Systematic Theology
A Compendium and Commonplace-Book
Designed For The Use Of Theological Students
By
Augustus Hopkins Strong, D.D., LL.D.
President and Professor of Biblical Theology in the Rochester Theological
Seminary
Revised and Enlarged
In Three Volumes
Volume 2
The Doctrine of Man
The Judson Press
Philadelphia
1907
CONTENTS
Part IV. The Nature, Decrees, And Works of God. (Continued)
Chapter IV. The Works Of God; Or The Execution Of The Decrees.
Section I.—Creation.
I. Definition Of Creation.
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Creation.
1. Direct Scripture Statements.
2. Indirect evidence from Scripture.
III. Theories which oppose Creation.
1. Dualism.
2. Emanation.
3. Creation from eternity.
4. Spontaneous generation.
IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.
1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of
development.
2. Its proper interpretation.
V. God’s End in Creation.
1. The testimony of Scripture.
2. The testimony of reason.
VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.
1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.
2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.
3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.
4. To Providence and Redemption.
5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.
Section II.—Preservation.
I. Definition of Preservation.
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.
1. From Scripture.
2. From Reason.
III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.
1. Deism.
2. Continuous Creation.
IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.
Section III.—Providence.
I. Definition of Providence.
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.
1. Scriptural Proof.
2. Rational proof.
III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.
1. Fatalism.
2. Casualism.
3. Theory of a merely general providence.
IV. Relations of the Doctrine of Providence.
1. To miracles and works of grace.
2. To prayer and its answer.
3. To Christian activity.
4. To the evil acts of free agents.
Section IV.—Good And Evil Angels.
I. Scripture Statements and Imitations.
1. As to the nature and attributes of angels.
2. As to their number and organization.
3. As to their moral character.
4. As to their employments.
A. The employments of good angels.
B. The employments of evil angels.
II. Objections to the Doctrine of Angels.
1. To the doctrine of angels in general.
2. To the doctrine of evil angels in particular.
III. Practical uses of the Doctrine of Angels.
A. Uses of the doctrine of good angels.
B. Uses of the doctrine of evil angels.
Part V. Anthropology, Or The Doctrine Of Man.
Chapter I. Preliminary.
I. Man a Creation of God and a Child of God.
II. Unity of the Human Race.
1. The argument from history.
2. The argument from language.
3. The argument from psychology.
4. The argument from physiology.
III. Essential Elements of Human Nature.
1. The Dichotomous Theory.
2. The Trichotomous Theory.
IV. Origin of the Soul.
1. The Theory of Preëxistence.
2. The Creatian Theory.
3. The Traducian Theory.
V. The Moral Nature of Man.
1. Conscience.
2. Will.
Chapter II. The Original State Of Man.
I. Essentials of Man’s Original State.
1. Natural likeness to God, or personality.
2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.
A. The image of God as including only personality.
B. The image of God as consisting simply in man’s natural
capacity for religion.
II. Incidents of Man’s Original State.
1. Results of man’s possession of the divine image.
2. Concomitants of man’s possession of the divine image.
Chapter III. Sin, Or Man’s State Of Apostasy.
Section I.—The Law Of God.
I. Law in General.
II. The Law of God in Particular.
III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.
Section II.—Nature Of Sin.
I. Definition of Sin.
1. Proof.
2. Inferences.
II. The Essential Principle of Sin.
1. Sin as Sensuousness.
2. Sin as Finiteness.
3. Sin as Selfishness.
Section III.—Universality Of Sin.
I. Every human being who has arrived at moral consciousness has
committed acts, or cherished dispositions, contrary to the divine
law.
II. Every member of the human race, without exception, possesses
a corrupted nature, which is a source of actual sin, and is
itself sin.
Section IV.—Origin Of Sin In The Personal Act Of Adam.
I. The Scriptural Account of the Temptation and Fall in Genesis
3:1-7.
1. Its general, character not mythical or allegorical, but
historical.
2. The course of the temptation, and the resulting fall.
II. Difficulties connected with the Fall considered as the
personal Act of Adam.
1. How could a holy being fall?
2. How could God justly permit Satanic temptation?
3. How could a penalty so great be justly connected with
disobedience to so slight a command?
III. Consequences of the Fall, so far as respects Adam.
1. Death.
2. Positive and formal exclusion from God’s presence.
Section V.—Imputation Of Adam’s Sin To His Posterity.
I. Theories of Imputation.
1. The Pelagian Theory, or Theory of Man’s natural Innocence.
2. The Arminian Theory, or Theory of voluntarily appropriated
Depravity.
3. The New School Theory, or Theory of uncondemnable
Vitiosity.
4. The Federal Theory, or Theory of Condemnation by Covenant.
5. Theory of Mediate Imputation, or Theory of Condemnation for
Depravity.
6. The Augustinian Theory, or Theory of Adam’s Natural
Headship.
II.—Objections to the Augustinian Doctrine of Imputation.
Section VI.—Consequences Of Sin To Adam’s Posterity.
I. Depravity.
1. Depravity partial or total?
2. Ability or inability?
II. Guilt.
1. Nature of guilt.
2. Degrees of guilt.
III. Penalty.
1. Idea of penalty.
2. The actual penalty of sin.
Section VII.—The Salvation Of Infants.
Part VI. Soteriology, Or The Doctrine Of Salvation Through The Work Of
Christ And Of The Holy Spirit.
Chapter I. Christology, Or The Redemption Wrought By Christ.
Section I.—Historical Preparation For Redemption.
I. Negative Preparation,—in the history of the heathen world.
II. Positive Preparation,—in the history of Israel.
Section II.—The Person Of Christ.
I. Historical Survey of Views Respecting the Person of Christ.
II. The two Natures of Christ,—their Reality and Integrity.
1. The Humanity of Christ.
2. The Deity of Christ.
III. The Union of the two Natures in one Person.
1. Proof of this Union.
2. Modern misrepresentations of this Union.
3. The real nature of this Union.
Section III.—The Two States Of Christ.
I. The State of Humiliation.
1. The nature of this humiliation.
2. The stages of Christ’s humiliation.
II. The State of Exaltation.
1. The nature of this exaltation.
2. The stages of Christ’s exaltation.
Section IV.—The Offices Of Christ.
I. The Prophetic Office of Christ.
1. The nature of Christ’s prophetic work.
2. The stages of Christ’s prophetic work.
II. The Priestly Office of Christ.
1. Christ’s Sacrificial Work, or the Doctrine of the
Atonement.
A. Scripture Methods of Representing the Atonement.
B. The Institution of Sacrifice, more especially as found
in the Mosaic system.
C. Theories of the Atonement.
1st. The Socinian, or Example Theory of the Atonement.
2nd. The Bushnellian, or Moral Influence Theory of the
Atonement.
3d. The Grotian, or Governmental Theory of the
Atonement.
4th. The Irvingian Theory, or Theory of Gradually
Extirpated Depravity.
5th. The Anselmic, or Commercial Theory of the
Atonement.
6th. The Ethical Theory of the Atonement.
D. Objections to the Ethical Theory of the Atonement.
E. The Extent of the Atonement.
2. Christ’s Intercessory Work.
III. The Kingly Office of Christ.
[Cover Art]
[Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]
Christo Deo Salvatori.
“THE EYE SEES ONLY THAT WHICH IT BRINGS WITH IT THE POWER OF
SEEING.”—_Cicero._
“OPEN THOU MINE EYES, THAT I MAY BEHOLD WONDROUS THINGS OUT OF THY
LAW.”—_Psalm 119:18._
“FOR WITH THEE IS THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE: IN THY LIGHT SHALL WE SEE
LIGHT.”—_Psalm 36:9._
“FOR WE KNOW IN PART, AND WE PROPHESY IN PART; BUT WHEN THAT WHICH IS
PERFECT IS COME, THAT WHICH IS IN PART SHALL BE DONE AWAY.”—_1 Cor. 13:9,
10._
PART IV. THE NATURE, DECREES, AND WORKS OF GOD. (CONTINUED)
Chapter IV. The Works Of God; Or The Execution Of The Decrees.
Section I.—Creation.
I. Definition Of Creation.
By creation we mean that free act of the triune God by which in the
beginning for his own glory he made, without the use of preëxisting
materials, the whole visible and invisible universe.
Creation is designed origination, by a transcendent and personal God, of
that which itself is not God. The universe is related to God as our own
volitions are related to ourselves. They are not ourselves, and we are
greater than they. Creation is not simply the idea of God, or even the
plan of God, but it is the idea externalized, the plan executed; in other
words, it implied an exercise, not only of intellect, but also of will,
and this will is not an instinctive and unconscious will, but a will that
is personal and free. Such exercise of will seems to involve, not
self-development, but self-limitation, on the part of God; the
transformation of energy into force, and so a beginning of time, with its
finite successions. But, whatever the relation of creation to time,
creation makes the universe wholly dependent upon God, as its originator.
F. H. Johnson, in Andover Rev., March, 1891:280, and What is
Reality, 285—“Creation is designed origination.... Men never could
have thought of God as the Creator of the world, were it not that
they had first known themselves as creators.” We agree with the
doctrine of Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause. Man creates ideas
and volitions, without use of preëxisting material. He also
indirectly, through these ideas and volitions, creates
brain-modifications. This creation, as Johnson has shown, is
without hands, yet elaborate, selective, progressive.
Schopenhauer: “Matter is nothing more than causation; its true
being is its action.”
Prof. C. L. Herrick, Denison Quarterly, 1896:248, and
Psychological Review, March, 1899, advocates what he calls
_dynamism_, which he regards as the only alternative to a
materialistic dualism which posits matter, and a God above and
distinct from matter. He claims that the predicate of reality can
apply only to energy. To speak of energy as _residing in_
something is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it
continues our guest _ad infinitum_. “Force,” he says, “is energy
under resistance, or self-limited energy, for all parts of the
universe are derived from the energy. Energy manifesting itself
under self-conditioning or differential forms is force. The change
of pure energy into force is creation—the introduction of
resistance. The progressive complication of this interference is
evolution—a form of orderly resolution of energy. Substance is
pure spontaneous energy. God’s substance is his energy—the
infinite and inexhaustible store of spontaneity which makes up his
being. The form which self-limitation impresses upon substance, in
revealing it in force, is not God, because it no longer possesses
the attributes of spontaneity and universality, though it emanates
from him. When we speak of energy as self-limited, we simply imply
that spontaneity is intelligent. The sum of God’s acts is his
being. There is no _causa posterior_ or _extranea_, which spurs
him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the
outcome. We can speak of _absolute_, but not of _infinite_ or
_immutable_, substance. The Universe is but the partial expression
of an infinite God.”
Our view of creation is so nearly that of Lotze, that we here
condense Ten Broeke’s statement of his philosophy: “Things are
concreted laws of action. If the idea of being must include
permanence as well as activity, we must say that only the personal
truly is. All else is flow and process. We can interpret ontology
only from the side of personality. Possibility of interaction
requires the dependence of the mutually related many of the system
upon an all-embracing, coördinating One. The finite is a mode or
phenomenon of the One Being. Mere things are only modes of
energizing of the One. Self-conscious personalities are created,
posited, and depend on the One in a different way. Interaction of
things is immanent action of the One, which the perceiving mind
interprets as causal. Real interaction is possible only between
the Infinite and the created finite, _i. e._, self-conscious
persons. The finite is not a part of the Infinite, nor does it
partly exhaust the stuff of the Infinite. The One, by an act of
freedom, posits the many, and the many have their ground and unity
in the Will and Thought of the One. Both the finite and the
Infinite are free and intelligent.
“Space is not an extra-mental reality, _sui generis_, nor an order
of relations among realities, but a form of dynamic appearance,
the ground of which is the fixed orderly changes in reality. So
time is the form of change, the subjective interpretation of
timeless yet successive changes in reality. So far as God is the
ground of the world-process, he is in time. So far as he
transcends the world-process in his self-conscious personality, he
is not in time. Motion too is the subjective interpretation of
changes in things, which changes are determined by the demands of
the world-system and the purpose being realized in it. Not
atomism, but dynamism, is the truth. Physical phenomena are
referable to the activity of the Infinite, which activity is given
a substantive character because we think under the form of
substance and attribute. Mechanism is compatible with teleology.
Mechanism is universal and is necessary to all system. But it is
limited by purpose, and by the possible appearance of any new law,
force, or act of freedom.
“The soul is not a function of material activities, but is a true
reality. The system is such that it can admit new factors, and the
soul is one of these possible new factors. The soul is created as
substantial reality, in contrast with other elements of the
system, which are only phenomenal manifestations of the One
Reality. The relation between soul and body is that of interaction
between the soul and the universe, the body being that part of the
universe which stands in closest relation with the soul (_versus_
Bradley, who holds that ‘body and soul alike are phenomenal
arrangements, neither one of which has any title to fact which is
not owned by the other’). Thought is a knowledge of reality. We
must assume an adjustment between subject and object. This
assumption is founded on the postulate of a morally perfect God.”
To Lotze, then, the only real creation is that of finite
personalities,—matter being only a mode of the divine activity.
See Lotze, Microcosmos, and Philosophy of Religion. Bowne, in his
Metaphysics and his Philosophy of Theism, is the best expositor of
Lotze’s system.
In further explanation of our definition we remark that
(_a_) Creation is not “production out of nothing,” as if “nothing” were a
substance out of which “something” could be formed.
We do not regard the doctrine of Creation as bound to the use of
the phrase “creation out of nothing,” and as standing or falling
with it. The phrase is a philosophical one, for which we have no
Scriptural warrant, and it is objectionable as intimating that
“nothing” can itself be an object of thought and a source of
being. The germ of truth intended to be conveyed in it can better
be expressed in the phrase “without use of preëxisting materials.”
(_b_) Creation is not a fashioning of preëxisting materials, nor an
emanation from the substance of Deity, but is a making of that to exist
which once did not exist, either in form or substance.
There is nothing divine in creation but the origination of
substance. Fashioning is competent to the creature also. Gassendi
said to Descartes that God’s creation, if he is the author of
forms but not of substances, is only that of the tailor who
clothes a man with his apparel. But substance is not necessarily
material. We are to conceive of it rather after the analogy of our
own ideas and volitions, and as a manifestation of spirit.
Creation is not simply the thought of God, nor even the plan of
God, but rather the externalization of that thought and the
execution of that plan. Nature is “a great sheet let down from God
out of heaven,” and containing “nothing that is common or
unclean;” but nature is not God nor a part of God, any more than
our ideas and volitions are ourselves or a part of ourselves.
Nature is a partial manifestation of God, but it does not exhaust
God.
(_c_) Creation is not an instinctive or necessary process of the divine
nature, but is the free act of a rational will, put forth for a definite
and sufficient end.
Creation is different in kind from that eternal process of the
divine nature in virtue of which we speak of generation and
procession. The Son is begotten of the Father, and is of the same
essence; the world is created without preëxisting material, is
different from God, and is made by God. Begetting is a necessary
act; creation is the act of God’s free grace. Begetting is
eternal, out of time; creation is in time, or with time.
Studia Biblica, 4:148—“Creation is the voluntary limitation which
God has imposed on himself.... It can only be regarded as a
Creation of free spirits.... It is a form of almighty power to
submit to limitation. Creation is not a development of God, but a
circumscription of God.... The world is not the expression of God,
or an emanation from God, but rather his self-limitation.”
(_d_) Creation is the act of the triune God, in the sense that all the
persons of the Trinity, themselves uncreated, have a part in it—the Father
as the originating, the Son as the mediating, the Spirit as the realizing
cause.
That all of God’s creative activity is exercised through Christ
has been sufficiently proved in our treatment of the Trinity and
of Christ’s deity as an element of that doctrine (see pages 310,
311). We may here refer to the texts which have been previously
considered, namely, _John 1:3, 4_—“_All things were made through
him, and without him was not anything made. That which hath been
made was life in him_”; _1 Cor. 8:6_—“_one Lord, Jesus Christ,
through whom are all things_”; _Col. 1:16_—“_all things have been
created through him, and unto him_”; _Heb. 1:10_—“_Thou, Lord, in
the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the
heavens are the works of thy hands._”
The work of the Holy Spirit seems to be that of completing,
bringing to perfection. We can understand this only by remembering
that our Christian knowledge and love are brought to their
consummation by the Holy Spirit, and that he is also the principle
of our natural self-consciousness, uniting subject and object in a
subject-object. If matter is conceived of as a manifestation of
spirit, after the idealistic philosophy, then the Holy Spirit may
be regarded as the perfecting and realizing agent in the
externalization of the divine ideas. While it was the Word though
whom all things were made, the Holy Spirit was the author of life,
order, and adornment. Creation is not a mere manufacturing,—it is
a spiritual act.
John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:120—“The creation
of the world cannot be by a Being who is external. Power
presupposes an object on which it is exerted. 129—There is in the
very nature of God a reason why he should reveal himself in, and
communicate himself to, a world of finite existences, or fulfil
and realize himself in the being and life of nature and man. His
nature would not be what it is if such a world did not exist;
something would be lacking to the completeness of the divine being
without it. 144—Even with respect to human thought or
intelligence, it is mind or spirit which creates the world. It is
not a ready-made world on which we look; in perceiving our world
we make it. 152-154—We make progress as we cease to think our own
thoughts and become media of the universal Intelligence.” While we
accept Caird’s idealistic interpretation of creation, we dissent
from his intimation that creation is a necessity to God. The
trinitarian being of God renders him sufficient to himself, even
without creation. Yet those very trinitarian relations throw light
upon the method of creation, since they disclose to us the order
of all the divine activity. On the definition of Creation, see
Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:11.
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Creation.
Creation is a truth of which mere science or reason cannot fully assure
us. Physical science can observe and record changes, but it knows nothing
of origins. Reason cannot absolutely disprove the eternity of matter. For
proof of the doctrine of Creation, therefore, we rely wholly upon
Scripture. Scripture supplements science, and renders its explanation of
the universe complete.
Drummond, in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World, claims that
atoms, as “manufactured articles,” and the dissipation of energy,
prove the creation of the visible from the invisible. See the same
doctrine propounded in “The Unseen Universe.” But Sir Charles
Lyell tells us: “Geology is the autobiography of the earth,—but
like all autobiographies, it does not go back to the beginning.”
Hopkins, Yale Lectures on the Scriptural View of Man: “There is
nothing _a priori_ against the eternity of matter.” Wardlaw, Syst.
Theol., 2:65—“We cannot form any distinct conception of creation
out of nothing. The very idea of it might never have occurred to
the mind of man, had it not been traditionally handed down as a
part of the original revelation to the parents of the race.”
Hartmann, the German philosopher, goes back to the original
elements of the universe, and then says that science stands
petrified before the question of their origin, as before a
Medusa’s head. But in the presence of problems, says Dorner, the
duty of science is not petrifaction, but solution. This is
peculiarly true, if science is, as Hartmann thinks, a complete
explanation of the universe. Since science, by her own
acknowledgment, furnishes no such explanation of the origin of
things, the Scripture revelation with regard to creation meets a
demand of human reason, by adding the one fact without which
science must forever be devoid of the highest unity and
rationality. For advocacy of the eternity of matter, see
Martineau, Essays, 1:157-169.
E. H. Johnson, in Andover Review, Nov. 1891:505 sq., and Dec.
1891:592 sq., remarks that evolution can be traced backward to
more and more simple elements, to matter without motion and with
no quality but being. Now make it still more simple by divesting
it of existence, and you get back to the necessity of a Creator.
An infinite number of past stages is impossible. There is no
infinite number. Somewhere there must be a beginning. We grant to
Dr. Johnson that the only alternative to creation is a
materialistic dualism, or an eternal matter which is the product
of the divine mind and will. The theories of dualism and of
creation from eternity we shall discuss hereafter.
1. Direct Scripture Statements.
A. Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” To
this it has been objected that the verb ברא does not necessarily denote
production without the use of preexisting materials (see Gen. 1:27 “God
created man in his own image”; _cf._ 2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the
dust of the ground”; also Ps. 51:10—“Create in me a clean heart”).
“In the first two chapters of Genesis ברא is used (1) of the
creation of the universe (_1:1_); (2) of the creation of the great
sea monsters (_1:21_); (3) of the creation of man (_1:27_).
Everywhere else we read of God’s _making_, as from an already
created substance, the firmament (_1:7_), the sun, moon and stars
(_1:16_), the brute creation (_1:25_); or of his _forming_ the
beasts of the field out of the ground (_2:19_); or, lastly, of his
_building up_ into a woman the rib he had taken from man (_2:22_,
margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“_Bara_
is thus reserved for marking the first introduction of each of the
three great spheres of existence—the world of matter, the world of
life, and the spiritual world represented by man.”
We grant, in reply, that the argument for absolute creation derived from
the mere word ברא is not entirely conclusive. Other considerations in
connection with the use of this word, however, seem to render this
interpretation of Gen. 1:1 the most plausible. Some of these
considerations we proceed to mention.
(_a_) While we acknowledge that the verb ברא “does not necessarily or
invariably denote production without the use of preëxisting materials, we
still maintain that it signifies the production of an effect for which no
natural antecedent existed before, and which can be only the result of
divine agency.” For this reason, in the Kal species it is used only of
God, and is never accompanied by any accusative denoting material.
No accusative denoting material follows _bara_, in the passages
indicated, for the reason that all thought of material was absent.
See Dillmann, Genesis, 18; Oehler, Theol. O. T., 1:177. The
quotation in the text above is from Green, Hebrew Chrestomathy,
67. But E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 88, remarks: “Whether
the Scriptures teach the absolute origination of matter—its
creation out of nothing—is an open question.... No decisive
evidence is furnished by the Hebrew word _bara_.”
A moderate and scholarly statement of the facts is furnished by
Professor W. J. Beecher, in S. S. Times, Dec. 23, 1893:807—“To
create is to originate divinely.... Creation, in the sense in
which the Bible uses the word, does not exclude the use of
materials previously existing; for man was taken from the ground
(_Gen. 2:7_), and woman was builded from the rib of a man
(_2:22_). Ordinarily God brings things into existence through the
operation of second causes. But it is possible, in our thinking,
to withdraw attention from the second causes, and to think of
anything as originating simply from God, apart from second causes.
To think of a thing thus is to think of it as created. The Bible
speaks of Israel as created, of the promised prosperity of
Jerusalem as created, of the Ammonite people and the king of Tyre
as created, of persons of any date in history as created (_Is.
43:1-15_; _65:18_; _Ez. 21:30_; _28:13, 15_; _Ps. 102:18_; _Eccl.
12:1_; _Mal. 2:10_). Miracles and the ultimate beginnings of
second causes are necessarily thought of as creative acts; all
other originating of things may be thought of, according to the
purpose we have in mind, either as creation or as effected by
second causes.”
(_b_) In the account of the creation, ברא seems to be distinguished from
עשה, “to make” either with or without the use of already existing material
(ברא לעשות, “created in making” or “made by creation,” in 2:3; and ויעש,
of the firmament, in 1:7), and from יצר, “to form” out of such material.
(See ויברא, of man regarded as a spiritual being, in 1:27; but ויצר, of
man regarded as a physical being, in 2:7.)
See Conant, Genesis, 1; Bible Com., 1:37—“ ‘created to make’ (in
_Gen. 2:3_) = created out of nothing, in order that he might make
out of it all the works recorded in the six days.” Over against
these texts, however, we must set others in which there appears no
accurate distinguishing of these words from one another. _Bara_ is
used in _Gen. 1:1_, _asah_ in _Gen. 2:4_, of the creation of the
heaven and earth. Of earth, both _yatzar_ and _asah_ are used in
_Is. 45:18_. In regard to man, in _Gen. 1:27_ we find _bara_; in
_Gen. 1:26_ and _9:6_, _asah_; and in _Gen. 2:7_, _yatzar_. In
_Is. 43:7_, all three are found in the same verse: “_whom I have_
_bara_ _for my glory, I have_ _yatzar_, _yea, I have_ _asah_
_him_.” In _Is. 45:12_, “_asah_ _the earth, and_ _bara_ _man upon
it_”; but in _Gen. 1:1_ we read: “_God_ _bara_ _the earth_,” and
in _9:6_ “_asah_ _man_.” _Is. 44:2—__“__the Lord that_ _asah_
_thee_ (_i. e._, man) and _yatzar_ _thee_”; but in _Gen. 1:27_,
God “_bara_ _man_.” _Gen. 5:2_—“_male and female_ _bara_ _he
them_.” _Gen. 2:22_—“_the rib_ _asah_ _he a woman_”; _Gen.
2:7_—“_he_ _yatzar_ _man_”; _i. e._, _bara_ male and female, yet
_asah_ the woman and _yatzar_ the man. _Asah_ is not always used
for _transform_: _Is. 41:20_—“_fir-tree, pine, box-tree_” in
nature—_bara_; _Ps. 51:10_—“_bara_ _in me a clean heart_”; _Is.
65:18_—God “_bara_ _Jerusalem into a rejoicing_.”
(_c_) The context shows that the meaning here is a making without the use
of preëxisting materials. Since the earth in its rude, unformed, chaotic
condition is still called “the earth” in verse 2, the word ברא in verse 1
cannot refer to any shaping or fashioning of the elements, but must
signify the calling of them into being.
Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absolute _berashith_, ‘_in
the beginning_,’ the divine creation is fixed as an absolute
beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”
_Verse 2_ cannot be the beginning of a history, for it begins with
“_and_.” Delitzsch says of the expression “_the earth was without
form and void_”: “From this it is evident that the void and
formless state of the earth was not uncreated or without a
beginning. ... It is evident that ‘_the heaven and earth_’ as God
created them in the beginning were not the well-ordered universe,
but the world in its elementary form.”
(_d_) The fact that ברא may have had an original signification of
“cutting,” “forming,” and that it retains this meaning in the Piel
conjugation, need not prejudice the conclusion thus reached, since terms
expressive of the most spiritual processes are derived from sensuous
roots. If ברא does not signify absolute creation, no word exists in the
Hebrew language that can express this idea.
(_e_) But this idea of production without the use of preëxisting materials
unquestionably existed among the Hebrews. The later Scriptures show that
it had become natural to the Hebrew mind. The possession of this idea by
the Hebrews, while it is either not found at all or is very dimly and
ambiguously expressed in the sacred books of the heathen, can be best
explained by supposing that it was derived from this early revelation in
Genesis.
E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 94—“_Rom. 4:17_ tells us
that the faith of Abraham, to whom God had promised a son, grasped
the fact that God calls into existence ‘_the things that are
not_.’ This may be accepted as Paul’s interpretation of the first
verse of the Bible.” It is possible that the heathen had
occasional glimpses of this truth, though with no such clearness
as that with which it was held in Israel. Perhaps we may say that
through the perversions of later nature-worship something of the
original revelation of absolute creation shines, as the first
writing of a palimpsest appears faintly through the subsequent
script with which it has been overlaid. If the doctrine of
absolute creation is found at all among the heathen, it is greatly
blurred and obscured. No one of the heathen books teaches it as do
the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews. Yet it seems as if this “One
accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world has never lost.”
Bib. Com., 1:31—“Perhaps no other ancient language, however
refined and philosophical, could have so dearly distinguished the
different acts of the Maker of all things [as the Hebrew did With
its four different words], and that because all heathen philosophy
esteemed matter to be eternal and uncreated.” Prof. E. D. Burton:
“Brahmanism, and the original religion of which Zoroastrianism was
a reformation, were Eastern and Western divisions of a primitive
Aryan, and probably monotheistic, religion. The Vedas, which
represented the Brahmanism, leave it a question whence the world
came, whether from God by emanation, or by the shaping of material
eternally existent. Later Brahmanism is pantheistic, and Buddhism,
the Reformation of Brahmanism, is atheistic.” See Shedd, Dogm.
Theol., 1:471, and Mosheim’s references in Cudworth’s Intellectual
System, 3:140.
We are inclined still to hold that the doctrine of absolute
creation was known to no other ancient nation besides the Hebrews.
Recent investigations, however, render this somewhat more doubtful
than it once seemed to be. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 142, 143,
finds creation among the early Babylonians. In his Religions of
Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397, he says: “The elements of
Hebrew cosmology are all Babylonian; even the creative word itself
was a Babylonian conception; but the spirit which inspires the
cosmology is the antithesis to that which inspired the cosmology
of Babylonia. Between the polytheism of Babylonia and the
monotheism of Israel a gulf is fixed which cannot be spanned. So
soon as we have a clear monotheism, absolute creation is a
corollary. As the monotheistic idea is corrupted, creation gives
place to pantheistic transformation.”
It is now claimed by others that Zoroastrianism, the Vedas, and
the religion of the ancient Egyptians had the idea of absolute
creation. On creation in the Zoroastrian system, see our treatment
of Dualism, page 382. Vedic hymn in Rig Veda, 10:9, quoted by J.
F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:205—“Originally this universe
was soul only; nothing else whatsoever existed, active or
inactive. He thought: ‘I will create worlds’; thus he created
these various worlds: earth, light, mortal being, and the waters.”
Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 216-222, speaks of a papyrus on the
staircase of the British Museum, which reads: “The great God, the
Lord of heaven and earth, who made all things which are ... the
almighty God, self-existent, who made heaven and earth; ... the
heaven was yet uncreated, uncreated was the earth; thou hast put
together the earth; ... who made all things, but was not made.”
But the Egyptian religion in its later development, as well as
Brahmanism, was pantheistic, and it is possible that all the
expressions we have quoted are to be interpreted, not as
indicating a belief in creation out of nothing, but as asserting
emanation, or the taking on by deity of new forms and modes of
existence. On creation in heathen systems, see Pierret,
Mythologie, and answer to it by Maspero; Hymn to Amen-Rha, in
“Records of the Past”; G. C. Müller, Literature of Greece, 87, 88;
George Smith, Chaldean Genesis, chapters 1, 3, 5 and 6; Dillmann,
Com. on Genesis, 6th edition, Introd., 5-10; LeNormant, Hist.
Ancienne de l’Orient, 1:17-26; 5:238; Otto Zöckler, art.:
Schöpfung, in Herzog and Plitt, Encyclop.; S. B. Gould, Origin and
Devel. of Relig. Beliefs, 281-292.
B. Hebrews 11:3—“By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed
by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things
which appear” = the world was not made out of sensible and preëxisting
material, but by the direct fiat of omnipotence (see Alford, and Lünemann,
Meyer’s Com. _in loco_).
Compare 2 Maccabees 7:28—ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἐποίησεν αὐτὰ ὁ Θεός. This
the Vulgate translated by “quia ex nihilo fecit illa Deus,” and
from the Vulgate the phrase “creation out of nothing” is derived.
Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, points out that Wisdom 11:17 has ἐξ
ἀμόρφου ὕλης, interprets by this the ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων in 2 Maccabees,
and denies that this last refers to creation out of nothing. But
we must remember that the later Apocryphal writings were composed
under the influence of the Platonic philosophy; that the passage
in Wisdom may be a rationalistic interpretation of that in
Maccabees; and that even if it were independent, we are not to
assume a harmony of view in the Apocrypha. 2 Maccabees 7:28 must
stand by itself as a testimony to Jewish belief in creation
without use of preëxisting material,—belief which can be traced to
no other source than the Old Testament Scriptures. Compare _Ex.
34:10_—“_I will do marvels such as have not been wrought_ [marg.
“_created_”] _in all the earth_”; _Num. 16:30_—“_if Jehovah make a
new thing_” [marg. “_create a creation_”]; _Is. 4:5_—“_Jehovah
will create ... a cloud and smoke_”; _41:20_—“_the Holy One of
Israel hath created it_”; _45:7, 8_—“_I form the light, and create
darkness_”; _57:19_—“_I create the fruit of the lips_”;
_65:17_—“_I create new heavens and a new earth_”; _Jer.
31:22_—“_Jehovah hath created a new thing._”
_Rom. 4:17_—“_God, who giveth life to the dead, and calleth the
things that are not, as though they were_”; _1 Cor. 1:28_—“_things
that are not_” [did God choose] “_that he might bring to naught
the things that are_”; _2 Cor. 4:6_—“_God, that said, Light shall
shine out of darkness_”—created light without preëxisting
material,—for darkness is no material; _Col. 1:16, 17_—“_in him
were all things created ... and he is before all things_”; so also
_Ps. 33:9_—“_he spake, and it was done_”; _148:5_—“_he commanded,
and they were created._” See Philo, Creation of the World, chap.
1-7, and Life of Moses, book 3, chap. 36—“He produced the most
perfect work, the Cosmos, out of non-existence (τοῦ μὴ ὄντος) into
being (εἰς τὸ εἶναι).” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 94—“We have no
reason to believe that the Hebrew mind had the idea of creation
out of _invisible_ materials. But creation out of _visible_
materials is in _Hebrews 11:3_ expressly denied. This text is
therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made
without the use of _any_ preëxisting materials.”
2. Indirect evidence from Scripture.
(_a_) The past duration of the world is limited; (_b_) before the world
began to be, each of the persons of the Godhead already existed; (_c_) the
origin of the universe is ascribed to God, and to each of the persons of
the Godhead. These representations of Scripture are not only most
consistent with the view that the universe was created by God without use
of preëxisting material, but they are inexplicable upon any other
hypothesis.
(_a_) _Mark 13:19_—“_from the beginning of the creation which God
created until now_”; _John 17:5_—“_before the world was_”; _Eph.
1:4_—“_before the foundation of the world._” (_b_) _Ps.
90:2_—“_Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever thou
hadst formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to
everlasting thou art God_”; _Prov. 8:23_—“_I was set up from
everlasting, from the beginning, Before the earth was_”; _John
1:1_—“_In the beginning was the Word_”; _Col. 1:17_—“_he is before
all things_”; _Heb. 9:14_—“_the eternal Spirit_” (see Tholuck,
Com. _in loco_). (_c_) _Eph. 3:9_—“_God who created all things_”;
_Rom. 11:36_—“_of him ... are all things_”; _1 Cor. 8:6_—“_one
God, the Father, of whom we are all things ... one Lord, Jesus
Christ, through whom are all things_”; _John 1:3_—“_all things
were made through him_”; _Col 1:16_—“_in him were all things
created ... all things have been created through him, and unto
him_”; _Heb. 1:2_—“_through whom also he made the worlds_”; _Gen.
1:2_—“_and the Spirit of God moved_ [marg. “_was brooding_”] _upon
the face of the waters._” From these passages we may also infer
that (1) all things are absolutely dependent upon God; (2) God
exercises supreme control over all things; (3) God is the only
infinite Being; (4) God alone is eternal; (5) there is no
substance out of which God creates; (6) things do not proceed from
God by necessary emanation; the universe has its source and
originator in God’s transcendent and personal will. See, on this
indirect proof of creation, Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:231. Since
other views, however, have been held to be more rational, we
proceed to the examination of
III. Theories which oppose Creation.
1. Dualism.
Of dualism there are two forms:
A. That which holds to two self-existent principles, God and matter. These
are distinct from and coëternal with each other. Matter, however, is an
unconscious, negative, and imperfect substance, which is subordinate to
God and is made the instrument of his will. This was the underlying
principle of the Alexandrian Gnostics. It was essentially an attempt to
combine with Christianity the Platonic or Aristotelian conception of the
ὕλη. In this way it was thought to account for the existence of evil, and
to escape the difficulty of imagining a production without use of
preëxisting material. Basilides (flourished 125) and Valentinus (died
160), the representatives of this view, were influenced also by Hindu
philosophy, and their dualism is almost indistinguishable from pantheism.
A similar view has been held in modern times by John Stuart Mill and
apparently by Frederick W. Robertson.
Dualism seeks to show how the One becomes the many, how the
Absolute gives birth to the relative, how the Good can consist
with evil. The ὕλη of Plato seems to have meant nothing but empty
space, whose not-being, or merely negative existence, prevented
the full realization of the divine ideas. Aristotle regarded the
ὕλη as a more positive cause of imperfection,—it was like the hard
material which hampers the sculptor in expressing his thought. The
real problem for both Plato and Aristotle was to explain the
passage from pure spiritual existence to that which is phenomenal
and imperfect, from the absolute and unlimited to that which
exists in space and time. Finiteness, instead of being created,
was regarded as having eternal existence and as limiting all
divine manifestations. The ὕλη, from being a mere abstraction,
became either a negative or a positive source of evil. The
Alexandrian Jews, under the influence of Hellenic culture, sought
to make this dualism explain the doctrine of creation.
Basilides and Valentinus, however, were also under the influence
of a pantheistic philosophy brought in from the remote East—the
philosophy of Buddhism, which taught that the original Source of
all was a nameless Being, devoid of all qualities, and so,
indistinguishable from Nothing. From this Being, which is
Not-being, all existing things proceed. Aristotle and Hegel
similarly taught that pure Being = Nothing. But inasmuch as the
object of the Alexandrian philosophers was to show how something
could be originated, they were obliged to conceive of the
primitive Nothing as capable of such originating. They, moreover,
in the absence of any conception of absolute creation, were
compelled to conceive of a material which could be fashioned.
Hence the Void, the Abyss, is made to take the place of matter. If
it be said that they did not conceive of the Void or the Abyss as
substance, we reply that they gave it just as substantial
existence as they gave to the first Cause of things, which, in
spite of their negative descriptions of it, involved Will and
Design. And although they do not attribute to this secondary
substance a positive influence for evil, they notwithstanding see
in it the unconscious hinderer of all good.
Principal Tulloch, in Encyc. Brit., 10:704—“In the Alexandrian
Gnosis ... the stream of being in its ever outward flow at length
comes in contact with dead matter which thus receives animation
and becomes a living source of evil.” Windelband, Hist.
Philosophy, 129, 144, 239—“With Valentinus, side by side with the
Deity poured forth into the Pleroma or Fulness of spiritual forms,
appears the Void, likewise original and from eternity; beside Form
appears matter; beside the good appears the evil.” Mansel, Gnostic
Heresies, 139—“The Platonic theory of an inert, semi-existent
matter, ... was adopted by the Gnosis of Egypt.... 187—Valentinus
does not content himself, like Plato, ... with assuming as the
germ of the natural world an unformed matter existing from all
eternity.... The whole theory may be described as a development,
in allegorical language of the pantheistic hypothesis which in its
outline had been previously adopted by Basilides.” A. H. Newman,
Ch. History, 1:181-192, calls the philosophy of Basilides
“fundamentally pantheistic.” “Valentinus,” he says, “was not so
careful to insist on the original non-existence of God and
everything.” We reply that even to Basilides the Non-existent One
is endued with power; and this power accomplishes nothing until it
comes in contact with things non-existent, and out of them
fashions the seed of the world. The things non-existent are as
substantial as is the Fashioner, and they imply both objectivity
and limitation.
Lightfoot, Com. on Colossians, 76-113, esp. 82, has traced a
connection between the Gnostic doctrine, the earlier Colossian
heresy, and the still earlier teaching of the Essenes of
Palestine. All these were characterized by (1) the spirit of caste
or intellectual exclusiveness; (2) peculiar tenets as to creation
and as to evil; (3) practical asceticism. Matter is evil and
separates man from God; hence intermediate beings between man and
God as objects of worship; hence also mortification of the body as
a means of purifying man from sin. Paul’s antidote for both errors
was simply the person of Christ, the true and only Mediator and
Sanctifier. See Guericke, Church History, 1:161.
Harnack, Hist. Dogma, 1:128—“The majority of Gnostic undertakings
may be viewed as attempts to transform Christianity into a
theosophy.... In Gnosticism the Hellenic spirit desired to make
itself master of Christianity, or more correctly, of the Christian
communities.”... 232—Harnack represents one of the fundamental
philosophic doctrines of Gnosticism to be that of the Cosmos as a
mixture of matter with divine sparks, which has arisen from a
descent of the latter into the former [Alexandrian Gnosticism],
or, as some say, from the perverse, or at least merely permitted
undertaking of a subordinate spirit [Syrian Gnosticism]. We may
compare the Hebrew Sadducee with the Greek Epicurean; the Pharisee
with the Stoic; the Essene with the Pythagorean. The Pharisees
overdid the idea of God’s transcendence. Angels must come in
between God and the world. Gnostic intermediaries were the logical
outcome. External works of obedience were alone valid. Christ
preached, instead of this, a religion of the heart. Wendt,
Teaching of Jesus, 1:52—“The rejection of animal sacrifices and
consequent abstaining from temple-worship on the part of the
Essenes, which seems out of harmony with the rest of their legal
obedience, is most simply explained as the consequence of their
idea that to bring to God a bloody animal offering was derogatory
to his transcendental character. Therefore they interpreted the O.
T. command in an allegorizing way.”
Lyman Abbott: “The Oriental dreams; the Greek defines; the Hebrew
acts. All these influences met and intermingled at Alexandria.
Emanations were mediations between the absolute, unknowable,
all-containing God, and the personal, revealed and holy God of
Scripture. Asceticism was one result: matter is undivine,
therefore get rid of it. License was another result: matter is
undivine, therefore disregard it—there is no disease and there is
no sin—the modern doctrine of Christian Science.” Kedney,
Christian Doctrine, 1:360-373; 2:354, conceives of the divine
glory as an eternal material environment of God, out of which the
universe is fashioned.
The author of “The Unseen Universe” (page 17) wrongly calls John
Stuart Mill a Manichæan. But Mill disclaims belief in the
_personality_ of this principle that resists and limits God,—see
his posthumous Essays on Religion, 176-195. F. W. Robertson,
Lectures on Genesis, 4-16—“Before the creation of the world all
was chaos ... but with the creation, order began.... God did not
cease from creation, for creation is going on every day. Nature is
God at work. Only after surprising changes, as in spring-time, do
we say figuratively, ‘God rests.’ ” See also Frothingham,
Christian Philosophy.
With regard to this view, we remark:
(_a_) The maxim _ex nihilo nihil fit_, upon which it rests, is true only
in so far as it asserts that no event takes place without a cause. It is
false, if it mean that nothing can ever be made except out of material
previously existing. The maxim is therefore applicable only to the realm
of second causes, and does not bar the creative power of the great first
Cause. The doctrine of creation does not dispense with a cause; on the
other hand, it assigns to the universe a sufficient cause in God.
Lucretius: “Nihil posse creari De nihilo, neque quod genitum est
ad nihil revocari.” Persius: “Gigni De nihilo nihil, in nihilum
nil posse reverti.” Martensen, Dogmatics, 116—“The nothing, out of
which God creates the world, is the eternal possibilities of his
will, which are the sources of all the actualities of the world.”
Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 2:292—“When therefore it is
argued that the creation of something from nothing is unthinkable
and is therefore peremptorily to be rejected, the argument seems
to me to be defective. The process is thinkable, but not
imaginable, conceivable but not probable.” See Cudworth,
Intellectual System, 3:81 _sq._ Lipsius, Dogmatik, 288, remarks
that the theory of dualism is quite as difficult as that of
absolute creation. It holds to a point of time when God began to
fashion preëxisting material, and can give no reason why God did
not do it before, since there must always have been in him an
impulse toward this fashioning.
(_b_) Although creation without the use of preëxisting material is
inconceivable, in the sense of being unpicturable to the imagination, yet
the eternity of matter is equally inconceivable. For creation without
preëxisting material, moreover, we find remote analogies in our own
creation of ideas and volitions, a fact as inexplicable as God’s bringing
of new substances into being.
Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 371, 372—“We have to a certain extent
an aid to the thought of absolute creation in our own free
volition, which, as absolutely originating and determining, may be
taken as the type to us of the creative act.” We speak of “the
creative faculty” of the artist or poet. We cannot give reality to
the products of our imaginations, as God can to his. But if
thought were only substance, the analogy would be complete. Shedd,
Dogm. Theol., 1:467—“Our thoughts and volitions are created ex
nihilo, in the sense that one thought is not made out of another
thought, nor one volition out of another volition.” So created
substance may be only the mind and will of God in exercise,
automatically in matter, freely in the case of free beings (see
pages 90, 105-110, 383, and in our treatment of Preservation).
Beddoes: “I have a bit of _Fiat_ in my soul, And can myself create
my little world.” Mark Hopkins: “Man is an image of God as a
creator.... He can purposely create, or cause to be, a future
that, but for him, would not have been.” E. C. Stedman, Nature of
Poetry, 223—“So far as the Poet, the artist, is creative, he
becomes a sharer of the divine imagination and power, and even of
the divine responsibility.” Wordsworth calls the poet a “serene
creator of immortal things.” Imagination, he says, is but another
name for “clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And reason in her
most exalted mood.” “If we are ‘_gods_’ (_Ps. 82:6_), that part of
the Infinite which is embodied in us must partake to a limited
extent of his power to create.” Veitch, Knowing and Being,
289—“Will, the expression of personality, both as originating
resolutions and moulding existing material into form, is the
nearest approach in thought which we can make to divine creation.”
Creation is not simply the thought of God,—it is also the will of
God—thought in expression, reason externalized. Will is creation
out of nothing, in the sense that there is no use of preëxisting
material. In man’s exercise of the creative imagination there is
will, as well as intellect. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 256,
points out that we can be original in (1) the style or form of our
work; (2) in the selection of the objects we imitate; (3) in the
invention of relatively novel combinations of material. Style,
subject, combination, then, comprise the methods of our
originality. Our new conceptions of nature as the expression of
the divine mind and will bring creation more within our
comprehension than did the old conception of the world as
substance capable of existing apart from God. Hudson, Law of
Psychic Phenomena, 294, thinks that we have power to create
visible phantasms, or embodied thoughts, that can be subjectively
perceived by others. See also Hudson’s Scientific Demonstration of
Future Life, 153. He defines genius as the result of the
synchronous action of the objective and subjective faculties.
Jesus of Nazareth, in his judgment, was a wonderful psychic.
Intuitive perception and objective reason were with him always in
the ascendant. His miracles were misinterpreted psychic phenomena.
Jesus never claimed that his works were outside of natural law.
All men have the same intuitional power, though in differing
degrees.
We may add that the begetting of a child by man is the giving of
substantial existence to another. Christ’s creation of man may be
like his own begetting by the Father. Behrends: “The relation
between God and the universe is more intimate and organic than
that between an artist and his work. The marble figure is
independent of the sculptor the moment it is completed. It
remains, though he die. But the universe would vanish in the
withdrawal of the divine presence and indwelling. If I were to use
any figure, it would be that of generation. The immanence of God
is the secret of natural permanence and uniformity. Creation is
primarily a spiritual act. The universe is not what we see and
handle. The real universe is an empire of energies, a hierarchy of
correlated forces, whose reality and unity are rooted in the
rational will of God perpetually active in preservation. But there
is no identity of substance, nor is there any division of the
divine substance.”
Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 36—“A mind is conceivable
which should create its objects outright by pure self-activity and
without dependence on anything beyond itself. Such is our
conception of the Creator’s relation to his objects. But this is
not the case with us except to a very slight extent. Our mental
life itself begins, and we come only gradually to a knowledge of
things, and of ourselves. In some sense our objects are given;
that is, we cannot have objects at will or vary their properties
at our pleasure. In this sense we are passive in knowledge, and no
idealism can remove this fact. But in some sense also our objects
are our own products; for an existing object becomes an object for
us only as we think it, and thus make it our object. In this
sense, knowledge is an active process, and not a passive reception
of readymade information from without.” Clarke, Self and the
Father, 38—“Are we humiliated by having data for our imaginations
to work upon? by being unable to create material? Not unless it be
a shame to be second to the Creator.” Causation is as mysterious
as Creation. Balzac lived with his characters as actual beings. On
the Creative Principle, see N. R. Wood, The Witness of Sin,
114-135.
(_c_) It is unphilosophical to postulate two eternal substances, when one
self-existent Cause of all things will account for the facts. (_d_) It
contradicts our fundamental notion of God as absolute sovereign to suppose
the existence of any other substance to be independent of his will. (_e_)
This second substance with which God must of necessity work, since it is,
according to the theory, inherently evil and the source of evil, not only
limits God’s power, but destroys his blessedness. (_f_) This theory does
not answer its purpose of accounting for moral evil, unless it be also
assumed that spirit is material,—in which case dualism gives place to
materialism.
Martensen, Dogmatics, 121—“God becomes a mere demiurge, if nature
existed before spirit. That spirit only who in a perfect sense is
able to commence his work of creation can have power to complete
it.” If God does not create, he must use what material he finds,
and this working with intractable material must be his perpetual
sorrow. Such limitation in the power of the deity seemed to John
Stuart Mill the best explanation of the existing imperfections of
the universe.
The other form of dualism is:
B. That which holds to the eternal existence of two antagonistic spirits,
one evil and the other good. In this view, matter is not a negative and
imperfect substance which nevertheless has self-existence, but is either
the work or the instrument of a personal and positively malignant
intelligence, who wages war against all good. This was the view of the
Manichæans. Manichæanism is a compound of Christianity and the Persian
doctrine of two eternal and opposite intelligences. Zoroaster, however,
held matter to be pure, and to be the creation of the good Being. Mani
apparently regarded matter as captive to the evil spirit, if not
absolutely his creation.
The old story of Mani’s travels in Greece is wholly a mistake.
Guericke, Church History, 1:185-187, maintains that Manichæanism
contains no mixture of Platonic philosophy, has no connection with
Judaism, and as a sect came into no direct relations with the
Catholic church. Harnoch, Wegweiser, 22, calls Manichæanism a
compound of Gnosticism and Parseeism. Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.:
Mani und die Manichäer, regards Manichæanism as the fruit, acme,
and completion of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a heresy in the
church; Manichæanism, like New Platonism, was an anti-church. J.
P. Lange: “These opposing theories represent various pagan
conceptions of the world, which, after the manner of palimpsests,
show through Christianity.” Isaac Taylor speaks of “the creator of
the carnivora”; and some modern Christians practically regard
Satan as a second and equal God.
On the Religion of Zoroaster, see Haug, Essays on Parsees,
139-161, 302-309; also our quotations on pp. 347-349; Monier
Williams, in 19th Century, Jan. 1881:155-177—Ahura Mazda was the
creator of the universe. Matter was created by him, and was
neither identified with him nor an emanation from him. In the
divine nature there were two opposite, but not opposing,
principles or forces, called “twins”—the one constructive, the
other destructive; the one beneficent, the other maleficent.
Zoroaster called these “twins” also by the name of “spirits,” and
declared that “these two spirits created, the one the reality, the
other the non-reality.” Williams says that these two principles
were conflicting only in name. The only antagonism was between the
resulting good and evil brought about by the free agent, man. See
Jackson, Zoroaster.
We may add that in later times this personification of principles
in the deity seems to have become a definite belief in two
opposing personal spirits, and that Mani, Manes, or Manichæus
adopted this feature of Parseeism, with the addition of certain
Christian elements. Hagenbach, History of Doctrine, 1:470—“The
doctrine of the Manichæans was that creation was the work of
Satan.” See also Gieseler, Church History, 1:203; Neander, Church
History, 1:478-505; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.:
Dualism; and especially Baur, Das manichäische Religionssystem. A.
H. Newman, Ch. History, 1:194—“Manichæism is Gnosticism, with its
Christian elements reduced to a minimum, and the Zoroastrian, old
Babylonian, and other Oriental elements raised to the maximum.
Manichæism is Oriental dualism under Christian names, the
Christian names employed retaining scarcely a trace of their
proper meaning. The most fundamental thing in Manichæism is its
absolute dualism. The kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness
with their rulers stand eternally opposed to each other.”
Of this view we need only say that it is refuted (_a_) by all the
arguments for the unity, omnipotence, sovereignty, and blessedness of God;
(_b_) by the Scripture representations of the prince of evil as the
creature of God and as subject to God’s control.
Scripture passages showing that Satan is God’s creature or subject
are the following: _Col. 1:16_—“_for in him were all things
created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and
things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities
or powers_”; _cf._ _Eph. 6:12_—“_our wrestling is not against
flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the
powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the
spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places_”; _2 Pet.
2:4_—“_God spared not the angels when they sinned, but cast them
down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness, to be
reserved unto judgment_”; _Rev. 20:2_—“_laid hold on the dragon,
the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan_”; _10_—“_and the
devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and
brimstone._”
The closest analogy to Manichæan dualism is found in the popular
conception of the devil held by the mediæval Roman church. It is a
question whether he was regarded as a rival or as a servant of
God. Matheson, Messages of Old Religions, says that Parseeism
recognizes an obstructive element in the nature of God himself.
Moral evil is reality, and there is that element of truth in
Parseeism. But there is no reconciliation, nor is it shown that
all things work together for good. E. H. Johnson: “This theory
sets up matter as a sort of deity, a senseless idol endowed with
the truly divine attribute of self-existence. But we can
acknowledge but one God. To erect matter into an eternal Thing,
independent of the Almighty but forever beside him, is the most
revolting of all theories.” Tennyson, Unpublished Poem (Life,
1:314)—“Oh me! for why is all around us here As if some lesser God
had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would Till
the high God behold it from beyond, And enter it and make it
beautiful?”
E. G. Robinson: “Evil is not eternal; if it were, we should be
paying our respects to it.... There is much Manichæanism in modern
piety. We would influence soul through the body. Hence
sacramentarianism and penance. Puritanism is theological
Manichæanism. Christ recommended fasting because it belonged to
his age. Christianity came from Judaism. Churchism comes largely
from reproducing what Christ did. Christianity is not perfunctory
in its practices. We are to fast only when there is good reason
for it.” L. H. Mills, New World, March, 1895:51, suggests that
Phariseeism may be the same with Farseeism, which is but another
name for Parseeism. He thinks that Resurrection, Immortality,
Paradise, Satan, Judgment, Hell, came from Persian sources, and
gradually drove out the old Sadduceean simplicity. Pfleiderer,
Philos, Religion, 1:206—“According to the Persian legend, the
first human pair was a good creation of the all-wise Spirit,
Ahura, who had breathed into them his own breath. But soon the
primeval men allowed themselves to be seduced by the hostile
Spirit Angromainyu into lying and idolatry, whereby the evil
spirits obtained power over them and the earth and spoiled the
good creation.”
Disselhoff, Die klassische Poesie und die göttliche Offenbarung,
13-25—“The Gathas of Zoroaster are the first poems of humanity. In
them man rouses himself to assert his superiority to nature and
the spirituality of God. God is not identified with nature. The
impersonal nature-gods are vain idols and are causes of
corruption. Their worshippers are servants of falsehood.
Ahura-Mazda (living-wise) is a moral and spiritual personality.
Ahriman is equally eternal but not equally powerful. Good has not
complete victory over evil. Dualism is admitted and unity is lost.
The conflict of faiths leads to separation. While one portion of
the race remains in the Iranian highlands to maintain man’s
freedom and independence of nature, another portion goes
South-East to the luxuriant banks of the Ganges to serve the
deified forces of nature. The East stands for unity, as the West
for duality. Yet Zoroaster in the Gathas is almost deified; and
his religion, which begins by giving predominance to the good
Spirit, ends by being honey-combed with nature-worship.”
2. Emanation.
This theory holds that the universe is of the same substance with God, and
is the product of successive evolutions from his being. This was the view
of the Syrian Gnostics. Their system was an attempt to interpret
Christianity in the forms of Oriental theosophy. A similar doctrine was
taught, in the last century, by Swedenborg.
We object to it on the following grounds: (_a_) It virtually denies the
infinity and transcendence of God,—by applying to him a principle of
evolution, growth, and progress which belongs only to the finite and
imperfect. (_b_) It contradicts the divine holiness,—since man, who by the
theory is of the substance of God, is nevertheless morally evil. (_c_) It
leads logically to pantheism,—since the claim that human personality is
illusory cannot be maintained without also surrendering belief in the
personality of God.
Saturninus of Antioch, Bardesanes of Edessa, Tatian of Assyria,
Marcion of Sinope, all of the second century, were representatives
of this view. Blunt, Dict. of Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.:
Emanation: “The divine operation was symbolized by the image of
the rays of light proceeding from the sun, which were most intense
when nearest to the luminous substance of the body of which they
formed a part, but which decreased in intensity as they receded
from their source, until at last they disappeared altogether in
darkness. So the spiritual effulgence of the Supreme Mind formed a
world of spirit, the intensity of which varied inversely with its
distance from its source, until at length it vanished in matter.
Hence there is a chain of ever expanding Æons which are increasing
attenuations of his substance and the sum of which constitutes his
fulness, _i. e._, the complete revelation of his hidden being.”
Emanation, from _e_, and _manare_, to flow forth. Guericke, Church
History, 1:160—“many flames from one light ... the direct contrary
to the doctrine of creation from nothing.” Neander, Church
History, 1:372-74. The doctrine of emanation is distinctly
materialistic. We hold, on the contrary, that the universe is an
expression of God, but not an emanation from God.
On the difference between Oriental emanation and eternal
generation, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:470, and History Doctrine,
1:11-18, 318, note—“1. That which is eternally generated is
infinite, not finite; it is a divine and eternal person who is not
the world or any portion of it. In the Oriental schemes, emanation
is a mode of accounting for the origin of the finite. But eternal
generation still leaves the finite to be originated. The begetting
of the Son is the generation of an infinite person who afterwards
creates the finite universe _de nihilo_. 2. Eternal generation has
for its result a subsistence or personal hypostasis totally
distinct from the world; but emanation In relation to the deity
yields only an impersonal or at most a personified energy or
effluence which is one of the powers or principles of nature—a
mere _anima mundi_.” The truths of which emanation was the
perversion and caricature were therefore the generation of the Son
and the procession of the Spirit.
Principal Tulloch, in Encyc. Brit., 10:704—“All the Gnostics agree
in regarding this world as not proceeding immediately from the
Supreme Being.... The Supreme Being is regarded as wholly
inconceivable and indescribable—as the unfathomable Abyss
(Valentinus)—the Unnameable (Basilides). From this transcendent
source existence springs by emanation in a series of spiritual
powers.... The passage from the higher spiritual world to the
lower material one is, on the one hand, apprehended as a mere
continued degeneracy from the Source of Life, at length
terminating in the kingdom of darkness and death—the bordering
chaos surrounding the kingdom of light. On the other hand the
passage is apprehended in a more precisely dualistic form, as a
positive invasion of the kingdom of light by a self-existent
kingdom of darkness. According as Gnosticism adopted one or other
of these modes of explaining the existence of the present world,
it fell into the two great divisions which, from their places of
origin, have received the respective names of the Alexandrian and
Syrian Gnosis. The one, as we have seen, presents more a Western,
the other more an Eastern type of speculation. The dualistic
element in the one case scarcely appears beneath the pantheistic,
and bears resemblance to the Platonic notion of the ὕλη, a mere
blank necessity, a limitless void. In the other case, the
dualistic element is clear and prominent, corresponding to the
Zarathustrian doctrine of an active principle of evil as well as
of good—of a kingdom of Ahriman, as well as a kingdom of Ormuzd.
In the Syrian Gnosis ... there appears from the first a hostile
principle of evil in collision with the good.”
We must remember that dualism is an attempt to substitute for the
doctrine of absolute creation, a theory that matter and evil are
due to something negative or positive outside of God. Dualism is a
theory of origins, not of results. Keeping this in mind, we may
call the Alexandrian Gnostics dualists, while we regard emanation
as the characteristic teaching of the Syrian Gnostics. These
latter made matter to be only an efflux from God and evil only a
degenerate form of good. If the Syrians held the world to be
independent of God, this independence was conceived of only as a
later result or product, not as an original fact. Some like
Saturninus and Bardesanes verged toward Manichæan doctrine; others
like Tatian and Marcion toward Egyptian dualism; but all held to
emanation as the philosophical explanation of what the Scriptures
call creation. These remarks will serve as qualification and
criticism of the opinions which we proceed to quote.
Sheldon, Ch. Hist., 1:206—“The Syrians were in general more
dualistic than the Alexandrians. Some, after the fashion of the
Hindu pantheists, regarded the material realm as the region of
emptiness and illusion, the void opposite of the Pleroma, that
world of spiritual reality and fulness; others assigned a more
positive nature to the material, and regarded it as capable of an
evil aggressiveness even apart from any quickening by the incoming
of life from above.” Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 139—“Like
Saturninus, Bardesanes is said to have combined the doctrine of
the malignity of matter with that of an active principle of evil;
and he connected together these two usually antagonistic theories
by maintaining that the inert matter was co-eternal with God,
while Satan as the active principle of evil was produced from
matter (or, according to another statement, co-eternal with it),
and acted in conjunction with it. 142—The feature which is usually
selected as characteristic of the Syrian Gnosis is the doctrine of
dualism; that is to say, the assumption of the existence of two
active and independent principles, the one of good, the other of
evil. This assumption was distinctly held by Saturninus and
Bardesanes ... in contradistinction to the Platonic theory of an
inert semi-existent matter, which was adopted by the Gnosis of
Egypt. The former principle found its logical development in the
next century in Manichæaism; the latter leads with almost equal
certainty to Pantheism.”
A. H. Newman, Ch. History, 1:192—“Marcion did not speculate as to
the origin of evil. The Demiurge and his kingdom are apparently
regarded as existing from eternity. Matter he regarded as
intrinsically evil, and he practised a rigid asceticism.” Mansel,
Gnostic Heresies, 210—“Marcion did not, with the majority of the
Gnostics, regard the Demiurge as a derived and dependent being,
whose imperfection is due to his remoteness from the highest
Cause; nor yet, according to the Persian doctrine, did he assume
an eternal principle of pure malignity. His second principle is
independent of and co-eternal with, the first; opposed to it
however, not as evil to good, but as imperfection to perfection,
or, as Marcion expressed it, as a just to a good being.
218—Non-recognition of any principle of pure evil. Three
principles only: the Supreme God, the Demiurge, and the eternal
Matter, the two latter being imperfect but not necessarily evil.
Some of the Marcionites seem to have added an evil spirit as a
fourth principle.... Marcion is the least Gnostic of all the
Gnostics.... 31—The Indian influence may be seen in Egypt, the
Persian in Syria.... 32—To Platonism, modified by Judaism,
Gnosticism owed much of its philosophical form and tendencies. To
the dualism of the Persian religion it owed one form at least of
its speculations on the origin and remedy of evil, and many of the
details of its doctrine of emanations. To the Buddhism of India,
modified again probably by Platonism, it was indebted for the
doctrines of the antagonism between spirit and matter and the
unreality of derived existence (the germ of the Gnostic Docetism),
and in part at least for the theory which regards the universe as
a series of successive emanations from the absolute Unity.”
Emanation holds that some stuff has proceeded from the nature of
God, and that God has formed this stuff into the universe. But
matter is not composed of stuff at all. It is merely an activity
of God. Origen held that ψυχή etymologically denotes a being
which, struck off from God the central source of light and warmth,
has cooled in its love for the good, but still has the possibility
of returning to its spiritual origin. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of
Religion, 2:271, thus describes Origen’s view: “As our body, while
consisting of many members, is yet an organism which is held
together by one soul, so the universe is to be thought of as an
immense living being, which is held together by one soul, the
power and the Logos of God.” Palmer, Theol. Definition, 63,
note—“The evil of Emanationism is seen in the history of
Gnosticism. An emanation is a portion of the divine essence
regarded as separated from it and sent forth as independent.
Having no perpetual bond of connection with the divine, it either
sinks into degradation, as Basilides taught, or becomes actively
hostile to the divine, as the Ophites believed.... In like manner
the Deists of a later time came to regard the laws of nature as
having an independent existence, _i. e._, as emanations.”
John Milton, Christian Doctrine, holds this view. Matter is an
efflux from God himself, not intrinsically bad, and incapable of
annihilation. Finite existence is an emanation from God’s
substance, and God has loosened his hold on those living portions
or centres of finite existence which he has endowed with free
will, so that these independent beings may originate actions not
morally referable to himself. This doctrine of free will relieves
Milton from the charge of pantheism; see Masson, Life of Milton,
6:824-826. Lotze, Philos. Religion, xlviii, li, distinguishes
creation from emanation by saying that creation necessitates a
divine Will, while emanation flows by natural consequence from the
being of God. God’s motive in creation is love, which urges him to
communicate his holiness to other beings. God creates individual
finite spirits, and then permits the thought, which at first was
only his, to become the thought of these other spirits. This
transference of his thought by will is the creation of the world.
F. W. Farrar, on _Heb. 1:2_—“The word _Æon_ was used by the
Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at
once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and
the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the
Incarnation, when he wrote: ‘_The Word became flesh_’ (_John
1:14_).”
Upton, Hibbert Lectures, chap. 2—“In the very making of souls of
his own essence and substance, and in the vacating of his own
causality in order that men may be free, God already dies in order
that they may live. God withdraws himself from our wills, so as to
make possible free choice and even possible opposition to himself.
Individualism admits dualism but not complete division. Our
dualism holds still to underground connections of life between man
and man, man and nature, man and God. Even the physical creation
is ethical at heart: each thing is dependent on other things, and
must serve them, or lose its own life and beauty. The branch must
abide in the vine, or it withers and is cut off and burned” (275).
Swedenborg held to emanation,—see Divine Love and Wisdom, 283,
303, 905—“Every one who thinks from clear reason sees that the
universe is not created from nothing.... All things were created
out of a substance.... As God alone is substance in itself and
therefore the real _esse_, it is evidence that the existence of
things is from no other source.... Yet the created universe is not
God, because God is not in time and space.... There is a creation
of the universe, and of all things therein, by continual
mediations from the First.... In the substances and matters of
which the earths consist, there is nothing of the Divine in
itself, but they are deprived of all that is divine in itself....
Still they have brought with them by continuation from the
substance of the spiritual sum that which was there from the
Divine.” Swedenborgianism is “materialism driven deep and clinched
on the inside.” This system reverses the Lord’s prayer; it should
read: “As on earth, so in heaven.” He disliked certain sects, and
he found that all who belonged to those sects were in the hells,
condemned to everlasting punishment. The truth is not
materialistic emanation, as Swedenborg imagined, but rather divine
energizing in space and time. The universe is God’s system of
graded self-limitation, from matter up to mind. It has had a
beginning, and God has instituted it. It is a finite and partial
manifestation of the infinite Spirit. Matter is an expression of
spirit, but not an emanation from spirit, any more than our
thoughts and volitions are. Finite spirits, on the other hand, are
differentiations within the being of God himself, and so are not
emanations from him.
Napoleon asked Goethe what matter was. “_Esprit gelé_,”—frozen
spirit was the answer Schelling wished Goethe had given him. But
neither is matter spirit, nor are matter and spirit together mere
natural effluxes from God’s substance. A divine institution of
them is requisite (quoted substantially from Dorner, System of
Doctrine, 2:40). Schlegel in a similar manner called architecture
“frozen music,” and another writer calls music “dissolved
architecture.” There is a “psychical automatism,” as Ladd says, in
his Philosophy of Mind, 169; and Hegel calls nature “the corpse of
the understanding—spirit to alienation from itself.” But spirit is
the Adam, of which nature is the Eve; and man says to nature:
“_This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh_,” as Adam did
in _Gen. 2:23_.
3. Creation from eternity.
This theory regards creation as an act of God in eternity past. It was
propounded by Origen, and has been held in recent times by Martensen,
Martineau, John Caird, Knight, and Pfleiderer. The necessity of supposing
such creation from eternity has been argued from God’s omnipotence, God’s
timelessness, God’s immutability, and God’s love. We consider each of
these arguments in their order.
Origen held that God was from eternity the creator of the world of
spirits. Martensen, in his Dogmatics, 114, shows favor to the
maxims: “Without the world God is not God.... God created the
world to satisfy a want in himself.... He cannot but constitute
himself the Father of spirits.” Schiller, Die Freundschaft, last
stanza, gives the following popular expression to this view:
“Freundlos war der grosse Weltenmeister; Fühlte Mangel, darum
schuf er Geister, Sel’ge Spiegel seiner Seligkeit. Fand das
höchste Wesen schon kein Gleiches; Aus dem Kelch des ganzen
Geisterreiches Schäumt ihm die Unendlichkeit.” The poet’s thought
was perhaps suggested by Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther: “The flight
of a bird above my head inspired me with the desire of being
transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, there to
quaff the pleasures of life from the foaming goblet of the
infinite.” Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, 31—“But I need now as
then, Thee, God, who mouldest men. And since, not even when the
whirl was worst, Did I—to the wheel of life With shapes and colors
rife, Bound dizzily—mistake my end, To slake thy thirst.” But this
regards the Creator as dependent upon, and in bondage to, his own
world.
Pythagoras held that nature’s substances and laws are eternal.
Martineau, Study of Religion, 1:144; 2:250, seems to make the
creation of the world an eternal process, conceiving of it as a
self-sundering of the Deity, in whom in some way the world was
always contained (Schurman, Belief in God, 140). Knight, Studies
in Philos. and Lit., 94, quotes from Byron’s Cain, I:1—“Let him
Sit on his vast and solitary throne, Creating worlds, to make
eternity Less burdensome to his immense existence And
unparticipated solitude.... He, so wretched in his height, So
restless in his wretchedness, must still Create and recreate.”
Byron puts these words into the mouth of Lucifer. Yet Knight, in
his Essays in Philosophy, 143, 247, regards the universe as the
everlasting effect of an eternal Cause. Dualism, he thinks, is
involved in the very notion of a search for God.
W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 117—“God is the source of the
universe. Whether by immediate production at some point of time,
so that after he had existed alone there came by his act to be a
universe, or by perpetual production from his own spiritual being,
so that his eternal existence was always accompanied by a universe
in some stage of being, God has brought the universe into
existence.... Any method in which the independent God could
produce a universe which without him could have had no existence,
is accordant with the teachings of Scripture. Many find it easier
philosophically to hold that God has eternally brought forth
creation from himself, so that there has never been a time when
there was not a universe in some stage of existence, than to think
of an instantaneous creation of all existing things when there had
been nothing but God before. Between these two views theology is
not compelled to decide, provided we believe that God is a free
Spirit greater than the universe.” We dissent from this conclusion
of Dr. Clarke, and hold that Scripture requires us to trace the
universe back to a beginning, while reason itself is better
satisfied with this view than it can be with the theory of
creation from eternity.
(_a_) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God’s omnipotence.
Omnipotence does not necessarily imply actual creation; it implies only
power to create. Creation, moreover, is in the nature of the case a thing
begun. Creation from eternity is a contradiction in terms, and that which
is self-contradictory is not an object of power.
The argument rests upon a misconception of eternity, regarding it
as a prolongation of time into the endless past. We have seen in
our discussion of eternity as an attribute of God, that eternity
is not endless time, or time without beginning, but rather
superiority to the law of time. Since eternity is no more past
than it is present, the idea of creation from eternity is an
irrational one. We must distinguish _creation in eternity past_ (=
God and the world coëternal, yet God the cause of the world, as he
is the begetter of the Son) from _continuous creation_ (which is
an explanation of preservation, but not of creation at all). It is
this latter, not the former, to which Rothe holds (see under the
doctrine of Preservation, pages 415, 416). Birks, Difficulties of
Belief, 81, 82—“Creation is not from eternity, since past eternity
cannot be actually traversed any more than we can reach the bound
of an eternity to come. There was no _time_ before creation,
because there was no _succession_.”
Birks, Scripture Doctrine of Creation, 78-105—“The first verse of
Genesis excludes five speculative falsehoods: 1. that there is
nothing but uncreated matter; 2. that there is no God distinct
from his creatures; 3. that creation is a series of acts without a
beginning; 4. that there is no real universe; 5. that nothing can
be known of God or the origin of things.” Veitch, Knowing and
Being, 22—“The ideas of creation and creative energy are emptied
of meaning, and for them is substituted the conception or fiction
of an eternally related or double-sided world, not of what has
been, but of what always is. It is another form of the see-saw
philosophy. The eternal Self only is, if the eternal manifold is;
the eternal manifold is, if the eternal Self is. The one, in being
the other, is or makes itself the one; the other, in being the
one, is or makes itself the other. This may be called a unity; it
is rather, if we might invent a term suited to the new and
marvellous conception, an unparalleled and unbegotten twinity.”
