Problems of Immanence Part 4

CHAPTER VI

EVIL _versus_ DIVINE GOODNESS

That the renewed emphasis upon the Divine immanence must have for one of its effects that of raising the problem of evil afresh, and in a particularly acute form, will be obvious to anyone who has thought out for himself the implications of that doctrine. Dark and pressing enough before, this particular problem has, in appearance at least, been both complicated and accentuated by the displacement of Deism.

If, as we have argued on a previous occasion, there is a certain causal connection between Deism and a somewhat sombre outlook upon the world, on the other hand the existence of evil seemed to fit in better with a view of G.o.d which represented Him as outside the universe than with one which insists upon His indwelling in creation. If the earth was the scene and playground of undivine agencies which work their will while the Divine control is withdrawn, then many things became comparatively easy of comprehension; indeed, there was a certain consolation in the thought that--

All the things that had been so wrong After all would not last for long,

{88} but that ultimately G.o.d would resume the supreme control He had temporarily abandoned, while the Power of darkness would be bound and cast into the abyss. If, however, we must think of Him as omnipresent and for that reason directly and uninterruptedly cognisant of all, then the plain man can only ask himself with a deepening wonder why an all-good and unimaginably powerful Being should permit evils of every description to lay waste His own creation. "No one can enter into the house of the strong, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong"; and since a direct overpowering of G.o.d by Satan is out of the question, is not the a.s.sumption to which we are driven this--that the Strong One is absent while His goods are being spoiled, and that it is this very absence of which the spoiler has taken advantage? Somehow, we feel, if He were really present--as present as the doctrine of immanence would have us believe--He would actively a.s.sert Himself against wrongs and abuses; and when we think of the blood and tears that are shed the world over as the result of disordered desire, industrial greed and political misrule, we find it difficult not to echo the words of psalmist and prophet, "Why standest Thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest Thou Thyself in times of trouble?" "Verily Thou art a G.o.d that hidest Thyself."

In saying this we do not suggest that such an attempt to explain the phenomena of evil {89} by G.o.d's supposed absence from the world is defensible; we do say that the belief in His all-encompa.s.sing nearness makes those phenomena even more difficult of explanation than they were before. The devout deist could always comfort himself with the thought that, however mysterious G.o.d's standing afar off might be, by and by, when He drew nigh again, He would deal out even-handed justice to all; but such comfort is not open to those who explicitly deny G.o.d's remoteness, but on the contrary a.s.sert that He is the Presence from which there is no escaping. And the fact of evil, physical and moral, is precisely the chief and most fruitful source of religious scepticism; it is not the abstract question whether there is a G.o.d, but the practical and insistent problem whether the Divine goodness can be reconciled with the facts of life and experience, that is agitating men's minds, and sways their decision for or against religion.

Everyone knows that this is what Mr. Mallock some time ago called "the crux of Theism"; that "crux," to use his own language, is not "the existence of intelligent purpose in the universe," which may be freely conceded, but whether the processes of nature are or are not consistent with "a G.o.d possessing the character which it is the essence of Theism to attribute to Him, and which alone could render Him an object of religion, or even of interest, to mankind." Sometimes in accents of wistful {90} wonder, sometimes in tones of revolt and defiant unbelief, the question is asked:--Why does G.o.d allow dire calamity, painful disease, earthquakes and s.h.i.+pwrecks, and accidents of the mine? Why does He permit war, or vivisection, or poverty, or vice--in fact any of "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to"?

We should stop these things if we could; why does not He? One is reminded of Mr. William Watson's pa.s.sionate arraignment of the Powers of Europe at the time of the Armenian ma.s.sacres:--

Yea, if ye could not, though ye would, lift hand-- Ye halting leaders--to abridge h.e.l.l's reign. . .

If such your plight, most hapless ye of men!

_But if ye could and would not_, oh, what plea, Think ye, shall stead you at your trial, when The thundercloud of witnesses shall loom At the a.s.sizes of Eternity?

