THE next sentence or statement to which the Archdeacon objects is as
follows:
_He who cannot harmonize the cruelties of the Bible with the goodness of
Jehovah, cannot harmonize the cruelties of Nature with the goodness or
wisdom of a supposed Deity. He will find it impossible to account for
pestilence and famine, for earthquake and storm, for slavery, and for
the triumph of the strong over the weak._
One objection that he urges to this statement is that St. Paul had made
a stronger one in the same direction. The Archdeacon however insists
that "a world without a contingency, or an agony, could have had no hero
and no saint," and that "science enables us to demonstrate that much of
the apparent misery and anguish is transitory and even phantasmal;
that many of the seeming forces of destruction are overruled to ends of
beneficence; that most of man's disease and anguish is due to his own
sin and folly and wilfulness."
I will not say that these things have been said before, but I will say
that they have been answered before. The idea that the world is a school
in which character is formed and in which men are educated is very old.
If, however, the world is a school, and there is trouble and misfortune,
and the object is to create character--that is to say, to produce heroes
and saints--then the question arises, what becomes of those who die
in infancy? They are left without the means of education. Are they
to remain forever without character? Or is there some other world of
suffering and sorrow?
Is it possible to form character in heaven? How did the angels become
good? How do you account for the justice of God? Did he attain character
through struggle and suffering?
What would you say of a school teacher who should kill one-third of
the children on the morning of the first day? And what can you say of
God,--if this world is a school,--who allows a large per cent, of his
children to die in infancy--consequently without education--therefore,
without character?
If the world is the result of infinite wisdom and goodness, why is the
Christian Church engaged in endeavoring to make it better; or, rather,
in an effort to change it? Why not leave it as an infinite God made it?
Is it true that most of man's diseases are due to his own sin and folly
and wilfulness? Is it not true that no matter how good men are they must
die, and will they not die of diseases? Is it true that the wickedness
of man has created the microbe? Is it possible that the sinfulness of
man created the countless enemies of human life that lurk in air and
water and food? Certainly the wickedness of man has had very little
influence on tornadoes, earthquakes and floods. Is it true that "the
signature of beauty with which God has stamped the visible world--alike
in the sky and on the earth--alike in the majestic phenomena of
an intelligent creation and in its humblest and most microscopic
production--is a perpetual proof that God is a God of love"?
Let us see. The scientists tell us that there is a little microscopic
animal, one who is very particular about his food--so particular,
that he prefers to all other things the optic nerve, and after he has
succeeded in destroying that nerve and covering the eye with the mask of
blindness, he has intelligence enough to bore his way through the bones
of the nose in search of the other optic nerve. Is it not somewhat
difficult to discover "the signature of beauty with which God has
stamped" this animal? For my part, I see but little beauty in poisonous
serpents, in man-eating sharks, in crocodiles, in alligators. It would
be impossible for me to gaze with admiration upon a cancer. Think, for a
moment, of a God ingenious enough and good enough to feed a cancer with
the quivering flesh of a human being, and to give for the sustenance of
that cancer the life of a mother.
It is well enough to speak of "the myriad voices of nature in their
mirth and sweetness," and it is also well enough to think of the other
side. The singing birds have a few notes of love--the rest are all of
warning and of fear. Nature, apparently with infinite care, produces
a living thing, and at the same time is just as diligently at work
creating another living thing to devour the first, and at the same time
a third to devour the second, and so on around the great circle of life
and death, of agony and joy--tooth and claw, fang and tusk, hunger and
rapine, massacre and murder, violence and vengeance and vice everywhere
and through all time. [Here the manuscript ends, with the following
notes.]