+The Fall.+—The theological muddle is largely caused by the inability of many people to free themselves from archaic notions which have really nothing to do with Christianity, although they have been imported into it. The principal of these, in relation to the question of sin, is the doctrine of the Fall. This doctrine has played a mischievous part in Christian thought, more especially perhaps since the Reformation. In broad outline it is as follows: Man was created originally innocent and pure,—for what reason is not quite clear, but it is said to be for the glory of God,—but by an act of disobedience to a divine command he fell from his high estate and in his fall dragged down the whole creation and blighted posterity. Things have been wrong ever since, and God has been angry not only with the original transgressor but with all his descendants. God is a God of righteousness and therefore in a future world He will torture every human being who dies without availing himself of a certain "plan of salvation" designed to give him a chance of escape. This is a queer sort of righteousness! The plan of salvation consists in sending His own Son—a Son who has existed eternally, which the rest of us have not—to live a few years on earth and go through a certain programme ending with a violent death. In consideration of this death, God undertakes to forgive His erring children, who could not help being sinners, and yet are just as much to blame as if they could, but only on consideration that they "believe" in time to flee from the wrath to come. If they happen to die half a minute too late, repentance will be of no avail.
Dogmatic theologians must really excuse me for paraphrasing their words in this way. I know they do not put the case with such irritating clearness, but this is what they mean. Their forefathers used to put it plainly enough. Turn up John Knox's "Confession of Faith," for instance, and it will be found that my statement of the case is mildness itself compared to his; John saw no necessity for mincing matters. It may be contended that no orthodox theologian of any repute now believes in an actual historical fall of the race. Perhaps not, but theological writers go on using language which implies it and so do preachers of the gospel. I do not mean that they are dishonest, but they cannot get their perspective right. They think that by giving up belief in a historical fall of the race they would have to give up a great deal more. Without the Fall they do not know what to say about sin, salvation, the Atonement, etc. They are mistaken in this supposition, as I trust I have already shown to some extent when discussing the question of sin, and as I shall hope to show more clearly still when we come to deal with the Atonement. What I now wish to insist upon is that it is absolutely impossible for any intelligent man to continue to believe in the Fall as it is literally understood and taught.
+The Genesis account.+—It is popularly supposed that the doctrine is derived from the book of Genesis, but that is hardly the case. No doubt the Genesis myth about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden forms the background of it, but it is not consonant with the doctrine itself. The Genesis narrative says nothing about the ruined creation or the curse upon posterity. There is no hint of individual immortality, much less of heaven and hell; no Christ, no cross, no future judgment, no vicarious Atonement. It is a composite primitive story. A careful examination of its constituents will show that more than one account of the event has been drawn upon to supply materials for the narrative as it now stands. The legend was in existence as oral tradition ages before it became literature. How old it may be we have no means of knowing with certainty, but the parallel stories in other Semitic religions are of great antiquity and had originally no ethical significance whatever. The Genesis story of the Fall exercised no influence upon Old Testament religion; it is scarcely alluded to in the best Old Testament writings, some of them earlier probably than the Genesis account itself. It was not until after the great captivity that it showed any tendency toward becoming an article of faith. At the time when Jesus was born it had passed into the popular Jewish religion. There is a psychological reason for the gradual transformation of a primitive legend into a religious dogma. The Jewish nation has fallen upon evil days. For generations after the great captivity they had been ground under the heel of a succession of foreign masters. Under the cruel rule of Antiochus Epiphanes, about the middle of the second century B.C., their very religion seemed likely to be crushed out by merciless persecution. It was no wonder that the serious minds of the day became inclined to look upon the present as being but the ruin of the past, the sorry remainder of what had once been an ideal world. This tendency showed itself in various ways, the chief of which was a looking back to the great days of David and Solomon as the period of Israel's brightest splendour and prosperity. Of this I must say a little more presently when we come to consider the genesis of the idea of the kingdom of God. Another way in which the same tendency showed itself was that of taking the legend of the Fall more or less literally. A suffering generation could hardly help thinking of their woes as being the result of some primitive act of transgression. This is the way in which the rabbis came to speak of the Fall as being an actual fact of religious and ethical importance.
