A course of purely metaphysical reasoning has led us up to the idea of
God--that is to say, of a conscious and rational Mind and Will for
which the world exists and by which that world and all other spirits
are caused to exist. I have passed over a host of difficulties--the
relation of God to time, the question whether or in what sense the
world may be supposed to have a beginning and an end, the question of
the relation in which God, the universal Mind, stands to other minds,
the question of Free-will. These are difficulties which would involve
elaborate metaphysical discussions: I shall return to some of them in a
later lecture. It must suffice for the present to say that more than
one answer to many of these questions might conceivably be given
consistently with the view of the divine nature which I have contended
for. All that I need insist on for my present purpose is--
(1) That God is personal in the sense that He is a {59} self-conscious,
thinking, willing, feeling Being, distinguishable from each and all
less perfect minds.
(2) That all other minds are in some sense brought into being by the
divine Mind, while at the same time they have such a resemblance to, or
community of nature with, their source that they may be regarded as not
mere creations but as in some sense reproductions, more or less
imperfect, of that source, approximating in various degrees to that
ideal of Personality which is realised perfectly in God alone. In
proportion as they approximate to that ideal, they are causes of their
own actions, and can claim for themselves the kind of causality which
we attribute in its perfection to God. I content myself now with
claiming for the developed, rational human self a measure of freedom to
the extent which I have just defined--that it is the real cause of its
own actions. It is capable of self-determination. The man's actions
are determined by his character. That is quite consistent with the
admission that God is the ultimate cause of a self of such and such a
character coming into existence at such and such a time.
(3) I will not say that the conception of those who regard the human
mind as literally a part of the divine, so that the human consciousness
is in no sense outside of the divine, is necessarily, for those who
hold it, inconsistent with the conception of {60} personality both in
God and man: I will only say that I do not myself understand such an
assertion. I regard the human mind as derived from God, but not as
being part of God. Further discussion of this question I reserve for
my next lecture.
We have led up to the idea of God's existence. But so far we have
discovered nothing at all about His character or purposes. And it is
clear that without some such knowledge the belief in God could be of
little or no value from any religious or moral point of view. How are
we to learn anything about the character of God? I imagine that at the
present day few people will attempt to prove the goodness or
benevolence of God from an empirical examination of the facts of Nature
or of History. There is, no doubt, much in History and in Nature to
suggest the idea of Benevolence, but there is much to suggest a
directly opposite conclusion. Few of us at the present day are likely
to be much impressed by the argument which Paley bases upon the
existence of the little apparatus in the throat by which it is
benevolently arranged that, though constantly on the point of being
choked by our food, we hardly ever are choked. I cannot help reminding
you of the characteristic passage: 'Consider a city-feast,' he
exclaims, 'what manducation, what deglutition, and yet not one Alderman
choked in a century!' Such arguments look at the matter from the point
{61} of view of the Alderman: the point of view of the turtle and the
turkey is entirely forgotten. I would not for a moment speak
disrespectfully of the argument from design. Darwinism has changed its
form, but anybody who reads Edouard von Hartmann's _Philosophy of the
Unconscious_ is not likely to rise from its perusal with the idea that
the evidences of design have been destroyed by Darwinism, whatever he
may think of Hartmann's strange conclusion that the design can be
explained by the operation of an unconscious Mind or Will. The
philosophical argument of Mr. R. B. Haldane in _The Pathway to
Reality_,[1] and the purely biological argument of Dr. John Haldane in
his two lectures on _Life and Mechanism_, and still more recently the
brilliant and very important work of M. Bergson, _L'Evolution
Creatrice_ have, as it seems to me, abundantly shown that it is as
impossible as ever it was to explain even the growth of a plant without
supposing that in it and all organic Nature there is a striving towards
an end. But the argument from design, though it testifies to purpose
in the Universe, tells us nothing about the nature of that purpose.
Purpose is one thing; benevolent purpose is another. Nobody's estimate
of the comparative amount of happiness and misery in the world is worth
much; but for my own part, if I trusted simply to empirical evidence,
{62} I should not be disposed to do more than slightly attenuate the
pessimism of the Pessimists. At all events, Nature is far too 'red in
tooth and claw' to permit of our basing an argument for a benevolent
deity upon a contemplation of the facts of animal and human life.
