Pastor Pastorum; Or, The Schooling of the Apostles by Our Lord

by Henry Latham

Then, as to my children, “Have I not been wrong in supposing that they must be good because they have never done wrong? They have been so kept from the suggestion of evil that they could hardly help going right. But could they resist temptation if it came? They have never been braced by a struggle with it, nor marked the ill fruits of evil. They take it on trust from me that evil brings sorrow; but it usually comes in disguise and declares itself harmless, and how should they recognise it if it came?” So, question after question suggests itself, all destructive of his satisfaction. “Can it be,” he says at last, “that I have brought up these children so as to be fit for no world but that which I have carefully constructed for them? I used to delight in their goodness; but since I have suspected it to be mainly instinctive—an innocence that is the outcome of ignorance—my satisfaction in it is half gone.”

At length, he is harassed with the idea that he may have given up his life to a mistake, that what he has done has cramped his own mental and moral expansion, and that the excellence of his blameless family is only fair-weather goodness after all. He casts about to think why it is that they have “neither savour nor salt,” and concludes “What they want is personality—and how should they have [pg 035] got it, living in a household where I have taken care to be all in all?”

Then his thoughts run upon evil, which he has been at such pains to shut out, closing against it every cranny and chink. “God,” he may say, “has let evil into His world—was I right in keeping it forcibly out of mine? May not the resisting and assuaging of evil give occasion for good to grow up, and feel its own strength? Are there not many kinds of goodness, brought out in this way, which we could no more have without evil than we could have light in a picture without shade? If there is no room for my children to go wrong, what moral significance,” he asks, “is there in saying that they go right?”

So he is disheartened with his project, and gives it up. He abandons his isolated way of life, and gives his children freedom. He encourages them to act and judge for themselves. Henceforth they can choose their own books, their own friends their own pursuits, and go forth into life, outside their charmed circle.

Of course this involves the giving up of his absolute power; this is inherent in the nature of things. A man cannot be an autocrat and have free people about him. If he would have intercourse with free intelligences, in order to get the advantages to his own cultivation and expansion of character which spring from such intercourse; this must be purchased by abdicating some of his [pg 036] powers, or putting them in abeyance. So the parent forbears using his power, in order that his children may learn to be free, and that he may hold communion with free, loving hearts, and engage in discussion with unfettered minds.

Soon, he finds that he has to encounter opposition. The children are free to go wrong, and wrong some of them will go: evil appears in that household where it was not known. The father sorrows over this, but when he reviews his condition he finds that he has a countervailing comfort; the good that is left about him is now real good. It is the good of persons who have known and resisted evil. Besides this, there is more life and greater vigour of character in his family, than there was before. They no longer sit with folded hands always waiting for direction; they have the air of persons who see a purpose before them; and they move along their way “with the certain step of man.” So he concludes that it is better that all should engage in the struggle with evil, even though some should fail, than that they should move along paths ready shaped out for them, shewing a merely mechanical goodness.

A great change has come over his life in another respect, he is now no longer alone. Other wills come into contact, sometimes into collision, with his will; a host of qualities, which had been folded up and laid by for years, come again into use. He is no longer among echoes of himself, but there [pg 037] are real voices in his new world. His views may still prevail, but it must be, not merely because they are his, but because they stand on solid ground. He may still lead in action; but it must be because he has the leader's strength, because he will venture when others waver, and decide when others doubt.

Here we must leave him, and say a word or two before making the obvious application of the parable: We must not press the application too closely or draw conclusions from the mere machinery of the parable: it must not, of course, be supposed that I conceive God to have dealt with man as the father does with his children; that is to say, to have kept him at first in tutelage, and then found it desirable to enfranchise him. The sole object of the story is to familiarise the reader with the need of freedom in moral growth. It shews that for education to be carried out, the will must be free to act. When we have brought this home to his mind, we shall be the better able “to justify the ways of God to man” in some important particulars.

The parable is designed to apply to the condition of men on earth on the supposition, that their education—in the largest sense of the word—is the main work held in view: all depends on the hypothesis that man is placed on earth to develop his powers. The need of freedom for members of the imagined family depends on their being in a [pg 038] state of growth. The parable would not apply to spiritual beings, if we could conceive such, whose qualities and character were unalterable. Perfected beings have done with growth and struggle, and have attained to the highest condition, viz. existence in unison with God. But for imperfect beings, struggling on to their goal, freedom is required and the opposition of evil is indispensable, in order that the moral thews and sinews may harden.

Whenever we come upon an objection to the ways of God's ordering of the world, which is put in the form of a question, such as “Why was not the world made in this way or that?” we shall find it a good plan, to follow out the line indicated in the complaint, and see what would have come about, supposing that God had made the world in the way which is suggested.