[ p. 74 ]
THERE is no necessary antagonism between the conditions of life and the Sovereign Goodness of God. Things are as they are because God is as he is and because his purpose determines his procedure. The “end” accounts for the process by which it is being realized. Certain features of the process, especially the mal-adjustments that result in suffering and death, have led men either to deny God altogether or to regard him as “finite,” “growing,” “struggling,” or otherwise “limited.” The denial of God leaves these features as they are, and in addition is quite helpless in the presence of the intrinsic good of life. The limitation of God in any derogatory sense has the result of vesting with uncertainty the whole outcome of the cosmic travail. The God who is not sure of himself can guarantee nothing. The theistic faith does not deny the biological facts, but it sees in these facts super-biological possibilities, and takes the second as providing the meaning of the first. The inevitabilities of existence, therefore, whether of thought or of action, whether of the conditions of life or of the results of these conditions, are determined by God according to the requirements of a freely-chosen purpose.
[ p. 75 ]
WE have spoken of the rights of God as the creative Will, and of this as involving his complete power. But what is the character of the God who has these rights? The question has been answered by the affirmation that he is perfectly good.
Few men to-day who believe in God at all would claim that he was in any sense vindictive, or that there was in his nature some essential evil that on occasion came to activity. There are those, however, who while still believing in God deny to him perfect goodness on the ground that, like all other life, he is a learner in the school of experience. His imperfection is the necessary imperfection of a growing God of “a changing God,” as Holmes says, “fulfilling himself in the changing processes of life.” [1] He is never quite equal to the total demand on him. While his goodness at a given time may be as great as his goodness could then be, conditions being as they are, it is still a goodness that falls short of absolute perfection. Thus W. P. Montague, while he is willing to allow an all-inclusive cosmic mind, nevertheless insists that as will it is finite: there is more knowledge than power. [2] God knows what to do but he cannot do it. A God who undertakes more than he can accomplish is hardly perfect in goodness.
It is not difficult ,to make out a plausible case for this claim, and it has been done many times. [3] The [ p. 76 ] original reaction of any reflective mind to the varied web of existence is naturally one of this sort. The skeptic is entirely wrong if he supposes that his mood is unknown to those who are not skeptics. Many a saint has been driven almost to desperation by the insistent voices of doubt. The difference between the skeptic and the saint is not that the saint knows nothing of those “specters of the mind” which has produced the skeptic, but that he has “faced” them and “laid” them. Life is full enough of hazards. They confront equally the most favored and the most unfortunate. It requires no great gifts of imagination to discern them. Sunt lachrymce rerum, et mentern mortalia, tangunt: tears flow, however, not merely for some JEneas, but for all the millions of mankind. Many a man feels that he could have done a better piece of work with the universe than the Creator himself has done. If he does not believe that he could have made one free from all flaws, he at least believes that he could have made one in which the flaws would be far fewer. In any event, a better universe is conceivable and describable. The critic would have nowhere any conflicts or maladjustments. All natural phenomena would move along in perfect harmony. There would be no earthquakes, no tidal waves, no volcanic eruptions, no extremes of heat or cold, no physical hardships which men must overcome or perish. There would be no disease germs, no pain, no accidents, no death. There would be no limitations on the human reason and will those limitations whence come the whole dark brood of error and gin. Every man would see in every other man his brother, so that such things as competition, jealousy, [ p. 77 ] hostility, war, would never even be dreamed of. This, in effect, is presented as the ideal world, and when contrasted with it the actual world seems to be a sorry enough piece of work. The world as we know it is described as everywhere shot through with imperfection. There is an evil in all life, and it is preferable to regard it as resulting from creative inefficiency than from creative intention. If the character of the workman is revealed in his work, then, as Hume maintained through the argument of Philo in the famous Dialogues, the Divine Workman cannot be held to rank very high. [4]
It should perhaps be observed, as a rather curious fact, that many of the most moving complaints against the world as it is have been written by men who were just as severe in their criticism of the traditional idea of heaven! When Holmes says that the world is characterized by the “maximum of pain” and that it is “evil in process,” he is simply saying in a few words what others have taken whole volumes to say. [5] Men who see only this side of things refuse to believe in the perfect goodness of the God who by the theory of creation is responsible for such a condition of affairs ; they offer what they would regard as a desirable substitute for the world as it is, or at least they point out where it might have been improved; but when something resembling this substitute or proposed improvement is offered as the ultimate goal and the final reason for the vast cosmic and human