She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky;
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.[4]
Belief in human Immortality is, as I have suggested, the postulate without which most of us cannot {79} believe in God. Even for its own sake it is of the highest ethical value. The belief in Immortality gives a meaning to life even when it has lost all other meaning. 'It is rather,' in the noble words of the late Professor Sidgwick, 'from a disinterested aversion to an universe so irrationally constituted that the wages of virtue should be dust than from any private reckoning about his own wages,' that the good man clings to the idea of Immortality. And that is not all. The value of all higher goods even in this life, though it does not depend wholly upon their duration, does partly depend upon it. It would be better to be pure and unselfish for a day than to be base and selfish for a century. And yet we do not hesitate to commend the value of intellectual and of all kinds of higher enjoyments on account of their greater durability. Why, then, should we shrink from admitting that the value of character really is increased when it is regarded as surviving bodily death? Disbelief in Immortality would, I believe, in the long run and for the vast majority of men, carry with it an enormous enhancement of the value of the carnal and sensual over the spiritual and intellectual element in life.
(3) A third consequence which follows from our determining to accept the moral consciousness as containing the supreme revelation of God is this. From the point of view of the moral consciousness {80} we cannot say that the Universe is wholly good. We have only one means of judging whether things are good or bad: the idea of value is wholly derived from our own ethical judgements or judgements of value. If we distrust these judgements, there is no higher court to which we can appeal. And if we distrust our most ultimate judgements of value, I do not know why we should trust any judgements whatever. Even if we grant that from some very transcendental metaphysical height—the height, for instance, of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy—it may be contended that none of our judgements are wholly true or fully adequate to express the true nature of Reality, we at all events cannot get nearer to Reality than we are conducted by the judgements which present themselves to us as immediate and self-evident. Now, if we do apply these judgements of value to the Universe as we know it, can we say that everything in it seems to be very good? For my own part, I unhesitatingly say, 'Pain is an evil, and sin is a worse evil, and nothing on earth can ever make them good.' How then are we to account for such evils in a Universe which we believe to express the thought and will of a perfectly righteous Being? In only one way that I know of—by supposing they are means to a greater good. That is really the substance and substratum of all the Theodicies of all the Philosophers and all the {81} Theologians except those who frankly trample on or throw over the Moral Consciousness, and declare that, for those who see truly, pain and sin are only additional sources of aesthetic interest in a great world-drama produced for his own entertainment by a Deity not anthropomorphic enough to love but still anthropomorphic enough to be amused.
I shall be told no doubt that this is limiting God. A human being may, it will be urged, without loss of goodness, do things in themselves evil, as a means to a greater good: as a surgeon, he may cause excruciating pain; as a statesman or a soldier, he may doom thousands to a cruel death; as a wise administrator of the poor law, he may refuse to relieve much suffering, in order that he may not cause more suffering. But this is because his power is limited; he has to work upon a world which has a nature of its own independent of his volition. To apply the same explanation to the evil which God causes, is to make Him finite instead of Infinite, limited in power instead of Omnipotent. Now in a sense I admit that this is so. I am not wedded to the words 'Infinite' or 'Omnipotent.' But I would protest against a persistent misrepresentation of the point of view which I defend. It is suggested that the limit to the power of God must necessarily spring from the existence of some other thing or being outside of Him, not created by Him or under His {82} control. I must protest that that is not so. Everybody admits that God cannot change the past; few Philosophers consider it necessary to maintain that God could construct triangles with their angles not together equal to two right angles, or think it any derogation from his Omnipotence to say that He could not make the sum of two and two to be other than four. Few Theologians push their idea of Freewill so far as to insist that God could will Himself to be unjust or unloving, or that, being just and loving, he could do unjust or unloving acts. There are necessities to which even God must submit. But they are not imposed upon Him from without: they are parts of His own essential nature. The limitation by which God cannot attain His ends without causing some evil is a limitation of exactly the same nature. If you say that it is no limitation of God not to be able to change the past, for the thing is really unmeaning, then I submit that in the same way it may be no limitation that He should not be able to evolve highly organized beings without a struggle for existence, or to train human beings in unselfishness without allowing the existence both of sin and of pain. From the point of view