to conclude that some one or something has blundered if it is not
of positive use to us, is, let me repeat, to see and to think as
a child. We know what the hooks on the burdock and the stick-seed
are for, and what the wings on the maple and the ash-seed are for,
but do we know what the stings on the nettle, or the spines on
the blackberry or on the thorn-apple tree are for? The cattle eat
the nettle, the birds eat the berries, and the wild creatures eat
the thorn-apple. How could their seeds get sown if the prickles
and thorns defended them against wild life? Spines and thorns
seem expressive of moods or conditions in Nature, and to be quite
independent of use, as we understand the term.
Nature’s ways are so unlike our ways! Her system of economics would
soon bring us to bankruptcy. She has no rival, no competitor, no
single end in view, no more need to store up wealth than to scatter
it. One form gains what another form loses. Humanly speaking, she is
always trying to defeat herself. The potato-bug, if left alone, would
exterminate the potato and so exterminate itself; the currant-worm
would exterminate the currant; the forest worms would exterminate
the forests, did not parasites appear and check these ravages.
Nature trumps her own trick; she scuttles her own ship; she mines
her own defenses; she poisons her own fountains; she sows tares in
her own wheat; and yet she wins, because she is the All. The tares
are hers, the parasites are hers, the devastating storms and floods
are hers, the earthquakes and volcanoes are hers, disease and death
are hers, as well as youth and health. The cancer that eats into a
man’s vitals--what keeps it going but Nature’s forces and fluids?
The bacteria that flourish in our bodies and bring the scourges of
typhoid fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, are all hers, and a part
of her system of things. A malignant tumor is as much an expression
of Providence as is a baby or a flower. Nature cuts the ground from
under her own feet; she saws off the limb upon which she is perched,
but if she falls, she alights in her own lap.
In walking through a blighted potato-field this morning, I said,
“Here is one form of vegetable life destroying another form and
bringing loss and discontent to the farmer’s heart.” What purpose in
the economy of Nature is served by this blight? Who or what is the
gainer? After the minute organisms that prey upon the potato-vines
have done their work, they too perish, so that two forms of life are
blotted out. What was it all for? Why is this tragedy of one form of
life bringing to naught other forms, which we witness on every hand,
in vegetable and animal life, and in human history, being constantly
enacted? The question, put in this way, is a purely human one; it
is applying to the vast scheme of creation purely human standards.
We instinctively ask the why and the wherefore of things, and in
our practical lives try to avoid letting one hand defeat the other
as Nature does in the above incident. We guard one form of life
against another hostile form. Our aim is to make things pull together
for our own advantage. We seek to check the ravages of the tent
caterpillar, the forest worms, the gypsy moth, the potato-beetle,
and the invisible enemies that rot our grapes and mar our apples, as
well as the germs that sow fatal diseases in our midst. But not so
Nature. She does not take sides. As I have said, she has no special
and limited aims. The stakes are hers, whoever wins. One condition of
the season favors the growth of the potato-vines; another condition
favors the development of the fungus that destroys them. Nature is
just as much on the side of the rat as on the side of the cat; she
arms each to defeat the other, and the fittest survives. She has not
given the rabbit strength or ferocity, but she has given her speed
and a sleepless eye and great fecundity, and her enemies do not cut
her off.
The struggle and competition of life go on everywhere. But life is
not all a struggle; it is unity and coöperation as well. The trees of
the forest protect one another; one form of life profits by another
form.
In the whole drama of organic nature we find waste and prodigality.
Our economics are set at naught by the power that works to no
special ends, but to all ends, and finds its account in the tumor
that eats up the man, as much as in the man himself, in the fungi
that destroy the potato crop, or the chestnut-trees, as truly as in
these things themselves. Yet behold what specialization and what
development has taken place in spite of these cross-purposes, this
chaos of conflicting interests! Out of discord has come harmony; out
of conflict has come peace; out of death has come life; out of the
reptile has come the bird; out of the beast has come man; out of
the savage has come the moral conscience; out of the tribe has come
the nation; out of tyranny has come democracy. It is the waste, the
delays, the pain, the price to be paid, that appall us.
