Even in the case of great evils, God does not step in at once to set things right. Character is an exceedingly costly product. This is no play-world, either as to mutual influence or as to freedom. God guards most jealously the freedom and personality of men. He never forgets that character must be from within. He will not accept, as Christ would not, a faith compelled by "signs." Hence, too, we are left to ask, and much is left to depend on our asking. So, also, God does not remove all difficulties and give sight in place of faith. He seems even careless, often, of how things go; for he would not only appeal to the heroic in us, but he wishes to make it impossible for us to confuse prudence and virtue in ourselves or others, and so to give us the opportunity and the joy of a real moral victory, of knowing that we have made a genuinely unselfish surrender to the right.
In the light of this deep-lying principle of God's sacred reverence for the person, one learns to hush his former complaints, and with full heart to thank God that he lives in a world where righteousness and happiness do not always seem to fall together, and where, therefore, he can "serve God for naught." Oh, let us know, that it is not that God does not care, but that he cares so much—too much to sacrifice to present comfort the character of the child he loves—too much to shut him out from his highest opportunity.
(4) In Our Personal Religious Life.—And the same principle holds in our personal religious life. The unobtrusiveness of God's relation to us, of which we often complain, is rather to be taken as evidence of his sacred respect for our own moral initiative, and proof of his careful adaptation to our moral need. Wherever a strong personality is in relation to a weaker, the stronger must maintain a conscientious self-restraint, lest he dominate the personality of the other, to the other's moral injury and to the hindering of his individuality. It is possible for a boy to be injuriously "tied to his mother's apron-strings." Much more is it necessary that God's relation to us should not be obtrusive. God must guard our freedom and our individuality. He must even take pains to hide his hand, as a strong, influential, but wise friend would do. As we go higher, our life is and must be increasingly one of faith, the Father's relation less and less obtrusive.[113] The times of vision are given to make us patient in our progress toward the goal. And after the vision comes often what Rendel Harris calls "the dark night of faith, when every step has to be taken in absolute dependence upon God and assurance that the vision was truth and was no lie."[114] We need the invisible God for character.
It is for this reason, no doubt, that God makes so rare use of overwhelming experiences in the religious life. He would be chosen with clear and rational self-consciousness, and so he rarely overpowers. And even in experiences which seem most overpowering, if the person is really awake to their true ethical and spiritual import, they will probably be found delicately adapted to call out the individual's own response. But for most of us such experiences prove a real temptation, because we allow the passively emotional to absorb our attention, and so lose the ethical and spiritual fruit. Where these marvelous experiences have been most marked, and have plainly given real help, they seem still, usually, to have been needed because of some false conception of God and the spiritual world that required a powerful corrective. Here they seem really to have been granted, as probably the transfiguration of Christ was to the disciples, as a concession to men's weakness, God consenting reluctantly to use for the time a lower line of appeal, because men are unable to rise to the higher appeal.
We have already seen the danger of the neo-platonic over-estimation of emotional experience, and of sudden and magical crises in religion; and this danger is especially seen in much that is said concerning the work of the Holy Spirit. It seems as if it were simply true, for many earnest and sincere Christians, that the superstitions, which they had conscientiously put aside elsewhere in religion, all came back in their thought of the work of the Spirit. Here their relation to God has ceased to be thought of as a personal or moral or truly spiritual one; and they are looking more or less definitely for bodily thrills, for marked and overwhelming emotional experiences, or for sudden transformations—hardly to be called transformations of character—in the passive half-magical removal of temptations altogether. That is, they are looking for moral and spiritual results from unmoral and unspiritual processes. The exact point is this: Doubtless we are not narrowly to limit what the personal influence of the personal Spirit of God may do in transforming human life—the possibilities probably far transcend what we think—but we are clearly to see that the relation is personal, that the influence is spiritual and under strictly ethical conditions, if we are to escape from simply pagan superstition. Let us see that, if God is a Personal Spirit and not an impersonal substance, then, as Herrmann says, he "communes with us through manifestations of his inner life, and when he consciously and purposely makes us feel what his mind is, then we feel himself."[115]
And, then, let us add, as has been already earlier said, that the deepening life in the Spirit becomes plainly a deepening personal friendship and communion with God, with laws—those of a growing friendship—that we may study and know and obey; and among these laws, none is of more central importance than this of the reverence for the person.
(5) In the Judgment.—And when we turn to God's relation to us in the judgment, we can be sure, I think, of a further application of this principle, contrary to common teaching and expectation. We have no reason to look forward to a time when the secrets of all, or of any, hearts shall be laid bare to all. In so doing, God would violate, it seems to me, the principle of his entire dealing with men, and give the lie to his own revelation in Christ and in history. For myself, Dr. Clarke's words carry immediate conviction: "No man needs to know the secrets of his neighbor, and be able to trace the justice of God through his neighbor's life, and no man who respects the sacredness of individuality will desire it. Neither revelation of his own secrets nor knowledge of another's seems a good thing to a self-respecting soul."[116]
Even the judgment itself proceeds, no doubt, in clear recognition of the free personality. We are "judged by the law of liberty." And we really choose our own destiny, as Phillips Brooks suggests in one of his most striking paragraphs. "By this law we shall be judged. How simple and sublime it makes the judgment day! We stand before the great white throne and wait our verdict. We watch the closed lips of the Eternal Judge, and our hearts stand still until those lips shall open and pronounce our fate, heaven or hell. The lips do not open. The Judge just lifts his hand and raises from each soul before him every law of constraint whose pressure has been its education. He lifts the laws of constraint, and their results are manifest. The real intrinsic nature of each soul leaps to the surface. Each soul's law of liberty becomes supreme. And each soul, without one word of commendation or approval, by its own inner tendency, seeks its own place.... The freeing of souls is the judging of souls. A liberated nature dictates its own destiny. Could there be a more solemn judgment seat? Is it not a fearful thing to be judged by the law of liberty?"[117]
And we may be most certain, that, in any judgment by God, there can be no thought of "human waste." The man must remain for God, to the end, a child of God, a person of sacredness and value, to be dealt with always as capable of character. And it is along just this line that, independently of exegetical grounds, it seems to me, we are led to a decisive rejection of the doctrine of annihilation. And I know no more convincing putting of the matter than this brief but comprehensive statement of Fairbairn: "If there is any truth in the Fatherhood, would not annihilation be even more a punishment of God than of man? The annihilated creature would indeed be gone forever—good and evil, shame and misery, penalty and pain, would for him all be ended with his being; but it would not be so with God—out of his memory the name of the man could never perish, and it would be, as it were, the eternal symbol of a soul he had made only to find that with it he could do nothing better than destroy it."[118]
(6) In the Future Life.—Doubtless our difficulties are not at an end even so; but, at least, our conception of God is saved from self-contradiction; and the Father is seen as suffering in the sin of the son, and perpetually desiring and seeking his return, never satisfied so long as any child of his still refuses his place in the Father's love. This deep-going principle of reverence for personality, with which we are dealing, is the finest flower of human ethical development, and seems completely to shut out the possibility of compulsion by God at any time in the future life. A person will never be treated as a thing. The soul that turns to God must be won voluntarily.