Sin is not God's work. Moral order may exist without moral disorder, but moral disorder can only exist as rebellion against moral order. The very notion of moral evil implies a moral good which it contravenes, and a moral law by which it is condemned. It can never be thought of as other than a something grafted on nature, by which nature is perverted and depraved. It is not natural, but unnatural; not primary and original, but secondary and derivative; not the law, but the violation of the law.
"The primal Will, innately good, hath never
Swerved, or from its own perfect self declined."
Between this Will and sin there are ever interposed created wills, which are conscious of their power to choose good or evil, obedience or disobedience to God's law. God bestows on His creatures only good gifts, but one of the best of all these gifts includes in its very nature ability to abuse and pervert itself and all things else. Freewill needs no vindication, for it is the primary and indispensable condition of moral agency. Without it there might be a certain animal goodness, but there could be no true virtue. A virtuous being is one which chooses of its own accord to do what is right. The notion of a moral creature being governed and guided without the concurrence and approval of its own will is a contradiction. If God desired to have moral creatures in His universe He could only have them by endowing them with freewill, which is the power to accept or reject His own will. The determination to create moral beings was a determination to create beings who should be the causes of their own actions, and who might set aside His own law. It was a determination to limit His own will to that extent and in that manner. Hence, when He created moral beings, and these beings, in the free exercise of their power, violated His law, sin entered into the world, but not through His will. It resulted from the exercise of an original good gift which He had bestowed on certain of His creatures, who could abuse that gift, but were not necessitated to abuse it. Their abuse of it was their own action, and the action consisted not in conforming to, but in contravening, God's will. Thus, God's character is not stained by the sins which His creatures have committed.
But, it will be objected, could not God have made moral creatures who would be certain always to choose what is right, always to acquiesce in His own holy will? and if He could do this, why did He not? Why did He create a class of moral creatures whom He could not but foresee to be certain to abuse their power of choice between obedience and disobedience to His law? Well, far be it from me to deny that God could have originated a sinless moral system. If anything I have already said be understood to imply this, it has been completely misunderstood. I have no doubt that God has actually made many moral beings who are certain never to oppose their own wills to His; or that He might, if it had so pleased Him, have created only such angels as were sure to keep their first estate. But if questioned as to why He has not done the latter, I feel no shame in confessing my ignorance. It seems to me that when you have resolved the problem of the origin of moral evil into the question, Why has God not originated a moral universe in which the lowest moral being would be as excellent as the archangels are? you have at once shown it to be speculatively incapable of solution and practically without importance. The question is one which would obviously give rise to another, Why has God not created only moral beings as much superior to the archangels as they are superior to the lowest Australian aborigines? and that to still another of the same kind, and so on ad infinitum? But no complete answer can be given to a question which may be followed by a series of similar questions to which there is no end. We have, besides, neither the facts nor the faculties requisite to answer such questions. A merely imaginary universe is one on which we have no data to reason. We who are so incompetent judges of the actual universe, notwithstanding the various opportunities which we possess of studying it, and the special adaptation of our organs and powers to the objects which it presents, can have no right to affirm its inferiority to any universe which we can imagine as possible. The best world, we may be assured, that our fancies can feign, would in reality be far inferior to the world God has made, whatever imperfections we may think we see in it. We ought to be content if we can show that what God has done is wise and right, and not perplex ourselves as to why He has not done an infinity of other things, the propriety of which we cannot possibly estimate aright or as parts of any scheme unlimited in extent and eternal in duration.
Sin, then, is not God's work, and we are unable to prove that He ought to have prevented it. Can we go any farther than this? Yes; we can show that the permission of it has been made subservient to the attainment of certain great ends. Man has the power to choose evil, but God has also the power to overrule it—to cause it, as it were, to contradict itself, to work out its own defeat and disgrace, to promote what it threatens to hinder; and the facts of experience and history show us that this is what He does. There is thus developed in His human creatures a higher kind of virtue than that of mere innocence; a virtue which can only be reached through suffering, and conflict, and conquest. The struggle with moral evil, still more than that with physical disadvantages and intellectual difficulties, tests and exercises the soul, teaches it its weakness and dependence on Divine strength, and elicits and trains its spiritual faculties. Successive battles with vice raise honest combatants to successive stages of virtue. The type of character presented to us in the second Adam is no bare restoration of that which was lost in the first Adam, but one immeasurably superior. The humblest of true Christians now aspires after a far grander moral ideal than that of an untested innocence. Is there not in this fact a vindication of God's wisdom and holiness worth more than volumes of abstract speculation?
