_THE SOURCE OF TEMPTATIONS AND THE REALITY OF SIN.
THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE DETERMINIST._
"Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he hath been
approved, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord
promised to them that love Him. 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. Then the lust, when it hath
conceived, beareth sin: and the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth
forth death. Be not deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good gift
and every perfect boon is from above, coming down from the Father of
lights, with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast
by turning. Of His own will He brought us forth by the word of
truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of His
creatures."--ST. JAMES i. 12-18.
After the slight digression respecting the short-lived glory of the
rich man, St. James returns once more to the subject with which the
letter opens--the blessing of trials and temptations as opportunities
of patience, and the blessedness of the man who endures them, and thus
earns "the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to them that
love Him." These last words are very interesting as being a record of
_some utterance of Christ's not preserved in the Gospels_, of which we
have perhaps other traces elsewhere in the New Testament (1 Pet. v. 4;
Rev. ii. 10; 2 Tim. iv. 8).[45] They imply a principle which qualifies
what goes before, and leads on to what follows. The mere endurance of
temptations and afflictions will not win the promised crown, unless
temptations are withstood, and afflictions endured in the right
spirit. The proud self-reliance and self-repression of the Stoic has
nothing meritorious about it. These trials must be met in a spirit of
loving trust in the God who sends or allows them. It is only those who
love and trust God who have the right to expect anything from His
bounty. This St. James continually insists on. Let not the
double-minded man, with his affections and loyalty divided between God
and Mammon, "think that he shall receive anything of the Lord" (i. 7).
God has chosen the poor who are "rich in _faith_" to be "heirs of the
kingdom which He promised _to them that love Him_" (ii. 5). And this
love of God is quite incompatible with love of the world. "Whosoever
therefore would be a friend of the world maketh himself an enemy of
God" (iv. 4).
It is the loving withstanding of temptation, then, that wins the crown
of life: the mere being tempted tends rather to death. "Lust, when it
hath conceived, beareth sin: and the sin, when it is full-grown,
bringeth forth death." With these facts before him, the loving
Christian will never say, when temptations come, that they come from
God. It cannot be God's will to seduce him from the path of life to
the path of death. The existence of temptations is no just ground of
complaint against God. Such complaints are an attempt to shift the
blame from himself to his Creator. The temptations proceed, not from
God, but from the man's own evil nature; a nature which God created
stainless, but which man of his own free will has debased. To tempt is
to try to lead astray; and one has only to understand the word in its
true sense to see how impossible it is that God should become a
tempter. By a simple but telling opposition of words St. James
indicates where the blame lies. God "_Himself_ tempteth no man
(πειράζει δὲ αὐτὸς οὐδένα); but each man is tempted when by his _own_
lust he is drawn away and enticed" (ὑπὸ τῆς ἰδίας ἐπιθυμίας
ἐξελκόμενος καὶ δελεαζόμενος). It is his own evil desire which plays
the part of the temptress, drawing him out from his place of safety by
the enticement of sinful pleasure.[46] So that the fault is in a sense
doubly his. The desire which tempts proceeds from his own evil nature,
and the will which consents to the temptress is his own. Throughout
the passage St. James represents the evil desire as playing the part
of Potiphar's wife. The man who withstands such temptation is winning
the promised crown of life; the man who yields has for the offspring
of his error death. The one result is in accordance with God's will,
as is proved by His promising and bestowing the crown; the other is
not, but is the natural and known consequence of the man's own act.
At the present time there is a vehement effort being made in some
quarters to shift the blame of man's wrong-doing, if not on to God
(and He is commonly left out of the account, as unknown or
non-existing), at any rate on to those natural laws which determine
phenomena. We are asked to believe that such ideas as moral freedom
and responsibility are mere chimæras, and that the first thing which a
reasonable person has to do, in raising himself to a higher level, is
to get rid of them. He is to convince himself that character and
conduct are the necessarily evolved result of inherited endowments,
developed in certain circumstances, over neither of which the man has
any control. He did not select the qualities of body and mind which he
received from his parents, and he did not make the circumstances in
which he has had to live since his birth. He could no more help acting
as he did on any given occasion than he could help the size of his
heart or the colour of his brain. He is no more responsible for the
acts which he produces than a tree is responsible for its leaves. And
of all senseless delusions and senseless wastes of power, those which
are involved in the feeling of remorse are the worst. In remorse we
wring our hands over deeds which we could not possibly have avoided
doing, and reproach ourselves for emitting what we could not by any
possibility have done. Ethiopians might as reasonably blame themselves
for their black skins, or be conscience-stricken for not having golden
hair, as any human being feel remorse for what he has done or left
undone in the past. Whatever folly a man may have committed, he
eclipses it all by the folly of self-reproach.