There is but one source from which such an idea can possibly be
derived--from the evidence of our own moral consciousness.
Our moral ideals are the work of Reason. That the happiness of many
ought to be preferred to the happiness of one, that pleasure is better
than pain, that goodness is of more value than pleasure, that some
pleasures are better than others--such judgements are as much the work
of our own Reason, they are as much self-evident truths, as the truth
that two and two make four, or that A cannot be both B and not B at the
same time, or that two straight lines cannot enclose a space. We have
every right to assume that such truths hold good for God as well as for
man. If such Idealism as I have endeavoured to lead you to is well
founded, the mind which knows comes from God, and therefore the
knowledge which that mind possesses must also be taken as an imperfect
or fragmentary reproduction of God's knowledge. And the Theist who
rejects Idealism but admits the existence of self-evident truths will
be equally justified in assuming that, for God as well as for man, two
and two must make {63} four. We have just as much right to assume that
our moral ideas--our ideas of value--must come from God too. For God
too, as for us, there must exist the idea, the ultimate category of the
good; and our judgements of value--judgements that such and such an end
is good or worth striving for--in so far as they are true judgements,
must be supposed to represent His judgements. We are conscious, in
proportion as we are rational, of pursuing ends which we judge to be
good. If such judgements reveal God's judgements, God must be supposed
to aim likewise at an ideal of good--the same ideal which is revealed
to us by our moral judgements. In these judgements then we have a
revelation, the only possible revelation, of the character of God. The
argument which I have suggested is simply a somewhat exacter statement
of the popular idea that Conscience is the voice of God.
Further to vindicate the idea of the existence, authority, objective
validity of Conscience would lead us too far away into the region of
Moral Philosophy for our present subject. I will only attempt very
briefly to guard against some possible misunderstandings, and to meet
some obvious objections:
(1) It need hardly be pointed out that the assertion of the existence
of the Moral Consciousness is not in the slightest degree inconsistent
with recognising its gradual growth and development. The {64} moral
faculty, like every other faculty or aspect or activity of the human
soul, has grown gradually. No rational man doubts the validity--no
Idealist doubts the _a priori_ character--of our mathematical
judgements because probably monkeys and possibly primitive men cannot
count, and certainly cannot perform more than the very simplest
arithmetical operations. Still less do we doubt the validity of
mathematical reasoning because not only children and savages, but
sometimes even distinguished classical scholars--a Macaulay, a Matthew
Arnold, a T. S. Evans,--were wholly incapable of understanding very
simple mathematical arguments. Equally little do we deny a real
difference between harmony and discord because people may be found who
see no difference between 'God save the King' and 'Pop goes the
Weasel.' Self-evident truth does not mean truth which is evident to
everybody.
(2) It is not doubted that the gradual evolution of our actual moral
ideas--our actual ideas about what is right or wrong in particular
cases--has been largely influenced by education, environment,
association, social pressure, superstition, perhaps natural
selection--in short, all the agencies by which naturalistic Moralists
try to account for the existence of Morality. Even Euclid, or whatever
his modern substitute may be, has to be taught; but that does not show
that Geometry is an arbitrary system {65} invented by the ingenious and
interested devices of those who want to get money by teaching it.
Arithmetic was invented largely as an instrument of commerce; but it
could not have been invented if there were really no such things as
number and quantity, or if the human mind had no original capacity for
recognizing them. Our scientific ideas, our political ideas, our ideas
upon a thousand subjects have been partly developed, partly thwarted
and distorted in their growth, by similar influences. But, however
great the difficulty of getting rid of these distorting influences and
facing such questions in a perfectly dry light, nobody suggests that
objective truth on such matters is non-existent or for ever
unattainable. A claim for objective validity for the moral judgement
does not mean a claim for infallibility on behalf of any individual
Conscience. We may make mistakes in Morals just as we may make
mistakes in Science, or even in pure Mathematics. If a class of forty
small boys are asked to do a sum, they will probably not all bring out
the same answer: but nobody doubts that one answer alone is right,
though arithmetical capacity is a variable quantity. What is meant is
merely that, if I am right in affirming that this is good, you cannot
be likewise right in saying that it is bad: and that we have some
capacity--though doubtless a variable capacity--of judging which is the
true {66} view. Hence our moral judgements, in so far as they are true
judgements, must be taken to be reproductions in us of the thought of
God. To show that an idea has been gradually developed, tells us
nothing as to its truth or falsehood--one way or the other.
