3. In men, as the higher reason, including our moral and spiritual
nature.
The long process of evolution is thus the progressive realisation of the
Thought of God now becoming the Word, the expressed Thought of God. And
this realisation is from within, a growing manifestation of God _in_
created things. And its climax was reached in the Incarnation when
4. The Word became flesh; the Thought of God perfectly embodied in our
humanity. And now this same progressive revelation of God is continuing
on the higher plane into which it was uplifted at the Incarnation. The
work of the Spirit is to form within the members of Christ's Body, that
Body which is constituted by His indwelling, the Mind and the Life of God
Incarnate. "He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you." So we
get
5. The work of the Spirit of Christ within the Church, extending the
Incarnation.
"He," writes St. Paul, "gave Him [Christ] as Head over all to the Church,
which is His Body, the fulness of Him Who at all points in all men is
being fulfilled."
The application of this to our present subject is as follows. The animal
life in us, and the Divine life in us, are both alike due to the
indwelling God, both alike are manifestations of His Presence. But they
are manifestations at two different levels of being. What follows?
The animal nature is good; the moral and spiritual nature is good. What
do we mean in this connexion by "good"? We mean, they are the results of
the action of Him Whose Will is essential goodness.
The peculiarity of human life is, however, the conflict between these two
elements of man's nature--the lower and the higher. Neither as yet,
_from the human standpoint_, is good or bad. Moral attributes belong
only to the will, which we may provisionally call the centre of man's
personality. For man is a personal being, and as such stands apart from
God.
God, Whose power brought man into being,
Stands as it were a handsbreadth off, to give
Room for the newly made to live,
And look at Him from a place apart,
And use His gifts of mind and heart.
Man alone can bring into existence the morally good or the morally bad.
And the materials of his choice are presented by the co-existence within
him of the lower and the higher. Sin is the choice by the will of the
lower, when that is felt to be in conflict with the higher. It is the
resolution, previous to any action, to satisfy the desires of the animal,
when these are known to contradict the dictates of the moral and
spiritual nature.
Here we pause to notice a point of great importance for clear thinking on
this subject. The conflict we have spoken of is that described by St.
Paul as between the flesh and the spirit. Now the flesh is not
equivalent to the body. The works of the flesh are by no means
necessarily sensual sins; they include strife and envy. The flesh, the
animal within us, is not to be identified with our physical organisation.
Now we are drawing near to the very heart of the matter. What is it
which distinguishes the lower nature from the higher, the animal from the
Divine in us, the flesh from the spirit? The distinction lies in the
objects to which the desires of each of these natures are directed.
The animal, predominantly, desires the good of self: the Divine, the good
of others.
This we must now expand. There is nothing morally wrong in the
self-seeking of the animal. Moral evil--sin--only arises when two
conditions are fulfilled.
The self-seeking desire must be felt to be in contradiction to the
unselfish dictates of the higher nature.
The will, having this knowledge more or less clearly before it, chooses
to give effect to the lower rather than to subordinate it to the higher.
We may express the same truth somewhat more accurately.
The material of human sin is the co-existence of the animal nature and
the Divine Nature within us.
The occasion of sin is the conflict between the two.
The conditions of sin are two--knowledge and freedom; knowledge of the
antagonism between the desires of the two natures, and freedom to give
effect either to the one or to the other.
The actual fact of sin is the movement of the will, making its choice in
favour of the lower in opposition to the higher.
These two corollaries follow:--(i) Sin belongs only to the will, not to
the nature. "There is nothing good in the world save a good will." And
the converse is true: there is nothing sinful in the world save a sinful
will.
(ii) Sin does not lie in the act, but in the movement of the will, of
which the act is but the outward symbol. We must carefully distinguish
between sin and temptation. No temptation is sinful, however strong and
however vividly presented to the mind. Sin only comes in when the will
makes the choice of the worse alternative. A sin in thought is an act of
inward choice, the deliberate indulgence of, the dwelling with pleasure
upon, the temptation presented to us. But if I am only prevented by
circumstances or by fear from embodying the wrong choice of my will in
action, I have, in the sight of God, committed that sin. If I have made
the wrong choice, and am deterred by the faintest of moral scruples, as
well as, perhaps, by other considerations, from carrying it out, I am
really, although in a less degree, guilty.
