Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

Two WEEKS ago I preached a sermon, the subject of which was "Morality Natural, not Statutory." Judging by the conversations which I have had and letters which I have received, it has aroused a good deal of question and criticism in certain quarters. This must be for one of three reasons. In the first place, the position which I took may not be a tenable one. In the second place, it is possible that the views expressed, being somewhat new and unfamiliar, were not found easy of apprehension and acceptance. In the third place, it is possible that, in endeavoring to treat so large a subject, I did not analyze and illustrate enough to make myself perfectly clear.

At any rate, the matter seems to me of such supreme importance as to make it worth my while this morning to continue the general subject by a careful and earnest treatment of the great question of reward and punishment as applied to feeling, to thought, to conduct, the whole of human life.

Let me say here at the outset, as indicating the point towards which I shall aim as my goal, that in the ordinary use of language, in the popular use of language, I do not believe in either reward or punishment: I believe only in causes and results. This, as I said, is the point that I shall aim at. Where shall I begin?

I need to ask you to consider for a moment the state of mind of man, so far as we can conceive it, when he first wakes up as a conscious being, and begins to look out over the scene of nature and human life with the endeavor to interpret facts as they appear to him. Of course, he knows nothing whatever of what we mean by natural law: he knows nothing of natural cause and of necessary result. So far as we can discover by our researches, all the tribes of men about whom we have been able to gather any information have had a belief, if not in God, at least in gods, or in spiritual existences and powers that controlled within certain limits the course of human events. It may have been the worship of ancestors, it may have been the worship of some great chief of the tribe; but these invisible beings have been able to help or hurt their followers, their worshippers; and of course they have been thought of as governing human life after substantially the same methods that they used when they were living here in the body.

That is, it has been a magical or arbitrary government of the world that has been for ages the dominant one in the human mind. People have supposed that these invisible beings desired them to do certain things, to refrain from doing certain other things, and they have expected them to reward or punish them how? By giving them that which they desired, on the one hand, or sending them something which they did not desire, on the other. They have brought the gods their offerings, their sacrifices, their words of praise, and have asked that they might be successful in war, that they might bring home the game which they sought when they went on a hunting expedition. When there have been disease, pestilence, famine, drought, no matter what the nature of the evil, they have been regarded as allotments of these divine powers sent on account of something they have done or omitted to do. It never occurred to them to interpret these as part of a natural order, because they knew nothing about any natural order. They reasoned as well as they were able to reason at that stage of culture in any particular age of the world's history which they had reached. But this has been the thought of men time out of mind concerning the method of the divine or spiritual or unseen government of the world.

Is this way of looking at it confined to primitive man, confined to pagan nations? Do we find something else, some other condition of mind, when we come to study carefully the Old Testament? Let us see. Take the first verse which I read as a part of my text. The author of this Psalm we do not know who he may have been says, "I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread." As I have read this a great many times in the past, I have wondered as to the strange experience that this man must have had in human life, if this is a correct interpretation of that experience. I have been young: I do not like to admit that as yet I am old; but, whether I am or not, I have a good many times seen the righteous forsaken, and his seed begging their bread.

It seems to me that the writer of this verse was trained in a theory of the government of human affairs that does not at all match the facts. He has this magical, this arbitrary theory in his mind. It was the general conception I think, as any one will find by a careful reading of the Old Testament or study of Jewish history, the ordinary conception among the Hebrews, that God was to reward people for being good by prosperity, long life, many children, herds of cattle, distinction among his fellow-men, positions of political honor and power; and the threat of the taking away of these is frequently uttered against those that presume to do wrong. In other words, it seems to me that the ordinary theory of the government of human affairs as set forth in the Old Testament is precisely this same one that I have been considering as the natural and necessary outcome of the ignorance and inexperience of early man.

As time went on, now and then some deeper, more spiritual thinker begins to question this method of reasoning, begins to wonder whether it is quite adequate; and we have a magnificent poetical expression of this kind of critical thought in the Book of Job. This Book of Job is any way and every way worthy of your careful attention. It is the nearest to a dramatic production of anything in the Bible. James Anthony Froude said once in regard to it that, if it were translated merely as a poem and published by itself, it would take rank as a literary work among the few great masterpieces of the world.

But the thing that engages our attention this morning is not its power as a dramatic production, but its criticism of God's government of the world. It has been assumed, as I have said, and we are not through with that assumption, that, if a man suffered, if he was ill, if his wife or children were taken away from him, if his property was destroyed, somehow he had offended God, and that this was a punishment for the course of wrong-doing in which he had been engaged. But the author of the Book of Job conceives that this does not quite match the facts; so he gives us this magnificent character that he declares upright, spotless, free from wrong of any kind, who yet is suffering. He has lost his property, it has been swept away, his children have been put to death, almost everything that he cared for he has lost, and he from head to feet is sick of a loathsome disease; and he sits in the midst of his deprivation and sorrow. His friends gather around him; and with this old assumption in their minds some of them begin to taunt him. They say, Now, Job, why not confess, why not own up as to what you have been doing? Of course, you have been doing something wrong, or all this would not have happened. This is the tone that one of his critics takes. This is the kind of comfort that he receives in the midst of his sorrow. But Job protests earnestly and indignantly that it is not true. He says he is innocent, there are no secret wrongs in his life; and he wishes that he might find some way by which he could come into the presence of the great Ruler of the universe, and openly plead his cause. But his friends do not believe him.

Now the writer of the book lets us into the explanation he has thought out for this: God for a special reason is testing Job, to see whether he will be true to him in spite of the fact that he does not get the ordinary blessings that the people were accustomed to look for as the rewards of their conduct. But the writer is not consistent with the wonderful position that he makes Job assume; for, after the trial is all over, he falls in with the popular theory, and shows us Job, not with the old children who could not be brought back, but with a lot of new ones, with herds and cattle again in plenty, with honor among his fellow-citizens, with all that heart could wish in the way of worldly prosperity and peace.