We must regard creation as a whole, as the evolution of worlds and
systems, and not concentrate our attention upon man and his ways, or
upon the earth--so small a part of our solar system.
Our benevolent institutions are not types of the universe; our idea
of fatherhood does not fit the Eternal.
Our fathers had a complete and consistent explanation of the
problem of evil that so perplexes us. They invented or postulated
two opposing and contending principles in the world--one divine,
the other diabolical. One they named God, the other, Satan. Their
conception of God would not allow them to saddle all the evil and
misery of the world upon him; they had to look for a scapegoat, and
they found him in the Devil. One is just as necessary to a consistent
cosmogony as the other. If we must have an all-wise, all-merciful,
all-powerful, all-loving God--the author of all good and the
contemner of all evil--we must also have a god of the opposite type,
the great mischief-maker and enemy of human happiness--the author of
war, pestilence, famine, disease, and of all that hinders and defeats
the reign of the perfect good. Without the conception of the Devil,
we are forced to the conclusion, either that God is not omnipotent,
or that he is responsible for all the sin and suffering in the world.
If you make man this Devil, then who made man?
Wrestle with the problem as we may, we are impaled on one or the
other horn of the dilemma. Our traditional God is more cruel and more
indifferent to human suffering than any tyrant that ever gloated over
human blood and agony, or else he is fearfully limited in his power
for good.
With a Devil at our disposal to whom we can impute the evils of life,
the situation clears up, and God emerges, shorn of his omnipotence,
it is true, but still the symbol of goodness and love.
In our day the Devil has lost his prestige and is much discredited.
As a power in men’s minds his reign is over, and hell, his
headquarters, no longer casts its lurid light upon human life.
In an equal measure the old Hebraic conception of God as a
much-magnified man, the king and ruler of heaven and earth, with
heaven as his throne, has gone out. God is now little more than a
name for that tendency or power in the universe which makes for
righteousness, and which has brought evolution thus far on its course.
To account for the world as we find it, we are compelled to look
upon it as the inevitable result of the clashing and interaction of
purely natural forces resulting in both so-called good and evil; that
is, in what is favorable to life, and in what is against life. But
as life is adaptive and assimilative, it slowly turns the evil into
good, of course at the expense of delays and waste and suffering, and
thus development becomes possible, and man, after untold millions of
years, appears.
When we look forth upon the universe, what do we see? When we look
upon the non-living world, we see a mere welter and chaos of material
forces--a conflict of chemical and physical principles seeking a
stable equilibrium--water running, winds blowing, mountains decaying,
stars and systems whirling, suns waning or waxing, nebulæ condensing,
vast orbs colliding, and all issuing in a certain order and system
under the rule of purely mechanical and mathematical laws. The
stellar universe is a vast machine, amenable to the measurements and
calculations of the astronomers. The eclipses all occur exactly on
time, and the planets revolve in their orbits without the untruth, as
Whitman says, of a single second. The disorder and disruptions which
occur are inside of vast fundamental laws. Our mountains and seas are
shaken by earthquakes, and the earth’s surface is swept by cyclones
and the seashores are devastated by tidal waves, yet these things are
only phases of the effort toward a fixed equilibrium. The earth’s
surface as we now behold it, the distribution of land and water,
of mountain and plain, the procession of the seasons, our whole
weather system, the friendly and the unfriendly forces, are all the
outcome of this clash and stress of the physical forces, which make a
paradise of some places and the opposite of others.
When we look upon the living world as revealed in the geologic
record, we still see a kind of welter and chaos, but we also see
the advent of new principles not entirely subject to mechanical
and mathematical laws. Life goes its way and takes liberties with
its physical environment. Living bodies change and develop as the
non-living do not. The various organic forms “rise on stepping-stones
of their dead selves,” and incalculably slow transformations of lower
forms into higher take place, but not without appalling delays and
waste and suffering. Chemical and mechanical laws are still in full
force, but they appear to be in the service of a new principle; an
organizing tendency of a new kind is at work in the world; chance and
necessity seem to play a less conspicuous part. Yet there is nothing
that meets our idea of justice, or mercy, or economy of effort.