Positivism will indeed have worked marvels when it has driven remorse
out of the world; and until it has succeeded in doing so, it will
remain confronted by an unanswerable proof--as universal as the
humanity which it professes to worship--that its moral system is based
upon a falsehood. Whether or no we admit the belief in a God, the fact
of self-reproach in every human heart remains to be accounted for. And
it is a fact of the most enormous proportions. Think of the years of
mental agony and moral torture which countless numbers of the human
race have endured since man became a living soul, because men have
invariably reproached themselves with the folly and wickedness which
they have committed. Think of the exquisite suffering which remorse
has inflicted on every human being who has reached years of reflexion.
Think of the untold misery which the misdeeds of men have inflicted
upon those who love and would fain respect them. It may be doubted
whether all other forms of human suffering, whether mental or bodily,
are more than as a drop in the ocean, compared with the agonies which
have been endured through the gnawing pangs of remorse for personal
misconduct, and of shame and grief for the misconduct of friends and
relations. And if the Determinist is right, all this mental torture,
with its myriad stabs and stings through centuries of centuries, is
based on a monstrous delusion. These bitter reproachers of themselves
and of those dearest to them might have been spared it all, if only
they had known that not one of the acts thus blamed and lamented in
tears of blood could have been avoided.
Certainly the Positivist, who shuts God out from his consideration,
has a difficult problem to solve, when he is asked how he accounts for
a delusion so vast, so universal, and so horrible in its consequences;
and we do not wonder that he should exhaust all the powers of rhetoric
and invective in the attempt to exorcize it. But his difficulty is as
nothing compared with the difficulties of a thinker who endeavours to
combine Determinism with Theism, and even with Christianity. What sort
of a God can He be who has allowed, who has even ordained, that every
human heart should be wrung with this needless, senseless agony? Has
any savage, any inquisitor, ever devised torture so diabolical? And
what kind of a Saviour and Redeemer can He be who has come from
heaven, and returned thither again, without saying one word to free
men from their blind, self-inflicted agonies; who, on the contrary,
has said many things to confirm them in their delusions? Whence came
moral evil and the pangs of remorse, if there is no such thing as free
will? They must have been fore-ordained and created by God. The Theist
has no escape from that. If God made man free, and man by misusing his
freedom brought sin into the world, and remorse as a punishment for
sin, then we have _some_ explanation of the mystery of evil. God
neither willed it nor created it; it was the offspring of a free and
rebellious will. But if man was never free, and there is no such thing
as sin, then the madman gnawing his own limbs in his frenzy is a
reasonable being and a joyous sight, compared with the man who gnaws
his own heart in remorse for the deeds which the inexorable laws of
his own nature compelled him, and still compel him, to commit.
Is there, or is there not, such a thing as sin? That is the question
which lies at the bottom of the error against which St. James warns
his readers, and of the doctrines which are advocated at the present
time by Positivists and all who deny the reality of human freedom and
responsibility. To say that when we are tempted we are tempted by God,
or that the Power which brought us into existence has given us no
freedom to refuse the evil and to choose the good, is to say that sin
is a figment of the human mind, and that a conscious revolt of the
human mind against the power of holiness is impossible. On such a
question the appeal to human language, of which Aristotle is so fond,
seems to be eminently suitable; and the verdict which it gives is
overwhelming. There is probably no language, there is certainly no
civilized language, which has no word to express the idea of sin. If
sin is an illusion, how came the whole human race to believe in it,
and to frame a word to express it?[47] Can we point to any other word
in universal, or even very general use, which nevertheless represents
a mere chimæra, believed in as real, but actually non-existent? And
let us remember that this is no case in which self-interest, which so
fatally warps our judgment, can have led the whole human race astray.
Self-interest would lead us entirely in the opposite direction. There
is no human being who would not enthusiastically welcome the belief
that what seem to him to be grievous sins are no more a matter of
reproach to him than the beatings of his heart or the winkings of his
eyes. Sometimes the conscience-stricken offender, in his efforts to
excuse his acts before the judgment-seat of his higher self, tries to
believe this. Sometimes the Determinist philosopher endeavours to
prove to him that he ought to believe it. But the stern facts of his
own nature and the bitter outcome of all human experience are too
strong for such attempts. In spite of all specious excuses, and all
plausible statements of philosophic difficulties, his conscience and
his consciousness compel him to confess, "It was my own lust that
enticed me, and my own will that consented."