+The doctrine transferred to Christianity.+—A similar set of political and social conditions carried the doctrine over into Christianity, chiefly through the influence of the apostle Paul who had received a rabbinical training. Not only Hebrews but Greeks had begun to feel that the world was decaying and perhaps nearing the end. They idealised the past and contrasted it with the present. All civilisation lay under the dominion of Rome, and Rome herself was subject to a military dictator. The heart of the world-wide empire was a hotbed of corruption where every form of vice took root and flourished. The Greek thinkers and scholars despised their masters, but their own heroic days were gone and they were helpless to cast off the yoke. They had no Pericles now, no Leonidas, no Miltiades. Gone were the men of Thermopylae, Marathon, and Salamis. These were lesser, darker days. With a sure instinct men were ceasing to feel any confidence in the future of this pagan civilisation. It had its great elements, but the signs of disruption were already apparent and no one could foresee what would take its place. The mood of the time is reflected in the pages of Tacitus and Juvenal. Into this atmosphere came Christianity with its doctrine of the holy love of God and its adoring faith in Jesus. But both Judaism and Hellenism had already the tendency to look back toward a better and happier time and to think of the present as a fall from it. Paul felt this like everyone else, and forthwith took some kind of a fall for granted when unfolding his system of thought. It is doubtful whether he took the Genesis story literally or not, and he certainly made Adam the type of the unideal or earthly man who had become estranged from God. He was too great a man to be pinned down to mere literalism in a question of this kind, so in his use of the terms supplied by the rabbinical version of the legend he glides easily into the statement of the obvious truth that the Adam, or lower man, or earthly principle in every human being, needs to be transformed by the uprising of the Christ or ideal man, within the soul. "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." "The first man is of the earth earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven."
Here, then, we have the origins of the doctrine of the Fall. Right through Christian history the tendency has run to look upon the world as the ruins of a divine plan marred by man's perversity and self-will. It is time we got rid of it, for it has had a blighting, deadening influence upon hopeful endeavour for the good of the race. It is not integral to Christianity, for Jesus never said a word about it and did not even allude to it indirectly. It implies a view of the nature and dealings of God with men which is unethical and untrue. Surely, if God knew beforehand that the world would go wrong, the blame for catastrophe was not all man's. If He were so baffled and horror-stricken by the results as the dogmatic theologian makes out, He ought to have been more careful about the way He did His work at the beginning; a world which went wrong so early and so easily was anything but "very good," although He pronounced it to be so according to the Genesis writer. Besides, why should a trivial act of transgression have sent it all wrong? We take leave of our common sense when we talk
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree.
To be sure Milton did not believe it himself when he wrote that line, but his Puritan associates and Catholic ancestors did, and orthodoxy professes to do so still, though it does not know quite how to put it without falling into absurdity. Again, why should God feel Himself so much aggrieved by Adam's peccadillo? If it were not for the theological atmosphere which surrounds the question, we should see at once that it was ridiculous. Why should the consequences continue through countless generations? Remember this was supposed to be the very start of humanity's career. What a dreary, hopeless outlook was left to it! The notion is incredible, and most of the clear-headed men who hold it would scout it without discussion if they heard of it now for the first time. As it is, however, they go on talking of the "awful holiness" of God, the offence against the divine majesty, and so on. But what is this divine holiness? I can well remember that as a child I used to tremble at the thought of it, for somehow, like a good many other people, I had been taught to think of the divine holiness as synonymous with merciless inflexibility. But holiness, righteousness, justice, mercy, love, are but different expressions of the same spiritual reality. One might go on multiplying these considerations for ever, but there is no need to do so. Sufficient has been said to demonstrate the fact that the doctrine of the Fall is an absurdity from the point of view both of ethical consistency and common sense.