travail, they declare that they could have no interest in personal residence in such a heaven. They are perfectly willing to work that something like this heaven may come about on earth, but apparently they want it only for [ p. 78 ] other people, not for themselves. These men, finding that life is surrounded by appalling difficulties, picture the desirability of a life from which the difficulties shall be absent. But when the Christian sings of “Jerusalem” as his “happy home,” and asks when his labors are to end in its “joy and peace,” he forthwith becomes the object of a good deal of scorn and contempt. Perhaps, after all, our chronic cosmic critics are much more satisfied with their lot than they pretend to be,* perhaps they do not believe that the world is in quite such a mess as they claim it is ; perhaps, on the whole, they are willing to take life as they find it opposition, hardship, pain, tragedy, and all. To complain at earth because it is too hard, and to complain at heaven because it is too easy, would seem to bespeak a mind difficult to please. And it is always proper to call attention to the very great satisfaction that certain men seem to derive from pointing out how bad things are. Their very satisfaction depends on what they condemn. They could not write as they write nor speak as they speak except there were something to find fault with. Perhaps some day they will realize how wise that God is who guarantees our growth by guaranteeing our discontent. The simple truth is that God does not want us to be content: he “invites our criticism.” But he invites it not for his own sake, but for ours, to inspire us thereby to seek that better which is his real will for us. One can believe that God is not disconcerted even by the bitter criticism of a Metzsche, for did not the criticism inspire two Christian theologians of widely differing schools of thought to a fresh appraisal of their faith? John Neville Figgis, the [ p. 79 ] Anglo-Catholic, declares that we shall go on loving v Nietzsche “even when he hits us hardest,” and George Burman Foster, the American Modernist, wrote in a sympathetic study that the world needs Nietzsche as never before, and that the religion he represented life, beauty, strength “must not perish from the earth.” [6]
Furthermore, whether the alleged imperfection of the world, with its entail of diverse ill for all living things, including man, is held to witness to a certain imperfection and impotency in God, or whether it is held to render invalid the idea of God altogether, in either case all just ground for complaint that the conditions of life are as they are s is surrendered. If God cannot help the course of events because he is himself at the mercy of forces and principles and necessities that he cannot control, then he would seem to call for our pity rather than for our blame. Or if there is no God at all, then the bringing of a railing accusation against what is admittedly a blind mechanism is nothing but the most childish petulance an animistic hangover, as when one curses the stone over which one has inadvertently stumbled. There is much more logic in the position of Bertrand Eussell, who, having explained things as the result of “omnipotent matter” as it “rolls on its relentless way,” thereupon calls man to a “proud defiance,” and to play the part of “a weary but unyielding Atlas.” [7] We find, however, that the critic of the scheme of things quite often recognizes the proper issue of his own criticism, and devotes himself to the noble task of molding the sorry scheme, “nearer to the heart’s desire.” [8] In this, as was pointed out before, he necessarily confesses to [ p. 80 ] the belief that improvement is a possibility. By what will he explain this possibility, if he has ruled out God ? He will probably fall back upon the theory of an immanent principle of good the “fundamental urge to the good life,” as Haydon puts it ; or upon a theory of necessary evolution toward the higher, as the same writer seems to mean when he accounts for man’s questing for the good life as “a cosmic process come to consciousness and to capacity for purposive self-control.” [^9] There is no need to emphasize again how astounding a position this is for one to take who, in theory at least, can think this way back to a primitive chaos, itself quite unexplainable, out of which, by virtue of nothing whatever but the passing of time, all that we know to-day has come. [9] What possible meaning can be assigned to either the term “good” or the term “evil” by one who takes such a worldview as that ? Or if God be brought into the picture, but God conceived as by Eolland, Wells, H. B. Alexander, Holmes, Brightman, and many others as one who is growing in wisdom, power, and goodness, and who will some day attain to completeness in these and all other respects, what reasons can be given for believing such a God to be a future possibility which are more cogent than the reasons for believing such a God to be already a fact, and to have been that “from the beginning” ? To suppose that there is “going to be” an all-sufficient God, but that there is not one yet, suggests a naivet6 on the part of those who make the supposition which one can hardly credit. It unfortunately no longer means very much to say of a given theory of things that it is “bad metaphysics,” but if ever the phrase could be appropriately applied, it [ p. 81 ] would be to the position in question. In a word, whether one decides that there is no God at all, or that there is only a “finite” and therefore “growing” God, no light at all comparable to the light of a thoroughgoing theism is thrown upon those very facts to explain which is the reason why God is denied or why his wisdom, power, and goodness are circumscribed.