The application of these burning lines is painfully obvious. It would be a positive relief were it thinkable that the Eternal would, but cannot, stem

the flood that rolls Hoa.r.s.er with anguish as the ages roll;

or if one might, with a modern novelist, compare the case to that of "a pract.i.tioner doing his best for a wilful patient, with poor appliances and indifferent nursing." _But if He could and will not--oh, what plea?_

What frankly appals men and freezes the wors.h.i.+pful instinct in their hearts is the {91} apparent Divine indifference, the silence of G.o.d, in the presence of so much human wretchedness. If one could only feel that He cared for and sympathised with His suffering creatures, it would be a help, like the sympathetic pressure of the hand from a friend, which does not lessen the actual calamity that may have befallen us, but makes it easier to bear; but an _indifferent_ G.o.d is equivalent to no G.o.d at all--or, as we have previously expressed it, a G.o.d who does not care, does not count. The mere sense that He was sorry for us would lighten the stroke of fate which He had not been able to avert; but if the truth is that He might have averted it by the simple exercise of His will, but refused to do so, coldly looking on at our grief--not from afar, but close by--then we can only say that no G.o.d at all were better than that. It seems, then, as though, in order to escape from palpable inconsistency between theory and fact, we should have to make a surrender either of His immanence, or His omnipotence, or His benevolence, or the reality of evil.

To surrender the Divine immanence will not really solve our problem.

Near or far, closer to us than breathing or dwelling beyond the furthest star, G.o.d is still the Author of our being, the Framer of the world and all that therein is, the Cause without which there would have been no effects. If, after creating the world, He withdrew from it to an inconceivable {92} distance, it is none the less His handiwork; if it is in and through His absence that the cosmic mechanism has got out of gear, it is yet He who willed to be so absent, well knowing what results would supervene; if a power other than He and hostile to Him has usurped the place and t.i.tle of Prince of this world, such usurpation would have been impossible but for His acquiescence, and personified Evil, playing with human happiness, would still be His licensed agent. Evidently, the solution of which we are in search does not lie along that way.

We turn, therefore, to the second possible explanation, strongly put forward by Mill, according to whom natural theology points to G.o.d as "a Being of great but limited power."

Those who have been strengthened in goodness by relying on the sympathising support of a powerful and good Governor of the world (he says) have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always saved His goodness at the expense of His power. They have believed . . .

that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to His intention.[1]

To the question, "Of what nature is the limitation of His power?" he returns the tentative answer that it

probably results either from the qualities of the material--the substances and forces of which the universe is composed not admitting of any arrangements by which His purposes could be more completely fulfilled; or else, the purposes might have been more fully attained, but the Creator did not know how to do it; creative {93} skill, wonderful as it is, was not sufficiently perfect to accomplish His purposes more thoroughly.[2]

Such an answer, we need scarcely say, could only have been given by a thinker who had grown up in the intellectual atmosphere of Deism; the Deity which he contemplates is One who works upon the world purely _ab extra_, who cannot be spoken of as the Creator, except by courtesy; in reality He merely shapes and adapts materials over which He has only an incomplete control, and which, therefore, so far from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He really _created_ the raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still to answer the question, What is that real First Cause, the _Urgott_ who created the _Urstoff_, matter in its most elementary form, and endowed it with qualities some of which were destined to serve, while others resisted and frustrated, the sub-Divinity's intentions?

Clearly, this notion also will not do; but while we may reject Mill's theory as to the _nature_ of the limitations of Divine power, there {94} is distinct force in his shrewd contention that religious people generally--professions to the contrary notwithstanding--have never really believed G.o.d to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent.

This contention we believe, indeed, to be almost self-evidently true; for on the contrary supposition nothing can happen contrary to G.o.d's will--all things and beings would necessarily be carrying out that will, and sin, _e.g._, would become an utterly meaningless term. But if omnipotence is limited--which sounds, we admit, a contradiction in terms--we ask once more, In what way and by whom? To that question we have no other reply than the one given in our first chapter, _viz._, that when we predicate limitation of the Deity, we must mean self-limitation. In creating the universe, we said, G.o.d made a distinction between His creation and Himself, and to that extent limited His Being--for the universe is not identical with G.o.d; we now add that in endowing man with an existence related to, but distinct from, His own, He limited not only His infinite Being, but also His infinite Power, delegating some portion thereof to us--for man's will is not identical with G.o.d's will, but capable of resisting, though also capable of co-operating with it. Without such individual initiative, without such an individual faculty of choosing between alternatives of action, man could never have been a moral agent; but moral liberty to choose and act aright or amiss implies also {95} moral responsibility for such choice on the part of the chooser.