(_b_) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God’s timelessness.
Because God is free from the law of time it does not follow that creation
is free from that law. Rather is it true that no eternal creation is
conceivable, since this involves an infinite number. Time must have had a
beginning, and since the universe and time are coëxistent, creation could
not have been from eternity.
_Jude 25_—“_Before all time_”—implies that time had a beginning,
and _Eph. 1:4_—“_before the foundation of the world_”—implies that
creation itself had a beginning. Is creation infinite? No, says
Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:459, because to a perfect creation unity
is as necessary as multiplicity. The universe is an organism, and
there can be no organism without a definite number of parts. For a
similar reason Dorner, System Doctrine, 2:28, denies that the
universe can be eternal. Granting on the one hand that the world
though eternal might be dependent upon God and as soon as the plan
was evolved there might be no reason why the execution should be
delayed, yet on the other hand the absolutely limitless is the
imperfect and no universe with an infinite number of parts is
conceivable or possible. So Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin,
1:220-225—“What has a goal or end must have a beginning; history,
as teleological, implies creation.”
Lotze, Philos. Religion, 74—“The world, with respect to its
existence as well as its content, is completely dependent on the
will of God, and not as a mere involuntary development of his
nature.... The word ‘creation’ ought not to be used to designate a
deed of God so much as the absolute dependence of the world on his
will.” So Schurman, Belief in God, 146, 156, 225—“Creation is the
eternal dependence of the world on God.... Nature is the
externalization of spirit.... Material things exist simply as
modes of the divine activity; they have no existence for
themselves.” On this view that God is the Ground but not the
Creator of the world, see Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion,
23-56—“Creation is no more of a mystery than is the causal action”
in which both Lotze and Schurman believe. “To deny that divine
power can originate real being—can add to the sum total of
existence—is much like saying that such power is finite.” No one
can prove that “it is of the essence of spirit to reveal itself,”
or if so, that it must do this by means of an organism or
externalization. Eternal succession of changes in nature is no
more comprehensible than are a creating God and a universe
originating in time.
(_c_) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God’s immutability.
His immutability requires, not an eternal creation, but only an eternal
plan of creation. The opposite principle would compel us to deny the
possibility of miracles, incarnation, and regeneration. Like creation,
these too would need to be eternal.
We distinguish between idea and plan, between plan and execution.
Much of God’s plan is not yet executed. The beginning of its
execution is as easy to conceive as is the continuation of its
execution. But the beginning of the execution of God’s plan is
creation. Active will is an element in creation. God’s will is not
always active. He waits for “_the fulness of the time_” (_Gal.
4:4_) before he sends forth his Son. As we can trace back Christ’s
earthly life to a beginning, so we can trace back the life of the
universe to a beginning. Those who hold to creation from eternity
usually interpret _Gen. 1:1_—“_In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth,_” and _John 1:1_—“_In the beginning was the
Word,_” as both and alike meaning “in eternity.” But neither of
these texts has this meaning. In each we are simply carried back
to the beginning of the creation, and it is asserted that God was
its author and that the Word already was.
(_d_) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God’s love. Creation
is finite and cannot furnish perfect satisfaction to the infinite love of
God. God has moreover from eternity an object of love infinitely superior
to any possible creation, in the person of his Son.
Since all things are created in Christ, the eternal Word, Reason,
and Power of God, God can “_reconcile all things to himself_” in
Christ (_Col. 1:20_). Athanasius called God κτίστης, ού
τεχνίτης—Creator, not Artisan. By this he meant that God is
immanent, and not the God of deism. But the moment we conceive of
God as _revealing_ himself in Christ, the idea of creation as an
eternal satisfaction of his love vanishes. God can have a plan
without executing his plan. Decree can precede creation. Ideas of
the universe may exist in the divine mind before they are realized
by the divine will. There are purposes of salvation in Christ
which antedate the world (_Eph. 1:4_). The doctrine of the
Trinity, once firmly grasped, enables us to see the fallacy of
such views as that of Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:286—“A
beginning and ending in time of the creating of God are not
thinkable. That would be to suppose a change of creating and
resting in God, which would equalize God’s being with the
changeable course of human life. Nor could it be conceived what
should have hindered God from creating the world up to the
beginning of his creating.... We say rather, with Scotus Erigena,
that the divine creating is equally eternal with God’s being.”
(_e_) Creation from eternity, moreover, is inconsistent with the divine
independence and personality. Since God’s power and love are infinite, a
creation that satisfied them must be infinite in extent as well as eternal
in past duration—in other words, a creation equal to God. But a God thus
dependent upon external creation is neither free nor sovereign. A God
existing in necessary relations to the universe, if different in substance
from the universe, must be the God of dualism; if of the same substance
with the universe, must be the God of pantheism.
Gore, Incarnation, 136, 137—“Christian theology is the harmony of
pantheism and deism.... It enjoys all the riches of pantheism
without its inherent weakness on the moral side, without making
God dependent on the world, as the world is dependent on God. On
the other hand, Christianity converts an unintelligible deism into
a rational theism. It can explain how God became a creator in
time, because it knows how creation has its eternal analogue in
the uncreated nature; it was God’s nature eternally to produce, to
communicate itself, to live.” In other words, it can explain how
God can be eternally alive, independent, self-sufficient, since he
is Trinity. Creation from eternity is a natural and logical
outgrowth of Unitarian tendencies in theology. It is of a piece
with the Stoic monism of which we read in Hatch, Hibbert Lectures,
177—“Stoic monism conceived of the world as a self-evolution of
God. Into such a conception the idea of a beginning does not
necessarily enter. It is consistent with the idea of an eternal
process of differentiation. That which is always has been under
changed and changing forms. The theory is cosmological rather than
cosmogonical. It rather explains the world as it is, than gives an
account of its origin.”
4. Spontaneous generation.
This theory holds that creation is but the name for a natural process
still going on,—matter itself having in it the power, under proper
conditions, of taking on new functions, and of developing into organic
forms. This view is held by Owen and Bastian. We object that
(_a_) It is a pure hypothesis, not only unverified, but contrary to all
known facts. No credible instance of the production of living forms from
inorganic material has yet been adduced. So far as science can at present
teach us, the law of nature is “omne vivum e vivo,” or “ex ovo.”
Owen, Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates, 3:814-818—on
Monogeny or Thaumatogeny; quoted in Argyle, Reign of Law, 281—“We
discern no evidence of a pause or intromission in the creation or
coming-to-be of new plants and animals.” So Bastian, Modes of
Origin of Lowest Organisms, Beginnings of Life, and articles on
Heterogeneous Evolution of Living Things, in Nature, 2:170, 193,
219, 410, 431. See Huxley’s Address before the British
Association, and Reply to Bastian, in Nature, 2:400, 473; also
Origin of Species, 69-79, and Physical Basis of Life, in Lay
Sermons, 142. Answers to this last by Stirling, in Half-hours with
Modern Scientists, and by Beale, Protoplasm or Life, Matter, and
Mind, 73-75.
In favor of Redi’s maxim, “omne vivum e vivo,” see Huxley, in
Encyc. Britannica, art.: Biology, 689—“At the present moment there
is not a shadow of trustworthy direct evidence that abiogenesis
does take place or has taken place within the period during which
the existence of the earth is recorded”; Flint, Physiology of Man,
1:263-265—“As the only true philosophic view to take of the
question, we shall assume in common with nearly all the modern
writers on physiology that there is no such thing as spontaneous
generation,—admitting that the exact mode of production of the
infusoria lowest in the scale of life is not understood.” On the
Philosophy of Evolution, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and
Religion, 39-57.
(_b_) If such instances could be authenticated, they would prove nothing
as against a proper doctrine of creation,—for there would still exist an
impossibility of accounting for these vivific properties of matter, except
upon the Scriptural view of an intelligent Contriver and Originator of
matter and its laws. In short, evolution implies previous involution,—if
anything comes out of matter, it must first have been put in.
Sully: “Every doctrine of evolution must assume some definite
initial arrangement which is supposed to contain the possibilities
of the order which we find to be evolved and no other
possibility.” Bixby, Crisis of Morals, 258—“If no creative fiat
can be believed to create something out of nothing, still less is
evolution able to perform such a contradiction.” As we can get
morality only out of a moral germ, so we can get vitality only out
of a vital germ. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 14—“By brooding
long enough on an egg that is next to nothing, you can in this way
hatch any universe actual or possible. Is it not evident that this
is a mere trick of imagination, concealing its thefts of causation
by committing them little by little, and taking the heap from the
divine storehouse grain by grain?”
Hens come before eggs. Perfect organic forms are antecedent to all
life-cells, whether animal or vegetable. “Omnis cellula e cellula,
sed primaria cellula ex organismo.” God created first the tree,
and its seed was in it when created (_Gen. 1:12_). Protoplasm is
not _proton_, but _deuteron_; the elements are antecedent to it.
It is not true that man was never made at all but only “growed”
like Topsy; see Watts, New Apologetic, xvi, 312. Royce, Spirit of
Modern Philosophy, 273—“Evolution is the attempt to comprehend the
world of experience in terms of the fundamental idealistic
postulates: (1) without ideas, there is no reality; (2) rational
order requires a rational Being to introduce it; (3) beneath our
conscious self there must be an infinite Self. The question is:
Has the world a meaning? It is not enough to refer ideas to
mechanism. Evolution, from the nebula to man, is only the
unfolding of the life of a divine Self.”
(_c_) This theory, therefore, if true, only supplements the doctrine of
original, absolute, immediate creation, with another doctrine of mediate
and derivative creation, or the development of the materials and forces
originated at the beginning. This development, however, cannot proceed to
any valuable end without guidance of the same intelligence which initiated
it. The Scriptures, although they do not sanction the doctrine of
spontaneous generation, do recognize processes of development as
supplementing the divine fiat which first called the elements into being.
There is such a thing as free will, and free will does not, like
the deterministic will, run in a groove. If there be free will in
man, then much more is there free will in God, and God’s will does
not run in a groove. God is not bound by law or to law. Wisdom
does not imply monotony or uniformity. God can do a thing once
that is never done again. Circumstances are never twice alike.
Here is the basis not only of creation but of new creation,
including miracle, incarnation, resurrection, regeneration,
redemption. Though will both in God and in man is for the most
part automatic and acts according to law, yet the power of new
beginnings, of creative action, resides in will, wherever it is
free, and this free will chiefly makes God to be God and man to be
man. Without it life would be hardly worth the living, for it
would be only the life of the brute. All schemes of evolution
which ignore this freedom of God are pantheistic in their
tendencies, for they practically deny both God’s transcendence and
his personality.
Leibnitz declined to accept the Newtonian theory of gravitation
because it seemed to him to substitute natural forces for God. In
our own day many still refuse to accept the Darwinian theory of
evolution because it seems to them to substitute natural forces
for God; see John Fiske, Idea of God, 97-102. But law is only a
method; it presupposes a lawgiver and requires an agent.
Gravitation and evolution are but the habitual operations of God.
If spontaneous generation should be proved true, it would be only
God’s way of originating life. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology,
91—“Spontaneous generation does not preclude the idea of a
creative will working by natural law and secondary causes.... Of
beginnings of life physical science knows nothing.... Of the
processes of nature science is competent to speak and against its
teachings respecting these there is no need that theology should
set itself in hostility.... Even if man were derived from the
lower animals, it would not prove that God did not create and
order the forces employed. It may be that God bestowed upon animal
life a plastic power.”
Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1:180—“It is far truer to say
that the universe is a life, than to say that it is a
mechanism.... We can never get to God through a mere mechanism....
With Leibnitz I would argue that absolute passivity or inertness
is not a reality but a limit. 269—Mr. Spencer grants that to
interpret spirit in terms of matter is impossible. 302—Natural
selection without teleological factors is not adequate to account
for biological evolution, and such teleological factors imply a
psychical something endowed with feelings and will, _i. e._, Life
and Mind. 2:130-135—Conation is more fundamental than cognition.
149-151—Things and events precede space and time. There is no
empty space or time. 252-257—Our assimilation of nature is the
greeting of spirit by spirit. 259-267—Either nature is itself
intelligent, or there is intelligence beyond it.
274-276—Appearances do not veil reality. 274—The truth is not God
_and_ mechanism, but God _only_ and no mechanism. 283—Naturalism
and Agnosticism, in spite of themselves, lead us to a world of
Spiritualistic Monism.” Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics,
36—“Spontaneous generation is a fiction in ethics, as it is in
psychology and biology. The moral cannot be derived from the
non-moral, any more than consciousness can be derived from the
unconscious, or life from the azoic rocks.”
IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.
1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of
development.
(_a_) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of
making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The
cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced
by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive
manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human
life.
All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism
or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or
growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards
natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in
regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder.
Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis
does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal
matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the
first (_Gen. 1:1_—_bara_) and he subsequently created animal life
(_Gen. 1:21_—“_and God created_”—_bara_) and the life of man
(_Gen. 1:27_—“_and God create man_”—_bara_ again).
Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it
as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires
an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward
step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational
end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power.
Schurman says well that Darwinism explains the _survival_ of the
fittest, but cannot explain the _arrival_ of the fittest.
Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of
star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills
space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also
the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and
the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at
the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically
adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real
antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is
the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being
at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is
a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the
natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence
nearest and best known to us.”
Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom,
76—“When we admit that Darwin’s argument in favor of the theory of
evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can
be in any sense the _cause_ of the origin of species. It has
probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its
rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the
process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably
been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which
species have been evolved has been completely independent of
natural selection and could have produced all the results which we
call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process
would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to
increase its pace.” New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison
on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal
Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3)
break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to
explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) the _a
priori_ self-consciousness which is the essential being and true
person of the mind.
Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is “an integration of
matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the
matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a
definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained
motion goes through a parallel transformation.” D. W. Simon
criticizes this definition as defective “because (1) it omits all
mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because
it introduces into the definition of the process one of the
phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both
energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly
introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought
therefore to have found recognition in the definition or
description.” Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have
we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as
they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a
beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of
the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through
molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its
highest culmination in man?”
(_b_) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present
order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also
of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic
materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the
conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing
itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by
virtue of its own inner energy.
Martensen wrongly asserts that “Judaism represented the world
exclusively as _creatura_, not _natura_; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”
This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth,
not of something dead, but of something living and capable of
self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not
only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which
the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4,
6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from
darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting
apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man’s body;
planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the
productive powers of the things and beings created (_Gen. 1:12,
22, 24, 28_—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose
seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man
commanded to be fruitful and multiply).
The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the
whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution,
thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and
along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest
member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to
Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our
common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He
argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by
gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there
is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a
different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877,
regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet
natural modification of species. “When catastrophic change burst
in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every
living thing the words: ‘Change or die!’ plasticity became the
sole principle of action.” Nature proceeded then by leaps, and
corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.
We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call
species were produced in some such ways. If science should render
it certain that all the present species of living creatures were
derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that
these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and
materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as
proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our
interpretation of the word _bara_ in _Gen. 1:21, 27_, and to give
it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such
a meaning might almost seem to be favored by _Gen. 1:11_—“_let the
earth put forth grass_”; _20_—“_let the waters bring forth
abundantly __ the moving creature that hath life_”; _2:7_—“_the
Lord God formed man of the dust_”; _9_—“_out of the ground made
the Lord God to grow every tree_”; _cf._ _Mark 4:28_—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή
καρποφορεῖ—“_the earth brings forth fruit automatically_.” Goethe,
Sprüche in Reimen: “Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse,
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt’s die Welt im
Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass,
was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen
Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets
the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell
within.”
All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in
May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark
and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force
from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment
changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent
transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes
great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to
express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so
groaned and bled when wounded. God’s life is in all. In evolution
we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is
“derived from the lower.” Rather let us say that both the higher
and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will
of God. The lower is only God’s preparation for his higher
self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.
Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic
narrative “two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of
separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive
development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere
admiration on the Jewish lawgiver’s grand insight into nature, and
his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering
in it a divine revelation.” Henry Drummond, whose first book,
Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days
regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic
direction, came to believe rather in “spiritual law in the natural
world.” His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the
methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that
the past history of life upon the planet was a history of
heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for
its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was “red in
tooth and claw with ravine.” But further thought has shown that
this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts.
Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a
struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to
be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of
offspring. In every lion’s den and tiger’s lair, in every
mother-eagle’s feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice
which faintly shadows forth man’s subordination of personal
interests to the interests of others.
Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond’s
doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one’s own
life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of
others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of
right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature
owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an
adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine
warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then
preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of
humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The
Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to
the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the
conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic
movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in
the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a
dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure
and stedfast.” God is not limited to creating from without: he can
also create from within; and development is as much a part of
creation as is the origination of the elements. For further
discussion of man’s origin, see section on Man a Creation of God,
in our treatment of Anthropology.
2. Its proper interpretation.
We adopt neither (_a_) the allegorical, or mythical, (_b_) the
hyperliteral, nor (_c_) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic
narrative; but rather (_d_) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which
holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true
in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to
the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying
to primitive man as accurate an idea of God’s work as man was able to
comprehend, the revelation was yet given in pregnant language, so that it
could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical
research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings
of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human
knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.
(_a_) The _allegorical_, or _mythical interpretation_, represents
the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek
cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the
origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation
upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably
connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most
naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the
narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover,
prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision
granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original
revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses’ time, and used
by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.
We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of
Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of
Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two
accounts of man’s creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”
Charles A. Briggs: “The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is
altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.” W. N. Clarke,
Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the
two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination
shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a
tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as
literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man
was created.” To these utterances we reply that the two accounts
are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of
Genesis describing man’s creation as the crown of God’s general
work, the second describing man’s creation with greater
particularity as the beginning of human history.
Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic
account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer,
Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen
theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first
who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the
ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that
reason called him “the first sober one among many drunken.”
Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and
the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time,
theogony.” Dr. E. G. Robinson: “The Bible writers believed and
intended to state that the world was made in three literal days.
But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did,
the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their
account.” For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies,
see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63;
Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine,
Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions,
2:193-221. For the theory of “prophetic vision,” see Kurtz, Hist.
of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller,
Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.:
Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia,
372-397.
(_b_) The _hyperliteral interpretation_ would withdraw the
narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by
putting the ages of geological history between the first and
second verses of _Gen. 1_, and by making the remainder of the
chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some
limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each.
Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are
Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith,
Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this
view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic
narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second
verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of
any such break between the ages of preparation and the present
time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that
there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word
“_day_” is not used in its literal sense; while the other
Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of
indefinite duration (_Gen. 1:5_—“_God called the light Day_”—a day
before there was a sun; _8_—“_there was evening and there was
morning, a second day_”; _2:2_—God “_rested on the seventh day_”;
_cf._ _Heb. 4:3-10_—where God’s day of rest seems to continue, and
his people are exhorted to enter into it; _Gen. 2:4_—“_the day
that Jehovah made earth and heaven_”—“_day_” here covers all the
seven days; _cf._ _Is. 2:12_—“_a day of Jehovah of hosts_”; _Zech.
14:7_—“_it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day,
and not night_”; _2 Pet. 3:8_—“_one day is with the Lord as __ a
thousand years, and a thousand years as one day_”). Guyot,
Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the
narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens
as well as of the earth (_Gen. 2:4_—“_these are the generations of
the heaven and of the earth_”), whereas this interpretation
confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word
“_day_,” as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of
Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.
(_c_) The _hyperscientific interpretation_ would find in the
narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological
record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the
purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord
between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it
is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every
detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific
fact. Far more probable we hold to be
(_d_) The _pictorial-summary interpretation_. Before explaining
this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any
future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality.
Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose
not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a
perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer
tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought
upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of
reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the
truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an
approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the
geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the
conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth
of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that
Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have
reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results.
See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter,
which was _next_ to _nothing_. This chaotic matter was made from
nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was
subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad
Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by
the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and
that is all.” We proceed now to the scheme:
1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid,
must have been void and formless as described in _Genesis 1:2_.
Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula,
and its fluid condition is indicated by the term “_waters_.”
2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by
the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular
activity. This corresponds to the statement in _verse 3_. As the
result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this
process from darkness to light is described as follows: “_there
was evening and there was morning, one day_.” Here we have a day
without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two
facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be
self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached
its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be
itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore
continuous—day without night.
3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its
separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of
“_the waters under the firmament from the waters above_,” in
_verse 7_. Here the word “_waters_” is used to designate the
“primordial cosmic material” (Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the
molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is
thrown off. The term “_waters_” is the best which the Hebrew
language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass. _Ps. 148_
seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the “_waters that
are above the heavens_” (_verse 4_)—waters which are distinguished
from the “_deeps_” below (_verse 7_), and the “_vapor_” above
(_verse 8_).
4. The production of the earth’s physical features by the partial
condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and
by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next
described in _verse 9_ as the gathering of the waters into one
place and the appearing of the dry land.
5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since
it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom,
is next described in _verse 11_ as a bringing into existence of
the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all
mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural
basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are
animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, the _algæ_,
were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that
graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal
remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal
forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and
presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by
the Eophyte. If it be said that fruit-trees could not have been
created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the
vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention
of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to
introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See
Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.
6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now
cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its
higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is
described in _verses 16_ and _17_ as a making of the sun, moon,
and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth.
Compare _Gen. 9:13_—“_I do set my bow in the cloud._” As the
rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to
serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon
and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights
for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no
longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through
the earth’s encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher
forms of life which were to come.
7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom
(radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes
the next stage of geological progress, is represented in _verses
20_ and _21_ as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm
in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land.
Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of
the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that
terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of
bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone.
But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions,
while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to
the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions.
They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying
lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all
these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus
Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds,
see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine,
1877:505.
8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are
eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a
high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated in
_verses 24_ and _25_ by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle
and beasts of prey.
9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and
the first in whom the unity of the great design has full
expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last
step of progress in creation (see _verses 26-31_). With Prof.
Dana, we may say that “in this succession we observe not merely an
order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system
in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which
philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.” See Dana,
Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224.
Richard Owen: “Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally
present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796;
Louis Agassiz: “Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal
creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic
fish.”
Prof. John M. Taylor: “Man is not merely a mortal but a moral
being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path
marked out for him by all his past development. In order to
progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to
mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the
rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man
must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the
great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the
sequence of physical and psychical functions.” W. E. Gladstone in
S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days “chapters in
the history of creation.” He objects to calling them epochs or
periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes
overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic
narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:
“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has
included as their central point the study of the means of making
himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better
position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech
proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect
Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical
science as such.”
On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N.
Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation;
Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic
Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in
Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in
Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences,
38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week; Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T.,
65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E.
Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1,
176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb.
1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in
the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard
to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original
Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und
Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib.
Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis,
see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.
V. God’s End in Creation.
Infinite wisdom must, in creating, propose to itself the most
comprehensive and the most valuable of ends,—the end most worthy of God,
and the end most fruitful in good. Only in the light of the end proposed
can we properly judge of God’s work, or of God’s character as revealed
therein.
It would seem that Scripture should give us an answer to the
question: Why did God create? The great Architect can best tell
his own design. Ambrose: “To whom shall I give greater credit
concerning God than to God himself?” George A. Gordon, New Epoch
for Faith, 15—“God is necessarily a being of ends. Teleology is
the warp and woof of humanity; it must be in the warp and woof of
Deity. Evolutionary science has but strengthened this view.
Natural science is but a mean disguise for ignorance if it does
not imply cosmical purpose. The movement of life from lower to
higher is a movement upon ends. Will is the last account of the
universe, and will is the faculty for ends. The moment one
concludes that God is, it appears certain that he is a being of
ends. The universe is alive with desire and movement.
Fundamentally it is throughout an expression of will. And it
follows, that the ultimate end of God in human history must be
worthy of himself.”
In determining this end, we turn first to:
1. The testimony of Scripture.
This may be summed up in four statements. God finds his end (_a_) in
himself; (_b_) in his own will and pleasure; (_c_) in his own glory; (_d_)
in the making known of his power, his wisdom, his holy name. All these
statements may be combined in the following, namely, that God’s supreme
end in creation is nothing outside of himself, but is his own glory—in the
revelation, in and through creatures, of the infinite perfection of his
own being.
(_a_) _Rom. 11:36_—“_unto him are all things_”; _Col. 1:16_—“_all
things have been created ... unto him_” (Christ); compare _Is.
48:11_—“_for mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it
... and my glory will I not give to another_”; and _1 Cor.
15:28_—“_subject all things unto him, that God may be all in
all._” _Proverbs 16:4_—not “The Lord hath made all things for
himself” (A. V.) but “_Jehovah hath made everything for its own
end_” (Rev. Vers.).
(_b_) _Eph. 1:5, 6, 9_—“_having foreordained us ... according to
the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his
grace ... mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure
which he purposed in him_”; _Rev. 4:11_—“_thou didst create all
things, and because of thy will they were, and were created._”
(_c_) _Is. 43:7_—“_whom I have created for my glory_”; _60:21_ and
_61:3_—the righteousness and blessedness of the redeemed are
secured, that “_he may be glorified_”; _Luke 2:14_—the angels’
song at the birth of Christ expressed the design of the work of
salvation: “_Glory to God in the highest_,” and only through, and
for its sake, “_on earth peace among men in whom he is well
pleased_.”
(_d_) _Ps. 143:11_—“_In thy righteousness bring my soul out of
trouble_”; _Ez. 36:21, 22_—“_I do not this for your sake ... but
for mine holy name_”; _39:7_—“_my holy name will I make known_”;
_Rom. 9:17_—to Pharaoh: “_For this very purpose did I raise thee
up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be
published abroad in all the earth_”; _22, 23_—“_riches of his
glory_” made known in vessels of wrath, and in vessels of mercy;
_Eph. 3:9, 10_—“_created all things; to the intent that now unto
the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be
made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God._” See
Godet, on Ultimate Design of Man; “God in man and man in God,” in
Princeton Rev., Nov. 1880; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:436, 535, 565,
568. _Per contra_, see Miller, Fetich in Theology, 19, 39-45,
88-98, 143-146.
Since holiness is the fundamental attribute in God, to make himself, his
own pleasure, his own glory, his own manifestation, to be his end in
creation, is to find his chief end in his own holiness, its maintenance,
expression, and communication. To make this his chief end, however, is not
to exclude certain subordinate ends, such as the revelation of his wisdom,
power, and love, and the consequent happiness of innumerable creatures to
whom this revelation is made.
God’s glory is that which makes him glorious. It is not something
without, like the praise and esteem of men, but something within,
like the dignity and value of his own attributes. To a noble man,
praise is very distasteful unless he is conscious of something in
himself that justifies it. We must be like God to be
self-respecting. Pythagoras said well: “Man’s end is to be like
God.” And so God must look within, and find his honor and his end
in himself. Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau: “This is the
glory, that in all conceived Or felt or known, I recognize a Mind,
Not mine but like mine,—for the double joy Making all things for
me, and me for Him.” Schurman, Belief in God, 214-216—“God
glorifies himself in communicating himself.” The object of his
love is the exercise of his holiness. Self-affirmation conditions
self-communication.
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 94, 196—“Law and gospel are
only two sides of the one object, the highest glory of God in the
highest good of man.... Nor is it unworthy of God to make himself
his own end: (_a_) It is both unworthy and criminal for a finite
being to make himself his own end, because it is an end that can
be reached only by degrading self and wronging others; but (_b_)
For an infinite Creator not to make himself his own end would be
to dishonor himself and wrong his creatures; since, thereby, (_c_)
he must either act without an end, which is irrational, or from an
end which is impossible without wronging his creatures; because
(_d_) the highest welfare of his creatures, and consequently their
happiness, is impossible except through the subordination and
conformity of their wills to that of their infinitely perfect
Ruler; and (_e_) without this highest welfare and happiness of his
creatures God’s own end itself becomes impossible, for he is
glorified only as his character is reflected in, and recognized
by, his intelligent creatures.” Creation can add nothing to the
essential wealth or worthiness of God. If the end were outside
himself, it would make him dependent and a servant. The old
theologians therefore spoke of God’s “declarative glory,” rather
than God’s “essential glory,” as resulting from man’s obedience
and salvation.
2. The testimony of reason.
That his own glory, in the sense just mentioned, is God’s supreme end in
creation, is evident from the following considerations:
(_a_) God’s own glory is the only end actually and perfectly attained in
the universe. Wisdom and omnipotence cannot choose an end which is
destined to be forever unattained; for _“__what his soul desireth, even
that he doeth__”__ (Job 23:13)_. God’s supreme end cannot be the happiness
of creatures, since many are miserable here and will be miserable forever.
God’s supreme end cannot be the holiness of creatures, for many are unholy
here and will be unholy forever. But while neither the holiness nor the
happiness of creatures is actually and perfectly attained, God’s glory is
made known and will be made known in both the saved and the lost. This
then must be God’s supreme end in creation.
This doctrine teaches us that none can frustrate God’s plan. God
will get glory out of every human life. Man may glorify God
voluntarily by love and obedience, but if he will not do this he
will be compelled to glorify God by his rejection and punishment.
Better be the molten iron that runs freely into the mold prepared
by the great Designer, than be the hard and cold iron that must be
hammered into shape. Cleanthes, quoted by Seneca: “Ducunt volentem
fata, nolentem trahunt.” W. C. Wilkinson, Epic of Saul, 271—“But
some are tools, and others ministers, Of God, who works his holy
will with all.” Christ baptizes _“__in the Holy Spirit and in
fire__”__ (Mat. 3:11)_. Alexander McLaren: “There are two fires,
to one or other of which we must be delivered. Either we shall
gladly accept the purifying fire of the Spirit which burns sin out
of us, or we shall have to meet the punitive fire which burns up
us and our sins together. To be cleansed by the one or to be
consumed by the other is the choice before each one of us.” Hare,
Mission of the Comforter, on _John 16:8_, shows that the Holy
Spirit either _convinces_ those who yield to his influence, or
_convicts_ those who resist—the word ἐλέγχω having this double
significance.
(_b_) God’s glory is the end intrinsically most valuable. The good of
creatures is of insignificant importance compared with this. Wisdom
dictates that the greater interest should have precedence of the less.
Because God can choose no greater end, he must choose for his end himself.
But this is to choose his holiness, and his glory in the manifestation of
that holiness.
_Is. 40:15, 16_—“_Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket,
and are counted as the small dust of the balance_”—like the drop
that falls unobserved from the bucket, like the fine dust of the
scales which the tradesman takes no notice of in weighing, so are
all the combined millions of earth and heaven before God. He
created, and he can in an instant destroy. The universe is but a
drop of dew upon the fringe of his garment. It is more important
that God should be glorified than that the universe should be
happy. As we read in _Heb. 6:13_—“_since he could swear by none
greater, he sware by himself_”—so here we may say: Because he
could choose no greater end in creating, he chose himself. But to
swear by himself is to swear by his holiness (_Ps. 89:35_). We
infer that to find his end in himself is to find that end in his
holiness. See Martineau on Malebranche, in Types, 177.
The stick or the stone does not exist for itself, but for some
consciousness. The soul of man exists in part for itself. But it
is conscious that in a more important sense it exists for God.
“Modern thought,” it is said, “worships and serves the creature
more than the Creator; indeed, the chief end of the Creator seems
to be to glorify man and to enjoy him forever.” So the small boy
said his Catechism: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to
annoy him forever.” Prof. Clifford: “The kingdom of God is
obsolete; the kingdom of man has now come.” All this is the
insanity of sin. _Per contra_, see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 329,
330—“Two things are plain in Edwards’s doctrine: first, that God
cannot love anything other than himself: he is so great, so
preponderating an amount of being, that what is left is hardly
worth considering; secondly, so far as God has any love for the
creature, it is because he is himself diffused therein: the
fulness of his own essence has overflowed into an outer world, and
that which he loves in created beings is his essence imparted to
them.” But we would add that Edwards does not say they are
themselves of the essence of God; see his Works, 2:210, 211.
(_c_) His own glory is the only end which consists with God’s independence
and sovereignty. Every being is dependent upon whomsoever or whatsoever he
makes his ultimate end. If anything in the creature is the last end of
God, God is dependent upon the creature. But since God is dependent only
on himself, he must find in himself his end.
To create is not to increase his blessedness, but only to reveal
it. There is no need or deficiency which creation supplies. The
creatures who derive all from him can add nothing to him. All our
worship is only the rendering back to him of that which is his
own. He notices us only for his own sake and not because our
little rivulets of praise add anything to the ocean-like fulness
of his joy. For his own sake, and not because of our misery or our
prayers, he redeems and exalts us. To make our pleasure and
welfare his ultimate end would be to abdicate his throne. He
creates, therefore, only for his own sake and for the sake of his
glory. To this reasoning the London Spectator replies: “The glory
of God is the splendor of a manifestation, not the intrinsic
splendor manifested. The splendor of a manifestation, however,
consists in the effect of the manifestation on those to whom it is
given. Precisely because the manifestation of God’s goodness can
be useful to us and cannot be useful to him, must its
manifestation be intended for our sake and not for his sake. We
gain everything by it—he nothing, except so far as it is his own
will that we should gain what he desires to bestow upon us.” In
this last clause we find the acknowledgment of weakness in the
theory that God’s supreme end is the good of his creatures. God
does gain the fulfilment of his plan, the doing of his will, the
manifestation of himself. The great painter loves his picture less
than he loves his ideal. He paints in order to express himself.
God loves each soul which he creates, but he loves yet more the
expression of his own perfections in it. And this self-expression
is his end. Robert Browning, Paracelsus, 54—“God is the perfect
Poet, Who in creation acts his own conceptions.” Shedd, Dogm.
Theol., 1:357, 358; Shairp, Province of Poetry, 11, 12.
God’s love makes him a self-expressing being. Self-expression is
an inborn impulse in his creatures. All genius partakes of this
characteristic of God. Sin substitutes concealment for outflow,
and stops this self-communication which would make the good of
each the good of all. Yet even sin cannot completely prevent it.
The wicked man is impelled to confess. By natural law the secrets
of all hearts will be made manifest at the judgment. Regeneration
restores the freedom and joy of self-manifestation. Christianity
and confession of Christ are inseparable. The preacher is simply a
Christian further advanced in this divine privilege. We need
utterance. Prayer is the most complete self-expression, and God’s
presence is the only land of perfectly free speech.
The great poet comes nearest, in the realm of secular things, to
realizing this privilege of the Christian. No great poet ever
wrote his best work for money, or for fame, or even for the sake
of doing good. Hawthorne was half-humorous and only partially
sincere, when he said he would never have written a page except
for pay. The hope of pay may have set his pen a-going, but only
love for his work could have made that work what it is. Motley
more truly declared that it was all up with a writer when he began
to consider the money he was to receive. But Hawthorne needed the
money to live on, while Motley had a rich father and uncle to back
him. The great writer certainly absorbs himself in his work. With
him necessity and freedom combine. He sings as the bird sings,
without dogmatic intent. Yet he is great in proportion as he is
moral and religious at heart. “Arma virumque cano” is the only
first person singular in the Æneid in which the author himself
speaks, yet the whole Æneid is a revelation of Virgil. So we know
little of Shakespeare’s life, but much of Shakespeare’s genius.
Nothing is added to the tree when it blossoms and bears fruit; it
only reveals its own inner nature. But we must distinguish in man
his true nature from his false nature. Not his private
peculiarities, but that in him which is permanent and universal,
is the real treasure upon which the great poet draws. Longfellow:
“He is the greatest artist then, Whether of pencil or of pen, Who
follows nature. Never man, as artist or as artizan, Pursuing his
own fantasies, Can touch the human heart or please, Or satisfy our
nobler needs.” Tennyson, after observing the subaqueous life of a
brook, exclaimed: “What an imagination God has!” Caird, Philos.
Religion, 245—“The world of finite intelligences, though distinct
from God, is still in its ideal nature one with him. That which
God creates, and by which he reveals the hidden treasures of his
wisdom and love, is still not foreign to his own infinite life,
but one with it. In the knowledge of the minds that know him, in
the self-surrender of the hearts that love him, it is no paradox
to affirm that he knows and loves himself.”
(_d_) His own glory is an end which comprehends and secures, as a
subordinate end, every interest of the universe. The interests of the
universe are bound up in the interests of God. There is no holiness or
happiness for creatures except as God is absolute sovereign, and is
recognized as such. It is therefore not selfishness, but benevolence, for
God to make his own glory the supreme object of creation. Glory is not
vain-glory, and in expressing his ideal, that is, in expressing himself,
in his creation, he communicates to his creatures the utmost possible
good.
This self-expression is not selfishness but benevolence. As the
true poet forgets himself in his work, so God does not manifest
himself for the sake of what he can make by it. Self-manifestation
is an end in itself. But God’s self-manifestation comprises all
good to his creatures. We are bound to love ourselves and our own
interests just in proportion to the value of those interests. The
monarch of a realm or the general of an army must be careful of
his life, because the sacrifice of it may involve the loss of
thousands of lives of soldiers or subjects. So God is the heart of
the great system. Only by being tributary to the heart can the
members be supplied with streams of holiness and happiness. And so
for only one Being in the universe is it safe to live for himself.
Man should not live for himself, because there is a higher end.
But there is no higher end for God. “Only one being in the
universe is excepted from the duty of subordination. Man must be
subject to the ‘_higher powers_’ (_Rom. 13:1_). But there are no
higher powers to God.” See Park, Discourses, 181-209.
Bismarck’s motto: “Ohne Kaiser, kein Reich”—“Without an emperor,
there can be no empire”—applies to God, as Von Moltke’s motto:
“Erst wägen, dann wagen”—“First weigh, then dare”—applies to man.
Edwards, Works, 2:215—“Selfishness is no otherwise vicious or
unbecoming than as one is less than a multitude. The public weal
is of greater value than his particular interest. It is fit and
suitable that God should value himself infinitely more than his
creatures.” Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:3—“The single and peculiar life
is bound With all the strength and armor of the mind To keep
itself from noyance; but much more That spirit upon whose weal
depends and rests The lives of many. The cease of majesty Dies not
alone, but like a gulf doth draw What’s near it with it: it is a
massy wheel Fixed on the summit of the highest mount, To whose
huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortis’d and adjoined;
which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone did the king sigh, But
with a general groan.”
(_e_) God’s glory is the end which in a right moral system is proposed to
creatures. This must therefore be the end which he in whose image they are
made proposes to himself. He who constitutes the centre and end of all his
creatures must find his centre and end in himself. This principle of moral
philosophy, and the conclusion drawn from it, are both explicitly and
implicitly taught in Scripture.
The beginning of all religion is the choosing of God’s end as our
end—the giving up of our preference of happiness, and the entrance
upon a life devoted to God. That happiness is not the ground of
moral obligation, is plain from the fact that there is no
happiness in seeking happiness. That the holiness of God is the
ground of moral obligation, is plain from the fact that the search
after holiness is not only successful in itself, but brings
happiness also in its train. Archbishop Leighton, Works, 695—“It
is a wonderful instance of wisdom and goodness that God has so
connected his own glory with our happiness, that we cannot
properly intend the one, but that the other must follow as a
matter of course, and our own felicity is at last resolved into
his eternal glory.” That God will certainly secure the end for
which he created, his own glory, and that his end is our end, is
the true source of comfort in affliction, of strength in labor, of
encouragement in prayer. See _Psalm 25:11_—“_For thy name’s
sake.... Pardon mine iniquity, for it is great_”; _115:1_—“_Not
unto us, O Jehovah, not unto us, But unto thy name give glory_”;
_Mat. 6:33_—“_Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness;
and all these things shall be added unto you_”; _1 Cor.
10:31_—“_Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do,
do all to the glory of God_”; _1 Pet. 2:9_—“_ye are an elect race
... that ye may show forth the excellencies of him who called you
out of darkness into his marvelous light_”; _4:11_—speaking,
ministering, “_that in all things God may be glorified through
Jesus Christ, whose is the glory and the dominion for ever and
ever. Amen._” On the whole subject, see Edwards, Works, 2:193-257;
Janet, Final Causes, 443-455; Princeton Theol. Essays, 2:15-32;
Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 358-362.
It is a duty to make the most of ourselves, but only for God’s
sake. _Jer. 45:5_—“_seekest thou great things for thyself? seek
them not!_” But it is nowhere forbidden us to seek great things
for God. Rather we are to “_desire earnestly the greater gifts_”
(_1 Cor. 12:31_). Self-realization as well as self-expression is
native to humanity. Kant: “Man, and with him every rational
creature, is an end in himself.” But this seeking of his own good
is to be subordinated to the higher motive of God’s glory. The
difference between the regenerate and the unregenerate may consist
wholly in motive. The latter lives for self, the former for God.
Illustrate by the young man in Yale College who began to learn his
lessons for God instead of for self, leaving his salvation in
Christ’s hands. God requires self-renunciation, taking up the
cross, and following Christ, because the first need of the sinner
is to change his centre. To be self-centered is to be a savage.
The struggle for the life of others is better. But there is
something higher still. Life has dignity according to the worth of
the object we install in place of self. Follow Christ, make God
the center of your life,—so shall you achieve the best; see
Colestock, Changing Viewpoint, 113-123.
George A. Gordon, The New Epoch for Faith, 11-13—“The ultimate
view of the universe is the religious view. Its worth is
ultimately worth for the supreme Being. Here is the note of
permanent value in Edwards’s great essay on The End of Creation.
The final value of creation is its value for God.... Men are men
in and through society—here is the truth which Aristotle
teaches—but Aristotle fails to see that society attains its end
only in and through God.” Hovey, Studies, 65—“To manifest the
glory or perfection of God is therefore the chief end of our
existence. To live in such a manner that his life is reflected in
ours; that his character shall reappear, at least faintly, in
ours; that his holiness and love shall be recognized and declared
by us, is to do that for which we are made. And so, in requiring
us to glorify himself, God simply requires us to do what is
absolutely right, and what is at the same time indispensable to
our highest welfare. Any lower aim could not have been placed
before us, without making us content with a character unlike that
of the First Good and the First Fair.” See statement and criticism
of Edwards’s view in Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 227-238.
VI. Relation of the Doctrine of Creation to other Doctrines.
1. To the holiness and benevolence of God.
Creation, as the work of God, manifests of necessity God’s moral
attributes. But the existence of physical and moral evil in the universe
appears, at first sight, to impugn these attributes, and to contradict the
Scripture declaration that the work of God’s hand was “very good” (Gen.
1:31). This difficulty may be in great part removed by considering that:
(_a_) At its first creation, the world was good in two senses: first, as
free from moral evil,—sin being a later addition, the work, not of God,
but of created spirits; secondly, as adapted to beneficent ends,—for
example, the revelation of God’s perfection, and the probation and
happiness of intelligent and obedient creatures.
(_b_) Physical pain and imperfection, so far as they existed before the
introduction of moral evil, are to be regarded: first, as congruous parts
of a system of which sin was foreseen to be an incident; and secondly, as
constituting, in part, the means of future discipline and redemption for
the fallen.
The coprolites of Saurians contain the scales and bones of fish
which they have devoured. _Rom. 8:20-22_—“_For the creation was
subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who
subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the
glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation_
[the irrational creation] _groaneth and travaileth in pain
together until now_”; _23_—our mortal body, as a part of nature,
participates in the same groaning. _2 Cor. 4:17_—“_our light
affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more
exceedingly an eternal weight of glory._” Bowne, Philosophy of
Theism, 224-240—“How explain our rather shabby universe? Pessimism
assumes that perfect wisdom is compatible only with a perfect
work, and that we know the universe to be truly worthless and
insignificant.” John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 29, brings
in a fearful indictment of nature, her storms, lightnings,
earthquakes, blight, decay, and death. Christianity however
regards these as due to man, not to God; as incidents of sin; as
the groans of creation, crying out for relief and liberty. Man’s
body, as a part of nature, waits for the adoption, and
resurrection of the body is to accompany the renewal of the world.
It was Darwin’s judgment that in the world of nature and of man,
on the whole, “happiness decidedly prevails.” Wallace, Darwinism,
36-40—“Animals enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable.”
Drummond, Ascent of Man, 203 _sq._—“In the struggle for life there
is no hate—only hunger.” Martineau, Study, 1:330—“Waste of life is
simply nature’s exuberance.” Newman Smyth, Place of Death in
Evolution, 44-56—“Death simply buries the useless waste. Death has
entered for life’s sake.” These utterances, however, come far
short of a proper estimate of the evils of the world, and they
ignore the Scriptural teaching with regard to the connection
between death and sin. A future world into which sin and death do
not enter shows that the present world is abnormal, and that
morality is the only cure for mortality. Nor can the imperfections
of the universe be explained by saying that they furnish
opportunity for struggle and for virtue. Robert Browning, Ring and
Book, Pope, 1875—“I can believe this dread machinery Of sin and
sorrow, would confound me else, Devised,—all pain, at most
expenditure Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve, By new
machinery in counterpart, The moral qualities of man—how else?—To
make him love in turn and be beloved, Creative and
self-sacrificing too, And thus eventually godlike.” This seems
like doing evil that good may come. We can explain mortality only
by immorality, and that not in God but in man. Fairbairn:
“Suffering is God’s protest against sin.”
Wallace’s theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by
the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson: “Finding that of
fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.” William James: “Our
dogs are _in_ our human life, but not _of_ it. The dog, under the
knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his
suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a
spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at
present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our
life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.”
Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper
and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a
shallow thing.” The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a
paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if
man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the
evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some
cause and reason in the misconduct of man.
This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when
originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made
it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the
great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon.
We accept Bushnell’s idea of “anticipative consequences,” and
would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet
no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the
patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest
vertebrates of geological history were types of man and
preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same
vertebrates may equally have been a type of man’s sin and its
results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and
provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of
fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the
redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of
Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward
world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into
nature.” Perowne refers _Ps. 96:10_—“_The world also is
established that it cannot be moved_”—to the restoration of the
inanimate creation; _cf._ _Heb. 12:27_—“_And this word, Yet once
more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as
of things that have been made, that those things which are not
shaken may remain_”; _Rev. 21:1, 5_—“_a new heaven and a new earth
... Behold, I make all things new._”
Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative
consequences. James D. Dana: “It is funny that the sin of Adam
should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have
kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor
innocents!” Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an
umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative
consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of
the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him
less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational
explanation of physical evil in the universe is that of _Rom.
8:20, 21_—“_the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of
him who subjected it_”—_i. e._, by reason of the first man’s
sin—“_in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered_.”
Martineau, Types, 2:151—“What meaning could Pity have in a world
where suffering was not meant to be?” Hicks, Critique of Design
Arguments, 386—“The very badness of the world convinces us that
God is good.” And Sir Henry Taylor’s words: “Pain in man Bears the
high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes ’tis surely
piteous”—receive their answer: The brute is but an appendage to
man, and like inanimate nature it suffers from man’s fall—suffers
not wholly in vain, for even pain in brutes serves to illustrate
the malign influence of sin and to suggest motives for resisting
it. Pascal: “Whatever virtue can be bought with pain is cheaply
bought.” The pain and imperfection of the world are God’s frown
upon sin and his warning against it. See Bushnell, chapter on
Anticipative Consequences, in Nature and the Supernatural,
194-219. Also McCosh, Divine Government, 26-35, 249-261; Farrar,
Science and Theology, 82-105; Johnson, in Bap. Rev., 6:141-154;
Fairbairn, Philos. Christ. Religion, 94-168.
2. To the wisdom and free-will of God.
No plan whatever of a finite creation can fully express the infinite
perfection of God. Since God, however, is immutable, he must always have
had a plan of the universe; since he is perfect, he must have had the best
possible plan. As wise, God cannot choose a plan less good, instead of one
more good. As rational, he cannot between plans equally good make a merely
arbitrary choice. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that
infinite wisdom will act wisely. As no compulsion from without, so no
necessity from within, moves God to create the actual universe. Creation
is both wise and free.
As God is both rational and wise, his having a plan of the
universe must be better than his not having a plan would be. But
the universe once was not; yet without a universe God was blessed
and sufficient to himself. God’s perfection therefore requires,
not that he have a universe, but that he have a plan of the
universe. Again, since God is both rational and wise, his actual
creation cannot be the worst possible, nor one arbitrarily chosen
from two or more equally good. It must be, all things considered,
the best possible. We are optimists rather than pessimists.
But we reject that form of optimism which regards evil as the
indispensable condition of the good, and sin as the direct product
of God’s will. We hold that other form of optimism which regards
sin as naturally destructive, but as made, in spite of itself, by
an overruling providence, to contribute to the highest good. For
the optimism which makes evil the necessary condition of finite
being, see Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, 468, 624; Hedge, Ways of
the Spirit, 241; and Pope’s Essay on Man. For the better form of
optimism, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Schöpfung, 13:651-653;
Chalmers, Works, 2:286; Mark Hopkins, in Andover Rev., March,
1885:197-210; Luthardt, Lehre des freien Willens, 9, 10—“Calvin’s
_Quia voluit_ is not the last answer. We could have no heart for
such a God, for he would himself have no heart. Formal will alone
has no heart. In God real freedom controls formal, as in fallen
man, formal controls real.”
Janet, in his Final Causes, 429 sq. and 490-503, claims that
optimism subjects God to fate. We have shown that this objection
mistakes the certainty which is consistent with freedom for the
necessity which is inconsistent with freedom. The opposite
doctrine attributes an irrational arbitrariness to God. We are
warranted in saying that the universe at present existing,
considered as a partial realization of God’s developing plan, is
the best possible for this particular point of time,—in short,
that all is for the best,—see _Rom. 8:28_—“_to them that love God
all things work together for good_”; _1 Cor. 3:21_—“_all things
are yours._”
For denial of optimism in any form, see Watson, Theol. Institutes,
1:419; Hovey, God with Us, 206-208; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:419,
432, 566, and 2:145; Lipsius, Dogmatik, 234-255; Flint, Theism,
227-256; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 397-409, and esp. 405—“A wisdom
the resources of which have been so expended that it cannot equal
its past achievements is a finite capacity, and not the boundless
depth of the infinite God.” But we reply that a wisdom which does
not do that which is best is not wisdom. The limit is not in God’s
abstract power, but in his other attributes of truth, love, and
holiness. Hence God can say in _Is. 5:4_—“_what could have been
done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?_”
The perfect antithesis to an ethical and theistic optimism is
found in the non-moral and atheistic pessimism of Schopenhauer
(Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) and Hartmann (Philosophie des
Unbewussten). “All life is summed up in effort, and effort is
painful; therefore life is pain.” But we might retort: “Life is
active, and action is always accompanied with pleasure; therefore
life is pleasure.” See Frances Power Cobbe, Peak in Darien,
95-134, for a graphic account of Schopenhauer’s heartlessness,
cowardice and arrogance. Pessimism is natural to a mind soured by
disappointment and forgetful of God: _Eccl. 2:11_—“_all was vanity
and a striving after wind._” Homer: “There is nothing whatever
more wretched than man.” Seneca praises death as the best
invention of nature. Byron: “Count o’er the joys thine hours have
seen, Count o’er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever
thou hast been, ’Tis something better not to be.” But it has been
left to Schopenhauer and Hartmann to define will as unsatisfied
yearning, to regard life itself as a huge blunder, and to urge
upon the human race, as the only measure of permanent relief, a
united and universal act of suicide.
G. H. Beard, in Andover Rev., March, 1892—“Schopenhauer utters one
New Testament truth: the utter delusiveness of self-indulgence.
Life which is dominated by the desires, and devoted to mere
getting, is a pendulum swinging between pain and ennui.” Bowne,
Philos. of Theism, 124—“For Schopenhauer the world-ground is pure
will, without intellect or personality. But pure will is nothing.
Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent
spirit, is nothing.” Royce, Spirit of Mod. Philos.,
253-280—“Schopenhauer united Kant’s thought, ‘The inmost life of
all things is one,’ with the Hindoo insight, ‘The life of all
these things, That art Thou.’ To him music shows best what the
will is: passionate, struggling, wandering, restless, ever
returning to itself, full of longing, vigor, majesty, caprice.
Schopenhauer condemns individual suicide, and counsels
resignation. That I must ever desire yet never fully attain, leads
Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant
spirit. Schopenhauer finds in it proof of the totally evil nature
of things. Thus while Hegel is an optimist, Schopenhauer is a
pessimist.”
Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man,
intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress “represents the universe as a trap which
catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before
them.” Strauss: “If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had
better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had
better never have prophesied.” Hawthorne, Note-book: “Curious to
imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of
the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be
abolished,—as, for instance, death.”
On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of
Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern
Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day
Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow,
Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most
miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also
Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and
misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both
optimism and pessimism are possible.” Yet it is evident that there
must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not
be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially
pessimistic.
3. To Christ as the Revealer of God.
Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption,
the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God’s transcendence—the
universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his
love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we
imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the
recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow
and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author;
(3) the recognition of Christ _for_ us on the Cross and Christ _in_ us by
his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God’s heart
on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing
love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have
involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future
judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting
upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.
Christ’s Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from
human sin, and Christ’s judgment will show that the wicked cannot
always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark
problems of history and the guarantee of human progress. _Rom.
3:25_—“_whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in
his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over
of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God_”;
_8:32_—“_He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for
us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all
things?_” _Heb. 2:8, 9_—“_we see not yet all things subjected to
him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor_”;
_Acts 17:31_—“_he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the
earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained._” See
Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems,
240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am.
Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.
G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called
by Huxley the classic of pessimism.” Dean Swift, on the successive
anniversaries of his own birth, was accustomed to read the third
chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible “_Let the day
perish wherein I was born_” (_3:3_). But predestination and
election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible
plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been
saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.
_Rev. 4:11_—“_Thou didst create all things, and because of thy
will they were, and were created._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
79—“All things were present to God’s mind because of his will, and
then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.” Pfleiderer,
Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he
says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the
actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world’s
history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not
unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of
the world.
Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts
that all things _are_ good; Christian optimism asserts that all
things are _working together_ for good. Reverie in Asolando: ‘From
the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive
but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’ Balaustion’s
Adventure: ‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think
this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes
glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage
to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’ Browning
endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His
optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred
the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely
arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the
monologue of Caliban on Setebos: ‘Loving not, hating not, just
choosing so.’ Pippa Passes: ‘God’s in his heaven—All’s right with
the world.’ But how is this consistent with the guilt of the
sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved,
only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands
distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man.
Saul: ‘All’s love, but all’s law.’ Carlyle forms a striking
contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce
happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not
idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought
moreover in a foreign cause. God’s cause is not ours. Duty is a
menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a
beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and
there is no love.” Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums
at midnight and asked him: “Do you believe in a devil now?” But
Emerson replied: “I am more and more convinced of the greatness
and goodness of the English people.” On Browning and Carlyle, see
A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.
Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living,
replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and
pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins
asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best
possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the
President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered: “I
would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make
oranges and bananas grow further north.” The lady who was bitten
by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the
creature as “a depraved little insect.” She was told that this
would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous
state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as
he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the
contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten
him, he crushed the insect, saying: “There! I’ll show you that
there is a God in Israel!” He identified the mosquito with all the
corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress,
22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution
depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke’s History of the
Popes, denied all religious progress.” On Huxley’s account of
evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265 _sq._
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer’s
time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an
optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their
increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.” On
the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek
Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between
Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of
progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous
poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes,
and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis
of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God
and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not
inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”
Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view
as follows: “The world is the best of all possible worlds, and
everything in it is a necessary evil.” He should have added that
pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the
cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing
character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will
pass away.
Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American
preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well
that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not
well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for
the world or what trust in God, if they were well?” _Live_ spells
_Evil_, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell,
Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the
general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases....
The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as
to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort
in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes,
and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the
matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame
of his universe was fireproof.”
Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám,
Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To
grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it
to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire?” Royce,
Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job,
suggests the following solution: “When you suffer, your sufferings
are God’s sufferings, not his external work, not his external
penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own
personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and
has all your concern in overcoming this grief.” F. H. Johnson,
What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not
maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his
creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends;
the evolution of moral character is another.” A. E. Waffle, Uses
of Moral Evil: “(1) It aids development of holy character by
opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes
known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the
blessedness of heaven.”
4. To Providence and Redemption.
Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It
conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest
himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.
But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in
providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world
be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and
must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can
secure God’s absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over
it.
The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in
which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheistic
_dicta_ of Fichte: “The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error
of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel: “God evolves the
world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the
Spirit”; and of Strauss: “Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are
one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other
empirically.”
Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God’s
nature to create. Creation is God’s positing an _other_ which is
not an _other_. The creation is _his_, belongs to his being or
essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object
and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love,
Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune
God. Love must create and love _another_. But in loving this
_other_, God is only loving himself.” We have already, in our
discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the
insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power
of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of
an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is
pantheistic in tendency.
Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a
logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion
of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of
the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism
takes its place.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world
cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or
over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents
the _confounding_ of God with the world. The declaration that the
Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was
developed under the continuous operation of God’s laws and
presence, prevents the _separation_ of God from the world. Thus
pantheism and deism are both avoided.” See Kant and Spinoza
contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full
treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a
conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of
the false philosophy of our time.
5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.
We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of
the Sabbath, as commemorating God’s act of creation, and thus God’s
personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.
(_a_) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God’s appointed memorial
of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue
and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man
as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.
_Gen. 2:3_—“_And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it;
because that in it he rested from all his work which God had
created and made._” Our rest is to be a miniature representation
of God’s rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine
day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to
rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of
an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:
_Gen. 4:3_—“_And in process of time_ [lit. “_at the end of days_”]
_it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an
offering unto Jehovah_”; _Gen. 8:10, 12_—Noah twice waited seven
days before sending forth the dove from the ark; _Gen. 29:27,
28_—“_fulfil the week_”; _cf._ _Judges 14:12_—“_the seven days of
the feast_”; _Ex. 16:5_—double portion of manna promised on the
sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (_cf._ _verses 20,
30_). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the
original institution of the Sabbath at man’s creation. Moses in
the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and
observed: _Ex. 20:8_—“_Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy._”
The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation;
see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften,
ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce: “Seven was a sacred number
descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven
by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times
had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil.
As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so
the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in
number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular
honor.” But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia
shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in
ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the
seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth
days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and
following it are the words: “A day of rest.” The restrictions are
quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This
institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the
days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is
called “the day of rest for the heart,” but of the gods, on
account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being
put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.
S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of
Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week: “_Subattu_ in
Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose.
A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the
rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another
period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the
storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven
being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days
of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.” Hutton,
Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God’s mind a spring of eternal
rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the
law of rest as well as the law of labor.” We may question, indeed,
whether this doctrine of God’s rest does not of itself refute the
theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.
(_b_) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the
decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as
to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its
observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.
Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship
and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are
binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment
of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of
Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by
asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental
human need. _Mark 2:27_—“_The Sabbath was made_ [by God] _for man,
and not man for the Sabbath._” The Puritan restrictions are not
essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the
methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was
more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England
Fast-day. _Nehemiah 8:12, 18_—“_And all the people went their way
to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great
mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth
day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance_”—seems to
include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.
Origen, in Homily 23 on _Numbers_ (Migne, II:358): “Leaving
therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what
ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the
Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be
done.” Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and
dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his
Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining
that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it
uncertain whether “the Lord’s day” was weekly or annual. The
observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of
authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley: “In my opinion
St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not
obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor
beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in
any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his
apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day
from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient
reason.”
According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted
in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his
sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox
visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday.
Martin Luther said: “Keep the day holy for its use’s sake, both to
body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere
day’s sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish
foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to
dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment
on the Christian spirit and liberty.” But the most liberal and
even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and
patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its
observance is “the core of our civilization.” Charles Sumner: “If
we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as
fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.” Oliver
Wendell Holmes: “He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.” In
Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules
that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they
would become blind. So men’s spiritual sight will fail them if
they do not weekly come up into God’s light.
(_c_) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time
for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by
all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance
possible. Christ’s example and apostolic sanction have transferred the
Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last
is the day of Christ’s resurrection, and so the day when God’s spiritual
creation became in Christ complete.
No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed
by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours
before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is
Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th
degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a
seventh-day Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus
return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his
fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894,
asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the
seventh to the first, in the references to “_a Sabbath rest_” that
“_remaineth_,” and to “_another day_” taking the place of the
original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:
“On the Lord’s Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and
break bread.”
The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been
due to the resurrection of Christ upon “_the first day of the
week_” (_Mat. 28:1_), to his meeting with the disciples upon that
day and upon the succeeding Sunday (_John 20:26_), and to the
pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks
after (_Acts 2:1_—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by
Christ’s own example and by apostolic sanction the first day
became “_the Lord’s day_” (_Rev. 1:10_), on which believers met
regularly each week with their Lord (_Acts 20:7_—“_the first day
of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread_”) and
brought together their benevolent contributions (_1 Cor. 16:1,
2_—“_Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the
first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as
he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come_”).
Eusebius, Com. on _Ps. 92_ (Migne, V:1191, C): “Wherefore those
things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected,
the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the
festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord’s
day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”
Justin Martyr, First Apology: “On the day called Sunday all who
live in city or country gather together in one place, and the
memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are
read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common
assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world
and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he
was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on
the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun
(Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught
them these things which we have submitted to you for your
consideration.” This seems to intimate that Jesus between his
resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance
of the first day of the week. He was “_received up_” only after
“_he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the
apostles whom he had chosen_” (_Acts 1:2_).
The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ’s resurrection.
The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world;
the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the
world in Christ, in which God’s work in humanity first becomes
complete. C. H. M. on _Gen. 2_: “If I celebrate the seventh day it
marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the
rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the
first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in
the new creation in Christ.” (_Gal. 4:10, 11_—“_Ye observe days,
and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by
any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain_”; _Col.
2:16,17_—“_Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or
in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which
are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ’s._”)
See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord’s Day; Hessey,
Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood,
Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays
Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3:
321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on
the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for
Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord’s Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics
and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday
and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings’ Bible
Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. on _Mat. 12:3_. For the seventh-day
view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the
Sabbath. _Per contra_, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or
Sunday?
Section II.—Preservation.
I. Definition of Preservation.
Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in
existence the things he has created, together with the properties and
powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is our
attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of
Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.
In explanation we remark:
(_a_) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation.
That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into
existence by the creative act of God.
(_b_) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to
destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every
moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.
(_c_) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations
of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God’s will is not
the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person
or force can continue to exist or to act.
Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation
cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product
of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature
and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the
universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... The _rest_ of
God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”
Nor is God “the soul of the universe.” This phrase is pantheistic,
and implies that God is the only agent.
It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood
through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an
expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The
muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the
blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute.
The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two
ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or
five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each
beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds
per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day.
Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of
the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising
its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in
short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being
continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any
improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this
respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as
the most violent muscular exertion.”
Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to
be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the
sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up
several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the
heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of
it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that
exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of
To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain
laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to
run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes
it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make
gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present
action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its
expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some
perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of
his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate
influence.”
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.
1. From Scripture.
In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished
from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established
an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is
declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its powers.
This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ;
as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in
preservation.
_Nehemiah 9:6_—“_Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made
heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and
all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and
thou preservest them all_”; _Job 7:20_—“_O thou watcher_ [marg.
“preserver”] _of men!_”; _Ps. 36:6_—“_thou preservest man and
beast_”; _104:29, 30_—“_Thou takest away their breath, they die,
And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are
created, And thou renewest the face of the ground._” See Perowne
on _Ps. 104_—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for
good.” Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the
whole Cosmos.” _Acts 17:28_—“_in him we live, and move, and have
our being_”; _Col. 1:17_—“_in him all things consist_”; _Heb. 1:2,
3_—“_upholding all things by the word of his power._” _John
5:17_—“_My Father worketh even until now, and I work_”—refers most
naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed;
compare _Gen. 2:2_—“_on the seventh day God finished his work
which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his
work which he had made._” God is the upholder of physical life;
see _Ps. 66:8, 9_—“_O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in
life._” God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see _1 Tim.
6:13_—“_I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all
things alive_” (ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables
us to persist in our Christian course. _Mat. 4:4_—“_Man shall not
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God_”—though originally referring to physical nourishment
is equally true of spiritual sustentation. In _Ps. 104:26_—“_There
go the ships,_” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the
reference is not to man’s works but to God’s, as the parallelism:
“There is leviathan” would indicate, and that by “ships” are meant
“floaters” like the nautilus, which is a “little ship.” The 104th
Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps
alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.
2. From Reason.
We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following
considerations:
(_a_) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause
of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin
must be due to a superior power.
Dorner, Glaubenslehre: “Were the world self-existent, it would be
God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world
has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are
subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—_i. e._, are
dependent for their continued existence upon God.
(_b_) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect
expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills.
Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second
causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic
workings of the great first Cause.
For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see
Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy,
Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of
Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen,
Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and
Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to
the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in
walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the
walk.” It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force
with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is
fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is
lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with
human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will.
To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are
one.
We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation
pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects
to this view as follows: “This implies, first, that the conception
of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes
in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we
derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the
causal relation always involves will; it would follow that the
universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It
implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe,
and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations
of one single force—the Creator’s.” We reply to this reasoning by
asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call
involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or
unremembered activities of the will.
From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge,
Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from
mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is
a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter
is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the
external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will
believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and
that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”
New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second
causes, _i. e._, machines, very little to accomplish his purposes.
His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or
his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method
as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher
conceptions of the divine action.” Dorner: “If the world had no
independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean
anything.” But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives,
moves and has his being in God (_Acts 17:28_), and whatever has
come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in
Christ (_John 1:3, 4_, marginal reading).
Preservation is God’s continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych.
Theory, 305, speaks of “a kind of wholesale willing.” Augustine:
“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.” Principal Fairbairn: “Nature is
spirit.” Tennyson, The Ancient Sage: “Force is from the heights.”
Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion,
392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting.
It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is
God.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit
in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be
that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own
self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both
matter and mind.”
(_c_) God’s sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving
agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred
or existed independent of his will.
James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is
will.... This identification of nature with God’s will _would_ be
pantheistic only _if_ we turned the proposition round and
identified God with _no more_ than the life of the universe. But
we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God’s will, but
God’s will _is_ more than they. He is not the equivalent of the
All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild
beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective
to him.... He puts his power into that which is _other than
himself_, and he parts with _other use of it_ by preëngagement to
an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the
system.”
Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with
their power of alternative, are the product of God’s
self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not
always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing
finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as
immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as
opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing
of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M.
Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we
walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but
depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which
it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will
does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.” A. R.
Wallace: “The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but
actually _is_, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme
intelligence.... Man’s free will is only a larger artery for the
controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long
evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite
One.” This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far
too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all
holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed
upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct.
Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin,
and guilt.
All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give
testimony to the will of God which originated them and which
continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no
sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant
willing of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in
the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself
any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy
will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The
being that sins can maintain its existence only through the
preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore
holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite
personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence.
On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being
and their powers only as they are upheld by God.
God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to
God’s transcendence as well as to God’s immanence. Immanence alone
is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore,
Incarnation, 136 _sq._—“Christian theology is the harmony of
pantheism and deism.” It maintains transcendence, and so has all
the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains
immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability
to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic
Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic
organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one
supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and
teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which
prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an
intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly
apart from it.” On the persistency of force, _super cuncta_,
_subter cuncta_, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic
Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of
preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond
nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is
exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of
Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.
III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.
1. Deism.
This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from
which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a
process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.
Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism
into a system. His book _De Veritate_ was published in 1624. He
argues against the probability of God’s revealing his will to only
a portion of the earth. This he calls “particular religion.” Yet
he sought, and according to his own account he received, a
revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in
disproof of revelation. He “asked for a sign,” and was answered by
a “loud though gentle noise from the heavens.” He had the vanity
to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to
extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of
half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God
would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See
Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the
exaggeration of the truth of God’s transcendence. See Christlieb,
Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon
illustrates by the shipbuilder: “Ut faber discedit a navi
exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.” God is the maker, not the
keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes
Teufelsdröckh speak of “An absentee God, sitting idle ever since
the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it
go.” Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.
“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a
mechanical view of the world” (Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of
Hindu Brahma, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted
ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce,
Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that
the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible.
Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by
separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no
resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet
George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord
Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the
founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston
its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature.
Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special
revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion
of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of
positive institution.”
We object to this view that:
(_a_) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a
self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as
gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe
to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.
Deism regards the universe as a “perpetual motion.” Modern views
of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is
the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to
deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and
then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the
key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made
mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an
impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver
or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces
God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls
the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.” Hence Spinoza,
the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See
Woods, Works, 2:40.
(_b_) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude
anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a
multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the
upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God.
Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence,
omniscience, and omnipotence.
The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would
seem care to man. To God’s inexhaustible fulness of life there are
no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has
created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may
alter the poet’s verse and say: “There’s not a flower that’s born
to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” God
does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are
not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being
in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of
To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God,
if he be nothing to the world.” See Chalmers, Astronomical
Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in
Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.
(_c_) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential
interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the
world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation,
regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God,
and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.
Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert
Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it
treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent
divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies
them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and
makes the relation between them a purely external one.” Ruskin:
“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on
every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the
pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and
to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same
power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the
casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the
mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.” See
Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit,
76.
2. Continuous Creation.
This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a
new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins,
and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.
Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor’s
utterance: “God is the original of all being, and the only cause
of all natural effects.” Edwards himself says: “God’s upholding
created substance, or causing its existence in each successive
moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of
nothing at each moment.” He argues that the past existence of a
thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a
thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not. “This is
equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall
last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative
power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot” (A. S. Carman).
Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation “is really continued
creation.” Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are
dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must
originate in a divine efficiency.” 2:683—“There is but one true
and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated
for centuries: ‘Whence came evil?’ and that is: It came from the
first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the
moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises
in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make
moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he
pleases.” God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as
he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material
world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression
is necessary to God. His maxim was: “Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There
can be no God without an accompanying world.” See Rothe, Dogmatik,
1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib.
Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.
The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that
all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force is
_divine_ will, and divine will in _direct_ exercise. But the human
will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of
nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate,
workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain
of truth in the following utterances which need important
qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202,
likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on
condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says
that “ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought
out from a piano, which successively die away as others are
produced.” Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but
asks quite pertinently: “What about the performer, in the case of
the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the
brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the
performer’s mind?” Professor Fitzgerald: “All nature is living
thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our
being.” Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891: “The
barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others
have done.”
To this we object, upon the following grounds:
(_a_) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and
executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but
is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.
Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in
Continuous Creation as follows: “The whole world of things is
momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually
new realities.” The words of the poet would then be literally
true: “Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From
the heart of God proceeds.” Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis
tellus, innabilis unda.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60,
says that, to Fichte, “the world was thus perpetually created anew
in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only
admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.” A. L.
Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional
intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary
absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of
God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science
relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion
does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their
relation to God.”
Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to
human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature
and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God
acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even
on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in
nature, since God’s regular and habitual action is a second and
subsequent thing, while his act of initiation and organization is
the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be
identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be
identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April,
1895:559—“What is _nature_, but the promise of God’s pledged and
habitual causality? And what is _spirit_, but the province of his
free causality responding to needs and affections of his free
children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then
be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God’s
agency is not intrusive.” William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be
a phantasm, as thou say’st, A splendid fiction and prodigious
dream, To reach the real and true I’ll make no haste, More than
content with worlds that only seem.”