(3) In comparing the self-evidence of moral to that of mathematical
judgements, it is not suggested that our moral judgements in detail are
as certain, as clear and sharply defined, as mathematical judgements,
or that they can claim so universal a consensus among the competent.
What is meant is merely (_a_) that the notion of good in general is an
ultimate category of thought; that it contains a meaning intelligible
not perhaps to every individual human soul, but to the normal,
developed, human consciousness; and (_b_) that the ultimate truth of
morals, if it is seen at all, must be seen immediately. An ultimate
moral truth cannot be deduced from, or proved by, any other truth. You
cannot prove that pleasure is better than pain, or that virtue is
better than pleasure, to any one who judges differently. It does not
follow that all men have an equally clear and delicate moral
consciousness. The power of discriminating moral values differs as
widely as the power of distinguishing musical sounds, or of
appreciating what is excellent in music. Some men may be almost or
altogether without such a power of moral discrimination, just as some
men are wholly {67} destitute of an ear for music; while the higher
degrees of moral appreciation are the possession of the few rather than
of the many. Moral insight is not possessed by all men in equal
measure. Moral genius is as rare as any other kind of genius.
(4) When we attribute Morality to God, it is not meant that the conduct
which is right for men in detail ought to be or could possibly in all
cases be practised by God. It is a childish objection (though it is
sometimes made by modern philosophers who should know better) to allege
with Aristotle that God cannot be supposed to make or keep contracts.
And in the same way, when we claim universal validity for our moral
judgements, we do not mean that the rules suitable for human conduct
would be the same for beings differently organized and constituted.
Our rules of sexual Morality are clearly applicable only to sexually
constituted beings. What is meant in asserting that these rules are
universally and objectively valid is that these are the rules which
every rational intelligence, in proportion as it is rational, will
recognize as being suitable, or conducive to the ideal life, in beings
constituted as we are. The truth that permanent monogamous marriage
represents the true type of sexual relations for human beings will be
none the less an objectively valid ethical truth, because the lower
animals are below it, while superior beings, {68} it may be, are above
it. Universal love is none the less the absolute moral ideal because
it would be absurd to say that beasts of prey do wrong in devouring
other creatures, or because war is sometimes necessary as a means to
the end of love at our present imperfect stage of social and
intellectual development. The means to the highest good vary with
circumstances; the amount of good that is attainable in such and such
circumstances varies also; consequently the right course of conduct
will be different for beings differently constituted or placed under
different circumstances: but the principles which, in the view of a
perfect intelligence, would determine what is the right course for
different beings in different circumstances will be always the same.
The ultimate principles of our moral judgement, _e.g._ that love is
better than hate, are just as applicable to God as they are to us. Our
conception of the highest good may be inadequate; but we certainly
shall not attain to greater adequacy, or a nearer approach to ultimate
truth, by flatly contradicting our own moral judgements. It would be
just as reasonable to argue that because the law of gravitation might
be proved, from the point of view of the highest knowledge, to be an
inadequate statement of the truth, and all inadequacy involves some
error, therefore we had better assume that from the point of view of
God there is no difference whatever {69} between attraction and
repulsion. All arguments for what is called a 'super-moral' Deity or a
'super-moral' Absolute are open to this fatal objection: moral
judgements cannot possibly rest upon anything but the moral
consciousness, and yet these doctrines contradict the moral
consciousness. The idea of good is derived from the moral
consciousness. When a man declares that from the point of view of the
Universe all things are very good, he gets the idea of good from his
own moral consciousness, and is assuming the objective validity of its
dictates. His judgement is an ethical judgement as much as mine when I
say that to me some things in this world appear very bad. If he is not
entitled to assume the validity of his ethical judgements, his
proposition is false or meaningless. If he is entitled to assume their
validity, why should he distrust that same moral consciousness when it
affirms (as it undoubtedly does) that pain and sin are for ever bad,
and not (as our 'super-moral' Religionists suggest) additional artistic
touches which only add to the aesthetic effect of the whole?
I shall now proceed to develop some of the consequences which (as it
appears to me) flow from the doctrine that our belief in the goodness
of God is an inference from our own moral consciousness:
(1) It throws light on the relations between Religion and Morality.
