CHAPTER IV
THE NATURE OF EVIL
+The problem not insoluble.+—Before going on to say more about human personality, especially the personality of Jesus, it is requisite that we should determine our attitude toward a great question which in manifold forms has beset the human intellect ever since the dawn of history, namely, the problem of evil. It is still the fashion to declare this problem insoluble, but I have the audacity to believe that it is not so; mystery there may be, but it is not chiefly mystery. I will even go so far as to assert that the problem had been solved in human thought before Christianity began. What I have to say about it now is ancient thinking confirmed by present-day experience.
Evil is a negative, not a positive term. It denotes the absence rather than the presence of something. It is the perceived privation of good, the shadow where the light ought to be. "The devil is a vacuum," as a friend of mine once remarked to the no small bewilderment of a group of listeners in whose imagination the devil was anything but a vacuum. Evil is not an intruder in an otherwise perfect universe; finiteness presumes it. A thing is only seen to be evil when the capacity for good is present and unsatisfied. Evil is not a principle at war with good. Good is being and evil is not-being. When consciousness of being seeks further expression and finds itself hindered by its limitations, it becomes aware of evil.
A little reflection ought to convince anyone that this is the true way to look at the question of evil. Instead of asking how evil came to be in the universe, we should recognise that nothing finite can exist without it. Infinity alone can know nothing of evil because its resources are illimitable and—if I may be permitted the expression—every need is supplied before it can be felt. Evil and good are not like two armies in deadly conflict with each other for the possession of the city of God. We ought not to say that when one is in the other is out, but rather when one is the other is not. The very word "good" implies evil. One is positive and the other negative. Good only emerges in our experience in contrast with evil, and the ideal existence must be that in which good and evil are both transcended in the life eternal, when struggle and conflict are no more. In our present state of existence evil is necessary in order that we may know that there is such a thing as good, and therefore that we may realise the true nature of the life eternal. Look at that shadow on the pavement cast by the row of houses between your vision and the rising sun. Until the sun made his presence felt, you did not even know there was a shadow. Presently as the light giver climbs beyond and above this temporary barrier you will watch the shadow shrink and disappear. Where has it gone? If it were an entity in itself, it would have moved off somewhere else, but you are well aware that it has not done so, for it never had any real existence; real as it seemed, so real that you were able to give it a name, it never did more than show the place that needed to be filled with light. When the light came the shadow was swallowed up. So it is with every kind of evil, no matter what. Your perception of evil is the concomitant of your expanding finite consciousness of good. The moment you see a thing to be wrong you have affirmed that you know, however vaguely, what is required to put it right. Even when evil comes in the form of a calamity that lessens and diminishes your previous experience of good, as in an earthquake or a pestilence, this statement as to its true nature is in no way invalidated. It is not a thing in itself, it is only the perceived privation of what you know to be good, and which you know to be good because of the very presence of limitation, hindrance, and imperfection.
+The relation of evil and pain.+—But to most minds evil is almost synonymous with pain, at any rate in our experience it is associated with pain. When men begin questioning the goodness of God because of the evil of the world, they usually mean the pain of the world. Perhaps their thought about sin is to some extent an exception; sin and pain are not necessarily immediately associated in the theological mind. But what is pain? Properly speaking it is not in itself evil, but rather the evidence of evil, and also in a different way the evidence of good. Pain is life asserting itself against death, the higher struggling with the lower, the true with the false, the real with the unreal. When a baby cries for food he does so in unconscious obedience to the law of life; a stone does not cry for food. When a strong man suffers in the grip of a fell disease, the life within him is fighting for expression against something that seems to be extinguishing it. The suffering is caused by the effort of the life to retain its hold on the form, and yet if the disease succeeds in breaking the form it has only released the life to find expression in some higher form. When a guilty man suffers the tortures of remorse, it means that the truth within him is declaring itself against the falsehood, although it does not follow that it will immediately conquer. This is what pain is: it is life pressing upon death, and death resisting life. If a traveller falls asleep in the snow, or a sailor is nearly drowned, the process of recovery is always painful because the returning life has to overcome death. Carry the same principle through the whole range of human experience, physical, mental, and moral, and it will indicate the real significance of all the pain which has ever been endured or ever will be endured by mankind.
Still this would not satisfy everyone who feels compassion for cosmic suffering. Professor Huxley has told us that there is no sadder story than the story of sentient life upon this planet, and in so saying he has the testimony of modern science behind him. A vast amount of attention has been directed to this phase of the subject within the past fifty years. We seem to be more sensitive to the presence of pain as well as more sympathetic than our fathers were, and this tendency shows itself in a recognition of the solidarity of humanity with the lower creation. Theology has had practically nothing to say about the suffering or even about the significance of the myriad forms of life which exist below the human scale. But why ought they to be ignored? Indeed, how can they be ignored? The theology that has nothing to say about my clever and loyal four-footed companion, with his magnanimity, his sensitive spirit, and even his moral qualities, omits something of considerable importance to a thorough and consistent world-view. "Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father," said one who spake as never man spake. I think it was Schopenhauer who once remarked, "The more I see of human nature the more I respect my dog." Now the New Theology finds no difficulty in recognising the importance of the brute creation, for it believes in a practical recognition of the solidarity of all existence. There is no life that is not of God, and therefore no life can ever perish, whatever may become of the form. If we can explain human suffering, the same explanation covers the suffering of all sub-human life.