(_b_) It exaggerates God’s power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and
holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely,
objective existences—God’s veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no
real freedom and life, God’s love has made no self-communication to
creatures; if God’s will is the only force in the universe, God’s holiness
can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be
regarded as the author of human sin.
Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases
identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by
so decreeing, make Adam’s posterity one with their first father
and responsible for his sin. Edwards’s theory of continuous
creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of
original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises
with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or
natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and
guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not
been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and
far too little of substance.
It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards’s
idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of
Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King’s
College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and
an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College
while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield
while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those
disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin,
479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:
“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in
philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and
operation of the Author of nature” (see Allen, Jonathan Edwards,
16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan.
1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier’s Clavis Universalis is the
source of Edwards’s idealism. It is more probable that his
idealism was the result of his own independent thinking,
occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and
Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C.
Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in
Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.
How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned
from Noah Porter’s Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and
quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct.
1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and
bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists
only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly
when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its
operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, ’tis
nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes
of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the
brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of
all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly
stable idea in God’s mind, together with his stable will that the
same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds
according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or,
in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise
divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact,
precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent
communications to created minds and effects on those minds.” It is
easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the “Exercise-system”
of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards’s
Idealism, see Frazer’s Berkeley (Blackwood’s Philos. Classics),
139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn’s
ed.), 327-334.
(_c_) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation
tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force from
the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine
will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending
will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which
has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and
personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and
personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.
Lotze tries to escape from _material_ causes and yet hold to
_second_ causes, by intimating that these second causes may be
spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit
in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we
call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very
peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a
one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog
would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James
Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a
veritable lion’s den,—all the footprints are in one direction.
Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply
the All,—the ununified totality of existence.” Dorner well remarks
that “Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance
of its activity, not new bringing it into being.” On the whole
subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi,
Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst.
Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.
IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.
(_a_) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying
or absorbing it. The influx of God’s sustaining energy is such that men
retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all
in all.
Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying
the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes
(continuous creation or pantheism). _1 Cor. 12:6_—“_there are
diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things
in all_”; _cf._ _Eph. 1:23_—the church, “_which is his body, the
fulness of him that filleth all in all_.” God’s action is no
_actio in distans_, or action where he is not. It is rather action
in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral
beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of
nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not.
God works through these human second causes, but he does not
supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action
of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are
real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of
God’s concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together
produce the writing, so God’s working causes natural powers to
work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words “_wherein
is the seed thereof_” (_Gen. 1:11_) has its counterpart in the
spiritual growth described in the words “_his seed abideth in
him_” (_1 John 3:9_). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency
in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (_1 Cor.
4:15_); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work
of God (_1 Pet. 1:3_). We are bidden to work out our own salvation
with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who
works in us both to will and to work (_Phil. 2:12, 13_).
(_b_) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to
remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they
are natural acts, and not as they are evil.
In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and
Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil
action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of
these powers is caused only by man. _Jer. 44:4_—“_Oh, do not this
abominable thing that I hate_”; _Hab. 1:13_—“_Thou that art of
purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on
perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal
treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up
the man that is more righteous than he?_” _James 1:13, 14_—“_Let
no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot
be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man
is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed._”
Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that
the fire did it; he asked the people for gold; “_so they gave it
me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf_”
(_Ex. 32:24_). Aaron leaves out one important point—his own
personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our
sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had
given him great talents, of which the devil had given the
application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he
himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are
electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to
which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the
wind or breath of the organ is God’s; but the fingering of the
keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at
every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his
instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual
grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds
all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the
suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which
the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary
(_Heb. 1:3_). On the importance of the idea of preservation in
Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).
Section III.—Providence.
I. Definition of Providence.
Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the
events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with
which he created it.
As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation
explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and
progress.
In explanation notice:
(_a_) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense of
_fore_seeing. It is _for_seeing also, or a positive agency in connection
with all the events of history.
(_b_) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While
preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created
things, providence is an actual care and control of them.
(_c_) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence
which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its
scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well
as over classes.
(_d_) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those
natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the
operation of God’s word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to
obedience.
(_e_) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the
efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive,
and determinative.
(_f_) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of
every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ;
see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”;
_cf._ John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”
The Germans have the word _Fürsehung_, forseeing, looking out for,
as well as the word _Vorsehung_, foreseeing, seeing beforehand.
Our word “providence” embraces the meanings of both these words.
On the general subject of providence, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology,
1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179;
21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.
Providence is God’s attention concentrated everywhere. His care is
microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,
_ad finem_: “All service is the same with God—With God, whose
puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”
Canon Farrar: “In one chapter of the Koran is the story how
Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to
earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the
sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal
steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of
Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and
which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one
behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered
it. ‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king’s sin,
And holp the little ant at entering in.’ ‘Nothing is too high or
low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’ ” Yet a preacher
began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are
are all numbered”—by saying: “Why, some of you, my hearers, do not
believe that even your heads are all numbered!”
A modern prophet of unbelief in God’s providence is William
Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read: “When
overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When
all I was to all men’s sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then
do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.” Then
he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and
continues: “O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine
own soul’s abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to
Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his
violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne’er Know, though
he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there.
Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit
doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate’er my deeds, I
am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a
speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good
or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear.
For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of
heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And
so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken.
And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul
The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the
Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval
Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high
imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we
forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But
history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven
times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do
the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The
work of heaven! ’Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly
will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world
enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold:
Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown
God.”
In pleasing contrast to William Watson’s Unknown God, is the God
of Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional: “God of our fathers, known of
old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we
hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us
yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting
dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient
Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be
with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies
melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of
yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations,
spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight
of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such
boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the
Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we
forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and
iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding
calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy
mercy on thy people, Lord!”
These problems of God’s providential dealings are intelligible
only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that
his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is
the progressive manifestation of Christ’s holiness and love, and
in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the
universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules
over all, and that “_all things work together for good to them
that love God._” (_Rom. 8:28_).
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.
1. Scriptural Proof.
The Scripture witnesses to
A. A general providential government and control (_a_) over the universe
at large; (_b_) over the physical world; (_c_) over the brute creation;
(_d_) over the affairs of nations; (_e_) over man’s birth and lot in life;
(_f_) over the outward successes and failures of men’s lives; (_g_) over
things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (_h_) in the protection of
the righteous; (_i_) in the supply of the wants of God’s people; (_j_) in
the arrangement of answers to prayer; (_k_) in the exposure and punishment
of the wicked.
(_a_) _Ps. 103:19_—“_his kingdom ruleth over all_”; _Dan.
4:35_—“_doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and
among the inhabitants of the earth_”; _Eph. 1:11_—“_worketh all
things after the counsel of his will._”
(_b_) _Job 37:5, 10_—“_God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice
is given_”; _Ps. 104:14_—“_causeth the grass to grow for the
cattle_”; _135:6, 7_—“_Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he
done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ...
vapors ... lightnings ... wind_”; _Mat. 5:45_—“_maketh his sun to
rise ... sendeth rain_”; _Ps. 104:16_—“_The trees of Jehovah are
filled_”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which
come under human cultivation; _cf._ _Mat. 6:30_—“_if God so clothe
the grass of the field._”
(_c_) _Ps. 104:21, 28_—“_young lions roar ... seek their food from
God ... that thou givest them they gather_”; _Mat. 6:26_—“_birds
of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them_”;
_10:29_—“_two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the
ground without your Father._”
(_d_) _Job 12:23_—“_He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth
them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive_”;
_Ps. 22:28_—“_the kingdom is Jehovah’s; And he is the ruler over
the nations_”; _66:7_—“_He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes
observe the nations_”; _Acts 17:26_—“_made of one every nation of
men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their
appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation_” (instance
Palestine, Greece, England).
(_e_) _1 Sam. 16:1_—“_fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send
thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king
among his sons_”; _Ps. 139:16_—“_Thine eyes did see mine unformed
substance, And in thy book were all my members written_”; _Is.
45:5_—“_I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me_”; _Jer.
1:5_—“_Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ...
sanctified thee ... appointed thee_”; _Gal. 1:15, 16_—“_God, who
separated me, even from my mother’s womb, and called me through
his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among
the Gentiles._”
(_f_) _Ps. 75:6, 7_—“_neither from the east, nor from the west,
Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He
putteth down one, and lifteth up another_”; _Luke 1:52_—“_He hath
put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low
degree._”
(_g_) _Prov. 16:33_—“_The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole
disposing thereof is of Jehovah_”; _Mat. 10:30_—“_the very hairs
of your head are all numbered._”
(_h_) _Ps. 4:8_—“_In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For
thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety_”; _5:12_—“_thou
wilt compass him with favor as with a shield_”; _63:8_—“_Thy right
hand upholdeth me_”; _121:3_—“_He that keepeth thee will not
slumber_”; _Rom. 8:28_—“_to them that love God all things work
together for good._”
(_i_) _Gen. 22:8, 14_—“_God will provide himself the lamb ...
Jehovah-jireh_” (marg.: that is, “Jehovah will see,” or
“provide”); _Deut. 8:3_—“_man doth not live by bread only, but by
every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man
live_”; _Phil. 4:19_—“_my God shall supply every need of yours._”
(_j_) _Ps. 68:10_—“_Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for
the poor_”; _Is. 64:4_—“_neither hath the eye seen a God besides
thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him_”; _Mat.
6:8_—“_your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye
ask him_”; _32, 33_—“_all these things shall be added unto you._”
(_k_) _Ps. 7:12, 13_—“_If a man turn not, he will whet his sword;
He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for
him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts_”;
_11:6_—“_Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone
and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup._”
The statements of Scripture with regard to God’s providence are strikingly
confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human
development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a
determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in
Buckle’s view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced,
ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment.
Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human
development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for
comparatively little. “There shall be no Alps!” says Napoleon. Charles
Kingsley: “The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by
circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering
circumstance.” Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to
physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the
ordering of God’s providence. Man’s need of fresh water leads him to
rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires
seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and
hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense
became also places of worship and of appeal to God.
Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national
characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The
greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position.
The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their
neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and
had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the
surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the
ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military
spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with
varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and
assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned
organization and law. _Parcere subjectis_ was her rule, as well as
_debellare superbos_. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that
the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only
a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration
strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion.
Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island
became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political
progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet
consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists of
_several_ islands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to
subjection.
Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine
as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a
sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of
antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth.
George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory
of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271,
treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature,
sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the
one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the
other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate
peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic
race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had
as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and
the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no
interest in science.
On God’s pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life,
striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America.
Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the
only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only
one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was
too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the
Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than
they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they
had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E.
Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American
Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and
bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829,
telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts
of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the
action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in
1855 the competition on the Emperor’s farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to
the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil
war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in
the crops.
B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(_a_) to
men’s free acts in general; (_b_) to the sinful acts of men also.
(a) _Ex. 12:36_—“_Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of
the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And
they despoiled the Egyptians_”; _1 Sam. 24:18_—“_Jehovah had
delivered me up into thy hand_” (Saul to David); _Ps. 33:14,
15_—“_He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He
that fashioneth the hearts of them all_” (_i. e._, equally, one as
well as another); _Prov. 16:1_—“_The plans of the heart belong to
man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah_”;
_19:21_—“_There are many devices in a man’s heart; But the counsel
of Jehovah, __ that shall stand_”; _20:24_—“_A man’s goings are of
Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?_” _21:1_—“_The
king’s heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He
turneth it whithersoever he will_” (_i. e._, as easily as the
rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion
of the hand or the foot of the husbandman); _Jer. 10:23_—“_O
Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not
in man that walketh to direct his steps_”; _Phil. 2:13_—“_it is
God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good
pleasure_”; _Eph. 2:10_—“_we are his workmanship, created in
Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we
should walk in them_”; _James 4:13-15_—“_If the Lord will, we
shall both live, and do this or that._”
(_b_) _2 Sam. 16:10_—“_because Jehovah hath said unto him_
[Shimei]: _Curse David_”; _24:1_—“_the anger of Jehovah was
kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying,
Go, number Israel and Judah_”; _Rom. 11:32_—“_God hath shut up all
unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all_”; _2 Thess.
2:11, 12_—“_God sendeth them a working of error, that they should
believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the
truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness._”
Henry Ward Beecher: “There seems to be no order in the movements
of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a
plan in them all.” John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in
which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder,
while yet a real order underlay it all. “As bees gather their
stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by
man’s superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and
work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.” Dr.
Deems: “The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then
do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the
rest: Then do not worry.” See Bruce, Providential Order, 183
_sq._; Providence in the Individual Life, 231 _sq._
God’s providence with respect to men’s evil acts is described in Scripture
as of four sorts:
(_a_) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise
be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not
of obligation, but of grace.
_Gen. 20:6_—Of Abimelech: “_I also withheld thee from sinning
against me_”; _31:24_—“_And God came to Laban the Syrian in a
dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that
thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad_”; _Psalm 19:13_—“_Keep
back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have
dominion over me_”; _Hosea 2:6_—“_Behold, I will hedge up thy way
with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall
not find her paths_”—here the “_thorns_” and the “_wall_” may
represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully
checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Bible _in
loco_). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws,
age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man
sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and
strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly
every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he
recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to
plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the
Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at
sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime
than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of
punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store,
when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the
city, replied: “Death!” Death certainly limits aggregations of
property, and so constitutes a means of God’s preventive
providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God
prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.
(_b_) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil
dispositions of their hearts. God’s permissive providence is simply the
negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner,
instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies
no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the
sin and determination to punish it.
_2 Chron. 32:31_—“_God left him_ [Hezekiah], _to try him, that he
might know all that was in his heart_”; _cf._ _Deut. 8:2_—“_that
he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine
heart._” _Ps. 17:13, 14_—“_Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is
thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah_”; _Ps. 81:12,
13_—“_So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That
they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would
hearken unto me!_” _Is. 53:4, 10_—“_Surely he hath borne our
griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him._” _Hosea
4:17_—“_Ephraim __ Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone_”;
_Acts 14:16_—“_who in the generations gone by suffered all the
nations to walk in their own ways_”; _Rom. 1:24, 28_—“_God gave
them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave
them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not
fitting_”; _3:25_—“_to show his righteousness, because of the
passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of
God._” To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be
referred _1 Sam. 18:10_—“_an evil spirit from God came mightily
upon Saul._” As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the
operation of the great first Cause, and said: “_The God of glory
thundereth_” (_Ps. 29:3_), so, because even the acts of the wicked
entered into God’s plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented
God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In _2
Sam. 24:1_, God moves David to number Israel, but in _1 Chron.
21:1_ the same thing is referred to Satan. God’s providence in
these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.
Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism: “God is law, say the wise; O Soul,
and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet
his voice.” Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear
separation of God’s efficiency from God’s permissive act was
reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament
laid upon the sovereign power of God.” Coleridge, in his
Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of “the
habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all
excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause,
without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a
striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the
narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical
books.... The distinction between the providential and the
miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate,
not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.” The woman who
had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it
for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser;
she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.
(_c_) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and
unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly
come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so
that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is
sometimes called overruling providence.
_Gen. 50:20_—“_as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant
it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much
people alive_”; _Ps. 76:10_—“_the wrath of man shall praise thee:
The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee_”—put on as an
ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory; _Is.
10:5_—“_Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose
hand is mine indignation_”; _John 13:27_—“_What thou doest, do
quickly_”—do in a particular way what is actually being done
(Westcott, Bib. Com., _in loco_); _Acts 4:27, 28_—“_against thy
holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius
Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered
together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained
to come to pass._”
To this head of directive providence should probably be referred
the passages with regard to Pharaoh in _Ex. 4:21_—“_I will harden
his heart, and he will not let the people go_”; _7:13_—“_and
Pharaoh’s heart was hardened_”; _8:15_—“_he hardened his
heart_”—_i. e._, Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the
controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of
Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous
cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had
hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in
circumstances which would have influenced to right action a
well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition
like Pharaoh’s to the peculiar course of wickedness which he
actually pursued.
God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, then, first, by permitting him to
harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the
sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the
direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of
enlightenment, Pharaoh’s very opportunities being perverted by him
into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted
being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially
forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do
God’s will, and thus making it morally certain, though not
necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing
Pharaoh’s surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one
way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano,
which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course
down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The
gravitation downward is due to man’s evil will; the direction to
this side or to that is due to God’s providence. See _Rom. 9:17,
18_—“_For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show
in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in
all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he
will he hardeneth._” Thus the very passions which excite men to
rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes:
see Annotated Paragraph Bible, on _Ps. 76:10_.
God hardens Pharaoh’s heart only after all the earlier plagues
have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God
hardens no man’s heart who has not first hardened it himself.
Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden
the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness.
It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh
hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature
is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they
resist softening influences.” The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God
decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself.
Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within
the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the
will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a
time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”
(_d_) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil
passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral
evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God’s determining the
measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God’s
complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.
_Job 1:12_—“_And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in
thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand_”; _2:6_—“_Behold, he
is in thy hand; only spare his life_”; _Ps. 124:2_—“_If it had not been
Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they
swallowed us up alive_”; _1 Cor. 10:13_—“_will not suffer you to be
tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the
way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it_”; _2 Thess. 2:7_—“_For
the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that
restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way_”; _Rev. 20:2, 3_—“_And
he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan,
and bound him for a thousand years._”
Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God’s will and man’s
will is “such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in
another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature
are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A
very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men.
The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will.
This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to
personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God’s control of both the
bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in
their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two
coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is
false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”
2. Rational proof.
A. Arguments _a priori_ from the divine attributes. (_a_) From the
immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his
eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this
plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence.
(_b_) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will
care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his
while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is
providence. (_c_) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God
must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the
universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice
is providence.
For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum,
11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,
“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum
administrari.” Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most
important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and
becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such
supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the
affairs of the world with a just and good providence.” Marcus
Antoninus: “If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for
human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods
and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they
regard human affairs.” See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall
see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general,
rather than in a particular, providence.
On the argument for providence derived from God’s benevolence, see
Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God’s
majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a
good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that
which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come
into existence without his agency, it would become God’s moral
character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so
susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so
great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.” _John
5:17_—“_My Father worketh even until now, and I work_”—is as
applicable to providence as to preservation.
The complexity of God’s providential arrangements may be
illustrated by Tyndall’s explanation of the fact that heartsease
does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In
English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats
must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound.
4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are
destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees’ nests are destroyed, there is no
fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no
heartsease grows.
B. Arguments _a posteriori_ from the facts of nature and of history. (_a_)
The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own
hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a
higher power. (_b_) The observed moral order of the world, although
imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine
providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are
beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will,
and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.
The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers
with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they
enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man’s destiny for time and
for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a
Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five
Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends
upon “variety of environment” (H. Spencer). But this variety of
environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.
“There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we
will.” Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness. “Man
proposes and God disposes” has become a proverb. Experience
teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men
often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they
“embattle and are broken.” Providence is not always on the side of
the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate
of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at
Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without
consciousness of their greatness. _Cf._ _Is. 42:16_—“_I will bring
the blind by a way that they know not_”; _1 Cor. 5:37, 38_—“_thou
sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it
pleased him._”
The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This
is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the
maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions
are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were
always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a
compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be
impossible. Job’s friends accuse Job of acting upon this
principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:
“_But if not_”—even if God does not deliver us—“_we will not serve
thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up_”
(_Dan. 3:18._)
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or
infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to
reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater
and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of
Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic
asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a
momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a
surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a
Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.” Kidd, Social
Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken
place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the
reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to
them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific
impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a
super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that
Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.
James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God’s calm
control of the forces of the universe, both physical and mental,
should give us confidence when evil seems impending: “How many
times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging
and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens
are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!” See
Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar’s Science
and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world,
notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn’s
ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.
1. Fatalism.
Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human
self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.
To this view we object that (_a_) it contradicts consciousness, which
testifies that we are free; (_b_) it exalts the divine power at the
expense of God’s truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (_c_) it destroys all
evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (_d_) it practically makes
necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature
without present validity or future vindication.
The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the
practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is
to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or
medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed.
Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that
fatalism is essential to the system. _Islam_ = “submission,” and
the participle _Moslem_ = “submitted,” _i. e._, to God. Turkish
proverb: “A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”
The Mohammedan thinks of God’s dominant attribute as being
greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God
is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of
sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of
believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and
a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.
Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman
tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that
it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders
denies that the Koran is peculiarly _sensual_. “The Christian and
Jewish religions,” he says, “have their paradise also. The Koran
makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct; ‘Grace from
thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’ The emphasis of the Koran is
upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of
religion by _force_. It declares that there shall be no compulsion
in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be
distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the
Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that
Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institute _polygamy_. It
found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it
prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as
Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is
not hostile to _secular learning_. Learning flourished under the
Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they
do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church
has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”
See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.
Calvinists can assert freedom, since man’s will finds its highest
freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates
submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The
essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is
found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God
in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the
submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh,
Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill,
Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton,
Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed.
Walker, 268-324.
2. Casualism.
Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers
the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.
Upon this view we remark:
(_a_) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the
fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or
relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence
arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge.
Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot
understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.
Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a
stranger in the street need not bring God’s providence before me,
although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that
meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger’s
conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many
opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the
river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an
ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God;
yet Dr. Arnold’s saying that every school boy should put on his
hat for God’s glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid.
There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not
afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic
punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the
question which shoe we shall put on first. “Love God and do what
you will,” said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that
love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be
always on the watch for indications of God’s will.
(_b_) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal
connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion
the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a
fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or
knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.
In _Luke 10:31_, our Savior says: “_By chance a certain priest was
going down that way_.” Janet: “Chance is not a cause, but a
coincidence of causes.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge,
197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence
in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the
unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one,
when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the
antithesis of chance is purpose.”
(_c_) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently
insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or
the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending
and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not
only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and
moral world, casualism must be ruled out.
The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate
of Rochester. “Climate?” he replied; “Rochester has no
climate,—only weather!” So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and
downs of human affairs as simply “cosmical weather.” But our
intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in
individual and national history, as well as in the physical
universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God
proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of
Christ, 1:155, note.
3. Theory of a merely general providence.
Many who acknowledge God’s control over the movements of planets and the
destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events.
Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory
of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism,
which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe,
but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general
laws.
This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen
philosophers. Cicero: “Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.” “Even
in kingdoms among men,” he says, “kings do not trouble themselves
with insignificant affairs.” Fullerton, Conceptions of the
Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of
worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.
‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’ could be grasped by no
consciousness.” The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without
ears, for they said: “It is a shame to believe that God would hear
the talk of men.” So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd
that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there
were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the
belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:
“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him
from broodin’ on bein’ a dog.” This has been paraphrased: “A
reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from
brooding over her being a girl.”
In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this
theory that:
(_a_) General control over the course of nature and of history is
impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the
course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to
escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to
determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the
fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.
“Nothing great has great beginnings.” “Take care of the pence, and
the pounds will take care of themselves.” “Care for the chain is
care for the links of the chain.” Instances in point are the
sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (_Esther 6:1_), and the seeming
chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai’s service
and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider’s web spun
across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken
refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a
bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire
of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which
occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which
pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English
kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror,
and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of
pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus,
hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so
prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that
dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy,
and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the
conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer
appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of
New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the
order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing
to America; Major André’s lack of self-possession in presence of
his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of
showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the
unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the
plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot
at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and
resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to
history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm
perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or
he cannot care for the greatest.
“Large doors swing on small hinges.” The barking of a dog
determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier.
Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium: “We find great things are
made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last
Comes God behind them.” E. G. Robinson: “We cannot suppose only a
general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the
filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general
includes the special.” Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors,
said to Pusey, “I wish you would learn something about those
German critics.” “In the obedient spirit of those times,” writes
Pusey, “I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to
Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life
turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd’s.”
Goldwin Smith: “Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of
William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at
Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed.
The course even of science would have been changed, if there had
not been a Newton and a Darwin.” The annexation of Corsica to
France gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror.
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt
deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome,
or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his
business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have
fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the
Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and
another form.” See Appleton, Works, 1:149 _sq._; Lecky, England in
the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.
(_b_) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must
also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the
happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as
trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the
object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to
provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief
in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God’s general care.
Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of
practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no
direct relation to them.
Man’s care for his own body involves care for the least important
members of it. A lover’s devotion is known by his interest in the
minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters
of interest to God. Pope’s Essay on Man: “All nature is but art
unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal
good.” If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency
of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the
results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and
storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God
not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general
trust in God will disappear also.
God’s care is shown in the least things as well as in the
greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says: “_Let these go their way:
that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom
thou hast given me I lost not one_” (_John 18:8, 9_). It is the
same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer: “_I guarded them,
and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition_” (_John
17:12_). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may
go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being
made a curse for us (_Gal. 3:13_). The dewdrop is moulded by the
same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he
had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place
he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God’s
hand for the accomplishing of God’s purposes, apart from any plan
or thought or hope of his own.
Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David
Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner’s Monthly for June,
1890: “Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that
without God’s help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest
solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of
death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness,
prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and
black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and
mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine
hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of
all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving
folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were
frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to
steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an
unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that
the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems
to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it
would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and
protecting us.” He refuses to believe that it is all the result of
“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from
Livingston but not from him: “Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”
(_c_) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of
public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events
which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies
force from men’s lips are proof that God is present and active in human
affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as
virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.
No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it
comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of
design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life,
as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature. _Ps.
107:23-28_—“_They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to
the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their
wits’ end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble._” A narrow
escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance
the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as
well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at
the President’s subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.
“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.” For contrast
between Nansen’s ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr.
Jacob Chamberlain’s calling upon God in his strait in India, see
Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4,
1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen.
Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing
business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy
discovery in science. But ‘Poor Richard’s’ sayings express his
mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave
him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it ‘with a rope
around their necks.’ As he told the Constitutional Convention of
1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with
prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that ‘God verily
rules in the affairs of men.’ And when the designs for an American
coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them,
not ‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’ or any other piece of
worldly prudence, but ‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of
Wisdom.’ ”
(_d_) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that
particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the
good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct
connection with the Christian’s prayers that no doubt remains with regard
to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine
agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the
Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and
daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation,
incarnation, and miracles.
Providence prepares the way for men’s conversion, sometimes by
their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of
others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns
that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is
busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying
his wants. Daniel Defoe: “I have been fed more by miracle than
Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.” In _Psalm 32_, David
celebrates not only God’s pardoning mercy but his subsequent
providential leading: “_I will counsel thee with mine eye upon
thee_” (_verse 8_). It may be objected that we often mistake the
meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence,
we are compelled to believe, not that we _know_ the design, but
that there _is_ a design. Instance Shelley’s drowning, and Jacob
Knapp’s prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman
Beecher’s attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God’s
judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the
burning of his own church.
_Job 23:10_—“_He knoweth the way that is mine,_” or “_the way that
is with me,_” _i. e._, my inmost way, life, character; “_When he
hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold._” _1 Cor. 19:4_—“_and
the rock was Christ_”—Christ was the ever present source of their
refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God’s
providence is all exercised through Christ. _2 Cor. 2:14_—“_But
thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ_”;
not, as in A. V., “_causeth us to triumph_.” Paul glories, not in
conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.
“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph
too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his
word.” Therefore Paul can call himself “_the prisoner of Christ
Jesus_” (_Eph. 3:1_). It was Christ who had shut him up two years
in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
IV. Relations of the Doctrine of Providence.
1. To miracles and works of grace.
Particular providence is the agency of God in what seem to us the minor
affairs of nature and human life. Special providence is only an instance
of God’s particular providence which has special relation to us or makes
peculiar impression upon us. It is special, not as respects the means
which God makes use of, but as respects the effect produced upon us. In
special providence we have only a more impressive manifestation of God’s
universal control.
Miracles and works of grace like regeneration are not to be regarded as
belonging to a different order of things from God’s special providences.
They too, like special providences, may have their natural connections and
antecedents, although they more readily suggest their divine authorship.
Nature and God are not mutually exclusive,—nature is rather God’s method
of working. Since nature is only the manifestation of God, special
providence, miracle, and regeneration are simply different degrees of
extraordinary nature. Certain of the wonders of Scripture, such as the
destruction of Sennacherib’s army and the dividing of the Red Sea, the
plagues of Egypt, the flight of quails, and the draught of fishes, can be
counted as exaggerations of natural forces, while at the same time they
are operations of the wonder-working God.
The falling of snow from a roof is an example of ordinary (or
particular) providence. But if a man is killed by it, it becomes a
special providence to him and to others who are thereby taught the
insecurity of life. So the providing of coal for fuel in the
geologic ages may be regarded by different persons in the light
either of a general or of a special providence. In all the
operations of nature and all the events of life God’s providence
is exhibited. That providence becomes special, when it manifestly
suggests some care of God for us or some duty of ours to God.
Savage, Life beyond Death, 285—“Mary A. Livermore’s life was saved
during her travels in the West by her hearing and instantly
obeying what seemed to her a voice. She did not know where it came
from; but she leaped, as the voice ordered, from one side of a car
to the other, and instantly the side where she had been sitting
was crushed in and utterly demolished.” In a similar way, the life
of Dr. Oncken was saved in the railroad disaster at Norwalk.
Trench gives the name of “providential miracles” to those
Scripture wonders which may be explained as wrought through the
agency of natural laws (see Trench, Miracles, 19). Mozley also
(Miracles, 117-120) calls these wonders miracles, because of the
predictive word of God which accompanied them. He says that the
difference in effect between miracles and special providences is
that the latter give _some_ warrant, while the former give _full_
warrant, for believing that they are wrought by God. He calls
special providences “invisible miracles.” Bp. of Southampton,
Place of Miracles, 12, 13—“The art of Bezaleel in constructing the
tabernacle, and the plans of generals like Moses and Joshua,
Gideon, Barak, and David, are in the Old Testament ascribed to the
direct inspiration of God. A less religious writer would have
ascribed them to the instinct of military skill. No miracle is
necessarily involved, when, in devising the system of ceremonial
law it is said: _‘__Jehovah spake unto Moses__’__ (Num. 5:1)_. God
is everywhere present in the history of Israel, but miracles are
strikingly rare.” We prefer to say that the line between the
natural and the supernatural, between special providence and
miracle, is an arbitrary one, and that the same event may often be
regarded either as special providence or as miracle, according as
we look at it from the point of view of its relation to other
events or from the point of view of its relation to God.
E. G. Robinson: “If Vesuvius should send up ashes and lava, and a
strong wind should scatter them, it could be said to rain fire and
brimstone, as at Sodom and Gomorrha.” There is abundant evident of
volcanic action at the Dead Sea. See article on the Physical
Preparation for Israel in Palestine, by G. Frederick Wright, in
Bib. Sac., April, 1901:364. The three great miracles—the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, the parting of the waters of
the Jordan, the falling down of the walls of Jericho—are described
as effect of volcanic eruption, elevation of the bed of the river
by a landslide, and earthquake-shock overthrowing the walls. Salt
slime thrown up may have enveloped Lot’s wife and turned her into
“_a mound of salt_” (_Gen. 19:26_). In like manner, some of Jesus’
works of healing, as for instance those wrought upon paralytics
and epileptics, may be susceptible of natural explanation, while
yet they show that Christ is absolute Lord of nature. For the
naturalistic view, see Tyndall on Miracles and Special
Providences, in Fragments of Science, 45, 418. _Per contra_, see
Farrar, on Divine Providence and General Laws, in Science and
Theology, 54-80; Row, Bampton Lect. on Christian Evidences,
109-115; Godet, Defence of Christian Faith, Chap. 2; Bowne, The
Immanence of God, 56-65.
2. To prayer and its answer.
What has been said with regard to God’s connection with nature suggests
the question, how God can answer prayer consistently with the fixity of
natural law.
Tyndall (see reference above), while repelling the charge of
denying that God can answer prayer at all, yet does deny that he
can answer it without a miracle. He says expressly “that without a
disturbance of natural law quite as serious as the stoppage of an
eclipse, or the rolling of the St. Lawrence up the falls of
Niagara, no act of humiliation, individual or national, could call
one shower from heaven or deflect toward us a single beam of the
sun.” In reply we would remark:
A. Negatively, that the true solution is not to be reached:
(_a_) By making the sole effect of prayer to be its reflex influence upon
the petitioner.—Prayer presupposes a God who hears and answers. It will
not be offered, unless it is believed to accomplish objective as well as
subjective results.
According to the first view mentioned above, prayer is a mere
spiritual gymnastics—an effort to lift ourselves from the ground
by tugging at our own boot-straps. David Hume said well, after
hearing a sermon by Dr. Leechman: “We can make use of no
expression or even thought in prayers and entreaties which does
not imply that these prayers have an influence.” See Tyndall on
Prayer and Natural Law, in Fragments of Science, 35. Will men pray
to a God who is both deaf and dumb? Will the sailor on the
bowsprit whistle to the wind for the sake of improving his voice?
Horace Bushnell called this perversion of prayer a “mere dumb-bell
exercise.” Baron Munchausen pulled himself out of the bog in China
by tugging away at his own pigtail.
Hyde, God’s Education of Man, 154, 155—“Prayer is not the reflex
action of my will upon itself, but rather the communion of two
wills, in which the finite comes into connection with the
Infinite, and, like the trolley, appropriates its purpose and
power.” Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 42, apparently follows
Schleiermacher in unduly limiting prayer to general petitions
which receive only a subjective answer. He tells us that “Jesus
taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer in response to a request
for directions how to pray. Yet we look in vain therein for
requests for special gifts of grace, or for particular good
things, even though they are spiritual. The name, the will, the
kingdom of God—these are the things which are the objects of
petition.” Harnack forgets that the same Christ said also: “_All
things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye receive
them, and ye shall have them_” (_Mark 11:24_).
(_b_) Nor by holding that God answers prayer simply by spiritual means,
such as the action of the Holy Spirit upon the spirit of man.—The realm of
spirit is no less subject to law than the realm of matter. Scripture and
experience, moreover, alike testify that in answer to prayer events take
place in the outward world which would not have taken place if prayer had
not gone before.
According to this second theory, God feeds the starving Elijah,
not by a distinct message from heaven but by giving a
compassionate disposition to the widow of Zarephath so that she is
moved to help the prophet. _1 K. 17:9_—“_behold, I have commanded
a widow there to sustain thee._” But God could also feed Elijah by
the ravens and the angel (_1 K. 17:4; 19:15_), and the pouring
rain that followed Elijah’s prayer (_1 K. 18:42-45_) cannot be
explained as a subjective spiritual phenomenon. Diman, Theistic
Argument, 268—“Our charts map out not only the solid shore but the
windings of the ocean currents, and we look into the morning
papers to ascertain the gathering of storms on the slopes of the
Rocky Mountains.” But law rules in the realm of spirit as well as
in the realm of nature. See Baden Powell, in Essays and Reviews,
106-162; Knight, Studies in Philosophy and Literature, 340-404;
George I. Chace, discourse before the Porter Rhet. Soc. of
Andover, August, 1854. Governor Rice in Washington is moved to
send money to a starving family in New York, and to secure
employment for them. Though he has had no information with regard
to their need, they have knelt in prayer for help just before the
coming of the aid.
(_c_) Nor by maintaining that God suspends or breaks in upon the order of
nature, in answering every prayer that is offered.—This view does not take
account of natural laws as having objective existence, and as revealing
the order of God’s being. Omnipotence might thus suspend natural law, but
wisdom, so far as we can see, would not.
This third theory might well be held by those who see in nature no
force but the all-working will of God. But the properties and
powers of matter are revelations of the divine will, and the human
will has only a relative independence in the universe. To desire
that God would answer all our prayers is to desire omnipotence
without omniscience. All true prayer is therefore an expression of
the one petition: “_Thy will be done_” (_Mat. 6:10_). E. G.
Robinson: “It takes much common sense to pray, and many prayers
are destitute of this quality. Man needs to pray audibly even in
his private prayers, to get the full benefit of them. One of the
chief benefits of the English liturgy is that the individual
minister is lost sight of. Protestantism makes you work; in
Romanism the church will do it all for you.”
(_d_) Nor by considering prayer as a physical force, linked in each case
to its answer, as physical cause is linked to physical effect.—Prayer is
not a force acting directly upon nature; else there would be no discretion
as to its answer. It can accomplish results in nature, only as it
influences God.
We educate our children in two ways: first, by training them to do
for themselves what they can do; and, secondly, by encouraging
them to seek our help in matters beyond their power. So God
educates us, first, by impersonal law, and, secondly, by personal
dependence. He teaches us both to work and to ask. Notice the
“perfect unwisdom of modern scientists who place themselves under
the training of impersonal law, to the exclusion of that higher
and better training which is under personality” (Hopkins, Sermon
on Prayer-gauge, 16).
It seems more in accordance with both Scripture and reason to say that:
B. God may answer prayer, even when that answer involves changes in the
sequences of nature,—
(_a_) By new combinations of natural forces, in regions withdrawn from our
observation, so that effects are produced which these same forces left to
themselves would never have accomplished. As man combines the laws of
chemical attraction and of combustion, to fire the gunpowder and split the
rock asunder, so God may combine the laws of nature to bring about answers
to prayer. In all this there may be no suspension or violation of law, but
a use of law unknown to us.
Hopkins, Sermon on the Prayer-gauge: “Nature is uniform in her
processes but not in her results. Do you say that water cannot run
uphill? Yes, it can and does. Whenever man constructs a milldam
the water runs up the environing hills till it reaches the top of
the milldam. Man can make a spark of electricity do his bidding;
why cannot God use a bolt of electricity? Laws are not our
masters, but our servants. They do our bidding all the better
because they are uniform. And our servants are not God’s masters.”
Kendall Brooks: “The master of a musical instrument can vary
without limit the combination of sounds and the melodies which
these combinations can produce. The laws of the instrument are not
changed, but in their unchanging steadfastness produce an infinite
variety of tunes. It is necessary that they should be unchanging
in order to secure a desired result. So nature, which exercises
the infinite skill of the divine Master, is governed by unvarying
laws; but he, by these laws, produces an infinite variety of
results.”
Hodge, Popular Lectures, 45, 99—“The system of natural laws is far
more flexible in God’s hands than it is in ours. We act on second
causes externally; God acts on them internally. We act upon them
at only a few isolated points; God acts upon every point of the
system at the same time. The whole of nature may be as plastic to
his will as the air in the organs of the great singer who
articulates it into a fit expression of every thought and passion
of his soaring soul.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 155—“If all the
chemical elements of our solar system preëxisted in the fiery
cosmic mist, there must have been a time when quite suddenly the
attractions between these elements overcame the degree of caloric
force which held them apart, and the rush of elements into
chemical union must have been consummated with inconceivable
rapidity. Uniformitarianism is not universal.”
Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, chap. 2—“By a little increase of
centrifugal force the elliptical orbit is changed into a parabola,
and the planet becomes a comet. By a little reduction in
temperature water becomes solid and loses many of its powers. So
unexpected results are brought about and surprises as
revolutionary as if a Supreme Power immediately intervened.”
William James, Address before Soc. for Psych. Research:
“Thought-transference may involve a critical point, as the
physicists call it, which is passed only when certain psychic
conditions are realized, and otherwise not reached at all—just as
a big conflagration will break out at a certain temperature, below
which no conflagration whatever, whether big or little, can
occur.” Tennyson, Life, 1:324—“Prayer is like opening a sluice
between the great ocean and our little channels, when the great
sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide.”
Since prayer is nothing more nor less than appeal to a personal and
present God, whose granting or withholding of the requested blessing is
believed to be determined by the prayer itself, we must conclude that
prayer moves God, or, in other words, induces the putting forth on his
part of an imperative volition.
The view that in answering prayer God combines natural forces is
elaborated by Chalmers, Works, 2:314, and 7:234. See Diman,
Theistic Argument, 111—“When laws are conceived of, not as single,
but as combined, instead of being immutable in their operation,
they are the agencies of ceaseless change. Phenomena are governed,
not by invariable forces, but by _endlessly varying combinations
of invariable forces_.” Diman seems to have followed Argyll, Reign
of Law, 100.
Janet, Final Causes, 219—“I kindle a fire in my grate. I only
intervene to produce and combine together the different agents
whose natural action behooves to produce the effect I have need
of; but the first step once taken, all the phenomena constituting
combustion engender each other, conformably to their laws, without
a new intervention of the agent; so that an observer who should
study the series of these phenomena, without perceiving the first
hand that had prepared all, could not seize that hand in any
especial act, and yet there is a preconceived plan and
combination.”
Hopkins, Sermon on Prayer-gauge: Man, by sprinkling plaster on his
field, may cause the corn to grow more luxuriantly; by kindling
great fires and by firing cannon, he may cause rain; and God can
surely, in answer to prayer, do as much as man can. Lewes says
that the fundamental character of all theological philosophy is
conceiving of phenomena as subject to supernatural volition, and
consequently as eminently and irregularly variable. This notion,
he says, is refuted, first, by exact and rational prevision of
phenomena, and, secondly, by the possibility of our modifying
these phenomena so as to promote our own advantage. But we ask in
reply: If we can modify them, cannot God? But, lest this should
seem to imply mutability in God or inconsistency in nature, we
remark, in addition, that:
(_b_) God may have so preärranged the laws of the material universe and
the events of history that, while the answer to prayer is an expression of
his will, it is granted through the working of natural agencies, and in
perfect accordance with the general principle that results, both temporal
and spiritual, are to be attained by intelligent creatures through the use
of the appropriate and appointed means.
J. P. Cooke, Credentials of Science, 194—“The Jacquard loom of
itself would weave a perfectly uniform plain fabric; the
perforated cards determine a selection of the threads, and through
a combination of these variable conditions, so complex that the
observer cannot follow their intricate workings, the predesigned
pattern appears.” E. G. Robinson: “The most formidable objection
to this theory is the apparent countenance it lends to the
doctrine of necessitarianism. But if it presupposes that free
actions have been taken into account, it cannot easily be shown to
be false.” The bishop who was asked by his curate to sanction
prayers for rain was unduly sceptical when he replied: “First
consult the barometer.” Phillips Brooks: “Prayer is not the
conquering of God’s reluctance, but the taking hold of God’s
willingness.”
The Pilgrims at Plymouth, somewhere about 1628, prayed for rain.
They met at 9 A. M., and continued in prayer for eight or nine
hours. While they were assembled clouds gathered, and the next
morning began rains which, with some intervals, lasted fourteen
days. John Easter was many years ago an evangelist in Virginia. A
large out-door meeting was being held. Many thousands had
assembled, when heavy storm clouds began to gather. There was no
shelter to which the multitudes could retreat. The rain had
already reached the adjoining fields when John Easter cried:
“Brethren, be still, while I call upon God to stay the storm till
the gospel is preached to this multitude!” Then he knelt and
prayed that the audience might be spared the rain, and that after
they had gone to their homes there might be refreshing showers.
Behold, the clouds parted as they came near, and passed to either
side of the crowd and then closed again, leaving the place dry
where the audience had assembled, and the next day the postponed
showers came down upon the ground that had been the day before
omitted.
Since God is immanent in nature, an answer to prayer, coming about through
the intervention of natural law, may be as real a revelation of God’s
personal care as if the laws of nature were suspended, and God interposed
by an exercise of his creative power. Prayer and its answer, though having
God’s immediate volition as their connecting bond, may yet be provided for
in the original plan of the universe.
The universe does not exist for itself, but for moral ends and
moral beings, to reveal God and to furnish facilities of
intercourse between God and intelligent creatures. Bishop
Berkeley: “The universe is God’s ceaseless conversation with his
creatures.” The universe certainly subserves moral ends—the
discouragement of vice and the reward of virtue; why not spiritual
ends also? When we remember that there is no true prayer which God
does not inspire; that every true prayer is part of the plan of
the universe linked in with all the rest and provided for at the
beginning; that God is in nature and in mind, supervising all
their movements and making all fulfill his will and reveal his
personal care; that God can adjust the forces of nature to each
other far more skilfully than can man when man produces effects
which nature of herself could never accomplish; that God is not
confined to nature or her forces, but can work by his creative and
omnipotent will where other means are not sufficient,—we need have
no fear, either that natural law will bar God’s answers to prayer,
or that these answers will cause a shock or jar in the system of
the universe.
Matheson, Messages of the Old Religions, 321, 322—“Hebrew poetry
never deals with outward nature for its own sake. The eye never
rests on beauty for itself alone. The heavens are the work of
God’s hands, the earth is God’s footstool, the winds are God’s
ministers, the stars are God’s host, the thunder is God’s voice.
What we call Nature the Jew called God.” Miss Heloise E. Hersey:
“Plato in the Phædrus sets forth in a splendid myth the means by
which the gods refresh themselves. Once a year, in a mighty host,
they drive their chariots up the steep to the topmost vault of
heaven. Thence they may behold all the wonders and the secrets of
the universe; and, quickened by the sight of the great plain of
truth, they return home replenished and made glad by the celestial
vision.” Abp. Trench, Poems, 134—“Lord, what a change within us
one short hour Spent in thy presence will prevail to make—What
heavy burdens from our bosoms take, What parched grounds refresh
as with a shower! We kneel, and all around us seems to lower; We
rise, and all, the distant and the near, Stands forth in sunny
outline, brave and clear; We kneel how weak, we rise how full of
power! Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong, Or
others—that we are not always strong; That we are ever overborne
with care; That we should ever weak or heartless be, Anxious or
troubled, when with us is prayer, And joy and strength and courage
are with thee?” See Calderwood, Science and Religion, 299-309;
McCosh, Divine Government, 215; Liddon, Elements of Religion,
178-203; Hamilton, Autology, 690-694. See also Jellett, Donnellan
Lectures on the Efficacy of Prayer; Butterworth, Story of Notable
Prayers; Patton, Prayer and its Answers; Monrad, World of Prayer;
Prime, Power of Prayer; Phelps, The Still Hour; Haven, and
Bickersteth, on Prayer; Prayer for Colleges; Cox, in Expositor,
1877: chap. 3; Faunce, Prayer as a Theory and a Fact; Trumbull,
Prayer, Its Nature and Scope.
C. If asked whether this relation between prayer and its providential
answer can be scientifically tested, we reply that it may be tested just
as a father’s love may be tested by a dutiful son.
(_a_) There is a general proof of it in the past experience of the
Christian and in the past history of the church.
_Ps. 116:1-8_—“_I love Jehovah because he heareth my voice and my
supplications._” Luther prays for the dying Melanchthon, and he recovers.
George Müller trusts to prayer, and builds his great orphan-houses. For a
multitude of instances, see Prime, Answers to Prayer. Charles H. Spurgeon:
“If there is any fact that is proved, it is that God hears prayer. If
there is any scientific statement that is capable of mathematical proof,
this is.” Mr. Spurgeon’s language is rhetorical: he means simply that
God’s answers to prayer remove all reasonable doubt. Adoniram Judson: “I
never was deeply interested in any object, I never prayed sincerely and
earnestly for anything, but it came; at some time—no matter at how distant
a day—somehow, in some shape, probably the last I should have devised—it
came. And yet I have always had so little faith! May God forgive me, and
while he condescends to use me as his instrument, wipe the sin of unbelief
from my heart!”
(_b_) In condescension to human blindness, God may sometimes submit to a
formal test of his faithfulness and power,—as in the case of Elijah and
the priests of Baal.
_Is. 7:10-13_—Ahaz is rebuked for not asking a sign,—in him it
indicated unbelief. _1 K. 18:36-38_—Elijah said, “_let it be known
this day that thou art God in Israel.... Then the fire of Jehovah
fell, and consumed the burnt offering._” Romaine speaks of “a year
famous for believing.” _Mat 21:21, 22_—“_even if ye shall say unto
this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be
done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer,
believing, ye shall receive._” “Impossible?” said Napoleon; “then
it shall be done!” Arthur Hallam, quoted in Tennyson’s Life,
1:44—“With respect to prayer, you ask how I am to distinguish the
operations of God in me from the motions of my own heart. Why
should you distinguish them, or how do you know that there is any
distinction? Is God less God because he acts by general laws when
he deals with the common elements of nature?” “Watch in prayer to
see what cometh. Foolish boys that knock at a door in wantonness,
will not stay till somebody open to them; but a man that hath
business will knock, and knock again, till he gets his answer.”
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 102, 103—“God is not beyond nature
simply,—he is within it. In nature and in mind we must find the
action of his power. There is no need of his being a third factor
over and above the life of nature and the life of man.” Hartley
Coleridge: “Be not afraid to pray,—to pray is right. Pray if thou
canst with hope, but ever pray, Though hope be weak, or sick with
long delay; Pray in the darkness, if there be no light. Far is the
time, remote from human sight, When war and discord on the earth
shall cease; Yet every prayer for universal peace Avails the
blessed time to expedite. Whate’er is good to wish, ask that of
heaven, Though it be what thou canst not hope to see; Pray to be
perfect, though the material leaven Forbid the spirit so on earth
to be; But if for any wish thou dar’st not pray, Then pray to God
to cast that wish away.”
(_c_) When proof sufficient to convince the candid inquirer has been
already given, it may not consist with the divine majesty to abide a test
imposed by mere curiosity or scepticism,—as in the case of the Jews who
sought a sign from heaven.
_Mat. 12:39_—“_An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a
sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah
the prophet._” Tyndall’s prayer-gauge would ensure a conflict of
prayers. Since our present life is a moral probation, delay in the
answer to our prayers, and even the denial of specific things for
which we pray, may be only signs of God’s faithfulness and love.
George Müller: “I myself have been bringing certain requests
before God now for seventeen years and six months, and never a day
has passed without my praying concerning them all this time; yet
the full answer has not come up to the present. But I look for it;
I confidently expect it.” Christ’s prayer, “_let this cup pass
away from me_” (_Mat. 26:39_), and Paul’s prayer that the “_thorn
in the flesh_” might depart from him (_2 Cor. 12:7, 8_), were not
answered in the precise way requested. No more are our prayers
always answered in the way we expect. Christ’s prayer was not
answered by the literal removing of the cup, because the drinking
of the cup was really his glory; and Paul’s prayer was not
answered by the literal removal of the thorn, because the thorn
was needful for his own perfecting. In the case of both Jesus and
Paul, there were larger interests to be consulted than their own
freedom from suffering.
(_d_) Since God’s will is the link between prayer and its answer, there
can be no such thing as a physical demonstration of its efficacy in any
proposed case. Physical tests have no application to things into which
free will enters as a constitutive element. But there are moral tests, and
moral tests are as scientific as physical tests can be.
Diman, Theistic Argument, 576, alludes to Goldwin Smith’s denial
that any scientific method can be applied to history because it
would make man a necessary link in a chain of cause and effect and
so would deny his free will. But Diman says this is no more
impossible than the development of the individual according to a
fixed law of growth, while yet free will is sedulously respected.
Froude says history is not a science, because no science could
foretell Mohammedanism or Buddhism; and Goldwin Smith says that
“prediction is the crown of all science.” But, as Diman remarks:
“geometry, geology, physiology, are sciences, yet they do not
predict.” Buckle brought history into contempt by asserting that
it could be analyzed and referred solely to intellectual laws and
forces. To all this we reply that there may be scientific tests
which are not physical, or even intellectual, but only moral. Such
a test God urges his people to use, in _Mal. 3:10_—“_Bring ye the
whole tithe into the storehouse ... and prove me now herewith, if
I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a
blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it._” All
such prayer is a reflection of Christ’s words—some fragment of his
teaching transformed into a supplication (_John 15:7_; see
Westcott, Bib. Com., _in loco_); all such prayer is moreover the
work of the Spirit of God (_Rom. 8:26, 27_). It is therefore sure
of an answer.
But the test of prayer proposed by Tyndall is not applicable to
the thing to be tested by it. Hopkins, Prayer and the
Prayer-gauge, 22 _sq._—“We cannot measure wheat by the yard, or
the weight of a discourse with a pair of scales.... God’s wisdom
might see that it was not best for the petitioners, nor for the
objects of their petition, to grant their request. Christians
therefore could not, without special divine authorization, rest
their faith upon the results of such a test.... Why may we not ask
for great changes in nature? For the same reason that a
well-informed child does not ask for the moon as a plaything....
There are two limitations upon prayer. First, except by special
direction of God, we cannot ask for a miracle, for the same reason
that a child could not ask his father to burn the house down.
Nature is the house we live in. Secondly, we cannot ask for
anything under the laws of nature which would contravene the
object of those laws. Whatever we can do for ourselves under these
laws, God expects us to do. If the child is cold, let him go near
the fire,—not beg his father to carry him.”
Herbert Spencer’s Sociology is only social physics. He denies
freedom, and declares anyone who will affix D. V. to the
announcement of the Mildmay Conference to be incapable of
understanding sociology. Prevision excludes divine or human will.
But Mr. Spencer intimates that the evils of natural selection may
be modified by artificial selection. What is this but the
interference of will? And if man can interfere, cannot God do the
same? Yet the wise child will not expect the father to give
everything he asks for. Nor will the father who loves his child
give him the razor to play with, or stuff him with unwholesome
sweets, simply because the child asks these things. If the
engineer of the ocean steamer should give me permission to press
the lever that sets all the machinery in motion, I should decline
to use my power and should prefer to leave such matters to him,
unless he first suggested it and showed me how. So the Holy Spirit
“_helpeth our infirmity; for we know not how to pray as we ought;
but the Spirit himself __ maketh intercession for us with
groanings which cannot be uttered_” (_Rom. 8:26_). And we ought
not to talk of “submitting” to perfect Wisdom, or of “being
resigned” to perfect Love. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra,
2:1—“What they [the gods] do delay, they do not deny.... We,
ignorant of ourselves, Beg often our own harms, which the wise
powers Deny us for our good; so find we profit By losing of our
prayers.” See Thornton, Old-Fashioned Ethics, 286-297. _Per
contra_, see Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 277-294.
3. To Christian activity.
Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.
(_a_) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which
quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle,
but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his
Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our
own salvation.
Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as “cessation of
wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from
irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the
will.” Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving
up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the
wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors
of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner: “Quietism makes
God a monarch without living subjects.” Certain English quietists,
like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They
quote _2 Chron. 16:12, 13_—Asa “_sought not to Jehovah, but to the
physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers_.” They forget that the
“_physicians_” alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen
necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides: “Trust God, and keep your
powder dry!”
Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of
natural law, by which we mean God’s regular way of working. It
leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning’s Mr. Sludge
the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The
thirty-three whom Providence forgot.” Schurman, Belief in God,
213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only
who had _escaped_ drowning.” “So like Provvy!” Bentham used to
say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of
natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law.
Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the
impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of
faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian
should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as
Edward Irving declared. “Every man is as lazy as circumstances
will admit.” We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens
which belong to us to bear. “_Work out your own salvation with
fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will
and to work, for his good pleasure_” (_Phil. 2:12, 13_).
Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God. “If God has
decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or
drinking?” Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold
of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on
account of his faith? “Tie your camel,” said Mohammed, “and commit
it to God.” Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he
often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till
he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of
Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the
power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the
secondary motor, nor the conductor’s application of the power.
True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our
part.” _Ps. 37:7_—“_Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him_”;
_Is. 57:2_—“_He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each
one that walketh in his uprightness_”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of
Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason,
which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the
heart, which is quietism.” On the self-guidance of Christ, see
Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.
George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:
“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it
has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of
the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the
Lord’s will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave
the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make
myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit
of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit
and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone,
without the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If
the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the
Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account
providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God’s
will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in
prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to
God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate
judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and,
if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”
We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See
Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm. “Not quiescence, but
acquiescence, is demanded of us.” As God feeds “_the birds of the
heaven_” (_Mat. 6:26_), not by dropping food from heaven into
their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves,
so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a
sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true
sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit
emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it
with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves
passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion: _1 John
4:1_—“_believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether
they are of God._” The test is the revealed word of God: _Is.
8:20_—“_To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not
according to this word, surely there is no morning for them._” See
remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.
(_b_) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near
the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential
working is so adjusted to the Christian’s nature and necessities as to
furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious
character, and needed help and comfort in trial.
In interpreting God’s providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are
dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in
great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances.
While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but
accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to
expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a
fine sense of God’s providential purposes with regard to us, which will
make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be
able to explain it to others.
The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the
unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, in _Ps. 106:13_,
“_They waited not for his counsel,_” the true believer has wisdom
given him from above. _Ps. 32:8_—“_I will instruct thee and teach
thee in the way which thou shalt go_”; _Prov. 3:6_—“_In all thy
ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths_”; _Phil.
1:9_—“_And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and
more in knowledge and all discernment_” (αἰσθήσει = spiritual
discernment); _James 1:5_—“_if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him
ask of God, who giveth_ (τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) _to all liberally and
upbraideth not_”; _John 15:15_—“_No longer do I call you servants;
for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called
you friends_”; _Col. 1:9, 10_—“_that ye may be filled with the
knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,
to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing._”
God’s Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us.
From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God
speaks to us. Tholuck: “The more we recognize in every daily
occurrence God’s secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us,
the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day
aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.” Hutton, Essays:
“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces
from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral
constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive
to every word of God give constant opportunity for his
interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their
lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of
providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath
of thought.” So the Christian hymn, “Guide me, O thou great
Jehovah!” likens God’s leading of the believer to that of Israel
by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls
himself “_the prisoner of Christ Jesus_” (_Eph. 3:1_). Affliction
is the discipline of God’s providence. Greek proverb: “He who does
not get thrashed, does not get educated.” On God’s Leadings, see
A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.
Abraham “_went out, not knowing whither he went_” (_Heb. 11:8_).
Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his
destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his
unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often
have guidance without discernment of that guidance. _Is.
42:16_—“_I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in
paths that they know not will I lead them._” So we act more wisely
than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with
astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:
“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he
knew.” Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling;
the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon: “Quem poetæ
fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.” Chinese proverb: “The good God
never smites with both hands.” “Tact is a sort of psychical
automatism” (Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at
fault, because its possessor is “_led by the Spirit of God_”
(_Rom. 8:14_). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver
Cromwell used to say, “for the possibility of being mistaken.”
When Luther’s friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at
the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking
up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had
found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God
needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on
nothing. So, in the working of God’s providence, the unseen is
prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out
God’s will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not
regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own
will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily
thwarts a man’s nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think
that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5.
Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God’s will in small things
is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When
decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider
the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably
not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you
have been led at all.”
Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility
and declared: “It is this thought that disgusts me with the
government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel
himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to
feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have
him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives
strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me
arbitrary and fortuitous.” How much better is Wordsworth’s faith,
Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of
mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the
procession of our fate, howe’er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a
Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting
purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.” Mrs.
Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days
go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth,
through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I
thank thee while my days go on!”
4. To the evil acts of free agents.
(_a_) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral
agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of
efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil,
nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the
self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it
is the greatest of blasphemies.
Bp. Wordsworth: “God _foresees_ evil deeds, but never _forces_
them.” “God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a
limping horse causes the limping.” Nor can it be said that Satan
is the author of man’s sin. Man’s powers are his own. Not Satan,
but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers.
Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the
cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.
(_b_) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God
does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil
shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by
guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man’s intent, has
set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its
own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome
and forsaken.
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas’s treachery works the
reconciliation of the world, and Israel’s apostasy the salvation
of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives
him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who
draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging
within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means,
or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”
Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition,
like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with
which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he
breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that
he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of
society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the
martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics
stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to
miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps
modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical
and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith.
Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of
wicked men To turn their own points on their masters’ bosoms”;
Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm
them, to men’s eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends
the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”
The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned,
thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step,
going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no
harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little
struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them
which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek
against the plate glass of the cobra’s cage, but could not keep
himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales,
14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus,
dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose
of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.” See F. A. Noble,
Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of
sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster’s speech in the case of
Knapp at Salem: “It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There
is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is
confession.”
(_c_) In cases of persistent iniquity, God’s providence still compels the
sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been
created, namely, the manifestation of God’s holiness. Even though he
struggle against God’s plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it.
His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and
doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his
salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.
_Is. 10:5, 7_—“_Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in
whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so._”
Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago: “He [Treluddra] is one of those
base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh,
whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add
the qualification: “consistently with the limits which he has set
to the operations of his grace.” Pharaoh’s ordering the
destruction of the Israelitish children (_Ex. 1:16_) was made the
means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for
his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose
sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil;
see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson: “My will
fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has
eyes to see His way home to the mark.” See also Edwards, Works,
4:300-312.
_Col. 2:15_—“_having stripped off from himself the principalities
and the powers_”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him
in their final onset—“_he made a show of them openly, triumphing
over them in it_,” _i. e._, in the cross, thus turning their evil
into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy,
443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light
engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the
shadow has disappeared.” But this means, not that all things _are_
good, but that “_all things work together __ for good_” (_Rom.
8:28_)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil.
John Wesley: “God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”
Sermon on “The Devil’s Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome
Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He
triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to
Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (_John
12:32_), and Paul’s imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New
Testament.
“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes
and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them
into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A
friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of
ink had been made. ‘Nothing can be done with that,’ the friend
said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin
carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his
friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine
design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being
ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable.
So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring
blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace
changes them into marks of beauty. David’s grievous sin was not
only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life.
Peter’s pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord’s
forgiveness and gentle dealing.” So “men may rise on stepping
stones Of their dead selves to higher things” (Tennyson, In
Memoriam, I).
Section IV.—Good And Evil Angels.
As ministers of divine providence there is a class of finite beings,
greater in intelligence and power than man in his present state, some of
whom positively serve God’s purpose by holiness and voluntary execution of
his will, some negatively, by giving examples to the universe of defeated
and punished rebellion, and by illustrating God’s distinguishing grace in
man’s salvation.
The scholastic subtleties which encumbered this doctrine in the Middle
Ages, and the exaggerated representations of the power of evil spirits
which then prevailed, have led, by a natural reaction, to an undue
depreciation of it in more recent times.
For scholastic discussions, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa (ed. Migne),
1:833-993. The scholastics debated the questions, how many angels
could stand at once on the point of a needle (relation of angels
to space); whether an angel could be in two places at the same
time; how great was the interval between the creation of angels
and their fall; whether the sin of the first angel caused the sin
of the rest; whether as many retained their integrity as fell;
whether our atmosphere is the place of punishment for fallen
angels; whether guardian-angels have charge of children from
baptism, from birth, or while the infant is yet in the womb of the
mother; even the excrements of angels were subjects of discussion,
for if there was “_angels’ food_” (_Ps. 78:25_), and if angels ate
(_Gen. 18:8_), it was argued that we must take the logical
consequences.
Dante makes the creation of angels simultaneous with that of the
universe at large. “The fall of the rebel angels he considers to
have taken place within twenty seconds of their creation, and to
have originated in the pride which made Lucifer unwilling to await
the time prefixed by his Maker for enlightening him with perfect
knowledge”—see Rossetti, Shadow of Dante, 14, 15. Milton, unlike
Dante, puts the creation of angels ages before the creation of
man. He tells us that Satan’s first name in heaven is now lost.
The sublime associations with which Milton surrounds the adversary
diminish our abhorrence of the evil one. Satan has been called the
hero of the Paradise Lost. Dante’s representation is much more
true to Scripture. But we must not go to the extreme of giving
ludicrous designations to the devil. This indicates and causes
scepticism as to his existence.
In mediæval times men’s minds were weighed down by the terror of
the spirit of evil. It was thought possible to sell one’s soul to
Satan, and such compacts were written with blood. Goethe
represents Mephistopheles as saying to Faust: “I to thy service
here agree to bind me, To run and never rest at call of thee; When
_over yonder_ thou shalt find me, Then thou shalt do as much for
me.” The cathedrals cultivated and perpetuated this superstition,
by the figures of malignant demons which grinned from the
gargoyles of their roofs and the capitals of their columns, and
popular preaching exalted Satan to the rank of a rival god—a god
more feared than was the true and living God. Satan was pictured
as having horns and hoofs—an image of the sensual and
bestial—which led Cuvier to remark that the adversary could not
devour, because horns and hoofs indicated not a carnivorous but a
ruminant quadruped.
But there is certainly a possibility that the ascending scale of
created intelligences does not reach its topmost point in man. As
the distance between man and the lowest forms of life is filled in
with numberless gradations of being, so it is possible that
between man and God there exist creatures of higher than human
intelligence. This possibility is turned to certainty by the
express declarations of Scripture. The doctrine is interwoven with
the later as well as with the earlier books of revelation.
Quenstedt (Theol., 1:629) regards the existence of angels as
antecedently probable, because there are no gaps in creation;
nature does not proceed _per saltum_. As we have (1) beings purely
corporeal, as stones; (2) beings partly corporeal and partly
spiritual, as men: so we should expect in creation (3) beings
wholly spiritual, as angels. Godet, in his Biblical Studies of the
O. T., 1-29, suggests another series of gradations. As we have (1)
vegetables—species without individuality; (2)
animals—individuality in bondage to species; and (3) men—species
overpowered by individuality: so we may expect (4)
angels—individuality without species.
If souls live after death, there is certainly a class of
disembodied spirits. It is not impossible that God may have
_created_ spirits without bodies. E. G. Robinson, Christian
Theology, 110—“The existence of lesser deities in all heathen
mythologies, and the disposition of man everywhere to believe in
beings superior to himself and inferior to the supreme God, is a
presumptive argument in favor of their existence.” Locke: “That
there should be more species of intelligent creatures above us
than there are of sensible and material below us, is probable to
me from hence, that in all the visible and corporeal world we see
no chasms and gaps.” Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 193—“A
man may certainly believe in the existence of angels upon the
testimony of one who claims to have come from the heavenly world,
if he can believe in the Ornithorhyncus upon the testimony of
travelers.” Tennyson, Two Voices: “This truth within thy mind
rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better,
boundless worse. Think you this world of hopes and fears Could
find no statelier than his peers In yonder hundred million
spheres?”
The doctrine of angels affords a barrier against the false
conception of this world as including the whole spiritual
universe. Earth is only part of a larger organism. As Christianity
has united Jew and Gentile, so hereafter will it blend our own and
other orders of creation: _Col. 2:10_—“_who is the head of all
principality and power_”—Christ is the head of angels as well as
of men; _Eph. 1:10_—“_to sum up all things in Christ, the things
in the heavens, and the things upon the earth._” On Christ and
Angels, see Robertson Smith in The Expositor, second series, vols.
1, 2, 3. On the general subject of angels, see also Whately, Good
and Evil Angels; Twesten, transl. in Bib. Sac., 1:768, and 2:108;
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:282-337, and 3:251-354; Birks,
Difficulties of Belief, 78 sq.; Scott, Existence of Evil Spirits;
Herzog, Encyclopädie, arts.: Engel, Teufel; Jewett,
Diabolology,—the Person and Kingdom of Satan; Alexander, Demonic
Possession.
I. Scripture Statements and Imitations.
1. As to the nature and attributes of angels.
(_a_) They are created beings.
_Ps. 148:2-5_—“_Praise ye him, all his angels.... For he
commanded, and they were created_”; _Col. 1:16_—“_for in him were
all things created ... whether thrones or dominions or
principalities or powers_”; _cf._ _1 Pet. 3:32_—“_angels and
authorities and powers._” God alone is uncreated and eternal. This
is implied in _1 Tim. 6:16_—“_who only hath immortality._”
(_b_) They are incorporeal beings.
In _Heb. 1:14_, where a single word is used to designate angels,
they are described as “_spirits_”—“_are they not all ministering
spirits?_” Men, with their twofold nature, material as well as
immaterial, could not well be designated as “_spirits_.” That
their being characteristically “_spirits_” forbids us to regard
angels as having a bodily organism, seems implied in _Eph.
6:12_—“_for our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but
against ... the spiritual hosts_ [or “_things_”] _of wickedness in
the heavenly places_”; cf. _Eph. 1:3_; _2:6_. In _Gen. 6:2_,
“_sons of God_” =, not angels, but descendants of Seth and
worshipers of the true God (see Murphy, Com., _in loco_). In _Ps.
78:25_ (A. V.), “_angels’ food_” = manna coming from heaven where
angels dwell; better, however, read with Rev. Vers.: “_bread of
the mighty_”—probably meaning angels, though the word “_mighty_”
is nowhere else applied to them; possibly = “bread of princes or
nobles,” _i. e._, the finest, most delicate bread. _Mat
22:30_—“_neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as
angels in heaven_”—and _Luke 20:36_—“_neither can they die any
more: for they are equal unto the angels_”—imply only that angels
are without distinctions of sex. Saints are to be like angels, not
as being incorporeal, but as not having the same sexual relations
which they have here.
There are no “souls of angels,” as there are “_souls of men_”
(_Rev. 18:13_), and we may infer that angels have no bodies for
souls to inhabit; see under Essential Elements of Human Nature.
Nevius, Demon-Possession, 258, attributes to evil spirits an
instinct or longing for a body to possess, even though it be the
body of an inferior animal: “So in Scripture we have spirits
represented as wandering about to seek rest in bodies, and asking
permission to enter into swine” (_Mat. 12:43; 8:31_). Angels
therefore, since they have no bodies, know nothing of growth, age,
or death. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 133—“It is precisely
because the angels are only spirits, but not souls, that they
cannot possess the same rich existence as man, whose soul is the
point of union in which spirit and nature meet.”
(_c_) They are personal—that is, intelligent and voluntary—agents.
_2 Sam. 14:20_—“_wise, according to the wisdom of an angel of
God_”; _Luke 4:34_—“_I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of
God_”; _2 Tim. 2:26_—“_snare of the devil ... taken captive by him
unto his will_”; _Rev. 22:9_—“_See thou do it not_” = exercise of
will; _Rev. 12:12_—“_The devil is gone down unto you, having great
wrath_” = set purpose of evil.
(_d_) They are possessed of superhuman intelligence and power, yet an
intelligence and power that has its fixed limits.
_Mat. 24:36_—“_of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the
angels of heaven_” = their knowledge, though superhuman, is yet
finite. _1 Pet. 1:12_—“_which things angels desire to look into_”;
_Ps. 103:20_—“_angels ... mighty in strength_”; _2 Thess.
1:7_—“_the angels of his power_”; _2 Pet. 2:11_—“_angels, though
greater_ [than men] _in might and power_”; _Rev. 20:2, 10_—“_laid
hold on the dragon ... and bound him ... cast into the lake of
fire._” Compare _Ps. 72:18_—“_God ... Who only doeth wondrous
things_” = only God can perform miracles. Angels are imperfect
compared with God (_Job 4:18; 15:15; 25:5_).
Power, rather than beauty or intelligence, is their striking
characteristic. They are “_principalities and powers_” (_Col.
1:16_). They terrify those who behold them (_Mat. 28:4_). The
rolling away of the stone from the sepulchre took strength. A
wheel of granite, eight feet in diameter and one foot thick,
rolling in a groove, would weigh more than four tons. Mason, Faith
of the Gospel, 86—“The spiritual might and burning indignation in
the face of Stephen reminded the guilty Sanhedrin of an angelic
vision.” Even in their tenderest ministrations they strengthen
(_Luke 22:43_; _cf._ _Dan. 10:19_). In _1 Tim. 6:15_—“_King of
kings and Lord of lords_”—the words “_kings_” and “_lords_”
(βασιλευόντων and κυριευόντων) may refer to angels. In the case of
evil spirits especially, power seems the chief thing in mind, _e.
g._, “_the prince of this world_,” “_the strong man armed_,” “_the
power of darkness_,” “_rulers of the darkness of this world_,”
“_the great dragon,_” “_all the power of the enemy_,” “_all these
things will I give thee_,” “_deliver us from the evil one_.”
