οἰδέ τι γίγνεται ἔργον ἐπὶ χθονὶ σου δίχα, δαῖμον,
πλὴν ὅποσα ῥέζουσι κακοὶ σφετέρῃσιν ἀνοίαις.[6]
I should like to agree with them; but I cannot. The picture of the cat
and the mouse appears—fertile in suggestions. “This at least,” I say,
“was not wrought by ‘evil men in their folly;’ and yet it did not come
direct from God.” Isaiah pleases me better with his prediction,
physiologically absurd, but spiritually most true: “The lion shall eat
straw like a bullock.” That is just the confession that I need: it comes
to me with all the force of a divine acknowledgment, as if God thereby
said: “Death and conflict must be for a time, but they shall not be for
ever: it was not my intention, it is not my will, that my creatures
should thrive by destroying each other.”
Applying this theory to Evolution, I believe that Satan, not God, was
the author of the wasteful and continuous conflict that has
characterized it; but that God has utilized this conflict for the
purposes of development and progress. This is what I had in my mind when
I said that Evolution diminished the difficulties in the way of
acknowledging the existence of a God. The problems of death,
destruction, waste, conflict and sin, are not new; they are as old as
Job, perhaps as old as the first-created man; but it is new to learn
that good has resulted from those evils. In so far as Evolution has
taught this, it has helped to strengthen, not to weaken, our faith. But
then, if we are to use this language, we must learn to think, not of
“Evolution by itself,” but of “Evolution with Satan.” “Evolution without
Satan” would appal us by the seeming wastefulness and ubiquity of
conflict and the indirectness of its benefits; but “Evolution with
Satan” enables us to realize God as our refuge and strength amid the
utmost storms and tempests of destruction.
If any one says that the belief in Satan is inexpedient, I am ready to
give him a patient hearing; but I find it difficult to listen patiently
to what people are pleased to call arguments against it. For example,
“Duty can exist only in a world of conflict;” to which the reply is
obvious, “But God might have made men for love and harmonious obedience,
and not for duty and conflict.” This, of course, is a very presumptuous
statement, such as Bishop Butler would have condemned; but it is a
fitting reply to a still more presumptuous implied statement. God has
revealed Himself as Righteousness and Goodness without internal
conflict; He has also revealed His purpose to conform us to Himself; and
the Bible speaks of Him as being opposed by an Adversary who caused men
for a time to differ from the divine image; is it not then a very
presumptuous thing to imply that “God _could_ not have created men but
for conflict and duty,” or, in other words, “God _could_ not have made
us better than we are, even had there been no Adversary opposing His
will?” Again, we hear it said that, “An evil Spirit contending against a
good Spirit must needs have produced two distinct worlds, and not the
one progressive world of which we have experience:” to which the answer
is equally obvious, “The orbit of every planet, or the path of any
projectile, shows that two different forces may result in one continuous
curve.”
The only consistent and systematic way of rejecting a belief in the
existence of Satan is to reject the belief in the existence of sin. Then
you can argue thus, “The notion of a Satan arises from the false and
sharp antagonism which our human imaginations set up between ‘good’ and
‘evil,’ whereas what we call ‘evil’ is really nothing but an excess of
tendencies good in themselves and only evil when carried to excess. The
difference therefore between good and evil is only a question of
degree.” That theory sounds plausible; but it ignores the essence of
sin, which consists in a rebellion against Conscience. It is not excess,
or defect, the more, or the less; it is the moral disorder, the
subversion of human nature, which is so frightful to contemplate that we
cannot believe it to have proceeded from God. But perhaps you reply,
“That very disorder is merely the result of energy out of place or in
excess.” Well, in the same way, when gas is escaping in a room in which
there is a lighted candle, there is first a quiet and inoffensive escape
of the gas, and secondly a violent and perhaps calamitous explosion; and
you might argue similarly, “The difference was only one of degree; the
explosion was merely the result of a useful element out of place and in
excess.” But I should answer that no sober and sensible householder
would justify himself in this way for allowing a lighted candle and
escaping gas to come together; and so I cannot believe that God is
willing that men should justify Him for tolerating theft, murder, and
adultery, on the ground that these things are “only questions of
degree.” I think we please Him better, and draw closer to Him, when we
say, “An Enemy hath done this.” And besides, for our own sakes, if we
are to resist sin with our utmost force, it seems to me we are far more
likely to do so when we regard it as Christ and St. Paul regarded it
than when we give it the name of “misplaced energy,” or “an excessive
use of faculties, in themselves, good and necessary.”