For millions upon millions of years the earth swarmed with low, all
but brainless creatures. The monsters of sea and land that appeared
in the middle period were huge and terrible in body and limb, but
very small in capacity of brain. Huge ganglions, or knots of nervous
tissue, in different parts of their bodies seem to have served as
a substitute for a centralized brain and a complex nervous system.
The brontosaurus, seventy feet long, with a body weighing many
tons, had a brain not much larger than a man’s double fists. Brains
as yet played a very subordinate part in the world. Reptiles and
half-reptiles possessed the earth. The age of mammals was as yet only
hinted at. But after long geologic ages, mammals came to the front,
holding the precious possibility of man, and reptiles were relegated
to the rear. The animal brain increased, wit began to get the better
of brute force, and the small and feeble ancestors of man appeared in
the biological drama. They were like small and timid supernumeraries
skulking or hiding on the wings of the stage. Lemurs and monkeys
appeared long before there were any signs of the anthropoid apes, and
the anthropoid apes were in evidence long before the first rude man
appeared.
In all the vast stretch of geologic and biologic time, do we see any
evidence of the active existence of the God and the Devil of our
fathers? Not unless we identify them with the material forces that
then ruled and shaped the world, and these forces, by any other name,
are of the same impersonal, impartial, unforgiving character as is
disclosed in our dealings with them to-day.
When we turn to the higher forms of organic life, especially to
man and his history, what do we see? We still behold the same
trial-and-error method, the same cruelty, waste, delays, and
suffering that we behold in the lower forms. We see progress, we see
the growth of ethical principles, we see man’s increasing mastery
over the forces of nature and over himself, but in the competition
of races and nations, the race is still to the swift and the battle
to the strong. We see a high standard of individual morality
contending with a low standard of international morality. We still
see civilized nations looking upon treaties as “scraps of paper”;
we see them regarding their neighbors as rivals and enemies; we see
millions of men that have not the shadow of a grievance against one
another, fiercely trying to slay one another, and praying to the
same God for victory. We see the nefarious doctrine that physical
might makes moral right written in lines of blood and fire across
the face of whole kingdoms; we see the legitimate competitions of
peace and industry turned into the strife of armed conquest; we see
a small and peaceful nation trampled underfoot by a big nation bent
upon plunder and conquest; we see hatred toward a kindred nation
glorified, and the murder of innocent women and children and other
non-combatants adopted as a fixed policy; in fact, we see all the
vast resources of science and of modern civilization wedded to the
spirit of the Hun, and turned loose in a war for world-dominion.
The results of eighteen centuries of Christian culture come off the
German nation like a whitewash in this craze and fury of the military
spirit; the German people stand revealed as at heart unmitigated
barbarians, wonderfully efficient, but wonderfully inhuman. If we
appeal to the supernatural to account for things, we certainly
need a Devil, if not several of them, to account for the temper of
the German mind during the late war. No wonder the good people are
losing faith, and are shocked and dismayed at the thought that their
all-loving, omnipotent God permits these things.
Down the whole course of history we see no other powers at work than
those that are about us. Good is in the ascendancy everywhere, or
soon will be; evil dies out; the wicked cease from troubling; the
amelioration of mankind goes on; and no God or Devil hinders or
favors.
Nature is both God and Devil, and natural law is supreme in
the world. The moral consciousness of man,--all our dreams of
perfection, of immortality, of the good, the beautiful, the true, all
our veneration and our religious aspirations,--this is Nature, too.
Man is a part of the universe; all that we call good in him, and all
that we call bad, are a part of the universe. The God he worships is
his own shadow cast upon the heavens, and the Devil he fears is his
own shadow likewise. The divine is the human, magnified and exalted;
the Satanic is the human, magnified and debased.
