‘Why should the Almighty, if He be All-Merciful, permit this carnage? There is no answer.’
The revolt of souls against religion is more often moral than intellectual in its origin. It is when the moral sense is shocked that the intellect sharpens its sword in the cause of unbelief.
The growing humanity of life—a humanity which is the one clear compensating gain for many defaults—rises in protest against the severities of religious history or religious doctrine. The murderous deeds wrought by the heroes and heroines of the Old Testament did not offend the Covenanters as they offend their late descendants to-day. It would not seem that the teaching of Christ, in regard to the future life and its punishments and rewards, aroused so much as one faint murmur of indignation among His contemporaries, who were the vigilant jealous enemies of His Messiahship. Yet that teaching, interpreted with the literalness which would wring the last latent drop of bitterness out of metaphor or allegory, has come to be so keenly resented by sensitive consciences as to imperil the claim of His religion to be the divinely appointed satisfaction for the spiritual needs of humanity.
Gerald was led on—it is but a step—from doubting the justice of God in this world to doubting it in the next. His spirit revolted at the inequalities and disproportions of the present life. But it revolted still more at the thought of an immutable inequality between the destinies of men in the unseen life. His father had always assumed this inequality as an element of revelation. He had spoken of the ‘great gulf fixed,’ of the eternity of bliss, and the eternity of condemnation. It was as sure to him as the Incarnation itself; nay, he would argue, if there was an Incarnation of the Eternal, can the penalty of rejecting Him be less than eternal?
There is no mistake in religion so great as that of being too logical. In the affairs of man and man logic has its place, for they are confined within the boundaries of the reason. But in the relation of the Infinite to the finite, in the problem where one factor is Infinity, logic is the most dangerous, the most fatal of possible guides. From Augustine to Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, it has been the vice of theology. Mr. Eversley did not ask himself, Can one man sin and the consequences for man be everlasting, and shall a God die and the consequences of His death end for most men with threescore years and ten?
Strictly considered, the revelation of the Divine Nature is and must be not single, but twofold. Every truth of God has two sides, like a medal, and it is impossible to view them simultaneously. The nearest human approximation to such truth will be found to lie in a harmony of conflicting propositions. Logical contradictions are an absurdity in human things; in divine things they are sometimes the only possible expressions of truth. The divine severity and the divine forgiveness, like necessity and free will, run in parallel lines which know no meeting in this life, but may perchance meet in the eternal Life of Heaven.
Gerald Eversley seems to have had some inkling or presentiment of this fact, for I find somewhat later a reference to Isaiah lv. 8, 9, as a passage affording the solution of religious difficulties. ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.’
But it was the last flicker of the dying flame. On the very same page there is a sentence showing how the bitter herb of unbelief had already begun to poison the spring of happiness in his life.
For no sooner is the goodness of God denied or doubted than a sense of dissatisfaction arises in the human mind. Things are well as they are, if they are the expression of a divine (though inscrutable) will. They are not well, if judged in and by themselves.
Gerald Eversley found himself impatient (as so many before him) of the circumstances of his being, nay, of his being itself. Instead of thanking God for his creation, he censured his father for it. Questions such as these welled up in his soul: ‘Why was I born, when it were so much better not to have been than to be? Τὸ μὴ φῦναι ἃπαντα νικᾷ λόγον. Why has man no option in his birth? why may he have none in his death? Where is the right of parents to bring children into life, knowing not if it will be to them a misery, a curse? How can he who believes that the vast majority of mankind are predestined to an everlasting woe, augment, with a light and laughing heart, the number of the damned?’