+Science and the Fall.+—After this it is almost superfluous to point out that modern science knows nothing of it and can find no trace of such a cataclysm in human history. On the contrary, it asserts that there has been a gradual and unmistakable rise; the law of evolution governs human affairs just as it does every other part of the cosmic process. This statement is quite consistent with the admission that there have been periods of retrogression as well as of advance, and that the advance itself has not been steady and uniform from first to last; there have been long stretches of history during which humanity has seemed to mark time and then a sudden outburst of intellectual activity and moral achievement. It could hardly be maintained, for instance, that the Athens of Socrates was not superior to the France of Fulk the black of Anjou, or that the Assyria of Asshur-bani-pal was not quite as civilised as the Germany of the ninth century A.D. Alfred Russel Wallace has shown in his popular book, "The Wonderful Century," that the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a greater advance in man's power over nature than the fifteen hundred years preceding it. There are some people who maintain that while the material advance is unquestionable, the intellectual advance is on the whole more doubtful, and that, morally speaking, human nature is no different from what it ever was. But I do not think any serious historian would say this. Intellectually, the average man may still be inferior to Plato,—though even Plato did not understand the need for exact thought as modern philosophers do,—but civilisation as a whole has produced a higher level of intellectual attainment than had been reached by Plato's world. A civilisation in which four-fifths of the people were helots kept in ignorance in order that an aristocratic few might enjoy the benefits of culture was not equal to ours, great and glaring as the defects of ours may be. Again, while it is only too sadly true that modern civilisation contains plenty of callous selfishness, gross injustice, and abominable cruelty, it can hardly be denied that these relics of our brute ancestry are universally deplored, and that society recognises them to be inimical to its well-being and seeks to get rid of them. Thank God, as Anthony Trollope said, that bad as men are to-day they are not as men were in the days of the Caesars.
If the New Theology controversy had arisen a few hundred years ago, theological disputants would not have wasted time in writing newspaper articles; they would have met in solemn conclave and condemned the heretic to be flayed alive or hung over a slow fire or treated in some similarly convincing manner. Of course it is remotely possible that some of them would like to do it now, but public opinion would not let them; things have changed, and the change is in the direction of a higher general morality. If any man feels pessimistic about the present, let him study the past and he will feel reassured. Those who maintain that society is not morally better but only more sentimental, beg the question. What they call sentimentalism is greater sensibility, greater sympathy, a keener sense of justice. What is the moral ideal but love? Every advance in the direction of universal love and brotherhood is a moral advance. The sternness of Stoicism or Puritanism was an imperfect morality. The grandeur and impressiveness of it were due to the fact that Stoics and Puritans for the most part took their ideal seriously; they aimed at something high and dedicated their lives to it. This dedication of the life to something higher than self-interest is of the very essence of true morality, and its highest reach is perfect love. We are a long way from that yet, although the ideal was manifested two thousand years ago. The average man to-day is certainly not nobler than the apostle Paul, nor does he see more deeply into the true meaning of life than did John the divine, but the general level is higher. Slowly, very slowly, with every now and then a depressing set-back, the race is climbing the steep ascent toward the ideal of universal brotherhood.
It is sometimes maintained by thinkers who account themselves progressive that the law of evolution holds good of mankind so far as our physical constitution is concerned, but that a special act of creation took place as soon as the physical frame was sufficiently developed to become the receptacle of a higher principle, and that then, and not till then, "man became a living soul." But it is impossible to square the circle in this way, and to contrive to get the doctrine of the Fall in by the back door, so to speak. The idea in the minds of those who hold this view appears to be that the tenant of the body which had been so long in preparation was a simple but intelligent and morally innocent personality who forthwith proceeded to do all that Adam is credited with and therefore spoiled what would otherwise have been a harmonious and orderly development; what we now see is not evolution as God meant it, but evolution perverted by human wrong-headedness. But this theory contains more difficulties than the older one it aims to replace. It makes God even more incompetent then the traditional view does. For untold ages, apparently, He has been preparing the world for the advent of humanity, only to find that the moment humanity enters it the whole scheme is spoiled. But we need not seriously consider this view; the facts are overwhelmingly against it. The history, even of the most recent civilisations, is, comparatively speaking, only as old as yesterday, whereas the presence of human life on this planet is traceable into the almost illimitable past. But the farther we go back in our investigation of human origins the less possible does it appear that the primitive man of theological tradition has ever existed. The Adam of the dogmatic theologian is like the economic man of the older school of writers on political science, the man who always wants to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, and whose one consistent endeavour is to seek pleasure and avoid pain; he has never existed.