(_e_) They are an order of intelligences distinct from man and older than
man.
Angels are distinct from man. _1 Cor. 6:3_—“_we shall judge
angels_”; _Heb. 1:14_—“_Are they not all ministering spirits, sent
forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit
salvation?_” They are not glorified human spirits; see _Heb.
2:16_—“_for verily not to angels doth he give help, but he giveth
help to __ the seed of Abraham_”; also _12:22, 23_, where “_the
innumerable hosts of angels_” are distinguished from “_the church
of the firstborn_” and “_the spirits of just men made perfect_.”
In _Rev. 22:9_—“_I am a fellow-servant with
thee_”—“_fellow-servant_” intimates likeness to men, not in
nature, but in service and subordination to God, the proper object
of worship. Sunday School Times, Mch. 15, 1902:146—“Angels are
spoken of as greater in power and might than man, but that could
be said of many a lower animal, or even of whirlwind and fire.
Angels are never spoken of as a superior order of spiritual
beings. We are to ‘_judge angels_’ (_1 Cor. 6:3_), and inferiors
are not to judge superiors.”
Angels are an order of intelligences older than man. The Fathers
made the creation of angels simultaneous with the original calling
into being of the elements, perhaps basing their opinion on the
apocryphal Ecclesiasticus, 18:1—“he that liveth eternally created
all things together.” In _Job 38:7_, the Hebrews parallelism makes
“_morning stars_”—“_sons of God,_” so that angels are spoken of as
present at certain stages of God’s creative work. The mention of
“_the serpent_” in _Gen. 3:1_ implies the fall of Satan before the
fall of man. We may infer that the creation of angels took place
before the creation of man—the lower before the higher. In _Gen.
2:1_, “_all the host of them,_” which God had created, may be
intended to include angels. Man was the crowning work of creation,
created after angels were created. Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
81—“Angels were perhaps created before the material heavens and
earth—a spiritual substratum in which the material things were
planted, a preparatory creation to receive what was to follow. In
the vision of Jacob they ascend first and descend after; their
natural place is in the world below.”
The constant representation of angels as personal beings in Scripture
cannot be explained as a personification of abstract good and evil, in
accommodation to Jewish superstitions, without wresting many narrative
passages from their obvious sense; implying on the part of Christ either
dissimulation or ignorance as to an important point of doctrine; and
surrendering belief in the inspiration of the Old Testament from which
these Jewish views of angelic beings were derived.
Jesus accommodated himself to the popular belief in respect at
least to “_Abraham’s bosom_” (_Luke 16:22_), and he confessed
ignorance with regard to the time of the end (_Mark 13:32_); see
Rush Rhees, Life of Jesus of Nazareth, 245-248. But in the former
case his hearers probably understood him to speak figuratively and
rhetorically, while in the latter case there was no teaching of
the false but only limitation of knowledge with regard to the
true. Our Lord did not hesitate to contradict Pharisaic belief in
the efficacy of ceremonies, and Sadducean denial of resurrection
and future life. The doctrine of angels had even stronger hold
upon the popular mind than had these errors of the Pharisees and
Sadducees. That Jesus did not correct or deny the general belief,
but rather himself expressed and confirmed it, implies that the
belief was rational and Scriptural. For one of the best statements
of the argument for the existence of evil spirits, see Broadus,
Com. on _Mat. 8:28_.
_Eph. 3:10_—“_to the intent that now unto the principalities and
the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the
church the manifold wisdom of God_”—excludes the hypothesis that
angels are simply abstract conceptions of good or evil. We speak
of “moon-struck” people (lunatics), only when we know that nobody
supposes us to believe in the power of the moon to cause madness.
But Christ’s contemporaries _did_ suppose him to believe in
angelic spirits, good and evil. If this belief was an error, it
was by no means a harmless one, and the benevolence as well as the
veracity of Christ would have led him to correct it. So too, if
Paul had known that there were no such beings as angels, he could
not honestly have contented himself with forbidding the Colossians
to worship them (_Col 2:18_) but would have denied their
existence, as he denied the existence of heathen gods (_1 Cor.
8:4_).
Theodore Parker said it was very evident that Jesus Christ
believed in a personal devil. Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums,
35—“There can be no doubt that Jesus shared with his
contemporaries the representation of two kingdoms, the kingdom of
God and the kingdom of the devil.” Wendt, Teaching of Jesus,
1:164—Jesus “makes it appear as if Satan was the immediate
tempter. I am far from thinking that he does so in a merely
figurative way. Beyond all doubt Jesus accepted the contemporary
ideas as to the real existence of Satan, and accordingly, in the
particular cases of disease referred to, he supposes a real
Satanic temptation.” Maurice, Theological Essays, 32, 34—“The
acknowledgment of an evil spirit is characteristic of
Christianity.” H. B. Smith, System, 261—“It would appear that the
power of Satan in the world reached its culminating point at the
time of Christ, and has been less ever since.”
The same remark applies to the view which regards Satan as but a
collective term for all evil beings, human or superhuman. The Scripture
representations of the progressive rage of the great adversary, from his
first assault on human virtue in Genesis to his final overthrow in
Revelation, join with the testimony of Christ just mentioned, to forbid
any other conclusion than this, that there is a personal being of great
power, who carries on organized opposition to the divine government.
Crane, The Religion of To-morrow, 299 sq.—“We well say ‘personal
devil,’ for there is no devil but personality.” We cannot deny the
personality of Satan except upon principles which would compel us
to deny the existence of good angels, the personality of the Holy
Spirit, and the personality of God the Father,—we may add, even
the personality of the human soul. Says Nigel Penruddock in Lord
Beaconsfield’s “Endymion”: “Give me a single argument against his
[Satan’s] personality, which is not applicable to the personality
of the Deity.” One of the most ingenious devices of Satan is that
of persuading men that he has no existence. Next to this is the
device of substituting for belief in a personal devil the belief
in a merely impersonal spirit of evil. Such a substitution we find
in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:311—“The idea of the
devil was a welcome expedient for the need of advanced religious
reflection, to put God out of relation to the evil and badness of
the world.” Pfleiderer tells us that the early optimism of the
Hebrews, like that of the Greeks, gave place in later times to
pessimism and despair. But the Hebrews still had hope of
deliverance by the Messiah and an apocalyptic reign of good.
For the view that Satan is merely a collective term for all evil
beings, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 131-137.
Bushnell, holding moral evil to be a necessary “condition
privative” of all finite beings as such, believes that “good
angels have all been passed through and helped up out of a fall,
as the redeemed of mankind will be.” “_Elect angels_” (_1 Tim.
5:21_) then would mean those saved _after_ falling, not those
saved _from_ falling; and “_Satan_” would be, not the name of a
particular person, but the all or total of all bad minds and
powers. _Per contra_, see Smith’s Bible Dictionary, arts.: Angels,
Demons, Demoniacs, Satan; Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 16-26.
For a comparison of Satan in the Book of Job, with Milton’s Satan
in “Paradise Lost,” and Goethe’s Mephistopheles in “Faust,” see
Masson, The Three Devils. We may add to this list Dante’s Satan
(or Dis) in the “Divine Comedy,” Byron’s Lucifer in “Cain,” and
Mrs. Browning’s Lucifer in her “Drama of Exile”; see Gregory,
Christian Ethics, 219.
2. As to their number and organization.
(_a_) They are of great multitude.
_Deut. 33:2_—“_Jehovah ... came from the ten thousands of holy
ones_”; _Ps. 68:17_—“_The chariots of God are twenty thousand,
even thousands upon thousands_”; _Dan. 7:10_—“_thousands of
thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand
stood before him_”; _Rev. 5:11_—“_I heard a voice of many angels
... and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand,
and thousands of thousands._” Anselm thought that the number of
lost angels was filled up by the number of elect men. Savage, Life
after Death, 61—The Pharisees held very exaggerated notions of the
number of angelic spirits. They “said that a man, if he threw a
stone over his shoulder or cast away a broken piece of pottery,
asked pardon of any spirit that he might possibly have hit in so
doing.” So in W. H. H. Murray’s time it was said to be dangerous
in the Adirondack to fire a gun,—you might hit a man.
(_b_) They constitute a company, as distinguished from a race.
_Mat. 22:30_—“_they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but
are as angels in heaven_”; _Luke 20:36_—“_neither can they die any
more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are sons of God._”
We are called “_sons of men_,” but angels are never called “_sons
of angels_,” but only “_sons of God_.” They are not developed from
one original stock, and no such common nature binds them together
as binds together the race of man. They have no common character
and history. Each was created separately, and each apostate angel
fell by himself. Humanity fell all at once in its first father.
Cut down a tree, and you cut down its branches. But angels were so
many separate trees. Some lapsed into sin, but some remained holy.
See Godet, Bib. Studies O. T., 1-29. This may be one reason why
salvation was provided for fallen man, but not for fallen angels.
Christ could join himself to humanity by taking the common nature
of all. There was no common nature of angels which he could take.
See _Heb. 2:16_—“_not to angels doth he give help._” The angels
are “_sons of God_,” as having no earthly parentage and no
parentage at all except the divine. _Eph. 3:14, 15_—“_the Father,
of whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named,_”—not
“_every family_,” as in R. V., for there are no families among the
angels. The marginal rendering “_fatherhood_” is better than
“_family_,”—all the πατριαί are named from the πατήρ. Dodge,
Christian Theology, 172—“The bond between angels is simply a
mental and moral one. They can gain nothing by inheritance,
nothing through domestic and family life, nothing through a
society held together by a bond of blood.... Belonging to two
worlds and not simply to one, the human soul has in it the springs
of a deeper and wider experience than angels can have.... God
comes nearer to man than to his angels.” Newman Smyth, Through
Science to Faith, 191—“In the resurrection life of man, the
species has died; man the individual lives on. Sex shall be no
more needed for the sake of life; they shall no more marry, but
men and women, the children of marriage, shall be as the angels.
Through the death of the human species shall be gained, as the
consummation of all, the immortality of the individuals.”
(_c_) They are of various ranks and endowments.
_Col. 1:16_—“_thrones or dominions or principalities or powers_”;
_1 Thess. 4:16_—“_the voice of the archangel_”; _Jude 9_—“_Michael
the archangel._” Michael (= who is like God?) is the only one
expressly called an archangel in Scripture, although Gabriel (=
God’s hero) has been called an archangel by Milton. In Scripture,
Michael seems the messenger of law and judgment; Gabriel, the
messenger of mercy and promise. The fact that Scripture has but
one archangel is proof that its doctrine of angels was not, as has
sometimes been charged, derived from Babylonian and Persian
sources; for there we find seven archangels instead of one. There,
moreover, we find the evil spirit enthroned as a god, while in
Scripture he is represented as a trembling slave.
Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:51—“The devout and trustful
consciousness of the immediate nearness of God, which is expressed
in so many beautiful utterances of the Psalmist, appears to be
supplanted in later Judaism by a belief in angels, which is
closely analogous to the superstitious belief in the saints on the
part of the Romish church. It is very significant that the Jews in
the time of Jesus could no longer conceive of the promulgation of
the law on Sinai, which was to them the foundation of their whole
religion, as an immediate revelation of Jehovah to Moses, except
as instituted through the mediation of angels (_Acts 7:38, 53_;
_Gal. 3:19_; _Heb. 2:2_; Josephus, Ant. 15:5, 3).”
(_d_) They have an organization.
_1 Sam. 1:11_—“_Jehovah of hosts_”; _1 K. 22:19_—“_Jehovah sitting
on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his
right hand and on his left_”; _Mat. 26:53_—“_twelve legions of
angels_”—suggests the organization of the Roman army;
_25:41_—“_the devil and his angels_”; _Eph. 2:2_—“_the prince of
the powers in the air_”; _Rev. 2:13_—“_Satan’s throne_” (not
“_seat_”); _16:10_—“_throne of the beast_”—“a hellish parody of
the heavenly kingdom” (Trench). The phrase “_host of heaven_,” in
_Deut. 4:19_; _17:3_; _Acts 7:42_, probably = the stars; but in
_Gen. 32:2_, “_God’s host_” = angels, for when Jacob saw the
angels he said “_this is God’s host_.” In general the phrases
“_God of hosts_”, “_Lord of hosts_” seem to mean “God of angels”,
“Lord of angels”: compare _2 Chron. 18:18_; _Luke 2:13_; _Rev.
19:14_—“_the armies which are in heaven._” Yet in _Neh. 9:6_ and
_Ps. 33:6_ the word “_host_” seems to include both angels and
stars.
Satan is “the ape of God.” He has a throne. He is “_the prince of
the world_” (_John 14:30; 16:11_), “_the prince of the powers of
the air_” (_Eph. 2:2_). There is a cosmos and order of evil, as
well as a cosmos and order of good, though Christ is stronger than
the strong man armed (_Luke 11:21_) and rules even over Satan. On
Satan in the Old Testament, see art. by T. W. Chambers, in Presb.
and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34. The first mention of Satan is in
the account of the Fall in _Gen. 3:1-15_; the second in _Lev.
16:8_, where one of the two goats on the day of atonement is said
to be “_for Azazel_,” or Satan; the third where Satan moved David
to number Israel (_1 Chron. 21:1_); the fourth in the book of _Job
1:6-12_; the fifth in _Zech. 3:1-3_, where Satan stands as the
adversary of Joshua the high priest, but Jehovah addresses Satan
and rebukes him. Cheyne, Com. on Isaiah, vol. 1, p. 11, thinks
that the stars were first called the hosts of God, with the notion
that they were animated creatures. In later times the belief in
angels threw into the background the belief in the stars as
animated beings; the angels however were connected very closely
with the stars. Marlowe, in his Tamburlaine, says: “The moon, the
planets, and the meteors light, These angels in their crystal
armor fight A doubtful battle.”
With regard to the “cherubim” of Genesis, Exodus, and Ezekiel,—with which
the “seraphim” of Isaiah and the “living creatures” of the book of
Revelation are to be identified,—the most probable interpretation is that
which regards them, not as actual beings of higher rank than man, but as
symbolic appearances, intended to represent redeemed humanity, endowed
with all the creature perfections lost by the Fall, and made to be the
dwelling-place of God.
Some have held that the cherubim are symbols of the divine
attributes, or of God’s government over nature; see Smith’s Bib.
Dict., art.: Cherub; Alford, Com. on _Rev. 4:6-8_, and Hulsean
Lectures, 1841: vol. 1, Lect. 2; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:278. But
whatever of truth belongs to this view may be included in the
doctrine stated above. The cherubim are indeed symbols of nature
pervaded by the divine energy and subordinated to the divine
purposes, but they are symbols of nature only because they are
symbols of man in his twofold capacity of _image of God_ and
_priest of nature_. Man, as having a body, is a part of nature; as
having a soul, he emerges from nature and gives to nature a voice.
Through man, nature, otherwise blind and dead, is able to
appreciate and to express the Creator’s glory.
The doctrine of the cherubim embraces the following points: 1. The
cherubim are not personal beings, but are artificial, temporary,
symbolic figures. 2. While they are not themselves personal
existences, they are symbols of personal existence—symbols not of
divine or angelic perfections but of human nature (_Ex.
1:5_—“_they had the likeness of a man_”; _Rev. 5:9_—A. V.—“_thou
hast redeemed us to God by thy blood_”—so read א, B, and
Tregelles; the Eng. and Am. Rev. Vers., however, follow A and
Tischendorf, and omit the word “_us_”). 3. They are emblems of
human nature, not in its present stage of development, but
possessed of all its original perfections; for this reason the
most perfect animal forms—the kinglike courage of the lion, the
patient service of the ox, the soaring insight of the eagle—are
combined with that of man (_Ez. 1_ and _10_; _Rev. 4:6-8_). 4.
These cherubic forms represent, not merely material or earthly
perfections, but human nature spiritualized and sanctified. They
are “_living creatures_” and their life is a holy life of
obedience to the divine will (_Ez. 1:12_—“_whither the spirit was
to go, they went_”). 5. They symbolize a human nature exalted to
be the dwelling-place of God. Hence the inner curtains of the
tabernacle were inwoven with cherubic figures, and God’s glory was
manifested on the mercy-seat between the cherubim (_Ex. 37:6-9_).
While the flaming sword at the gates of Eden was the symbol of
justice, the cherubim were symbols of mercy—keeping the “_way of
the tree of life_” for man, until by sacrifice and renewal
Paradise should be regained (_Gen. 3:24_).
In corroboration of this general view, note that angels and
cherubim never go together; and that in the closing visions of the
book of Revelation these symbolic forms are seen no longer. When
redeemed humanity has entered heaven, the figures which typified
that humanity, having served their purpose, finally disappear. For
fuller elaboration, see A. H. Strong, The Nature and Purpose of
the Cherubim, in Philosophy and Religion, 391-399; Fairbairn,
Typology, 1:185-208; Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:87; Bib. Sac.,
1876:32-51; Bib. Com., 1:49-52—“The winged lions, eagles, and
bulls, that guard the entrances of the palace of Nineveh, are
worshipers rather than divinities.” It has lately been shown that
the winged bull of Assyria was called “Kerub” almost as far back
as the time of Moses. The word appears in its Hebrew form 500
years before the Jews had any contact with the Persian dominion.
The Jews did not derive it from any Aryan race. It belonged to
their own language.
The variable form of the cherubim seems to prove that they are
symbolic appearances rather than real beings. A parallel may be
found in classical literature. In Horace, Carmina, 3:11, 15,
Cerberus has three heads; in 2:13, 34, he has a hundred. Bréal,
Semantics suggests that the three heads may be dog-heads, while
the hundred heads may be snake-heads. But Cerberus is also
represented in Greece as having only one head. Cerberus must
therefore be a symbol rather than an actually existing creature.
H. W. Congdon of Wyoming, N. Y., held, however, that the cherubim
are symbols of God’s life in the universe as a whole. _Ez.
28:14-19_—“_the anointed cherub that covereth_”—the power of the
King of Tyre was so all-pervading throughout his dominion, his
sovereignty so absolute, and his decrees so instantly obeyed, that
his rule resembled the divine government over the world. Mr.
Congdon regarded the cherubim as a proof of monism. See
Margoliouth, The Lord’s Prayer, 159-180. On animal characteristics
in man, see Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 105.
3. As to their moral character.
(_a_) They were all created holy.
_Gen. 1:31_—“_God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it
was very good_”; _Jude 6_—“_angels that kept not their own
beginning_”—ἀρχήν seems here to mean their beginning in holy
character, rather than their original lordship and dominion.
(_b_) They had a probation.
This we infer from _1 Tim. 5:21_—“_the elect angels_”; _cf._ _1
Pet. 1:1, 2_—“_elect ... unto obedience._” If certain angels, like
certain men, are “_elect ... unto obedience_,” it would seem to
follow that there was a period of probation, during which their
obedience or disobedience determined their future destiny; see
Ellicott on _1 Tim. 5:21_. Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
106-108—“_Gen. 3:14_—‘_Because thou hast done this, cursed art
thou_’—in the sentence on the serpent, seems to imply that Satan’s
day of grace was ended when he seduced man. Thenceforth he was
driven to live on dust, to triumph only in sin, to pick up a
living out of man, to possess man’s body or soul, to tempt from
the good.”
(_c_) Some preserved their integrity.
_Ps. 89:7_—“_the council of the holy ones_”—a designation of
angels; _Mark 8:38_—“_the holy angels._” Shakespeare, Macbeth,
4:3—“Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.”
(_d_) Some fell from their state of innocence.
_John 8:44_—“_He was a murderer from the beginning, and standeth
not in the truth, because there is no truth in him_”; _2 Pet.
2:4_—“_angels when they sinned_”; _Jude 6_—“_angels who kept not
their own beginning, but left their proper habitation._”
Shakespeare, Henry VIII, 3:2—“Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away
ambition; By that sin fell the angels; how can man then, The image
of his Maker, hope to win by it?... How wretched Is that poor man
that hangs on princes’ favors!... When he falls, he falls like
Lucifer, Never to hope again.”
(_e_) The good are confirmed in good.
_Mat. 6:10_—“_Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth_”;
_18:10_—“_in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my
Father who is in heaven_”; _2 Cor. 11:14_—“_an angel of light._”
(_f_) The evil are confirmed in evil.
_Mat. 13:19_—“_the evil one_”; _1 John 5:18, 19_—“_the evil one
toucheth him not ... the whole world lieth in the evil one_”;
_cf._ _John 8:44_—“_Ye are of your father the devil ... When he
speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the
father thereof_”; _Mat. 6:13_—“_deliver us from the evil one._”
From these Scriptural statements we infer that all free creatures
pass through a period of probation; that probation does not
necessarily involve a fall; that there is possible a sinless
development of moral beings. Other Scriptures seem to intimate
that the revelation of God in Christ is an object of interest and
wonder to other orders of intelligence than our own; that they are
drawn in Christ more closely to God and to us; in short, that they
are confirmed in their integrity by the cross. See _1 Pet.
1:12_—“_which things angels desire to look into_”; _Eph.
3:10_—“_that now unto the principalities and the powers in the
heavenly places might be made known through the church the
manifold wisdom of God_”; _Col. 1:20_—“_through him to reconcile
all things unto himself ... whether things upon the earth, or
things in the heavens_”; _Eph. 1:10_—“_to sum up all things in
Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the
earth_”—“the unification of the whole universe in Christ as the
divine centre.... The great system is a harp all whose strings are
in tune but one, and that one jarring string makes discord
throughout the whole. The whole universe shall feel the influence,
and shall be reduced to harmony, when that one string, the world
in which we live, shall be put in tune by the hand of love and
mercy”—freely quoted from Leitch, God’s Glory in the Heavens,
327-330.
It is not impossible that God is using this earth as a
breeding-ground from which to populate the universe. Mark Hopkins,
Life, 317—“While there shall be gathered at last and preserved, as
Paul says, a holy church, and every man shall be perfect and the
church shall be spotless.... there will be other forms of
perfection in other departments of the universe. And when the
great day of restitution shall come and God shall vindicate his
government, there may be seen to be coming in from other
departments of the universe a long procession of angelic forms,
great white legions from Sirius, from Arcturus and the chambers of
the South, gathering around the throne of God and that centre
around which the universe revolves.”
4. As to their employments.
A. The employments of good angels.
(_a_) They stand in the presence of God and worship him.
_Ps. 29:1, 2_—“_Ascribe unto Jehovah, O ye sons of the mighty,
Ascribe unto Jehovah glory and strength. Ascribe unto Jehovah the
glory due unto his name. Worship Jehovah in holy array_”—Perowne:
“Heaven being thought of as one great temple, and all the
worshipers therein as clothed in priestly vestments.” _Ps.
89:7_—“_a God very terrible in the council of the holy ones,_” _i.
e._, angels—Perowne: “Angels are called an assembly or
congregation, as the church above, which like the church below
worships and praises God.” _Mat. 18:10_—“_in heaven their angels
do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven._” In
apparent allusion to this text, Dante represents the saints as
dwelling in the presence of God yet at the same time rendering
humble service to their fellow men here upon the earth. Just in
proportion to their nearness to God and the light they receive
from him, is the influence they are able to exert over others.
(_b_) They rejoice in God’s works.
_Job 38:7_—“_all the sons of God shouted for joy_”; _Luke
15:10_—“_there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over
one sinner that repenteth_”; _cf._ _2 Tim. 2:25_—“_if peradventure
God may give them repentance._” Dante represents the angels that
are nearest to God, the infinite source of life, as ever advancing
toward the spring-time of youth, so that the oldest angels are the
youngest.
(_c_) They execute God’s will,—by working in nature;
_Ps. 103:20_—“_Ye his angels ... that fulfil his word, Hearkening
unto the voice of his word_”; _104:4_ marg.—“_Who maketh his
angels winds_; _His ministers a flaming fire_,” _i. e._,
lightnings. See Alford on _Heb. 1:7_—“The order of the Hebrew
words here [in _Ps. 104:4_] is not the same as in the former
verses (see especially _v. 3_), where we have: ‘_Who maketh the
clouds his chariot_.’ For this transposition, those who insist
that the passage means ‘he maketh winds his messengers’ can give
no reason.”
Farrar on _Heb. 1:7_—“_He maketh his angels winds_”; “The Rabbis
often refer to the fact that God makes his angels assume any form
he pleases, whether man (_Gen. 18:2_) or woman (_Zech 5:9_—‘_two
women, and the wind was in their wings_’), or wind or flame (_Ex.
3:2_—‘_angel ... in a flame of fire_’; _2 K. 6:17_). But that
untenable and fleeting form of existence which is the glory of the
angels would be an inferiority in the Son. He could not be
clothed, as they are at God’s will, in the fleeting robes of
material phenomena.” John Henry Newman, in his Apologia, sees an
angel in every flower. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 82—“Origen
thought not a blade of grass nor a fly was without its angel.
_Rev. 14:18_—an angel ‘_that hath power over fire_’; _John
5:4_—intermittent spring under charge of an angel; _Mat.
28:2_—descent of an angel caused earthquake on the morning of
Christ’s resurrection; _Luke 13:11_—control of diseases is
ascribed to angels.”
(_d_) by guiding the affairs of nations;
_Dan. 10:12, 13, 21_—“_I come for thy words’ sake. But the prince
of the kingdom of Persia withstood me ... Michael, one of the
chief princes, came to help me ... Michael your prince_”;
_11:1_—“_And as for me, in the first year of Darius the Mede, I
stood up to confirm and strengthen him_”; _12:1_—“_at that time
shall Michael stand up, the great prince who standeth for the
children of thy people._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 87, suggests
the question whether “the spirit of the age” or “the national
character” in any particular case may not be due to the unseen
“principalities” under which men live. Paul certainly recognizes,
in _Eph. 2:2_, “_the prince of the powers of the air, ... the
spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience._” May not
good angels be entrusted with influence over nations’ affairs to
counteract the evil and help the good?
(_e_) by watching over the interests of particular churches;
_1 Cor. 11:10_—“_for this cause ought the women to have a sign of
authority_ [_i. e._, a veil] _on her head, because of the
angels_”—who watch over the church and have care for its order.
Matheson, Spiritual Development of St. Paul, 242—“Man’s covering
is woman’s power. Ministration _is_ her power and it allies her
with a greater than man—the angel. Christianity is a feminine
strength. Judaism had made woman only a means to an end—the
multiplication of the race. So it had degraded her. Paul will
restore woman to her original and equal dignity.” _Col.
2:18_—“_Let no man rob you of your prize by a voluntary humility
and worshiping of the angels_”—a false worship which would be very
natural if angels were present to guard the meetings of the
saints. _1 Tim. 5:21_—“_I charge thee in the sight of God, and
Christ Jesus, and the elect angels, that thou observe these
things_”—the public duties of the Christian minister.
Alford regards “_the angels of the seven churches_” (_Rev. 1:20_)
as superhuman beings appointed to represent and guard the
churches, and that upon the grounds: (1) that the word is used
elsewhere in the book of Revelation only in this sense; and (2)
that nothing in the book is addressed to a teacher individually,
but all to some one who reflects the complexion and fortunes of
the church as no human person could. We prefer, however, to regard
“_the angels of the seven churches_” as meaning simply the pastors
of the seven churches. The word “_angel_” means simply
“messenger,” and may be used of human as well as of superhuman
beings—see _Hag. 1:13_—“_Haggai, Jehovah’s messenger_”—literally,
“_the angel of Jehovah_.” The use of the word in this figurative
sense would not be incongruous with the mystical character of the
book of Revelation (see Bib. Sac. 12:339). John Lightfoot, Heb.
and Talmud. Exerc., 2:90, says that “angel” was a term designating
officer or elder of a synagogue. See also Bp. Lightfoot, Com. on
Philippians, 187, 188; Jacobs, Eccl. Polity, 100 and note. In the
Irvingite church, accordingly, “angels” constitute an official
class.
(_f_) by assisting and protecting individual believers;
_1 K. 19:5_—“_an angel touched him_ [Elijah], _and said unto him,
Arise and eat_”; _Ps. 91:11_—“_he will give his angels charge over
thee, To keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in
their hands, Lest thou dash thy foot against a stone_”; _Dan.
6:22_—“_My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’
mouths, and they have not hurt me_”; _Mat. 4:11_—“_angels came and
ministered unto him_”—Jesus was the type of all believers;
_18:10_—“_despise not one of these little ones, for I say unto
you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my
Father_”; compare _verse 6_—“_one of these little ones that
believe on me_”; see Meyer, Com. _in loco_, who regards these
passages as proving the doctrine of guardian angels. _Luke
16:22_—“_the beggar died, and ... was carried away by the angels
into Abraham’s bosom_”; _Heb. 1:14_—“_Are they not all ministering
spirits, sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall
inherit salvation?_” Compare _Acts 12:15_—“_And they said, It is
his angel_”—of Peter standing knocking; see Hackett, Com. _in
loco_: the utterance “expresses a popular belief prevalent among
the Jews, which is neither affirmed nor denied.” Shakespeare,
Henry IV, 2nd part, 2:2—“For the boy—there is a good angel about
him.” _Per contra_, see Broadus, Com. on _Mat. 18:10_—“It is
simply said of believers as a class that there are angels which
are ‘_their angels_’; but there is nothing here or elsewhere to
show that one angel has special charge of one believer.”
(_g_) by punishing God’s enemies.
_2 K. 19:35_—“_it came to pass that night, that the angel of
Jehovah went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an
hundred fourscore and five thousand_”; _Acts 12:23_—“_And
immediately an angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not
God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost._”
A general survey of this Scripture testimony as to the employments of good
angels leads us to the following conclusions:
First,—that good angels are not to be considered as the mediating agents
of God’s regular and common providence, but as the ministers of his
special providence in the affairs of his church. He “maketh his angels
winds” and “a flaming fire,” not in his ordinary procedure, but in
connection with special displays of his power for moral ends (Deut. 33:2;
Acts 7:53; Gal. 3:19; Heb. 2:2). Their intervention is apparently
occasional and exceptional—not at their own option, but only as it is
permitted or commanded by God. Hence we are not to conceive of angels as
coming between us and God, nor are we, without special revelation of the
fact, to attribute to them in any particular case the effects which the
Scriptures generally ascribe to divine providence. Like miracles,
therefore, angelic appearances generally mark God’s entrance upon new
epochs in the unfolding of his plans. Hence we read of angels at the
completion of creation (Job 38:7); at the giving of the law (Gal 3:19); at
the birth of Christ (Luke 2:13); at the two temptations in the wilderness
and in Gethsemane (Mat. 4:11, Luke 22:43); at the resurrection (Mat.
28:2); at the ascension (Acts 1:10); at the final judgment (Mat. 25:31).
The substance of these remarks may be found in Hodge, Systematic
Theology, 1:637-645. Milton tells us that “Millions of spiritual
creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we
sleep.” Whether this be true or not, it is a question of interest
why such angelic beings as have to do with human affairs are not
at present seen by men. Paul’s admonition against the “_worshiping
of the angels_” (_Col. 2:18_) seems to suggest the reason. If men
have not abstained from worshiping their fellow-men, when these
latter have been priests or media of divine communications, the
danger of idolatry would be much greater if we came into close and
constant contact with angels; see _Rev. 22:8, 9_—“_I fell down to
worship before the feet of the angel which showed me these things.
And he saith unto me, See thou do it not._”
The fact that we do not in our day see angels should not make us
sceptical as to their existence any more than the fact that we do
not in our day see miracles should make us doubt the reality of
the New Testament miracles. As evil spirits were permitted to work
most actively when Christianity began its appeal to men, so good
angels were then most frequently recognized as executing the
divine purposes. Nevius, Demon-Possession, 278, thinks that evil
spirits are still at work where Christianity comes in conflict
with heathenism, and that they retire into the background as
Christianity triumphs. This may be true also of good angels.
Otherwise we might be in danger of overestimating their greatness
and authority. Father Taylor was right when he said: “Folks are
better than angels.” It is vain to sing: “I want to be an angel.”
We never shall be angels. Victor Hugo is wrong when he says: “I am
the tadpole of an archangel.” John Smith is not an angel, and he
never will be. But he may be far greater than an angel, because
Christ took, not the nature of angels, but the nature of man
(_Heb. 2:16_).
As intimated above, there is no reason to believe that even the
invisible presence of angels is a constant one. Doddridge’s dream
of accident prevented by angelic interposition seems to embody the
essential truth. We append the passages referred to in the text.
_Job 38:7_—“_When the morning stars sang together, And all the
sons of God shouted for joy_”; _Deut. 33:2_—“_Jehovah came from
Sinai ... he came from the ten thousands of holy ones: At his
right hand was a fiery law for them_”; _Gal. 3:19_—“_it_ [the law]
_was ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator_”; _Heb.
2:2_—“_the word spoken through angels_”; _Acts 7:53_—“_who
received the law as it was ordained by angels_”; _Luke
2:13_—“_suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the
heavenly host_”; _Mat. 4:11_—“_Then the devil leaveth him; and
behold, angels came and ministered unto him_”; _Luke 22:43_—“_And
there appeared unto him an angel from heaven, strengthening him_”;
_Mat. 28:2_—“_an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came
and rolled away the stone, and sat upon it_”; _Acts 1:10_—“_And
while they were looking steadfastly into heaven as he went,
behold, two men stood by them in white apparel_”; _Mat.
25:31_—“_when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the
angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory._”
Secondly,—that their power, as being in its nature dependent and derived,
is exercised in accordance with the laws of the spiritual and natural
world. They cannot, like God, create, perform miracles, act without means,
search the heart. Unlike the Holy Spirit, who can influence the human mind
directly, they can influence men only in ways analogous to those by which
men influence each other. As evil angels may tempt men to sin, so it is
probable that good angels may attract men to holiness.
Recent psychical researches disclose almost unlimited
possibilities of influencing other minds by suggestion. Slight
physical phenomena, as the odor of a violet or the sight in a book
of a crumpled roseleaf, may start trains of thought which change
the whole course of a life. A word or a look may have great power
over us. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 276—“The facts
of hypnotism illustrate the possibility of one mind falling into a
strange thraldom under another.” If other men can so powerfully
influence us, it is quite possible that spirits which are not
subject to limitations of the flesh may influence us yet more.
Binet, in his Alterations of Personality, says that experiments on
hysterical patients have produced in his mind the conviction that,
in them at least, “a plurality of persons exists.... We have
established almost with certainty that in such patients, side by
side with the principal personality, there is a secondary
personality, which is unknown by the first, which sees, hears,
reflects, reasons and acts”; see Andover Review, April, 1890:422.
Hudson, Law of Psychic Phenomena, 81-143, claims that we have two
minds, the objective and conscious, and the subjective and
unconscious. The latter works automatically upon suggestion from
the objective or from other minds. In view of the facts referred
to by Binet and Hudson, we claim that the influence of angelic
spirits is no more incredible than is the influence of suggestion
from living men. There is no need of attributing the phenomena of
hypnotism to spirits of the dead. Our human nature is larger and
more susceptible to spiritual influence than we have commonly
believed. These psychical phenomena indeed furnish us with a
corroboration of our Ethical Monism, for if in one human being
there may be two or more consciousnesses, then in the one God
there may be not only three infinite personalities but also
multitudinous finite personalities. See T. H. Wright, The Finger
of God, 124-133.
B. The employments of evil angels.
(_a_) They oppose God and strive to defeat his will. This is indicated in
the names applied to their chief. The word “Satan” means
“adversary”—primarily to God, secondarily to men; the term “devil”
signifies “slanderer”—of God to men, and of men to God. It is indicated
also in the description of the “man of sin” as “he that opposeth and
exalteth himself against all that is called God.”
_Job 1:6_—Satan appears among “_the sons of God_”; _Zech.
3:1_—“_Joshua the high priest ... and Satan standing at his right
hand to be his adversary_”; _Mat. 13:39_—“_the enemy that sowed
them is the devil_”; _1 Pet. 5:8_—“_your adversary the devil._”
Satan slanders God to men, in _Gen. 3:1, 4_—“_Yea, hath God
said?... Ye shall not surely die_”; men to God, in _Job 1:9,
11_—“_Doth Job fear God for naught?... put forth thy hand now, and
touch all that he hath, and he will renounce thee to thy face_”;
_2:4, 5_—“_Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give
for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and
his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy face_”; _Rev.
12:10_—“_the accuser of our brethren is cast down, who accuseth
them before our God night and day._”
Notice how, over against the evil spirit who thus accuses God to
man and man to God, stands the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, who
pleads God’s cause with man and man’s cause with God: _John
16:8_—“_he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of
sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment_”; _Rom. 8:26_—“_the
Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know not how to pray as
we ought; but the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us with
groanings which cannot be uttered._” Hence Balaam can say: _Num.
23:21_, “_He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, Neither hath he
seen perverseness in Israel_”; and the Lord can say to Satan as he
resists Joshua: “_Jehovah rebuke thee, O Satan; yea, Jehovah that
hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee_” (_Zech. 3:2_). “Thus he puts
himself between his people and every tongue that would accuse
them” (C. H. M.). For the description of the “_man of sin_,” see
_2 Thess. 2:3, 4_—“_he that opposeth_”; _cf._ _verse 9_—“_whose
coming is according to the working of Satan._”
On the “_man of sin_,” see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev.,
July, 1889:328-360. As in _Daniel 11:36_, the great enemy of the
faith, he who “_shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above
every God_”, is the Syrian King, Antiochus Epiphanes, so the man
of lawlessness described by Paul in _2 Thess. 2:3, 4_ was “the
corrupt and impious Judaism of the apostolic age.” This only had
its seat in the temple of God. It was doomed to destruction when
the Lord should come at the fall of Jerusalem. But this fulfilment
does not preclude a future and final fulfilment of the prophecy.
Contrasts between the Holy Spirit and the spirit of evil: 1. The dove, and
the serpent; 2. the father of lies, and the Spirit of truth; 3. men
possessed by dumb spirits, and men given wonderful utterance in diverse
tongues; 4. the murderer from the beginning, and the life-giving Spirit,
who regenerates the soul and quickens our mortal bodies; 5. the adversary,
and the Helper; 6. the slanderer, and the Advocate; 7. Satan’s sifting,
and the Master’s winnowing; 8. the organizing intelligence and malignity
of the evil one, and the Holy Spirit’s combination of all the forces of
matter and mind to build up the kingdom of God; 9. the strong man fully
armed, and a stronger than he; 10. the evil one who works only evil, and
the holy One who is the author of holiness in the hearts of men. The
opposition of evil angels, at first and ever since their fall, may be a
reason why they are incapable of redemption.
(_b_) They hinder man’s temporal and eternal welfare,—sometimes by
exercising a certain control over natural phenomena, but more commonly by
subjecting man’s soul to temptation. Possession of man’s being, either
physical or spiritual, by demons, is also recognized in Scripture.
Control of natural phenomena is ascribed to evil spirits in _Job
1:12, 16, 19_ and _2:7_—“_all that he hath is in thy power_”—and
Satan uses lightning, whirlwind, disease, for his purposes; _Luke
13:11, 16_—“_a woman that had a spirit of infirmity ... whom Satan
had bound, lo, these eighteen years_”; _Acts 10:38_—“_healing all
that were oppressed of the devil_”; _2 Cor. 12:7_—“_a thorn in the
flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me_”; _1 Thess. 2:18_—“_we
would fain have come unto you, I Paul once and again; and Satan
hindered us_”; _Heb. 2:14_—“_him that had the power of death, that
is, the devil._” Temptation is ascribed to evil spirits in _Gen.
3:1_ _sq._—“_Now the serpent was more subtle_”; _cf._ _Rev.
20:2_—“_the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan_”; _Mat.
4:3_—“_the tempter came_”; _John 13:27_—“_after the sop, then
entered Satan into him_”; _Acts 5:3_—“_why hath Satan filled thy
heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?_” _Eph. 2:2_—“_the spirit that
now worketh in the sons of disobedience_”; _1 Thess. 3:5_—“_lest
by any means the tempter had tempted you_”; _1 Pet 5:8_—“_your
adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking
whom he may devour._”
At the time of Christ, popular belief undoubtedly exaggerated the
influence of evil spirits. Savage, Life after Death, 113—“While
God was at a distance, the demons were very, very near. The air
about the earth was full of these evil tempting spirits. They
caused shipwreck at sea, and sudden death on land; they blighted
the crops; they smote and blasted in the tempests; they took
possession of the bodies and the souls of men. They entered into
compacts, and took mortgages on men’s souls.” If some good end has
been attained in spite of them they feel that “Their labor must be
to pervert that end. And out of good still to find means of evil.”
In Goethe’s Faust, Margaret detects the evil in Mephistopheles:
“You see that he with no soul sympathizes. ’Tis written on his
face—he never loved.... Whenever he comes near, I cannot pray.”
Mephistopheles describes himself as “Ein Theil von jener Kraft Die
stäts das Böse will Und stäts das Gute schafft”—“Part of that
power not understood, which always wills the bad, and always works
the good”—through the overruling Providence of God. “The devil
says his prayers backwards.” “He tried to learn the Basque
language, but had to give it up, having learned only three words
in two years.” Walter Scott tells us that a certain sulphur spring
in Scotland was reputed to owe its quality to an ancient
compulsory immersion of Satan in it.
Satan’s temptations are represented as both negative and
positive,—he takes away the seed sown, and he sows tares. He
controls many subordinate evil spirits; there is only one devil,
but there are many angels or demons, and through their agency
Satan may accomplish his purposes.
Satan’s negative agency is shown in _Mark 4:15_—“_when they have
heard, straightway cometh Satan, and taketh away the word which
hath been sown in them_”; his positive agency in _Mat. 13:38,
39_—“_the tares are the sons of the evil one; and the enemy that
sowed them is the devil._” One devil, but many angels: see _Mat.
25:41_—“_the devil and his angels_”; _Mark 5:9_—“_My name is
Legion, for we are many_”; _Eph. 2:2_—“_the prince of the powers
of the air_”; _6:12_—“_principalities ... powers ... world-rulers
of this darkness ... spiritual hosts of wickedness._” The mode of
Satan’s access to the human mind we do not know. It may be that by
moving upon our physical organism he produces subtle signs of
thought and so reaches the understanding and desires. He certainly
has the power to present in captivating forms the objects of
appetite and selfish ambition, as he did to Christ in the
wilderness (_Mat. 4:3, 6, 9_), and to appeal to our love for
independence by saying to us, as he did to our first parents—“_ye
shall be as God_” (_Gen. 3:5_).
C. C. Everett, Essays Theol. and Lit., 186-218, on The Devil: “If
the supernatural powers would only hold themselves aloof and not
interfere with the natural processes of the world, there would be
no sickness, no death, no sorrow.... This shows a real, though
perhaps unconscious, faith in the goodness and trustworthiness of
nature. The world in itself is a source only of good. Here is the
germ of a positive religion, though this religion when it appears,
may adopt the form of supernaturalism.” If there was no Satan,
then Christ’s temptations came from within, and showed a
predisposition to evil on his own part.
Possession is distinguished from bodily or mental disease, though such
disease often accompanies possession or results from it.—The demons speak
in their own persons, with supernatural knowledge, and they are directly
addressed by Christ. Jesus recognizes Satanic agency in these cases of
possession, and he rejoices in the casting out of demons, as a sign of
Satan’s downfall. These facts render it impossible to interpret the
narratives of demoniac possession as popular descriptions of abnormal
physical or mental conditions.
Possession may apparently be either physical, as in the case of
the Gerasene demoniacs (_Mark 5:2-4_), or spiritual, as in the
case of the “_maid having a spirit of divination_” (_Acts 16:16_),
where the body does not seem to have been affected. It is
distinguished from bodily disease: see _Mat. 17:15,
18_—“_epileptic ... the demon went out from him: and the boy was
cured_”; _Mark 9:25_—“_Thou dumb and deaf spirit_”; _3:11,
12_—“_the unclean spirits ... cried, saying, Thou art the Son of
God. And he charged them much that they should not make him
known_”; _Luke 8:30, 31_—“_And Jesus asked him, What is thy name?
And he said, Legion; for many demons were entered unto him. And
they entreated him that he would not command them to depart into
the abyss_”; _10:17, 18_—“_And the seventy returned with joy,
saying, Lord, even the demons are subject unto us in thy name. And
he said unto them, I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from
heaven._”
These descriptions of personal intercourse between Christ and the demons
cannot be interpreted as metaphorical. “In the temptation of Christ and in
the possession of the swine, imagination could have no place. Christ was
_above_ its delusions; the brutes were _below_ them.” Farrar (Life of
Christ, 1:337-341, and 2:excursus vii), while he admits the existence and
agency of good angels, very inconsistently gives a metaphorical
interpretation to the Scriptural accounts of evil angels. We find
corroborative evidence of the Scripture doctrine in the domination which
one wicked man frequently exercises over others; in the opinion of some
modern physicians in charge of the insane, that certain phenomena in their
patients’ experience are best explained by supposing an actual subjection
of the will to a foreign power; and, finally, in the influence of the Holy
Spirit upon the human heart. See Trench, Miracles, 125-136; Smith’s Bible
Dictionary, 1:586—“Possession is distinguished from mere temptation by the
complete or incomplete loss of the sufferer’s reason or power of will; his
actions, words, and almost his thoughts, are mastered by the evil spirit,
till his personality seems to be destroyed, or at least so overborne as to
produce the consciousness of a twofold will within him like that in a
dream. In the ordinary assaults and temptations of Satan, the will itself
yields consciously, and by yielding gradually assumes, without losing its
apparent freedom of action, the characteristics of the Satanic nature. It
is solicited, urged, and persuaded against the strivings of grace, but it
is not overborne.”
T. H. Wright, The Finger of God, argues that Jesus, in his mention of
demoniacs, accommodated himself to the beliefs of his time. Fisher, Nature
and Method of Revelation, 274, with reference to Weiss’s Meyer on _Mat.
4:24_, gives Meyer’s arguments against demoniacal possession as follows:
1. the absence of references to demoniacal possession in the Old
Testament, and the fact that so-called demoniacs were cured by exorcists;
2. that no clear case of possession occurs at present; 3. that there is no
notice of demoniacal possession in John’s Gospel, though the overcoming of
Satan is there made a part of the Messiah’s work and Satan is said to
enter into a man’s mind and take control there (_John 13:27_); 4. and that
the so-called demoniacs are not, as would be expected, of a diabolic
temper and filled with malignant feelings toward Christ. Harnack, Wesen
des Christenthums, 38—“The popular belief in demon-possession gave form to
the conceptions of those who had nervous diseases, so that they expressed
themselves in language proper only to those who were actually possessed.
Jesus is no believer in Christian Science: he calls sickness sickness and
health health; but he regards all disease as a proof and effect of the
working of the evil one.”
On _Mark 1:21-34_, see Maclaren in S. S. Times, Jan. 23, 1904—“We
are told by some that this demoniac was an epileptic. Possibly;
but, if the epilepsy was not the result of possession, why should
it take the shape of violent hatred of Jesus? And what is there in
epilepsy to give discernment of his character and the purpose of
his mission?” Not Jesus’ exorcism of demons as a fact, but his
casting them out by a word, was our Lord’s wonderful
characteristic. Nevius, Demon-Possession, 240—“May not
demon-possession be only a different, a more advanced, form of
hypnotism?... It is possible that these evil spirits are familiar
with the organism of the nervous system, and are capable of acting
upon and influencing mankind in accordance with physical and
psychological laws.... The hypnotic trance may be effected,
without the use of physical organs, by the mere force of
will-power, spirit acting upon spirit.” Nevius quotes F. W. A.
Myers, Fortnightly Rev., Nov. 1885—“One such discovery, that of
telepathy, or the transference of thought and sensation from mind
to mind without the agency of the recognized organs of sense, has,
as I hold, been already achieved.” See Bennet, Diseases of the
Bible; Kedney, Diabolology; and references in Poole’s Synopsis,
1:343; also Bramwell, Hypnotism, 358-398.
(_c_) Yet, in spite of themselves, they execute God’s plans of punishing
the ungodly, of chastening the good, and of illustrating the nature and
fate of moral evil.
Punishing the ungodly: _Ps. 78:49_—“_He cast upon them the
fierceness of his anger, Wrath and indignation, and trouble, A
band of angels of evil_”; _1 K. 22:23_—“_Jehovah hath put a lying
spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets; and Jehovah hath
spoken evil concerning thee._” In _Luke 22:31_, Satan’s sifting
accomplishes the opposite of the sifter’s intention, and the same
as the Master’s winnowing (Maclaren).
Chastening the good: see _Job, chapters 1_ and _2_; _1 Cor.
5:5_—“_deliver such a one unto Satan for the destruction of the
flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord
Jesus_”; _cf._ _1 Tim. 1:20_—“_Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I
delivered onto Satan, that they might be taught not to
blaspheme._” This delivering to Satan for the destruction of the
flesh seems to have involved four things: (1) excommunication from
the church; (2) authoritative infliction of bodily disease or
death; (3) loss of all protection from good angels, who minister
only to saints; (4) subjection to the buffetings and tormentings
of the great accuser. Gould, in Am. Com. on _1 Cor. 5:5_, regards
“delivering to Satan” as merely putting a man out of the church by
excommunication. This of itself was equivalent to banishing him
into “the world,” of which Satan was the ruler.
Evil spirits illustrate the nature and fate of moral evil: see
_Mat 8:29_—“_art thou come hither to torment us before the time?_”
_25:41_—“_eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his
angels_”; _2 Thess. 2:8_—“_then shall be revealed the lawless
one_”; _James 2:19_—“_the demons also believe, and shudder_”;
_Rev. 12:9, 12_—“_the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole
world ... the devil is gone down unto you, having great wrath,
knowing that he hath but a short time_”; _20:10_—“_cast into the
lake of fire ... tormented day and night for ever and ever._”
It is an interesting question whether Scripture recognizes any
special connection of evil spirits with the systems of idolatry,
witchcraft, and spiritualism which burden the world. _1 Cor.
10:20_—“_the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice
to demons, and not to God_”; _2 Thess. 2:9_—“_the working of Satan
with all power and signs of lying wonders_”—would seem to favor an
affirmative answer. But _1 Cor. 8:4_—“_concerning therefore the
eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that no idol is
anything in the world_”—seems to favor a negative answer. This
last may, however, mean that “the beings whom the idols are
designed to _represent_ have no existence, although it is
afterwards shown (_10:20_) that there are _other_ beings connected
with false worship” (Ann. Par. Bible, _in loco_). “Heathenism is
the reign of the devil” (Meyer), and while the heathen think
themselves to be sacrificing to Jupiter or Venus, they are really
“_sacrificing to demons_,” and are thus furthering the plans of a
malignant spirit who uses these forms of false religion as a means
of enslaving their souls. In like manner, the network of
influences which support the papacy, spiritualism, modern
unbelief, is difficult of explanation, unless we believe in a
superhuman intelligence which organizes these forces against God.
In these, as well as in heathen religions, there are facts
inexplicable upon merely natural principles of disease and
delusion.
Nevius, Demon-Possession, 294—“Paul teaches that the gods
mentioned under different names are imaginary and non-existent;
but that, behind and in connection with these gods, there are
demons who make use of idolatry to draw men away from God; and it
is to these that the heathen are unconsciously rendering obedience
and service.... It is most reasonable to believe that the
sufferings of people bewitched were caused by the devil, not by
the so-called witches. Let us substitute ‘devilcraft’ for
‘witchcraft.’... Had the courts in Salem proceeded on the
Scriptural presumption that the testimony of those under the
control of evil spirits would, in the nature of the case, be
false, such a thing as the Salem tragedy would never have been
known.”
A survey of the Scripture testimony with regard to the employments of evil
spirits leads to the following general conclusions:
First,—the power of evil spirits over men is not independent of the human
will. This power cannot be exercised without at least the original consent
of the human will, and may be resisted and shaken off through prayer and
faith in God.
_Luke 22:31, 40_—“_Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you
as wheat.... Pray that ye enter not into temptation_”; _Eph.
6:11_—“_Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to
stand against the wiles of the devil_”; _16_—“_the shield of
faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of
the evil one_”; _James 4:7_—“_resist the devil, and he will flee
from you_”; _1 Pet. 5:9_—“_whom withstand stedfast in your
faith._” The coals are already in the human heart, in the shape of
corrupt inclinations; Satan only blows them into flame. The double
source of sin is illustrated in _Acts 5:3, 4_—“_Why hath Satan
filled thy heart?... How is it that thou hast conceived this thing
in thine heart?_” The Satanic impulse could have been resisted,
and “_after it was_” suggested, it was still “_in his own power_,”
as was the land that he had sold (Maclaren).
The soul is a castle into which even the king of evil spirits
cannot enter without receiving permission from within. Bp.
Wordsworth: “The devil may _tempt_ us to fall, but he cannot
_make_ us fall; he may persuade us to cast _ourselves_ down, but
he cannot _cast_ us down.” E. G. Robinson: “It is left to us
whether the devil shall get control of us. We pack off on the
devil’s shoulders much of our own wrong doing, just as Adam had
the impertinence to tell God that the woman did the mischief.”
Both God and Satan stand at the door and knock, but neither heaven
nor hell can come in unless we will. “We cannot prevent the birds
from flying over our heads, but we can prevent them from making
their nests in our hair.” _Mat 12:43-45_—“_The unclean spirit,
when he is gone out of a man_”—suggests that the man who gets rid
of one vice but does not occupy his mind with better things is
ready to be repossessed. “_Seven other spirits more evil than
himself_” implies that some demons are more wicked than others and
so are harder to cast out (_Mark 9:29_). The Jews had cast out
idolatry, but other and worse sins had taken possession of them.
Hudson, Law of Psychic Phenomena, 129—“The hypnotic subject cannot
be controlled so far as to make him do what he knows to be wrong,
unless he himself voluntarily assents.” A. S. Hart: “Unless one is
willing to be hypnotized, no one can put him under the influence.
The more intelligent one is, the more susceptible. Hypnotism
requires the subject to do two-thirds of the work, while the
instructor does only one-third—that of telling the subject what to
do. It is not an inherent influence, nor a gift, but can be
learned by any one who can read. It is impossible to compel a
person to do wrong while under the influence, for the subject
retains a consciousness of the difference between right and
wrong.”
Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 330-335—“Some persons have the
power of intentionally calling up hallucinations; but it often
happens to them as to Goethe’s Zauberlehrling, or
apprentice-magician, that the phantoms gain power over them and
will not be again dispersed. Goethe’s Fischer—‘Half she drew him
down and half he sank’—repeats the duality in the second term; for
to sink is to let one’s self sink.” Manton, the Puritan: “A
stranger cannot call off a dog from the flock, but the Shepherd
can do so with a word; so the Lord can easily rebuke Satan when he
finds him most violent.” Spurgeon, the modern Puritan, remarks on
the above: “O Lord, when I am worried by my great enemy, call him
off, I pray thee! Let me hear a voice saying: ‘_Jehovah rebuke
thee, O Satan; even Jehovah that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke
thee!_’ (_Zech. 3:2)_. By thine election of me, rebuke him, I pray
thee, and deliver me from ‘_the power of the dog_’! (_Ps.
22:20)_.”
Secondly,—their power is limited, both in time and in extent, by the
permissive will of God. Evil spirits are neither omnipotent, omniscient,
nor omnipresent. We are to attribute disease and natural calamity to their
agency, only when this is matter of special revelation. Opposed to God as
evil spirits are, God compels them to serve his purposes. Their power for
harm lasts but for a season, and ultimate judgment and punishment will
vindicate God’s permission of their evil agency.
_1 Cor. 10:13_—“_God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be
tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make
also the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it_”; _Jude
6_—“_angels which kept not their own beginning, but left their
proper habitation, he hath kept in everlasting bonds under
darkness unto the judgment of the great day._”
Luther saw Satan nearer to man than his coat, or his shirt, or even his
skin. In all misfortune he saw the devil’s work. Was there a conflagration
in the town? By looking closely you might see a demon blowing upon the
flame. Pestilence and storm he attributed to Satan. All this was a relic
of the mediæval exaggerations of Satan’s power. It was then supposed that
men might make covenants with the evil one, in which supernatural power
was purchased at the price of final perdition (see Goethe’s Faust).
Scripture furnishes no warrant for such representations. There
seems to have been permitted a special activity of Satan in
temptation and possession during our Savior’s ministry, in order
that Christ’s power might be demonstrated. By his death Jesus
brought “_to naught him that had the power of death, that is, the
devil_” (_Heb. 2:14)_ and “_having despoiled the principalities
and the powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over
them in it_,” _i. e._, in the Cross (_Col. 2:15_). _1 John
3:8_—“_To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might
destroy the works of the devil._” Evil spirits now exist and act
only upon sufferance. McLeod, Temptation of our Lord, 24—“Satan’s
power is limited, (1) by the fact that he is a creature; (2) by
the fact of God’s providence; (3) by the fact of his own
wickedness.”
Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 136—“Having neither fixed
principle in himself nor connection with the source of order
outside, Satan has not prophetic ability. He can appeal to chance,
but he cannot foresee. So Goethe’s Mephistopheles insolently
boasts that he can lead Faust astray: ‘What will you bet? There’s
still a chance to gain him, If unto me full leave you give Gently
upon _my_ road to train him!’ And in _Job 1:11; 2:5_, Satan
wagers: ‘_He will renounce thee to thy face._’ ” William Ashmore:
“Is Satan omnipresent? No, but he is very spry. Is he bound? Yes,
but with a rather loose rope.” In the Persian story, God scattered
seed. The devil buried it, and sent the rain to rot it. But soon
it sprang up, and the wilderness blossomed as the rose.
II. Objections to the Doctrine of Angels.
1. To the doctrine of angels in general.
It is objected:
(_a_) That it is opposed to the modern scientific view of the world, as a
system of definite forces and laws.—We reply that, whatever truth there
may be in this modern view, it does not exclude the play of divine or
human free agency. It does not, therefore, exclude the possibility of
angelic agency.
Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 332—“It is easier to believe in
angels than in ether; in God rather than atoms; and in the history
of his kingdom as a divine self-revelation rather than in the
physicist’s or the biologist’s purely mechanical process of
evolution.”
(_b_) That it is opposed to the modern doctrine of infinite space above
and beneath us—a space peopled with worlds. With the surrender of the old
conception of the firmament, as a boundary separating this world from the
regions beyond, it is claimed that we must give up all belief in a heaven
of the angels.—We reply that the notions of an infinite universe, of
heaven as a definite place, and of spirits as confined to fixed locality,
are without certain warrant either in reason or in Scripture. We know
nothing of the modes of existence of pure spirits.
What we know of the universe is certainly finite. Angels are
apparently incorporeal beings, and as such are free from all laws
of matter and space. Heaven and hell are essentially conditions,
corresponding to character—conditions in which the body and the
surroundings of the soul express and reflect its inward state. The
main thing to be insisted on is therefore the state; place is
merely incidental. The fact that Christ ascended to heaven with a
human body, and that the saints are to possess glorified bodies,
would seem to imply that heaven is a place. Christ’s declaration
with regard to him who is “_able to destroy both soul and body in
hell_” (_Mat. 10:28_) affords some reason for believing that hell
is also a place.
Where heaven and hell are, is not revealed to us. But it is not
necessary to suppose that they are in some remote part of the
universe; for aught we know, they may be right about us, so that
if our eyes were opened, like those of the prophet’s servant (_2
Kings 6:17_), we ourselves should behold them. Upon ground of
_Eph. 2:2_—“_prince of the __ powers of the air_”—and _3:10_—“_the
principalities and the powers in the heavenly places_”—some have
assigned the atmosphere of the earth as the abode of angelic
spirits, both good and evil. But the expressions “_air_” and
“_heavenly places_” may be merely metaphorical designations of
their spiritual method of existence.
The idealistic philosophy, which regards time and space as merely
subjective forms of our human thinking and as not conditioning the
thought of God, may possibly afford some additional aid in the
consideration of this problem. If matter be only the expression of
God’s mind and will, having no existence apart from his
intelligence and volition, the question of place ceases to have
significance. Heaven is in that case simply the state in which God
manifests himself in his grace, and hell is the state in which a
moral being finds himself in opposition to God, and God in
opposition to him. Christ can manifest himself to his followers in
all parts of the earth and to all the inhabitants of heaven at one
and the same time (_John 14:21_; _Mat. 28:20_; _Rev. 1:7_). Angels
in like manner, being purely spiritual beings, may be free from
the laws of space and time, and may not be limited to any fixed
locality.
We prefer therefore to leave the question of place undecided, and
to accept the existence and working of angels both good and evil
as a matter of faith, without professing to understand their
relations to space. For the rationalistic view, see Strauss,
Glaubenslehre, 1:670-675. _Per contra_, see Van Oosterzee,
Christian Dogmatics, 1:308-317; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics,
127-136.
2. To the doctrine of evil angels in particular.
It is objected that:
(_a_) The idea of the fall of angels is self-contradictory, since a fall
determined by pride presupposes pride—that is, a fall before the fall.—We
reply that the objection confounds the occasion of sin with the sin
itself. The outward motive to disobedience is not disobedience. The fall
took place only when that outward motive was chosen by free will. When the
motive of independence was selfishly adopted, only then did the innocent
desire for knowledge and power become pride and sin. How an evil volition
could originate in spirits created pure is an insoluble problem. Our faith
in God’s holiness, however, compels us to attribute the origin of this
evil volition, not to the Creator, but to the creature.
There can be no sinful propensity before there is sin. The reason
of the _first_ sin can not be sin itself. This would be to make
sin a necessary development; to deny the holiness of God the
Creator; to leave the ground of theism for pantheism.
(_b_) It is irrational to suppose that Satan should have been able to
change his whole nature by a single act, so that he thenceforth willed
only evil.—But we reply that the circumstances of that decision are
unknown to us; while the power of single acts permanently to change
character is matter of observation among men.
Instance the effect, upon character and life, of a single act of
falsehood or embezzlement. The first glass of intoxicating drink,
and the first yielding to impure suggestion, often establish
nerve-tracts in the brain and associations in the mind which are
not reversed and overcome for a whole lifetime. “Sow an act, and
you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a
character, and you reap a destiny.” And what is true of men, may
be also true of angels.
(_c_) It is impossible that so wise a being should enter upon a hopeless
rebellion.—We answer that no amount of mere knowledge ensures right moral
action. If men gratify present passion, in spite of their knowledge that
the sin involves present misery and future perdition, it is not impossible
that Satan may have done the same.
Scherer, Essays on English Literature, 139, puts this objection as
follows: “The idea of Satan is a contradictory idea; for it is
contradictory to know God and yet attempt rivalry with him.” But
we must remember that understanding is the servant of will, and is
darkened by will. Many clever men fail to see what belongs to
their peace. It is the very madness of sin, that it persists in
iniquity, even when it sees and fears the approaching judgment of
God. Jonathan Edwards: “Although the devil be exceedingly crafty
and subtle, yet he is one of the greatest fools and blockheads in
the world, as the subtlest of wicked men are. Sin is of such a
nature that it strangely infatuates and stultifies the mind.” One
of Ben Jonson’s plays has, for its title: “The Devil is an Ass.”
Schleiermacher, Die Christliche Glaube, 1:210, urges that
continual wickedness must have weakened Satan’s understanding, so
that he could be no longer feared, and he adds: “Nothing is easier
than to contend against emotional evil.” On the other hand, there
seems evidence in Scripture of a progressive rage and devastating
activity in the case of the evil one, beginning in Genesis and
culminating in the Revelation. With this increasing malignity
there is also abundant evidence of his unwisdom. We may instance
the devil’s mistakes in misrepresenting 1. God to man (_Gen.
3:1_—“_hath God said?_”). 2. Man to himself (_Gen. 3:4_—“_Ye shall
not surely die_”). 3. Man to God (_Job 1:9_—“_Doth Job fear God
for naught?_”). 4. God to himself (_Mat. 4:3_—“_If thou art the
Son of God_”). 5. Himself to man (_2 Cor. 11:14_—“_Satan
fashioneth himself into an angel of light_”). 6. Himself to
himself (_Rev. 12:12_—“_the devil is gone down unto you, having
great wrath_”—thinking he could successfully oppose God or destroy
man).
(_d_) It is inconsistent with the benevolence of God to create and uphold
spirits, who he knows will be and do evil.—We reply that this is no more
inconsistent with God’s benevolence than the creation and preservation of
men, whose action God overrules for the furtherance of his purposes, and
whose iniquity he finally brings to light and punishes.
Seduction of the pure by the impure, piracy, slavery, and war,
have all been permitted among men. It is no more inconsistent with
God’s benevolence to permit them among angelic spirits. Caroline
Fox tells of Emerson and Carlyle that the latter once led his
friend, the serene philosopher, through the abominations of the
streets of London at midnight, asking him with grim humor at every
few steps: “Do you believe in the devil now?” Emerson replied that
the more he saw of the English people, the greater and better he
thought them. It must have been because with such depths beneath
them they could notwithstanding reach such heights of
civilization. Even vice and misery can be overruled for good, and
the fate of evil angels may be made a warning to the universe.
(_e_) The notion of organization among evil spirits is self-contradictory,
since the nature of evil is to sunder and divide.—We reply that such
organization of evil spirits is no more impossible than the organization
of wicked men, for the purpose of furthering their selfish ends. Common
hatred to God may constitute a principle of union among them, as among
men.
Wicked men succeed in their plans only by adhering in some way to
the good. Even a robber-horde must have laws, and there is a sort
of “honor among thieves.” Else the world would be a pandemonium,
and society would be what Hobbes called it: “bellum omnium contra
omnes.” See art. on Satan, by Whitehouse, in Hastings, Dictionary
of the Bible: “Some personalities are ganglionic centres of a
nervous system, incarnations of evil influence. The Bible teaches
that Satan is such a centre.”
But the organizing power of Satan has its limitations. Nevius,
Demon-Possession, 279—“Satan is not omniscient, and it is not
certain that all demons are perfectly subject to his control. Want
of vigilance on his part, and personal ambition in them, may
obstruct and delay the execution of his plans, as among men.” An
English parliamentarian comforted himself by saying: “If the fleas
were all of one mind, they would have us out of bed.” Plato,
Lysis, 214—“The good are like one another, and friends to one
another, and the bad are never at unity with one another or with
themselves; for they are passionate and restless, and anything
which is at variance and enmity with itself is not likely to be in
union or harmony with any other thing.”
(_f_) The doctrine is morally pernicious, as transferring the blame of
human sin to the being or beings who tempt men thereto.—We reply that
neither conscience nor Scripture allows temptation to be an excuse for
sin, or regards Satan as having power to compel the human will. The
objection, moreover, contradicts our observation,—for only where the
personal existence of Satan is recognized, do we find sin recognized in
its true nature.
The diabolic character of sin makes it more guilty and abhorred.
The immorality lies, not in the maintenance, but in the denial, of
the doctrine. Giving up the doctrine of Satan is connected with
laxity in the administration of criminal justice. Penalty comes to
be regarded as only deterrent or reformatory.
(_g_) The doctrine degrades man, by representing him as the tool and slave
of Satan.—We reply that it does indeed show his actual state to be
degraded, but only with the result of exalting our idea of his original
dignity, and of his possible glory in Christ. The fact that man’s sin was
suggested from without, and not from within, may be the one mitigating
circumstance which renders possible his redemption.
It rather puts a stigma upon human nature to say that it is _not_
fallen—that its present condition is its original and normal
state. Nor is it worth while to attribute to man a dignity he does
not possess, if thereby we deprive him of the dignity that may be
his. Satan’s sin was, in its essence, sin against the Holy Ghost,
for which there can be no “_Father, forgive them, for they know
not what they do_” (_Luke 23:34_), since it was choosing evil with
the _mala gaudia mentis_, or the clearest intuition that it was
evil. If there be no devil, then man himself is devil. It has been
said of Voltaire, that without believing in a devil, he saw him
everywhere—even where he was not. Christian, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress, takes comfort when he finds that the blasphemous
suggestions which came to him in the dark valley were suggestions
from the fiend that pursued him. If all temptation is from within,
our case would seem hopeless. But if “_an enemy hath done this_”
(_Mat. 13:28_), then there is hope. And so we may accept the
maxim: “Nullus diabolus, nullus Redemptor.” Unitarians have no
Captain of their Salvation, and so have no Adversary against whom
to contend. See Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 17; Birks,
Difficulties of Belief, 78-100; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:291-293. Many
of the objections and answers mentioned above have been taken from
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:251-284, where a fuller statement of
them may be found.
III. Practical uses of the Doctrine of Angels.
A. Uses of the doctrine of good angels.
(_a_) It gives us a new sense of the greatness of the divine resources,
and of God’s grace in our creation, to think of the multitude of unfallen
intelligences who executed the divine purposes before man appeared.
(_b_) It strengthens our faith in God’s providential care, to know that
spirits of so high rank are deputed to minister to creatures who are
environed with temptations and are conscious of sin.
(_c_) It teaches us humility, that beings of so much greater knowledge and
power than ours should gladly perform these unnoticed services, in behalf
of those whose only claim upon them is that they are children of the same
common Father.
(_d_) It helps us in the struggle against sin, to learn that these
messengers of God are near, to mark our wrong doing if we fall, and to
sustain us if we resist temptation.
(_e_) It enlarges our conceptions of the dignity of our own being, and of
the boundless possibilities of our future existence, to remember these
forms of typical innocence and love, that praise and serve God unceasingly
in heaven.
Instance the appearance of angels in Jacob’s life at Bethel (_Gen.
28:12_—Jacob’s conversion?) and at Mahanaim (_Gen. 32:1, 2_—two
camps, of angels, on the right hand and on the left; _cf._ _Ps.
34:7_—“_The angel of Jehovah encampeth round about them that fear
him, And delivereth them_”); so too the Angel at Penuel that
struggled with Jacob at his entering the promised land (_Gen.
32:24_; _cf._ _Hos. 12:3, 4_—“_in his manhood he had power with
God: yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed_”), and “_the
angel who hath redeemed me from all evil_” (_Gen. 48:16_) to whom
Jacob refers on his dying bed. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene:
“And is there care in heaven? and is there love In heavenly
spirits to these creatures base That may compassion of their evils
move? There is; else much more wretched were the case Of men than
beasts. But O, th’ exceeding grace Of highest God that loves his
creatures so, And all his works with mercy doth embrace, That
blessed angels he sends to and fro To serve to wicked man, to
serve his wicked foe! How oft do they their silver bowers leave
And come to succor us who succor want! How oft do they with golden
pinions cleave The flitting skies like flying pursuivant, Against
foul fiends to aid us militant! They for us fight; they watch and
duly ward, And their bright squadrons round about us plant; And
all for love, and nothing for reward. Oh, why should heavenly God
for men have such regard!”
It shows us that sin is not mere finiteness, to see these finite
intelligences that maintained their integrity. Shakespeare, Henry
VIII, 2:2—“He counsels a divorce—a loss of her That, like a jewel,
has hung twenty years About his neck, yet never lost her lustre;
Of her that loves him with that excellence That angels love good
men with; even of her That, when the greatest stroke of fortune
falls, Will bless the king.” Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Man, proud
man, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As makes the
angels weep.”
B. Uses of the doctrine of evil angels.
(_a_) It illustrates the real nature of sin, and the depth of the ruin to
which it may bring the soul, to reflect upon the present moral condition
and eternal wretchedness to which these spirits, so highly endowed, have
brought themselves by their rebellion against God.