This neglected truth of G.o.d's self-limitation of His power needs to be far more explicitly avowed than has generally been the case. Only so shall we get clear of the confusion and uncertainty with which the subject of human freedom is so largely surrounded; only so shall we be enabled to place the burden of responsibility for sin, the cause of so immense a proportion of the world's suffering, upon the right shoulders--_i.e._, man's, not G.o.d's. It is urgently necessary to disperse the common fallacy according to which G.o.d, being the Author of all, is the causative Agent answerable for all the happenings in His universe, for all human pain and all human sin. Where freedom is, _there_ is responsibility. For let us bring the matter down from the abstract to the concrete: if a dreadful railway accident is caused through the momentary mental lapse of a signalman who has been overtaxed by excessive working hours, how is the responsibility G.o.d's?

It obviously belongs to those who imposed a task involving the safety of human lives on a man who was not in a fit condition to fulfil such a duty. If an explosion in a coal-mine, accompanied by terrible loss of life, is caused through some miner striking a match, or carrying a naked light, in defiance of well-known regulations of safety, how is G.o.d responsible? He has endowed us with intelligence whereby to {96} discover His laws, and with freedom to obey or disobey them: the use or misuse of that freedom rests with ourselves.

But now it may be asked--Was it the act of a benevolent Deity to entrust this terribly two-edged weapon of liberty to our unskilful hands, in which it was bound to work so vast an amount of injury? And this opens up the larger and more general question, Must we, in view of the facts of life, surrender the idea of the Divine benevolence? It is quite true that the evidence of purpose discernible in the whole structure of the universe proclaims the Deity to be personal; but, as Mr. Mallock says, "the theistic doctrine of G.o.d is not a doctrine that the supreme mind acts with purpose, but a doctrine that it acts with purpose of a highly specialised kind"--_viz._, _benevolent_ purpose.

Let us once more state the problem in the partial but very pertinent form in which it arises in connection with man's faculty of freedom.

To bestow upon His creatures a gift which He must have known they would use in such a manner as to work infinite harm to themselves and to each other, seems _prima facie_ no more compatible with kindly intentions than it would be to leave children to play with sharp tools, loaded firearms and deadly poisons; since disaster was bound to ensue from such a course, does not responsibility for the disaster rest with the one who deliberately provided the {97} elements for it? But such a comparison, while superficially plausible, upon reflection is seen to be beside the mark. We really cannot plead such inexperience of right and wrong, such ignorance of moral safety and moral danger, as would furnish a true parallel between playing with temptation and playing with cyanide of pota.s.sium. In setting before us "life and good, and death and evil," G.o.d has as distinctly placed within our hearts the moral intuition which, says, "Therefore choose life." But why, the questioner proceeds, have made sin even possible? Because, we answer, not to have done so would have made morality impossible. It cannot be too often, or too plainly, pointed out that just as the only alternative to purpose is chance, so the only alternative to liberty is necessity. That is to say, G.o.d could no doubt have made us automata instead of free agents; but even He could not have made us free to _choose_ the right, yet not free to choose its contrary. Choice that is not willed is not choice at all; goodness by compulsion is not goodness, but merely correct.i.tude--the behaviour of a skilfully-devised mechanism, but possessing no _moral_ quality whatever. We are not at present concerned with the view of those who maintain that men are _de facto_ no more than such "cunning casts in clay" a contention which will occupy us at a later stage; we merely state the commonplace that in making us free G.o.d Himself could not also {98} make us impeccable, insusceptible to temptation, immune against the possibility of sin.