How serious St. James considers the error of attempting to make God
responsible for our temptations is shown both by the earnest and
affectionate insertion of "Be not deceived,[48] my beloved brethren,"
and also by the pains which he takes to disprove the error. After
having shown the true source of temptation, and explained the way in
which sin and death are generated, he points out how incredible it is
on other grounds that God should become a tempter. How can the Source
of every good gift and every perfect boon[49] be also a source of
temptations to sin? How can the Father of lights be one who would lead
away His creatures into darkness? If what we know of human nature
ought to tell us whence temptations to sin are likely to come, what we
know of God's nature and of His dealings with mankind ought to tell us
whence such things are _not_ likely to come.
And He is far above those heavenly luminaries of which He is the
Author. _They_ are not always bright, and are therefore very imperfect
symbols of His holiness. In their revolutions they are sometimes
overshadowed. The moon is not always at the full, the sun is sometimes
eclipsed, and the stars suffer changes in like manner. In Him there is
no change, no loss of light, no encroachment of shadow. There is never
a time at which one could say that through momentary diminution in
holiness it had become possible for Him to become a tempter.
Nor are the brightness and beneficence which pervade the material
universe the chief proofs of God's goodness and of the impossibility
of temptations to sin proceeding from Him. It was "of His own will"
that He rescued mankind from the state of death into which their
rebellious wills had brought them, and by a new revelation of Himself
in "the Word of truth," _i.e._ the Gospel, brought them forth again,
born anew as Christians, to be, like the first-born under the Law, "a
kind of first-fruits of His creatures."[50]
When, therefore, we sum up all the known facts of the case, there is
only one conclusion at which we can justly arrive. There is the nature
of God, so far as it is known to us, utterly opposed to evil. There is
the nature of man, as it has been debased by himself, constantly
bringing forth evil. There is God's goodness, as manifested in the
creation of the universe and in the regeneration of man. It is a
hopeless case to try to banish remorse by making God responsible for
man's temptations and sin.
There is only one way of getting rid of remorse, and that is to
confess sin--to confess its reality, to confess it to God, and if need
be to man. No man ever yet succeeded in justifying himself by laying
the blame of his sins on God. But he may do so by laying the sins
themselves upon "the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the
world," and by washing his stained robes, "and making them white in
the blood of the Lamb." That done, remorse will have no power over
him; and instead of fruitlessly accusing God, and seeking vain
substitutes for the service of God, he will humbly "give Him glory,"
and "serve Him day and night in His temple" (Joshua vii. 19; Rev.
vii. 15).
NOTE.--The difficult expression (τροπῆς ἀποσκίασμα) rendered in the
Authorized Version "shadow of turning," and in the Revised "shadow
that is cast by turning," has received a great variety of translations
and explanations. The Old Latin, _modicum obumbrationis_, like the
Greek commentators, makes ἀποσκίασμα = σκιά = "shade, trace, small
amount." It is doubtful whether the rare compound ἀποσκίασμα ever
acquired this meaning; but the opinion of Greeks on this point is of
great weight, and certainly this meaning makes good sense. The
Vulgate, _vicissitudinis obumbratio_, is as difficult as the Greek;
and Augustine's _momenti obumbratio_ comes from the false reading
ῥοπῆς. "Shadow cast by turning" does not seem to be very helpful,
whether we interpret "turning" to mean the revolutions of the sun or
of the earth, or the changes of nature generally. Perhaps the genitive
is the genitive of quality, "shadow of change" for "changing shadow;"
so Stier and Theil, _wechselnde Beschattung_, and Stolz _abwechselnde
Verdunkelung_. Comp. ἀκροατὴς ἐπιλησμονῆς (i. 25), and, see the
_Expositor_, Sept. 1889, pp. 228-30.
[45] In the _Acta Philippi, Apocal. Apocr._, ed. Tischendorf, p. 147,
we have, "Blessed is he who hath his raiment white; for he it is who
receiveth the crown of joy." See A. Resch, _Agrapha; Aussercanonische
Evangelienfragmente_ (Leipzig, 1889), p. 254.
[46] The punctuation and order of words in both A.V. and R.V. seem to
be faulty: "enticed," quite as much as "drawn away," belongs to "by
his own lust." Moreover, the metaphor is not seduction from the right
road, but alluring out of security into danger.
[47] See R. H. Hutton on _The Service of Man_, in the _Contemporary
Review_, April, 1887, p. 492.
[48] Or, "led astray" (πλανᾶσθε). The word implies fundamental
departure from the truth (v. 19; John vii. 47; 1 John i. 8; ii. 26;
iii. 7; Rev. xviii. 23).
[49] The words form an hexameter in the original, which may be either
accidental or a quotation: πᾶσα δόσις ἀγαθὴ καὶ πᾶν δώρημα τελειον
("Every gift that is good, and every boon that is perfect").
[50] See F. D. Maurice, _Unity of the N.T._ (Parker, 1854), pp. 320-23.