(_b_) It inspires a salutary fear and hatred of the first subtle
approaches of evil from within or from without, to remember that these may
be the covert advances of a personal and malignant being, who seeks to
overcome our virtue and to involve us in his own apostasy and destruction.
(_c_) It shuts us up to Christ, as the only Being who is able to deliver
us or others from the enemy of all good.
(_d_) It teaches us that our salvation is wholly of grace, since for such
multitudes of rebellious spirits no atonement and no renewal were
provided—simple justice having its way, with no mercy to interpose or
save.
Philippi, in his Glaubenslehre, 3:151-284, suggests the following
relations of the doctrine of Satan to the doctrine of sin: 1.
Since Satan is a fallen _angel_, who once was pure, evil is not
self-existent or necessary. Sin does not belong to the substance
which God created, but is a later addition. 2. Since Satan is a
purely _spiritual_ creature, sin cannot have its origin in mere
sensuousness, or in the mere possession of a physical nature. 3.
Since Satan is not a _weak_ and _poorly endowed_ creature, sin is
not a necessary result of weakness and limitation. 4. Since Satan
is _confirmed in evil_, sin is not necessarily a transient or
remediable act of will. 5. Since in Satan sin _does not come to an
end_, sin is not a step of creaturely development, or a stage of
progress to something higher and better. On the uses of the
doctrine, see also Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 1:316;
Robert Hall, Works, 3:35-51; Brooks, Satan and his Devices.
“They never sank so low, They are not raised so high; They never
knew such depths of woe, Such heights of majesty. The Savior did
not join Their nature to his own; For them he shed no blood
divine. Nor heaved a single groan.” If no redemption has been
provided for them, it may be because: 1. sin originated with them;
2. the sin which they committed was “_an eternal sin_” (_cf._
_Mark 3:29_); 3. they sinned with clearer intellect and fuller
knowledge than ours (_cf._ _Luke 23:34_); 4. their incorporeal
being aggravated their sin and made it analogous to our sinning
against the Holy Spirit (_cf._ _Mat. 12:31, 32_); 5. this
incorporeal being gave no opportunity for Christ to objectify his
grace and visibly to join himself to them (_cf._ _Heb. 2:16_); 6.
their persistence in evil, in spite of their growing knowledge of
the character of God as exhibited in human history, has resulted
in a hardening of heart which is not susceptible of salvation.
Yet angels were created in Christ (_Col. 1:16_); they consist in
him (_Col. 1:17_); he must suffer in their sin; God would save
them, if he consistently could. Dr. G. W. Samson held that the
Logos became an angel before he became man, and that this explains
his appearances as “_the angel of Jehovah_” in the Old Testament
(_Gen. 22:11_). It is not asserted that _all_ fallen angels shall
be eternally tormented (_Rev. 14:10_). In terms equally strong
(_Mat. 25:41_; _Rev. 20:10_) the existence of a place of eternal
punishment for wicked men is declared, but nevertheless we do not
believe that all men will go there, in spite of the fact that all
men are wicked. The silence of Scripture with regard to a
provision of salvation for fallen angels does not prove that there
is no such provision. _2 Pet. 2:4_ shows that evil angels have not
received _final_ judgment, but are in a temporary state of
existence, and their final state is yet to be revealed. If God has
not already provided, may he not yet provide redemption for them,
and the “_elect angels_” (_1 Tim. 5:21_) be those whom God has
predestinated to stand this future probation and be saved, while
only those who persist in their rebellion will be consigned to the
lake of fire and brimstone (_Rev. 20:10_)?
The keeper of a young tigress patted her head and she licked his
hand. But when she grew older she seized his hand with her teeth
and began to craunch it. He pulled away his hand in shreds. He
learned not to fondle a tigress. Let us learn not to fondle Satan.
Let us not be “_ignorant of his devices_” (_2 Cor. 2:11_). It is
not well to keep loaded firearms in the chimney corner. “They who
fear the adder’s sting will not come near her hissing.” Talmage:
“O Lord, help us to hear the serpent’s rattle before we feel its
fangs.” Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 215—The pastor trembles for a
soul, “when he sees the destroyer hovering over it like a hawk
poised in midair, and would have it gathered beneath Christ’s
wing.”
Thomas K. Beecher: “Suppose I lived on Broadway where the crowd
was surging past in both directions all the time. Would I leave my
doors and windows open, saying to the crowd of strangers: ‘Enter
my door, pass through my hall, come into my parlor, make
yourselves at home in my dining-room, go up into my bedchambers’?
No! I would have my windows and doors barred and locked against
intruders, to be opened only to me and mine and those I would have
as companions. Yet here we see foolish men and women stretching
out their arms and saying to the spirits of the vasty deep: ‘Come
in, and take possession of me. Write with my hands, think with my
brain, speak with my lips, walk with my feet, use me as a medium
for whatever you will.’ God respects the sanctity of man’s spirit.
Even Christ stands at the door and knocks. Holy Spirit, fill me,
so that there shall be room for no other!” (_Rev. 3:20_; _Eph.
5:18_.)
PART V. ANTHROPOLOGY, OR THE DOCTRINE OF MAN.
Chapter I. Preliminary.
I. Man a Creation of God and a Child of God.
The fact of man’s creation is declared in Gen. 1:27—“And God created man
in his own image, in the image of God created he him”; 2:7—“And Jehovah
God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
(_a_) The Scriptures, on the one hand, negate the idea that man is the
mere product of unreasoning natural forces. They refer his existence to a
cause different from mere nature, namely, the creative act of God.
Compare _Hebrews 12:9_—“_the Father of spirits_”; _Num.
16:22_—“_the God of the spirits of all flesh_”; _27:16_—“_Jehovah,
the God of the spirits of all flesh_”; _Rev. 22:6_—“_the God of
the spirits of the prophets._” Bruce, The Providential Order,
25—“Faith in God may remain intact, though we concede that man in
all his characteristics, physical and psychical, is no exception
to the universal law of growth, no breach in the continuity of the
evolutionary process.” By “_mere_ nature” we mean nature apart
from God. Our previous treatment of the doctrine of creation in
general has shown that the laws of nature are only the regular
methods of God, and that the conception of a nature apart from God
is an irrational one. If the evolution of the lower creation
cannot be explained without taking into account the originating
agency of God, much less can the coming into being of man, the
crown of all created things. Hudson, Divine Pedigree of Man:
“Spirit in man is linked with, because derived from, God, who is
spirit.”
(_b_) But, on the other hand, the Scriptures do not disclose the method of
man’s creation. Whether man’s physical system is or is not derived, by
natural descent, from the lower animals, the record of creation does not
inform us. As the command “Let the earth bring forth living creatures”
(Gen. 1:24) does not exclude the idea of mediate creation, through natural
generation, so the forming of man “of the dust of the ground” (Gen. 2:7)
does not in itself determine whether the creation of man’s body was
mediate or immediate.
We may believe that man sustained to the highest preceding brute
the same relation which the multiplied bread and fish sustained to
the five loaves and two fishes (_Mat. 14:19_), or which the wine
sustained to the water which was transformed at Cana (_John
2:7-10_), or which the multiplied oil sustained to the original
oil in the O. T. miracle (_2 K. 4:1-7_). The “_dust_,” before the
breathing of the spirit into it, may have been animated dust.
Natural means may have been used, so far as they would go.
Sterrett, Reason and Authority in Religion, 39—“Our heredity is
from God, even though it be from lower forms of life, and our goal
is also God, even though it be through imperfect manhood.”
Evolution does not make the idea of a Creator superfluous, because
evolution is only the method of God. It is perfectly consistent
with a Scriptural doctrine of Creation that man should emerge at
the proper time, governed by different laws from the brute
creation yet growing out of the brute, just as the foundation of a
house built of stone is perfectly consistent with the wooden
structure built upon it. All depends upon the plan. An atheistic
and undesigning evolution cannot include man without excluding
what Christianity regards as essential to man; see Griffith-Jones,
Ascent through Christ, 43-73. But a theistic evolution can
recognize the whole process of man’s creation as equally the work
of nature and the work of God.
Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 42—“You are not what you have
come from, but what you have become.” Huxley said of the brutes:
“Whether _from_ them or not, man is assuredly not _of_ them.”
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:289—“The religious dignity of man
rests after all upon what he _is_, not upon the mode and manner in
which he has _become_ what he is.” Because he came _from_ a beast,
it does not follow that he _is_ a beast. Nor does the fact that
man’s existence can be traced back to a brute ancestry furnish any
proper reason why the brute should become man. Here is a teleology
which requires a divine Creatorship.
J. M. Bronson: “The theist must accept evolution if he would keep
his argument for the existence of God from the unity of design in
nature. Unless man is an _end_, he is an _anomaly_. The greatest
argument for God is the fact that all animate nature is one vast
and connected unity. Man has developed not _from_ the ape, but
_away from_ the ape. He was never anything but potential man. He
did not, as man, come into being until he became a conscious moral
agent.” This conscious moral nature, which we call personality,
requires a divine Author, because it surpasses all the powers
which can be found in the animal creation. Romanes, Mental
Evolution in Animals, tells us that: 1. Mollusca learn by
experience; 2. Insects and spiders recognize offspring; 3. Fishes
make mental association of objects by their similarity; 4.
Reptiles recognize persons; 5. Hymenoptera, as bees and ants,
communicate ideas; 6. Birds recognize pictorial representations
and understand words; 7. Rodents, as rats and foxes, understand
mechanisms; 8. Monkeys and elephants learn to use tools; 9.
Anthropoid apes and dogs have indefinite morality.
But it is definite and not indefinite morality which differences
man from the brute. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, concedes that
man passed through a period when he resembled the ape more than
any known animal, but at the same time declares that no anthropoid
ape could develop into a man. The brute can be defined in terms of
man, but man cannot be defined in terms of the brute. It is
significant that in insanity the higher endowments of man
disappear in an order precisely the reverse of that in which,
according to the development theory, they have been acquired. The
highest part of man totters first. The last added is first to
suffer. Man moreover can transmit his own acquisitions to his
posterity, as the brute cannot. Weismann, Heredity, 2:69—“The
evolution of music does not depend upon any increase of the
musical faculty or any alteration in the inherent physical nature
of man, but solely upon the power of transmitting the intellectual
achievements of each generation to those which follow. This, more
than anything, is the cause of the superiority of men over
animals—this, and not merely human faculty, although it may be
admitted that this latter is much higher than in animals.” To this
utterance of Weismann we would add that human progress depends
quite as much upon man’s power of reception as upon man’s power of
transmission. Interpretation must equal expression; and, in this
interpretation of the past, man has a guarantee of the future
which the brute does not possess.
(_c_) Psychology, however, comes in to help our interpretation of
Scripture. The radical differences between man’s soul and the principle of
intelligence in the lower animals, especially man’s possession of
self-consciousness, general ideas, the moral sense, and the power of
self-determination, show that that which chiefly constitutes him man could
not have been derived, by any natural process of development, from the
inferior creatures. We are compelled, then, to believe that God’s
“breathing into man’s nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7), though it
was a mediate creation as presupposing existing material in the shape of
animal forms, was yet an immediate creation in the sense that only a
divine reinforcement of the process of life turned the animal into man. In
other words, man came not _from_ the brute, but _through_ the brute, and
the same immanent God who had previously created the brute created also
the man.
Tennyson, In Memoriam, XLV—“The baby new to earth and sky, What
time his tender palm is pressed Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that ‘this is I’: But as he grows he gathers
much, And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’ And finds ‘I am not what
I see, And other than the things I touch.’ So rounds he to a
separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro’ the
frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.” Fichte
called that the birthday of his child, when the child awoke to
self-consciousness and said “I.” Memory goes back no further than
language. Knowledge of the ego is objective, before it is
subjective. The child at first speaks of himself in the third
person: “Henry did so and so.” Hence most men do not remember what
happened before their third year, though Samuel Miles Hopkins,
Memoir, 20, remembered what must have happened when he was only 23
months old. Only a conscious person remembers, and he remembers
only as his will exerts itself in attention.
Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 110—“Never
shall I forget the phenomenon in myself, never till now recited,
when I stood by the birth of my own self-consciousness, the place
and time of which are distinct in my memory. On a certain
forenoon, I stood, a very young child, within the house-door, and
was looking out toward the wood-pile, as in an instant the inner
revelation ‘I am I,’ like lightning from heaven, flashed and stood
brightly before me; in that moment I had seen myself as I, for the
first time and forever.”
Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 3—“The beginning of conscious
life is to be placed probably before birth.... Sensations only
faintly and dimly distinguished from the general feeling of
vegetative comfort and discomfort. Still the experiences undergone
before birth perhaps suffice to form the foundation of the
consciousness of an external world.” Hill, Genetic Philosophy,
282, suggests that this early state, in which the child speaks of
self in the third person and is devoid of _self_-consciousness,
corresponds to the brute condition of the race, before it had
reached self-consciousness, attained language, and become man. In
the race, however, there was no heredity to predetermine
self-consciousness—it was a new acquisition, marking transition to
a superior order of being.
Connecting these remarks with our present subject, we assert that
no brute ever yet said, or thought, “I.” With this, then, we may
begin a series of simple distinctions between man and the brute,
so far as the immaterial principle in each is concerned. These are
mainly compiled from writers hereafter mentioned.
1. The brute is conscious, but man is self-conscious. The brute
does not objectify self. “If the pig could once say, ‘I am a pig,’
it would at once and thereby cease to be a pig.” The brute does
not distinguish itself from its sensations. The brute has
perception, but only the man has apperception, _i. e._, perception
accompanied by reference of it to the self to which it belongs.
2. The brute has only percepts; man has also concepts. The brute
knows white things, but not whiteness. It remembers things, but
not thoughts. Man alone has the power of abstraction, _i. e._, the
power of deriving abstract ideas from particular things or
experiences.
3. Hence the brute has no language. “Language is the expression of
general notions by symbols” (Harris). Words are the symbols of
concepts. Where there are no concepts there can be no words. The
parrot utters cries; but “no parrot ever yet spoke a true word.”
Since language is a sign, it presupposes the existence of an
intellect capable of understanding the sign,—in short, language is
the effect of mind, not the cause of mind. See Mivart, in Brit.
Quar., Oct. 1881:154-172. “The ape’s tongue is eloquent in his own
dispraise.” James, Psychology, 2:356—“The notion of a sign as
such, and the general purpose to apply it to everything, is the
distinctive characteristic of man.” Why do not animals speak?
Because they have nothing to say, _i. e._, have no general ideas
which words might express.
4. The brute forms no judgments, _e. g._, that _this_ is like
_that_, accompanied with belief. Hence there is no sense of the
ridiculous, and no laughter. James, Psychology, 2:360—“The brute
does not associate ideas by similarity.... Genius in man is the
possession of this power of association in an extreme degree.”
5. The brute has no reasoning—no sense that _this_ follows from
_that_, accompanied by a feeling that the sequence is necessary.
Association of ideas without judgment is the typical process of
the brute mind, though not that of the mind of man. See Mind,
5:402-409, 575-581. Man’s dream-life is the best analogue to the
mental life of the brute.
6. The brute has no general ideas or intuitions, as of space,
time, substance, cause, right. Hence there is no generalizing, and
no proper experience or progress. There is no capacity for
improvement in animals. The brute cannot be trained, except in
certain inferior matters of association, where independent
judgment is not required. No animal makes tools, uses clothes,
cooks food, breeds other animals for food. No hunter’s dog,
however long its observation of its master, ever learned to put
wood on a fire to keep itself from freezing. Even the rudest stone
implements show a break in continuity and mark the introduction of
man; see J. P. Cook, Credentials of Science, 14. “The dog can see
the printed page as well as a man can, but no dog was ever taught
to read a book. The animal cannot create in its own mind the
thoughts of the writer. The physical in man, on the contrary, is
only an aid to the spiritual. Education is a trained capacity to
discern the inner meaning and deeper relations of things. So the
universe is but a symbol and expression of spirit, a garment in
which an invisible Power has robed his majesty and glory”; see S.
S. Times, April 7, 1900. In man, mind first became supreme.
7. The brute has determination, but not self-determination. There
is no freedom of choice, no conscious forming of a purpose, and no
self-movement toward a predetermined end. The donkey is
determined, but not self-determined; he is the victim of heredity
and environment; he acts only as he is acted upon. Harris, Philos.
Basis of Theism, 537-554—“Man, though implicated in nature through
his bodily organization, is in his personality supernatural; the
brute is wholly submerged in nature.... Man is like a ship in the
sea—in it, yet above it—guiding his course, by observing the
heavens, even against wind and current. A brute has no such power;
it is in nature like a balloon, wholly immersed in air, and driven
about by its currents, with no power of steering.” Calderwood,
Philosophy of Evolution, chapter on Right and Wrong: “The grand
distinction of human life is self-control in the field of
action—control over all the animal impulses, so that these do not
spontaneously and of themselves determine activity” [as they do in
the brute]. By what Mivart calls a process of “inverse
anthropomorphism,” we clothe the brute with the attributes of
freedom; but it does not really possess them. Just as we do not
transfer to God all our human imperfections, so we ought not to
transfer all our human perfections to the brute, “reading our full
selves in life of lower forms.” The brute has no power to choose
between motives; it simply obeys motive. The necessitarian
philosophy, therefore, is a correct and excellent philosophy for
the brute. But man’s power of initiative—in short, man’s free
will—renders it impossible to explain his higher nature as a mere
natural development from the inferior creatures. Even Huxley has
said that, taking mind into the account, there is between man and
the highest beasts an “enormous gulf,” a “divergence immeasurable”
and “practically infinite.”
8. The brute has no conscience and no religious nature. No dog
ever brought back to the butcher the meat it had stolen. “The
aspen trembles without fear, and dogs skulk without guilt.” The
dog mentioned by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper
moved by the wind seemed to testify to “a sense of the
supernatural,” was merely exhibiting the irritation due to the
sense of an unknown future; see James, Will to Believe, 79. The
bearing of flogged curs does not throw light upon the nature of
conscience. If ethics is not hedonism, if moral obligation is not
a refined utilitarianism, if the right is something distinct from
the good we get out of it, then there must be a flaw in the theory
that man’s conscience is simply a development of brute instincts;
and a reinforcement of brute life from the divine source of life
must be postulated in order to account for the appearance of man.
Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165-167—“Is the spirit of man derived
from the soul of the animal? No, for neither one of these has
self-existence. Both are self-differentiations of God. The latter
is simply God’s preparation for the former.” Calderwood, Evolution
and Man’s Place in Nature, 337, speaks of “the impossibility of
tracing the origin of man’s rational life to evolution from a
lower life.... There are no physical forces discoverable in nature
sufficient to account for the appearance of this life.” Shaler,
Interpretation of Nature, 186—“Man’s place has been won by an
entire change in the limitations of his psychic development....
The old bondage of the mind to the body is swept away.... In this
new freedom we find the one dominant characteristic of man, the
feature which entitles us to class him as an entirely new class of
animal.”
John Burroughs, Ways of Nature: “Animal life parallels human life
at many points, but it is in another plane. Something guides the
lower animals, but it is not thought; something restrains them,
but it is not judgment; they are provident without prudence; they
are active without industry; they are skilful without practice;
they are wise without knowledge; they are rational without reason;
they are deceptive without guile.... When they are joyful, they
sing or they play; when they are distressed, they moan or they
cry; ... and yet I do not suppose they experience the emotion of
joy or sorrow, or anger or love, as we do, because these feelings
in them do not involve reflection, memory, and what we call the
higher nature, as with us. Their instinct is intelligence directed
outward, never inward, as in man. They share with man the emotions
of his animal nature, but not of his moral or æsthetic nature;
they know no altruism, no moral code.” Mr. Burroughs maintains
that we have no proof that animals in a state of nature can
reflect, form abstract ideas, associate cause and effect. Animals,
for instance, that store up food for the winter simply follow a
provident instinct but do not take thought for the future, any
more than does the tree that forms new buds for the coming season.
He sums up his position as follows: “To attribute human motives
and faculties to the animals is to caricature them; but to put us
in such relation to them that we feel their kinship, that we see
their lives embosomed in the same iron necessity as our own, that
we see in their minds a humbler manifestation of the same psychic
power and intelligence that culminates and is conscious of itself
in man—that, I take it, is the true humanization.” We assent to
all this except the ascription to human life of the same iron
necessity that rules the animal creation. Man is man, because his
free will transcends the limitations of the brute.
While we grant, then, that man is the last stage in the
development of life and that he has a brute ancestry, we regard
him also as the offspring of God. The same God who was the author
of the brute became in due time the creator of man. Though man
came _through_ the brute, he did not come _from_ the brute, but
from God, the Father of spirits and the author of all life.
Œdipus’ terrific oracle: “Mayst thou ne’er know the truth of what
thou art!” might well be uttered to those who believe only in the
brute origin of man. Pascal says it is dangerous to let man see
too clearly that he is on a level with the animals unless at the
same time we show him his greatness. The doctrine that the brute
is imperfect man is logically connected with the doctrine that man
is a perfect brute. Thomas Carlyle: “If this brute philosophy is
true, then man should go on all fours, and not lay claim to the
dignity of being moral.” G. F. Wright, Ant. and Origin of Human
Race, lecture IX—“One or other of the lower animals may exhibit
all the faculties used by a child of fifteen months. The
difference may seem very little, but what there is is very
important. It is like the difference in direction in the early
stages of two separating curves, which go on forever diverging....
The probability is that both in his bodily and in his mental
development man appeared as a _sport_ in nature, and leaped at
once in some single pair from the plane of irrational being to the
possession of the higher powers that have ever since characterized
him and dominated both his development and his history.”
Scripture seems to teach the doctrine that man’s nature is the
creation of God. _Gen. 2:7_—“_Jehovah God formed man of the dust
of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul_”—appears, says Hovey (State of the
Impen. Dead, 14), “to distinguish the vital informing principle of
human nature from its material part, pronouncing the former to be
more directly from God, and more akin to him, than the latter.” So
in _Zech. 12:1_—“_Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and
layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man
within him_”—the soul is recognized as distinct in nature from the
body, and of a dignity and value far beyond those of any material
organism. _Job 32:8_—“_there is a spirit in man, and the breath of
the Almighty giveth them understanding_”; _Eccl. 12:7_—“_the dust
returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto
God who gave it._” A sober view of the similarities and
differences between man and the lower animals may be found in
Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence. See also Martineau,
Types, 2:65, 140, and Study, 1:180; 2:9, 13, 184, 350; Hopkins,
Outline Study of Man, 8:23; Chadbourne, Instinct, 187-211; Porter,
Hum. Intellect, 384, 386, 397; Bascom, Science of Mind, 295-305;
Mansel, Metaphysics, 49, 50; Princeton Rev., Jan. 1881:104-128;
Henslow, in Nature, May 1, 1879:21, 22; Ferrier, Remains, 2:39;
Argyll, Unity of Nature, 117-119; Bib. Sac., 29:275-282; Max
Müller, Lectures on Philos. of Language, no. 1, 2, 3; F. W.
Robertson, Lectures on Genesis, 21; Le Conte, in Princeton Rev.,
May, 1884:238-261; Lindsay, Mind in Lower Animals; Romanes, Mental
Evolution in Animals; Fiske, The Destiny of Man.
(_d_) Comparative physiology, moreover, has, up to the present time, done
nothing to forbid the extension of this doctrine to man’s body. No single
instance has yet been adduced of the transformation of one animal species
into another, either by natural or artificial selection; much less has it
been demonstrated that the body of the brute has ever been developed into
that of man. All evolution implies progress and reinforcement of life, and
is unintelligible except as the immanent God gives new impulses to the
process. Apart from the direct agency of God, the view that man’s physical
system is descended by natural generation from some ancestral simian form
can be regarded only as an irrational hypothesis. Since the soul, then, is
an immediate creation of God, and the forming of man’s body is mentioned
by the Scripture writer in direct connection with this creation of the
spirit, man’s body was in this sense an immediate creation also.
For the theory of natural selection, see Darwin, Origin of
Species, 398-424, and Descent of Man, 2:368-387; Huxley, Critiques
and Addresses, 241-269, Man’s Place in Nature, 71-138, Lay
Sermons, 323, and art.: Biology, in Encyc. Britannica, 9th ed.;
Romanes, Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution. The theory
holds that, in the struggle for existence, the varieties best
adapted to their surroundings succeed in maintaining and
reproducing themselves, while the rest die out. Thus, by gradual
change and improvement of lower into higher forms of life, man has
been evolved. We grant that Darwin has disclosed one of the
important features of God’s method. We concede the partial truth
of his theory. We find it supported by the vertebrate structure
and nervous organization which man has in common with the lower
animals; by the facts of embryonic development; of rudimentary
organs; of common diseases and remedies; and of reversion to
former types. But we refuse to regard natural selection as a
complete explanation of the history of life, and that for the
following reasons:
1. It gives no account of the origin of substance, nor of the
origin of variations. Darwinism simply says that “round stones
will roll down hill further than flat ones” (Gray, Natural Science
and Religion). It accounts for the selection, not for the
creation, of forms. “Natural selection originates nothing. It is a
destructive, not a creative, principle. If we must idealize it as
a positive force, we must think of it, not as the preserver of the
fittest, but as the destroyer, that follows ever in the wake of
creation and devours the failures; the scavenger of creation, that
takes out of the way forms which are not fit to live and reproduce
themselves” (Johnson, on Theistic Evolution, in Andover Review,
April, 1884:363-381). Natural selection is only unintelligent
repression. Darwin’s Origin of Species is in fact “not the
Genesis, but the Exodus, of living forms.” Schurman: “The
_survival_ of the fittest does nothing to explain the _arrival_ of
the fittest”; see also DeVries, Species and Varieties, _ad finem_.
Darwin himself acknowledged that “Our ignorance of the laws of
variation is profound.... The cause of each slight variation and
of each monstrosity lies much more in the nature or constitution
of the organism than in the nature of the surrounding conditions”
(quoted by Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 280-301). Weismann has
therefore modified the Darwinian theory by asserting that there
would be no development unless there were a spontaneous, innate
tendency to variation. In this innate tendency we see, not mere
nature, but the work of an originating and superintending God. E.
M. Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:873-881—“Spirit was the
moulding power, from the beginning, of those lower forms which
would ultimately become man. Instead of the physical derivation of
the soul, we propose the spiritual derivation of the body.”
2. Some of the most important forms appear suddenly in the
geological record, without connecting links to unite them with the
past. The first fishes are the Ganoid, large in size and advanced
in type. There are no intermediate gradations between the ape and
man. Huxley, in Man’s Place in Nature, 94, tells us that the
lowest gorilla has a skull capacity of 24 cubic inches, whereas
the highest gorilla has 34-½. Over against this, the lowest man
has a skull capacity of 62; though men with less than 65 are
invariably idiotic; the highest man has 114. Professor Burt G.
Wilder of Cornell University: “The largest ape-brain is only half
as large as the smallest normal human.” Wallace, Darwinism,
458—“The average human brain weighs 48 or 49 ounces; the average
ape’s brain is only 18 ounces.” The brain of Daniel Webster
weighed 53 ounces; but Dr. Bastian tells of an imbecile whose
intellectual deficiency was congenital, yet whose brain weighed 55
ounces. Large heads do not always indicate great intellect.
Professor Virchow points out that the Greeks, one of the most
intellectual of nations, are also one of the smallest-headed of
all. Bain: “While the size of the brain increases in arithmetical
proportion, intellectual range increases in geometrical
proportion.”
Respecting the Enghis and Neanderthal crania, Huxley says: “The
fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to
take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form by the
modification of which he has probably become what he is.... In
vain have the links which should bind man to the monkey been
sought: not a single one is there to show. The so-called
_Protanthropos_ who should exhibit this link has not been
found.... None have been found that stood nearer the monkey than
the men of to-day.” Huxley argues that the difference between man
and the gorilla is smaller than that between the gorilla and some
apes; if the gorilla and the apes constitute one family and have a
common origin, may not man and the gorilla have a common ancestry
also? We reply that the space between the lowest ape and the
highest gorilla is filled in with numberless intermediate
gradations. The space between the lowest man and the highest man
is also filled in with many types that shade off one into the
other. But the space between the highest gorilla and the lowest
man is absolutely vacant; there are no intermediate types; no
connecting links between the ape and man have yet been found.
Professor Virchow has also very recently expressed his belief that
no relics of any predecessor of man have yet been discovered. He
said: “In my judgment, no skull hitherto discovered can be
regarded as that of a predecessor of man. In the course of the
last fifteen years we have had opportunities of examining skulls
of all the various races of mankind—even of the most savage
tribes; and among them all no group has been observed differing in
its essential characters from the general human type.... Out of
all the skulls found in the lake-dwellings there is not one that
lies outside the boundaries of our present population.” Dr. Eugene
Dubois has discovered in the Post-pliocene deposits of the island
of Java the remains of a preeminently hominine anthropoid which he
calls _Pithecanthropus erectus_. Its cranial capacity approaches
the physiological minimum in man, and is double that of the
gorilla. The thigh bone is in form and dimensions the absolute
analogue of that of man, and gives evidence of having supported a
habitually erect body. Dr. Dubois unhesitatingly places this
extinct Javan ape as the intermediate form between man and the
true anthropoid apes. Haeckel (in The Nation, Sept. 15, 1898) and
Keane (in Man Past and Present, 3), regard the _Pithecanthropus_
as a “missing link.” But “Nature” regards it as the remains of a
human microcephalous idiot. In addition to all this, it deserves
to be noticed that man does not degenerate as we travel back in
time. “The Enghis skull, the contemporary of the mammoth and the
cave-bear, is as large as the average of to-day, and might have
belonged to a philosopher.” The monkey nearest to man in physical
form is no more intelligent than the elephant or the bee.
3. There are certain facts which mere heredity cannot explain,
such for example as the origin of the working-bee from the queen
and the drone, neither of which produces honey. The working-bee,
moreover, does not transmit the honey-making instinct to its
posterity; for it is sterile and childless. If man had descended
from the conscienceless brute, we should expect him, when
degraded, to revert to his primitive type. On the contrary, he
does not revert to the brute, but dies out instead. The theory can
give no explanation of beauty in the lowest forms of life, such as
molluscs and diatoms. Darwin grants that this beauty must be of
use to its possessor, in order to be consistent with its
origination through natural selection. But no such use has yet
been shown; for the creatures which possess the beauty often live
in the dark, or have no eyes to see. So, too, the large brain of
the savage is beyond his needs, and is inconsistent with the
principle of natural selection which teaches that no organ can
permanently attain a size unrequired by its needs and its
environment. See Wallace, Natural Selection, 338-360. G. F.
Wright, Man and the Glacial Epoch, 242-301—“That man’s bodily
organization is in some way a development from some extinct member
of the animal kingdom allied to the anthropoid apes is scarcely
any longer susceptible of doubt.... But he is certainly not
descended from any _existing_ species of anthropoid apes.... When
once _mind_ became supreme, the bodily adjustment must have been
rapid, if indeed it is not necessary to suppose that the bodily
preparation for the highest mental faculties was instantaneous, or
by what is called in nature a _sport_.” With this statement of Dr.
Wright we substantially agree, and therefore differ from Shedd
when he says that there is just as much reason for supposing that
monkeys are degenerate men, as that men are improved monkeys.
Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 1:1:249, seems to have hinted the
view of Dr. Shedd: “The strain of man’s bred out into baboon and
monkey.” Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was related to
an ape on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side. Huxley replied
that he should prefer such a relationship to having for an
ancestor a man who used his position as a minister of religion to
ridicule truth which he did not comprehend. “Mamma, am I descended
from a monkey?” “I do not know, William, I never met any of your
father’s people.”
4. No species is yet known to have been produced either by
artificial or by natural selection. Huxley, Lay Sermons, 323—“It
is not absolutely proven that a group of animals having all the
characters exhibited by species in nature has ever been originated
by selection, whether artificial or natural”; Man’s Place in
Nature, 107—“Our acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis must be
provisional, so long as one link in the chain of evidence is
wanting; and so long as all the animals and plants certainly
produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fertile
with one another, that link will be wanting.” Huxley has more
recently declared that the missing proof has been found in the
descent of the modern horse with one toe, from Hipparion with two
toes, Anchitherium with three, and Orohippus with four. Even if
this were demonstrated, we should still maintain that the only
proper analogue was to be found in that artificial selection by
which man produces new varieties, and that natural selection can
bring about no useful results and show no progress, unless it be
the method and revelation of a wise and designing mind. In other
words, selection implies intelligence and will, and therefore
cannot be exclusively natural. Mivart, Man and Apes, 192—“If it is
inconceivable and impossible for man’s body to be developed or to
exist without his informing soul, we conclude that, as no natural
process accounts for the different kind of soul—one capable of
articulately expressing general conceptions,—so no merely natural
process can account for the origin of the body informed by it—a
body to which such an intellectual faculty was so essentially and
intimately related.” Thus Mivart, who once considered that
evolution could account for man’s body, now holds instead that it
can account neither for man’s body nor for his soul, and calls
natural selection “a puerile hypothesis” (Lessons from Nature,
300; Essays and Criticisms, 2:289-314).
(_e_) While we concede, then, that man has a brute ancestry, we make two
claims by way of qualification and explanation: first, that the laws of
organic development which have been followed in man’s origin are only the
methods of God and proofs of his creatorship; secondly, that man, when he
appears upon the scene, is no longer brute, but a self-conscious and
self-determining being, made in the image of his Creator and capable of
free moral decision between good and evil.
Both man’s original creation and his new creation in regeneration
are creations from within, rather than from without. In both
cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a
product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same
divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact
that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship
of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water
had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the
brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John
H. Strong: “Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in
the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in
the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed
himself. God’s work was never really or fully done; man was a
compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements
could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not
really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The
evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot
sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no
regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that,
though man came _through_ the brute, he did not come _from_ the
brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose
image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God
succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long
creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed
itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.” See also A.
H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.
An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the
savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a
sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny
God’s authorship. He closes his first great book with the
declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally
breathed “by the Creator” into the first forms of organic being.
And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles
Kingsley’s finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent
with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples
like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis
of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but
we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and
must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act,
introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by
other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the
incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism,
33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin
from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing
argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph
over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way
that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of
that await his tireless feet.” All this is true if we regard human
nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as
the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E.
Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in
heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in
environment is his presence in human life at every point.”
The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the
verse: “There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries
passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb
gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.” That this
conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is
clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of
the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man’s body
was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three
breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance
of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit.
These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human
life. He thinks natural selection may account for man’s place _in_
nature, but not for man’s place _above_ nature, as a spiritual
being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr.
Darwin’s conclusion as to the essential identity of man’s bodily
structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from
some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.” But
the conclusion that man’s higher faculties have also been derived
from the lower animals “appears to me not to be supported by
adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many
well-ascertained facts” (461).... The mathematical, the artistic
and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of
advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and
could not have been developed by natural selection. The
introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of
higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to
which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man’s
intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed
from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this
origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.
Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of
the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of
the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid
apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases
taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the
following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized
man, 32.” _Ibid._, 360—“The inference I would draw from this class
of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the
development of man in a definite direction and for a special
purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and
vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher
intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as
the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in
organic development,—else the laws which govern the material
universe are insufficient for the production of man.” Sir Wm.
Thompson: “That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is
the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends
me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.” Hartmann, in his
Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of “the possibility
of discovering the true link between the world of man and
mammals,” declares that “that purely hypothetical being, the
common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,” and that
“man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which
have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species
of apes now extant.” See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts,
1876:251, and Geology, 603, 604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk.
3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and
Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat.
and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History
of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson,
Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man,
38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of
Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine,
Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43;
Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov.
1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.
(_f_) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative
truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he
originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself.
Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his
fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of
holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship
which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood,
therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God’s special
Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who
have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God’s creations take place in
and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by
virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and
prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to
him by faith. Man’s natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and
qualifies the doctrine of Sin.
Texts referring to God’s natural and common Fatherhood are: _Mal.
2:10_—“_Have we not all one father_ [Abraham]? _hath not one God
created us?_” _Luke 3:38_—“_Adam, the son of God_”; _15:11-32_—the
parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even
before the prodigal returns; _John 3:16_—“_God so loved the world,
that he gave his only begotten Son_”; _John 15:6_—“_If a man abide
not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they
gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are
burned_”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with
Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually
united to him can perish everlastingly. _Acts 17:28_—“_For we are
also his offspring_”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen
audience; _Col. 1:16, 17_—“_in him were all things created ... and
in him all things consist_”; _Heb. 12:9_—“_the Father of
spirits._” Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1.
Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness
in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all
these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love
is both preserving and atoning. God’s natural fatherhood is
mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom
all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of
God, as we were _created_ in Christ; we are spiritually sons of
God, as we have been _created anew_ in Christ Jesus. G. W.
Northrop: “God never _becomes_ Father to any men or class of men;
he only becomes a _reconciled_ and _complacent_ Father to those
who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal
sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.” Chapman,
Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of
all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God
always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but
the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”
Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are: _John
1:12, 13_—“_as many as received him, to them gave he the right to
become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who
were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the
will of man, but of God_”; _Rom. 8:14_—“_for as many as are led by
the Spirit of God, these are sons of God_”; _15_—“_ye received the
spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father_”; _2 Cor.
6:17_—“_Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the
Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will
be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters,
saith the Lord Almighty_”; _Eph. 1:5, 6_—“_having foreordained us
unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself_”; _3:14,
15_—“_the Father, from whom every family_ [marg. “fatherhood”] _in
heaven and on earth is named_” (= every race among angels or
men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159); _Gal 3:26_—“_for ye are all sons
of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus_”; _4:6_—“_And because ye
are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
crying, Abba, Father_”; _1 John 3:1, 2_—“_Behold what manner of
love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called
children of God; __ and such we are.... Beloved, now are we
children of God._” The sonship of the race is only rudimentary.
The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.
_Gal. 4:1-7_ intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which
the child “_differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord
of all_,” and needs still to “_receive the adoption of sons_.”
Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another
to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes
fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in
themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or
character of their children. No father can normally discharge his
fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even
the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”
Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that
all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not
spiritually sons of God; they are only “_servants_” who “_abide
not in the house forever_” (_John 8:35_). God is their Father, but
they have yet to “_become_” his children (_Mat. 5:45_).
The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that
God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is
physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and
spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his
Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of
their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the
higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a
spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by
those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example,
C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who
maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and
who quotes, in support of this view, _John 8:41-44_—“_If God were
your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the
devil_” = the Fatherhood of God is not universal; _Mat. 5:44,
45_—“_Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of
your Father who is in heaven_”; _John 1:12_—“_as many as received
him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to
them that believe on his name._” Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit,
103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his
sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which
the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience
of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests
either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the
universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the
universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case
the teaching belongs to ‘_another gospel_’ (_Gal. 1:7_), the
recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an
‘_anathema_’ (_Gal 1:8._)”
But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite
party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does
not _become_ the Father, but _is_ the heavenly Father, even of
those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of
the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made
the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood
of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are
true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the
world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and
to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood
apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of
love and holiness.” A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There
is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once
began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If
there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But
Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent
and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God,
and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the
products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by
nature partakers of the life of God. They are called ‘_children of
wrath_’ (_Eph. 2:3_), or ‘_of perdition_’ (_John 17:12_), only to
indicate that their proper relations and duties have been
violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of
love, and that is found in man’s essential divinity.” We object to
this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what
can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in
Christ (_Col. 1:16_) and was a son of God by virtue of his union
with Christ (_Luke 3:38_; _John 15:6_). But since man has sinned
and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In
a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of
Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (_Eph.
2:10_—“_created in Christ Jesus for good works_”; _2 Pet
1:4_—“_his precious and exceeding great promises; that through
these ye may become partakers of the divine nature_”).
Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry
their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they
should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord’s Prayer or even
to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father
of all actually said: “My children are not converted, and if I
were to teach them the Lord’s Prayer, I must teach them to say:
‘Our father who art in hell’; for they are only children of the
devil.” Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are
to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress,
1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God’s
universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the
image of God; 2. God’s fatherly treatment of man, especially in
the life of Christ among men; 3. God’s universal claim on man for
his filial love and trust; 4. Only God’s Fatherhood makes
incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between
God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ
could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in
Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy
Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial
relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into
abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate,
see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For
advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of
God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.
II. Unity of the Human Race.
(_a_) The Scriptures teach that the whole human race is descended from a
single pair.
_Gen. 1:27, 28_—“_And God created man in his own image, in the
image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And
God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and
multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it_”; _2:7_—“_And
Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul_”; _22_—“_and the rib, which Jehovah God had taken from the
man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man_”; _3:20_—“_And
the man called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of
all living_” = even Eve is traced back to Adam; _9:19_—“_These
three were the sons of Noah; and of these was the whole earth
overspread._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 110—“Logically, it seems
easier to account for the divergence of what was at first one,
than for the union of what was at first heterogeneous.”
(_b_) This truth lies at the foundation of Paul’s doctrine of the organic
unity of mankind in the first transgression, and of the provision of
salvation for the race in Christ.
_Rom. 5:12_—“_Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the
world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men,
for that all sinned_”; _19_—“_For as through the one man’s
disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the
obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous_”; _1 Cor.
15:21, 22_—“_For since by man came death, by man came also the
resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in
Christ shall all be made alive_”; _Heb. 2:16_—“_For verily not of
angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold of the seed of
Abraham._” One of the most eminent ethnologists and
anthropologists, Prof. D. G. Brinton, said not long before his
death that all scientific research and teaching tended to the
conviction that mankind has descended from one pair.
(_c_) This descent of humanity from a single pair also constitutes the
ground of man’s obligation of natural brotherhood to every member of the
race.
_Acts 17:26_—“_he made of one every nation of men to dwell on all
the face of the earth_”—here the Rev. Vers. omits the word
“_blood_” (“_made of one blood_”—Auth. Vers.). The word to be
supplied is possibly “father,” but more probably “body”; _cf._
_Heb. 2:11_—“_for both he that sanctifieth and they that are
sanctified are all of one_ [father or body]: _for which cause he
is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare thy
name unto my brethren, In the midst of the congregation will I
sing thy praise._”
Winchell, in his Preadamites, has recently revived the theory
broached in 1655 by Peyrerius, that there were men before Adam:
“Adam is descended from a black race—not the black races from
Adam.” Adam is simply “the remotest ancestor to whom the Jews
could trace their lineage.... The derivation of Adam from an older
human stock is essentially the creation of Adam.” Winchell does
not deny the unity of the race, nor the retroactive effect of the
atonement upon those who lived before Adam; he simply denies that
Adam was the first man. 297—He “regards the Adamic stock as
derived from an older and humbler human type,” originally as low
in the scale as the present Australian savages.
Although this theory furnishes a plausible explanation of certain
Biblical facts, such as the marriage of Cain (_Gen. 4:17_), Cain’s
fear that men would slay him (_Gen. 4:14_), and the distinction
between “_the sons of God_” and “_the daughters of men_” (_Gen.
6:1, 2_), it treats the Mosaic narrative as legendary rather than
historical. Shem, Ham, and Japheth, it is intimated, may have
lived hundreds of years apart from one another (409). Upon this
view, Eve could not be “_the mother of all living_” (_Gen. 3:20_),
nor could the transgression of Adam be the cause and beginning of
condemnation to the whole race (_Rom. 5:12, 19_). As to Cain’s
fear of other families who might take vengeance upon him, we must
remember that we do not know how many children were born to Adam
between Cain and Abel, nor what the age of Cain and Abel was, nor
whether Cain feared only those that were then living. As to Cain’s
marriage, we must remember that even if Cain married into another
family, his wife, upon any hypothesis of the unity of the race,
must have been descended from some other original Cain that
married his sister.
See Keil and Delitzsch, Com. on Pentateuch, 1:116—“The marriage of
brothers and sisters was inevitable in the case of children of the
first man, in case the human race was actually to descend from a
single pair, and may therefore be justified, in the face of the
Mosaic prohibition of such marriages, on the ground that the sons
and daughters of Adam represented not merely the family but the
genus, and that it was not till after the rise of several families
that the bonds of fraternal and conjugal love became distinct from
one another and assumed fixed and mutually exclusive forms, the
violation of which is sin.” Prof. W. H. Green: “_Gen. 20:12_ shows
that Sarah was Abraham’s half-sister;...the regulations
subsequently ordained in the Mosaic law were not then in force.”
G. H. Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, has shown that marriage
between cousins is harmless where there is difference of
temperament between the parties. Modern palæontology makes it
probable that at the beginning of the race there was greater
differentiation of brothers and sisters in the same family than
obtains in later times. See Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:275. For criticism
of the doctrine that there were men before Adam, see Methodist
Quar. Rev., April, 1881:205-231; Presb. Rev., 1881:440-444.
The Scripture statements are corroborated by considerations drawn from
history and science. Four arguments may be briefly mentioned:
1. The argument from history.
So far as the history of nations and tribes in both hemispheres can be
traced, the evidence points to a common origin and ancestry in central
Asia.
The European nations are acknowledged to have come, in successive
waves of migration, from Asia. Modern ethnologists generally agree
that the Indian races of America are derived from Mongoloid
sources in Eastern Asia, either through Polynesia or by way of the
Aleutian Islands. Bunsen, Philos. of Universal History, 2:112—the
Asiatic origin of all the North American Indians “is as fully
proved as the unity of family among themselves.” Mason, Origins of
Invention, 361—“Before the time of Columbus, the Polynesians made
canoe voyages from Tahiti to Hawaii, a distance of 2300 miles.”
Keane, Man Past and Present, 1-15, 349-440, treats of the American
Aborigines under two primitive types: Longheads from Europe and
Roundheads from Asia. The human race, he claims, originated in
Indomalaysia and spread thence by migration over the globe. The
world was peopled from one center by Pleistocene man. The primary
groups were evolved each in its special habitat, but all sprang
from a Pleiocene precursor 100,000 years ago. W. T. Lopp,
missionary to the Eskimos, at Port Clarence, Alaska, on the
American side of Bering Strait, writes under date of August 31,
1892: “No thaws during the winter, and ice blocked in the Strait.
This has always been doubted by whalers. Eskimos have told them
that they sometimes crossed the Strait on ice, but they have never
believed them. Last February and March our Eskimos had a tobacco
famine. Two parties (five men) went with dogsleds to East Cape, on
the Siberian coast, and traded some beaver, otter and marten skins
for Russian tobacco, and returned safely. It is only during an
occasional winter that they can do this. But every summer they
make several trips in their big wolf-skin boats—forty feet long.
These observations may throw some light upon the origin of the
prehistoric races of America.”
Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48—“The semi-civilized nations of Java
and Sumatra are found in possession of a civilization which at
first glance shows itself to have been borrowed from Hindu and
Moslem sources.” See also Sir Henry Rawlinson, quoted in Burgess,
Antiquity and Unity of the Race, 156, 157; Smyth, Unity of Human
Races, 223-236; Pickering, Races of Man, Introd., synopsis, and
page 316; Guyot, Earth and Man, 298-334; Quatrefages, Natural
History of Man, and Unité de l’Espèce Humaine; Godron, Unité de
l’Espèce Humaine, 2:412 _sq._ _Per contra_, however, see Prof. A.
H. Sayce: “The evidence is now all tending to show that the
districts in the neighborhood of the Baltic were those from which
the Aryan languages first radiated, and where the race or races
who spoke them originally dwelt. The Aryan invaders of
Northwestern India could only have been a late and distant
offshoot of the primitive stock, speedily absorbed into the
earlier population of the country as they advanced southward; and
to speak of ‘our Indian brethren’ is as absurd and false as to
claim relationship with the negroes of the United States because
they now use an Aryan language.” Scribner, Where Did Life Begin?
has lately adduced arguments to prove that life on the earth
originated at the North Pole, and Prof. Asa Gray favors this view;
see his Darwiniana, 205, and Scientific Papers, 2:152; so also
Warren, Paradise Found; and Wieland, in Am. Journal of Science,
Dec. 1903:401-430. Dr. J. L. Wortman, in Yale Alumni Weekly, Jan.
14, 1903:129—“The appearance of all these primates in North
America was very abrupt at the beginning of the second stage of
the Eocene. And it is a striking coincidence that approximately
the same forms appear in beds of exactly corresponding age in
Europe. Nor does this synchronism stop with the apes. It applies
to nearly all the other types of Eocene mammalia in the Northern
Hemisphere, and to the accompanying flora as well. These facts can
be explained only on the hypothesis that there was a common centre
from which these plants and animals were distributed. Considering
further that the present continental masses were essentially the
same in the Eocene time as now, and that the North Polar region
then enjoyed a subtropical climate, as is abundantly proved by
fossil plants, we are forced to the conclusion that this common
centre of dispersion lay approximately within the Arctic
Circle.... The origin of the human species did not take place on
the Western Hemisphere.”
2. The argument from language.
Comparative philology points to a common origin of all the more important
languages, and furnishes no evidence that the less important are not also
so derived.
On Sanskrit as a connecting link between the Indo-Germanic
languages, see Max Müller, Science of Language, 1:146-165,
326-342, who claims that all languages pass through the three
stages: monosyllabic, agglutinative, inflectional; and that
nothing necessitates the admission of different independent
beginnings for either the material or the formal elements of the
Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech. The changes of
language are often rapid. Latin becomes the Romance languages, and
Saxon and Norman are united into English, in three centuries. The
Chinese may have departed from their primitive abodes while their
language was yet monosyllabic.
G. J. Romanes, Life and Letters, 195—“Children are the
constructors of all _languages_, as distinguished from
_language_.” Instance Helen Keller’s sudden acquisition of
language, uttering publicly a long piece only three weeks after
she first began to imitate the motions of the lips. G. F. Wright,
Man and the Glacial Period, 242-301—“Recent investigations show
that children, when from any cause isolated at an early age, will
often produce at once a language _de novo_. Thus it would appear
by no means improbable that various languages in America, and
perhaps the earliest languages of the world, may have arisen in a
short time where conditions were such that a family of small
children could have maintained existence when for any cause
deprived of parental and other fostering care.... Two or three
thousand years of prehistoric time is perhaps all that would be
required to produce the diversification of languages which appears
at the dawn of history.... The prehistoric stage of Europe ended
less than a thousand years before the Christian Era.” In a people
whose speech has not been fixed by being committed to writing,
baby-talk is a great source of linguistic corruption, and the
changes are exceedingly rapid. Humboldt took down the vocabulary
of a South American tribe, and after fifteen years of absence
found their speech so changed as to seem a different language.
Zöckler, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 8:68 _sq._, denies
the progress from lower methods of speech to higher, and declares
the most highly developed inflectional languages to be the oldest
and most widespread. Inferior languages are a degeneration from a
higher state of culture. In the development of the Indo-Germanic
languages (such as the French and the English), we have instances
of change from more full and luxuriant expression to that which is
monosyllabic or agglutinative. The theory of Max Müller is also
opposed by Pott, Die Verschiedenheiten der menschlichen Rassen,
202, 242. Pott calls attention to the fact that the Australian
languages show unmistakable similarity to the languages of Eastern
and Southern Asia, although the physical characteristics of these
tribes are far different from the Asiatic.
On the old Egyptian language as a connecting link between the
Indo-European and the Semitic tongues, see Bunsen, Egypt’s Place,
1: preface, 10; also see Farrar, Origin of Language, 213. Like the
old Egyptian, the Berber and the Touareg are Semitic in parts of
their vocabulary, while yet they are Aryan in grammar. So the
Tibetan and Burmese stand between the Indo-European languages, on
the one hand, and the monosyllabic languages, as of China, on the
other. A French philologist claims now to have interpreted the
_Yh-King_, the oldest and most unintelligible monumental writing
of the Chinese, by regarding it as a corruption of the old
Assyrian or Accadian cuneiform characters, and as resembling the
syllabaries, vocabularies, and bilingual tablets in the ruined
libraries of Assyria and Babylon; see Terrien de Lacouperie, The
Oldest Book of the Chinese and its Authors, and The Languages of
China before the Chinese, 11, note; he holds to “the
non-indigenousness of the Chinese civilization and its derivation
from the old Chaldæo-Babylonian focus of culture by the medium of
Susiana.” See also Sayce, in Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1884:934-936;
also, The Monist, Oct. 1906:562-596, on The Ideograms of the
Chinese and the Central American Calendars. The evidence goes to
show that the Chinese came into China from Susiana in the 23d
century before Christ. Initial G wears down in time into a Y
sound. Many words which begin with Y in Chinese are found in
Accadian beginning with G, as Chinese Ye, “night,” is in Accadian
Ge, “night.” The order of development seems to be: 1. picture
writing; 2. syllabic writing; 3. alphabetic writing.
In a similar manner, there is evidence that the Pharaonic
Egyptians were immigrants from another land, namely, Babylonia.
Hommel derives the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians from the pictures
out of which the cuneiform characters developed, and he shows that
the elements of the Egyptian language itself are contained in that
mixed speech of Babylonia which originated in the fusion of
Sumerians and Semites. The Osiris of Egypt is the Asari of the
Sumerians. Burial in brick tombs in the first two Egyptian
dynasties is a survival from Babylonia, as are also the
seal-cylinders impressed on clay. On the relations between Aryan
and Semitic languages, see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 55-61;
Murray, Origin and Growth of the Psalms, 7; Bib. Sac., 1870:162;
1876:352-380; 1879:674-706. See also Pezzi, Aryan Philology, 125;
Sayce, Principles of Comp. Philology, 132-174; Whitney, art. on
Comp. Philology in Encyc. Britannica, also Life and Growth of
Language, 269, and Study of Language, 307, 308—“Language affords
certain indications of doubtful value, which, taken along with
certain other ethnological considerations, also of questionable
pertinency, furnish ground for suspecting an ultimate
relationship.... That more thorough comprehension of the history
of Semitic speech will enable us to determine this ultimate
relationship, may perhaps be looked for with hope, though it is
not to be expected with confidence.” See also Smyth, Unity of
Human Races, 199-222; Smith’s Bib. Dict., art.: Confusion of
Tongues.
We regard the facts as, on the whole, favoring an opposite
conclusion from that in Hastings’s Bible Dictionary, art.: Flood:
“The diversity of the human race and of language alike makes it
improbable that men were derived from a single pair.” E. G.
Robinson: “The only trustworthy argument for the unity of the race
is derived from comparative philology. If it should be established
that one of the three families of speech was more ancient than the
others, and the source of the others, the argument would be
unanswerable. Coloration of the skin seems to lie back of climatic
influences. We believe in the unity of the race because in this
there are the fewest difficulties. We would not know how else to
interpret Paul in _Romans 5_.” Max Müller has said that the
fountain head of modern philology as of modern freedom and
international law is the change wrought by Christianity,
superseding the narrow national conception of patriotism by the
recognition of all the nations and races as members of one great
human family.
3. The argument from psychology.
The existence, among all families of mankind, of common mental and moral
characteristics, as evinced in common maxims, tendencies and capacities,
in the prevalence of similar traditions, and in the universal
applicability of one philosophy and religion, is most easily explained
upon the theory of a common origin.
Among the widely prevalent traditions may be mentioned the
tradition of the fashioning of the world and man, of a primeval
garden, of an original innocence and happiness, of a tree of
knowledge, of a serpent, of a temptation and fall, of a division
of time into weeks, of a flood, of sacrifice. It is possible, if
not probable, that certain myths, common to many nations, may have
been handed down from a time when the families of the race had not
yet separated. See Zöckler, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie,
8:71-90; Max Müller, Science of Language, 2:444-455; Prichard,
Nat. Hist. of Man, 2:657-714; Smyth, Unity of Human Races,
236-240; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:77-91; Gladstone, Juventus Mundi.
4. The argument from physiology.
A. It is the common judgment of comparative physiologists that man
constitutes but a single species. The differences which exist between the
various families of mankind are to be regarded as varieties of this
species. In proof of these statements we urge: (_a_) The numberless
intermediate gradations which connect the so-called races with each other.
(_b_) The essential identity of all races in cranial, osteological, and
dental characteristics. (_c_) The fertility of unions between individuals
of the most diverse types, and the continuous fertility of the offspring
of such unions.
Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 163—“It may be safely affirmed
that, even if the differences between men are specific, they are
so small that the assumption of more than one primitive stock for
all is altogether superfluous. We may admit that Negroes and
Australians are distinct species, yet be the strictest
monogenists, and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primeval
parents of mankind, _i. e._, on Darwin’s hypothesis”; Origin of
Species, 118—“I am one of those who believe that at present there
is no evidence whatever for saying that mankind sprang originally
from more than a single pair; I must say that I cannot see any
good ground whatever, or any tenable evidence, for believing that
there is more than one species of man.” Owen, quoted by Burgess,
Ant. and Unity of Race, 185—“Man forms but one species, and
differences are but indications of varieties. These variations
merge into each other by easy gradations.” Alex. von Humboldt:
“The different races of men are forms of one sole species,—they
are not different species of a genus.”
Quatrefages, in Revue d. deux Mondes, Dec. 1860:814—“If one places
himself exclusively upon the plane of the natural sciences, it is
impossible not to conclude in favor of the monogenist doctrine.”
Wagner, quoted in Bib. Sac., 19:607—“Species—the collective total
of individuals which are capable of producing one with another an
uninterruptedly fertile progeny.” Pickering, Races of Man,
316—“There is no middle ground between the admission of eleven
distinct species in the human family and their reduction to one.
The latter opinion implies a central point of origin.”
There is an impossibility of deciding how many races there are, if
we once allow that there are more than one. While Pickering would
say eleven, Agassiz says eight, Morton twenty-two, and Burke
sixty-five. Modern science all tends to the derivation of each
family from a single germ. Other common characteristics of all
races of men, in addition to those mentioned in the text, are the
duration of pregnancy, the normal temperature of the body, the
mean frequency of the pulse, the liability to the same diseases.
Meehan, State Botanist of Pennsylvania, maintains that hybrid
vegetable products are no more sterile than are ordinary plants
(Independent, Aug. 21, 1884).
E. B. Tylor, art.: Anthropology, in Encyc. Britannica: “On the
whole it may be asserted that the doctrine of the unity of mankind
now stands on a firmer basis than in previous ages.” Darwin,
Animals and Plants under Domestication, 1:39—“From the resemblance
in several countries of the half-domesticated dogs to the wild
species still living there, from the facility with which they can
be crossed together, from even half tamed animals being so much
valued by savages, and from the other circumstances previously
remarked on which favor domestication, it is highly probable that
the domestic dogs of the world have descended from two good
species of wolf (_viz._, _Canis lupus_ and _Canis latrans_), and
from two or three other doubtful species of wolves (namely, the
European, Indian and North American forms); from at least one or
two South American canine species; from several races or species
of the jackal; and perhaps from one or more extinct species.” Dr.
E. M. Moore tried unsuccessfully to produce offspring by pairing a
Newfoundland dog and a wolf-like dog from Canada. He only proved
anew the repugnance of even slightly separated species toward one
another.
B. Unity of species is presumptive evidence of unity of origin. Oneness of
origin furnishes the simplest explanation of specific uniformity, if
indeed the very conception of species does not imply the repetition and
reproduction of a primordial type-idea impressed at its creation upon an
individual empowered to transmit this type-idea to its successors.
Dana, quoted in Burgess, Antiq. and Unity of Race, 185, 186—“In
the ascending scale of animals, the number of species in any genus
diminishes as we rise, and should by analogy be smallest at the
head of the series. Among mammals, the higher genera have few
species, and the highest group next to man, the orang-outang, has
only eight, and these constitute but two genera. Analogy requires
that man should have preëminence and should constitute only one.”
194—“A species corresponds to a specific amount or condition of
concentrated force defined in the act or law of creation.... The
species in any particular case began its existence when the first
germ-cell or individual was created. When individuals multiply
from generation to generation, it is but a repetition of the
primordial type-idea.... The specific is based on a numerical
unity, the species being nothing else than an enlargement of the
individual.” For full statement of Dana’s view, see Bib. Sac., Oct
1857:862-866. On the idea of species, see also Shedd, Dogm.
Theol., 2:63-74.
(_a_) To this view is opposed the theory, propounded by Agassiz, of
different centres of creation, and of different types of humanity
corresponding to the varying fauna and flora of each. But this theory
makes the plural origin of man an exception in creation. Science points
rather to a single origin of each species, whether vegetable or animal. If
man be, as this theory grants, a single species, he should be, by the same
rule, restricted to one continent in his origin. This theory, moreover,
applies an unproved hypothesis with regard to the distribution of
organized beings in general to the very being whose whole nature and
history show conclusively that he is an exception to such a general rule,
if one exists. Since man can adapt himself to all climes and conditions,
the theory of separate centres of creation is, in his case, gratuitous and
unnecessary.
Agassiz’s view was first published in an essay on the Provinces of
the Animal World, in Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind, a book
gotten up in the interest of slavery. Agassiz held to eight
distinct centres of creation, and to eight corresponding types of
humanity—the Arctic, the Mongolian, the European, the American,
the Negro, the Hottentot, the Malay, the Australian. Agassiz
regarded Adam as the ancestor only of the white race, yet like
Peyrerius and Winchell be held that man in all his various races
constitutes but one species.
The whole tendency of recent science, however, has been adverse to
the doctrine of separate centres of creation, even in the case of
animal and vegetable life. In temperate North America there are
two hundred and seven species of quadrupeds, of which only eight,
and these polar animals, are found in the north of Europe or Asia.
If North America be an instance of a separate centre of creation
for its peculiar species, why should God create the same species
of man in eight different localities? This would make man an
exception in creation. There is, moreover, no need of creating man
in many separate localities; for, unlike the polar bears and the
Norwegian firs, which cannot live at the equator, man can adapt
himself to the most varied climates and conditions. For replies to
Agassiz, see Bib. Sac., 19:607-632; Princeton Rev., 1862:435-464.
(_b_) It is objected, moreover, that the diversities of size, color, and
physical conformation, among the various families of mankind, are
inconsistent with the theory of a common origin. But we reply that these
diversities are of a superficial character, and can be accounted for by
corresponding diversities of condition and environment. Changes which have
been observed and recorded within historic times show that the differences
alluded to may be the result of slowly accumulated divergences from one
and the same original and ancestral type. The difficulty in the case,
moreover, is greatly relieved when we remember (1) that the period during
which these divergences have arisen is by no means limited to six thousand
years (see note on the antiquity of the race, pages 224-226); and (2)
that, since species in general exhibit their greatest power of divergence
into varieties immediately after their first introduction, all the
varieties of the human species may have presented themselves in man’s
earliest history.
Instances of physiological change as the result of new conditions:
The Irish driven by the English two centuries ago from Armagh and
the south of Down, have become prognathous like the Australians.
The inhabitants of New England have descended from the English,
yet they have already a physical type of their own. The Indians of
North America, or at least certain tribes of them, have
permanently altered the shape of the skull by bandaging the head
in infancy. The Sikhs of India, since the establishment of Bába
Nának’s religion (1500 A. D.) and their consequent advance in
civilization, have changed to a longer head and more regular
features, so that they are now distinguished greatly from their
neighbors, the Afghans, Tibetans, Hindus. The Ostiak savages have
become the Magyar nobility of Hungary. The Turks in Europe are, in
cranial shape, greatly in advance of the Turks in Asia from whom
they descended. The Jews are confessedly of one ancestry; yet we
have among them the light-haired Jews of Poland, the dark Jews of
Spain, and the Ethiopian Jews of the Nile Valley. The Portuguese
who settled in the East Indies in the 16th century are now as dark
in complexion as the Hindus themselves. Africans become lighter in
complexion as they go up from the alluvial river-banks to higher
land, or from the coast; and on the contrary the coast tribes
which drive out the negroes of the interior and take their
territory end by becoming negroes themselves. See, for many of the
above facts, Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of the Race, 195-202.
The law of originally greater plasticity, mentioned in the text,
was first hinted by Hall, the palæontologist of New York. It is
accepted and defined by Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 360—“A
new law is coming into view: that species when first introduced
have an innate power of expansion, which enables them rapidly to
extend themselves to the limit of their geographical range, and
also to reach the limit of their divergence into races. This limit
once reached, these races run on in parallel lines until they one
by one run out and disappear. According to this law the most
aberrant races of men might be developed in a few centuries, after
which divergence would cease, and the several lines of variation
would remain permanent, at least so long as the conditions under
which they originated remained.” See the similar view of Von Baer
in Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 55, note. Joseph Cook: Variability
is a lessening quantity; the tendency to change is greatest at the
first, but, like the rate of motion of a stone thrown upward, it
lessens every moment after. Ruskin, Seven Lamps, 125—“The life of
a nation is usually, like the flow of a lava-stream, first bright
and fierce, then languid and covered, at last advancing only by
the tumbling over and over of its frozen blocks.” Renouf, Hibbert
Lectures, 54—“The further back we go into antiquity, the more
closely does the Egyptian type approach the European.” Rawlinson
says that negroes are not represented in the Egyptian monuments
before 1500 B. C. The influence of climate is very great,
especially in the savage state.
In May, 1891, there died in San Francisco the son of an
interpreter at the Merchants’ Exchange. He was 21 years of age.
Three years before his death his clear skin was his chief claim to
manly beauty. He was attacked by “Addison’s disease,” a gradual
darkening of the color of the surface of the body. At the time of
his death his skin was as dark as that of a full-blooded negro.
His name was George L. Sturtevant. Ratzel, History of Mankind,
1:9, 10—As there is only one species of man, “the reunion into one
real whole of the parts which have diverged after the fashion of
sports” is said to be “the unconscious ultimate aim of all the
movements” which have taken place since man began his wanderings.
“With Humboldt we can only hold fast to the external unity of the
race.” See Sir Wm. Hunter, The Indian Empire, 223, 410; Encyc.
Britannica, 12:808; 20:110; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 109-132, and in
Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 8:51-71; Prichard, Researches,
5:547-552, and Nat. Hist. of Man, 2:644-656; Duke of Argyll,
Primeval Man, 96-108; Smith, Unity of Human Races, 255-283;
Morris, Conflict of Science and Religion, 325-385; Rawlinson, in
Journ. Christ. Philosophy, April, 1883:359.
III. Essential Elements of Human Nature.
1. The Dichotomous Theory.
Man has a two-fold nature,—on the one hand material, on the other hand
immaterial. He consists of body, and of spirit, or soul. That there are
two, and only two, elements in man’s being, is a fact to which
consciousness testifies. This testimony is confirmed by Scripture, in
which the prevailing representation of man’s constitution is that of
dichotomy.
Dichotomous, from δίχα, “in two,” and τέμνω, “to cut,” = composed
of two parts. Man is as conscious that his immaterial part is a
unity, as that his body is a unity. He knows two, and only two,
parts of his being—body and soul. So man is the true Janus
(Martensen), Mr. Facing-both-ways (Bunyan). That the Scriptures
favor dichotomy will appear by considering:
(_a_) The record of man’s creation (Gen. 2:7), in which, as a result of
the inbreathing of the divine Spirit, the body becomes possessed and
vitalized by a single principle—the living soul.
_Gen. 2:7_—“_And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became
a living soul_”—here it is not said that man was first a living
soul, and that then God breathed into him a spirit; but that God
inbreathed spirit, and man became a living soul = God’s life took
possession of clay, and as a result, man had a soul. _Cf._ _Job
27:3_—“_for my life is yet whole in me, And the spirit of God is
in my nostrils_”; _32:8_—“_there is a spirit in man, And the
breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding_”; _33:4_—“_The
Spirit of God hath made me, And the breath of the Almighty giveth
me life._”
(_b_) Passages in which the human soul, or spirit, is distinguished, both
from the divine Spirit from whom it proceeded, and from the body which it
inhabits.
_Num. 16:22_—“_O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh_”;
_Zech. 12:1_—“_Jehovah, who ... formeth the spirit of man within
him_”; _1 Cor. 2:11_—“_the spirit of the man which is in him ...
the Spirit of God_”; _Heb. 12:9_—“_the Father of spirits._” The
passages just mentioned distinguish the spirit of man from the
Spirit of God. The following distinguish the soul, or spirit, of
man from the body which it inhabits: _Gen, 35:18_—“_it came to
pass, as her soul was departing (for she died)_”; _1 K. 17:21_—“_O
Jehovah my God, I pray thee, let this child’s soul come into him
again_”; _Eccl. 12:7_—“_the dust returneth to the earth as it was,
and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it_”; _James
2:26_—“_the body apart from the spirit is dead._” The first class
of passages refutes pantheism; the second refutes materialism.
(_c_) The interchangeable use of the terms “soul” and “spirit.”
_Gen. 41:8_—“_his spirit was troubled_”; _cf._ _Ps. 42:6_—“_my
soul is cast down within me._” _John 12:27_—“_Now is my soul
troubled_”; _cf._ _13:21_—“_he was troubled in the spirit._” _Mat.
20:28_—“_to give his life (ψυχήν) a ransom for many_”; _cf._
_27:50_—“_yielded up his spirit (πνεῦμα)._” _Heb. 12:23_—“_spirits
of just men made perfect_”; _cf._ _Rev. 6:9_—“_I saw underneath
the altar the souls of them that had been slain for the word of
God._” In these passages “_spirit_” and “_soul_” seem to be used
interchangeably.
(_d_) The mention of body and soul (or spirit) as together constituting
the whole man.
_Mat 10:28_—“_able to destroy both soul and body in hell_”; _1
Cor. 5:3_—“_absent in body but present in spirit_”; _3 John 2_—“_I
pray that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul
prospereth._” These texts imply that body and soul (or spirit)
together constitute the whole man.
For advocacy of the dichotomous theory, see Goodwin, in Journ.
Society Bib. Exegesis, 1881:73-86; Godet, Bib. Studies of the O.
T., 32; Oehler, Theology of the O. T., 1:219; Hahn, Bib. Theol. N.
T., 390 _sq._; Schmid, Bib. Theology N. T., 503; Weiss, Bib.
Theology N. T., 214; Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 112, 113;
Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:294-298; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 1:549; 3:249;
Harless, Com. on Eph., 4:23, and Christian Ethics, 22; Thomasius,
Christi Person und Werk. 1:164-168; Hodge, in Princeton Review,
1865:116, and Systematic Theol., 2:47-51; Ebrard, Dogmatik,
1:261-263; Wm. H. Hodge, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apl. 1897.
2. The Trichotomous Theory.
Side by side with this common representation of human nature as consisting
of two parts, are found passages which at first sight appear to favor
trichotomy. It must be acknowledged that πνεῦμα (spirit) and ψυχή (soul),
although often used interchangeably, and always designating the same
indivisible substance, are sometimes employed as contrasted terms.
In this more accurate use, ψυχή denotes man’s immaterial part in its
inferior powers and activities;—as ψυχή, man is a conscious individual,
and, in common with the brute creation, has an animal life, together with
appetite, imagination, memory, understanding. Πνεῦμα, on the other hand,
denotes man’s immaterial part in its higher capacities and faculties;—as
πνεῦμα, man is a being related to God, and possessing powers of reason,
conscience, and free will, which difference him from the brute creation
and constitute him responsible and immortal.
In the following texts, spirit and soul are distinguished from
each other: _1 Thess. 5:23_—“_And the God of peace himself
sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be
preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ_”; _Heb. 4:12_—“_For the word of God is living, and active,
and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the
dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick
to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart._” Compare _1
Cor. 2:14_—“_Now the natural_ [Gr. “_psychical_”] _man receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God_”; _15:44_—“_It is sown a
natural_ [Gr. “_psychical_”] _body; it is raised a spiritual body.