Now we can fall back upon our main thought. The animal matter is
essentially self-regarding. This is not (_a_) the same thing as to say
that all actions of all animals are self-regarding. I see no difficulty
in believing that there may be adumbrations of the moral and spiritual in
animals below man, if the animal life is the manifestation, on a lower
plane, of the same Word Who is the Life of nature and the Light (the
higher reason and spiritual life) of man. Nor (_b_) is it the same thing
as to say that the desires of the animal nature are selfish. For
selfishness is a moral term and, as we have seen, moral attributes are
inapplicable except to a wrong choice of the will.
These self-regarding impulses of the animal nature are due to the fact,
that that nature is the result of the age-long struggle for existence.
These impulses have secured the survival and the predominance of man.
But man is more than a successful animal. He is made in the image of
God. In him, the Word is revealed, not as life only, but as light. In
an altogether higher sense than can be predicated of any part of creation
below man, he is a sharer in the Divine life.
Now that Divine life is the very life of Him Whose very essence and being
is Love. God is Love. What does this mean? It has never been better
expressed than in the following words: "God is a Being, not one of Whose
thoughts is for Himself. . . . Creation is one great unselfish thought of
God, the bringing into existence of beings who can know the happiness
which God Himself knows" (Dr. Askwith). What happiness is that? It is
explained, by the same writer, as the happiness which is found in the
promotion of the happiness, that is, in the largest sense, the well-being
of others.
We can now see the reason of the antagonism between the animal and the
Divine in ourselves, the real meaning of the Pauline antithesis between
the flesh and the Spirit, the old man and the new.
We are to "put off the old man." He is old, indeed, beyond our
imaginations of antiquity, for he is the product of the hoary animal
ancestry of our race. Our progress as successful competitors in the
struggle for animal existence, has been the waxing stronger of the old
man day by day.
To put on the new man, is to continue our evolution, now a conscious and
deliberate evolution, on an entirely different plane. It is to subdue
the self-regarding impulses, in obedience to the movements of the Divine
life within us, which bids us deny ourselves--not some particular desire,
but our own selves--and to seek the good of others; to seek and, seeking,
surely to find, "the happiness which God Himself knows."
To put on the new man is synonymous, in St. Paul, with putting on Christ.
For He is the perfect revelation of the Divine in our humanity.
He is this perfect revelation of the Divine self-sacrifice in His
Incarnation, when "He became poor for our sakes," when "He emptied
Himself." So the Incarnation is, it may well be, but the climax of the
Divine sacrifice involved in creation, when God limited Himself by His
manifestation in "material" things; involved, we may say with greater
certainty, in the creation of man, who can, in some real sense, thwart
and hinder the Divine Will.
He is the revelation of the Divine in us, in the whole course of His
earthly life. "Christ pleased not Himself." "He went about doing good."
And, above all, He is that revelation in the supreme act of love and
sacrifice upon the Cross. "In this have we come to know what love is,
because He laid down His life for us." We have come to know love, in its
supreme manifestation of itself, for ever the test, the standard of all
true love; and in coming to know love, we have necessarily come to know
God. The Cross is the perfect self-utterance and disclosure of the Mind
of God, the crowning revelation of His Word. And in coming to know God,
we have come to know ourselves. For the true self of man is the self
conformed perfectly to the Divine Life within him.
Thus the Cross of Jesus Christ is the crowning revelation of man, as well
as of God. There, side by side with humanity marred and wrecked and
spoilt by sin, which is selfishness, we see man as God made him, as God
meant him to be, clothed with the Divine beauty and glory of
self-sacrifice.
In the Cross we see ourselves, our true selves, not as we have made
ourselves, but our real and genuine selves, as we exist in the Mind of
God.
In the light of that wonderful revelation, we can recognise that which is
Divine and Christ-like in us, that spirit which bids us seek not the
things of self, but the things of others, "even as Christ pleased not
Himself."
All this may be summed up in one short phrase, which goes near, I
believe, to express the innermost reality of the Christian religion.
Christ, the Son of man, is the true self of every man. To follow Him, to
be His disciple, in thought, and word, and deed, is to be oneself, to
realise one's own personality. In no other way can I attain to be
myself.
Thus the Cross is the supreme revelation of the Divine Life in man. And
now we shall go on to see how it brings to us, not merely the knowledge
of the Ideal, but also, what is far more, the very means whereby the
Ideal may be realised in and by each one of us.