The denial of God "naturally relieves the mind from a good many intellectual perplexities. The general problem, as to how there can be anything at all, still remains, but that remains on any view. The difference is that the theist can give it a rational solution. As was shown in the preceding Chapter, the man who denies God has no logical right to be perplexed by the fact of evil, but whatever benefit accrues to this is offset by the fact that he cannot account for good. It was also said that if he rejects God because he is oppressed by the nature of things, that nature still^ remains what it was before God was rejected. All the relief he gets is relief from the necessity of explaining how a world like this is compatible with a God of perfect wisdom and power. But such a man gains his relief at the expense of creating for himself the infinitely greater problem of how a being like man rational and ethical as he is could be the issue of forces themselves impersonal, mechanistic, nonrational, and nonethical. [10] Or if he attempts to make his problem easier, not by wholly denying God, but by circumscribing him trimming him down, so to speak, until it becomes possible to relieve him from responsibility for the more baffling aspects of life and experience he is still no nearer an explanation of [ p. 82 ] “the shadows in the picture.” What real help is there in being told that only the good of life can be explained by God, but not its evil? If the evil of the world is too much for God to-day, what reason is there for supposing that it will not be too much for him to-morrow ? Brightman’s attempt at this point only pushes “the problem of evil” farther back : it does not solve it, any more than Milton, in Paradise Lost, solved it by assuming an evil outside of and .before the world. Brightman speaks of an “irrational given element” in God, whose presence more or less “retards” his action, and is the real reason for the imperfection of the world, although it is some day to be wholly subdued. If this is so, are we to suppose that God’s real motive in creation was to get rid of an “irritant” in his own nature? Or if that is denied, and God’s creative act is still held to be entirely free, it is to be assumed that he knew how much he would be hampered by this “given,” to what devices it would drive Mm, and what tragedies it would bring to pass in his world. Then in that case, God is just as responsible for imperfections that he “cannot help” as he would be if he could “help” them. [11] The view involves other difficulties. If God is “bigger” to-day than he was yesterday, does he become “smaller” the farther back we go into history ? And if so, do we not necessarily come to a time when he began to be if not as a bare existence, at 'least as a moral being? A God who began to be a Creator who was himself created what confusion of thought is this !
Still other questions are provoked by the view, but one refrains, except perhaps to ask how a God who has been equal to the vast processes of nature and [ p. 83 ] history on their supposedly positive and constructive sides is not just as well equal to those processes in their totality. A conception of God that is able to sustain the weight of all natural phenomena, of all historical movements, of all individual experience, of whatever kind they be, is not one whit more difficult to come at and to keep than a conception that carries less than the whole. A God who does not account for everything does not account for anything. We can only revert to our previous claim, and say again that a God who does not account for evil does not account for good, while a God who accounts for good can account for evil as well. We cannot pick and choose among our facts. Existence and experience belong together, and an interpretation must be of the whole or of nothing. The God of a speck of dust is the God of the planets. The God of the baby’s breath is the God of the hurricane. The God of the homes of peace is the God of the horrors of the battlefield. The God but for whom there could be no saints is the God but for whom there could be no “damned souls.” Sir Henry Jones may have been unduly impatient in dismissing as “not worthy of serious criticism” the view of a limited and growing God, but it is not difficult to understand the mood. [12] Life is full of inevitabilities, and from the stark horror of some of them we would fain hide our face. But a man is intended to stand up and look about him and report on what he sees, and, much supposition to the contrary notwithstanding, the believer in God seeks to do precisely this. The much-derided “traditional theism” involves no “facile optimism,” as is so often charged. What it clings to is belief in a God who makes provision [ p. 84 ] for those very inevitabilities that seem to deny him, or at least to circumscribe and harass him, but who is a$:the same time a God whose will, seen in its total reach and purpose, these inevitabilities express and carry out.
