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

by Henry Latham

From the imaginary case here put, we see to what the common child's question leads us—the question “Why did not God make all people good and keep them so?”—If people had been “made good and kept good,” that is to say if they had been constructed by God so as always to act as His will prompted, then they would not in the proper sense of the word have been people at all; they would have been mechanisms worked by God, and so they could not have been “good” in the sense in which we use the word of a man, but only in that in which we apply it to a watch. There [pg 039] could be no moral life without freedom; there could be no growth of character without temptations and difficulties to overcome; no heroism, no self-denial, no sympathising tenderness, no forgiving love, without suffering or wrongdoing to call them forth.

Moreover if not only people on earth, but all created intelligences had, in like manner, been constrained to respond to every motion of the Divine will, God would have been the one spiritual being in the world and would therefore have been absolutely alone.

Let us now suppose, and the supposition falls in with what our conscience and the Bible tell us, that in God all goodness dwells. This goodness cannot lie stored away as in a treasure-house, so as to be merely an object of contemplation, it must be active and in operation. This is essential to our idea of goodness, and it agrees with the view of God which Christ presents to us, which is that of a being ever operating. “My Father worketh hitherto,” says our Lord, “and I work.” For good to unfold, and advance toward perfection in its manifold ways, an arena is wanted. The world we know of affords the arena required; in this, God has been working from the first One kind of His work we can conceive to be the suggesting thoughts to men; but if it be so, He leaves the will free either to entertain or to reject the suggestions, as we might those of a friend.

That we may not lose ourselves in the immensity of God and eternity, we will withdraw our gaze from the rest of the Universe, and fix it on this planet of ours, when organic life first began to appear upon it. The spiritual and material world might, before this, have been going on, each apart, through countless ages; but a moment came when the spiritual and the material were wondrously blended, and life began upon the earth. Different orders of being succeeded each other, and fresh forces came into play. We may suppose that God sympathised with all His creation, and that the qualities that appeared in it reflected something in Himself. God may have rejoiced in seeing the animal creation happy. The animals were in a degree free, but they were not self-conscious; they did not know that they were happy, or that they were loved, and God may have required for the full unfolding of His infinite capacity for sympathy and love, to be in relation with beings who could know Him and love Him, and know that they loved Him.

Mr Erskine of Linlathen, in his excellent book on the Spiritual Order, says “Is there not a comfort in the doctrine of the eternal Sonship, as a deliverance from the thought of a God, whose very nature is Love, dwelling in absolute solitude from all eternity without an object of love?” We may extend this observation to other qualities besides love, from the exercise of which, a being who is [pg 041] alone in the world is necessarily debarred. Is it not likely that a God of mercy, truth and justice would frame a world of beings, in His dealing with whom all these qualities should find scope and exercise? Without self-conscious beings having free wills, how could this be done?

Close by the side of this question of free will, lies that of the existence of moral evil, in a world made by a being who, by the hypothesis, is perfectly good. When we supposed the world to be formed for the evolution of moral goodness, we, perhaps without knowing it, introduced the idea of moral evil, implied in that of goodness; for actual good is evolved in resisting evil and repairing the mischief it has done; indeed many forms of it can no more exist without evil as an antagonist, than a wheel can turn without the friction of the road.

Now, as I have said, if men be left free, they must have liberty to go wrong. For if they had been originally made so perfect that they could not go wrong, this would only mean that they were like watches very excellently fabricated; they could only move in one particular way, viz. the way in which they had been designed to move by God. Inasmuch as such beings would not be persons, we could not feel gratitude or anger towards them, nor influence them in any way. If men were like this, there could be little or no growth, little or no action of man on man. If, to take another supposition, man had been so made that it would be [pg 042] possible for him to go wrong, but that he had been sedulously kept out of temptation and placed in an abode where innocence reigned undisturbed; then we come to a case very like that sketched in the foregoing parable.

There is a third case possible. God might make men capable of going wrong, but might watch over them and protect them, whether they craved His help or not, whenever temptation approached. This constant supernatural interference would soon have destroyed all self-helpfulness; men would never have formed habits of avoiding or resisting temptation. “God,” the man would say, “will not let me sin—I may go as near to danger as I like, and need take no care of myself, because I am sure of God's protection.” We know that a child does not learn to take care of himself, so long as he feels that it is the nurse's business to see that no harm happens to him. We come then to this result. God requires free self-conscious beings, for the full exercise of the moral goodness in Himself and for its development and manifestation in the world.

But He cannot give others freedom, and at the same time provide that they should act only in the way that He approves: because this in itself would be a contradiction, and a contradiction not even Divine power can effect. Hence these free, intelligent beings must be at liberty to go wrong, and God must, in exchange for having free wills about him, forego part of His absolute prerogative: [pg 043] and so He must allow evil a place in the world because this is involved in the “liberty to go wrong” just spoken of.

This brings us to the mystery of the “origin of evil.” I shall not lay myself open to the charge made against divines, “That they no sooner declare a subject to be a mystery than they set to work to explain it.” I can see that if man is to be left free, evil must needs come, and that without evil in the world none of the more masculine virtues can be brought to the birth—that is to say, I see that evil, being in the world, serves to discharge a function—but I do not pretend to say how it came. I do not maintain that it came, solely, from man's misuse of his freedom.