We have dealt with the Cross as illumination; we now approach its
consideration as redemptive power.
V
THE GREAT RECONCILIATION
"God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself." 2 COR. V. 19.
Such considerations as we have had before us, are of far more than
theoretical interest. They are of all questions the most practical. Sin
is not a curious object which we examine from an aloof and external
standpoint. However we regard it, to whatever view of its nature we are
led, it is, alas, a fact within and not merely outside our experience.
And so we are at length brought to this most personal and most urgent
inquiry, What has been the result _to me_ of my past acts of sin? I have
sinned; what have been, what are, what will be the consequences?
The most hopelessly unintelligent answer is, that there are no results,
no consequences. It behoves us to remember that we can never sin with
impunity. This is true, even in the apparent absence of all punishment.
Every act of sin is followed by two results, though probably a profounder
analysis would show them to be in reality one.
(i) Whenever I sin I inflict a definite injury on myself, varying with
the sinfulness of the sin; that is, with its nature and the degree of
deliberation it involved. I am become a worse man; I have, in some
degree, rejected and done to death the Divine in me, my true self. Every
sin, in its own proper measure, is both a rejection of the Christ within,
and also an act of spiritual suicide.
Again (ii), each sin, once more according to the degree of its guilt,
involves separation from God. And, as union with God is life, it follows
that sin is, and not merely brings death. That is the death of which the
outward, physical death is the mere symbol. It is death of that which
makes me man--the weakening of my will, the dulling of my conscience, the
loss of spiritual vision. Hereafter, it may be, all this will be
recognised by me as being death indeed, when I see how much I have
missed, by my own fault, of the life and happiness which might have been
mine in virtue of that unbroken communion with God, for which I was made.
These two results may be regarded as the penalties of sinning; more
truly, they are aspects of sin itself. We can hardly be reminded too
often that the worst punishment of sin is sin itself. The external
results of sin, where such occur, are not evil, but good; for the object
for which they are sent is the cure of sin. "To me no harder hell was
shown than sin." If hell is this separation from God, this veritable and
only real death, then hell is not an external penalty inflicted upon sin,
but is involved in the very nature of sin itself. Or, it would be still
more accurate to say, the constitution of the universe (including
ourselves) being what it is, and the nature of sin being what it is,
these results necessarily follow.
Now, the universe is not something which God has created and then, as it
were, flung off from Himself, standing for ever outside it, as it is for
ever outside Him. The universe, at each moment of its existence, is the
expression, in time and space, of the Divine Mind. What we call its
"laws," whether in the physical or the spiritual sphere, are the thoughts
of the Mind of God: its "forces" are the operations of the Will of God,
acting in accordance with His thoughts: material "things" are His
thoughts embodied, that is, Divine thoughts rendered, by an act of the
Divine Will, accessible to our senses.
Now we are in a position to understand both what is meant by the Wrath of
God, and the manner in which it acts.
By the expression, "the Wrath of God," we are to understand the hostility
of the Divine Mind to moral evil: the eternal antagonism of the Divine
righteousness to its opposite. We are not now dealing with the question
of the real or substantive existence of evil. But revelation amply
confirms and enforces the conviction of our moral consciousness that,
with a hatred beyond all human measures of hatred, God hates sin. It is
hardly necessary to add, that that eternal and immeasurable hatred and
hostility of the Divine Mind towards sin is compatible with infinite love
towards His children, in whose minds and lives sin is elaborated and
manifested. In fact, all attempts to reconcile the Wrath of God with His
love seem to be utterly beside the mark. They only serve to obscure the
truth that the Divine Wrath is itself a manifestation of the Divine Love.
For if sin is, as we have already seen, in its very essence, selfishness,
and if Love is the very Being of God--if He is not merely loving, but
Love itself--then the Wrath of God, His hostility to sin, is His Love
viewed in one particular aspect, in its outlook on moral evil, in its
relation to that which is its very opposite and antithesis. Hell and
Heaven, separation from God and union with Him, are alike expressions of
the Eternal Love, which, because it is love, burns with unquenchable fire
against all forms of selfishness and lovelessness.
This is the true, the ultimate reason why, in a universe which is the
expression of the Mind of God, we cannot sin, and never have sinned, with
impunity.