I believe that there is some advantage in stating in this somewhat
crabbed and dialectical fashion, a problem which most of us usually
approach through much more direct and pathetic experience. One
advantage in crabbedness and in fondness for dialectic is that it
sometimes tends to clear away the clouds {228} with which emotion from
moment to moment surrounds certain great problems of life. As I said
earlier, in speaking of the office of the reason, abstract ideas are
but means to an end. Their end is to help us to a clear and rational
survey of the connections of things. When you are to examine the
landscape from a height, in order to obtain a wide prospect, you may
have to use a glass, or a compass, or some other instrument of
abstraction, in order to define what the distance tends to render
obscure, or what the manifoldness of the scenery surveyed makes it
hard rightly to view in its true relations. And, in such cases, the
glass or the compass is but an auxiliary, intended to help in the end
your whole outlook. Now the world of good and evil is a world of wide
prospects, of vast distances, of manifold features. A bit of
dialectics, using abstract and one-sided considerations in succession,
may prepare the way for seeing the whole better.
The plain man well knows the problem that I have just been
characterising. He knows how it may enter his religious life. Only he
does not usually think of it abstractly. It pierces his heart. Stunned
by a grief, he may say: "I have trusted God, and now he forsakes me.
How can a good God permit this horror in my life?" Yet the plain man,
if religiously minded, also knows what is meant by saying, "Out of the
depths have I cried." And he knows, too, that part of the preciousness
of his {229} very idea of God depends upon the fact that there are
depths, and that out of them one can cry, and that God is precisely a
being who somehow hears the cry from the depths. God, "pragmatically
viewed," as some of our recent teachers express the matter, is thus
often defined for the plain man's religious experience as a helper in
trouble. Were there no trouble, there would be, then, it would seem,
no cry of the soul for such a being, and very possibly no such being
conceived by the soul that now cries. Yet this very God--one cries to
him because he is supposed to be all-powerful, and to do all things
well, and therefore to be a very present help in time of trouble. All
this seems clear enough at the time when one is on the way up, out of
the depths, or when one begins to praise God in the Psalmist's words,
because, as one now says: "He hath planted my feet upon a rock, and
hath established my goings." But how does all this seem at the moment
when one suddenly falls into the pit of sorrow, and when one's eyes
are turned downward; when he who doeth all things well permits the
utmost treachery of fortune, and when the one who can hear every cry
seems deaf to one's most heartrending pleadings? The familiar
explanation that all this is a penalty for one's sins may awaken an
echo of Job's protest in the mind of the man who knows not how he has
deserved this woe, or may arouse the deeper and now consciously
dialectical comments on the mystery involved in the fact that God
{230} permits sin. "Why was I made thus blind and sinful?" one may
cry. And hereupon religious insight becomes, indeed, confused enough,
and may turn for relief to that well-known type of defiance which, if
not religious, is at least moral; for it is a protest against evil. If
at such moments God is, indeed, to our darkened vision, and, for us,
who wait for his blessing, as if he were sleeping or on a journey, one
can at least, as moral agent, utter this protest against ill, and
wonder why his omnipotence does not make it effective. One thus
begins, as it were, to try heroically to do the absent God's work for
him.
All these are familiar experiences. They find us, too often,
unprepared. They find us when emotion tends to cloud every insight.
They illustrate a certain dialectical process which belongs to all
human life and which plays its part in the whole history of religion.
Perhaps it is well to state an aspect of this dialectical process
abstractly, crabbedly, and unemotionally, as we have just done, in
order that we may make ourselves the more ready to face the issue when
life exemplifies it with crushing suddenness, and when
"The painful ploughshare of passion
Grinds down to our uttermost rock."
The problem, as just abstractly stated, is this. Religion seems to
face this dilemma: Either there are no great and essential ills about
human life; {231} and then there is no great danger of perdition, and
no great need of salvation, and religion has no notable office; or
there are great and essential ills, and man's life is in bitter need
of salvation; but in that case evil is deeply rooted in the very
nature of the reality from which we have sprung; and therefore
religion has no right to assure us of communion with a real master of
life who is able to do with evil what not only ought to be done with
it, but ought always to have been done with it by any being able to
offer man any genuine salvation. For (as we are assuming) what ought
to be done, yes, what ought to have been done with evil from the
beginning, is and was this: To banish it altogether from existence.
This, I say, is, when abstractly stated, the dilemma in which religion
seems to be placed. Of this dilemma the countless struggles of the
human soul when, in the spirit of some practical religion, it seeks
for salvation and faces its woes are examples. These struggles are
infinitely pathetic and in life are often confusing to insight. Is
there any value in considering this abstract statement of the
principles upon which this dilemma seems to be founded? Possibly there
is, if we can hereby be led also to consider--not indeed, in this
place, the problems of theology, or the metaphysics of evil, but a new
source of insight.
{232}