Due weight ought also to be given to the circumstance that the system of God's moral government of our race is only in course of development. We can see but a small part of it, for the rest is as yet unevolved. History is not a whole, but the initial or preliminary portion of a process which may be of vast duration, and the sequel of which may be far grander than the past has been. That portion of the process which has been already accomplished, small though it be, indicates the direction which is being taken; it is, on the whole, a progressive movement; a movement bearing humanity towards truth, freedom, and justice. Is it scientific, or in any wise reasonable, to believe that the process will not advance to its legitimate goal? Surely not. The physical history of the earth affords abundant evidence of the realisation of the most comprehensive plans, and no indication of failure. We can have no right to imagine that it will be otherwise in the moral sphere; that the ideals towards which history shows humanity to have been approaching in the past will not be reached even in the most distant future. But if moral progress will, no less than physical progress, be carried on unto completion, the future cannot fail to throw light on the past—cannot fail to some extent to justify the past. The slowness of the progress may perplex us, and yet, perhaps, it is just what we ought to expect, both from God's greatness and our own littleness. He is patient because eternal. His plans stretch from everlasting to everlasting, and a thousand years are in His sight but as yesterday when it is past. We have not the faculties which fit us for rapid movements and vast achievements. We need to be conducted by easy and circuitous courses. "Lofty heights must be ascended by winding paths."
"We have not wings, we cannot soar,
But we have feet to scale and climb
By slow degrees, by more and more,
The cloudy summits of our time."
It must be added that whoever acknowledges Christianity to be a revelation from God, must see in it reasons which go far to explain the permission of sin. There is, it is true, in the authoritative records of the Christian religion, the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, no explanation of the origin of moral evil as a speculative problem. The account of the first parents of the human race introducing sin into the world by yielding to the seduction of a being who had himself sinned, is wholly of a historical character, and can neither be compared nor contrasted with the theories of philosophers as to the nature, possibility, and cause of sin. To measure the one by the others, or to set the one over against the others, is to do injustice both to Scripture and philosophy. But the whole scheme of Christianity must seem to those who accept it the strongest possible of practical grounds for the Divine permission of man's abuse of freewill. The existence of sin has, according to the Christian view, been the occasion and condition of a manifestation of the Divine character far more glorious than that which had been given by the creation of the heavens and the earth. It called forth a display of justice, love, and mercy before which all moral beings in the universe may well bow down in wonder and adoration, and man especially with unspeakable gratitude. If God has really manifested Himself in Christ for the reconciliation of the world to Himself, His permission of sin has certainly to all practical intents been amply justified.
But I must conclude. Let it be in leaving with you the lesson that belief in conscience and belief in God—belief in the moral order of the universe and belief in a moral Governor and Judge—are most intimately connected and mutually support each other. Many of you will remember how Robertson of Brighton,—when describing the crisis of the conflict between doubt and faith in the awful hour in which, as he says, life has lost its meaning, and the grave appears to be the end of all, and the sky above the universe is a dead expanse, black with the void from which God has disappeared,—tells us that he knows but of one way in which a man may come forth from this agony scatheless—namely, by holding fast to those things which are certain still, the grand, simple landmarks of morality. "In the darkest hour," are his words, "through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at least is certain,—If there be no God, and no future state, even then, it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be brave than to be a coward. Blessed, beyond all earthly blessedness, is the man who in the tempestuous darkness of the soul has dared to hold fast to these venerable landmarks. Thrice blessed is he who, when all is drear and cheerless within and without, when his teachers terrify him and his friends shrink from him, has obstinately clung to moral good. Thrice blessed, because his night shall pass into clear bright day." Now there is a great truth, a most sacred and solemn truth, in these words. But it is only a half truth, and it should not be mistaken for the whole truth. It is not less true, and it is true, perhaps, of a far greater number of human souls, that there are dark and dreadful hours when they are tempted to believe that virtue is but a name, that generosity is not better than selfishness, truth not better than falsehood, and the courage which defends a post of dangerous duty not better than the cowardice which abandons it; and in these hours I know not how the soul is to regain its trust in human goodness, except by holding fast its faith in Divine goodness; or how it can be strengthened to cling to what is right, except by cleaving to God. It is as possible to doubt of the authority of conscience as to doubt of the existence of God. There are few souls which have not their Philippi, when they are tempted to cry like Brutus, "O virtue, thou art but an empty name!" Blessed in such an hour is he who, feeling himself to be sinking in gloomy waters, cries to that God who is able to rescue him from the abyss, and clings to that justice in heaven which is the pledge that justice will be done on earth below. Thrice blessed, because he will be guided through the darkness of a sea of doubts even thus terrible to a haven of light and safety. Faith in duty helps us to faith in God: faith in God helps us to faith in duty. Duty and God, God and duty, that is the full truth.[46]