If there is a natural_ [Gr. “psychical”] _body, there is also a
spiritual body_”; _Eph. 4:23_—“_that ye be renewed in the spirit
of your mind_”; _Jude 19_—“_sensual_ [Gr. “_psychical_”], _having
not the Spirit._”
For the proper interpretation of these texts, see note on the next
page. Among those who cite them as proofs of the trichotomous
theory (trichotomous, from τρίχα, “in three parts,” and τέμνω, “to
cut,” = composed of three parts, _i. e._, spirit, soul, and body)
may be mentioned Olshausen, Opuscula, 134, and Com. on _1 Thess.,
5:23_; Beck, Biblische Seelenlehre, 81; Delitzsch, Biblical
Psychology, 117, 118; Göschel, in Herzog, Realencyclopädie, art.:
Seele; also, art. by Auberlen: Geist des Menschen; Cremer, N. T.
Lexicon, on πνεῦμα and ψυχή; Usteri, Paulin. Lehrbegriff, 384
_sq._; Neander, Planting and Training, 394; Van Oosterzee,
Christian Dogmatics, 365, 366; Boardman, in Bap. Quarterly, 1:177,
325, 428; Heard, Tripartite Nature of Man, 62-114; Ellicott,
Destiny of the Creature, 106-125.
The element of truth in trichotomy is simply this, that man has a
triplicity of endowment, in virtue of which the single soul has relations
to matter, to self, and to God. The trichotomous theory, however, as it is
ordinarily defined, endangers the unity and immateriality of our higher
nature, by holding that man consists of three _substances_, or three
component _parts_—body, soul and spirit—and that soul and spirit are as
distinct from each other as are soul and body.
The advocates of this view differ among themselves as to the
nature of the ψυχή and its relation to the other elements of our
being; some (as Delitzsch) holding that the ψυχή is an efflux of
the πνεῦμα, distinct in substance, but not in essence, even as the
divine Word is distinct from God, while yet he is God; others (as
Göschel) regarding the ψυχή, not as a distinct substance, but as a
resultant of the union of the πνεῦμα and the σῶμα. Still others
(as Cremer) hold the ψυχή to be the subject of the personal life
whose principle is the πνεῦμα. Heard, Tripartite Nature of Man,
103—“God is the Creator _ex traduce_ of the animal and
intellectual part of every man.... Not so with the spirit.... It
proceeds from God, not by creation, but by emanation.”
We regard the trichotomous theory as untenable, not only for the reasons
already urged in proof of the dichotomous theory, but from the following
additional considerations:
(_a_) Πνεῦμα, as well as ψυχή, is used of the brute creation.
_Eccl. 3:21_—“_Who knoweth the spirit of man, whether it goeth_
[marg. “_that goeth_”] _upward, and the spirit of the beast,
whether it goeth_ [marg. “_that goeth_”] _downward to the earth?_”
_Rev. 16:3_—“_And the second poured out his bowl into the sea; and
it became blood, as of a dead man; and every living soul died,
even the things that were in the sea_” = the fish.
(_b_) ψυχή is ascribed to Jehovah.
_Amos 6:8_—“_The Lord Jehovah hath sworn by himself_” (lit. “_by
his soul_”) LXX _42:1_—“_my chosen in whom my soul delighteth_”;
_Jer. 9:9_—“_Shall I not visit them for these things? saith
Jehovah; shall not my soul be avenged?_” _Heb. 10:38_—“_my
righteous one shall live by faith: And if he shrink back, my soul
hath no pleasure in him._”
(_c_) The disembodied dead are called ψυχαί.
_Rev. 6:9_—“_I saw underneath the altar the souls of them that had
been slain for the word of God_”; _cf._ _20:4_—“_souls of them
that had been beheaded._”
(_d_) The highest exercises of religion are attributed to the ψυχή.
_Mark 12:30_—“_thou shalt love the Lord thy God ... with all thy
soul_”; _Luke 1:46_—“_My soul doth magnify the Lord_”; _Heb. 6:18,
19_—“_the hope set before us: which we have as an anchor of the
soul_”; _James 1:21_—“_the implanted word, which is able to save
your souls._”
(_e_) To lose this ψυχή is to lose all.
_Mark 8:36, 37_—“_For what doth it profit a man, to gain the whole
world, and forfeit his life_ [or “_soul_,” ψυχή]? _For what should
a man give in exchange for his life_ [or ‘_soul_,’ ψυχή]?”
(_f_) The passages chiefly relied upon as supporting trichotomy may be
better explained upon the view already indicated, that soul and spirit are
not two distinct substances or parts, but that they designate the
immaterial principle from different points of view.
_1 Thess. 5:23_—“_may your spirit and soul and body be preserved
entire_” = not a scientific enumeration of the constituent parts
of human nature, but a comprehensive sketch of that nature in its
chief relations; compare _Mark 12:30_—“_thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy mind, and with all thy strength_”—where none would think of
finding proof of a fourfold division of human nature. On _1 Thess.
5:23_, see Riggenbach (in Lange’s Com.), and Commentary of Prof.
W. A. Stevens. _Heb. 4:12_—“_piercing even to the dividing of soul
and spirit, of both joints and marrow_” = not the dividing of soul
_from_ spirit, or of joints _from_ marrow, but rather the piercing
of the soul and of the spirit, even to their very joints and
marrow; _i. e._, to the very depths of the spiritual nature. On
_Heb. 4:12_, see Ebrard (in Olshausen’s Com.), and Lünemann (in
Meyer’s Com.); also Tholuck, Com. _in loco_. _Jude 19_—“_sensual,
having not the Spirit_” (ψυχικοί, πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες)—even though
πνεῦμα = the human spirit, need not mean that there is no spirit
existing, but only that the spirit is torpid and inoperative—as we
say of a weak man: “he has no mind,” or of an unprincipled man:
“he has no conscience”; so Alford; see Nitzsch, Christian
Doctrine, 202. But πνεῦμα here probably = the divine πνεῦμα. Meyer
takes this view, and the Revised Version capitalizes the word
“_Spirit_.” See Goodwin, Soc. Bib. Exegesis, 1881:85—“The
distinction between ψυχή and πνεῦμα is a _functional_, and not a
_substantial_, distinction.” Moule, Outlines of Christian
Doctrine, 161, 162—“Soul = spirit organized, inseparably linked
with the body; spirit = man’s inner being considered as God’s
gift. Soul = man’s inner being viewed as his own; spirit = man’s
inner being viewed as from God. They are not separate elements.”
See Lightfoot, Essay on St. Paul and Seneca, appended to his Com.
on Philippians, on the influence of the ethical language of
Stoicism on the N. T. writers. Martineau, Seat of Authority,
39—“The difference between man and his companion creatures on this
earth is not that his instinctive life is less than theirs, for in
truth it goes far beyond them; but that in him it acts in the
presence and under the eye of other powers which transform it, and
by giving to it vision as well as light take its blindness away.
He is let into his own secrets.”
We conclude that the immaterial part of man, viewed as an individual and
conscious life, capable of possessing and animating a physical organism,
is called ψυχή; viewed as a rational and moral agent, susceptible of
divine influence and indwelling, this same immaterial part is called
πνεῦμα. The πνεῦμα, then, is man’s nature looking Godward, and capable of
receiving and manifesting the Πνεῦμα ἅγιον; the ψυχή is man’s nature
looking earthward, and touching the world of sense. The πνεῦμα is man’s
higher part, as related to spiritual realities or as capable of such
relation; the ψυχή is man’s higher part, as related to the body, or as
capable of such relation. Man’s being is therefore not trichotomous but
dichotomous, and his immaterial part, while possessing duality of powers,
has unity of substance.
Man’s nature is not a three-storied house, but a two-storied
house, with windows in the upper story looking in two
directions—toward earth and toward heaven. The lower story is the
physical part of us—the body. But man’s “upper story” has two
aspects; there is an outlook toward things below, and a skylight
through which to see the stars. “Soul” says Hovey, “is spirit as
modified by union with the body.” Is man then the same in kind
with the brute, but different in degree? No, man is different in
kind, though possessed of certain powers which the brute has. The
frog is not a magnified sensitive-plant, though his nerves
automatically respond to irritation. The animal is different in
kind from the vegetable, though he has some of the same powers
which the vegetable has. God’s powers include man’s; but man is
not of the same substance with God, nor could man be enlarged or
developed into God. So man’s powers include those of the brute,
but the brute is not of the same substance with man, nor could he
be enlarged or developed into man.
Porter, Human Intellect, 39—“The spirit of man, in addition to its
higher endowments, may also possess the lower powers which
vitalize dead matter into a human body.” It does not follow that
the soul of the animal or plant is capable of man’s higher
functions or developments, or that the subjection of man’s spirit
to body, in the present life, disproves his immortality. Porter
continues: “That the soul begins to exist as a vital force, does
not require that it should always exist as such a force or in
connection with a material body. Should it require another such
body, it may have the power to create it for itself, as it has
formed the one it first inhabited; or it may have already formed
it, and may hold it ready for occupation and use as soon as it
sloughs off the one which connects it with the earth.”
Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 547—“Brutes may have organic life
and sensitivity, and yet remain submerged in nature. It is not
life and sensitivity that lift man above nature, but it is the
distinctive characteristic of personality.” Parkhurst, The Pattern
in the Mount, 17-30, on Prov. 20:27—“The spirit of man is the lamp
of Jehovah”—not necessarily lighted, but capable of being lighted,
and intended to be lighted, by the touch of the divine flame.
_Cf._ _Mat. 6:22, 23_—“_The lamp of the body.... If therefore the
light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness._”
Schleiermacher, Christliche Glaube, 2:487—“We think of the spirit
as soul, only when in the body, so that we cannot speak of an
immortality of the soul, in the proper sense, without bodily
life.” The doctrine of the spiritual body is therefore the
complement to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. A. A.
Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 221—“By soul we mean only one thing, _i.
e._, an incarnate spirit, a spirit with a body. Thus we never
speak of the souls of angels. They are pure spirits, having no
bodies.” Lisle, Evolution of Spiritual Man, 72—“The animal is the
foundation of the spiritual; it is what the cellar is to the
house; it is the base of supplies.” Ladd, Philosophy of Mind,
371-378—“Trichotomy is absolutely untenable on grounds of
psychological science. Man’s reason, or the spirit that is in man,
is not to be regarded as a sort of Mansard roof, built on to one
building in a block, all the dwellings in which are otherwise
substantially alike.... On the contrary, in every set of
characteristics, from those called lowest to those pronounced
highest, the soul of man differences itself from the soul of any
species of animals.... The highest has also the lowest. All must
be assigned to one subject.”
This view of the soul and spirit as different aspects of the same
spiritual principle furnishes a refutation of six important errors:
(_a_) That of the Gnostics, who held that the πνεῦμα is part of the divine
essence, and therefore incapable of sin.
(_b_) That of the Apollinarians, who taught that Christ’s humanity
embraced only σῶμα and ψυχή, while his divine nature furnished the πνεῦμα.
(_c_) That of the Semi-Pelagians, who excepted the human πνεῦμα from the
dominion of original sin.
(_d_) That of Placeus, who held that only the πνεῦμα was directly created
by God (see our section on Theories of Imputation).
(_e_) That of Julius Müller, who held that the ψυχή comes to us from Adam,
but that our πνεῦμα was corrupted in a previous state of being (see page
490).
(_f_) That of the Annihilationists, who hold that man at his creation had
a divine element breathed into him, which he lost by sin, and which he
recovers only in regeneration; so that only when he has this πνεῦμα
restored by virtue of his union with Christ does man become immortal,
death being to the sinner a complete extinction of being.
Tacitus might almost be understood to be a trichotomist when he
writes: “Si ut sapientibus placuit, non extinguuntur cum corpora
_magnæ_ animæ.” Trichotomy allies itself readily with materialism.
Many trichotomists hold that man can exist without a πνεῦμα, but
that the σῶμα and the ψυχή by themselves are mere matter, and are
incapable of eternal existence. Trichotomy, however, when it
speaks of the πνεῦμα as the divine principle in man, seems to
savor of emanation or of pantheism. A modern English poet
describes the glad and winsome child as “A silver stream, Breaking
with laughter from the lake divine, Whence all things flow.”
Another poet, Robert Browning, in his Death in the Desert, 107,
describes body, soul, and spirit, as “What does, what knows, what
is—three souls, one man.”
The Eastern church generally held to trichotomy, and is best
represented by John of Damascus (11:12) who speaks of the soul as
the sensuous life-principle which takes up the spirit—the spirit
being an efflux from God. The Western church, on the other hand,
generally held to dichotomy, and is best represented by Anselm:
“Constat homo ex duabus naturis, ex natura animæ et ex natura
carnis.”
Luther has been quoted upon both sides of the controversy: by
Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 460-462, as trichotomous, and as making
the Mosaic tabernacle with its three divisions an image of the
tripartite man. “The first division,” he says, “was called the
holy of holies, since God dwelt there, and there was no light
therein. The next was denominated the holy place, for within it
stood a candlestick with seven branches and lamps. The third was
called the atrium or court; this was under the broad heaven, and
was open to the light of the sun. A regenerate man is depicted in
this figure. His spirit is the holy of holies, God’s
dwelling-place, in the darkness of faith, without a light, for he
believes what he neither sees, nor feels, nor comprehends. The
_psyche_ of that man is the holy place, whose seven lights
represent the various powers of understanding, the perception and
knowledge of material and visible things. His body is the atrium
or court, which is open to everybody, so that all can see how he
acts and lives.”
Thomasius, however, in his Christi Person und Werk, 1:164-168,
quotes from Luther the following statement, which is clearly
dichotomous: “The first part, the spirit, is the highest, deepest,
noblest part of man. By it he is fitted to comprehend eternal
things, and it is, in short, the house in which dwell faith and
the word of God. The other, the soul, is this same spirit,
according to nature, but yet in another sort of activity, namely,
in this, that it animates the body and works through it; and it is
its method not to grasp things incomprehensible, but only what
reason can search out, know, and measure.” Thomasius himself says:
“Trichotomy, I hold with Meyer, is not Scripturally sustained.”
Neander, sometimes spoken of as a trichotomist, says that spirit
is soul in its elevated and normal relation to God and divine
things; ψυχή is that same soul in its relation to the sensuous and
perhaps sinful things of this world. Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T.,
32—“Spirit = the breath of God, considered as independent of the
body; soul = that same breath, in so far as it gives life to the
body.”
The doctrine we have advocated, moreover, in contrast with the
heathen view, puts honor upon man’s body, as proceeding from the
hand of God and as therefore originally pure (_Gen. 1:31_—“_And
God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very
good_”); as intended to be the dwelling place of the divine Spirit
(_1 Cor. 6:19_—“_know ye not that your body is a temple of the
Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?_”); and as
containing the germ of the heavenly body (_1 Cor. 15:44_—“_it is
sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body_”; _Rom.
8:11_—“_shall give life also to your mortal bodies through his
Spirit that dwelleth in you_”—here many ancient authorities read
“_because of his Spirit that dwelleth in you_”—διά τὸ ἐνοικοῦν
αὐτοῦ πνεῦμα). Birks, in his Difficulties of Belief, suggests that
man, unlike angels, may have been provided with a fleshly body,
(1) to objectify sin, and (2) to enable Christ to unite himself to
the race, in order to save it.
IV. Origin of the Soul.
Three theories with regard to this subject have divided opinion:
1. The Theory of Preëxistence.
This view was held by Plato, Philo, and Origen; by the first, in order to
explain the soul’s possession of ideas not derived from sense; by the
second, to account for its imprisonment in the body; by the third, to
justify the disparity of conditions in which men enter the world. We
concern ourselves, however, only with the forms which the view has assumed
in modern times. Kant and Julius Müller in Germany, and Edward Beecher in
America, have advocated it, upon the ground that the inborn depravity of
the human will can be explained only by supposing a personal act of
self-determination in a previous, or timeless, state of being.
The truth at the basis of the theory of preëxistence is simply the
ideal existence of the soul, before birth, in the mind of God—that
is, God’s foreknowledge of it. The intuitive ideas of which the
soul finds itself in possession, such as space, time, cause,
substance, right, God, are evolved from itself; in other words,
man is so constituted that he perceives these truths upon proper
occasions or conditions. The apparent recollection that we have
seen at some past time a landscape which we know to be now for the
first time before us, is an illusory putting together of
fragmentary concepts or a mistaking of a part for the whole; we
have seen something like a part of the landscape,—we fancy that we
have seen this landscape, and the whole of it. Our recollection of
a past event or scene is one whole, but this one idea may have an
indefinite number of subordinate ideas existing within it. The
sight of something which is similar to one of these parts suggests
the past whole. Coleridge: “The great law of the imagination that
likeness in part tends to become likeness of the whole.” Augustine
hinted that this illusion of memory may have played an important
part in developing the belief in metempsychosis.
Other explanations are those of William James, in his Psychology:
The brain tracts excited by the event proper, and those excited in
its recall, are different; Baldwin, Psychology, 263, 264: We may
remember what we have seen in a dream, or there may be a revival
of ancestral or race experiences. Still others suggest that the
two hemispheres of the brain act asynchronously;
self-consciousness or apperception is distinguished from
perception; divorce, from fatigue, of the processes of sensation
and perception, causes paramnesia. Sully, Illusions, 280, speaks
of an organic or atavistic memory: “May it not happen that by the
law of hereditary transmission ... ancient experiences will now
and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise
to apparently personal recollections?” Letson, The Crowd, believes
that the mob is atavistic and that it bases its action upon
inherited impulses: “The inherited reflexes are atavistic
memories” (quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 204).
Plato held that intuitive ideas are reminiscences of things
learned in a previous state of being; he regarded the body as the
grave of the soul; and urged the fact that the soul had knowledge
before it entered the body, as proof that the soul would have
knowledge after it left the body, that is, would be immortal. See
Plato, Meno, 82-85, Phædo, 72-75, Phædrus, 245-250, Republic,
5:460 and 10:614. Alexander, Theories of the Will, 36, 37—“Plato
represents preëxistent souls as having set before them a choice of
virtue. The choice is free, but it will determine the destiny of
each soul. Not God, but he who chooses, is responsible for his
choice. After making their choice, the souls go to the fates, who
spin the threads of their destiny, and it is thenceforth
irreversible. As Christian theology teaches that man was free but
lost his freedom by the fall of Adam, so Plato affirms that the
preëxistent soul is free until it has chosen its lot in life.” See
Introductions to the above mentioned works of Plato in Jowett’s
translation. Philo held that all souls are emanations from God,
and that those who allowed themselves, unlike the angels, to be
attracted by matter, are punished for this fall by imprisonment in
the body, which corrupts them, and from which they must break
loose. See Philo, De Gigantibus, Pfeiffer’s ed., 2:360-364. Origen
accounted for disparity of conditions at birth by the differences
in the conduct of these same souls in a previous state. God’s
justice at the first made all souls equal; condition here
corresponds to the degree of previous guilt; _Mat. 20:3_—“_others
standing in the market place idle_” = souls not yet brought into
the world. The Talmudists regarded all souls as created at once in
the beginning, and as kept like grains of corn in God’s granary,
until the time should come for joining each to its appointed body.
See Origen, De Anima, 7; περὶ ἀρχῶν, ii:9:6; _cf._ i:1:2, 4, 18;
4:36. Origen’s view was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople,
538. Many of the preceding facts and references are taken from
Bruch, Lehre der Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681-733.
For modern advocates of the theory, see Kant, Critique of Pure
Reason, sec. 15; Religion in. d. Grenzen d. bl. Vernunft, 26, 27;
Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:357-401; Edward Beecher,
Conflict of Ages. The idea of preëxistence has appeared to a
notable extent in modern poetry. See Vaughan, The Retreate (1621);
Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood;
Tennyson, Two Voices, stanzas 105-119, and Early Sonnets, 25—“As
when with downcast eyes we muse and brood, And ebb into a former
life, or seem To lapse far back in some confused dream To states
of mystical similitude; If one but speaks or hems or stirs his
chair, Ever the wonder waxeth more and more, So that we say ‘All
this hath been before, All this hath been, I know not when or
where.’ So, friend, when first I looked upon your face, Our
thought gave answer each to each, so true—Opposed mirrors each
reflecting each—That though I knew not in what time or place,
Methought that I had often met with you, And either lived in
either’s heart and speech.” Robert Browning, La Saisiaz, and
Christina: “Ages past the soul existed; Here an age ’tis resting
merely, And hence fleets again for ages.” Rossetti, House of Life:
“I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell; I know
the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing
sound, the lights along the shore. You have been mine before, How
long ago I may not know; But just when, at that swallow’s soar,
Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall—I knew it all of yore”;
quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 103-106, who holds the phenomenon due
to false induction and interpretation.
Briggs, School, College and Character, 95—“Some of us remember the
days when we were on earth for the first time;”—which reminds us
of the boy who remembered sitting in a corner before he was born
and crying for fear he would be a girl. A more notable
illustration is that found in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by
Lockhart, his son-in-law, 8:274—“Yesterday, at dinner time, I was
strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of
preëxistence—viz., a confused idea that nothing that passed was
said for the first time—that the same topics had been discussed
and the same persons had started the same opinions on them. It is
true there might have been some ground for recollections,
considering that three at least of the company were old friends
and had kept much company together.... But the sensation was so
strong as to resemble what is called a mirage in the desert, or a
calenture on board of ship, when lakes are seen in the desert and
sylvan landscapes in the sea. It was very distressing yesterday
and brought to mind the fancies of Bishop Berkeley about an ideal
world. There was a vile sense of want of reality in all I did and
said.... I drank several glasses of wine, but these only
aggravated the disorder. I did not find the _in vino veritas_ of
the philosophers.”
To the theory of preëxistence we urge the following objections:
(_a_) It is not only wholly without support from Scripture, but it
directly contradicts the Mosaic account of man’s creation in the image of
God, and Paul’s description of all evil and death in the human race as the
result of Adam’s sin.
_Gen. 1:27_—“_And God created man in his own image, in the image
of God created he him_”; _31_—“_And God saw every thing that he
had made, and, behold, it was very good._” _Rom.
5:12_—“_Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world,
and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that
all sinned._” The theory of preëxistence would still leave it
doubtful whether all men are sinners, or whether God assembles
only sinners upon the earth.
(_b_) If the soul in this preëxistent state was conscious and personal, it
is inexplicable that we should have no remembrance of such preëxistence,
and of so important a decision in that previous condition of being;—if the
soul was yet unconscious and impersonal, the theory fails to show how a
moral act involving consequences so vast could have been performed at all.
Christ remembered his preëxistent state; why should not we? There
is every reason to believe that in the future state we shall
remember our present existence; why should we not now remember the
past state from which we came? It may be objected that
Augustinians hold to a sin of the race in Adam—a sin which none of
Adam’s descendants can remember. But we reply that no Augustinian
holds to a personal existence of each member of the race in Adam,
and therefore no Augustinian needs to account for lack of memory
of Adam’s sin. The advocate of preëxistence, however, does hold to
a personal existence of each soul in a previous state, and
therefore needs to account for our lack of memory of it.
(_c_) The view sheds no light either upon the origin of sin, or upon God’s
justice in dealing with it, since it throws back the first transgression
to a state of being in which there was no flesh to tempt, and then
represents God as putting the fallen into sensuous conditions in the
highest degree unfavorable to their restoration.
This theory only increases the difficulty of explaining the origin
of sin, by pushing back its beginning to a state of which we know
less than we do of the present. To say that the soul in that
previous state was only potentially conscious and personal, is to
deny any real probation, and to throw the blame of sin on God the
Creator. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:228—“In modern times,
the philosophers Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer have explained
the bad from an intelligible act of freedom, which (according to
Schelling and Schopenhauer) also at the same time effectuates the
temporal existence and condition of the individual soul. But what
are we to think of as meant by such a mystical deed or act through
which the subject of it first comes into existence? Is it not
this, that perhaps under this singular disguise there is concealed
the simple thought that the origin of the bad lies not so much in
a _doing_ of the individual freedom as rather in the _rise_ of
it,—that is to say, in the process of development through which
the natural man becomes a moral man, and the merely potentially
rational man becomes an actually rational man?”
(_d_) While this theory accounts for inborn spiritual sin, such as pride
and enmity to God, it gives no explanation of inherited sensual sin, which
it holds to have come from Adam, and the guilt of which must logically be
denied.
While certain forms of the preëxistence theory are exposed to the
last objection indicated in the text, Julius Müller claims that
his own view escapes it; see Doctrine of Sin, 2:393. His theory,
he says, “would contradict holy Scripture if it derived inborn
sinfulness _solely_ from this extra-temporal act of the
individual, without recognizing in this sinfulness the element of
hereditary depravity in the sphere of the natural life, and its
connection with the sin of our first parents.” Müller, whose
trichotomy here determines his whole subsequent scheme, holds only
the πνεῦμα to have thus fallen in a preëxistent state. The ψυχή
comes, with the body, from Adam. The tempter only brought man’s
latent perversity of will into open transgression. Sinfulness, as
hereditary, does not involve guilt, but the hereditary principle
is the “medium through which the transcendent self-perversion of
the spiritual nature of man is transmitted to his whole temporal
mode of being.” While man is born guilty as to his πνεῦμα, for the
reason that this πνεῦμα sinned in a preëxistent state, he is also
born guilty as to his ψυχή, because this was one with the first
man in his transgression.
Even upon the most favorable statement of Müller’s view, we fail
to see how it can consist with the organic unity of the race; for
in that which chiefly constitutes us men—the πνεῦμα—we are as
distinct and separate creations as are the angels. We also fail to
see how, upon this view, Christ can be said to take our nature;
or, if he takes it, how it can be without sin. See Ernesti,
Ursprung der Sünde, 2:1-247; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele,
11-17: Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:92-122; Bruch, Lehre der
Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681-733. Also Bib. Sac.,
11:186-191; 12:156; 17:419-427; 20:447; Kahnis, Dogmatik,
3:250—“This doctrine is inconsistent with the indisputable fact
that the souls of children are like those of the parents; and it
ignores the connection of the individual with the race.”
2. The Creatian Theory.
This view was held by Aristotle, Jerome, and Pelagius, and in modern times
has been advocated by most of the Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians.
It regards the soul of each human being as immediately created by God and
joined to the body either at conception, at birth, or at some time between
these two. The advocates of the theory urge in its favor certain texts of
Scripture, referring to God as the Creator of the human spirit, together
with the fact that there is a marked individuality in the child, which
cannot be explained as a mere reproduction of the qualities existing in
the parents.
Creatianism, as ordinarily held, regards only the body as
propagated from past generations. Creatianists who hold to
trichotomy would say, however, that the animal soul, the ψυχή, is
propagated with the body, while the highest part of man, the
πνεῦμα, is in each case a direct creation of God,—the πνεῦμα not
being created, as the advocates of preëxistence believe, ages
before the body, but rather at the time that the body assumes its
distinct individuality.
Aristotle (De Anima) first gives definite expression to this view.
Jerome speaks of God as “making souls daily.” The scholastics
followed Aristotle, and through the influence of the Reformed
church, creatianism has been the prevailing opinion for the last
two hundred years. Among its best representatives are Turretin,
Inst., 5:13 (vol. 1:425); Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:65-76; Martensen,
Dogmatics, 141-148; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 99-106. Certain
Reformed theologians have defined very exactly God’s method of
creation. Polanus (5:31:1) says that God breathes the soul into
boys, forty days, and into girls, eighty days, after conception.
Göschel (in Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Seele) holds that while
dichotomy leads to traducianism, trichotomy allies itself to that
form of creatianism which regards the πνεῦμα as a direct creation
of God, but the ψυχή as propagated with the body. To the latter
answers the family name; to the former the Christian name. Shall
we count George Macdonald as a believer in Preëxistence or in
Creatianism, when he writes in his Baby’s Catechism: “Where did
you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into here. Where
did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky, as I came through.
Where did you get that little tear? I found it waiting when I got
here. Where did you get that pearly ear? God spoke, and it came
out to hear. How did they all just come to be you? God thought
about me, and so I grew.”
Creatianism is untenable for the following reasons:
(_a_) The passages adduced in its support may with equal propriety be
regarded as expressing God’s mediate agency in the origination of human
souls; while the general tenor of Scripture, as well as its
representations of God as the author of man’s body, favor this latter
interpretation.
Passages commonly relied upon by creatianists are the following:
_Eccl. 12:7_—“_the spirit returneth unto God who gave it_”; _Is.
57:16_—“_the souls that I have made_”; _Zech. 12:1_—“_Jehovah ...
who formeth the spirit of man within him_”; _Heb. 12:9_—“_the
Father of spirits._” But God is with equal clearness declared to
be the former of man’s body: see _Ps. 139:13, 14_—“_thou didst
form my inward parts: Thou didst cover me_ [marg. “_knit me
together_”] _in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks unto thee;
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Wonderful are thy
works_”; _Jer. 1:5_—“_I formed thee in the belly._” Yet we do not
hesitate to interpret these latter passages as expressive of
mediate, not immediate, creatorship,—God works through natural
laws of generation and development so far as the production of
man’s body is concerned. None of the passages first mentioned
forbid us to suppose that he works through these same natural laws
in the production of the soul. The truth in creatianism is the
presence and operation of God in all natural processes. A
transcendent God manifests himself in all physical begetting.
Shakespeare: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew
them how we will.” Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 112—“Creatianism, which
emphasizes the divine origin of man, is entirely compatible with
Traducianism, which emphasizes the mediation of natural agencies.
So for the race as a whole, its origin in a creative activity of
God is quite consistent with its being a product of natural
evolution.”
(_b_) Creatianism regards the earthly father as begetting only the body of
his child—certainly as not the father of the child’s highest part. This
makes the beast to possess nobler powers of propagation than man; for the
beast multiplies himself after his own image.
The new physiology properly views soul, not as something added
from without, but as the animating principle of the body from the
beginning and as having a determining influence upon its whole
development. That children are like their parents, in intellectual
and spiritual as well as in physical respects, is a fact of which
the creatian theory gives no proper explanation. Mason, Faith of
the Gospel, 115—“The love of parents to children and of children
to parents protests against the doctrine that only the body is
propagated.” Aubrey Moore, Science and the Faith, 207,—quoted in
Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:876—“Instead of the physical derivation
of the soul, we stand for the spiritual derivation of the body.”
We would amend this statement by saying that we stand for the
spiritual derivation of both soul and body, natural law being only
the operation of spirit, human and divine.
(_c_) The individuality of the child, even in the most extreme cases, as
in the sudden rise from obscure families and surroundings of marked men
like Luther, may be better explained by supposing a law of variation
impressed upon the species at its beginning—a law whose operation is
foreseen and supervised by God.
The differences of the child from the parent are often
exaggerated; men are generally more the product of their ancestry
and of their time than we are accustomed to think. Dickens made
angelic children to be born of depraved parents, and to grow up in
the slums. But this writing belongs to a past generation, when the
facts of heredity were unrecognized. George Eliot’s school is
nearer the truth; although she exaggerates the doctrine of
heredity in turn, until all idea of free will and all hope of
escaping our fate vanish. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 78,
90—“Separate motives, handed down from generation to generation,
sometimes remaining latent for great periods, to become suddenly
manifested under conditions the nature of which is not
discernible.... Conflict of inheritances [from different
ancestors] may lead to the institution of variety.”
Sometimes, in spite of George Eliot, a lily grows out of a
stagnant pool—how shall we explain the fact? We must remember that
the paternal and the maternal elements are themselves unlike; the
union of the two may well produce a third in some respects unlike
either; as, when two chemical elements unite, the product differs
from either of the constituents. We must remember also that
_nature_ is one factor; _nurture_ is another; and that the latter
is often as potent as the former (see Galton, Inquiries into Human
Faculty, 77-81). Environment determines to a large extent both the
fact and the degree of development. Genius is often another name
for Providence. Yet before all and beyond all we must recognize a
manifold wisdom of God, which in the very organization of species
impresses upon it a law of variation, so that at proper times and
under proper conditions the old is modified in the line of
progress and advance to something higher. Dante, Purgatory, canto
vii—“Rarely into the branches of the tree Doth human worth mount
up; and so ordains He that bestows it, that as his free gift It
may be called.” Pompilia, the noblest character in Robert
Browning’s Ring and the Book, came of “a bad lot.” Geo. A. Gordon,
Christ of To-day, 123-126—“It is mockery to account for Abraham
Lincoln and Robert Burns and William Shakespeare upon naked
principles of heredity and environment.... All intelligence and
all high character are transcendent, and have their source in the
mind and heart of God. It is in the range of Christ’s
transcendence of his earthly conditions that we note the complete
uniqueness of his person.”
(_d_) This theory, if it allows that the soul is originally possessed of
depraved tendencies, makes God the direct author of moral evil; if it
holds the soul to have been created pure, it makes God indirectly the
author of moral evil, by teaching that he puts this pure soul into a body
which will inevitably corrupt it.
The decisive argument against creatianism is this one, that it
makes God the author of moral evil. See Kahnis, Dogmatik,
3:250—“Creatianism rests upon a justly antiquated dualism between
soul and body, and is irreconcilable with the sinful condition of
the human soul. The truth in the doctrine is just this only, that
generation can bring forth an immortal human life only according
to the power imparted by God’s word, and with the special
coöperation of God himself.” The difficulty of supposing that God
immediately creates a pure soul, only to put it into a body that
will infallibly corrupt it—“sicut vinum in vase acetoso”—has led
many of the most thoughtful Reformed theologians to modify the
creatian doctrine by combining it with traducianism.
Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:249-251, holds to creatianism in a wider
sense—a union of the paternal and maternal elements under the
express and determining efficiency of God. Ebrard, Dogmatik,
1:327-332, regards the soul as new-created, yet by a process of
mediate creation according to law, which he calls “metaphysical
generation.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:56, says that the
individual is not simply a manifestation of the species; God
applies to the origination of every single man a special creative
thought and act of will; yet he does this through the species, so
that it is creation by law,—else the child would be, not a
continuation of the old species, but the establishment of a new
one. So in speaking of the human soul of Christ, Dorner says
(3:340-349) that the soul itself does not owe its origin to Mary
nor to the species, but to the creative act of God. This soul
appropriates to itself from Mary’s body the elements of a human
form, purifying them in the process so far as is consistent with
the beginning of a life yet subject to development and human
weakness.
Bowne, Metaphysics, 500—“The laws of heredity must be viewed
simply as descriptions of a fact and never as its explanation. Not
as if ancestors passed on something to posterity, but solely
because of the inner consistency of the divine action” are
children like their parents. We cannot regard either of these
mediating views as self-consistent or intelligible. We pass on
therefore to consider the traducian theory which we believe more
fully to meet the requirements of Scripture and of reason. For
further discussion of creatianism, see Frohschammer, Ursprung der
Seele, 18-58; Alger, Doctrine of a Future Life, 1-17.
3. The Traducian Theory.
This view was propounded by Tertullian, and was implicitly held by
Augustine. In modern times it has been the prevailing opinion of the
Lutheran Church. It holds that the human race was immediately created in
Adam, and, as respects both body and soul, was propagated from him by
natural generation—all souls since Adam being only mediately created by
God, as the upholder of the laws of propagation which were originally
established by him.
Tertullian, De Anima: “Tradux peccati, tradux animæ.” Gregory of
Nyssa: “Man being one, consisting of soul and body, the common
beginning of his constitution must be supposed also one; so that
he may not be both older and younger than himself—that in him
which is bodily being first, and the other coming after” (quoted
in Crippen, Hist. of Christ. Doct., 80). Augustine, De Pec. Mer.
et Rem., 3:7—“In Adam all sinned, at the time when in his nature
all were still that one man”; De Civ. Dei, 13:14—“For we all were
in that one man, when we all were that one man.... The form in
which we each should live was not as yet individually created and
distributed to us, but there already existed the seminal nature
from which we were propagated.”
Augustine, indeed, wavered in his statements with regard to the
origin of the soul, apparently fearing that an explicit and
pronounced traducianism might involve materialistic consequences;
yet, as logically lying at the basis of his doctrine of original
sin, traducianism came to be the ruling view of the Lutheran
reformers. In his Table Talk, Luther says: “The reproduction of
mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the
matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of
the species by fashioning them out of clay, in the way Adam was
fashioned; as I should have counseled him also to let the sun
remain always suspended over the earth, like a great lamp,
maintaining perpetual light and heat.”
Traducianism holds that man, as a species, was created in Adam. In
Adam, the substance of humanity was yet undistributed. We derive
our immaterial as well as our material being, by natural laws of
propagation, from Adam,—each individual man after Adam possessing
a part of the substance that was originated in him. Sexual
reproduction has for its purpose the keeping of variations within
limit. Every marriage tends to bring back the individual type to
that of the species. The offspring represents not one of the
parents but both. And, as each of these parents represents two
grandparents, the offspring really represents the whole race.
Without this conjugation the individual peculiarities would
reproduce themselves in divergent lines like the shot from a
shot-gun. Fission needs to be supplemented by conjugation. The use
of sexual reproduction is to preserve the average individual in
the face of a progressive tendency to variation. In asexual
reproduction the offspring start on deviating lines and never mix
their qualities with those of their mates. Sexual reproduction
makes the individual the type of the species and gives solidarity
to the race. See Maupas, quoted by Newman Smith, Place of Death in
Evolution, 19-22.
John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is a Traducian. He has no
faith in the notion of a soul separate from and inhabiting the
body. He believes in a certain corporeity of the soul. Mind and
thought are rooted in the bodily organism. Soul was not inbreathed
after the body was formed. The breathing of God into man’s
nostrils was only the quickening impulse to that which already had
life. God does not create souls every day. Man is a body-and-soul,
or a soul-body, and he transmits himself as such. Harris, Moral
Evolution, 171—The individual man has a great number of ancestors
as well as a great number of descendants. He is the central point
of an hour-glass, or a strait between two seas which widen out
behind and before. How then shall we escape the conclusion that
the human race was most numerous at the beginning? We must
remember that other children have the same great-grandparents with
ourselves; that there have been inter-marriages; and that, after
all, the generations run on in parallel lines, that the lines
spread a little in some countries and periods, and narrow a little
in other countries and periods. It is like a wall covered with
paper in diamond pattern. The lines diverge and converge, but the
figures are parallel. See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:7-94, Hist.
Doctrine, 2:1-26, Discourses and Essays, 259; Baird, Elohim
Revealed, 137-151, 335-384; Edwards, Works, 2:483; Hopkins, Works,
1:289; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 161; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych.,
128-142; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 59-224.
With regard to this view we remark:
(_a_) It seems best to accord with Scripture, which represents God as
creating the species in Adam (Gen. 1:27), and as increasing and
perpetuating it through secondary agencies (1:28; _cf._ 22). Only once is
breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life (2:7, _cf._ 22; 1 Cor.
11:8. Gen. 4:1; 5:3; 46:26; _cf._ Acts 17:21-26; Heb. 7:10), and after
man’s formation God ceases from his work of creation (Gen. 2:2).
_Gen. 1:27_—“_And God created man in his own image, in the image
of God created he him: male and female created he them_”;
_28_—“_And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful,
and multiply, and replenish the earth_”; _cf._ _22_—of the brute
creation: “_And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and
multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply
on the earth._” _Gen. 2:7_—“_And Jehovah God formed man of the
dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life; and man became a living soul_”; _cf._ _22_—“_and the rib
which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and
brought her unto the man_”; _1 Cor. 11:8_—“_For the man is not of
the woman; but the woman of the man_” (ἐξ ἀνδρός). _Gen.
4:1_—“_Eve ... bare Cain_”; _5:3_—“_Adam ... begat a son ...
Seth_”; _46:26_—“_All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt,
that came out of his loins_”; _Acts 17:26_—“_he made of one_
[“father” or “body”] _every nation of men_”; _Heb. 7:10_—Levi
“_was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedek met him_”;
_Gen. 2:2_—“_And on the seventh day God finished his work which he
had made, __ and he rested on the seventh day from all his work
which he had made._” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:19-29, adduces also
_John 1:13; 3:6_; _Rom. 1:13; 5:12_; _1 Cor. 15:22_; _Eph. 2:3_;
_Heb. 12:9_; _Ps. 139:15, 16_. Only Adam had the right to be a
creatianist. Westcott, Com. on Hebrews, 114—“Levi paying tithes in
Abraham implies that descendants are included in the ancestor so
far that his acts have force for them. Physically, at least, the
dead so rule the living. The individual is not a completely
self-centred being. He is member in a body. So far traducianism is
true. But, if this were all, man would be a mere result of the
past, and would have no individual responsibility. There is an
element not derived from birth, though it may follow upon it.
Recognition of individuality is the truth in creatianism. Power of
vision follows upon preparation of an organ of vision, modified by
the latter but not created by it. So we have the social unity of
the race, _plus_ the personal responsibility of the individual,
the influence of common thoughts _plus_ the power of great men,
the foundation of hope _plus_ the condition of judgment.”
(_b_) It is favored by the analogy of vegetable and animal life, in which
increase of numbers is secured, not by a multiplicity of immediate
creations, but by the natural derivation of new individuals from a parent
stock. A derivation of the human soul from its parents no more implies a
materialistic view of the soul and its endless division and subdivision,
than the similar derivation of the brute proves the principle of
intelligence in the lower animals to be wholly material.
God’s method is not the method of endless miracle. God works in
nature through second causes. God does not create a new vital
principle at the beginning of existence of each separate apple,
and of each separate dog. Each of these is the result of a
self-multiplying force, implanted once for all in the first of its
race. To say, with Moxom (Baptist Review, 1881:278), that God is
the immediate author of each new individual, is to deny second
causes, and to merge nature in God. The whole tendency of modern
science is in the opposite direction. Nor is there any good reason
for making the origin of the individual human soul an exception to
the general rule. Augustine wavered in his traducianism because he
feared the inference that the soul is divided and subdivided,—that
is, that it is composed of parts, and is therefore material in its
nature. But it does not follow that all separation is material
separation. We do not, indeed, know how the soul is propagated.
But we know that animal life is propagated, and still that it is
not material, nor composed of parts. The fact that the soul is not
material, nor composed of parts, is no reason why it may not be
propagated also.
It is well to remember that _substance_ does not necessarily imply
either _extension_ or _figure_. _Substantia_ is simply that which
stands under, underlies, supports, or in other words that which is
the _ground_ of phenomena. The propagation of mind therefore does
not involve any dividing up, or splitting off, as if the mind were
a material mass. Flame is propagated, but not by division and
subdivision. Professor Ladd is a creatianist, together with Lotze,
whom he quotes, but he repudiates the idea that the mind is
susceptible of division; see Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206,
359-366—“The mind comes from nowhere, for it never was, as mind,
in space, is not now in space, and cannot be conceived of as
coming and going in space.... Mind is a growth.... Parents do not
transmit their minds to their offspring. The child’s mind does not
exist before it acts. Its activities _are_ its existence.” So we
might say that flame has no existence before it acts. Yet it may
owe its existence to a preceding flame. The Indian proverb is: “No
lotus without a stem.” Hall Caine, in his novel The Manxman, tells
us that the Deemster of the Isle of Man had two sons. These two
sons were as unlike each other as are the inside and the outside
of a bowl. But the bowl was old Deemster himself. Hartley
Coleridge inherited his father’s imperious desire for stimulants
and with it his inability to resist their temptation.
(_c_) The observed transmission not merely of physical, but of mental and
spiritual, characteristics in families and races, and especially the
uniformly evil moral tendencies and dispositions which all men possess
from their birth, are proof that in soul, as well as in body, we derive
our being from our human ancestry.
Galton, in his Hereditary Genius, and Inquiries into Human
Faculty, furnishes abundant proof of the transmission of mental
and spiritual characteristics from father to son. Illustrations,
in the case of families, are the American Adamses, the English
Georges, the French Bourbons, the German Bachs. Illustrations, in
the case of races, are the Indians, the Negroes, the Chinese, the
Jews. Hawthorne represented the introspection and the conscience
of Puritan New England. Emerson had a minister among his ancestry,
either on the paternal or the maternal side, for eight generations
back. Every man is “a chip of the old block.” “A man is an
omnibus, in which all his ancestors are seated” (O. W. Holmes).
Variation is one of the properties of living things,—the other is
transmission. “On a dissecting table, in the membranes of a
new-born infant’s body, can be seen ‘the drunkard’s tinge.’ The
blotches on his grand-child’s cheeks furnish a mirror to the old
debauchee. Heredity is God’s visiting of sin to the third and
fourth generations.” On heredity and depravity, see Phelps, in
Bib. Sac., Apr. 1884:254—“When every molecule in the paternal
brain bears the shape of a point of interrogation, it would border
on the miraculous if we should find the exclamation-sign of faith
in the brain-cells of the child.”
Robert G. Ingersoll said that most great men have great mothers,
and that most great women have great fathers. Most of the great
are like mountains, with the valley of ancestors on one side and
the depression of posterity on the other. Hawthorne’s House of the
Seven Gables illustrates the principle of heredity. But in his
Marble Faun and Transformation, Hawthorne unwisely intimates that
sin is a necessity to virtue, a background or condition of good.
Dryden, Absalom and Ahithophel, 1:156—“Great wits are sure to
madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
Lombroso, The Man of Genius, maintains that genius is a mental
disease allied to epileptiform mania or the dementia of cranks. If
this were so, we should infer that civilization is the result of
insanity, and that, so soon as Napoleons, Dantes and Newtons
manifest themselves, they should be confined in Genius Asylums.
Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau, comes nearer the truth: “A
solitary great man’s worth the world. God takes the business into
his own hands At such time: Who creates the novel flower Contrives
to guard and give it breathing-room.... ’Tis the great Gardener
grafts the excellence On wildlings, where he will.”
(_d_) The traducian doctrine embraces and acknowledges the element of
truth which gives plausibility to the creatian view. Traducianism,
properly defined, admits a divine concurrence throughout the whole
development of the human species, and allows, under the guidance of a
superintending Providence, special improvements in type at the birth of
marked men, similar to those which we may suppose to have occurred in the
introduction of new varieties in the animal creation.
Page-Roberts, Oxford University Sermons: “It is no more unjust
that man should inherit evil tendencies, than that he should
inherit good. To make the former impossible is to make the latter
impossible. To object to the law of heredity, is to object to
God’s ordinance of society, and to say that God should have made
men, like the angels, a company, and not a race.” The common moral
characteristics of the race can only be accounted for upon the
Scriptural view that “_that which is born of the flesh is flesh_”
(_John 3:6_). Since propagation is a propagation of soul, as well
as body, we see that to beget children under improper conditions
is a crime, and that fœticide is murder. Haeckel, Evolution of
Man, 2:3—“The human embryo passes through the whole course of its
development in forty weeks. Each man is really older by this
period than is usually assumed. When, for example, a child is said
to be nine and a quarter years old, he is really ten years old.”
Is this the reason why Hebrews call a child a year old at birth?
President Edwards prayed for his children and his children’s
children to the end of time, and President Woolsey congratulated
himself that he was one of the inheritors of those prayers. R. W.
Emerson: “How can a man get away from his ancestors?” Men of
genius should select their ancestors with great care. When begin
the instruction of a child? A hundred years before he is born. A
lady whose children were noisy and troublesome said to a Quaker
relative that she wished she could get a good Quaker governess for
them, to teach them the quiet ways of the Society of Friends. “It
would not do them that service,” was the reply; “they should have
been rocked in a Quaker cradle, if they were to learn Quakerly
ways.”
Galton, Natural Inheritance, 104—“The child inherits partly from
his parents, partly from his ancestry. In every population that
intermarries freely, when the genealogy of any man is traced far
backwards, his ancestry will be found to consist of such varied
elements that they are indistinguishable from the sample taken at
haphazard from the general population. Galton speaks of the
tendency of peculiarities to revert to the general type, and says
that a man’s brother is twice as nearly related to him as his
father is, and nine times as nearly as his cousin. The mean
stature of any particular class of men will be the same as that of
the race; in other words, it will be mediocre. This tells heavily
against the full hereditary transmission of any rare and valuable
gift, as only a few of the many children would resemble their
parents.” We may add to these thoughts of Galton that Christ
himself, as respects his merely human ancestry, was not so much
son of Mary, as he was Son of man.
Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 144-167—In an investigated case,
“in seven and a half generations the maximum ancestry for one
person is 382, or for three persons 1146. The names of 452 of
them, or nearly half, are recorded, and these 452 named ancestors
are not 452 distinct persons, but only 149, many of them, in the
remote generations, being common ancestors of all three in many
lines. If the lines of descent from the unrecorded ancestors were
interrelated in the same way, as they would surely be in an old
and stable community, the total ancestry of these three persons
for seven and a half generations would be 378 persons instead of
1146. The descendants of many die out. All the members of a
species descend from a few ancestors in a remote generation, and
these few are the common ancestors of all. Extinction of family
names is very common. We must seek in the modern world and not in
the remote past for an explanation of that diversity among
individuals which passes under the name of variation. The
genealogy of a species is not a tree, but a slender thread of very
few strands, a little frayed at the near end, but of immeasurable
length. A fringe of loose ends all along the thread may represent
the animals which having no descendants are now as if they had
never been. Each of the strands at the near end is important as a
possible line of union between the thread of the past and that of
the distant future.”
Weismann, Heredity, 270, 272, 380, 384, denies Brooks’s theory
that the male element represents the principle of variation. He
finds the cause of variation in the union of elements from the two
parents. Each child unites the hereditary tendencies of two
parents, and so must be different from either. The third
generation is a compromise between four different hereditary
tendencies. Brooks finds the cause of variation in sexual
reproduction, but he bases his theory upon the transmission of
acquired characters. This transmission is denied by Weismann, who
says that the male germ-cell does not play a different part from
that of the female in the construction of the embryo. Children
inherit quite as much from the father as from the mother. Like
twins are derived from the same egg-cell. No two germ-cells
contain exactly the same combinations of hereditary tendencies.
Changes in environment and organism affect posterity, not
directly, but only through other changes produced in its germinal
matter. Hence efforts to reach high food cannot directly produce
the giraffe. See Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution, 235-239;
Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems; Ribot, Heredity; Woods,
Heredity in Royalty. On organic unity in connection with realism,
see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1865:126-135; Dabney, Theology,
317-321.
V. The Moral Nature of Man.
By the moral nature of man we mean those powers which fit him for right or
wrong action. These powers are intellect, sensibility, and will, together
with that peculiar power of discrimination and impulsion, which we call
conscience. In order to have moral action, man has intellect or reason, to
discern the difference between right and wrong; sensibility, to be moved
by each of these; free will, to do the one or the other. Intellect,
sensibility, and will, are man’s three faculties. But in connection with
these faculties there is a sort of activity which involves them all, and
without which there can be no moral action, namely, the activity of
conscience. Conscience applies the moral law to particular cases in our
personal experience, and proclaims that law as binding upon us. Only a
rational and sentient being can be truly moral; yet it does not come
within our province to treat of man’s intellect or sensibility in general.
We speak here only of Conscience and of Will.
1. Conscience.
A. Conscience an accompanying knowledge.—As already intimated, conscience
is not a separate faculty, like intellect, sensibility, and will, but
rather a mode in which these faculties act. Like consciousness, conscience
is an accompanying knowledge. Conscience is a knowing of self (including
our acts and states) in connection with a moral standard, or law. Adding
now the element of feeling, we may say that conscience is man’s
consciousness of his own moral relations, together with a peculiar feeling
in view of them. It thus involves the combined action of the intellect and
of the sensibility, and that in view of a certain class of objects, viz.:
right and wrong.
There is no separate ethical faculty any more than there is a
separate æsthetic faculty. Conscience is like taste: it has to do
with moral being and relations, as taste has to do with æsthetic
being and relations. But the ethical judgment and impulse are,
like the æsthetic judgment and impulse, the mode in which
intellect, sensibility and will act with reference to a certain
class of objects. Conscience deals with the right, as taste deals
with the beautiful. As consciousness (_con_ and _scio_) is a
con-knowing, a knowing of our thoughts, desires and volitions in
connection with a knowing of the self that has these thoughts,
desires and volitions; so conscience is a con-knowing, a knowing
of our moral acts and states in connection with a knowing of some
moral standard or law which is conceived of as our true self, and
therefore as having authority over us. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind,
183-185—“The condemnation of self involves self-diremption, double
consciousness. Without it Kant’s categorical imperative is
impossible. The one self lays down the law to the other self,
judges it, threatens it. This is what is meant, when the apostle
says: ‘_It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me_’
(_Rom. 7:17_).”
B. Conscience discriminative and impulsive.—But we need to define more
narrowly both the intellectual and the emotional elements in conscience.
As respects the intellectual element, we may say that conscience is a
power of judgment,—it declares our acts or states to conform, or not to
conform, to law; it declares the acts or states which conform to be
obligatory,—those which do not conform, to be forbidden. In other words,
conscience judges: (1) This is right (or, wrong); (2) I ought (or, I ought
not). In connection with this latter judgment, there comes into view the
emotional element of conscience,—we feel the claim of duty; there is an
inner sense that the wrong must not be done. Thus conscience is (1)
discriminative, and (2) impulsive.
Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 173—“The one
distinctive function of conscience is that of authoritative
self-judgments in the conscious presence of a supreme Personality
to whom we as persons feel ourselves accountable. It is this
twofold personal element in every judgment of conscience, _viz._,
the conscious self-judgment in the presence of the all-judging
Deity, which has led such writers as Bain and Spencer and Stephen
to attempt the explanation of the origin and authority of
conscience as the product of parental training and social
environment.... Conscience is not prudential nor advisory nor
executive, but solely judicial. Conscience is the moral reason,
pronouncing upon moral actions. Consciousness furnishes law;
conscience pronounces judgments; it says: Thou shalt, Thou shalt
not. Every man must obey his conscience; if it is not enlightened,
that is his look-out. The callousing of conscience in this life is
already a penal infliction.” S. S. Times, Apl. 5, 1902:185—“Doing
as well as we know how is not enough, unless we know just what is
right and then do that. God never tells us merely to do our best,
or according to our knowledge. It is our duty to know what is
right, and then to do it. Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. We
have responsibility for knowing preliminary to doing.”
C. Conscience distinguished from other mental processes.—The nature and
office of conscience will be still more clearly perceived if we
distinguish it from other processes and operations with which it is too
often confounded. The term conscience has been used by various writers to
designate either one or all of the following: 1. _Moral intuition_—the
intuitive perception of the difference between right and wrong, as
opposite moral categories. 2. _Accepted law_—the application of the
intuitive idea to general classes of actions, and the declaration that
these classes of actions are right or wrong, apart from our individual
relation to them. This accepted law is the complex product of (_a_) the
intuitive idea, (_b_) the logical intelligence, (_c_) experiences of
utility, (_d_) influences of society and education, and (e) positive
divine revelation. 3. _Judgment_—applying this accepted law to individual
and concrete cases in our own experience, and pronouncing our own acts or
states either past, present, or prospective, to be right or wrong. 4.
_Command_—authoritative declaration of obligation to do the right, or
forbear the wrong, together with an impulse of the sensibility away from
the one, and toward the other. 5. _Remorse_ or _approval_—moral sentiments
either of approbation or disapprobation, in view of past acts or states,
regarded as wrong or right. 6. _Fear_ or _hope_—instinctive disposition of
disobedience to expect punishment, and of obedience to expect reward.
Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 70—“The feeling of the ought is primary,
essential, unique; the judgments as to what one ought are the
results of environment, education and reflection.” The sentiment
of justice is not an inheritance of civilized man alone. No Indian
was ever robbed of his lands or had his government allowance
stolen from him who was not as keenly conscious of the wrong as in
like circumstances we could conceive that a philosopher would be.
The _oughtness_ of the ought is certainly intuitive; the _whyness_
of the ought (conformity to God) is possibly intuitive also; the
_whatness_ of the ought is less certainly intuitive. Cutler,
Beginnings of Ethics, 163, 164—“Intuition tells us _that_ we are
obliged; _why_ we are obliged, and _what_ we are obliged to, we
must learn elsewhere.” _Obligation_—that which is binding on a
man; _ought_ is something owed; _duty_ is something due. The
intuitive notion of duty (intellect) is matched by the sense of
obligation (feeling).
Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 203, 270—“All men have a sense of
right,—of right to life, and contemporaneously perhaps, but
certainly afterwards, of right to personal property. And my right
implies duty in my neighbor to respect it. Then the sense of right
becomes objective and impersonal. My neighbor’s duty to me implies
my duty to him. I put myself in his place.” Bowne, Principles of
Ethics, 156, 188—“First, the feeling of obligation, the idea of a
right and a wrong with corresponding duties, is universal....
Secondly, there is a very general agreement in the formal
principles of action, and largely in the virtues also, such as
benevolence, justice, gratitude.... Whether we owe anything to our
neighbor has never been a real question. The practical trouble has
always lain in the other question: Who is my neighbor? Thirdly,
the specific contents of the moral ideal are not fixed, but the
direction in which the ideal lies is generally discernible.... We
have in ethics the same fact as in intellect—a potentially
infallible standard, with manifold errors in its apprehension and
application. Lucretius held that degradation and paralysis of the
moral nature result from religion. Many claim on the other hand
that without religion morals would disappear from the earth.”
Robinson, Princ. and Prac. of Morality, 173—“Fear of an omnipotent
will is very different from remorse in view of the nature of the
supreme Being whose law we have violated.” A duty is to be settled
in accordance with the standard of absolute right, not as public
sentiment would dictate. A man must be ready to do right in spite
of what everybody thinks. Just as the decisions of a judge are for
the time binding on all good citizens, so the decisions of
conscience, as relatively binding, must always be obeyed. They are
presumptively right and they are the only present guide of action.
Yet man’s present state of sin makes it quite possible that the
decisions which are relatively right may be absolutely wrong. It
is not enough to take one’s time from the watch; the watch may go
wrong; there is a prior duty of regulating the watch by
astronomical standards. Bishop Gore: “Man’s first duty is, not to
_follow_ his conscience, but to _enlighten_ his conscience.”
Lowell says that the Scythians used to eat their grandfathers out
of humanity. Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300—“Nothing is so stubborn
or so fanatical as a wrongly instructed conscience, as Paul showed
in his own case by his own confession” (_Acts 26:9_—“_I verily
thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the
name of Jesus of Nazareth_”).
D. Conscience the moral judiciary of the soul.—From what has been
previously said, it is evident that only 3. and 4. are properly included
under the term conscience. Conscience is the moral judiciary of the
soul—the power within of judgment and command. Conscience must judge
according to the law given to it, and therefore, since the moral standard
accepted by the reason may be imperfect, its decisions, while relatively
just, may be absolutely unjust.—1. and 2. belong to the _moral reason_,
but not to conscience proper. Hence the duty of enlightening and
cultivating the moral reason, so that conscience may have a proper
standard of judgment.—5. and 6. belong to the sphere of _moral sentiment_,
and not to conscience proper. The office of conscience is to “bear
witness” (Rom. 2:15).
In _Rom. 2:15_—“_they show the work of the law written in their
hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their
thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them_”—we have
conscience clearly distinguished both from the law and the
perception of law on the one hand, and from the moral sentiments
of approbation and disapprobation on the other. Conscience does
not furnish the law, but it bears witness with the law which is
furnished by other sources. It is not “that power of mind by which
moral law is discovered to each individual” (Calderwood, Moral
Philosophy, 77), nor can we speak of “Conscience, the Law” (as
Whewell does in his Elements of Morality, 1:259-266). Conscience
is not the law-book, in the court room, but it is the judge,—whose
business is, not to make law, but to decide cases according to the
law given to him.
As conscience is not legislative, so it is not retributive; as it
is not the law-book, so it is not the sheriff. We say, indeed, in
popular language, that conscience scourges or chastises, but it is
only in the sense in which we say that the judge punishes,—_i.
e._, through the sheriff. The moral sentiments are the
sheriff,—they carry out the decisions of conscience, the judge;
but they are not themselves conscience, any more than the sheriff
is the judge.
Only this doctrine, that conscience does not discover law, can
explain on the one hand the fact that men are bound to follow
their consciences, and on the other hand the fact that their
consciences so greatly differ as to what is right or wrong in
particular cases. The truth is, that conscience is uniform and
infallible, in the sense that it always decides rightly according
to the law given it. Men’s decisions vary, only because the moral
reason has presented to the conscience different standards by
which to judge.
Conscience can be educated only in the sense of acquiring greater
facility and quickness in making its decisions. Education has its
chief effect, not upon the conscience, but upon the moral reason,
in rectifying its erroneous, or imperfect standards of judgment.
Give conscience a right law by which to judge, and its decisions
will be uniform, and absolutely as well as relatively just. We are
bound, not only to “follow our conscience,” but to have a right
conscience to follow,—and to follow it, not as one follows the
beast he drives, but as the soldier follows his commander. Robert
J. Burdette: “Following conscience as a guide is like following
one’s nose. It is important to get the nose pointed right before
it is safe to follow it. A man can keep the approval of his own
conscience in very much the same way that he can keep directly
behind his nose, and go wrong all the time.”
Conscience is the con-knowing of a particular act or state, as
coming under the law accepted by the reason as to right and wrong;
and the judgment of conscience subsumes this act or state under
that general standard. Conscience cannot _include_ the law—cannot
itself _be_ the law,—because reason only knows, never _con_-knows.
Reason says _scio_; only judgment says _conscio_.
This view enables us to reconcile the intuitional and the
empirical theories of morals. Each has its element of truth. The
original sense of right and wrong is intuitive,—no education could
ever impart the idea of the difference between right and wrong to
one who had it not. But what classes of things _are_ right or
wrong, we learn by the exercise of our logical intelligence, in
connection with experiences of utility, influences of society and
tradition, and positive divine revelation. Thus our moral reason,
through a combination of intuition and education, of internal and
external information as to general principles of right and wrong,
furnishes the standard according to which conscience may judge the
particular cases which come before it.
This moral reason may become depraved by sin, so that the light
becomes darkness (_Mat. 6:22, 23_) and conscience has only a
perverse standard by which to judge. The “_weak_” conscience (_1
Cor. 8:12_) is one whose standard of judgment is yet imperfect;
the conscience “_branded_” (Rev. Vers.) or “_seared_” (A. V.) “_as
with a hot iron_” (_1 Tim. 4:2_) is one whose standard has been
wholly perverted by practical disobedience. The word and the
Spirit of God are the chief agencies in rectifying our standards
of judgment, and so of enabling conscience to make absolutely
right decisions. God can so unite the soul to Christ, that it
becomes partaker on the one hand of his satisfaction to justice
and is thus “_sprinkled from an evil conscience_” (_Heb. 10:22_),
and on the other hand of his sanctifying power and is thus enabled
in certain respects to obey God’s command and to speak of a “_good
conscience_” (_1 Pet. 3:16_—of single act; _3:21_—of state)
instead of an “_evil conscience_” (_Heb. 10:22_) or a conscience
“_defiled_” (_Tit. 1:15_) by sin. Here the “_good conscience_” is
the conscience which has been obeyed by the will, and the “_evil
conscience_” the conscience which has been disobeyed; with the
result, in the first case, of approval from the moral sentiments,
and, in the second case, of disapproval.
E. Conscience in its relation to God as law-giver.—Since conscience, in
the proper sense, gives uniform and infallible judgment that the right is
supremely obligatory, and that the wrong must be forborne at every cost,
it can be called an echo of God’s voice, and an indication in man of that
which his own true being requires.
Conscience has sometimes been described as the voice of God in the
soul, or as the personal presence and influence of God himself.
But we must not identify conscience with God. D. W. Faunce:
“Conscience is not God,—it is only a part of one’s self. To build
up a religion about one’s own conscience, as if it were God, is
only a refined selfishness—a worship of one part of one’s self by
another part of one’s self.” In The Excursion, Wordsworth speaks
of conscience as “God’s most intimate presence in the soul And his
most perfect image in the world.” But in his Ode to Duty he more
discreetly writes: “Stern daughter of the voice of God! O Duty! if
that name thou love, Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the
erring, and reprove, Thou who art victory and law When empty
terrors overawe, From vain temptations dost set free And calmst
the weary strife of frail humanity!” Here is an allusion to the
Hebrew Bath Kol. “The Jews say that the Holy Spirit spoke during
the Tabernacle by Urim and Thummim, under the first Temple by the
Prophets, and under the second Temple by the Bath Kol—a divine
intimation as inferior to the oracular voice proceeding from the
mercy seat as a daughter is supposed to be inferior to her mother.
It is also used in the sense of an approving conscience. In this
case it is the echo of the voice of God in those who by obeying
hear” (Hershon’s Talmudic Miscellany, 2, note). This phrase, “the
echo of God’s voice,” is a correct description of conscience, and
Wordsworth probably had it in mind when he spoke of duty as “the
daughter of the voice of God.” Robert Browning describes
conscience as “the great beacon-light God sets in all.... The
worst man upon earth ... knows in his conscience more Of what
right is, than arrives at birth In the best man’s acts that we bow
before.” Jackson, James Martineau, 154—The sense of obligation is
“a piercing ray of the great Orb of souls.” On Wordsworth’s
conception of conscience, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 365-368.
Since the activity of the immanent God reveals itself in the
normal operations of our own faculties, conscience might be also
regarded as man’s true self over against the false self which we
have set up against it. Theodore Parker defines conscience as “our
consciousness of the conscience of God.” In his fourth year, says
Chadwick, his biographer (pages 12, 13, 185), young Theodore saw a
little spotted tortoise and lifted his hand to strike. All at once
something checked his arm, and a voice within said clear and loud:
“It is wrong.” He asked his mother what it was that told him it
was wrong. She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and
taking him in her arms said: “Some men call it conscience, but I
prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you
listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and
will always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear and
disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and will leave
you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on your
hearing this little voice.” R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man
and of God, 87, 171—“Man has conscience, as he has talents.
Conscience, no more than talent, makes him good. He is good, only
as he follows conscience and uses talent.... The relation between
the terms consciousness and conscience, which are in fact but
forms of the same word, testifies to the fact that it is in the
action of conscience that man’s consciousness of himself is
chiefly experienced.”
The conscience of the regenerate man may have such right
standards, and its decisions may be followed by such uniformly
right action, that its voice, though it is not itself God’s voice,
is yet the very echo of God’s voice. The renewed conscience may
take up into itself, and may express, the witness of the Holy
Spirit (_Rom. 9:1_—“_I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my
conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Spirit_”; _cf._
_8:16_—“_the Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that
we are children of God_”). But even when conscience judges
according to imperfect standards, and is imperfectly obeyed by the
will, there is a spontaneity in its utterances and a sovereignty
in its commands. It declares that whatever is right must be done.
The imperative of conscience is a “categorical imperative” (Kant).
It is independent of the human will. Even when disobeyed, it still
asserts its authority. Before conscience, every other impulse and
affection of man’s nature is called to bow.
F. Conscience in its relation to God as holy.—Conscience is not an
original authority. It points to something higher than itself. The
“authority of conscience” is simply the authority of the moral law, or
rather, the authority of the personal God, of whose nature the law is but
a transcript. Conscience, therefore, with its continual and supreme demand
that the right should be done, furnishes the best witness to man of the
existence of a personal God, and of the supremacy of holiness in him in
whose image we are made.
In knowing self in connection with moral law, man not only gets
his best knowledge of self, but his best knowledge of that other
self opposite to him, namely, God. Gordon, Christ of To-day,
236—“The conscience is the true Jacob’s ladder, set in the heart
of the individual and reaching unto heaven; and upon it the angels
of self-reproach and self-approval ascend and descend.” This is of
course true if we confine our thoughts to the mandatory element in
revelation. There is a higher knowledge of God which is given only
in grace. Jacob’s ladder symbolizes the Christ who publishes not
only the gospel but the law, and not only the law but the gospel.
Dewey, Psychology, 344—“Conscience is intuitive, not in the sense
that it enunciates universal laws and principles, for it lays down
no laws. Conscience is a name for the experience of personality
that any given act is in harmony or in discord with a truly
realized personality.” Because obedience to the dictates of
conscience is always relatively right, Kant could say that “an
erring conscience is a chimæra.” But because the law accepted by
conscience may be absolutely wrong, conscience may in its
decisions greatly err from the truth. S. S. Times: “Saul before
his conversion was a conscientious wrong doer. His spirit and
character was commendable, while his conduct was reprehensible.”
We prefer to say that Saul’s zeal for the law was a zeal to make
the law subservient to his own pride and honor.
Horace Bushnell said that the first requirement of a great
ministry is a great conscience. He did not mean the punitive,
inhibitory conscience merely, but rather the discovering,
arousing, inspiring conscience, that sees at once the great things
to be done, and moves toward them with a shout and a song. This
unbiased and pure conscience is inseparable from the sense of its
relation to God and to God’s holiness. Shakespeare, Henry VI, 2d
Part, 3:2—“What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?
Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just; And he but naked,
though locked up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is
corrupted.” Huxley, in his lecture at Oxford in 1893, admits and
even insists that ethical practice must be and should be in
opposition to evolution; that the methods of evolution do not
account for ethical man and his ethical progress. Morality is not
a product of the same methods by which lower orders have advanced
in perfection of organization, namely, by the struggle for
existence and survival of the fittest. Human progress is moral, is
in freedom, is under the law of love, is different in kind from
physical evolution. James Russell Lowell: “In vain we call old
notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing: The ten
commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.”
R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God, 161—“Conscience
lives in human nature like a rightful king, whose claim can never
be forgotten by his people, even though they dethrone and misuse
him, and whose presence on the seat of judgment can alone make the
nation to be at peace with itself.” Seth, Ethical Principles,
424—“The Kantian theory of autonomy does not tell the whole story
of the moral life. Its unyielding Ought, its categorical
Imperative, issues not merely from the depths of our own nature,
but from the heart of the universe itself. We are
self-legislative; but we reënact the law already enacted by God;
we recognize, rather than constitute, the law of our own being.
The moral law is an echo, within our own souls, of the voice of
the Eternal, _‘__whose offspring we are__’__ (Acts 17:28)_.”
Schenkel, Christliche Dogmatik, 1:135-155—“The conscience is the
organ by which the human spirit finds God in itself and so becomes
aware of itself in him. Only in conscience is man conscious of
himself as eternal, as distinct from God, yet as normally bound to
be determined wholly by God. When we subject ourselves wholly to
God, conscience gives us peace. When we surrender to the world the
allegiance due only to God, conscience brings remorse. In this
latter case we become aware that while God is in us, we are no
longer in God. Religion is exchanged for ethics, the relation of
communion for the relation of separation. In conscience alone man
distinguishes himself absolutely from the brute. Man does not make
conscience, but conscience makes man. Conscience feels every
separation from God as an injury to self. Faith is the relating of
the self-consciousness to the God-consciousness, the becoming sure
of our own personality, in the absolute personality of God. Only
in faith does conscience come to itself. But by sin this
faith-consciousness may be turned into law-consciousness. Faith
affirms God _in_ us; Law affirms God _outside_ of us.” Schenkel
differs from Schleiermacher in holding that religion is not
feeling but conscience, and that it is not a sense of dependence
on the world, but a sense of dependence on God. Conscience
recognizes a God distinct from the universe, a moral God, and so
makes an unmoral religion impossible.
Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 283-285, Moral Science, 49, Law of
Love, 41—“Conscience is the moral consciousness of man in view of
his own actions as related to moral law. It is a double knowledge
of self and of the law. Conscience is not the whole of the moral
nature. It presupposes the moral reason, which recognizes the
moral law and affirms its universal obligation for all moral
beings. It is the office of conscience to bring man into personal
relation to this law. It sets up a tribunal within him by which
his own actions are judged. Not conscience, but the moral reason,
judges of the conduct of others. This last is _science_, but not
_conscience_.”