To me it seems that if we are to have a genuine trust in God, it is
almost necessary that we should believe in the existence of a Satan. I
say “almost,” because there may be rare exceptions. A few pure saintly
souls, of inextinguishable trust, may perhaps be able to face the awful
phenomena of Evil and to say, “Though He hath done all this yet will we
trust in Him; what may have moved Him to cause His creatures to struggle
together, and to thrive, each on the destruction of its neighbour, we
know not, and we are not careful to know; our hearts teach us that He is
above us in goodness, and in wisdom, as in power; we know that we must
trust Him; more than this we do not wish to know.” Such men are to be
admired—but to be admired by most of us at a great distance. For the
masses of men, and especially for those who know something of the depth
of sin, it must be a great and almost a necessary help to say, “The Good
that is done upon Earth, God doeth it Himself; the evil that is upon
earth God doeth it not: an Enemy hath done this.”
One evil resulting from the rejection of Christ’s doctrine is that we
consequently fail to understand much of His life and sufferings. If
Christ was really manifested that He might destroy the works of the
Devil, then much is clear that is otherwise incomprehensible. There was
then no delusion nor insincerity in the parables of the Sower and the
Tares. God did not first cast the good seed and then blow it away with
His own breath. God did not sow wheat with the right hand and tares with
the left. “An Enemy” had done the mischief. There was no fiction when
Jesus spent those long hours by night on the mountain top in prayer. He
needed help, and needed it sorely. He was fighting a real battle. It was
not the mere anticipation of pains in the flesh, the piercing nails, the
parching thirst, the long-protracted death, that made the bitterness of
Christ’s passion. Even when He had regained composure, and in perfect
calm was going forth to meet His death, we find Him declaring that Satan
had asked for one of his Apostles “to sift him as wheat”, and implying
that all His prayers were needed that the faith of the tempted disciple
should not “fail.” But in Gethsemane the battle for the souls of men was
still pending. There was an Enemy who was pulling down His heart,
striving hard to make Him despair of sinful mankind, perhaps to despair
of we know not what more beyond; forcing Him in the extremity of that
sore conflict to cry that He was “exceeding sorrowful even unto death,”
and afterwards, on the Cross, to utter those terrible words, “My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?” All this is full of profound meaning,
if there was indeed an Enemy. But if there was no Enemy, what becomes of
the conflict? What meaning is left to the Crucifixion, except as the
record of mere physical sufferings, the like of which have been endured,
before and after, by thousands of ordinary men and women?
This belief in the existence of Satan appears to me to be confirmed by
daily present experience as well as by the life of Christ. It “works.”
It enables us, as no other belief does, to go to the poor, the sick, the
suffering, and the sinful, and to preach Christ’s Gospel of the
fatherhood of God. All simple, straightforward people who are acquainted
with the troubles of life must naturally crave this doctrine. If you
ascribe to Providence the work of Satan, they will consciously or
unconsciously identify Providence with the author of evil, and look to
One above to rescue them from Providence. Instead of attempting to
console people for all their evils by laying them on the Author of
Goodness, we ought to lay them in part upon themselves, in part on the
author of evil. “God, the Father in heaven, did not intend you to be
thus miserable”—thus we can begin our message—“your sufferings come from
an Enemy against whom He is contending. Do not for a moment suppose that
you are to put up in this life with penury, disease, misery, and sin as
if these things came from God. Very often they are the just punishments
of your own faults, as when drunkenness brings disease; but as the sin,
so also the punishment, was of Satan’s making, though God may use both
for your good. You are to be patient under tribulation; you are to be
made perfect through suffering; you are to regard the trials and
troubles of life as being in some sense a useful chastisement proceeding
from the fatherly hand of God. But never let your sense of the need of
resignation lead you to attribute to the origination of God that which
Christ teaches us to have been brought into the world by God’s
adversary. Satan made these evils to lead men wrong; God uses them to
lead men right. Death, for example, came from Satan, who would fain make
us believe that our souls perish with our bodies, that friends are
parted for ever by the grave, and that there is no righteousness
hereafter to compensate for what is wrong here: but God uses death to
make men sober, thoughtful, steadfast, courageous, and trustful. It
remains with you to decide whether you will bear your evils so as to
succumb to the temptations of Satan, or so as to prevail over them and
utilize them to your own welfare and to the glory of God. On which side
will you fight? We ask you to enlist on the side of righteousness.”
I feel sure that this theory of life would commend itself to the poor,
that it would be morally advantageous to the rich, and that it would be
politically useful to the State. There has been too prevalent a
habit—among those believers especially who ignore Satan and attribute
all things to God—of taking for granted that the social inequalities and
miseries of the lower classes which have come down to us from feudal and
non-Christian times, can never pass away. I remember once in my boyhood
how, when I represented to a farmer that the condition of his labourers
was not a happy one, he met me with a text of Scripture, “The poor shall
never depart out of the land;” and that seemed to him to leave no more
to be said. It is this provoking acquiescence of the comfortable classes
in the miseries of the suffering classes, which irritates the latter
into a disbelief of the religion that dictates so great a readiness to
see in the miseries of others a divinely ordained institution.