The champions of ethical {70} education as a substitute for Religion
and of ethical societies as a substitute for Churches are fond of
assuming that Religion is not only unnecessary to, but actually
destructive of, the intrinsic authority of the moral law. If we
supposed with a few theologians in the most degenerate periods of
Theology (with William of Occam, some extreme Calvinists, and a few
eighteenth-century divines like Archdeacon Paley) that actions are
right or wrong merely because willed by God--meaning by God simply a
powerful being without goodness or moral character, then undoubtedly
the Secularists would be right. If a religious Morality implies that
Virtue means merely (in Paley's words) 'the doing good to mankind in
obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness'
(so that if God were to will murder and adultery, those practices would
forthwith become meritorious), then undoubtedly it would be better to
teach Morality without Religion than with it. But that is a caricature
of the true teaching of Christ or of any considerable Christian
theologian. Undoubtedly we must assert what is called the
'independence' of the moral judgement. The judgement 'to love is
better than to hate' has a meaning complete in itself, which contains
no reference whatever to any theological presupposition. It is a
judgement which is, and which can intelligibly be, made by people of
all religions or of none. But {71} we may still raise the question
whether the validity of that judgement can be defended without
theological implications. And I am prepared most distinctly to
maintain that it cannot. These moral judgements claim objective
validity. When we say 'this is right,' we do not mean merely 'I
approve this course of conduct,' 'this conduct gives me a thrill of
satisfaction, a "feeling of approbation," a pleasure of the moral
sense.' If that were all that was meant, it would be perfectly
possible that another person might feel an equally satisfactory glow of
approbation at conduct of a precisely opposite character _without
either of them being wrong_. A bull-fight fills most Spaniards with
feelings of lively approbation, and most Englishmen with feelings of
acute disapprobation. If such moral judgements were mere feelings,
neither of them would be wrong. There could be no question of
objective rightness or wrongness. Mustard is not objectively nice or
objectively nasty: it is simply nice to some people and nasty to
others. The mustard-lover has no right to condemn the mustard-hater,
or the mustard-hater the mustard-lover. If Morality were merely a
matter of feeling or emotion, actions would not be objectively right or
objectively wrong; but simply right to some people, wrong to others.
Hume would be right in holding the morality of an action to consist
simply in the pleasure it gives to the person who {72} contemplates it.
Rightness thus becomes simply a name for the fact of social
approbation.[2] And yet surely the very heart of the affirmation which
the moral consciousness makes in each of us is that right and wrong are
not matters of mere subjective feeling. When I assert 'this is right,'
I do not claim personal infallibility. I may, indeed, be wrong, as I
may be wrong in my political or scientific theories. But I do mean
that I think I am right; and that, if I am right, you cannot also be
right when you affirm that this same action is wrong. This objective
validity is the very core and centre of the idea of Duty or moral
obligation. That is why it is so important to assert that moral
judgements are the work of Reason, not of a supposed moral sense or any
other kind of feeling. Feelings may vary in different men without any
of them being in the wrong; red really is the same as green to a
colour-blind person. What we mean when we talk about the existence of
Duty is that things are right or wrong, no matter what you or I think
about them--that the laws of Morality {73} are quite as much
independent of my personal likings and dislikings as the physical laws
of Nature. That is what is meant by the 'objectivity' of the moral law.
Now, the question arises--'Can such an objectivity be asserted by those
who take a purely materialistic or naturalistic view of the Universe?'
