EVIL _versus_ DIVINE GOODNESS
That the renewed emphasis upon the Divine immanence must have for one
of its effects that of raising the problem of evil afresh, and in a
particularly acute form, will be obvious to anyone who has thought out
for himself the implications of that doctrine. Dark and pressing
enough before, this particular problem has, in appearance at least,
been both complicated and accentuated by the displacement of Deism.
If, as we have argued on a previous occasion, there is a certain causal
connection between Deism and a somewhat sombre outlook upon the world,
on the other hand the existence of evil seemed to fit in better with a
view of God which represented Him as outside the universe than with one
which insists upon His indwelling in creation. If the earth was the
scene and playground of undivine agencies which work their will while
the Divine control is withdrawn, then many things became comparatively
easy of comprehension; indeed, there was a certain consolation in the
thought that--
All the things that had been so wrong
After all would not last for long,
{88} but that ultimately God would resume the supreme control He had
temporarily abandoned, while the Power of darkness would be bound and
cast into the abyss. If, however, we must think of Him as omnipresent
and for that reason directly and uninterruptedly cognisant of all, then
the plain man can only ask himself with a deepening wonder why an
all-good and unimaginably powerful Being should permit evils of every
description to lay waste His own creation. "No one can enter into the
house of the strong, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the
strong"; and since a direct overpowering of God by Satan is out of the
question, is not the assumption to which we are driven this--that the
Strong One is absent while His goods are being spoiled, and that it is
this very absence of which the spoiler has taken advantage? Somehow,
we feel, if He were really present--as present as the doctrine of
immanence would have us believe--He would actively assert Himself
against wrongs and abuses; and when we think of the blood and tears
that are shed the world over as the result of disordered desire,
industrial greed and political misrule, we find it difficult not to
echo the words of psalmist and prophet, "Why standest Thou afar off, O
Lord? Why hidest Thou Thyself in times of trouble?" "Verily Thou art
a God that hidest Thyself."
In saying this we do not suggest that such an attempt to explain the
phenomena of evil {89} by God's supposed absence from the world is
defensible; we do say that the belief in His all-encompassing nearness
makes those phenomena even more difficult of explanation than they were
before. The devout deist could always comfort himself with the thought
that, however mysterious God's standing afar off might be, by and by,
when He drew nigh again, He would deal out even-handed justice to all;
but such comfort is not open to those who explicitly deny God's
remoteness, but on the contrary assert that He is the Presence from
which there is no escaping. And the fact of evil, physical and moral,
is precisely the chief and most fruitful source of religious
scepticism; it is not the abstract question whether there is a God, but
the practical and insistent problem whether the Divine goodness can be
reconciled with the facts of life and experience, that is agitating
men's minds, and sways their decision for or against religion.
Everyone knows that this is what Mr. Mallock some time ago called "the
crux of Theism"; that "crux," to use his own language, is not "the
existence of intelligent purpose in the universe," which may be freely
conceded, but whether the processes of nature are or are not consistent
with "a God possessing the character which it is the essence of Theism
to attribute to Him, and which alone could render Him an object of
religion, or even of interest, to mankind." Sometimes in accents of
wistful {90} wonder, sometimes in tones of revolt and defiant unbelief,
the question is asked:--Why does God allow dire calamity, painful
disease, earthquakes and shipwrecks, and accidents of the mine? Why
does He permit war, or vivisection, or poverty, or vice--in fact any of
"the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to"?
We should stop these things if we could; why does not He? One is
reminded of Mr. William Watson's passionate arraignment of the Powers
of Europe at the time of the Armenian massacres:--
Yea, if ye could not, though ye would, lift hand--
Ye halting leaders--to abridge Hell's reign. . .
If such your plight, most hapless ye of men!
_But if ye could and would not_, oh, what plea,
Think ye, shall stead you at your trial, when
The thundercloud of witnesses shall loom
At the Assizes of Eternity?
The application of these burning lines is painfully obvious. It would
be a positive relief were it thinkable that the Eternal would, but
cannot, stem
the flood that rolls
Hoarser with anguish as the ages roll;
or if one might, with a modern novelist, compare the case to that of "a
practitioner doing his best for a wilful patient, with poor appliances
and indifferent nursing." _But if He could and will not--oh, what
plea?_
What frankly appals men and freezes the worshipful instinct in their
hearts is the {91} apparent Divine indifference, the silence of God, in
the presence of so much human wretchedness. If one could only feel
that He cared for and sympathised with His suffering creatures, it
would be a help, like the sympathetic pressure of the hand from a
friend, which does not lessen the actual calamity that may have
befallen us, but makes it easier to bear; but an _indifferent_ God is
equivalent to no God at all--or, as we have previously expressed it, a
God who does not care, does not count. The mere sense that He was
sorry for us would lighten the stroke of fate which He had not been
able to avert; but if the truth is that He might have averted it by the
simple exercise of His will, but refused to do so, coldly looking on at
our grief--not from afar, but close by--then we can only say that no
God at all were better than that. It seems, then, as though, in order
to escape from palpable inconsistency between theory and fact, we
should have to make a surrender either of His immanence, or His
omnipotence, or His benevolence, or the reality of evil.