The time will soon come (1885) when the very poor will demand a greater
share in the happiness of life; and the question will arise whether they
can be helped to obtain this by their own individual efforts or by the
co-operation of those of their own class, or by the State, or by the
Church. Caution must be shewn in trying experiments with nations; but as
some experiments will assuredly have to be tried, it is most desirable
in this crisis of our history that the Church at all events should
faithfully follow Christ by regarding physical evil, not as a law of
fate, but as a device of Satan. If, by descending a step or two lower in
the scale of comfort, the comfortable classes could lift the very poor a
step or two higher, the Church ought not to help the rich to shut their
eyes to their obvious duty by giving them the excuses of such texts as
“The poor shall never depart out of the land,” or, “Man is born to
trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Poverty is often a good school: but
penury is distinctly an evil; and the Church should regard it as an evil
not coming from God, and should make war against it, and teach the poor
not to acquiesce in it. The Gospel of Christ would be made more
intelligible to the poorer classes than it has been made for many
centuries past, if it could be preached as a war against physical as
well as moral harm. Such a crusade would call out and enlist on the
right side all the combative faculty in us; it would inspire in us a
passionate allegiance towards Christ, as our Leader, desiring, asking,
yes, and we may almost say, needing our help in a real conflict in which
His honour as well as our happiness and highest interests are at stake;
it would attract the co-operation of all faculties in the individual, of
all classes in the country. In other words the theory would work; and so
far as a religious theory works, so far have we evidence, present and
intelligible to all, that it contains truth.
I have recently heard views similar to mine controverted by an able
theologian, who contended that, although they professed to be illogical,
they went beyond the bounds even of the illogicality permissible in this
subject. But the controverter’s solution of the problem was this: “_Evil
is a part of God’s intention._ We have to fight, with God, against
something _which we recognise to be His work_.” Is not this a “hard
saying”? Is it not harder than the saying of Christ, “An enemy hath done
this”? I say nothing about its being illogical and absurd: but does it
not raise up a new stumbling-block in the path of those who are striving
to follow Christ?
It may be urged that the belief in Satan has been tested by the
experience of centuries and has been found to be productive of
superstition, insanity, and immorality; but these evils appear to me to
have sprung, not from the belief in Satan, but from a superstitious,
disorderly and materialistic form of Christianity, which has perverted
Christ’s doctrine about the Adversary into a recognition of a licensed
Trafficker in Souls. The same materialistic and immoral tendency has
perverted Christ’s sacrifice into a bribe. But, just as we should not
reject the spiritual doctrine of Christ’s Atonement, so neither should
we reject the spiritual doctrine of an Evil in the world resisting the
Good, although both doctrines alike have been grossly and harmfully
misinterpreted.
Of course it is possible that in our notions of spiritual personality,
and therefore in our personification of Satan, we may be under some
partial illusion. The subject teems with difficulties; and I have not
concealed from you my opinion that some passages in the Old Testament
appear to support a view at variance with the tenour of the New. The
real truth, while justifying our Lord’s language, may not accord with
all our inferences as to its meaning; and I should myself admit that it
would be most disastrous to attempt to personify the Adversary with the
same vividness with which we personify the Father in heaven. Still,—in
answer to the taunt of the agnostic or sceptic, “Is this, or that, the
work of the God whom you describe as Love?”—I think we avail ourselves
of our truest and most effective answer, when we resolve to separate
certain aspects of Nature from the intention of God, and to say, with
Christ, “An enemy hath done these things.”
Footnote 5:
Some passages in the Old Testament (notably Isaiah xlv. 7) state that
God “created evil;” and results attributed by one author to Satan (1
Chron. xxi. 1) are attributed by another to “the anger of the Lord” (2
Sam. xxiv. 1). Much of course depends upon the meaning of the word
“evil;” and I am knowingly guilty of talking absurdly when I first
define evil as “that which is not in accordance with God’s intention,”
and then proceed to say that “God did not create evil.” But all people
who discourse philosophically on this subject talk far more absurdly
than I do: for I am consciously, but they are unconsciously,
illogical. The belief that God “created evil,” whether held or not by
the authors of any of the books of the Old Testament, is against the
whole tenour of the teaching of Christ.
Footnote 6:
“Naught is on earth, O God, without thy hand,
Save deeds of folly wrought by evil men.”
X
ILLUSIONS