From what we see in the world arises a fancy that every thing must have its opposite, that light presupposes darkness, and pleasure pain, and so good may presuppose evil; but this fancy is not substantial enough to build upon. Our Lord's words on the occasions when He deals with evil, are, to my judgment, most easily reconciled with one another, and with the circumstances which call them forth, by supposing Him to recognise a personal spiritual influence, presenting evil thoughts to the minds of men; the man remaining free to choose whether he will entertain these suggestions or not.
I return to my immediate subject—the function that evil performs in the existing moral world. We [pg 044] read in the Book of Genesis that the earth was to bring forth “thorns and thistles,” and that man was “to eat bread in the sweat of his brow.”[7] This is the result of a change worked, we are told, “for man's sake.” It was indeed for man's sake—though in a different sense—that this was so. He would have remained a very poor creature if the earth had produced just what he wanted, without any labour of his. This illustrates the function of evil in the ordering of the world. Man's qualities, moral and physical, are developed by it. It subserves the progress of the human race.
We should have less heroism, without cruelty and oppression from without; and could have no self-restraint, without temptation from within. Piety and love indeed, when they had once come into being, might exist without evil; we may believe that they satisfy the souls of the saints in heaven; but among men they commonly owe their birth to a feeling of shelter against evil, and to a sense of pardoned wrong.
Another office which evil performs is this. The contention with it helps to bring out the difference between man and man. If any members of the family of my parable had possessed the germs of a strong character, they could hardly have brought fruit to perfection: the conditions of their innocent life tended to uniformity. But as soon as temptations came, latent differences would forthwith [pg 045] appear; the strong would grow stronger and the bad worse. Now there is need of strong men for human progress. They form the steps in the stairway by which the race mounts. If life were smooth and easy, men would, as it were, advance in line, and the stronger men would not so surely come in front of the rest. It is in times of trouble that men are most apt to recognise worth and capacity, and make much of them. So that the trials and difficulties of human life which come of evil, have this good effect among others, they help to pick out the men who are fitted to be the leaders of human movements and of human thought.
It may have struck us as strange that Christ does not deal directly with these perplexing questions which trouble so many minds. We shall see, later on, that His not doing so is quite consistent with the uniform “tenour of His way.” But though our Lord does not lay down dogmas on these points, yet His own actions and expressions would, of course, accord with what He knew: if, then, when we hit upon some view of this “riddle of the painful earth,” which commends itself to our minds, we find that it clashes with what our Lord does or says, then we may throw it aside at once: and, on the other hand, if we arrive at a way of looking at the matter which seems to harmonise with what falls from Him; then, we may hope, not indeed that we have found a solution of the riddle, but that our hypothesis will not mislead us, so [pg 046] long as we own it to be an hypothesis, and nothing more.
We may be supposed then to have arrived at this position. We assume the existence of a mighty Divine being, in whom all goodness dwells. We suppose that this world is an arena in which a struggle is to be carried on between good and evil by the agency of free intelligent beings; that by means of this struggle the better natures will be strengthened and developed, and come more and more into action; we suppose also that God whispers counsel and comfort on the side of good. Further than this we need not now go.
As regards the presence of evil in the world, there are several sayings of our Lord which might be noted. I must confine myself to one or two of the most important.
First let us consider the following passage from St John's Gospel:[8]
“And as he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind? Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”
Here the disciples take it for granted, that the blindness was a punishment for sin, either on the part of the man or his parents. It is our Lord's practice—and [pg 047] a practice so uniform that we may call it a Law of proceeding—not to enter into controversy about wide-spread mistaken views on merely speculative subjects: He usually gives a hint, and leaves it to work in the hearer's mind.