in God, it is almost necessary that we should believe in the existence of a Satan. I say “almost,” because there may be rare exceptions. A few pure saintly souls, of inextinguishable trust, may perhaps be able to face the awful phenomena of Evil and to say, “Though He hath done all this yet will we trust in Him; what may have moved Him to cause His creatures to struggle together, and to thrive, each on the destruction of its neighbour, we know not, and we are not careful to know; our hearts teach us that He is above us in goodness, and in wisdom, as in power; we know that we must trust Him; more than this we do not wish to know.” Such men are to be admired—but to be admired by most of us at a great distance. For the masses of men, and especially for those who know something of the depth of sin, it must be a great and almost a necessary help to say, “The Good that is done upon Earth, God doeth it Himself; the evil that is upon earth God doeth it not: an Enemy hath done this.”