Whatever our metaphysical theories about the nature of Reality may be,
we can in practice have no difficulty in the region of Physical Science
about recognizing an objective reality of some kind which is other than
my mere thinking about it. That fire will burn whether I think so or
not is practically recognized by persons of all metaphysical
persuasions. If I say 'I can cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare
imagination of a feast,' I try the experiment, and I fail. I imagine
the feast, but I am hungry still: and if I persist in the experiment, I
die. But what do we mean when we say that things are right or wrong
whether I think them so or not, that the Moral Law exists outside me
and independently of my thinking about it? Where and how does this
moral law exist? The physical laws of Nature may be supposed by the
Materialist or the Realist somehow to exist in matter: to the
Metaphysician there may be difficulties in such a view, but the
difficulties are not obvious to common-sense. But surely (whatever may
be thought about physical laws) the moral law, {74} which expresses not
any matter of physical fact but what _ought_ to be thought of acts,
cannot be supposed to exist in a purely material Universe. An 'ought'
can exist only in and for a mind. In what mind, then, does the moral
law exist? As a matter of fact, different people's moral judgements
contradict one another. And the consciousness of no living man can
well be supposed to be a flawless reflection of the absolute moral
ideal. On a non-theistic view of the Universe, then, the moral law
cannot well be thought of as having any actual existence. The
objective validity of the moral law can indeed be and no doubt is
_asserted_, believed in, acted upon without reference to any
theological creed; but it cannot be defended or fully justified without
the pre-supposition of Theism. What we mean by an objective law is
that the moral law is a part of the ultimate nature of things, on a
level with the laws of physical nature, and it cannot be _that_, unless
we assume that law to be an expression of the same mind in which
physical laws originate. The idea of duty, when analysed, implies the
idea of God. Whatever else Plato meant by the 'idea of the good,' this
at least was one of his meanings--that the moral law has its source in
the source of all Reality.
And therefore at bottom popular feeling is right in holding that
religious belief is necessary to Morality. Of course I do not mean to
say that, were {75} religious belief to disappear from the world,
Morality would disappear too. But I do think Morality would become
quite a different thing from what it has been for the higher levels of
religious thought and feeling. The best men would no doubt go on
acting up to their own highest ideal just as if it did possess
objective validity, no matter how unable they might be to reconcile
their practical with their speculative beliefs. But it would not be so
for the many--or perhaps even for the few in their moments of weakness
and temptation, when once the consequences of purely naturalistic
Ethics were thoroughly admitted and realized. The only kind of
objective validity which can be recognized on a purely naturalistic
view of Ethics is conformity to public opinion. The tendency of all
naturalistic Ethics is to make a God of public opinion. And if no
other deity were recognized, such a God would assuredly not be without
worshippers. And yet the strongest temptation to most of us is the
temptation to follow a debased public opinion--the opinion of our age,
our class, our party. Apart from faith in a perfectly righteous God
whose commands are, however imperfectly, revealed in the individual
Conscience, we can find no really valid reason why the individual
should act on his own sense of what is intrinsically right, even when
he finds himself an 'Athanasius contra mundum,' and when his own
personal likings and inclinations {76} and interests are on the side of
the world. Kant was at bottom right, though perhaps he did not give
the strongest reasons for his position, in making the idea of God a
postulate of Morality.
From a more directly practical point of view I need hardly point out
how much easier it is to feel towards the moral law the reverence that
we ought to feel when we believe that that law is embodied in a
personal Will. Not only is religious Morality not opposed to the idea
of duty for duty's sake: it is speculatively the only reasonable basis
of it; practically and emotionally the great safeguard of it. And
whatever may be thought of the possibility of a speculative defence of
such an idea without Theism, the practical difficulty of teaching
it--especially to children, uneducated and unreflective persons--seems
to be quite insuperable.[3] In more than one country in which
religious education has been banished from the primary schools, grave
observers complain that the idea of Duty seems to be suffering an
eclipse in the minds of the rising {77} generation; some of them add
that in those lands crime is steadily on the increase. Catechisms of
civil duty and the like have not hitherto proved very satisfactory
substitutes for the old teaching about the fear of God. Would that it
were more frequently remembered on both sides of our educational
squabbles that the supreme object of all religious education should be
to instil into children's minds in the closest possible connexion the
twin ideas of God and of Duty!
(2) I have tried to show that the ethical importance of the idea of God
is prior to and independent of any belief in the idea of future rewards
and punishments or of a future life, however conceived of. But when
the idea of a righteous God has once been accepted, the idea of
Immortality seems to me to follow from it as a sort of corollary. If
any one on a calm review of the actual facts of the world's history can
suppose that such a world as ours could be the expression of the will
of a rational and moral Being without the assumption of a future life
for which this is a discipline or education or preparatory stage,
argument would be useless with him. Inveterate Optimism, like
inveterate Scepticism, admits of no refutation, but in most minds
produces no conviction. For those who are convinced that the world has
a rational end, and yet that life as we see it (taken by itself) cannot
be that end, the hypothesis {78} of Immortality becomes a necessary
deduction from their belief in God.