Peabody, Moral Philos., 41-60—“Conscience not a source, but a
means, of knowledge. Analogous to consciousness. A judicial
faculty. Judges according to the law before it. Verdict (verum
dictum) always relatively right, although, by the absolute
standard of right, it may be wrong. Like all perceptive faculties,
educated by use (not by increase of knowledge only, for man may
act worse, the more knowledge he has). For absolutely right
decisions, conscience is dependent upon knowledge. To recognize
conscience as _legislator_ (as well as judge), is to fail to
recognize any objective standard of right.” The Two Consciences,
46, 47—“Conscience the Law, and Conscience the Witness. The latter
is the true and proper Conscience.”
H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theology, 178-191—“The unity of
conscience is not in its being one faculty or in its performing
one function, but in its having one _object_, its relation to one
idea, viz., _right_.... The term ‘conscience’ no more designates a
special faculty than the term ‘religion’ does (or than the
‘æsthetic sense’).... The existence of conscience proves a moral
law above us; it leads logically to a Moral Governor; ... it
implies an essential distinction between right and wrong, an
immutable morality; ... yet needs to be enlightened; ... men may
be conscientious in iniquity; ... conscience is not righteousness;
... this may only show the greatness of the depravity, having
conscience, and yet ever disobeying it.”
On the New Testament passages with regard to conscience, see
Hofmann, Lehre von dem Gewissen, 30-38; Kähler, Das Gewissen,
225-293. For the view that conscience is primarily the cognitive
or intuitional power of the soul, see Calderwood, Moral
Philosophy, 77; Alexander, Moral Science, 20; McCosh, Div. Govt.,
297-312; Talbot, Ethical Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July,
1877:257-274; Park, Discourses, 260-296; Whewell, Elements of
Morality, 1:259-266. On the whole subject of conscience, see
Mansel, Metaphysics, 158-170; Martineau, Religion and Materialism,
45—“The discovery of duty is as distinctly relative to an
objective Righteousness as the perception of form to an external
space”; also Types, 2:27-30—“We first judge ourselves; then
others”; 53, 54, 74, 103—“Subjective morals are as absurd as
subjective mathematics.” The best brief treatment of the whole
subject is that of E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of
Morality, 26-78. See also Wayland, Moral Science, 49; Harless,
Christian Ethics, 45, 60; H. N. Day, Science of Ethics, 17; Janet,
Theory of Morals, 264, 348; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 62; _cf._
Schwegler, Hist. Philosophy, 233; Haven, Mor. Philos., 41;
Fairchild, Mor. Philos., 75; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 71;
Passavant, Das Gewissen; Wm. Schmid, Das Gewissen.
2. Will.
A. Will defined.—Will is the soul’s power to choose between motives and to
direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in
other words, the soul’s power to choose both an end and the means to
attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the
choice of means we call executive volition.
In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom
of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul’s
power to act according to motive, _i. e._, to act out its nature,
but he denies the soul’s power to choose between motives, _i. e._,
to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has
been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy
being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to
change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of
action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards
(Works, 1:483) shows what his father’s doctrine of the will
implies, when he says: “Beasts therefore, according to the measure
of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not
liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral
agents.” Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his
sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges
the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power
of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was
unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human
will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen,
Jonathan Edwards, 109.
For references, and additional statements with regard to the will
and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and
article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and
reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon
the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian
liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act
without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral
Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism
propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works,
vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility
with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of
volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action
as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The
Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in
the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a
motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and
will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and
therefore the cause of its own act.” For objections to the
Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and
Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312;
E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137;
Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.
James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting
agency.” 2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a
great many more besides. Reason, _per se_, can inhibit no
impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an
impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which
will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other
way.” 549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the
greatest resistance.” 562—“Effort of attention is the essential
phenomenon of will.” 567—“The terminus of the psychological
process is volition; the point to which the will is directly
applied is always an idea.” 568—“Though attention is the first
thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is
attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not
only: It is a reality; but we also say: ‘Let it be a reality.’ ”
571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions
of the object, or are they not? We answer, _No_, and so we
maintain freedom of the will.” 584—“The soul presents nothing,
creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all
possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it
figures not as an _epiphenomenon_, but as something from which the
play gets moral support.” Alexander, Theories of the Will,
201-214, finds in Reid’s Active Powers of the Human Mind the most
adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.
B. Will and other faculties.—(_a_) We accept the threefold division of
human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (_b_) Intellect is
the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections);
will is the soul choosing (end or means). (_c_) In every act of the soul,
all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling
involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (_d_)
Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the
former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before
willing. (_e_) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of
these is possible without willing.
Socrates to Theætetus: “It would be a singular thing, my lad, if
each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were
seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite
into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with
this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive
sensible objects.” Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling
are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract,
while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the
universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling,
and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is
will.” 364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation
is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of
one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of
the self is thrown into it.” 411—“The man determines himself by
setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets
up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without
will, for thought implies inhibition.” Ribot, Diseases of the
Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to
inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its
roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond
the individual, into the species and into all species.”
As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly
will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:
“Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.” There is no perception, and there
is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the
will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind,
July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the
self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more
interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter
character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the
facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man.
T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying
itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but
that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus
identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than
another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of
Ethical Postulate: “The only hope of finding a place for real free
will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological
account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will
again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate.
Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power
of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is
necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.” Without will
to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we
can have no _science_; without will to select and combine the
elements of imagination, we can have no _art_; without will to
choose between evil and good, we can have no _morality_. Ælfric,
A. D. 900: “The verb ‘to will’ has no imperative, for that the
will must be always free.”
C. Will and permanent states.—(_a_) Though every act of the soul involves
the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty
may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of intellect,
of affection, of will. (_b_) This predominant action of any single faculty
produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action
of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well
as a permanent bent to the will itself. (_c_) Each faculty, therefore, has
its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may
originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may
with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent
voluntary states we denominate character.
I “make up” my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the
influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these
ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine
me.” All men can say with Robert Browning’s Paracelsus: “I have
subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.” “Sow an
act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character;
sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” Tito, in George Eliot’s
Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson’s story of that name, are
instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil
ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the
will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World,
Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall
frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall
form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is
the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the
motive, but in the making of the motive.” By every decision of the
will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an
object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which
thought may hereafter more or less easily travel. “Nothing makes
an inroad, without making a road.” By slight efforts of attention
to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may “_make level
in the desert a highway for our God_” (_Is. 40:3_), or render the
soul a hard trodden ground impervious to “_the word of the
kingdom_” (_Mat. 13:19_).
The word “character” meant originally the mark of the engraver’s
tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the
collective result of the engraver’s work. The use of the word in
morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into
the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill: “A character
is a completely fashioned will.” We may talk therefore of a
“generic volition” (Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will
toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man’s shadow, sometimes
longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other
hand, is the man’s true self—“what a man is in the dark” (Dwight
L. Moody). In this sense, “purpose is the autograph of mind.” Duke
of Wellington: “Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”
When Macbeth says: “If ’twere done when ’tis done, Then ’twere
well ’twere done quickly,” the trouble is that when ’tis done, it
is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle
of socialism in the maxim: “A man’s character is made for him, not
by him.” Hence he would change man’s diet or his environment, as a
means of forming man’s character. But Jesus teaches that what
defiles comes not from without but from within (_Mat. 15:18_).
Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus
is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man’s character is his destiny. On
habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.
D. Will and motives.—(_a_) The permanent states just mentioned, when they
have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and
dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the
strength of motives. (_b_) These motives often conflict, and though the
soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between
motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its
activities. (_c_) Motives are not _causes_, which compel the will, but
_influences_, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is
proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has
made them what they are.
“Incentives come from the soul’s self: the rest avail not.” The
same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as
they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in
George Washington’s refusing, and Benedict Arnold’s accepting, the
bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:
“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds
innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.” Jonathan Edwards
made motives to be _efficient_ causes, when they are only _final_
causes. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It
is always a man’s fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never
takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are
ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not
themselves. Bowne: “Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are
alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in
the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be
the power to determine ourselves accordingly.” Bowne, Principles
of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief
in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so
that it is only executive freedom that is denied.” Bowne, Theory
of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must
invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make
shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth,
but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus
error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but
self-control in accordance with them.”
The will, in choosing _between_ motives, chooses _with_ a motive,
namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion,
76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The
will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and
environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought
is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is
transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double
transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of
man.” New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self
that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is
due.” William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait
the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master
of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far
as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is
conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the
deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his
distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must
have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive
nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it
is itself the product of freedom in moral development. _Matt.
12:33_—‘_make the tree good, and its fruit good_’—combines both.
Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary
decisions of the will (‘_make the tree good_’). Some determinism
is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will’s remaining
power of choice] and partly traced back to a former
self-determining.” _Ibid._, 67—“If freedom be the self-determining
of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found
wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a
self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs
from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is
found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as
presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual
self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a
self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We
must, therefore, hold the doctrine of a _conditional_ and
_limited_ freedom.”
E. Will and contrary choice.—(_a_) Though no act of pure will is possible,
the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its
previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary
choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (_b_) But in so far as
will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect
and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a
single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power
of a contrary choice. (_c_) In this latter case he can change his
character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations
fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives
to an opposite course.
There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters,
Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing
is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind
conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will
strives to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause.
J. F. Watts: “We know causality only as we know will, _i. e._,
where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore
have more than one certain effect. In the external material world
we cannot find _cause_, but only _antecedent_. To construct a
theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to
seek the living among the dead. Will is power to _make_ a
decision, not to _be made_ by decisions, to decide between
motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the
trial between motives? Only the self.” While we agree with the
above in its assertion of the certainty of nature’s sequences, we
object to its attribution even to nature of anything like
necessity. Since nature’s laws are merely the habits of God, God’s
causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of
freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as
most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to
have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives
which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses
of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for
them we would be no better than the beasts that perish. “Unless
above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”
Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute
will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of
Herbert Spencer’s argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his
Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or
they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of
Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be
any such thing as free will.” Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds
that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think
itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that
to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for
him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to
collect the ‘data of ethics’ when there is no recognition of man
as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and
the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor
lost.” Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of
Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very
term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that
the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is
free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which is
_fatalism_—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a
force acting from within, which is _determinism_—is immediately
evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by
an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives,
nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a
proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have an _influence_,
but influence is not to be confounded with _causal_ efficiency.”
Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is
neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not
freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure
spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it
is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited
however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and
convictions, by feelings and social relations.” Ernest Naville, in
Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in
producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in
choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It is _choice_, not
_creation_, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose
whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it
down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the
will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between
these impulses.” Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power
of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of
choosing an end or law, and of governing one’s self accordingly.”
Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is “not a power to choose
without motive.” It “does not exclude motives to the contrary.”
Volition “supposes two or more objects between which election is
made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one
motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception
and the act two motives at least are required.” Lyall, Intellect,
Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons,
inducements—but it is not _caused_. It obeys or acts under
inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena
of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it,
rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this
is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this
phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in
its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will
can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an
intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate
phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”
F. Will and responsibility.—(_a_) By repeated acts of will put forth in a
given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or
in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future
good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may
be the “bondservant of sin” (John 8:31-36) or the “servant of
righteousness” (Rom. 6:15-23; _cf._ Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made
perfect”). (_b_) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as
for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts;
for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the
acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are
maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).
Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the
two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual
limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more
and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually
choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality
according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other
causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same
experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when
we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.” R. T.
Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making a _will_ is
significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the
amount of the testator’s property, the number of his relatives,
the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”
Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives,
or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of
being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives
= sensibilities. Motive is not _cause_; does not determine; is
only influence. Yet determination is always made under the
influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained
by any law of uniform influence of motives, but by _character_ in
the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by
action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops
the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies
motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and
modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect,
sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed
intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a
powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary
choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself
ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by
choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete
indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less
expressions of character already formed. The theory that
indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never
acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every
act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if
acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a
choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility
and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”
My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and
environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the
product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action
practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for
perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act
according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And
this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It
is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again.
By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but
free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the
action of grace can free it.” Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:
“Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make
them thine.” Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one
might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian
ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most
clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it
discloses the remedy in Christ: “_If therefore the Son shall make
you free, ye shall be free indeed_” (_John 8:36_).
Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal
freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of
determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which
this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the man
from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as
an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two
things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is
that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in
every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only
if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate;
but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and
verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.” Morell, Mental
Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and so _far_ the will
is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less
or a greater power of influencing his life, and so _far_ the man
is a free agent.” Santayana: “A free man, because he is free, may
make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he
cannot make himself free.” Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51,
65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity]
seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the
other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the
moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think,
at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my
formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite
conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the
evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”
G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(_a_) We can be responsible for
the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will’s
inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we
originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in
originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of
Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its
first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural
generation from him. (_b_) While there remains to man, even in his present
condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient
volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited
extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of
his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent
constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that
it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil
choice, and renders necessary a special working of God’s Spirit upon his
heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of
Regeneration.
There is such a thing as “psychical automatism” (Ladd, Philos.
Mind, 169). Mother: “Oscar, why can’t you be good?” “Mamma, it
makes me so tired!” The wayward four-year-old is a type of
universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have
energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all
freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant
evil. T. C. Chamberlain: “Conditions may make choices run rigidly
in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical
phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice
between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can
be safely predicted.” Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but
claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion,
155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and
external causes, it does not follow that they are determined
_necessarily_, and this makes all the difference between the
theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as
first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and
therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The
condition to the effective operation of a _motive_—as
distinguished from a _motor_—is the acquiescence of the first
cause upon whom that motive is operating.” Fichte: “If any one
adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must
seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness
of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty,
virtue, and morality have any existence.” Lessing: “Kein Mensch
muss müssen.” Delitzsch: “Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist
wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”
Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural
causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for
causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get
our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the
whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully
the determinism of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a
turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements, _i.
e._, was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin,
Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the
outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements,
but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned
upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference
and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the
unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into
volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The
motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total
expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of
one’s self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a
kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For
use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the
devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.” 3:2—“Purpose is but
the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”
4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for this
_would_ changes And hath abatements and delays as many As there
are tongues, are hands, are accidents.” Goethe: “Von der Gewalt
die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich
überwindet.”
Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The
chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action
of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting
loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it
is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality,
will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject
volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes
possession of the personality and uses it for its natural
desires.” Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot,
Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It
is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a
cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the
last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.” Yet Maudsley
argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This
implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with
power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but
God can do more.
H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism
holds that man’s actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon
his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act
contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and
pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if
it does not destroy man’s conviction with regard to responsibility, sin,
guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other
hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man’s faith in his own power as
well as in God’s power of initiating action, and so obscures the
possibility of atonement.
Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám’s Rubáiyát: “With
earth’s first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the
last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation
wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.” William James,
Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves
pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of
increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology
antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life
sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton,
review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The
determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that
did not express previous tendency, _i. e._, a man is responsible
only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain
will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism
settles for him whether he shall make it or no.” Royce, World and
Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are
no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a
mosaic.” The French monarch announced that all his subjects should
be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody
should choose a different religion from the king’s. “Johnny, did
you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”
“Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and
she chose the little one.” Hobson’s choice was always the choice
of the last horse in the row. The bartender with revolver in hand
met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:
“You’ll drink that whisky, and you’ll like it too!”
Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly
present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism
largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the
spontaneity which he finds in himself.” Freedom does not
contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature,
March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to
increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its
direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor
do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy
but a guiding effect.” J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir.
Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A
very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in
the steering of a modern steamship.” James Seth, in Philos. Rev.,
3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of
energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and
directs the channels which activity shall take.” See also James
Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical
Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the
demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its
philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy
of such scientific categories.” Shadworth Hodgson: “Either liberty
is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the
categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.” Wagner
is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt;
action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious
fate rules all. Life: “The views upon heredity Of scientists
remind one That, shape one’s conduct as one may, One’s future is
behind one.”
We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but
to his infinite personality. If man is made in God’s image, why we
may not trace man’s willing also back, not to motives and
antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God’s
fiat, but we may speak of man’s fiat also. Napoleon: “There shall
be no Alps!” Dutch William III: “I may fall, but shall fight every
ditch, and die in the last one!” When God energizes the will, it
becomes indomitable. _Phil. 4:13_—“_I can do all things in him
that strengtheneth me._” Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a
determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom
is to act out one’s own nature. He regarded the will as only the
nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense
that will determines the self, but in the sense that self
determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless
self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and
logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he
conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted,
though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery
as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are
often directly in the face of the current of a man’s life. Yet he
held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary
choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the
moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.
Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice
is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were
comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is,
it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting
conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally
free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the
mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another
stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our
individual selves.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an
able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and
Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward
Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James
in America, as recent advocates of free will.
Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and
above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of
the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute
idealism, like Green’s, will not recognize the existence of this
Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially
240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field
together, they cannot compare themselves _inter se_: they need and
meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The
decision will not be _unmotived_, for it will have its reasons. It
will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for
it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by
a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected
by them.” 241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot
come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that
nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”
309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of
deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the
German schools.” 311—“The whole illusion of Necessity springs from
the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of
Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects
that transcend it.”
See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel,
Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory,
Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan.
1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp.
Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in
Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology,
97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of
Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to
Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159;
Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886;
Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth,
Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For
Lotze’s view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and
his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.
Chapter II. The Original State Of Man.
In determining man’s original state, we are wholly dependent upon
Scripture. This represents human nature as coming from God’s hand, and
therefore “very good” (Gen. 1:31). It moreover draws a parallel between
man’s first state and that of his restoration (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24). In
interpreting these passages, however, we are to remember the twofold
danger, on the one hand of putting man so high that no progress is
conceivable, on the other hand of putting him so low that he could not
fall. We shall the more easily avoid these dangers by distinguishing
between the essentials and the incidents of man’s original state.
_Gen. 1:31_—“_And God saw everything that he had made, and,
behold, it was very good_”; _Col. 3:10_—“_the new man, that is
being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created
him_”; _Eph. 4:24_—“_the new man that after God hath been created
in righteousness and holiness of truth._”
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:337-399—“The original state must be (1)
a contrast to sin; (2) a parallel to the state of restoration.
Difficulties in the way of understanding it: (1) What lives in
regeneration is something foreign to our present nature (‘_it is
no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me_’—_Gal. 2:20_); but
the original state was something native. (2) It was a state of
childhood. We cannot fully enter into childhood, though we see it
about us, and have ourselves been through it. The original state
is yet more difficult to reproduce to reason. (3) Man’s external
circumstances and his organization have suffered great changes, so
that the present is no sign of the past. We must recur to the
Scriptures, therefore, as well-nigh our only guide.” John Caird,
Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:164-195, points out that ideal
perfection is to be looked for, not at the outset, but at the
final stage of the spiritual life. If man were wholly finite, he
would not know his finitude.
Lord Bacon: “The sparkle of the purity of man’s first estate.”
Calvin: “It was monstrous impiety that a son of the earth should
not be satisfied with being made after the similitude of God,
unless he could also be equal with him.” Prof. Hastings: “The
truly natural is not the real, but the ideal. Made in the image of
God—between that beginning and the end stands God made in the
image of man.” On the general subject of man’s original state, see
Zöckler, 3:283-290; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:215-243;
Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:267-276; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 374-375;
Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:92-116.
I. Essentials of Man’s Original State.
These are summed up in the phrase “the image of God.” In God’s image man
is said to have been created (Gen. 1:26, 27). In what did this image of
God consist? We reply that it consisted in 1. Natural likeness to God, or
personality; 2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.
_Gen. 1:26, 27_—“_And God said, Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness.... And God created man in his own image, in
the image of God created he him._” It is of great importance to
distinguish clearly between the two elements embraced in this
image of God, the natural and the moral. By virtue of the first,
man possessed certain _faculties_ (intellect, affection, will); by
virtue of the second, he had _right tendencies_ (bent, proclivity,
disposition). By virtue of the first, he was invested with certain
_powers_; by virtue of the second, a certain _direction_ was
imparted to these powers. As created in the natural image of God,
man had a moral _nature_; as created in the moral image of God,
man had a holy _character_. The first gave him _natural_ ability;
the second gave him _moral_ ability. The Greek Fathers emphasized
the first element, or _personality_; the Latin Fathers emphasized
the second element, or _holiness_. See Orr, God’s Image in Man.
As the Logos, or divine Reason, Christ Jesus, dwells in humanity
and constitutes the principle of its being, humanity shares with
Christ in the image of God. That image is never wholly lost. It is
completely restored in sinners when the Spirit of Christ gains
control of their wills and they merge their life in his. To those
who accused Jesus of blasphemy, he replied by quoting the words of
_Psalm 82:6_—“_I said, Ye are gods_”—words spoken of imperfect
earthly rulers. Thus, in _John 10:34-36_, Jesus, who constitutes
the very essence of humanity, justifies his own claim to divinity
by showing that even men who represent God are also in a minor
sense “_partakers of the divine nature_” (_2 Pet. 1:4_). Hence the
many legends, in heathen religions, of the divine descent of man.
_1 Cor. 11:3_—“_the head of every man is Christ._” In every man,
even the most degraded, there is an image of God to be brought
out, as Michael Angelo saw the angel in the rough block of marble.
This natural _worth_ does not imply _worthiness_; it implies only
capacity for redemption. “The abysmal depths of personality,”
which Tennyson speaks of, are sounded, as man goes down in thought
successively from individual sins to sin of the heart and to
race-sin. But “the deeper depth is out of reach To all, O God, but
thee.” From this deeper depth, where man is rooted and grounded in
God, rise aspirations for a better life. These are not due to the
man himself, but to Christ, the immanent God, who ever works
within him. Fanny J. Crosby: “Rescue the perishing, Care for the
dying.... Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter,
Feelings lie buried that grace can restore; Touched by a loving
heart, wakened by kindness, Chords that were broken will vibrate
once more.”
1. Natural likeness to God, or personality.
Man was created a personal being, and was by this personality
distinguished from the brute. By personality we mean the twofold power to
know self as related to the world and to God, and to determine self in
view of moral ends. By virtue of this personality, man could at his
creation choose which of the objects of his knowledge—self, the world, or
God—should be the norm and centre of his development. This natural
likeness to God is inalienable, and as constituting a capacity for
redemption gives value to the life even of the unregenerate (Gen. 9:6; 1
Cor. 11:7; James 3:9).
For definitions of personality, see notes on the Anthropological
Argument, page 82; on Pantheism, pages 104, 105; on the
Attributes, pages 252-254; and on the Person of Christ, in Part
VI. Here we may content ourselves with the formula: Personality =
self-consciousness + self-determination. _Self_-consciousness and
_self_-determination, as distinguished from the consciousness and
determination of the brute, involve all the higher mental and
moral powers which constitute us men. Conscience is but a mode of
their activity. Notice that the term “image” does not, in man,
imply _perfect_ representation. Only Christ is the “_very image_”
of God (_Heb. 1:3_), the “_image of the invisible God_” (_Col.
1:15_—on which see Lightfoot). Christ is the image of God
absolutely and archetypally; man, only relatively and
derivatively. But notice also that, since God is Spirit, man made
in God’s image cannot be a material thing. By virtue of his
possession of this first element of the image of God, namely,
personality, materialism is excluded.
This first element of the divine image man can never lose until he
ceases to be man. Even insanity can only obscure this natural
image,—it cannot destroy it. St. Bernard well said that it could
not be burned out, even in hell. The lost piece of money (_Luke
15:8_) still bore the image and superscription of the king, even
though it did not know it, and did not even know that it was lost.
Human nature is therefore to be reverenced, and he who destroys
human life is to be put to death: _Gen. 9:6_—“_for in the image of
God made he man_”; _1 Cor. 11:7_—“_a man indeed ought not to have
his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God_”;
_James 3:9_—even men whom we curse “_are made after the likeness
of God_”; _cf._ _Ps. 8:5_—“_thou hast made him but little lower
than God_”; _1 Pet. 2:17_—“_Honor all men._” In the being of every
man are continents which no Columbus has ever yet discovered,
depths of possible joy or sorrow which no plummet has ever yet
sounded. A whole heaven, a whole hell, may lie within the compass
of his single soul. If we could see the meanest real Christian as
he will be in the great hereafter, we should bow before him as
John bowed before the angel in the Apocalypse, for we should not
be able to distinguish him from God (_Rev. 22:8, 9_).
Sir William Hamilton: “On earth there is nothing great but man; In
man there is nothing great but mind.” We accept this dictum only
if “mind” can be understood to include man’s moral powers together
with the right direction of those powers. Shakespeare, Hamlet,
2:2—“What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how
infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!”
Pascal: “Man is greater than the universe; the universe may crush
him, but it does not know that it crushes him.” Whiton, Gloria
Patri, 94—“God is not only the Giver but the Sharer of my life. My
natural powers are that part of God’s power which is lodged with
me in trust to keep and use.” Man can be an _instrument_ of God,
without being an _agent_ of God. “Each man has his place and value
as a reflection of God and of Christ. Like a letter in a word, or
a word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context; but
the sentence is meaningless without him; rays from the whole
universe converge in him.” John Howe’s Living Temple shows the
greatness of human nature in its first construction and even in
its ruin. Only a noble ship could make so great a wreck.
Aristotle, Problem, sec. 30—“No excellent soul is exempt from a
mixture of madness.” Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi, 15—“There is
no great genius without a tincture of madness.”
Kant: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or
in that of any other, in every case as an _end_, and never as a
_means_ only.” If there is a divine element in every man, then we
have no right to _use_ a human being merely for our own pleasure
or profit. In receiving him we receive Christ, and in receiving
Christ we receive him who sent Christ (_Mat. 10:40_). Christ is
the vine and all men are his natural branches, cutting themselves
off only when they refuse to bear fruit, and condemning themselves
to the burning only because they destroy, so far as they can
destroy, God’s image in them, all that makes them worth preserving
(_John 15:1-6_). Cicero: “Homo mortalis deus.” This possession of
natural likeness to God, or personality, involves boundless
possibilities of good or ill, and it constitutes the natural
foundation of the love for man which is required of us by the law.
Indeed it constitutes the reason why Christ should die. Man was
worth redeeming. The woman whose ring slipped from her finger and
fell into the heap of mud in the gutter, bared her white arm and
thrust her hand into the slimy mass until she found her ring; but
she would not have done this if the ring had not contained a
costly diamond. The lost piece of money, the lost sheep, the lost
son, were worth effort to seek and to save (_Luke 15_). But, on
the other hand, it is folly when man, made in the image of God,
“blinds himself with clay.” The man on shipboard, who playfully
tossed up the diamond ring which contained his whole fortune, at
last to his distress tossed it overboard. There is a “_merchandise
of souls_” (_Rev. 18:13_) and we must not juggle with them.
Christ’s death for man, by showing the worth of humanity, has
recreated ethics. “Plato defended infanticide as under certain
circumstances permissible. Aristotle viewed slavery as founded in
the nature of things. The reason assigned was the essential
inferiority of nature on the part of the enslaved.” But the divine
image in man makes these barbarities no longer possible to us.
Christ sometimes looked upon men with anger, but he never looked
upon them with contempt. He taught the woman, he blessed the
child, he cleansed the leper, he raised the dead. His own death
revealed the infinite worth of the meanest human soul, and taught
us to count all men as brethren for whose salvation we may well
lay down our lives. George Washington answered the salute of his
slave. Abraham Lincoln took off his hat to a negro who gave him
his blessing as he entered Richmond; but a lady who had been
brought up under the old regime looked from a window upon the
scene with unspeakable horror. Robert Burns, walking with a
nobleman in Edinburgh, met an old townsfellow from Ayr and stopped
to talk with him. The nobleman, kept waiting, grew restive, and
afterward reproved Burns for talking to a man with so bad a coat.
Burns replied: “I was not talking to the coat,—I was talking to
the man.” Jean Ingelow: “The street and market place Grow holy
ground: each face—Pale faces marked with care, Dark, toilworn
brows—grows fair. King’s children are all these, though want and
sin Have marred their beauty, glorious within. We may not pass
them but with reverent eye.” See Porter, Human Intellect, 393,
394, 401; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:42; Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
2:343.
2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.
In addition to the powers of self-consciousness and self-determination
just mentioned, man was created with such a direction of the affections
and the will, as constituted God the supreme end of man’s being, and
constituted man a finite reflection of God’s moral attributes. Since
holiness is the fundamental attribute of God, this must of necessity be
the chief attribute of his image in the moral beings whom he creates. That
original righteousness was essential to this image, is also distinctly
taught in Scripture (Eccl. 7:29; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10).
Besides the possession of natural powers, the image of God
involves the possession of right moral tendencies. It is not
enough to say that man was created in a state of innocence. The
Scripture asserts that man had a righteousness like God’s: _Eccl.
7:29_—“_God made man upright_”; _Eph. 4:24_—“_the new man, that
after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of
truth_”—here Meyer says: “κατὰ Θεόν, ‘_after God_,’ _i. e._, _ad
exemplum Dei_, after the pattern of God (_Gal. 4:28_—κατὰ Ἰσαάκ,
‘after Isaac’ = as Isaac was). This phrase makes the creation of
the new man a parallel to that of our first parents, who were
created after God’s image; they too, before sin came into
existence through Adam, were sinless—‘_in righteousness and
holiness of truth_.’ ” On N. T. “truth” = rectitude, see Wendt,
Teaching of Jesus, 1:257-260.
Meyer refers also, as a parallel passage, to _Col. 3:10_—“_the new
man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him
that created him._” Here the “_knowledge_” referred to is that
knowledge of God which is the source of all virtue, and which is
inseparable from holiness of heart. “Holiness has two sides or
phases: (1) it is perception and knowledge; (2) it is inclination
and feeling” (Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:97). On _Eph. 4:24_ and _Col.
3:10_, the classical passages with regard to man’s original state,
see also the Commentaries of DeWette, Rückert, Ellicott, and
compare _Gen. 5:3_—“_And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years,
and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image,_” _i. e._,
in his own sinful likeness, which is evidently contrasted with the
“_likeness of God_” (_verse 1_) in which he himself had been
created (An. Par. Bible). _2 Cor. 4:4_—“_Christ, who is the image
of God_”—where the phrase “_image of God_” is not simply the
_natural_, but also the _moral_, image. Since Christ is the image
of God primarily in his holiness, man’s creation in the image of
God must have involved a holiness like Christ’s, so far as such
holiness could belong to a being yet untried, that is, so far as
respects man’s tastes and dispositions prior to moral action.
“Couldst thou in vision see Thyself the man God meant, Thou
nevermore couldst be The man thou art—content.” Newly created man
had right moral tendencies, as well as freedom from actual fault.
Otherwise the communion with God described in Genesis would not
have been possible. Goethe: “Unless the eye were sunlike, how
could it see the sun?” Because a holy disposition accompanied
man’s innocence, he was capable of obedience, and was guilty when
he sinned. The loss of this moral likeness to God was the chief
calamity of the Fall. Man is now “the glory and the scandal of the
universe.” He has defaced the image of God in his nature, even
though that image, in its natural aspect, is ineffaceable (E. H.
Johnson).
The dignity of human nature consists, not so much in what man is,
as in what God meant him to be, and in what God means him yet to
become, when the lost image of God is restored by the union of
man’s soul with Christ. Because of his future possibilities, the
meanest of mankind is sacred. The great sin of the second table of
the decalogue is the sin of despising our fellow man. To cherish
contempt for others can have its root only in idolatry of self and
rebellion against God. Abraham Lincoln said well that “God must
have liked common people,—else he would not have made so many of
them.” Regard for the image of God in man leads also to kind and
reverent treatment even of those lower animals in which so many
human characteristics are foreshadowed. Bradford, Heredity and
Christian Problems, 166—“The current philosophy says: The fittest
will survive; let the rest die. The religion of Christ says: That
maxim as applied to men is just, only as regards their
characteristics, of which indeed only the fittest should survive.
It does not and cannot apply to the men themselves, since all men,
being children of God, are supremely fit. The very fact that a
human being is sick, weak, poor, an outcast, and a vagabond, is
the strongest possible appeal for effort toward his salvation. Let
individuals look upon humanity from the point of view of Christ,
and they will not be long in finding ways in which environment can
be caused to work for righteousness.”
This original righteousness, in which the image of God chiefly consisted,
is to be viewed:
(_a_) Not as constituting the substance or essence of human nature,—for in
this case human nature would have ceased to exist as soon as man sinned.
Men every day change their tastes and loves, without changing the
essence or substance of their being. When sin is called a
“nature,” therefore (as by Shedd, in his Essay on “Sin a Nature,
and that Nature Guilt”), it is only in the sense of being
something inborn (_natura_, from _nascor_). Hereditary tastes may
just as properly be denominated a “nature” as may the substance of
one’s being. Moehler, the greatest modern Roman Catholic critic of
Protestant doctrine, in his Symbolism, 58, 59, absurdly holds
Luther to have taught that by the Fall man lost his essential
nature, and that another essence was substituted in its room.
Luther, however, is only rhetorical when he says: “It is the
nature of man to sin; sin constitutes the essence of man; the
nature of man since the Fall has become quite changed; original
sin is that very thing which is born of father and mother; the
clay out of which we are formed is damnable; the fœtus in the
maternal womb is sin; man as born of his father and mother,
together with his whole essence and nature, is not only a sinner
but sin itself.”
(_b_) Nor as a _gift_ from without, foreign to human nature, and added to
it after man’s creation,—for man is said to have possessed the divine
image by the fact of creation, and not by subsequent bestowal.
As men, since Adam, are born with a sinful nature, that is, with
tendencies away from God, so Adam was created with a holy nature,
that is, with tendencies toward God. Moehler says: “God cannot
give a man actions.” We reply: “No, but God can give man
dispositions; and he does this at the first creation, as well as
at the new creation (regeneration).”
(_c_) But rather, as an original direction or tendency of man’s affections
and will, still accompanied by the power of evil choice, and so, differing
from the perfected holiness of the saints, as instinctive affection and
child-like innocence differ from the holiness that has been developed and
confirmed by experience of temptation.
Man’s original righteousness was not immutable or indefectible;
there was still the possibility of sinning. Though the first man
was fundamentally good, he still had the power of choosing evil.
There was a bent of the affections and will toward God, but man
was not yet confirmed in holiness. Man’s love for God was like the
germinal filial affection in the child, not developed, yet
sincere—“caritas puerilis, non virilis.”
(_d_) As a moral disposition, moreover, which was propagable to Adam’s
descendants, if it continued, and which, though lost to him and to them,
if Adam sinned, would still leave man possessed of a natural likeness to
God which made him susceptible of God’s redeeming grace.
Hooker (Works, ed. Keble, 2:683) distinguishes between aptness and
ableness. The latter, men have lost; the former, they retain,—else
grace could not work in us, more than in the brutes. Hase: “Only
enough likeness to God remained to remind man of what he had lost,
and enable him to feel the hell of God’s forsaking.” The moral
likeness to God can be restored, but only by God himself. God
secures this to men by making “_the light of the gospel of the
glory of Christ, who is the image of God, ... dawn upon them_” (_2
Cor. 4:4_). Pusey made _Ps. 72:6_—“_He will come down like rain
upon the mown grass_”—the image of a world hopelessly dead, but
with a hidden capacity for receiving life. Dr. Daggett: “Man is a
‘_son of the morning_’ (_Is. 14:12_), fallen, yet arrested midway
between heaven and hell, a prize between the powers of light and
darkness.” See Edwards, Works, 2:19, 20, 381-390; Hopkins, Works,
1:162; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:50-66; Augustine, De Civitate Dei,
14:11.
In the light of the preceding investigation, we may properly estimate two
theories of man’s original state which claim to be more Scriptural and
reasonable:
A. The image of God as including only personality.
This theory denies that any positive determination to virtue inhered
originally in man’s nature, and regards man at the beginning as simply
possessed of spiritual powers, perfectly adjusted to each other. This is
the view of Schleiermacher, who is followed by Nitzsch, Julius Müller, and
Hofmann.
For the view here combated, see Schleiermacher, Christl. Glaube,
sec. 60; Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine, 201; Julius
Müller, Doct. of Sin, 2:113-133, 350-357; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis,
1:287-291; Bib. Sac., 7:409-425. Julius Müller’s theory of the
Fall in a preëxistent state makes it impossible for him to hold
here that Adam was possessed of moral likeness to God. The origin
of his view of the image of God renders it liable to suspicion.
Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 113—“The original state of man was that of
child-like innocence or morally indifferent naturalness, which had
in itself indeed the possibility (_Anlage_) of ideal development,
but in such a way that its realization could be reached only by
struggle with its natural opposite. The image of God was already
present in the original state, but only as the possibility
(_Anlage_) of real likeness to God—the endowment of reason which
belonged to human personality. The _reality_ of a spirit like that
of God has appeared first in the _second_ Adam, and has become the
principle of the kingdom of God.”
Raymond (Theology, 2:43, 132) is an American representative of the
view that the image of God consists in mere personality: “The
image of God in which man was created did not consist in an
inclination and determination of the will to holiness.” This is
maintained upon the ground that such a moral likeness to God would
have rendered it impossible for man to fall,—to which we reply
that Adam’s righteousness was not immutable, and the bias of his
will toward God did not render it impossible for him to sin.
Motives do not compel the will, and Adam at least had a certain
power of contrary choice. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology,
119-122, also maintains that the image of God signified only that
personality which distinguished man from the brute. Christ, he
says, carries forward human nature to a higher point, instead of
merely restoring what is lost. “_Very good_” (_Gen. 1:31_) does
not imply moral perfection,—this cannot be the result of creation,
but only of discipline and will. Man’s original state was only one
of untried innocence. Dr. Robinson is combating the view that the
first man was at his creation possessed of a developed character.
He distinguishes between character and the germs of character.
These germs he grants that man possessed. And so he defines the
image of God as a constitutional predisposition toward a course of
right conduct. This is all the perfection which we claim for the
first man. We hold that this predisposition toward the good can
properly be called character, since it is the germ from which all
holy action springs.
In addition to what has already been said in support of the opposite view,
we may urge against this theory the following objections:
(_a_) It is contrary to analogy, in making man the author of his own
holiness; our sinful condition is not the product of our individual wills,
nor is our subsequent condition of holiness the product of anything but
God’s regenerating power.
To hold that Adam was created undecided, would make man, as
Philippi says, in the highest sense his own creator. But morally,
as well as physically, man is God’s creature. In regeneration it
is not sufficient for God to give _power_ to decide for good; God
must give new _love_ also. If this be so in the new creation, God
could give love in the first creation also. Holiness therefore is
creatable. “_Underived_ holiness is possible only in God; in its
origin, it is _given_ both to angels and men.” Therefore we pray:
“_Create in me a clean heart_” (_Ps. 51:10_); “_Incline my heart
unto thy testimonies_” (_Ps. 119:36_). See Edwards, Eff. Grace,
sec. 43-51; Kaftan, Dogmatik, 290—“If Adam’s perfection was not a
moral perfection, then his sin was no real moral corruption.” The
_animus_ of the theory we are combating seems to be an
unwillingness to grant that man, either in his first creation or
in his new creation, owes his holiness to God.
(_b_) The knowledge of God in which man was originally created logically
presupposes a direction toward God of man’s affections and will, since
only the holy heart can have any proper understanding of the God of
holiness.
“Ubi caritas, ibi claritas.” Man’s heart was originally filled
with divine love, and out of this came the knowledge of God. We
know God only as we love him, and this love comes not from our own
single volition. No one loves by command, because no one can give
himself love. In Adam love was an inborn impulse, which he could
affirm or deny. Compare _1 Cor. 8:3_—“_if any man loveth God, the
same_ [God] _is known by him_”; _1 John 4:8_—“_He that loveth not
knoweth not God._” See other Scripture references on pages 3, 4.
(_c_) A likeness to God in mere personality, such as Satan also possesses,
comes far short of answering the demands of the Scripture, in which the
ethical conception of the divine nature so overshadows the merely natural.
The image of God must be, not simply ability to be like God, but actual
likeness.
God could never create an intelligent being evenly balanced
between good and evil—“on the razor’s edge”—“on the fence.” The
preacher who took for his text “_Adam, where art thou?_” had for
his first head: “It is every man’s business to be somewhere;” for
his second: “Some of you are where you ought not to be;” and for
his third: “Get where you ought to be, as soon as possible.” A
simple capacity for good or evil is, as Augustine says, already
sinful. A man who is neutral between good and evil is already a
violator of that law, which requires likeness to God in the bent
of his nature. Delitzsch, Bib. Psychol., 45-84—“Personality is
only the basis of the divine image,—it is not the image itself.”
Bledsoe says there can be no created virtue or viciousness. Whedon
(On the Will, 388) objects to this, and says rather: “There can be
no created moral desert, good or evil. Adam’s nature as created
was pure and excellent, but there was nothing meritorious until he
had freely and rightly exercised his will with full power to the
contrary.” We add: There was nothing meritorious even then. For
substance of these objections, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:346.
Lessing said that the character of the Germans was to have no
character. Goethe partook of this cosmopolitan characterlessness
(Prof. Seely). Tennyson had Goethe in view when he wrote in The
Palace of Art: “I sit apart, holding no form of creed, but
contemplating all.” And Goethe is probably still alluded to in the
words: “A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, That did love
beauty only, Or if good, good only for its beauty”; see A. H.
Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 331; Robert Browning,
Christmas Eve: “The truth in God’s breast Lies trace for trace
upon ours impressed: Though he is so bright, and we so dim, We are
made in his image to witness him.”
B. The image of God as consisting simply in man’s natural capacity for
religion.
This view, first elaborated by the scholastics, is the doctrine of the
Roman Catholic Church. It distinguishes between the image and the likeness
of God. The former (צלם—Gen. 1:26) alone belonged to man’s nature at its
creation. The latter (דמות) was the product of his own acts of obedience.
In order that this obedience might be made easier and the consequent
likeness to God more sure, a third element was added—an element not
belonging to man’s nature—namely, a supernatural gift of special grace,
which acted as a curb upon the sensuous impulses, and brought them under
the control of reason. Original righteousness was therefore not a natural
endowment, but a joint product of man’s obedience and of God’s
supernatural grace.
Roman Catholicism holds that the white paper of man’s soul
received two impressions instead of one. Protestantism sees no
reason why both impressions should not have been given at the
beginning. Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 4:708, gives a good
statement of the Roman Catholic view. It holds that the supreme
good transcends the finite mind and its powers of comprehension.
Even at the first it was beyond man’s created nature. The _donum
superadditum_ did not inwardly and personally belong to him. Now
that he has lost it, he is entirely dependent on the church for
truth and grace. He does not receive the truth because it is this
and no other, but because the church tells him that it is the
truth.
The Roman Catholic doctrine may be roughly and pictorially stated
as follows: As created, man was morally naked, or devoid of
positive righteousness (_pura naturalia_, or _in puris
naturalibus_). By obedience he obtained as a reward from God
(_donum supernaturale_, or _superadditum_) a suit of clothes or
robe of righteousness to protect him, so that he became clothed
(_vestitus_). This suit of clothes, however, was a sort of magic
spell of which he could be divested. The adversary attacked him
and stripped him of his suit. After his sin he was one despoiled
(_spoliatus_). But his condition after differed from his condition
before this attack, only as a stripped man differs from a naked
man (_spoliatus a nudo_). He was now only in the same state in
which he was created, with the single exception of the weakness he
might feel as the result of losing his customary clothing. He
could still earn himself another suit,—in fact, he could earn two
or more, so as to sell, or give away, what he did not need for
himself. The phrase _in puris naturalibus_ describes the original
state, as the phrase _spoliatus a nudo_ describes the difference
resulting from man’s sin.
Many of the considerations already adduced apply equally as arguments
against this view. We may say, however, with reference to certain features
peculiar to the theory:
(_a_) No such distinction can justly be drawn between the words צלם and
דםות. The addition of the synonym simply strengthens the expression, and
both together signify “the very image.”
(_b_) Whatever is denoted by either or both of these words was bestowed
upon man in and by the fact of creation, and the additional hypothesis of
a supernatural gift not originally belonging to man’s nature, but
subsequently conferred, has no foundation either here or elsewhere in
Scripture. Man is said to have been created in the image and likeness of
God, not to have been afterwards endowed with either of them.
(_c_) The concreated opposition between sense and reason which this theory
supposes is inconsistent with the Scripture declaration that the work of
God’s hands “was very good” (Gen. 1:31), and transfers the blame of
temptation and sin from man to God. To hold to a merely negative
innocence, in which evil desire was only slumbering, is to make God author
of sin by making him author of the constitution which rendered sin
inevitable.
(_d_) This theory directly contradicts Scripture by making the effect of
the first sin to have been a weakening but not a perversion of human
nature, and the work of regeneration to be not a renewal of the affections
but merely a strengthening of the natural powers. The theory regards that
first sin as simply despoiling man of a special gift of grace and as
putting him where he was when first created—still able to obey God and to
coöperate with God for his own salvation,—whereas the Scripture represents
man since the fall as “dead through ... trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1),
as incapable of true obedience (Rom. 8:7—“not subject to the law of God,
neither indeed can it be”), and as needing to be “created in Christ Jesus
for good works” (Eph. 2:10).
At few points in Christian doctrine do we see more clearly than
here the large results of error which may ultimately spring from
what might at first sight seem to be only a slight divergence from
the truth. Augustine had rightly taught that in Adam the _posse
non peccare_ was accompanied by a _posse peccare_, and that for
this reason man’s holy disposition needed the help of divine grace
to preserve its integrity. But the scholastics wrongly added that
this original disposition to righteousness was not the outflow of
man’s nature as originally created, but was the gift of grace. As
this later teaching, however, was by some disputed, the Council of
Trent (sess. 5, cap. 1) left the matter more indefinite, simply
declaring man: “Sanctitatem et justitiam in qua _constitutus
fuerat_, amisisse.” The Roman Catechism, however (1:2:19),
explained the phrase “constitutus fuerat” by the words: “Tum
originalis justitiæ admirabile donum _addidit_.” And Bellarmine
(De Gratia, 2) says plainly: “Imago, quæ est ipsa natura mentis et
voluntatis, a solo Deo fieri potuit; similitudo autem, quæ in
virtute et probitate consistit, _a nobis quoque_ Deo adjuvante
perficitur.”... (5) “Integritas illa ... non fuit naturalis ejus
conditio, sed supernaturalis evectio.... Addidisse homini donum
quoddam insigne, justitiam videlicet originalem, qua veluti aureo
quodam fræno pars inferior parti superiori subjecta contineretur.”
Moehler (Symbolism, 21-35) holds that the religious faculty—the
“image of God”; the pious exertion of this faculty—the “likeness
of God.” He seems to favor the view that Adam received “this
supernatural gift of a holy and blessed communion with God at a
later period than his creation, _i. e._, only when he had prepared
himself for its reception and by his own efforts had rendered
himself worthy of it.” He was created “just” and acceptable to
God, even without communion with God or help from God. He became
“holy” and enjoyed communion with God, only when God rewarded his
obedience and bestowed the _supernaturale donum_. Although Moehler
favors this view and claims that it is permitted by the standards,
he also says that it is not definitely taught. The quotations from
Bellarmine and the Roman Catechism above make it clear that it is
the prevailing doctrine of the Roman Catholic church.
So, to quote the words of Shedd, “the Tridentine theology starts
with Pelagianism and ends with Augustinianism. Created without
character, God subsequently endows man with character.... The
Papal idea of creation differs from the Augustinian in that it
involves imperfection. There is a disease and languor which
require a subsequent and supernatural act to remedy.” The
Augustinian and Protestant conception of man’s original state is
far nobler than this. The ethical element is not a later addition,
but is man’s true nature—essential to God’s idea of him. The
normal and original condition of man (_pura naturalia_) is one of
grace and of the Spirit’s indwelling—hence, of direction toward
God.
From this original difference between Roman Catholic and
Protestant doctrine with regard to man’s original state result
diverging views as to sin and as to regeneration. The Protestant
holds that, as man was possessed by creation of moral likeness to
God, or holiness, so his sin robbed his nature of its integrity,
deprived it of essential and concreated advantages and powers, and
substituted for these a positive corruption and tendency to evil.
Unpremeditated evil desire, or concupiscence, is original sin; as
concreated love for God constituted man’s original righteousness.
No man since the fall has original righteousness, and it is man’s
sin that he has it not. Since without love to God no act, emotion,
or thought of man can answer the demands of God’s law, the
Scripture denies to fallen man all power of himself to know,
think, feel, or do aright. His nature therefore needs a
new-creation, a resurrection from death, such as God only, by his
mighty Spirit, can work; and to this work of God man can
contribute nothing, except as power is first given him by God
himself.
According to the Roman Catholic view, however, since the image of
God in which man was created included only man’s religious
faculty, his sin can rob him only of what became subsequently and
adventitiously his. Fallen man differs from unfallen only as
_spoliatus a nudo_. He loses only a sort of magic spell, which
leaves him still in possession of all his essential powers.
Unpremeditated evil desire, or concupiscence, is not sin; for this
belonged to his nature even before he fell. His sin has therefore
only put him back into the natural state of conflict and
concupiscence, ordered by God in the concreated opposition of
sense and reason. The sole qualification is this, that, having
made an evil decision, his will is weakened. “Man does not need
resurrection from death, but rather a crutch to help his lameness,
a tonic to reinforce his feebleness, a medicine to cure his
sickness.” He is still able to turn to God; and in regeneration
the Holy Spirit simply awakens and strengthens the natural ability
slumbering in the natural man. But even here, man must yield to
the influence of the Holy Spirit; and regeneration is effected by
uniting his power to the divine. In baptism the guilt of original
sin is remitted, and everything called sin is taken away. No
baptized person has any further process of regeneration to
undergo. Man has not only strength to coöperate with God for his
own salvation, but he may even go beyond the demands of the law
and perform works of supererogation. And the whole sacramental
system of the Roman Catholic Church, with its salvation by works,
its purgatorial fires, and its invocation of the saints, connects
itself logically with this erroneous theory of man’s original
state.
See Dorner’s Augustinus, 116; Perrone, Prælectiones Theologicæ,
1:737-748; Winer, Confessions, 79, 80; Dorner, History Protestant
Theology, 38, 39, and Glaubenslehre, 1:51; Van Oosterzee,
Dogmatics, 376; Cunningham, Historical Theology, 1:516-586; Shedd,
Hist. Doctrine, 2:140-149.
II. Incidents of Man’s Original State.
1. Results of man’s possession of the divine image.
(_a_) Reflection of this divine image in man’s physical form.—Even in
man’s body were typified those higher attributes which chiefly constituted
his likeness to God. A gross perversion of this truth, however, is the
view which holds, upon the ground of Gen. 2:7, and 3:8, that the image of
God consists in bodily resemblance to the Creator. In the first of these
passages, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of
dust, and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is
breathed. The second of these passages is to be interpreted by those other
portions of the Pentateuch in which God is represented as free from all
limitations of matter (Gen. 11:5; 18:15).
The spirit presents the divine image immediately: the body,
mediately. The scholastics called the soul the image of God
_proprie_; the body they called the image of God _significative_.
Soul is the direct reflection of God; body is the reflection of
that reflection. The _os sublime_ manifests the dignity of the
endowments within. Hence the word “upright,” as applied to moral
condition; one of the first impulses of the renewed man is to
physical purity. Compare Ovid, Metaph., bk. 1, Dryden’s transl.:
“Thus while the mute creation downward bend Their sight, and to
their earthly mother tend, Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.” (Ἄνθρωπος, from ἀνά, ἄνω,
suffix _tra_, and ὢψ, with reference to the upright posture.)
Milton speaks of “the human face divine.” S. S. Times, July 28,
1900—“Man is the only erect being among living creatures. He alone
looks up naturally and without effort. He foregoes his birthright
when he looks only at what is on a level with his eyes and
occupies himself only with what lies in the plane of his own
existence.”
Bretschneider (Dogmatik, 1:682) regards the Scripture as teaching
that the image of God consists in bodily resemblance to the
Creator, but considers this as only the imperfect method of
representation belonging to an early age. So Strauss,
Glaubenslehre, 1:687. They refer to _Gen. 2:7_—“_And Jehovah God
formed man of the dust of the ground_”; _3:8_—“_Jehovah God
walking in the garden._” But see _Gen. 11:5_—“_And Jehovah came
down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men
builded_”; _Is. 66:1_—“_Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my
footstool_”; _1 K. 8:27_—“_behold, heaven and the heaven of
heavens cannot contain thee._” On the Anthropomorphites, see
Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:103, 308, 491. For answers to
Bretschneider and Strauss, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:364.
(_b_) Subjection of the sensuous impulses to the control of the
spirit.—Here we are to hold a middle ground between two extremes. On the
one hand, the first man possessed a body and a spirit so fitted to each
other that no conflict was felt between their several claims. On the other
hand, this physical perfection was not final and absolute, but relative
and provisional. There was still room for progress to a higher state of
being (Gen. 3:22).
Sir Henry Watton’s Happy Life: “That man was free from servile
bands Of hope to rise or fear to fall, Lord of himself if not of
lands, And having nothing yet had all.” Here we hold to the
_æquale temperamentum_. There was no disease, but rather the joy
of abounding health. Labor was only a happy activity. God’s
infinite creatorship and fountainhead of being was typified in
man’s powers of generation. But there was no concreated opposition
of sense and reason, nor an imperfect physical nature with whose
impulses reason was at war. With this moderate Scriptural
doctrine, contrast the exaggerations of the Fathers and of the
scholastics. Augustine says that Adam’s reason was to ours what
the bird’s is to that of the tortoise; propagation in the unfallen
state would have been without concupiscence, and the new-born
child would have attained perfection at birth. Albertus Magnus
thought the first man would have felt no pain, even though he had
been stoned with heavy stones. Scotus Erigena held that the male
and female elements were yet undistinguished. Others called
sexuality the first sin. Jacob Boehme regarded the intestinal
canal, and all connected with it, as the consequence of the Fall;
he had the fancy that the earth was transparent at the first and
cast no shadow,—sin, he thought, had made it opaque and dark;
redemption would restore it to its first estate and make night a
thing of the past. South, Sermons, 1:24, 25—“Man came into the
world a philosopher.... Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam.”
Lyman Abbott tells us of a minister who assured his congregation
that Adam was acquainted with the telephone. But God educates his
children, as chemists educate their pupils, by putting them into
the laboratory and letting them work. Scripture does not represent
Adam as a walking encyclopædia, but as a being yet inexperienced;
see _Gen. 3:22_—“_Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know
good and evil_”; _1 Cor. 15:46_—“_that is not first which is
spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is
spiritual._” On this last text, see Expositor’s Greek Testament.
(_c_) Dominion over the lower creation.—Adam possessed an insight into
nature analogous to that of susceptible childhood, and therefore was able
to name and to rule the brute creation (Gen. 2:19). Yet this native
insight was capable of development into the higher knowledge of culture
and science. From Gen. 1:26 (_cf._ Ps. 8:5-8), it has been erroneously
inferred that the image of God in man consists in dominion over the brute
creation and the natural world. But, in this verse, the words “let them
have dominion” do not define the image of God, but indicate the result of
possessing that image. To make the image of God consist in this dominion,
would imply that only the divine omnipotence was shadowed forth in man.
_Gen. 2:19_—“_Jehovah God formed every beast of the field, and
every bird of the heavens; and brought them unto the man to see
what he would call them_”; _20_—“_And the man gave names to all
cattle_”; _Gen. 1:26_—“_Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle_”; _cf._ _Ps.
8:5-8_—“_thou hast made him but little lower than God, And
crownest him with glory and honor. Thou makest him to have
dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things
under his feet: All sheep and oxen, Yea, and the beasts of the
field._” Adam’s naming the animals implied insight into their
nature; see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 393, 394, 401. On man’s
original dominion over (1) self, (2) nature, (3) fellow-man, see
Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 105.
Courage and a good conscience have a power over the brute
creation, and unfallen man can well be supposed to have dominated
creatures which had no experience of human cruelty. Rarey tamed
the wildest horses by his steadfast and fearless eye. In Paris a
young woman was hypnotized and put into a den of lions. She had no
fear of the lions and the lions paid not the slightest attention
to her. The little daughter of an English officer in South Africa
wandered away from camp and spent the night among lions.
“Katrina,” her father said when he found her, “were you not afraid
to be alone here?” “No, papa,” she replied, “the big dogs played
with me and one of them lay here and kept me warm.” MacLaren, in
S. S. Times, Dec. 23, 1893—“The dominion over all creatures
results from likeness to God. It is not then a mere right to use
them for one’s own material advantage, but a viceroy’s authority,
which the holder is bound to employ for the honor of the true
King.” This principle gives the warrant and the limit to
vivisection and to the killing of the lower animals for food
(_Gen. 9:2, 3._).
Socinian writers generally hold the view that the image of God
consisted simply in this dominion. Holding a low view of the
nature of sin, they are naturally disinclined to believe that the
fall has wrought any profound change in human nature. See their
view stated in the Racovian Catechism, 21. It is held also by the
Arminian Limborch, Theol. Christ., ii, 24:2, 3, 11. Upon the basis
of this interpretation of Scripture, the Encratites held, with
Peter Martyr, that women do not possess the divine image at all.
(_d_) Communion with God.—Our first parents enjoyed the divine presence
and teaching (Gen. 2:16). It would seem that God manifested himself to
them in visible form (Gen. 3:8). This companionship was both in kind and
degree suited to their spiritual capacity, and by no means necessarily
involved that perfected vision of God which is possible to beings of
confirmed and unchangeable holiness (Mat. 5:8; 1 John 3:2).
_Gen. 2:16_—“_And Jehovah God commanded the man_”; _3:8_—“_And
they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden in the
cool of the day_”; _Mat. 5:8_—“_Blessed are the pure in heart: for
they shall see God_”; _1 John 3:2_—“_We know that, if he shall be
manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he
is_”; _Rev. 22:4_—“_and they shall see his his face._”
2. Concomitants of man’s possession of the divine image.
(_a_) Surroundings and society fitted to yield happiness and to assist a
holy development of human nature (Eden and Eve). We append some recent
theories with regard to the creation of Eve and the nature of Eden.
Eden—pleasure, delight. Tennyson: “When high in Paradise By the
four rivers the first roses blew.” Streams were necessary to the
very existence of an oriental garden. Hopkins, Script. Idea of
Man, 107—“Man includes woman. Creation of _a_ man without a woman
would not have been the creation of man. Adam called her name Eve
but God called their name Adam.” Mat. Henry: “Not out of his head
to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled on by him; but out
of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by
him, and near his heart to be beloved.” Robert Burns says of
nature: “Her ’prentice hand she tried on man, And then she made
the lasses, O!” Stevens, Pauline Theology, 329—“In the natural
relations of the sexes there is a certain reciprocal dependence,
since it is not only true that woman was made from man, but that
man is born of woman (_1 Cor. 11:11, 12_).” Of the Elgin marbles
Boswell asked: “Don’t you think them indecent?” Dr. Johnson
replied: “No, sir; but your question is.” Man, who in the adult
state possesses twelve pairs of ribs, is found in the embryonic
state to have thirteen or fourteen. Dawson, Modern Ideas of
Evolution, 148—“Why does not the male man lack one rib? Because
only the individual skeleton of Adam was affected by the taking of
the rib.... The unfinished vertebral arches of the skin-fibrous
layer may have produced a new individual by a process of budding
or gemmation.”
H. H. Bawden suggests that the account of Eve’s creation may be
the “pictorial summary” of an actual phylogenetic evolutionary
process by which the sexes were separated or isolated from a
common hermaphroditic ancestor or ancestry. The mesodermic portion
of the organism in which the urinogenital system has its origin
develops later than the ectodermic or the endodermic portions. The
word “rib” may designate this mesodermic portion. Bayard Taylor,
John Godfrey’s Fortunes, 392, suggests that a genius is
hermaphroditic, adding a male element to the woman, and a female
element to the man. Professor Loeb, Am. Journ. Physiology, Vol.
III, no. 3, has found that in certain chemical solutions prepared
in the laboratory, approximately the concentration of sea-water,
the unfertilized eggs of the sea-urchin will mature without the
intervention of the spermatozoön. Perfect embryos and normal
individuals are produced under these conditions. He thinks it
probable that similar parthenogenesis may be produced in higher
types of being. In 1900 he achieved successful results on
Annelids, though it is doubtful whether he produced anything more
than normal _larvæ_. These results have been criticized by a
European investigator who is also a Roman priest. Prof. Loeb wrote
a rejoinder in which he expressed surprise that a representative
of the Roman church did not heartily endorse his conclusions,
since they afford a vindication of the doctrine of the immaculate
conception.
H. H. Bawden has reviewed Prof. Loeb’s work in the Psychological
Review, Jan. 1900. Janósik has found segmentation in the
unfertilized eggs of mammalians. Prof. Loeb considers it possible
that only the ions of the blood prevent the parthenogenetic origin
of embryos in mammals, and thinks it not improbable that by a
transitory change in these ions it will be possible to produce
complete parthenogenesis in these higher types. Dr. Bawden goes on
to say that “both parent and child are dependent upon a common
source of energy. The universe is one great organism, and there is
no inorganic or non-organic matter, but differences only in
degrees of organization. Sex is designed only secondarily for the
perpetuation of species; primarily it is the bond or medium for
the connection and interaction of the various parts of this great
organism, for maintaining that degree of heterogeneity which is
the prerequisite of a high degree of organization. By means of the
growth of a lifetime I have become an essential part in a great
organic system. What I call my individual personality represents
simply the focusing, the flowering of the universe at one finite
concrete point or centre. Must not then my personality continue as
long as that universal system continues? And is immortality
conceivable if the soul is something shut up within itself,
unshareable and unique? Are not the many foci mutually
interdependent, instead of mutually exclusive? We must not then
conceive of an immortality which means the continued existence of
an individual cut off from that social context which is really
essential to his very nature.”
J. H. Richardson suggests in the Standard, Sept. 10, 1901, that
the first chapter of Genesis describes the creation of the
spiritual part of man only—that part which was made in the image
of God—while the second chapter describes the creation of man’s
body, the animal part, which may have been originated by a process
of evolution. S. W. Howland, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:121-128,
supposes Adam and Eve to have been twins, joined by the ensiform
cartilage or breast-bone, as were the Siamese Chang and Eng. By
violence or accident this cartilage was broken before it hardened
into bone, and the two were separated until puberty. Then Adam saw
Eve coming to him with a bone projecting from her side
corresponding to the hollow in his own side, and said: “She is
bone of my bone; she must have been taken from my side when I
slept.” This tradition was handed down to his posterity. The Jews
have a tradition that Adam was created double-sexed, and that the
two sexes were afterwards separated. The Hindus say that man was
at first of both sexes and divided himself in order to people the
earth. In the Zodiac of Dendera, Castor and Pollux appear as man
and woman, and these twins, some say, were called Adam and Eve.
The Coptic name for this sign is _Pi Mahi_, “the United.” Darwin,
in the postscript to a letter to Lyell, written as early as July,
1850, tells his friend that he has “a pleasant genealogy for
mankind,” and describes our remotest ancestor as “an animal which
breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an
imperfect skull, and was undoubtedly a hermaphrodite.”
Matthew Arnold speaks of “the freshness of the early world.”
Novalis says that “all philosophy begins in homesickness.”
Shelley, Skylark: “We look before and after, And pine for what is
not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our
sweetest songs are those That tell of saddest thought.”—“The
golden conception of a Paradise is the poet’s guiding thought.”
There is a universal feeling that we are not now in our natural
state; that we are far away from home; that we are exiles from our
true habitation. Keble, Groans of Nature: “Such thoughts, the
wreck of Paradise, Through many a dreary age, Upbore whate’er of
good or wise Yet lived in bard or sage.” Poetry and music echo the
longing for some possession lost. Jessica in Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.”
All true poetry is forward-looking or backward-looking prophecy,
as sculpture sets before us the original or the resurrection body.
See Isaac Taylor, Hebrew Poetry, 94-101; Tyler, Theol. of Greek
Poets, 225, 226.
Wellhausen, on the legend of a golden age, says: “It is the
yearning song which goes through all the peoples: having attained
the historical civilization, they feel the worth of the goods
which they have sacrificed for it.” He regards the golden age as
only an ideal image, like the millennial kingdom at the end. Man
differs from the beast in this power to form ideals. His
destination _to_ God shows his descent _from_ God. Hegel in a
similar manner claimed that the Paradisaic condition is only an
ideal conception underlying human development. But may not the
traditions of the gardens of Brahma and of the Hesperides embody
the world’s recollection of an historical fact, when man was free
from external evil and possessed all that could minister to
innocent joy? The “golden age” of the heathen was connected with
the hope of restoration. So the use of the doctrine of man’s
original state is to convince men of the high ideal once realized,
properly belonging to man, now lost, and recoverable, not by man’s
own powers, but only through God’s provision in Christ. For
references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt,
Compendium, 115. He mentions the following: Hesiod, Works and
Days, 109-208; Aratus, Phenom., 100-184; Plato, Tim., 233; Vergil,
Ec., 4, Georgics, 1:135, Æneid, 8:314.
(_b_) Provisions for the trying of man’s virtue.—Since man was not yet in
a state of confirmed holiness, but rather of simple childlike innocence,
he could be made perfect only through temptation. Hence the “tree of the
knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9). The one slight command best tested
the spirit of obedience. Temptation did not necessitate a fall, If
resisted, it would strengthen virtue. In that case, the _posse non
peccare_ would have become the _non posse peccare_.
Thomasius: “That evil is a necessary transition-point to good, is
Satan’s doctrine and philosophy.” The tree was mainly a tree of
probation. It is right for a father to make his son’s title to his
estate depend upon the performance of some filial duty, as
Thaddeus Stevens made his son’s possession of property conditional
upon his keeping the temperance-pledge. Whether, besides this, the
tree of knowledge was naturally hurtful or poisonous, we do not
know.
(_c_) Opportunity of securing physical immortality.—The body of the first
man was in itself mortal (1 Cor. 15:45). Science shows that physical life
involves decay and loss. But means were apparently provided for checking
this decay and preserving the body’s youth. This means was the “tree of
life” (Gen. 2:9). If Adam had maintained his integrity, the body might
have been developed and transfigured, without intervention of death. In
other words, the _posse non mori_ might have become a _non posse mori_.
The tree of life was symbolic of communion with God and of man’s
dependence upon him. But this, only because it had a physical
efficacy. It was sacramental and memorial to the soul, because it
sustained the life of the body. Natural immortality without
holiness would have been unending misery. Sinful man was therefore
shut out from the tree of life, till he could be prepared for it
by God’s righteousness. Redemption and resurrection not only
restore that which was lost, but give what man was originally
created to attain: _1 Cor. 15:45_—“_The first man Adam became a
living soul. The last man Adam became a life-giving spirit_”;
_Rev. 22:14_—“_Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they
may have the right to come to the tree of life._”
The conclusions we have thus reached with regard to the incidents of man’s
original state are combated upon two distinct grounds:
1st. The facts bearing upon man’s prehistoric condition point to a
development from primitive savagery to civilization. Among these facts may
be mentioned the succession of implements and weapons from stone to bronze
and iron; the polyandry and communal marriage systems of the lowest
tribes; the relics of barbarous customs still prevailing among the most
civilized.
For the theory of an originally savage condition of man, see Sir
John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, and Origin of Civilization: “The
primitive condition of mankind was one of utter barbarism”; but
especially L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society, who divides human
progress into three great periods, the savage, the barbarian, and
the civilized. Each of the two former has three states, as
follows: I. Savage: 1. Lowest state, marked by attainment of
speech and subsistence upon roots. 2. Middle state, marked by
fish-food and fire. 3. Upper state, marked by use of the bow and
hunting. II. Barbarian: 1. Lower state, marked by invention and
use of pottery. 2. Middle state, marked by use of domestic
animals, maize, and building stone. 3. Upper state, marked by
invention and use of iron tools. III. Civilized man next appears,
with the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and writing. J. S.
Stuart-Glennie, Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1892:844, defines civilization
as “enforced social organization, with written records, and hence
intellectual development and social progress.”
With regard to this view we remark:
(_a_) It is based upon an insufficient induction of facts.—History shows a
law of degeneration supplementing and often counteracting the tendency to
development. In the earliest times of which we have any record, we find
nations in a high state of civilization; but in the case of every nation
whose history runs back of the Christian era—as for example, the Romans,
the Greeks, the Egyptians—the subsequent progress has been downward, and
no nation is known to have recovered from barbarism except as the result
of influence from without.
Lubbock seems to admit that cannibalism was not primeval; yet he
shows a general tendency to take every brutal custom as a sample
of man’s first state. And this, in spite of the fact that many
such customs have been the result of corruption. Bride-catching,
for example, could not possibly have been primeval, in the strict
sense of that term. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48, presents a far
more moderate view. He favors a theory of development, but with
degeneration “as a secondary action largely and deeply affecting
the development of civilization.” So the Duke of Argyll, Unity of
Nature: “Civilization and savagery are both the results of
evolutionary development; but the one is a development in the
upward, the latter in the downward direction; and for this reason,
neither civilization nor savagery can rationally be looked upon as
the primitive condition of man.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:467—“As
plausible an argument might be constructed out of the
deterioration and degradation of some of the human family to prove
that man may have evolved downward into an anthropoid ape, as that
which has been constructed to prove that he has been evolved
upward from one.”
Modern nations fall far short of the old Greek perception and
expression of beauty. Modern Egyptians, Bushmen, Australians, are
unquestionably degenerate races. See Lankester, Degeneration. The
same is true of Italians and Spaniards, as well as of Turks.
Abyssinians are now polygamists, though their ancestors were
Christians and monogamists. The physical degeneration of portions
of the population of Ireland is well known. See Mivart, Lessons
from Nature, 146-160, who applies to the savage-theory the tests
of language, morals, and religion, and who quotes Herbert Spencer
as saying: “Probably most of them [savages], if not all of them,
had ancestors in higher states, and among their beliefs remain
some which were evolved during those higher states.... It is quite
possible, and I believe highly probable, that retrogression has
been as frequent as progression.” Spencer, however, denies that
savagery is always caused by lapse from civilization.
Bib. Sac., 6:715; 29:282—“Man as a moral being does not tend to
rise but to fall, and that with a geometric progress, except he be
elevated and sustained by some force from without and above
himself. While man once civilized may advance, yet moral ideas are
apparently never developed from within.” Had savagery been man’s
primitive condition, he never could have emerged. See Whately,
Origin of Civilization, who maintains that man needed not only a
divine Creator, but a divine Instructor. Seelye, Introd. to A
Century of Dishonor, 3—“The first missionaries to the Indians in
Canada took with them skilled laborers to teach the savages how to
till their fields, to provide them with comfortable homes,
clothing, and food. But the Indians preferred their wigwams,
skins, raw flesh, and filth. Only as Christian influences taught
the Indian his inner need, and how this was to be supplied, was he
led to wish and work for the improvement of his outward condition
and habits. Civilization does not reproduce itself. It must first
be kindled, and it can then be kept alive only by a power
genuinely Christian.” So Wallace, in Nature, Sept. 7, 1876, vol.
14:408-412.
Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 149-168, shows that
evolution does not necessarily involve development as regards
particular races. There is degeneration in all the organic orders.
