The steps of life: further essays on happiness

by Karl Hilty

I. SIN AND SORROW

I. SIN AND SORROW

ALTHOUGH the Way to Happiness is ever plain and open to all, yet not all who have seen it succeed in really finding it. Like poor Pliable in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” they turn back when once they have fallen into the Slough of Despond; and it is they, and not those who have never tried it, who give the narrow path to genuine happiness the poor repute it has with so-called realists.

Such deserters are often highly gifted and, at first, earnest; and they are by no means always lacking in the courage needed to seek the truth and for its sake to give up the enticing illusions of life. But on the very threshold of that better life which alone brings peace stand two dark figures, like the guardians at the mouth of Hell in the “Paradise Lost”; and before them even the stoutest heart trembles, and they let no man by who has not first had it out with them.

What stands in the way of our happiness is a twofold terrible reality known to every one who has lived beyond the first half-unconscious age of childhood—Sin and Sorrow. To be set free from these is the true motive in all men’s strivings after happiness; no philosophy, no religion, no economics, no politics, that is not essentially directed to this end.

Of these two great antagonists, with which every man has to engage in hard conflict, the first is Sin. It begins early in life, for the most part earlier than sorrow, earlier even than the common expression of “the innocence of childhood” implies. “Ye lead us into life amain, ye let poor man all sinful grow, and then abandon him to pain;” thus Goethe accuses the “heavenly powers,” really meaning, however, an inexorable fate which, in his view, dominates human existence, and against which neither Promethean revolt avails nor the attempt (more common since his day) to deny the existence of sin altogether. In every man there lives a relentlessly real feeling that duty and sin do exist, and that sin not merely follows transgression, but is lodged within it and must pour its consequences with mathematical certainty upon the head of the guilty one, unless averted by some means or other; and that can be by no mere philosophical train of reasoning.

Try (if you would be so bold) by mere negation to declare yourself free from these realities, rooted like granite in all human existence! Notwithstanding your resolution, there is, all the same, in every action of yours, yes, in every thought, a right way, and if you do not pursue it, then it is a sin. Or rather do not try; it is a reef on which millions have already gone to pieces, and on which you will go to pieces, too. “Beyond all Good and Evil” is a place not to be found on earth outside the mad-house, where many men, often highly gifted, are shut up to-day; not merely by chance, for the human spirit sinks into madness whenever, in all earnestness, it seeks to disregard these truths in its own life.

I am quite well aware that this does not “explain” the feeling of duty and sin; besides, it is a matter of indifference to man’s welfare how this feeling is to be explained, whether as a superstition handed down for many generations, or as a belief wholly in accord with reason. Even if it be a superstition, the champion has not yet been found who is able to set humanity free from a nightmare which has burdened it from the beginning of time; the isolated, weak attempts to do so have for the most part fallen out very unhappily for those who undertook them. A man who, with clear, unclouded brow, openly denies duty and sin, and, though boldly believing he may do anything he pleases, has yet gone through his whole life glad-heartedly, with the certainty of his inner conviction unruffled—such a man we should first like to see, before we believe in him. And though such a man were to be found, he would stand alone and would be incomprehensible to all other men, so differently constituted.

Duty and sin become wholly intelligible only when we recognize a personal, extra-mundane God from whose will this inner law proceeds; while the so-called “immanence” of God is but another name for atheism or pantheism. To be sure, it would be idle to desire a reasoned explanation of the transcendental God; everything transcendental by its very nature escapes our comprehension, and for this reason the so-called “proofs” of the existence of God have no power to convince the human understanding. Nor do they seem as yet ever to have convinced any one who did not first want to be. In so far, therefore, atheism has a certain right to declare itself not convinced; but it is itself just as little in a position to prove that its own system is in any way reasonable, or to solve the doubts which that system generates. Therefore so long as humanity abides, the matter will perhaps stand simply at this, that one can not prove there is a God, but just as little, if God indeed exists, can one remove him out of the account of his own life by a mere denial. The decisive question of all questions for every man (but always a question) will be: whether he shall attempt such a denial and be able to attain the inward peace he expects therefrom, or whether he shall acknowledge as binding the categorical demand of the oldest divine revelation, “I am the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me.”