We find God in Nature by projecting ourselves there; we find him in
the course of history by reading our own ideals into human events;
we find him in our daily lives by listening to the whisperings of
our own inherited and acquired consciences, and by dwelling upon the
fatality that rules our lives.
We had nothing to do with our appearance here in this world, or
with the form our bodies take, or with our temperaments, and, only
in a degree, with our dispositions. Some power other than ourselves
brought us here and maintains us here for a period, as it brought
here and maintains all other forms of life; but, I repeat, that
power is inseparable from the physical and chemical forces, and goes
its way whether we prosper or perish. Yet it is more positive than
negative, more for us than against us, else we should not be here.
Where does man get his ethical standards? Where does he get his
eyes, his ears, his heart? He gets them where he got his life--from
natural sources. He gets them whence he got his sense of art, of
beauty, of harmony. There are no moral standards in Nature apart from
man, but as man is a part of Nature, so are these, and all other
standards. So are all religions, arts, literatures, philosophies,
heroisms, self-denials, as well as all idolatries, superstitions,
sorceries, cruelties, wrongs, failures, a part of Nature.
Is the big-brained man of to-day any less a part of Nature than the
low-browed, long-jawed man of Pliocene times?
The humanization of God leads us into many difficulties. If He is a
personal being with attributes and emotions like our own, then we
are forced to the conclusion that He is no better than we are--that
He has our faults as well as our virtues, our cruelty as well as
our love. He is a party to all the wrongs and crimes and suffering
that darken the earth; He permits wars and pestilence and famine
and earthquakes and tornadoes, and all the consuming and agonizing
diseases that flesh is heir to. He is an infinite man with infinite
powers for good and evil.
In the long drama of animal evolution there has evidently been as
much suffering as pleasure, and of the drama of human history the
same may be said: pain, failure, delay, injustice, to all of which
our humanized God has been a party. No wonder our fathers struggled
over the problem of the ways of God to man. As soon as they put
themselves in his place, they felt the need of some grounds upon
which to justify his dealings with the beings He had created. But
they searched, and their descendants still search, in vain. If we see
God as a man, no matter how mighty, He is still guilty of what few
finite men would be guilty. What men would be guilty of permitting
the sin and misery that fill the world at this, or any other, time?
The Nature God neither sends calamities nor wills them--they are an
inevitable part of the growth and development of things; they are
eddies in the stream of forces. What we call evil is evil only from
our point of view; evil is a human word and not the word of the
Infinite. If the world were something made by a Maker external to
it, then it were pertinent to ask, Why not make it a better world?
Why not leave out pain and sin and all other phases of evil? But
the world is not something made, and it did not have a Maker, as
we use those words. The universe _is_, and always has been, “from
everlasting to everlasting,” and man is a part of it, and his life
is subject to the same vicissitudes as the rest of creation. Man has
come into this sense of right and wrong, of justice and mercy, of
truth and falsehood, of good and evil, as necessary conditions of
his development, but those things are not absolute; they pertain to
him alone. The physical forces break out of their natural bounds
and run riot for a season; the human forces do the same thing and
give rise to various excesses. The crimes and misdemeanors of man
are exceptional as the outbreaks in nature are exceptional. They
relate man to nature and show how the same plan runs through both. A
world with storm and the warring and violence of the elements left
out would be a radically different world--an impossible world. And a
world of man, a Quaker world, is equally impossible.
If some being of infinite wisdom and love had made the world and made
man to live in it, we could ask him some embarrassing questions;
but, let me repeat, the world was not made, it is only a link in a
chain of cosmic events, and it is not for man any more than for any
other creature. Each must “work out his own salvation, with fear and
trembling.”