The real question, then, shapes itself as follows: Can we discern the nature of the purpose which expresses itself in the bestowal of this gift of freedom? Stated in that form, we see that the question has already been answered by implication; for if there could be no morality without liberty, it is fair to make the inference that the very object of G.o.d in allowing us to choose between alternatives of conduct was to make morality so much as possible. Was that a good and beneficent object? We submit that even those who impeach the Deity for opening the door to sin would on second thoughts confess that morally free--and therefore peccable--beings stand on a higher level than marionettes, however faultlessly contrived to perform certain evolutions. The truth of the matter is set forth with poetic insight in Andersen's story of the Nightingale--the immeasurable difference between the artificial bird and the real songster, whose melodious raptures somehow touched a chord in the listener which all the nicely-calculated trills and cadences of the ingenious mechanical toy failed to set in motion. In like manner we repeat that the power to determine his own course raises man to a plane incomparably higher than he could have occupied as an automaton. The same faculty of free choice which in its abuse makes the sinner, in its right {99} exercise furnishes forth the saint. All that we mean by moral progress, by "the steady gain of man," his rise to more exalted ideals, his conquest of baser appet.i.tes--all that makes the history of the race a thrilling and uplifting drama--is bound up with his possession of liberty; it is this supreme gift which makes him "a little lower than the angels," and "crowns him with glory and honour." Alone of all earthly beings, man is not only an effect but a cause; his freedom--not unlimited but quite real within its not inelastic confines--is the n.o.blest of all his faculties, even though for that very reason it is capable of being most ign.o.bly perverted.

What its bestowal tells us is that G.o.d does not call us into servitude, but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us with the power to choose for ourselves He has made us His potential fellow-workers. May we not ask--Who, after all, would prefer the safety of automatism to the glory of this Divine adventure?

In all this we are not shutting our eyes to what is involved in the misuse of liberty--the dread nature of wilful sin and its ghastly harvest of wrecked and ruined lives; we do not say that the price of freedom is not a heavy {100} one, nor do we pretend that the subject is free from painful mystery. It could not be otherwise; that we, with our limited vision and circ.u.mscribed understanding, should be able to solve that mystery with any completeness, is not even to be imagined.

Nevertheless, we may claim that we have at least obtained a glimpse of the purpose of G.o.d in conferring upon the race this fateful power; for this and no other was the appointed means by which man was to ascend to his true place as a moral and spiritual being. If we can admit that purpose to be in harmony with the Divine benevolence, we may the more hopefully turn to other aspects of our problem.

[1] _Three Essays on Religion_, p. 22.

[2] _Ibid_, p. 79.

[3] _The Laws_, vii, 803: [Greek] "Theou ti paignion memechanmenon."

Compare also Browning's unhappy phrase, "G.o.d, whose puppets, best and worst, are we."

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CHAPTER VII

EVIL _versus_ DIVINE GOODNESS (_Continued_)

There is probably no more serious aspect of the popular philosophy which declares so confidently, "There is no will that is not G.o.d's will," than that, while professing to be a Gospel of sweetness and light, it in reality plunges us into the very depths of pessimism by making G.o.d Himself "ultimately responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world." From such a position, from such premises as these, there is only one step to such conclusions as have been actually drawn:--

It is His world, remember; He made it, and He is omnipotent. . . If creation does not please the Creator, why did He not make it better?

If it is wayward and intractable, it can be no more than He expected, or ought to have expected. Wherein consists His right to punish us for our transgressions? Suppose we challenge it; what will He say in defence?

We may shrink with distaste from such wild and whirling words; but if it be true that "there is no will that is not G.o.d's will"--if whatever takes place in the universe expresses that almighty will--they are as rational in their very vehemence as Omar's lines are rational in their melancholy:--

{102}

O Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin Beset the Road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with Predestin'd Evil round Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!

O Thou, who man of baser Earth didst make, And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake: For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blacken'd--Man's forgiveness give--and take!

It is only when we clearly recognise that man is other than a mere phase or mode of the one Eternal Being; that he has been endowed with individual existence and individual will, and therefore with individual responsibility--and that for the express purpose of realising his highest potentialities: it is only when we accept such a reading of the facts as this that we escape from that worst of nightmares which reaches its climax in hurling its foolish defiance at the Most High, challenging His right to punish the instruments of His own will, those "helpless pieces of the game He plays," impotent items in that unending spectacle--

Which for the pastime of Eternity He doth Himself contrive, enact, behold.