Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors

by James Freeman Clarke

4. Spiritual Evil.

(a.) Wilful alienation from God, or perverse choice.
(b.) Spiritual inability.

Now, we see that in all these divisions of evil,—physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual,—it is found in the two forms of active and passive evil. In the latter form it is disease, and independent of the will.

Returning, then, to the Orthodox view of evil, which it is our business to examine, we find already that it has the advantage of the Liberal theology in recognizing this passive side of evil, which we may call disease. It is true that Orthodoxy has not yet succeeded in coming to any clearness on this question, and has not yet any firm, intellectual hold of the main points of its argument. Examples of this confusion are quite common. Not to go back to the Calvinistic and Arminian controversies, which were but a revival of the Augustinian and Pelagian dispute; not to recur even to the Hopkinsian and Edwardian discussions,—we have only to refer to the differences between new and old school theology in the Presbyterian Church; to the trial of Dr. Beecher; to the book of his son Edward; to the divergence of Andover from New Haven, and Princeton from Andover. Unsettled, because superficial, views of evil are at the roots of all these controversies.

§ 5. Doctrine of the Fall in Adam, and Natural Depravity. Their Truth and Error.

The first point of the doctrine of evil regards the Fall, including the doctrine of depravity.

Modern French philosophers have dwelt much on what they call the solidarity of the human race. By this they mean that two individuals are not independent of each other, like two trees standing side by side, but like two buds on the same tree or bough. There is a common life-sap flowing through them all. Let the life of the tree be attacked anywhere,—in [pg 137] its roots, its trunk, its limbs,—and all these individual buds feel it. Yet each bud has also a life of its own, and develops its own stalk, leaves, blossom, fruit. It can be taken from its own tree, and put into another tree, and grow. So it is with separate men grafted into the great tree of mankind. No one lives to himself, nor dies to himself. If one suffers, all suffer. The life of mankind, becoming diseased, pours disease into all individual men.

Now, is there not something in this doctrine to which our instincts assent? Do not we feel it true that we inherit not our own life merely, but that of our race? and is not this the essential truth in the doctrine of the fall?

It is true that we fell in Adam. It is also true that we fell in every act of sin, in every weakness and folly, of any subsequent child of Adam. We are all drawn downward by every sin; we are lifted upward, too, by every act of heroic virtue, not by example only, but also by that mysterious influence, that subtile contagion, finer than anything visible, ponderable, or tangible,—that effluence from eye, voice, tone, manner, which, according to the character which is behind, communicates an impulse of faith and courage, or an impulse of cowardice and untruth; which may be transmitted onward, forward, on every side, like the widening circles in a disturbed lake,—circles which meet and cross each other without disturbance, and whose influence may be strictly illimitable and infinite.