Assuming that determinists are wrong, and that the Creator is not responsible for the shortcomings of His creatures, the only fault for which primeval man could possibly be held to be answerable is that of not controlling his animal instincts so soon as he commenced to be conscious and could no longer claim the excuse of innocence. Probably he did his best, and began to improve himself ever so little. In that case, as the Church Times sapiently remarks, there was no Fall, but an advance. Or, adopting a compromise suggested by an American divine, he fell upward! If he did not strive as much as he might have done, there was, at all events, no sudden leap over a precipice; for the gift of increased consciousness, such as the human being now possesses, must have evolved very gradually. However, the creation of the world and all that therein is was also exceedingly gradual, and yet the pious find themselves able to consider the Bible account to be an accurate though allegorical representation of the process; so there is really nothing to prevent them from considering the account of a remarkable incident in a certain garden during a hot summer’s day, shortly after man put in his appearance on this globe, to be a true representation of the perverse conduct of their ancestors through countless ages.
For this so-called “Fall” we are to be visited with a death which will be the end of our hopes if we do not believe in Christ. This, then, is the new threat held over the unbeliever: he will forfeit his right to immortality. As it is in place of the old-fashioned consignment to hell, we may hope, for the sake of the human race as a whole, past and present, that the new Christian dogma is nearer the truth than the old. Most of us, however, will, I think, come to the conclusion that there has never been a “Fall” at all in any sense. Dr. Gore in one breath asks us to think man so much above the ape that his spiritual powers cannot have been evolved; yet, when science points out that they were evolved—that man rose so much above his relations—he still speaks of a fall! It is an outrage to our common sense. And, if there were a Fall, may we not say with the Persian poet?—
Oh Thou who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
Beset the Path I was to travel in,
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin.
THE ARCHDEACON OF MANCHESTER’S THEORY.
Archdeacon J. M. Wilson tells us[55] that “We are taking our part in the long struggle of good against evil. This has been often pictured to us as the struggle of God against some Personal Power of Evil which we call Satan, the fact of struggle suggesting two rival powers. But the evolutionary way of regarding it presents the struggle as one of the divine element in man struggling to overcome the purely animal inheritance of lust and passion inherited from a far by-gone stage.” Dr. Wilson, therefore, believes, as every thorough evolutionist must believe, that we have to look to an animal and not a human ancestor for the ultimate origin of what we call sin. But we want to know where the “Fall” comes in, and this he has explained elsewhere,[56] in what seems to me to be the only possible way open to an evolutionist. He says: “Man fell, according to science, when he first became conscious of the conflict of freedom and conscience; and each individual man falls as his ancestor fell.” Dr. Wilson does not attempt to make out that there was any particular “fall” at any particular period in man’s history, such as Dr. Gore apparently still clings to; but he plainly tells us: “I do not mean to say that there is a particular moment at which men fell: it is not so. It is a continuous struggle of good and evil.” He continues: “I see in this nothing to conflict with a legitimate interpretation of the story of the Fall in the third chapter of Genesis. Such a narrative is not an illusion, still less a mere fiction; it is, as all teaching of spiritual truth must be, a temporary and figurative mode of expression.” In other words, Dr. Wilson considers these early chapters of Genesis, and probably a great deal more of the Old Testament and some of the New, to be only an allegory. With regard to the Atonement difficulty, Dr. Wilson’s argument is simply that “We need only to look at the world as it is to see the struggle of the two-fold nature in man; to see that it has need of a Redemption, of a Saviour.” Few, I fear, will accept this latest explanation by a learned and earnest believer. Theologians, in Dr. Wilson’s opinion, have made a grievous mistake when they say: “If the story of the Fall is not literally true, then it is literally false, and with it goes the need of a Redemption, of a Saviour.” Yet most people—and these will include the whole body both of the old-fashioned orthodox and of the unbelievers—will certainly side with those “grievously mistaken” theologians.
THE RATIONALIST’S THEORY.
To many of us there seems no need whatever to have recourse to the supernatural in order to account for the origin of sin. It is not one of the mysteries of life. When we know who our ancestors were, and hence why we possess certain instincts, it is quite unnecessary to predicate a “Fall.” Details of the Rationalist’s view of sin (and of the reasons for morality) will be found in the last chapter of this book.