I would not disparage the educative effect of the belief in a future
life even when expressed in the crude and inadequate metaphor of reward
and punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have reached the moral
level at which the belief--not in a vindictive, retributive, unending
torment, but in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls
prolonged after death--is without its value. At the same time it is a
mere caricature of all higher religious beliefs when the religious
motive is supposed to mean simply a fear of punishment and hope of
personal reward, even of the least sensuous or material kind. Love of
goodness for its own sake is for the Theist identical with the love of
God. Love of a Person is a stronger force than devotion to an idea;
and an ethical conception of God carries with it the idea of
Immortality.
The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm
and the fly?
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky;
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.[4]
Belief in human Immortality is, as I have suggested, the postulate
without which most of us cannot {79} believe in God. Even for its own
sake it is of the highest ethical value. The belief in Immortality
gives a meaning to life even when it has lost all other meaning. 'It
is rather,' in the noble words of the late Professor Sidgwick, 'from a
disinterested aversion to an universe so irrationally constituted that
the wages of virtue should be dust than from any private reckoning
about his own wages,' that the good man clings to the idea of
Immortality. And that is not all. The value of all higher goods even
in this life, though it does not depend wholly upon their duration,
does partly depend upon it. It would be better to be pure and
unselfish for a day than to be base and selfish for a century. And yet
we do not hesitate to commend the value of intellectual and of all
kinds of higher enjoyments on account of their greater durability.
Why, then, should we shrink from admitting that the value of character
really is increased when it is regarded as surviving bodily death?
Disbelief in Immortality would, I believe, in the long run and for the
vast majority of men, carry with it an enormous enhancement of the
value of the carnal and sensual over the spiritual and intellectual
element in life.
(3) A third consequence which follows from our determining to accept
the moral consciousness as containing the supreme revelation of God is
this. From the point of view of the moral consciousness {80} we cannot
say that the Universe is wholly good. We have only one means of
judging whether things are good or bad: the idea of value is wholly
derived from our own ethical judgements or judgements of value. If we
distrust these judgements, there is no higher court to which we can
appeal. And if we distrust our most ultimate judgements of value, I do
not know why we should trust any judgements whatever. Even if we grant
that from some very transcendental metaphysical height--the height, for
instance, of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy--it may be contended that none of
our judgements are wholly true or fully adequate to express the true
nature of Reality, we at all events cannot get nearer to Reality than
we are conducted by the judgements which present themselves to us as
immediate and self-evident. Now, if we do apply these judgements of
value to the Universe as we know it, can we say that everything in it
seems to be very good? For my own part, I unhesitatingly say, 'Pain is
an evil, and sin is a worse evil, and nothing on earth can ever make
them good.' How then are we to account for such evils in a Universe
which we believe to express the thought and will of a perfectly
righteous Being? In only one way that I know of--by supposing they are
means to a greater good. That is really the substance and substratum
of all the Theodicies of all the Philosophers and all the {81}
Theologians except those who frankly trample on or throw over the Moral
Consciousness, and declare that, for those who see truly, pain and sin
are only additional sources of aesthetic interest in a great
world-drama produced for his own entertainment by a Deity not
anthropomorphic enough to love but still anthropomorphic enough to be
amused.
I shall be told no doubt that this is limiting God. A human being may,
it will be urged, without loss of goodness, do things in themselves
evil, as a means to a greater good: as a surgeon, he may cause
excruciating pain; as a statesman or a soldier, he may doom thousands
to a cruel death; as a wise administrator of the poor law, he may
refuse to relieve much suffering, in order that he may not cause more
suffering. But this is because his power is limited; he has to work
upon a world which has a nature of its own independent of his volition.
To apply the same explanation to the evil which God causes, is to make
Him finite instead of Infinite, limited in power instead of Omnipotent.
Now in a sense I admit that this is so. I am not wedded to the words
'Infinite' or 'Omnipotent.' But I would protest against a persistent
misrepresentation of the point of view which I defend. It is suggested
that the limit to the power of God must necessarily spring from the
existence of some other thing or being outside of Him, not created by
Him or under His {82} control. I must protest that that is not so.