of perfect knowledge, these things might turn out to be just as unmeaning as for God to change the past. The popular idea of Omnipotence is one which really does not bear looking into. If we supposed the world {83} to contain no evil at all, still there would be in it a definite amount of good. Twice such a world would be twice as good. Why is there not twice that amount of good? A being who deliberately created only a good world of limited quantity—a definite number of spirits (for instance) enjoying so much pleasure and so much virtue—when he could have created twice that number of spirits, and consequently twice that amount of good, would not be perfectly good or loving. And so on ad infinitum, no matter how much good you suppose him to have created. The only sense which we can intelligibly give to the idea of a divine Omnipotence is this—that God possesses all the power there is, that He can do all things that are in their own nature possible.[5]
But there is a more formidable objection which I have yet to meet. It has been urged by certain Philosophers of great eminence that, if we suppose God not to be unlimited in power, we have no guarantee that the world is even good on the whole; we should not be authorized to infer anything as to a future life or the ultimate destiny of Humanity from the fact of God's goodness. A limited God might be a defeated God. I admit the difficulty. This is the 'greatest wave' of all in the theistic {84} argument. In reply, I would simply appeal to the reasons which I have given for supposing that the world is really willed by God. A rational being does not will evil except as a means to a greater good. If God be rational, we have a right to suppose that the world must contain more good than evil, or it would not be willed at all. A being who was obliged to create a world which did not seem to him good would be a blind force, as force is understood by the pure Materialist, not a rational Will. That much we have a right to claim as a matter of strict Logic; and that would to my own mind be a sufficient reason for assuming that, at least for the higher order of spirits, such a life as ours must be intended as the preface to a better life than this. But I should go further. To me it appears that such evils as sin and pain are so enormously worse than the mere absence of good, that I could not regard as rational a Universe in which the good did not very greatly predominate over the evil. More than that I do not think we are entitled to say. And yet Justice is so great a good that it is rational to hope that for every individual conscious being—at least each individual capable of any high degree of good—there must be a predominance of good on the whole. Beings of very small capacity might conceivably be created chiefly or entirely as a means to a vastly greater good than any that they {85} themselves enjoy: the higher a spirit is in the scale of being, the more difficult it becomes to suppose that it has been brought into existence merely as a means to another's good, or that it will not ultimately enjoy a good which will make it on the whole good that it should have been born.
I could wish myself that, in popular religious teaching, there was a franker conception of this position—a position which, as I have said, is really implied in the Theodicies of all the Divines. Popular unbelief—and sometimes the unbelief of more cultivated persons—rests mainly upon the existence of evil. We should cut at the roots of it by teaching frankly that this is the best of all possible Universes, though not the best of all imaginable Universes—such Universes as we can construct in our own imagination by picturing to ourselves all the good that there is in the world without any of the evil. We may still say, if we please, that God is infinite because He is limited by nothing outside His own nature, except what He has Himself caused. We can still call Him Omnipotent in the sense that He possesses all the power there is. And in many ways such a belief is far more practically consolatory and stimulating than a belief in a God who can do all things by any means and who consequently does not need our help. In our view, we are engaged not in a sham warfare with an evil that is really {86} good, but in a real warfare with a real evil, a struggle in which we have the ultimate power in the Universe on our side, but one in which the victory cannot be won without our help, a real struggle in which we are called upon to be literally fellow-workers with God.
LITERATURE
The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with in most of the works mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and also in books on Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. Classical vindications of the authority of the Moral Consciousness are Bishop Butler's Sermons, and Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals and other ethical writings (translated by T. K. Abbott). I have expressed my own views on the subject with some fullness in the third book of my Theory of Good and Evil.
[1] See especially Book II. Lect. iii.
[2] 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.' (Treatise, Part I, Section ii., ed. Green and Grose, vol. ii. p. 247.) 'The distinction of moral good and evil is founded in the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character; and as that pleasure or pain cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows that there is just so much virtue in any character as every one places in it, and that 'tis impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken.' (Ibid. vol. ii. p. 311.)