There is nothing said of man throughout all scripture
but what supposes him to stand, in nature,
under a necessity of choosing something that is
natural, either life or death, fire or water.
_William Law._
So far-reaching a confession of the spiritual freedom and the spiritual
dependence of man as is shown in the principles of Christian incarnation
and atonement has never been popular. As they passed through the popular
mind incarnation was often and widely made to seem a thunderclap from on
high and atonement a transaction of the heavenly courts. All generations
have clamoured for signs; and because none, such as they desired, has
been given they have invented signs for themselves. The spiritual union
of person with person in a coincidence of knowledge, will, aims, and
mutual love, is at once too natural to be remarked in ordinary life and
too remote from what is remarked to focus attention. It is much easier
to think of a God disguised in manhood than of one who has taken manhood
into himself and is 'made man' by a communication of himself to the
man's own self. A king can masquerade as a beggar—that is a simple
affair; but for the king to become a beggar and the beggar a king, the
one remaining, nevertheless, beggar and the other king, is beyond belief
by men whose belief is bounded by the behaviour of things that can be
seen and handled, and by the logic of space. And it is much easier to
think of salvation as bargained for, or bought, or handed over, than as
attained only in the union of love and the co-operation of persons. In
this corruption of religion human freedom has too often either been lost
sight of or made a fixed character of man as man, a mark distinguishing
him from other creatures and things. He is supposed to be free, but not
to have the capacity to grow in freedom. 'Freedom of the will,'
according to this, is like the right to a vote. It is a thing-character,
ready-made, in a man, as the right to a vote is a thing-character
assured to a man of a certain age and standing. A man does not advance
towards spiritual freedom and grow in it; he has it as a diamond has a
degree of hardness that enables it to cut glass. It is, in fact, a
natural quality, not a growing achievement of growth that still goes on.
Therefore it does not need to be fostered either by the man himself or
by God. And it cannot be lost. So men too often have said.
On the other hand we have seen, in our enquiry, that life in its
progress from its first entrance upon earth seems to have had as its aim
growth towards and in spiritual freedom. The force of life, in the
channel that led to man, seems to have been directed towards securing
the maximum of choice and of field of choice for him, the minimum of
determination and of hindrance from without. We said that the brain is
an organ of indetermination; we might have said that it is the organ of
a spirit seeking its fulfilment through freedom in growth, and growth in
freedom. No religion which does not show congruity with what we have
learnt about life can seem to us in truth of touch with it. The popular
forms of Christianity do not show this congruity. Even the officially
instituted forms have, according to the manner of institutions, overlaid
that truth and encumbered spiritual and moral life with tradition,
habit, heritage that are become its burdens instead of its instruments
of expression. Therefore we have to go to the prophet and learn of him,
drink from his clear fountain of living waters. There, unquestionably,
we find what we seek, religion in touch, in more than touch, with life.
It is one with life, this religion given and shown us in the prophet of
Nazareth.
Then and there we see that the Christian doctrines of incarnation and
atonement should properly have an unmistakable connexion both with our
own lives, their needs and aspirations, and with truth we have come to
know through men of science. Those doctrines are, to begin with, an
explicit recognition of a promise of freedom which the force of emergent
life has striven for and secured, and which men are called upon to
realize for themselves. That men shall fulfil their destiny more and
ever more of life, it seems, must become theirs. That is, more and more
of the spirit and life of God must become in very fact, not merely their
own, but themselves. This the Christian speaks of as the incarnation or
the extension of the incarnation of God in man. And, plainly, there is
nothing in the teaching of Jesus, or in his work and person, which
implies that this process is mechanical or that, being spiritual, it can
be inevitable. God in the nature of things, of himself, cannot—will not,
if you like, it is the same—compel union with him. Therefore men can
escape their destiny of union with God by rejecting his proffer of more
and greater life. They have their fate in their own hands; they may
choose amiss.
Then, the Christian says, that other aspect of the love of God, which in
fact is only other because we speak of it as though it were and look at
it in a special point of view, his atonement or reconciliation of man
with himself, comes into play. Here, too, love seeks to win love, will
invites the co-operation of will, and wisdom pleads. No mechanism, no
compulsion, nothing arbitrary or even commanding. 'Come unto me,' he
says. And every effort love can make that man may be won is made, even
to that of the agony and death of the lover that the loved one may be
rescued from slavery to self, and brought into the life of love and the
liberty wherewith Christ would make him free.
A deepening enslavement by sin, or a growing liberty in vital union with
the Christ of God—these are the alternatives put before us in the
Christian religion. And again we see life—or shall we say God?—striving
to give freedom, yet with no preordained success. As in the plants and
beasts life found no open way for that advance, so, although in man the
way was found, men can bring it to an end merely by desiring and seeking
no more than gratification of the narrow interests of a self that is
bounded by self-seeking. It seems that life can be as effectually
checked by this as, in a lower order, it was checked by the coating of
cellulose on the vegetable cell. It is possible for a man so to imprison
himself in self as to shut out God, so to build a wall about himself as
to cut off from his life that fountain of living waters on which its
advance and true continuance depend. He contracts into an eddy, a
circling stream narrowed within set boundaries of himself. He becomes as
the lower beasts, but worse than they because he is no beast.
The Christian says that when this process of cutting off and shutting
out reaches completion, the man is in hell. And the language of symbol
and pictorial imagination has spent itself in trying to express what
that really means. Naturally, the symbolism and the painting have varied
with the character of imagination at different times and in different
nations. What we must tell ourselves is that they are no more than this,
and that they may well both falter and fail before a horror so extreme.
The shutting-down, the extinction, of a man—for this is what it amounts
to—who is capable of an indefinite advance in freedom and life, in love
and wisdom and knowledge—that is, in God and fellowship—is a catastrophe
with which the blotting-out of all the mighty beasts of the past is
incomparable. Consider, if he were the only man? Yet is he the less what
he is because he is one of millions? For one man, the Christian says,
Christ would die, though it is for all men that he died. 'The very hairs
of your head are numbered.'
One man in hell—think of it. One man who might have been united with God
in an influx of inexhaustible new life lifting him from order to order
of glory—that is what the Christian sees and what leads him, or has led
him often, to describe such a loss in terms from which we shrink to-day.
But if we learn to see what it is the Christian means, can we say that
he goes too far? Or shall we not say that if we had at our command words
fit to depict his meaning they would go even farther? No doubt we see
plainly the absurdity of material fires and the religious and
psychological falsity of the picture of human beings vainly desiring
God, when we know that, as has been said by a great Christian, 'the sun
meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him, with half that
certainty, as God, the Source of all good, communicates himself to the
soul that longs to partake of him.' But the fact remains that to lose
life in 'the second death,' to pass out of all fellowship whether with
man or God, to shrink into an ever-shrivelling creature who cares for
nothing outside its ever-narrowing and concentrating self-love, is for
any live, loving, healthy-minded man or woman as terrible and repulsive
a fate as ever a painter or poet or theologian of old times attempted to
describe.
Yet it seems reasonable enough. If we will not live we shall not live.
If God, the Christian says, is permitted by us to reconcile us with
himself, he will reconcile us. If we do not bar out his fountains of
life they will live in us as well-springs. We are wholly dependent upon
receiving more of his life, but we cannot be compelled to receive it. We
may even decline freedom and lose what we had of it, employing it amiss;
it is not an inalienable character stamped upon us. We have grown into
enough of it to be able to refuse to have more. 'Whosoever hath, to him
shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away
even that which he seemeth to have.'
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