+The true extent of the problem of pain.+—But the problem is not so large as it looks. When we hear of a terrible event like the Jamaica disaster, we are apt to jump to the conclusion that the amount of suffering in the world is specially and enormously greater because of it. But that is not so. Our standard of measurement is a false one. The amount of pain endured depends upon the consciousness enduring it and upon its capacity for looking before and after. Besides we only suffer individually, and therefore all the pain of the world is comprised within the experience of the being who suffers most, whoever that may be. We ought to estimate the actual amount of cosmic suffering by the intensity of the suffering borne by any one individual at any one time. We are not immediately conscious of all the woe of the universe; we are each of us conscious of our own, even though it may be caused by sympathy with others; and the world's woe taken as a whole is not greater than the amount borne by him whose consciousness of it is greatest. This is what we may call the intensive as contrasted with the extensive observation of the problem of pain. It is a kind of barometrical measurement. We do not gauge the weather by adding together the figures of all the storm-glasses in the world; the rise or fall of the mercury in any one of them, especially the best one among them, comprehends the whole. Here is the problem of pain in a nutshell. The whole appalling tale of cosmic suffering can be compressed within the limits of the individual consciousness which has endured the most.
+The purpose of pain.+—Nor is there the slightest need to be afraid of it. Theologians may tell us that we should never have known anything about it but for man's first disobedience, and humanists may maintain that it is impossible to reconcile it with belief in the goodness of God; but they are both wrong. There are some things impossible even to omnipotence, and one of them is the realisation of a love which has never known pain. If creation is the self-expression of God, pain was inevitable from the first. For what is the nature of God? According to the Christian religion it is love. And what is love? Here is another slippery word which has had some contradictory connotations in the course of its history. Some time ago Mr. G. Bernard Shaw delivered a lecture at the City Temple on the "Religion of the British Empire," in the course of which he said that, if I knew as much about stage-plays as he did, I should distrust the word "love," for it was bound up with an amount of false and gusty sentiment. He himself preferred the word "life" to express what I meant by the word "love." But love is too good a word to be given over to the sentimentalists, although Mr. Shaw was perfectly right as to the way in which it has been misused. Love is life, the life eternal, the life of God. Jesus and His New Testament followers used both terms as expressive of the innermost of God. The life of God is such that in the presence of need it must give itself just as water will run down hill; this is the law of its being. Where no need exists, that is, where life is infinite, love finds no expression. To realise itself for what it is, sacrifice, that is self-limitation, becomes necessary. Love is essentially self-giving. It is the living of the individual life in terms of the whole. In a finite world this cannot but mean pain, but it is also self-fulfilment. "Whosoever shall save his life shall lose it, but whosoever will lose his life shall find it." This profound saying of Jesus is older even than Jesus; it is the law of God's own being, the law of love, the means to the realisation of the life eternal. It is so plain and simple, and withal so sublime, that we cannot but see it to be true, and can do no other than bow before it. The law of the universe is the law of sacrifice in order to self-manifestation. In this age-long process all sentient life has its part, for it is of the infinite, and to the infinite it will return. When, therefore, you feel compassion for the rabbit which is being killed by the weasel, or the stag that falls before the hounds, you can remember at the same time that this is not meaningless cruelty, but the operation of the same law that governs the highest activities of your own soul. You are right to feel the compassion; you were meant to feel it; and there is good reason why you should, for the suffering is real enough to awaken it. But do not forget that the suffering is not quite what it appears to you; it is only yours as it enters into your own consciousness and you suffer along with the actual victim. Compassion in such a case is the initial impulse toward self-offering, the desire to take the victim's place. But the suffering of the rabbit or the stag is to be measured by the consciousness of the rabbit or the stag, not by yours. In the slaughter nothing perishes but the form, the life returns to the Soul of the universe.
+The nature of sin.+—What, then, is sin? In the light of the foregoing considerations that question should not be difficult to answer. Some of my recent critics have been declaring that I deny the existence of sin, and am teaching that as there is no sin there is no need for Atonement. This looks like wilful misrepresentation, for my words on the subject have been clear enough and I have nothing to un-say, but perhaps it would be better to allow that the critics have made the mistake of rushing into print without carefully examining the utterances which they denounce. Let me say, then, that sin is the opposite of love. All possible activities of the soul are between two poles,—self on the one hand and the common life on the other. Everything we can think or say or do is in one or other of these directions; we are either living for the self at the expense of the whole, or we are fulfilling the self by serving the whole. Sin is therefore selfishness. If the true life is the life which is lived in terms of the whole, then the sinful life is the life which is lived for self alone. No man, however depraved, succeeds in living the selfish life all the time; if he did he would sink below the level of the brutes. Sin makes for death; love makes for life. Sin is self-ward; love is All-ward. Sin is always a blunder; in the long run it becomes its own punishment, for it is the soul imposing fetters upon itself, which fetters must be broken by the reassertion of the universal life. Sin is actually a quest for life, but a quest which is pursued in the wrong way. The man who is living a selfish life must think, if he thinks about it at all, that he can gratify himself in that way, that is, he can get more abundant life. But in this he is mistaken; he is trying to cut himself off from the source of life. He is like a man seated on the branch of a tree and sawing it off from the trunk. But when theologians talk of the wrath of God against sin, and the wrong which sin has inflicted upon God, they employ figures of speech which are distinctly misleading. In fact, they do not seem to have a clear idea as to what sin really is. They use vague language about it as though it were some kind of corporate offence against God of which the whole race has been guilty without being able to help it, and which no individual can escape although he is as much to blame as if he could. But sin has never injured God except through man. It is the God within who is injured by it rather than the God without. It is time we had done with the unreal language about the Judge on the great white throne, whose justice must be satisfied before His mercy can operate. The figure contains a truth which everyone knows well enough, but it is not easy to recognise it under this form.