Introduce design into nature and you humanize it and get into
difficulties at once. It is above design. We have no language in
which to speak the ultimate truth, no language in which to describe
the character and the doings of the Infinite. The ways of the
Infinite are not only past finding out, they are unspeakable by
reason of our finite relations to them. We cannot arraign the Nature
God. It does not design, nor make, nor govern, nor employ means to
ends, as do the man-made gods. It _is_. All things are a part of
its infinite complexity. Nature rests forever in itself. It neither
fails nor succeeds. In itself it is neither good nor evil, neither
divine nor devilish; it is all things to all men, because they are
all things to it. It is neither one nor many; it is the Infinite. In
these vain attempts to define or describe the indefinable I have no
language but that of the finite, no language but that of our limited
or circumscribed relation to the world of concrete and fragmentary
things. Hence I am constantly like the plains ranger caught by his
own lasso, or the angler caught by his own hook.
Emerson said that in trying to define the Eternal we need a language
that differs from our everyday speech as much as algebra differs
from arithmetic. Outside of the physical organism there is neither
pleasure nor pain, good nor bad, light nor dark, sound nor silence,
heat nor cold, big nor little, hard nor soft; all these things are
but words in which we describe our sensations. When there is no ear,
there is no sound, but only motion in the air; when there is no eye,
there is no light or color, but only motion in the ether; when there
are no nerves, there is no heat or cold, but only motion, more or
less, in the molecules of matter. Degrees and differences belong to
the region of our finite minds. In trying to define or state the
Infinite, we are off the sphere, outside the realm of experience, and
our words have no meaning.
It is the circular or orbicular character of creation that baffles
us. We cannot fit the sphere into the triangles and parallelograms
of the terms of our experience. We cannot square the circle of
Infinity. The terms “love,” “anger,” “mercy,” “fatherhood,” do not
apply to God any more than “over” or “under,” or “beginning” or
“end,” apply to the sphere. In regard to God, the language of science
and mathematics is one with the language of worship and ecstasy.
I find I have never been burdened by a sense of my duty to God.
My duty to my fellow-men and to myself is plain enough, but the
word is not adequate to express any relation I may hold to the
Eternal. Do I owe any duty to gravity without which I could not
move or lift my hand, or any duty to the sunshine or to the rains
and the winds? Instinctively, unconsciously, for the most part we
obey the law of gravity, and instinctively we adjust ourselves to
all the natural forces, not from a sense of duty, but from a sense
of self-preservation. These things are a part of our lives and not
something to which we hold only a casual and precarious or external
relation. My relation to the Eternal is not that of an inferior to
a superior, or of a beneficiary to his benefactor, or of a subject
to his king. It is that of the leaf to the branch, of the fruit to
the tree, of the babe in the womb to its mother. It is a vital and
an inevitable relation. It cannot be broken. It is not a matter of
will or choice. We are embosomed in the Eternal Beneficence, whether
we desire it or not. Those good persons who go through life looking
upon the Eternal as a power external to themselves, saluting him as
the soldier salutes his officer, are not as truly religious as they
think they are. The old conception of an external God, the supreme
ruler of the universe, with whom Moses talked and walked and even
saw the hinder parts of, is out of date in our time. Still the
overarching thought of the Infinite and the Eternal, in whom we live
and move and have our being, must at times awaken in the minds of all
of us, and lend dignity and sobriety to our lives.
But the other world fades as this world brightens. Science has made
this world so interesting and wonderful, and our minds find such
scope in it for the exercise of all their powers, that thoughts of
another world are becoming foreign to us. We shall never exhaust the
beauties and the wonders and the possibilities of this. To feel at
home on this planet, and that it is, with all its drawbacks, the best
possible world, I look upon as the supreme felicity of life.
When we look at it in its mere physical and chemical aspects, its
play of forces, tangible and intangible, its reservoir of energy,
its “journeying of atoms,” its radiating electrons, its magnetic
currents, its transmutations and cycles of change, its hidden but
potent activities, its streaming auroras, its changing seasons, its
myriad forms of life, and a thousand other things--all make it a
unique and most desirable habitation.