As regards man, he may be evolving in some directions, while in
others he has degenerated. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the
Atonement, 245, speaks of “Prof. Clifford as pointing to the
history of human progress and declaring that mankind is a risen
and not a fallen race. There is no real contradiction between
these two views. God has not let man go because man has rebelled
against him. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The
humanity which was created in Christ and which is upheld by his
power has ever received reinforcements of its physical and mental
life, in spite of its moral and spiritual deterioration. “Some
shrimps, by the adjustment of their bodily parts, go onward to the
higher structure of the lobsters and crabs; while others, taking
up the habit of dwelling in the gills of fishes, sink downward
into a state closely resembling that of the worms.” Drummond,
Ascent of Man: “When a boy’s kite comes down in our garden, we do
not hold that it originally came from the clouds. So nations went
up, before they came down. There is a national gravitation. The
stick age preceded the stone age, but has been lost.” Tennyson:
“Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever
dragging Evolution in the mud.” Evolution often becomes
devolution, if not devilution. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the
Spirit, 104—“The Jordan is the fitting symbol of our natural life,
rising in a lofty elevation, and from pure springs, but plunging
steadily down till it pours itself into that Dead Sea from which
there is no outlet.”
(_b_) Later investigations have rendered it probable that the stone age of
some localities was contemporaneous with the bronze and iron ages of
others, while certain tribes and nations, instead of making progress from
one to the other, were never, so far back as we can trace them, without
the knowledge and use of the metals. It is to be observed, moreover, that
even without such knowledge and use man is not necessarily a barbarian,
though he may be a child.
On the question whether the arts of civilization can be lost, see
Arthur Mitchell, Past in the Present, 219: Rude art is often the
debasement of a higher, instead of being the earlier; the rudest
art in a nation may coëxist with the highest; cave-life may
accompany high civilization. Illustrations from modern Scotland,
where burial of a cock for epilepsy, and sacrifice of a bull, were
until very recently extant. Certain arts have unquestionably been
lost, as glass-making and iron-working in Assyria (see Mivart,
referred to above). The most ancient men do not appear to have
been inferior to the latest, either physically or intellectually.
Rawlinson: “The explorers who have dug deep into the Mesopotamian
mounds, and have ransacked the tombs of Egypt, have come upon no
certain traces of savage man in those regions which a wide-spread
tradition makes the cradle of the human race.” The Tyrolese
peasants show that a rude people may be moral, and a very simple
people may be highly intelligent. See Southall, Recent Origin of
Man, 386-449; Schliemann, Troy and her Remains, 274.
Mason, Origins of Invention, 110, 124, 128—“There is no evidence
that a stone age ever existed in some regions. In Africa, Canada,
and perhaps Michigan, the metal age was as old as the stone age.”
An illustration of the mathematical powers of the savage is given
by Rev. A. E. Hunt in an account of the native arithmetic of
Murray Islands, Torres Straits. “Netat” (one) and “neis” (two) are
the only numerals, higher numbers being described by combinations
of these, as “neis-netat” for three, “neis-i-neis” for four, etc.,
or by reference to one of the fingers, elbows or other parts of
the body. A total of thirty-one could be counted by the latter
method. Beyond this all numbers were “many,” as this was the limit
reached in counting before the introduction of English numerals,
now in general use in the islands.
Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 171—“It is commonly supposed
that the direction of the movement [in the variation of species]
is ever upward. The fact is on the contrary that in a large number
of cases, perhaps in the aggregate in more than half, the change
gives rise to a form which, by all the canons by which we
determine relative rank, is to be regarded as regressive or
degradational.... Species, genera, families, and orders have all,
like the individuals of which they are composed, a period of decay
in which the gain won by infinite toil and pains is altogether
lost in the old age of the group.” Shaler goes on to say that in
the matter of variation successes are to failures as 1 to 100,000,
and if man be counted the solitary distinguished success, then the
proportion is something like 1 to 100,000,000. No species that
passes away is ever reinstated. If man were now to disappear,
there is no reason to believe that by any process of change a
similar creature would be evolved, however long the animal kingdom
continued to exist. The use of these successive chances to produce
man is inexplicable except upon the hypothesis of an infinite
designing Wisdom.
(_c_) The barbarous customs to which this view looks for support may
better be explained as marks of broken-down civilization than as relics of
a primitive and universal savagery. Even if they indicated a former state
of barbarism, that state might have been itself preceded by a condition of
comparative culture.
Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev. Sept., 1882:194—“There is no cruel
treatment of females among animals. If man came from the lower
animals, then he cannot have been originally savage; for you find
the most of this cruel treatment among savages.” Tylor instances
“street Arabs.” He compares street Arabs to a ruined house, but
savage tribes to a builder’s yard. See Duke of Argyll, Primeval
Man, 129, 133; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 223;
McLennan, Studies in Ancient History. Gulick, in Bib. Sac., July,
1892:517—“Cannibalism and infanticide are unknown among the
anthropoid apes. These must be the results of degradation. Pirates
and slavetraders are not men of low and abortive intelligence, but
men of education who deliberately throw off all restraint, and who
use their powers for the destruction of society.”
Keane, Man, Past and Present, 40, quotes Sir H. H. Johnston, an
administrator who has had a wider experience of the natives of
Africa than any man living, as saying that “the tendency of the
negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde
one—return toward the savage and even the brute. If he had been
cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the
purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing
towards a higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by
degrees to a type no longer human.” Ratzel’s History of Mankind:
“We assign no great antiquity to Polynesian civilization. In New
Zealand it is a matter of only some centuries back. In newly
occupied territories, the development of the population began upon
a higher level and then fell off. The Maoris’ decadence resulted
in the rapid impoverishment of culture, and the character of the
people became more savage and cruel. Captain Cook found objects of
art worshiped by the descendants of those who produced them.”
Recent researches have entirely discredited L. H. Morgan’s theory
of an original brutal promiscuity of the human race. Ritchie,
Darwin and Hegel, 6, note—“The theory of an original promiscuity
is rendered extremely doubtful by the habits of many of the higher
animals.” E. B. Tylor, in 19th Century, July, 1906—“A sort of
family life, lasting for the sake of the young, beyond a single
pairing season, exists among the higher manlike apes. The male
gorilla keeps watch and ward over his progeny. He is the antetype
of the house-father. The matriarchal system is a later device for
political reasons, to bind together in peace and alliance tribes
that would otherwise be hostile. But it is an artificial system
introduced as a substitute for and in opposition to the natural
paternal system. When the social pressure is removed, the
maternalized husband emancipates himself, and paternalism begins.”
Westermarck, History of Human Marriage: “Marriage and the family
are thus intimately connected with one another; it is for the
benefit of the young that male and female continue to live
together. Marriage is therefore rooted in the family, rather than
the family in marriage.... There is not a shred of genuine
evidence for the notion that promiscuity ever formed a general
stage in the social history of mankind. The hypothesis of
promiscuity, instead of belonging to the class of hypotheses which
are scientifically permissible, has no real foundation, and is
essentially unscientific.” Howard, History of Matrimonial
Institutions: “Marriage or pairing between one man and one woman,
though the union be often transitory and the rule often violated,
is the typical form of sexual union from the infancy of the human
race.”
(_d_) The well-nigh universal tradition of a golden age of virtue and
happiness may be most easily explained upon the Scripture view of an
actual creation of the race in holiness and its subsequent apostasy.
For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt,
Compendium der Dogmatik, 115; Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion,
1:205—“In Hesiod we have the legend of a golden age under the
lordship of Chronos, when man was free from cares and toils, in
untroubled youth and cheerfulness, with a superabundance of the
gifts which the earth furnished of itself; the race was indeed not
immortal, but it experienced death even as a soft sleep.” We may
add that capacity for religious truth depends upon moral
conditions. Very early races therefore have a purer faith than the
later ones. Increasing depravity makes it harder for the later
generations to exercise faith. The wisdom-literature may have been
very early instead of very late, just as monotheistic ideas are
clearer the further we go back. Bixby, Crisis in Morals,
171—“Precisely because such tribes [Australian and African
savages] have been deficient in average moral quality, have they
failed to march upward on the road of civilization with the rest
of mankind, and have fallen into these bog holes of savage
degradation.” On petrified civilizations, see Henry George,
Progress and Poverty, 433-439—“The law of human progress, what is
it but the moral law?” On retrogressive development in nature, see
Weismann, Heredity, 2:1-30. But see also Mary E. Case, “Did the
Romans Degenerate?” in Internat. Journ. Ethics. Jan. 1893:165-182,
in which it is maintained that the Romans made constant advances
rather. Henry Sumner Maine calls the Bible the most important
single document in the history of sociology, because it exhibits
authentically the early development of society from the family,
through the tribe, into the nation,—a progress learned only by
glimpses, intervals, and survivals of old usages in the literature
of other nations.
2nd. That the religious history of mankind warrants us in inferring a
necessary and universal law of progress, in accordance with which man
passes from fetichism to polytheism and monotheism,—this first theological
stage, of which fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism are parts, being
succeeded by the metaphysical stage, and that in turn by the positive.
This theory is propounded by Comte, in his Positive Philosophy,
English transl., 25, 26, 515-636—“Each branch of our knowledge
passes successively through three different theoretical
conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or
abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.... The first is the
necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the
third is its fixed and definite state. The second is merely a
state of transition. In the theological state, the human mind,
seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final
causes, the origin and purpose, of all effects—in short, absolute
knowledge—supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate
action of supernatural beings. In the metaphysical state, which is
only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of
supernatural beings, abstract forces, veritable entities, that is,
personified abstractions, inherent in all beings, and capable of
producing all phenomena. What is called the explanation of
phenomena is, in this stage, a mere reference of each to its
proper entity. In the final, the positive state, the mind has
given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and
destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and
applies itself to the study of their laws—that is, their
invariable relations of succession and resemblance.... The
theological system arrived at its highest perfection when it
substituted the providential action of a single Being for the
varied operations of numerous divinities. In the last stage of the
metaphysical system, men substituted one great entity, Nature, as
the cause of all phenomena, instead of the multitude of entities
at first supposed. In the same way the ultimate perfection of the
positive system would be to represent all phenomena as particular
aspects of a single general fact—such as Gravitation, for
instance.”
This assumed law of progress, however, is contradicted by the following
facts:
(_a_) Not only did the monotheism of the Hebrews precede the great
polytheistic systems of antiquity, but even these heathen religions are
purer from polytheistic elements, the further back we trace them; so that
the facts point to an original monotheistic basis for them all.
The gradual deterioration of all religions, apart from special
revelation and influence from God, is proof that the purely
evolutionary theory is defective. The most natural supposition is
that of a primitive revelation, which little by little receded
from human memory. In Japan, Shinto was originally the worship of
Heaven. The worship of the dead, the deification of the Mikado,
etc., were a corruption and aftergrowth. The Mikado’s ancestors,
instead of coming from heaven, came from Korea. Shinto was
originally a form of monotheism. Not one of the first emperors was
deified after death. Apotheosis of the Mikados dated from the
corruption of Shinto through the importation of Buddhism. Andrew
Lang, in his Making of Religion, advocates primitive monotheism.
T. G. Pinches, of the British Museum, 1894, declares that, as in
the earliest Egyptian, so in the early Babylonian records, there
is evidence of a primitive monotheism. Nevins, Demon-Possession,
170-173, quotes W. A. P. Martin, President of the Peking
University, as follows: “China, India, Egypt and Greece all agree
in the monotheistic type of their early religion. The Orphic
Hymns, long before the advent of the popular divinities,
celebrated the _Pantheos_, the universal God. The odes compiled by
Confucius testify to the early worship of Shangte, the Supreme
Ruler. The Vedas speak of ‘one unknown true Being, all-present,
all-powerful, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of the
Universe.’ And in Egypt, as late as the time of Plutarch, there
were still vestiges of a monotheistic worship.”
On the evidences of an original monotheism, see Max Müller, Chips,
1:337; Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, 2: no. 11; Legge,
Religions of China, 8, 11; Diestel, in Jahrbuch für deutsche
Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5:669; Philip Smith, Anc. Hist. of East,
65, 195; Warren, on the Earliest Creed of Mankind, in the Meth.
Quar. Rev., Jan. 1884.
(_b_) “There is no proof that the Indo-Germanic or Semitic stocks ever
practiced fetich worship, or were ever enslaved by the lowest types of
mythological religion, or ascended from them to somewhat higher” (Fisher).
See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 545;
Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 36-115. Herbert
Spencer once held that fetichism was primordial. But he afterwards
changed his mind, and said that the facts proved to be exactly the
opposite when he had become better acquainted with the ideas of
savages; see his Principles of Sociology, 1:343. Mr. Spencer
finally traced the beginnings of religion to the worship of
ancestors. But in China no ancestor has ever become a god; see
Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 304-313. And unless man had an inborn
sense of divinity, he could deify neither ancestors nor ghosts.
Professor Hilprecht of Philadelphia says: “As the attempt has
recently been made to trace the pure monotheism of Israel to
Babylonian sources, I am bound to declare this an absolute
impossibility, on the basis of my fourteen years’ researches in
Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions. The faith of Israel’s chosen
people is: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.’ And
this faith could never have proceeded from the Babylonian mountain
of gods, that charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s
bones.”
(_c_) Some of the earliest remains of man yet found show, by the burial of
food and weapons with the dead, that there already existed the idea of
spiritual beings and of a future state, and therefore a religion of a
higher sort than fetichism.
Idolatry proper regards the idol as the symbol and representative
of a spiritual being who exists apart from the material object,
though he manifests himself through it. Fetichism, however,
identifies the divinity with the material thing, and worships the
stock or stone; spirit is not conceived of as existing apart from
body. Belief in spiritual beings and a future state is therefore
proof of a religion higher in kind than fetichism. See Lyell,
Antiquity of Man, quoted in Dawson, Story of Earth and Man, 384;
see also 368, 372, 386—“Man’s capacities for degradation are
commensurate with his capacities for improvement” (Dawson). Lyell,
in his last edition, however, admits the evidence from the
Aurignac cave to be doubtful. See art. by Dawkins, in Nature,
4:208.
(_d_) The theory in question, in making theological thought a merely
transient stage of mental evolution, ignores the fact that religion has
its root in the intuitions and yearnings of the human soul, and that
therefore no philosophical or scientific progress can ever abolish it.
While the terms theological, metaphysical, and positive may properly mark
the order in which the ideas of the individual and the race are acquired,
positivism errs in holding that these three phases of thought are mutually
exclusive, and that upon the rise of the later the earlier must of
necessity become extinct.
John Stuart Mill suggests that “personifying” would be a much
better term than “theological” to designate the earliest efforts
to explain physical phenomena. On the fundamental principles of
Positivism, see New Englander, 1873:323-386; Diman, Theistic
Argument, 338—“Three coëxistent states are here confounded with
three successive stages of human thought; three aspects of things
with three epochs of time. Theology, metaphysics, and science must
always exist side by side, for all positive science rests on
metaphysical principles, and theology lies behind both. All are as
permanent as human reason itself.” Martineau, Types, 1:487—“Comte
sets up mediæval Christianity as the typical example of evolved
monotheism, and develops it out of the Greek and Roman polytheism
which it overthrew and dissipated. But the religion of modern
Europe notoriously does not descend from the same source as its
civilization and is no continuation of the ancient culture,”—it
comes rather from Hebrew sources; Essays, Philos. and Theol.,
1:24, 62—“The Jews were always a disobliging people; what business
had they to be up so early in the morning, disturbing the house
ever so long before M. Comte’s bell rang to prayers?” See also
Gillett, God in Human Thought, 1:17-23; Rawlinson, in Journ.
Christ. Philos., April, 1883:353; Nineteenth Century, Oct.
1886:473-490.
Chapter III. Sin, Or Man’s State Of Apostasy.
Section I.—The Law Of God.
As preliminary to a treatment of man’s state of apostasy, it becomes
necessary to consider the nature of that law of God, the transgression of
which is sin. We may best approach the subject by inquiring what is the
true conception of
I. Law in General.
1. Law is an expression of _will_.
The essential idea of law is that of a general expression of will enforced
by power. It implies: (_a_) A lawgiver, or authoritative will. (_b_)
Subjects, or beings upon whom this will terminates. (_c_) A general
command, or expression of this will. (_d_) A power, enforcing the command.
These elements are found even in what we call natural law. The phrase “law
of nature” involves a self-contradiction, when used to denote a mode of
action or an order of sequence behind which there is conceived to be no
intelligent and ordaining will. Physics derives the term “law” from
jurisprudence, instead of jurisprudence deriving it from physics. It is
first used of the relations of voluntary agents. Causation in our own
wills enables us to see something besides mere antecedence and consequence
in the world about us. Physical science, in her very use of the word
“law,” implicitly confesses that a supreme Will has set general rules
which control the processes of the universe.
Wayland, Moral Science, 1, unwisely defines law as “a mode of
existence or order of sequence,” thus leaving out of his
definition all reference to an ordaining will. He subsequently
says that law presupposes an establisher, but in his definition
there is nothing to indicate this. We insist, on the other hand,
that the term “law” itself includes the idea of force and cause.
The word “law” is from “lay” (German _legen_),—something laid
down; German _Gesetz_, from _setzen_,—something set or
established; Greek νόμος, from νέμω,—something assigned or
apportioned; Latin _lex_, from _lego_,—something said or spoken.
All these derivations show that man’s original conception of law
is that of something proceeding from volition. Lewes, in his
Problems of Life and Mind, says that the term “law” is so
suggestive of a giver and impresser of law, that it ought to be
dropped, and the word “method” substituted. The merit of Austin’s
treatment of the subject is that he “rigorously limits the term
‘law’ to the commands of a superior”; see John Austin, Province of
Jurisprudence, 1:88-93, 220-223. The defects of his treatment we
shall note further on.
J. S. Mill: “It is the custom, wherever they [scientific men] can
trace regularity of any kind, to call the general proposition
which expresses the nature of that regularity, a law; as when in
mathematics we speak of the law of the successive terms of a
converging series. But the expression ‘law of nature’ is generally
employed by scientific men with a sort of tacit reference to the
original sense of the word ‘law,’ namely, the expression of the
will of a superior—the superior in this case being the Ruler of
the universe.” Paley, Nat. Theology, chap. 1—“It is a perversion
of language to assign any _law_ as the efficient operative cause
of anything. A law presupposes an agent; this is only the mode
according to which an agent proceeds; it implies a power, for it
is the order according to which that power acts. Without this
agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself,
the law does nothing.” “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Rules do
not fulfill themselves, any more than a statute-book can quell a
riot” (Martineau, Types, 1:367).
Charles Darwin got the suggestion of natural selection, not from
the study of lower plants and animals, but from Malthus on
Population; see his Life and Letters, Vol. I, autobiographical
chapter. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 2:248-252—“The
conception of natural law rests upon the analogy of civil law.”
Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 333—“Laws are only the more or less
frequently repeated and uniform modes of the behavior of things”;
Philosophy of Mind, 122—“To be, to stand in relation, to be
self-active, to act upon other being, to obey law, to be a cause,
to be a permanent subject of states, to be the same to-day as
yesterday, to be identical, to be one,—all these and all similar
conceptions, together with the proofs that they are valid for real
beings, are affirmed of physical realities, or projected into
them, only on a basis of self-knowledge, envisaging and affirming
the reality of mind. Without psychological insight and
philosophical training, such terms or their equivalents are
meaningless in physics. And because writers on physics do not in
general have this insight and this training, in spite of their
utmost endeavors to treat physics as an empirical science without
metaphysics, they flounder and blunder and contradict themselves
hopelessly whenever they touch upon fundamental matters.” See
President McGarvey’s Criticism on James Lane Allen’s Reign of Law:
“It is not in the nature of law to reign. To reign is an act which
can be literally affirmed only of persons. A man may reign; a God
may reign; a devil may reign; but a law cannot reign. If a law
could reign, we should have no gambling in New York and no open
saloons on Sunday. There would be no false swearing in courts of
justice, and no dishonesty in politics. It is men who reign in
these matters—the judges, the grand jury, the sheriff and the
police. They may reign according to law. Law cannot reign even
over those who are appointed to execute the law.”
2. Law is a _general_ expression of will.
The characteristic of law is generality. It is addressed to substances or
persons in classes. Special legislation is contrary to the true theory of
law.
When the Sultan of Zanzibar orders his barber to be beheaded
because the latter has cut his master, this order is not properly
a law. To be a law it must read: “Every barber who cuts his
majesty shall thereupon be decapitated.” _Einmal ist keinmal_ =
“Once is no custom.” Dr. Schurman suggests that the word _meal_
(Mahl) means originally _time_ (_mal_ in _einmal_). The
measurement of time among ourselves is astronomical; among our
earliest ancestors it was gastronomical, and the reduplication
_mealtime_ = the ding-dong of the dinner bell. The Shah of Persia
once asked the Prince of Wales to have a man put to death in order
that he might see the English method of execution. When the Prince
told him that this was beyond his power, the Shah wished to know
what was the use of being a king if he could not kill people at
his pleasure. Peter the Great suggested a way out of the
difficulty. He desired to see keelhauling. When informed that
there was no sailor liable to that penalty, he replied: “That does
not matter,—take one of my suite.” Amos, Science of Law, 33,
34—“Law eminently deals in general rules.” It knows not persons or
personality. It must apply to more than one case. “The
characteristic of law is generality, as that of morality is
individual application.” Special legislation is the bane of good
government; it does not properly fall within the province of the
law-making power; it savors of the caprice of despotism, which
gives commands to each subject at will. Hence our more advanced
political constitutions check lobby influence and bribery, by
prohibiting special legislation in all cases where general laws
already exist.
3. Law implies _power to enforce_.
It is essential to the existence of law, that there be power to enforce.
Otherwise law becomes the expression of mere wish or advice. Since
physical substances and forces have no intelligence and no power to
resist, the four elements already mentioned exhaust the implications of
the term “law” as applied to nature. In the case of rational and free
agents, however, law implies in addition: (_e_) Duty or obligation to
obey; and (_f_) Sanctions, or pains and penalties for disobedience.
“Law that has no penalty is not law but advice, and the government
in which infliction does not follow transgression is the reign of
rogues or demons.” On the question whether any of the punishments
of civil law are legal sanctions, except the punishment of death,
see N. W. Taylor, Moral Govt., 2:367-387. Rewards are motives, but
they are not sanctions. Since public opinion may be conceived of
as inflicting penalties for violation of her will, we speak
figuratively of the laws of society, of fashion, of etiquette, of
honor. Only so far as the community of nations can and does by
sanctions compel obedience, can we with propriety assert the
existence of international law. Even among nations, however, there
may be moral as well as physical sanctions. The decision of an
international tribunal has the same sanction as a treaty, and if
the former is impotent, the latter also is. Fines and imprisonment
do not deter decent people from violations of law half so
effectively as do the social penalties of ostracism and disgrace,
and it will be the same with the findings of an international
tribunal. Diplomacy without ships and armies has been said to be
law without penalty. But exclusion from civilized society is
penalty. “In the unquestioning obedience to fashion’s decrees, to
which we all quietly submit, we are simply yielding to the
pressure of the persons about us. No one adopts a style of dress
because it is reasonable, for the styles are often most
unreasonable; but we meekly yield to the most absurd of them
rather than resist this force and be called eccentric. So what we
call public opinion is the most mighty power to-day known, whether
in society or in politics.”
4. Law expresses and demands _nature_.
The will which thus binds its subjects by commands and penalties is an
expression of the nature of the governing power, and reveals the normal
relations of the subjects to that power. Finally, therefore, law (_g_) Is
an expression of the nature of the lawgiver; and (_h_) Sets forth the
condition or conduct in the subjects which is requisite for harmony with
that nature. Any so-called law which fails to represent the nature of the
governing power soon becomes obsolete. All law that is permanent is a
transcript of the facts of being, a discovery of what is and must be, in
order to harmony between the governing and the governed; in short,
positive law is just and lasting only as it is an expression and
republication of the law of nature.
Diman, Theistic Argument, 106, 107: John Austin, although he
“rigorously limited the term law to the commands of a superior,”
yet “rejected Ulpian’s explanation of the law of nature, and
ridiculed as fustian the celebrated description in Hooker.” This
we conceive to be the radical defect of Austin’s conception. The
Will from which natural law proceeds is conceived of after a
deistic fashion, instead of being immanent in the universe.
Lightwood, in his Nature of Positive Law, 78-90, criticizes
Austin’s definition of law as command, and substitutes the idea of
law as custom. Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law has shown us that the
early village communities had customs which only gradually took
form as definite laws. But we reply that custom is not the
ultimate source of anything. Repeated acts of will are necessary
to constitute custom. The first customs are due to the commanding
will of the father in the patriarchal family. So Austin’s
definition is justified. Collective morals (_mores_) come from
individual duty (_due_); law originates in will; Martineau, Types,
2:18, 19. Behind this will, however, is something which Austin
does not take account of, namely, the nature of things as
constituted by God, as revealing the universal Reason, and as
furnishing the standard to which all positive law, if it would be
permanent, must conform.
See Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, book 1, sec. 14—“Laws are the
necessary relations arising from the nature of things.... There is
a primitive Reason, and laws are the relations subsisting between
it and different beings, and the relations of these to one
another.... These rules are a fixed and invariable relation....
Particular intelligent beings may have laws of their own making,
but they have some likewise that they never made.... To say that
there is nothing just or unjust but what is commanded or forbidden
by positive laws, is the same as saying that before the describing
of a circle all the radii were not equal. We must therefore
acknowledge relations antecedent to the positive law by which they
were established.” Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 169-172—“By the
science of law is meant systematic knowledge of the principles of
the law of nature—from which positive law takes its rise—which is
forever the same, and carries its sure and unchanging obligations
over all nations and throughout all ages.”
It is true even of a despot’s law, that it reveals his nature, and
shows what is requisite in the subject to constitute him in
harmony with that nature. A law which does not represent the
nature of things, or the real relations of the governor and the
governed, has only a nominal existence, and cannot be permanent.
On the definition and nature of law, see also Pomeroy, in
Johnson’s Encyclopædia, art.: Law; Ahrens, Cours de Droit Naturel,
book 1, sec. 14; Lorimer, Institutes of Law, 256, who quotes from
Burke: “All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory.
They may alter the mode and application, but have no power over
the substance of original justice”; Lord Bacon: “Regula enim legem
(ut acus nautica polos) indicat, non statuit.” Duke of Argyll,
Reign of Law, 64; H. C. Carey, Unity of Law.
Fairbairn, in Contemp. Rev., Apl. 1895:473—“The Roman jurists draw
a distinction between _jus naturale_ and _jus civile_, and they
used the former to affect the latter. The _jus civile_ was
statutory, established and fixed law, as it were, the actual legal
environment; the _jus naturale_ was ideal, the principle of
justice and equity immanent in man, yet with the progress of his
ethical culture growing ever more articulate.” We add the fact
that _jus_ in Latin and _Recht_ in German have ceased to mean
merely abstract right, and have come to denote the legal system in
which that abstract right is embodied and expressed. Here we have
a proof that Christ is gradually moralizing the world and
translating law into life. E. G. Robinson: “Never a government on
earth made its own laws. Even constitutions simply declare laws
already and actually existing. Where society falls into anarchy,
the _lex talionis_ becomes the prevailing principle.”
II. The Law of God in Particular.
The law of God is a general expression of the divine will enforced by
power. It has two forms: Elemental Law and Positive Enactment.
1. _Elemental Law_, or law inwrought into the elements, substances, and
forces of the rational and irrational creation. This is twofold:
A. The expression of the divine will in the constitution of the material
universe;—this we call physical, or natural law. Physical law is not
necessary. Another order of things is conceivable. Physical order is not
an end in itself; it exists for the sake of moral order. Physical order
has therefore only a relative constancy, and God supplements it at times
by miracle.
Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 210—“The laws of nature
represent no necessity, but are only the orderly forms of
procedure of some Being back of them.... Cosmic uniformities are
God’s methods in freedom.” Philos. of Theism, 73—“Any of the
cosmic laws, from gravitation on, might conceivably have been
lacking or altogether different.... No trace of necessity can be
found in the Cosmos or in its laws.” Seth, Hegelianism and
Personality: “Nature is not necessary. Why put an island where it
is, and not a mile east or west? Why connect the smell and shape
of the rose, or the taste and color of the orange? Why do H2O form
water? No one knows.” William James: “The parts seem shot at us
out of a pistol.” Rather, we would say, out of a shotgun.
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 33—“Why undulations in one medium
should produce sound, and in another light; why one speed of
vibration should give red color, and another blue, can be
explained by no reason of necessity. Here is selecting will.”
Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 126—“So far as the philosophy of
evolution involves belief that nature is determinate, or due to a
necessary law of universal progress or evolution, it seems to me
to be utterly unsupported by evidence and totally unscientific.”
There is no power to deduce anything whatever from homogeneity.
Press the button and law does the rest? Yes, but what presses the
button? The solution crystalises when shaken? Yes, but what shakes
it? Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge, 310—“The directions and velocities
of the stars fall under no common principles that astronomy can
discover. One of the stars—‘1830 Groombridge’—is flying through
space at a rate many times as great as it could attain if it had
fallen through infinite space through all eternity toward the
entire physical universe.... Fluids contract when cooled and
expand when heated,—yet there is the well known exception of water
at the degree of freezing.” 263—“Things do not appear to be
mathematical all the way through. The system of things may be a
Life, changing its modes of manifestation according to immanent
ideas, rather than a collection of rigid entities, blindly subject
in a mechanical way to unchanging laws.”
Augustine: “Dei voluntas rerum natura est.” Joseph Cook: “The laws
of nature are the habits of God.” But Campbell, Atonement,
Introd., xxvi, says there is this difference between the laws of
the moral universe and those of the physical, namely, that we do
not trace the existence of the former to an act of will, as we do
the latter. “To say that God has given existence to goodness, as
he has to the laws of nature, would be equivalent to saying that
he has given existence to himself.” Pepper, Outlines of Syst.
Theol., 91—“Moral law, unlike natural law, is a standard of action
to be adopted or rejected in the exercise of rational freedom, _i.
e._, of moral agency.” See also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:531.
Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:190—“In moral law
there is enforcement by punishment only—never by power, for this
would confound moral law with physical, and obedience can never be
produced or secured by power. In physical law, on the contrary,
enforcement is wholly by power, and punishment is impossible. So
far as man is free, he is not subject to law at all, in its
physical sense. Our wills are free _from_ law, as enforced by
_power_; but are free _under_ law, as enforced by _punishment_.
Where law prevails in the same sense as in the material world,
there can be no freedom. Law does not prevail when we reach the
region of choice. We hold to a power in the mind of man
originating a free choice. Two objects or courses of action,
between which choice is to be made, are presupposed: (1) A
uniformity or set of uniformities implying a force by which the
uniformity is produced [physical or natural law]; (2) A command,
addressed to free and intelligent beings, that can be obeyed or
disobeyed, and that has connected with it rewards or punishments”
[moral law]. See also Wm. Arthur, Difference between Physical and
Moral Law.
B. The expression of the divine will in the constitution of rational and
free agents;—this we call moral law. This elemental law of our moral
nature, with which only we are now concerned, has all the characteristics
mentioned as belonging to law in general. It implies: (_a_) A divine
Law-giver, or ordaining Will. (_b_) Subjects, or moral beings upon whom
the law terminates. (_c_) General command, or expression of this will in
the moral constitution of the subjects. (_d_) Power, enforcing the
command. (_e_) Duty, or obligation to obey. (_f_) Sanctions, or pains and
penalties for disobedience.
All these are of a loftier sort than are found in human law. But we need
especially to emphasize the fact that this law (_g_) Is an expression of
the moral nature of God, and therefore of God’s holiness, the fundamental
attribute of that nature; and that it (_h_) Sets forth absolute conformity
to that holiness, as the normal condition of man. This law is inwrought
into man’s rational and moral being. Man fulfills it, only when in his
moral as well as his rational being he is the image of God.
Although the will from which the moral law springs is an
expression of the nature of God, and a necessary expression of
that nature in view of the existence of moral beings, it is none
the less a personal will. We should be careful not to attribute to
law a personality of its own. When Plutarch says: “Law is king
both of mortal and immortal beings,” and when we say: “The law
will take hold of you,” “The criminal is in danger of the law,” we
are simply substituting the name of the agent for that of the
principal. God is not subject to law; God is the source of law;
and we may say: “If Jehovah be God, worship him; but if Law,
worship it.”
Since moral law merely reflects God, it is not a thing _made_. Men
_discover_ laws, but they do not _make_ them, any more than the
chemist makes the laws by which the elements combine. Instance the
solidification of hydrogen at Geneva. Utility does not constitute
law, although we test law by utility; see Murphy, Scientific Bases
of Faith, 58-71. The true nature of the moral law is set forth in
the noble though rhetorical description of Hooker (Eccl. Pol.,
1:194)—“Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her
seat is in the bosom of God; her voice the harmony of the world;
all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as
feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power;
both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever,
though each in a different sort and manner, yet all with uniform
consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” See
also Martineau, Types, 2:119, and Study, 1:35.
Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religions, 66, 101—“The Oriental
believes that God makes right by edict. Saladin demonstrated to
Henry of Champagne the loyalty of his Assassins, by commanding two
of them to throw themselves down from a lofty tower to certain and
violent death.” H. B. Smith, System, 192—“Will implies
personality, and personality adds to abstract truth and duty the
element of authority. Law therefore has the force that a person
has over and above that of an idea.” Human law forbids only those
offences which constitute a breach of public order or of private
right. God’s law forbids all that is an offence against the divine
order, that is, all that is unlike God. The whole law may be
summed up in the words: “Be like God.” Salter, First Steps in
Philosophy, 101-126—“The realization of the nature of each being
is the end to be striven for. Self-realization is an ideal end,
not of one being, but of each being, with due regard to the value
of each in the proper scale of worth. The beast can be sacrificed
for man. All men are sacred as capable of unlimited progress. It
is our duty to realize the capacities of our nature so far as they
are consistent with one another and go to make up one whole.” This
means that man fulfills the law only as he realizes the divine
idea in his character and life, or, in other words, as he becomes
a finite image of God’s infinite perfections.
Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 191, 201, 285, 286—“Morality is rooted in
the nature of things. There is a universe. We are all parts of an
infinite organism. Man is inseparably bound to man [and to God].
All rights and duties arise out of this common life. In the
solidarity of social life lies the ground of Kant’s law: So will,
that the maxim of thy conduct may apply to all. The planet cannot
safely fly away from the sun, and the hand cannot safely separate
itself from the heart. It is from the fundamental unity of life
that our duties flow.... The infinite world-organism is the body
and manifestation of God. And when we recognize the solidarity of
our vital being with this divine life and embodiment, we begin to
see into the heart of the mystery, the unquestionable authority
and supreme sanction of duty. Our moral intuitions are simply the
unchanging laws of the universe that have emerged to consciousness
in the human heart.... The inherent principles of the universal
Reason reflect themselves in the mirror of the moral nature....
The enlightened conscience is the expression in the human soul of
the divine Consciousness.... Morality is the victory of the divine
Life in us.... Solidarity of our life with the universal Life
gives it unconditional sacredness and transcendental authority....
The microcosm must bring itself _en rapport_ with the Macrocosm.
Man must bring his spirit into resemblance to the World-essence,
and into union with it.”
The law of God, then, is simply an expression of the nature of God in the
form of moral requirement, and a necessary expression of that nature in
view of the existence of moral beings (Ps. 19:7; _cf._ 1). To the
existence of this law all men bear witness. The consciences even of the
heathen testify to it (Rom. 2:14, 15). Those who have the written law
recognize this elemental law as of greater compass and penetration (Rom.
7:14; 8:4). The perfect embodiment and fulfillment of this law is seen
only in Christ (Rom. 10:4; Phil. 3:8, 9).
_Ps. 19:7_—“_The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul_”;
_cf._ _verse 1_—“_The heavens declare the glory of God_”—two
revelations of God—one in nature, the other in the moral law.
_Rom. 2:14, 15_—“_for when Gentiles that have not the law do by
nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the
law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written
in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and
their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing
them_”—here the “_work of the law_”—, not the ten commandments,
for of these the heathen were ignorant, but rather the work
corresponding to them, _i. e._, the substance of them. _Rom.
7:14_—“_For we know that the law is spiritual_”—this, says Meyer,
is equivalent to saying “its essence is divine, of like nature
with the Holy Spirit who gave it, a holy self-revelation of God.”
_Rom. 8:4_—“_that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in
us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit_”;
_10:4_—“_For Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to
every one that believeth_”; _Phil. 3:8, 9_—“_that I may gain
Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of mine
own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through
faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith_”;
_Heb. 10:9_—“_Lo, I am come to do thy will._” In Christ “the law
appears Drawn out in living characters.” Just such as he was and
is, we feel that we ought to be. Hence the character of Christ
convicts us of sin, as does no other manifestation of God. See, on
the passages from Romans, the Commentary of Philippi.
Fleming, Vocab. Philos., 286—“Moral laws are derived from the
nature and will of God, and the character and condition of man.”
God’s nature is reflected in the laws of our nature. Since law is
inwrought into man’s nature, man is a law unto himself. To conform
to his own nature, in which conscience is supreme, is to conform
to the nature of God. The law is only the revelation of the
constitutive principles of being, the declaration of what must be,
so long as man is man and God is God. It says in effect: “Be like
God, or you cannot be truly man.” So moral law is not simply a
test of obedience, but is also a revelation of eternal reality.
Man cannot be lost to God, without being lost to himself. “The
‘_hands of the living God_’ (_Heb. 10:31_) into which we fall, are
the laws of nature.” In the spiritual world “the same wheels
revolve, only there is no iron” (Drummond, Natural Law in the
Spiritual World, 27). Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:82-92—“The
totality of created being is to be in harmony with God and with
itself. The idea of this harmony, as active in God under the form
of will, is God’s law.” A manuscript of the U. S. Constitution was
so written that when held at a little distance the shading of the
letters and their position showed the countenance of George
Washington. So the law of God is only God’s face disclosed to
human sight.
R. W. Emerson, Woodnotes, 57—“Conscious Law is King of kings.” Two
centuries ago John Norton wrote a book entitled The Orthodox
Evangelist, “designed for the begetting and establishing of the
faith which is in Jesus,” in which we find the following: “God
doth not will things because they are just, but things are
therefore just because God so willeth them. What reasonable man
but will yield that the being of the moral law hath no necessary
connection with the being of God? That the actions of men not
conformable to this law should be sin, that death should be the
punishment of sin, these are the constitutions of God, proceeding
from him not by way of necessity of nature, but freely, as effects
and products of his eternal good pleasure.” This is to make God an
arbitrary despot. We should not say that God _makes_ law, nor on
the other hand that God _is subject to_ law, but rather that God
_is_ law and _the source_ of law.
Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 161—“God’s law is organic—inwrought into
the constitution of men and things. The chart however does not
make the channel.... A law of nature is never the antecedent but
the consequence of reality. What right has this consequence of
reality to be personalized and made the ruler and source of
reality? Law is only the fixed mode in which reality works. Law
therefore can explain nothing. Only God, from whom reality
springs, can explain reality.” In other words, law is never an
agent but always a method—the method of God, or rather of Christ
who is the only Revealer of God. Christ’s life in the flesh is the
clearest manifestation of him who is the principle of law in the
physical and moral universe. Christ is the Reason of God in
expression. It was he who gave the law on Mount Sinai as well as
in the Sermon on the Mount. For fuller treatment of the subject,
see Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 321-344; Talbot, Ethical
Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July, 1877:257-274; Whewell, Elements
of Morality, 2:35; and especially E. G. Robinson, Principles and
Practice of Morality, 79-108.
Each of the two last-mentioned characteristics of God’s law is important
in its implications. We treat of these in their order.
First, the law of God as a transcript of the divine nature.—If this be the
nature of the law, then certain common misconceptions of it are excluded.
The law of God is
(_a_) Not arbitrary, or the product of arbitrary will. Since the will from
which the law springs is a revelation of God’s nature, there can be no
rashness or unwisdom in the law itself.
E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 193—“No law of God seems ever to
have been arbitrarily enacted, or simply with a view to certain
ends to be accomplished; it always represented some reality of
life which it was inexorably necessary that those who were to be
regulated should carefully observe.” The theory that law
originates in arbitrary will results in an effeminate type of
piety, just as the theory that legislation has for its sole end
the greatest happiness results in all manner of compromises of
justice. Jones, Robert Browning, 43—“He who cheats his neighbor
believes in tortuosity, and, as Carlyle says, has the supreme
Quack for his god.”
(b) Not temporary, or ordained simply to meet an exigency. The law is a
manifestation, not of temporary moods or desires, but of the essential
nature of God.
The great speech of Sophocles’ Antigone gives us this conception
of law: “The ordinances of the gods are unwritten, but sure. Not
one of them is for to-day or for yesterday alone, but they live
forever.” Moses might break the tables of stone upon which the law
was inscribed, and Jehoiakim might cut up the scroll and cast it
into the fire (_Ex. 32:19_; _Jer. 36:23_), but the law remained
eternal as before in the nature of God and in the constitution of
man. Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch: “The moral laws are just as
stable as the law of gravitation. Every fuzzy human chicken that
is hatched into this world tries to fool with those laws. Some
grow wiser in the process and some do not. We talk about breaking
God’s laws. But after those laws have been broken several billion
times since Adam first tried to play with them, those laws are
still intact and no seam or fracture is visible in them,—not even
a scratch on the enamel. But the lawbreakers—that is another
story. If you want to find their fragments, go to the ruins of
Egypt, of Babylon, of Jerusalem; study statistics; read faces;
keep your eyes open; visit Blackwell’s Island; walk through the
graveyard and read the invisible inscriptions left by the Angel of
Judgment, for instance: ‘Here lie the fragments of John Smith, who
contradicted his Maker, played football with the ten commandments,
and departed this life at the age of thirty-five. His mother and
wife weep for him. Nobody else does. May he rest in peace!’ ”
(_c_) Not merely negative, or a law of mere prohibition,—since positive
conformity to God is the inmost requisition of law.
The negative form of the commandments in the decalogue merely takes for
granted the evil inclination in men’s hearts and practically opposes its
gratification. In the case of each commandment a whole province of the
moral life is taken into the account, although the act expressly forbidden
is the acme of evil in that one province. So the decalogue makes itself
intelligible: it crosses man’s path just where he most feels inclined to
wander. But back of the negative and specific expression in each case lies
the whole mass of moral requirement: the thin edge of the wedge has the
positive demand of holiness behind it, without obedience to which even the
prohibition cannot in spirit be obeyed. Thus “_the law is spiritual_”
(_Rom. 7:14_), and requires likeness in character and life to the
spiritual God; _John 4:24_—“_God is spirit, and they that worship him must
worship in spirit and truth._”
(_d_) Not partial, or addressed to one part only of man’s being,—since
likeness to God requires purity of substance in man’s soul and body, as
well as purity in all the thoughts and acts that proceed therefrom. As law
proceeds from the nature of God, so it requires conformity to that nature
in the nature of man.
Whatever God gave to man at the beginning he requires of man with
interest; _cf._ _Mat. 25:27_—“_thou oughtest therefore to have put
my money to the bankers, and at my coming I should have received
back mine own with interest._” Whatever comes short of perfect
purity in soul or perfect health in body is non-conformity to God
and contradicts his law, it being understood that only that
perfection is demanded which answers to the creature’s stage of
growth and progress, so that of the child there is required only
the perfection of the child, of the youth only the perfection of
the youth, of the man only the perfection of the man. See Julius
Müller, Doctrine of Sin, chapter 1.
(_e_) Not outwardly published,—since all positive enactment is only the
imperfect expression of this underlying and unwritten law of being.
Much misunderstanding of God’s law results from confounding it
with published enactment. Paul takes the larger view that the law
is independent of such expression; see _Rom. 2:14, 15_—“_for when
Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law,
these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that
they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their
conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with
another accusing or else excusing them:_” see Expositor’s Greek
Testament, _in loco_: “ ‘_written on their hearts_,’ when
contrasted with the law written on the tables of stone, is equal
to ‘unwritten’; the Apostle refers to what the Greeks called
ἄγραφος νόμος.”
(_f_) Not inwardly conscious, or limited in its scope by men’s
consciousness of it. Like the laws of our physical being, the moral law
exists whether we recognize it or not.
Overeating brings its penalty in dyspepsia, whether we are
conscious of our fault or not. We cannot by ignorance or by vote
repeal the laws of our physical system. Self-will does not secure
independence, any more than the stars can by combination abolish
gravitation. Man cannot get rid of God’s dominion by denying its
existence, nor by refusing submission to it. _Psalm 2:1-4_—“_Why
do the nations rage ... against Jehovah ... saying, Let us break
their bonds asunder.... He that sitteth in the heavens will
laugh._” Salter, First Steps in Philosophy, 94—“The fact that one
is not aware of obligation no more affects its reality than
ignorance of what is at the centre of the earth affects the nature
of what is really discoverable there. We discover obligation, and
do not create it by thinking of it, any more than we create the
sensible world by thinking of it.”
(_g_) Not local, or confined to place,—since no moral creature can escape
from God, from his own being, or from the natural necessity that
unlikeness to God should involve misery and ruin.
“The Dutch auction” was the public offer of property at a price
beyond its value, followed by the lowering of the price until some
one accepted it as a purchaser. There is no such local exception
to the full validity of God’s demands. The moral law has even more
necessary and universal sway than the law of gravitation in the
physical universe. It is inwrought into the very constitution of
man, and of every other moral being. The man who offended the
Roman Emperor found the whole empire a prison.
(_h_) Not changeable, or capable of modification. Since law represents the
unchangeable nature of God, it is not a sliding scale of requirements
which adapts itself to the ability of the subjects. God himself cannot
change it without ceasing to be God.
The law, then, has a deeper foundation than that God merely “said
so.” God’s word and God’s will are revelations of his inmost
being; every transgression of the law is a stab at the heart of
God. Simon, Reconciliation, 141, 142—“God continues to demand
loyalty even after man has proved disloyal. Sin changes man, and
man’s change involves a change in God. Man now regards God as a
ruler and exactor, and God must regard man as a defaulter and a
rebel.” God’s requirement is not lessened because man is unable to
meet it. This inability is itself non-conformity to law, and is no
excuse for sin; see Dr. Bushnell’s sermon on “Duty not measured by
Ability.” The man with the withered hand would not have been
justified in refusing to stretch it forth at Jesus’ command (_Mat.
12:10-13_).
The obligation to obey this law and to be conformed to God’s
perfect moral character is based upon man’s original ability and
the gifts which God bestowed upon him at the beginning. Created in
the image of God, it is man’s duty to render back to God that
which God first gave, enlarged and improved by growth and culture
(_Luke 19:23_—“_wherefore gavest thou not my money into the bank,
and I at my coming should have required it with interest_”). This
obligation is not impaired by sin and the weakening of man’s
powers. To let down the standard would be to misrepresent God.
Adolphe Monod would not save himself from shame and remorse by
lowering the claims of the law: “Save first the holy law of my
God,” he says, “after that you shall save me!”
Even salvation is not through violation of law. The moral law is
immutable, because it is a transcript of the nature of the
immutable God. Shall nature conform to me, or I to nature? If I
attempt to resist even physical laws, I am crushed. I can use
nature only by obeying her laws. Lord Bacon: “Natura enim non nisi
parendo vincitur.” So in the moral realm. We cannot buy off nor
escape the moral law of God. God will not, and God can not, change
his law by one hair’s breadth, even to save a universe of sinners.
Omar Kháyyám, in his Rubáiyát, begs his god to “reconcile the law
to my desires.” Marie Corelli says well: “As if a gnat should seek
to build a cathedral, and should ask to have the laws of
architecture altered to suit its gnat-like capacity.” See
Martineau, Types, 2:120.
Secondly, the law of God as the ideal of human nature.—A law thus
identical with the eternal and necessary relations of the creature to the
Creator, and demanding of the creature nothing less than perfect holiness,
as the condition of harmony with the infinite holiness of God, is adapted
to man’s finite nature, as needing law; to man’s free nature, as needing
moral law; and to man’s progressive nature, as needing ideal law.
Man, as finite, needs law, just as railway cars need a track to
guide them—to leap the track is to find, not freedom, but ruin.
Railway President: “Our rules are written in blood.” Goethe, Was
Wir Bringen, 19 Auftritt: “In vain shall spirits that are all
unbound To the pure heights of perfectness aspire; In limitation
first the Master shines, And law alone can give us liberty.”—Man,
as a free being, needs moral law. He is not an automaton, a
creature of necessity, governed only by physical influences. With
conscience to command the right, and will to choose or reject it,
his true dignity and calling are that he should freely realize the
right.—Man, as a progressive being, needs nothing less than an
ideal and infinite standard of attainment, a goal which he can
never overpass, an end which shall ever attract and urge him
forward. This he finds in the holiness of God.
The law is a _fence_, not only for ownership, but for care. God
not only demands, but he protects. Law is the transcript of love
as well as of holiness. We may reverse the well-known couplet and
say: “I slept, and dreamed that life was Duty; I woke and found
that life was Beauty.” “Cui servire regnare est.” Butcher, Aspects
of Greek Genius, 56—“In Plato’s Crito, the Laws are made to
present themselves in person to Socrates in prison, not only as
the guardians of his liberty, but as his lifelong friends, his
well-wishers, his equals, with whom he had of his own free will
entered into binding compact.” It does not harm the scholar to
have before him the ideal of perfect scholarship; nor the teacher
to have before him the ideal of a perfect school; nor the
legislator to have before him the ideal of perfect law. Gordon,
The Christ of To-day, 134—“The moral goal must be a flying goal;
the standard to which we are to grow must be ever rising; the type
to which we are to be conformed must have in it inexhaustible
fulness.”
John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:119—“It is just the
best, purest, noblest human souls, who are least satisfied with
themselves and their own spiritual attainments; and the reason is
that the human is not a nature essentially different from the
divine, but a nature which, just because it is in essential
affinity with God, can be satisfied with nothing less than a
divine perfection.” J. M. Whiton, The Divine Satisfaction: “Law
requires being, character, likeness to God. It is automatic,
self-operating. Penalty is untransferable. It cannot admit of any
other satisfaction than the reëstablishment of the normal relation
which it requires. Punishment proclaims that the law has not been
satisfied. There is no cancelling of the curse except through the
growing up of the normal relation. Blessing and curse ensue upon
what we are, not upon what we were. Reparation is within the
spirit itself. The atonement is educational, not governmental.” We
reply that the atonement is both governmental and educational, and
that reparation must first be made to the holiness of God before
conscience, the mirror of God’s holiness, can reflect that
reparation and be at peace.
The law of God is therefore characterized by:
(_a_) All-comprehensiveness.—It is over us at all times; it respects our
past, our present, our future. It forbids every conceivable sin; it
requires every conceivable virtue; omissions as well as commissions are
condemned by it.
_Ps. 119:96_—“_I have seen an end of all perfection ... thy
commandment is exceeding broad_”; _Rom. 3:23_—“_all have sinned,
and fall short of the glory of God_”; _James 4:17_—“_To him
therefore that knoweth to do good, and __ doeth it not, to him it
is sin._” Gravitation holds the mote as well as the world. God’s
law detects and denounces the least sin, so that without atonement
it cannot be pardoned. The law of gravitation may be suspended or
abrogated, for it has no necessary ground in God’s being; but
God’s moral law cannot be suspended or abrogated, for that would
contradict God’s holiness. “About right” is not “all right.” “The
giant hexagonal pillars of basalt in the Scottish Staffa are
identical in form with the microscopic crystals of the same
mineral.” So God is our pattern, and goodness is our likeness to
him.
(_b_) Spirituality.—It demands not only right acts and words, but also
right dispositions and states. Perfect obedience requires not only the
intense and unremitting reign of love toward God and man, but conformity
of the whole inward and outward nature of man to the holiness of God.
_Mat. 5:22, 28_—the angry word is murder; the sinful look is
adultery. _Mark 12:30, 31_—“_thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and
with all thy strength.... Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself_”; _2 Cor. 10:5_—“_bringing every thought into captivity
to the obedience of Christ_”; _Eph. 5:1_—“_Be ye therefore
imitators of God, as beloved children_”; _1 Pet. 1:16_—“_Ye shall
be holy; for I am holy._” As the brightest electric light, seen
through a smoked glass against the sun, appears like a black spot,
so the brightest unregenerate character is dark, when compared
with the holiness of God. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 235,
remarks on _Gal. 6:4_—“_let each man prove his own work, and then
shall he have his glorying in regard of himself alone, and not of
his neighbor_”—“I have a small candle and I compare it with my
brother’s taper and come away rejoicing. Why not compare it with
the sun? Then I shall lose my pride and uncharitableness.” The
distance to the sun from the top of an ant-hill and from the top
of Mount Everest is nearly the same. The African princess praised
for her beauty had no way to verify the compliments paid her but
by looking in the glassy surface of the pool. But the trader came
and sold her a mirror. Then she was so shocked at her own ugliness
that she broke the mirror in pieces. So we look into the mirror of
God’s law, compare ourselves with the Christ who is reflected
there, and hate the mirror which reveals us to ourselves (_James
1:23, 24_).
(_c_) Solidarity.—It exhibits in all its parts the nature of the one
Lawgiver, and it expresses, in its least command, the one requirement of
harmony with him.
_Mat. 5:48_—“_Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly
Father is perfect_”; _Mark 12:29, 30_—“_The Lord our God, the Lord
is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God_”; _James 2:10_—“_For
whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point,
he is become guilty of all_”; _4:12_—“_One only is the lawgiver
and judge._” Even little rattlesnakes are snakes. One link broken
in the chain, and the bucket falls into the well. The least sin
separates us from God. The least sin renders us guilty of the
whole law, because it shows us to lack the love which is required
in all the commandments. Those who send us to the Sermon on the
Mount for salvation send us to a tribunal that damns us. The
Sermon on the Mount is but a republication of the law given on
Sinai, but now in more spiritual and penetrating form. Thunders
and lightnings proceed from the N. T., as from the O. T., mount.
The Sermon on the Mount is only the introductory lecture of Jesus’
theological course, as _John 14-17_ is the closing lecture. In it
is announced the law, which prepares the way for the gospel. Those
who would degrade doctrine by exalting precept will find that they
have left men without the motive or the power to keep the precept.
Æschylus, Agamemnon: “For there’s no bulwark in man’s wealth to
him Who, through a surfeit, kicks—into the dim And
disappearing—Right’s great altar.”
Only to the first man, then, was the law proposed as a method of
salvation. With the first sin, all hope of obtaining the divine favor by
perfect obedience is lost. To sinners the law remains as a means of
discovering and developing sin in its true nature, and of compelling a
recourse to the mercy provided in Jesus Christ.
_2 Chron. 34:19_—“_And it came to pass, when the king had heard
the words of the law, that he rent his clothes_”; _Job 42:5,
6_—“_I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; But now mine
eye seeth thee; Wherefore I abhor myself, And repent in dust and
ashes._” The revelation of God in _Is. 6:3, 5_—“_Holy, holy, holy,
is Jehovah of hosts_”—causes the prophet to cry like the leper:
“_Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean
lips._” _Rom. 3:20_—“_by the works of the law shall no flesh be
justified in his sight; for through the law cometh the __
knowledge of sin_”; _5:20_—“_the law came in besides, that the
trespass might abound_”; _7:7, 8_—“_I had not known sin, except
through the law: for I had not known coveting, except the law had
said, Thou shalt not covet: but sin, finding occasion, wrought in
me through the commandment all manner of coveting: for apart from
the law sin is dead_”; _Gal. 3:24_—“_So that the law is become our
tutor,_” or attendant-slave, “_to bring us unto Christ, that we
might be justified by faith_”—the law trains our wayward boyhood
and leads it to Christ the Master, as in old times the slave
accompanied children to school. Stevens, Pauline Theology, 177,
178—“The law increases sin by increasing the knowledge of sin and
by increasing the activity of sin. The law does not add to the
inherent energy of the sinful principle which pervades human
nature, but it does cause this principle to reveal itself more
energetically in sinful act.” The law inspires fear, but it leads
to love. The Rabbins said that, if Israel repented but for one
day, the Messiah would appear.
No man ever yet drew a straight line or a perfect curve; yet he
would be a poor architect who contented himself with anything
less. Since men never come up to their ideals, he who aims to live
only an _average_ moral life will inevitably fall _below_ the
average. The law, then, leads to Christ. He who is the _ideal_ is
also the _way_ to attain the ideal. He who is himself the Word and
the Law embodied, is also the Spirit of life that makes obedience
possible to us (_John 14:6_—“_I am the way, and the truth, and the
life_”; _Rom. 8:2_—“_For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death_”). Mrs.
Browning, Aurora Leigh: “The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless he had given the Life too with the Law.” Christ _for_ us
upon the Cross, and Christ _in_ us by his Spirit, is the only
deliverance from the curse of the law; _Gal 3:13_—“_Christ
redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for
us._” We must see the claims of the law satisfied and the law
itself written on our hearts. We are “_reconciled to God through
the death of his Son_,” but we are also _“__saved by his life__”__
(Rom. 5:10_).
Robert Browning, in The Ring and the Book, represents Caponsacchi
as comparing himself at his best with the new ideal of “perfect as
Father in heaven is perfect” suggested by Pompilia’s purity, and
as breaking out into the cry: “O great, just, good God! Miserable
me!” In the Interpreter’s House of Pilgrim’s Progress, Law only
stirred up the dust in the foul room,—the Gospel had to sprinkle
water on the floor before it could be cleansed. E. G. Robinson:
“It is necessary to smoke a man out, before you can bring a higher
motive to bear upon him.” Barnabas said that Christ was the answer
to the riddle of the law. _Rom. 10:4_—“_Christ is the end of the
law unto righteousness to every one that believeth._” The railroad
track opposite Detroit on the St. Clair River runs to the edge of
the dock and seems intended to plunge the train into the abyss.
But when the ferry boat comes up, rails are seen upon its deck,
and the boat is the end of the track, to carry passengers over to
Detroit. So the law, which by itself would bring only destruction,
finds its end in Christ who ensures our passage to the celestial
city.
Law, then, with its picture of spotless innocence, simply reminds
man of the heights from which he has fallen. “It is a mirror which
reveals derangement, but does not create or remove it.” With its
demand of absolute perfection, up to the measure of man’s original
endowments and possibilities, it drives us, in despair of
ourselves, to Christ as our only righteousness and our only Savior
(_Rom. 8:3, 4_—“_For what the law could not do, in that it was
weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness
of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the
ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after
the flesh, but after the Spirit_”; _Phil. 3:8, 9_—“_that I may
gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of
mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through
faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith_”).
Thus law must prepare the way for grace, and John the Baptist must
precede Christ.
When Sarah Bernhardt was solicited to add an eleventh commandment,
she declined upon the ground there were already ten too many. It
was an expression of pagan contempt of law. In heathendom, sin and
insensibility to sin increased together. In Judaism and
Christianity, on the contrary, there has been a growing sense of
sin’s guilt and condemnableness. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Sept.
23, 1893:600—“Among the Jews there was a far profounder sense of
sin than in any other ancient nation. The law written on men’s
hearts evoked a lower consciousness of sin, and there are prayers
on the Assyrian and Babylonian tablets which may almost stand
beside the 51st Psalm. But, on the whole, the deep sense of sin
was the product of the revealed law.” See Fairbairn, Revelation of
Law and Scripture; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 187-242; Hovey, God
with Us, 187-210; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:45-50; Murphy,
Scientific Bases of Faith, 53-71; Martineau, Types, 2:120-125.
2. _Positive Enactment_, or the expression of the will of God in published
ordinances. This is also two-fold:
A. General moral precepts.—These are written summaries of the elemental
law (Mat. 5:48; 22:37-40), or authorized applications of it to special
human conditions (Ex. 20:1-17; Mat. chap. 5-8).
_Mat. 5:48_—“_Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly
Father is perfect_”; _22:37-40_—“_Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God.... Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two
commandments the whole law hangeth and the prophets_”; _Ex.
20:1-17_—the Ten Commandments; _Mat., chap. 5-8_—the Sermon on the
Mount. _Cf._ Augustine, on _Ps. 57:1_.
Solly, On the Will, 162, gives two illustrations of the fact that
positive precepts are merely applications of elemental law or the
law of nature: “ ‘_Thou shalt not steal_,’ is a moral law which
may be stated thus: _thou shalt not take that for thy own
property, which is the property of another_. The contradictory of
this proposition would be: _thou mayest take that for thy own
property which is the property of another_. But this is a
contradiction in terms; for it is the very conception of property,
that the owner stands in a peculiar relation to its subject
matter; and what is every man’s property is no man’s property, as
it is _proper_ to no man. Hence the contradictory of the
commandment contains a simple contradiction directly it is made a
rule universal; and the commandment itself is established as one
of the principles for the harmony of individual wills.
“ ‘_Thou shalt not tell a lie_,’ as a rule of morality, may be
expressed generally: _thou shall not by thy outward act make
another to believe thy thought to be other than it is_. The
contradictory made universal is: _every man may by his outward act
make another to believe his thought to be other than it is_. Now
this maxim also contains a contradiction, and is self-destructive.
It conveys a permission to do that which is rendered impossible by
the permission itself. Absolute and universal indifference to
truth, or the entire mutual independence of the thought and
symbol, makes the symbol cease to be a symbol, and the conveyance
of thought by its means, an impossibility.”
Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 48, 90—“Fundamental law of reason: So
act, that thy maxims of will might become laws in a system of
universal moral legislation.” This is Kant’s categorical
imperative. He expresses it in yet another form: “Act from maxims
fit to be regarded as universal laws of nature.” For expositions
of the Decalogue which bring out its spiritual meaning, see Kurtz,
Religionslehre, 9-72; Dick, Theology, 2:513-554; Dwight, Theology,
3:163-560; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3:259-465.
B. Ceremonial or special injunctions.—These are illustrations of the
elemental law, or approximate revelations of it, suited to lower degrees
of capacity and to earlier stages of spiritual training (Ez. 20:25; Mat.
19:8; Mark 10:5). Though temporary, only God can say when they cease to be
binding upon us in their outward form.
All positive enactments, therefore, whether they be moral or ceremonial,
are republications of elemental law. Their forms may change, but the
substance is eternal. Certain modes of expression, like the Mosaic system,
may be abolished, but the essential demands are unchanging (Mat. 5:17, 18;
cf. Eph. 2:15). From the imperfection of human language, no positive
enactments are able to express in themselves the whole content and meaning
of the elemental law. “It is not the purpose of revelation to disclose the
whole of our duties.” Scripture is not a complete code of rules for
practical action, but an enunciation of principles, with occasional
precepts by way of illustration. Hence we must supplement the positive
enactment by the law of being—the moral ideal found in the nature of God.
_Ez. 20:25_—“_Moreover also I gave them statutes that were not
good, and ordinances wherein they should not live_”; _Mat.
19:8_—“_Moses for your hardness of heart suffered you to put away
your wives_”; _Mark 10:5_—“_For your hardness of heart he wrote
you this commandment_”; _Mat. 5:17, 18_—“_Think not that I came to
destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to
fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass
away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the
law, till all things be accomplished_”; _cf._ _Eph. 2:15_—“_having
abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments
contained in ordinances_”; _Heb. 8:7_—“_if that first covenant had
been faultless, then would no place have been sought for a
second._” Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 90—“After the
coming of the new covenant, the keeping up of the old was as
needless a burden as winter garments in the mild air of summer, or
as the attempt of an adult to wear the clothes of a child.”
Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:5-35—“Jesus repudiates for himself and
for his disciples absolute subjection to O. T. Sabbath law (_Mark
2:27_ _sq._); to O. T. law as to external defilements (_Mark
7:15_); to O. T. divorce law (_Mark 10:2_ _sq._). He would
‘_fulfil_’ law and prophets by complete practical performance of
the revealed will of God. He would bring out their inner meaning,
not by literal and slavish obedience to every minute requirement
of the Mosaic law, but by revealing in himself the perfect life
and work toward which they tended. He would perfect the O. T.
conceptions of God—not keep them intact in their literal form, but
in their essential spirit. Not by quantitative extension, but by
qualitative renewal, he would fulfil the law and the prophets. He
would bring the imperfect expression in the O. T. to perfection,
not by servile letter-worship or allegorizing, but through grasp
of the divine idea.”
Scripture is not a series of minute injunctions and prohibitions
such as the Pharisees and the Jesuits laid down. The Koran showed
its immeasurable inferiority to the Bible by establishing the
letter instead of the spirit, by giving permanent, definite, and
specific rules of conduct, instead of leaving room for the growth
of the free spirit and for the education of conscience. This is
not true either of O. T. or of N. T. law. In Miss Fowler’s novel
The Farringdons, Mrs. Herbert wishes “that the Bible had been
written on the principle of that dreadful little book called
‘Don’t,’ which gives a list of the solecisms you should avoid; she
would have understood it so much better than the present system.”
Our Savior’s words about giving to him that asketh, and turning
the cheek to the smiter (_Mat 5:39-42_) must be interpreted by the
principle of love that lies at the foundation of the law. Giving
to every tramp and yielding to every marauder is not pleasing our
neighbor “_for that which is good unto edifying_” (_Rom. 15:2_).
Only by confounding the divine law with Scripture prohibition
could one write as in N. Amer. Rev., Feb. 1890:275—“Sin is the
transgression of a divine law; but there is no divine law against
suicide; therefore suicide is not sin.”
The written law was imperfect because God could, at the time, give
no higher to an unenlightened people. “But to say that the _scope_
and _design_ were imperfectly moral, is contradicted by the whole
course of the history. We must ask what is the moral standard in
which this course of education issues.” And this we find in the
life and precepts of Christ. Even the law of repentance and faith
does not take the place of the old law of being, but applies the
latter to the special conditions of sin. Under the Levitical law,
the prohibition of the touching of the dry bone (_Num. 19:16_),
equally with the purifications and sacrifices, the separations and
penalties of the Mosaic code, expressed God’s holiness and his
repelling from him all that savored of sin or death. The laws with
regard to leprosy were symbolic, as well as sanitary. So church
polity and the ordinances are not arbitrary requirements, but they
publish to dull sense-environed consciences, better than abstract
propositions could have done, the fundamental truths of the
Christian scheme. Hence they are not to be abrogated “_till he
come_” (_1 Cor. 11:26_).
The Puritans, however, in reënacting the Mosaic code, made the
mistake of confounding the eternal law of God with a partial,
temporary, and obsolete expression of it. So we are not to rest in
external precepts respecting woman’s hair and dress and speech,
but to find the underlying principle of modesty and subordination
which alone is of universal and eternal validity. Robert Browning,
The Ring and the Book, 1:255—“God breathes, not speaks, his
verdicts, felt not heard—Passed on successively to each court, I
call Man’s conscience, custom, manners, all that make More and
more effort to promulgate, mark God’s verdict in determinable
words, Till last come human jurists—solidify Fluid results,—what’s
fixable lies forged, Statute,—the residue escapes in fume, Yet
hangs aloft a cloud, as palpable To the finer sense as word the
legist welds. Justinian’s Pandects only make precise What simply
sparkled in men’s eyes before, Twitched in their brow or quivered
on their lip, Waited the speech they called, but would not come.”
See Mozley, Ruling Ideas in Early Ages, 104; Tulloch, Doctrine of
Sin, 141-144; Finney, Syst. Theol., 1-40, 135-319; Mansel,
Metaphysics, 378, 379; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 191-195.
Paul’s injunction to women to keep silence in the churches (_1
Cor. 14:35_; _1 Tim. 2:11,12_) is to be interpreted by the larger
law of gospel equality and privilege (_Col. 3:11_). Modesty and
subordination once required a seclusion of the female sex which is
no longer obligatory. Christianity has emancipated woman and has
restored her to the dignity which belonged to her at the
beginning. “In the old dispensation Miriam and Deborah and Huldah
were recognized as leaders of God’s people, and Anna was a notable
prophetess in the temple courts at the time of the coming of
Christ. Elizabeth and Mary spoke songs of praise for all
generations. A prophecy of _Joel 2:28_ was that the daughters of
the Lord’s people should prophesy, under the guidance of the
Spirit, in the new dispensation. Philip the evangelist had ‘_four
virgin daughters, who prophesied_’ (_Acts 21:9_), and Paul
cautioned Christian women to have their heads covered when they
prayed or prophesied in public (_1 Cor. 11:5_), but had no words
against the work of such women. He brought Priscilla with him to
Ephesus, where she aided in training Apollos into better preaching
power (_Acts 18:26_). He welcomed and was grateful for the work of
those women who labored with him in the gospel at Philippi (_Phil.
4:3_). And it is certainly an inference from the spirit and
teachings of Paul that we should rejoice in the efficient service
and sound words of Christian women to-day in the Sunday School and
in the missionary field.” The command “_And he that heareth let
him say, Come_” (_Rev. 22:17_) is addressed to women also. See
Ellen Batelle Dietrick, Women in the Early Christian Ministry;
_per contra_, see G. F. Wilkin, Prophesying of Women, 183-193.
III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.
In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the
governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no
means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists
only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command
through the executive, as well as for “the institution of equity, the
faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”
Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how “the institution of equity,
the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of
pardon” all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is
contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity: “English
law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands.
A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a
patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could
not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to
the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king’s
conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor
should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible
property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession
of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These
chancellors’ courts were called courts of equity, and redressed
wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times
law and equity are administered for the most part by the same
courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at
another time as a court of equity.” “Summa lex, summa injuria,” is
sometimes true.
Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we
remark:
(_a_) The law of God is a _general_ expression of God’s will, applicable
to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of
special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power
in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions
of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.
Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith: “The soul of man was not produced
by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the
ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature,
that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the
law of his secret will and grace.”
(_b_) The law of God, accordingly, is a _partial_, not an exhaustive,
expression of God’s nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of
that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must
possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express
God’s nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness,
mercy.
The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that
law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre,
1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of the divine essence, is
equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can
be nothing above and beyond it.” This is a denial of the
transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere
law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb: “As the cartwheel
follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.” Denovan:
“Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it
is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that
we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified
[without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole
penalty of the law.”
(_c_) Mere law, therefore, leaves God’s nature in these aspects of
personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward
sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating,
pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not
exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law
could not do ... God” did).
Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it
is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires,
not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.” Campbell,
Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine
self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of
God.” C. H. M.: “Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to
what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There
is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the ‘ten words.’
Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God” (_John
1:17_—“_For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came
through Jesus Christ_”). So there is more in man’s heart toward
God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who
sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she
must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is
to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and
without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in
proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or
glad-tidings.
(_d_) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as
republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By
removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to
obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the
ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law
(Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace,
the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the “law of sin and of
death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended,
annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by,
the exertion of personal divine will.
Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly
disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other
revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him
how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally
attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not
the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and
includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the
law of nature.” The truth is midway between the Pelagian view,
that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the
modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God,
there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of
Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive
sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the
occurrence of an effect.” Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds
are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them
irrevocably.” So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes’
Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as
merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and
grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but
grace is above and beyond nature.
Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible
utterance: “Nature always checkmates, without haste and without
remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest
allowance for ignorance.” Bradford then remarks: “This is
Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or
minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is
able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace, but grace brings
salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms
strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.” God
revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; see _Deut.
1:6, 7_—“_Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain_”—the
mountain of the law; “_turn you and take your journey_”—_i. e._,
see how God’s law is to be applied to life.
(_e_) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in
itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely,
the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law
has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become
“the perfect law, the law of liberty” (James 1:25). In fine, grace is that
larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law
constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.
Law reveals God’s love and mercy, but only in their mandatory
aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of
God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so
law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness
in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is
in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even
love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously
satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul: “I spoke as I saw.
I report as man may of God’s work—All’s Love, yet all’s Law.”
Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος),
but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of
God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and
there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command
(_dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen_). The Christian λόγος is
λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and
effective word, as that of creation.” Chaucer, The Persones Tale:
“For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.” S. S. Times,
Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the
kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to
think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps
where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”
Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine
Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of
Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.