To surrender the Divine immanence will not really solve our problem.
Near or far, closer to us than breathing or dwelling beyond the
furthest star, God is still the Author of our being, the Framer of the
world and all that therein is, the Cause without which there would have
been no effects. If, after creating the world, He withdrew from it to
an inconceivable {92} distance, it is none the less His handiwork; if
it is in and through His absence that the cosmic mechanism has got out
of gear, it is yet He who willed to be so absent, well knowing what
results would supervene; if a power other than He and hostile to Him
has usurped the place and title of Prince of this world, such
usurpation would have been impossible but for His acquiescence, and
personified Evil, playing with human happiness, would still be His
licensed agent. Evidently, the solution of which we are in search does
not lie along that way.
We turn, therefore, to the second possible explanation, strongly put
forward by Mill, according to whom natural theology points to God as "a
Being of great but limited power."
Those who have been strengthened in goodness by relying on the
sympathising support of a powerful and good Governor of the world (he
says) have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be,
in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always saved
His goodness at the expense of His power. They have believed . . .
that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to His intention.[1]
To the question, "Of what nature is the limitation of His power?" he
returns the tentative answer that it
probably results either from the qualities of the material--the
substances and forces of which the universe is composed not admitting
of any arrangements by which His purposes could be more completely
fulfilled; or else, the purposes might have been more fully attained,
but the Creator did not know how to do it; creative {93} skill,
wonderful as it is, was not sufficiently perfect to accomplish His
purposes more thoroughly.[2]
Such an answer, we need scarcely say, could only have been given by a
thinker who had grown up in the intellectual atmosphere of Deism; the
Deity which he contemplates is One who works upon the world purely _ab
extra_, who cannot be spoken of as the Creator, except by courtesy; in
reality He merely shapes and adapts materials over which He has only an
incomplete control, and which, therefore, so far from having been
called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently
of Him. Had He really _created_ the raw material from which He was to
frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium
perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He
merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and
unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still
to answer the question, What is that real First Cause, the _Urgott_ who
created the _Urstoff_, matter in its most elementary form, and endowed
it with qualities some of which were destined to serve, while others
resisted and frustrated, the sub-Divinity's intentions?
Clearly, this notion also will not do; but while we may reject Mill's
theory as to the _nature_ of the limitations of Divine power, there
{94} is distinct force in his shrewd contention that religious people
generally--professions to the contrary notwithstanding--have never
really believed God to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent.
This contention we believe, indeed, to be almost self-evidently true;
for on the contrary supposition nothing can happen contrary to God's
will--all things and beings would necessarily be carrying out that
will, and sin, _e.g._, would become an utterly meaningless term. But
if omnipotence is limited--which sounds, we admit, a contradiction in
terms--we ask once more, In what way and by whom? To that question we
have no other reply than the one given in our first chapter, _viz._,
that when we predicate limitation of the Deity, we must mean
self-limitation. In creating the universe, we said, God made a
distinction between His creation and Himself, and to that extent
limited His Being--for the universe is not identical with God; we now
add that in endowing man with an existence related to, but distinct
from, His own, He limited not only His infinite Being, but also His
infinite Power, delegating some portion thereof to us--for man's will
is not identical with God's will, but capable of resisting, though also
capable of co-operating with it. Without such individual initiative,
without such an individual faculty of choosing between alternatives of
action, man could never have been a moral agent; but moral liberty to
choose and act aright or amiss implies also {95} moral responsibility
for such choice on the part of the chooser.
This neglected truth of God's self-limitation of His power needs to be
far more explicitly avowed than has generally been the case. Only so
shall we get clear of the confusion and uncertainty with which the
subject of human freedom is so largely surrounded; only so shall we be
enabled to place the burden of responsibility for sin, the cause of so
immense a proportion of the world's suffering, upon the right
shoulders--_i.e._, man's, not God's. It is urgently necessary to
disperse the common fallacy according to which God, being the Author of
all, is the causative Agent answerable for all the happenings in His
universe, for all human pain and all human sin. Where freedom is,
_there_ is responsibility. For let us bring the matter down from the
abstract to the concrete: if a dreadful railway accident is caused
through the momentary mental lapse of a signalman who has been
overtaxed by excessive working hours, how is the responsibility God's?
It obviously belongs to those who imposed a task involving the safety
of human lives on a man who was not in a fit condition to fulfil such a
duty. If an explosion in a coal-mine, accompanied by terrible loss of
life, is caused through some miner striking a match, or carrying a
naked light, in defiance of well-known regulations of safety, how is
God responsible? He has endowed us with intelligence whereby to {96}
discover His laws, and with freedom to obey or disobey them: the use or
misuse of that freedom rests with ourselves.
