Let us now take up the question of what is Sin? and what we mean by the
term “damnation,” in the light of this view of human reality. Most of
the great world religions are as clear as Professor Metchnikoff that
life in the world is a tangle of disharmonies, and in most cases they
supply a more or less myth-like explanation, they declare that evil is
one side of the conflict between Ahriman and Ormazd, or that it is the
punishment of an act of disobedience, of the fall of man and world alike
from a state of harmony. Their case, like his, is that THIS world is
damned.
We do not find the belief that superposed upon the miseries of this
world there are the still bitterer miseries of punishments after death,
so nearly universal. The endless punishments of hell appear to be
an exploit of theory; they have a superadded appearance even in the
Christian system; the same common tendency to superlatives and absolutes
that makes men ashamed to admit that God is finite, makes them seek to
enhance the merits of their Saviour by the device of everlasting fire.
Conquest over the sorrow of life and the fear of death do not seem to
them sufficient for Christ’s glory.
Now the turning round of the modern mind from a conception of the
universe as something derived deductively from the past to a conception
of it as something gathering itself adventurously towards the future,
involves a release from the supposed necessity to tell a story and
explain why. Instead comes the inquiry, “To what end?” We can say
without mental discomfort, these disharmonies are here, this damnation
is here--inexplicably. We can, without any distressful inquiry into
ultimate origins, bring our minds to the conception of a spontaneous and
developing God arising out of those stresses in our hearts and in the
universe, and arising to overcome them. Salvation for the individual
is escape from the individual distress at disharmony and the individual
defeat by death, into the Kingdom of God. And damnation can be nothing
more and nothing less than the failure or inability or disinclination to
make that escape.
Something of that idea of damnation as a lack of the will for salvation
has crept at a number of points into contemporary religious thought. It
was the fine fancy of Swedenborg that the damned go to their own hells
of their own accord. It underlies a queer poem, “Simpson,” by that
interesting essayist upon modern Christianity, Mr. Clutton Brock, which
I have recently read. Simpson dies and goes to hell--it is rather like
the Cromwell Road--and approves of it very highly, and then and then
only is he completely damned. Not to realise that one can be damned is
certainly to be damned; such is Mr. Brock’s idea. It is his definition
of damnation. Satisfaction with existing things is damnation. It is
surrender to limitation; it is acquiescence in “disharmony”; it is
making peace with that enemy against whom God fights for ever.
(But whether there are indeed Simpsons who acquiesce always and for ever
remains for me, as I have already confessed in the previous chapter,
a quite open question. My Arminian temperament turns me from the
Calvinistic conclusion of Mr. Brock’s satire.)