Everybody admits that God cannot change the past; few Philosophers
consider it necessary to maintain that God could construct triangles
with their angles not together equal to two right angles, or think it
any derogation from his Omnipotence to say that He could not make the
sum of two and two to be other than four. Few Theologians push their
idea of Freewill so far as to insist that God could will Himself to be
unjust or unloving, or that, being just and loving, he could do unjust
or unloving acts. There are necessities to which even God must submit.
But they are not imposed upon Him from without: they are parts of His
own essential nature. The limitation by which God cannot attain His
ends without causing some evil is a limitation of exactly the same
nature. If you say that it is no limitation of God not to be able to
change the past, for the thing is really unmeaning, then I submit that
in the same way it may be no limitation that He should not be able to
evolve highly organized beings without a struggle for existence, or to
train human beings in unselfishness without allowing the existence both
of sin and of pain. From the point of view of perfect knowledge, these
things might turn out to be just as unmeaning as for God to change the
past. The popular idea of Omnipotence is one which really does not
bear looking into. If we supposed the world {83} to contain no evil at
all, still there would be in it a definite amount of good. Twice such
a world would be twice as good. Why is there not twice that amount of
good? A being who deliberately created only a good world of limited
quantity--a definite number of spirits (for instance) enjoying so much
pleasure and so much virtue--when he could have created twice that
number of spirits, and consequently twice that amount of good, would
not be perfectly good or loving. And so on _ad infinitum_, no matter
how much good you suppose him to have created. The only sense which we
can intelligibly give to the idea of a divine Omnipotence is this--that
God possesses all the power there is, that He can do all things that
are in their own nature possible.[5]
But there is a more formidable objection which I have yet to meet. It
has been urged by certain Philosophers of great eminence that, if we
suppose God not to be unlimited in power, we have no guarantee that the
world is even good on the whole; we should not be authorized to infer
anything as to a future life or the ultimate destiny of Humanity from
the fact of God's goodness. A limited God might be a defeated God. I
admit the difficulty. This is the 'greatest wave' of all in the
theistic {84} argument. In reply, I would simply appeal to the reasons
which I have given for supposing that the world is really willed by
God. A rational being does not will evil except as a means to a
greater good. If God be rational, we have a right to suppose that the
world must contain more good than evil, or it would not be willed at
all. A being who was obliged to create a world which did not seem to
him good would be a blind force, as force is understood by the pure
Materialist, not a rational Will. That much we have a right to claim
as a matter of strict Logic; and that would to my own mind be a
sufficient reason for assuming that, at least for the higher order of
spirits, such a life as ours must be intended as the preface to a
better life than this. But I should go further. To me it appears that
such evils as sin and pain are so enormously worse than the mere
absence of good, that I could not regard as rational a Universe in
which the good did not very greatly predominate over the evil. More
than that I do not think we are entitled to say. And yet Justice is so
great a good that it is rational to hope that for every individual
conscious being--at least each individual capable of any high degree of
good--there must be a predominance of good on the whole. Beings of
very small capacity might conceivably be created chiefly or entirely as
a means to a vastly greater good than any that they {85} themselves
enjoy: the higher a spirit is in the scale of being, the more difficult
it becomes to suppose that it has been brought into existence merely as
a means to another's good, or that it will not ultimately enjoy a good
which will make it on the whole good that it should have been born.
I could wish myself that, in popular religious teaching, there was a
franker conception of this position--a position which, as I have said,
is really implied in the Theodicies of all the Divines. Popular
unbelief--and sometimes the unbelief of more cultivated persons--rests
mainly upon the existence of evil. We should cut at the roots of it by
teaching frankly that this is the best of all possible Universes,
though not the best of all imaginable Universes--such Universes as we
can construct in our own imagination by picturing to ourselves all the
good that there is in the world without any of the evil. We may still
say, if we please, that God is infinite because He is limited by
nothing outside His own nature, except what He has Himself caused. We
can still call Him Omnipotent in the sense that He possesses all the
power there is. And in many ways such a belief is far more practically
consolatory and stimulating than a belief in a God who can do all
things by any means and who consequently does not need our help. In
our view, we are engaged not in a sham warfare with an evil that is
really {86} good, but in a real warfare with a real evil, a struggle in
which we have the ultimate power in the Universe on our side, but one
in which the victory cannot be won without our help, a real struggle in
which we are called upon to be literally fellow-workers with God.