But now it may be asked--Was it the act of a benevolent Deity to
entrust this terribly two-edged weapon of liberty to our unskilful
hands, in which it was bound to work so vast an amount of injury? And
this opens up the larger and more general question, Must we, in view of
the facts of life, surrender the idea of the Divine benevolence? It is
quite true that the evidence of purpose discernible in the whole
structure of the universe proclaims the Deity to be personal; but, as
Mr. Mallock says, "the theistic doctrine of God is not a doctrine that
the supreme mind acts with purpose, but a doctrine that it acts with
purpose of a highly specialised kind"--_viz._, _benevolent_ purpose.
Let us once more state the problem in the partial but very pertinent
form in which it arises in connection with man's faculty of freedom.
To bestow upon His creatures a gift which He must have known they would
use in such a manner as to work infinite harm to themselves and to each
other, seems _prima facie_ no more compatible with kindly intentions
than it would be to leave children to play with sharp tools, loaded
firearms and deadly poisons; since disaster was bound to ensue from
such a course, does not responsibility for the disaster rest with the
one who deliberately provided the {97} elements for it? But such a
comparison, while superficially plausible, upon reflection is seen to
be beside the mark. We really cannot plead such inexperience of right
and wrong, such ignorance of moral safety and moral danger, as would
furnish a true parallel between playing with temptation and playing
with cyanide of potassium. In setting before us "life and good, and
death and evil," God has as distinctly placed within our hearts the
moral intuition which, says, "Therefore choose life." But why, the
questioner proceeds, have made sin even possible? Because, we answer,
not to have done so would have made morality impossible. It cannot be
too often, or too plainly, pointed out that just as the only
alternative to purpose is chance, so the only alternative to liberty is
necessity. That is to say, God could no doubt have made us automata
instead of free agents; but even He could not have made us free to
_choose_ the right, yet not free to choose its contrary. Choice that
is not willed is not choice at all; goodness by compulsion is not
goodness, but merely correctitude--the behaviour of a skilfully-devised
mechanism, but possessing no _moral_ quality whatever. We are not at
present concerned with the view of those who maintain that men are _de
facto_ no more than such "cunning casts in clay" a contention which
will occupy us at a later stage; we merely state the commonplace that
in making us free God Himself could not also {98} make us impeccable,
insusceptible to temptation, immune against the possibility of sin.
The real question, then, shapes itself as follows: Can we discern the
nature of the purpose which expresses itself in the bestowal of this
gift of freedom? Stated in that form, we see that the question has
already been answered by implication; for if there could be no morality
without liberty, it is fair to make the inference that the very object
of God in allowing us to choose between alternatives of conduct was to
make morality so much as possible. Was that a good and beneficent
object? We submit that even those who impeach the Deity for opening
the door to sin would on second thoughts confess that morally free--and
therefore peccable--beings stand on a higher level than marionettes,
however faultlessly contrived to perform certain evolutions. The truth
of the matter is set forth with poetic insight in Andersen's story of
the Nightingale--the immeasurable difference between the artificial
bird and the real songster, whose melodious raptures somehow touched a
chord in the listener which all the nicely-calculated trills and
cadences of the ingenious mechanical toy failed to set in motion. In
like manner we repeat that the power to determine his own course raises
man to a plane incomparably higher than he could have occupied as an
automaton. The same faculty of free choice which in its abuse makes
the sinner, in its right {99} exercise furnishes forth the saint. All
that we mean by moral progress, by "the steady gain of man," his rise
to more exalted ideals, his conquest of baser appetites--all that makes
the history of the race a thrilling and uplifting drama--is bound up
with his possession of liberty; it is this supreme gift which makes him
"a little lower than the angels," and "crowns him with glory and
honour." Alone of all earthly beings, man is not only an effect but a
cause; his freedom--not unlimited but quite real within its not
inelastic confines--is the noblest of all his faculties, even though
for that very reason it is capable of being most ignobly perverted.
What its bestowal tells us is that God does not call us into servitude,
but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His
playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us with the power to
choose for ourselves He has made us His potential fellow-workers. May
we not ask--Who, after all, would prefer the safety of automatism to
the glory of this Divine adventure?
In all this we are not shutting our eyes to what is involved in the
misuse of liberty--the dread nature of wilful sin and its ghastly
harvest of wrecked and ruined lives; we do not say that the price of
freedom is not a heavy {100} one, nor do we pretend that the subject is
free from painful mystery. It could not be otherwise; that we, with
our limited vision and circumscribed understanding, should be able to
solve that mystery with any completeness, is not even to be imagined.
Nevertheless, we may claim that we have at least obtained a glimpse of
the purpose of God in conferring upon the race this fateful power; for
this and no other was the appointed means by which man was to ascend to
his true place as a moral and spiritual being. If we can admit that
purpose to be in harmony with the Divine benevolence, we may the more
hopefully turn to other aspects of our problem.
[1] _Three Essays on Religion_, p. 22.
[2] _Ibid_, p. 79.
[3] _The Laws_, vii, 803: [Greek] "Theou ti paignion memechanmenon."
Compare also Browning's unhappy phrase, "God, whose puppets, best and
worst, are we."
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