God’s nature, God’s method, God’s purpose these belong together and involve each other, with the nature as the fundamental factor. If God is creative Will, we only say what that fact requires when we go on and attribute to him perfect power, perfect wisdom, and perfect goodness. An adequate interpretation of the total facts of life and experience brings us not merely to the fact of a God, but also to the fact of a God who is every way good. If he is good in himself, his purpose will be good. If he is wise, his method of achieving his purpose will be the best possible. If he is almighty, there can be no frustration of his purpose : any apparent failure at this point or that for example, a completely reprobate soul will be due to the essential nature of the method and the purpose. Almightiness and failure are not necessarily contradictions. They would be contradictions if what offered successful opposition to so-called almightiness were merely the insensate and inert. But where a moral purpose involving the wills of free beings is concerned, almightiness may meet successful resistance and still remain almighty. It may do that because the very resistance would itself be a gift from the almighty power. [13]
It has already been said in this discussion that God’s motive in creation is to share with other beings the blessedness of existence. This, it must be admitted, is pure theory, but it is theory with practical [ p. 85 ] implications of great significance. Existence is intrinsically good, as is evidenced by the tenacity with which living things cling to it. The discounting of existence in certain Oriental religions is the result of an a priori philosophy which pays no heed to the simple testimony of nature. It is false logic which makes life evil because evil may attend on life. Lessen the evil, and how quickly the intrinsic goodness of mere existence makes itself felt! Then because existence is itself a good, the multiplication of existences involves an increase of blessedness. The more centers of experience there are, the more experiences become possible. There is a limitation, however, on the power of nature to sustain life. Species restrict each other, and nature restricts the species. The people to whom death is the ultimate mystery and the ultimate problem can certainly never have considered that without death the creative method as we know it would be impossible. How can death per se be a v denial of God, or of his wisdom and love, when it is the very condition to an increasing sum of blessedness?^ As one considers the very nature of things, two alternatives seem to arise: either that the maximum of existences having been secured they should be kept in being indefinitely ; or that provision should be made for the continual passing of individual existences and the continual coming of others. As between the two alternatives, the second is not only the one that is alone compatible with the assumed purpose of creation, namely, the largest possible amount of blessedness, but it is also the one that would carry the more .weight even if there were no question whatever of a divine purpose. It were better that many [ p. 86 ] should lire a little while and then make room for others than that a few should live all the time. What, therefore, seems at first sight to be the denial of life and the height of all tragedy death turns out on deeper consideration to be the very means whereby life increases. And not only is the increase merely quantitative ; it is qualitative as well unless, indeed, we are to surrender the basic principle in the very idea of evolution itself. But even if we waive the question of an increasing richness of experience in the animal world, we can hardly deny the fact that among mankind each succeeding generation benefits to some extent by its predecessor. An age that makes so much as ours does of the fact of heredity, of the plasticity and educability of youth, of the settling down of maturity into a routine of habit and an increasing inability or at least unwillingness to learn the new such an age ought to see no great problem in the fact of human individual mortality. If there is to be birth, there must be death as well, and there must be birth if life is to make its fullest attainment. Death, therefore, appears as the very nexus of the cosmic movement, at least on its sentient side. If death were the penalty of an original “fall,” then we should have to say that the “fall” was sheer triumph for the cause of creation. A deathless world would have to be a world without any young in it, and who can imagine that? Who could tolerate it? Who could see in it any hope of improvement ?
Life, we have said already, is pure gift. This is true from the lowest to the highest. No life can will its own existence: all it can will is its own death and to do that is an “unnatural” act, involving the [ p. 87 ] suppression of the deepest of all instincts. What is given may be taken away. No living thing has a just claim to continue indefinitely. While a given individual may rebel against the limitation on the span of life, that limitation is the very condition on which the rebel would have come into existence himself. “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” If those before us had not passed, we could not have come; and if there are to be others besides us in the future, we too must pass for their sakes. The evolutionary process simply could not have continued without death. There must be either death or no birth, and there must be both birth and death as a condition, first, to the mere quantitative increase of the blessedness that goes with existence, and second, to the increase of that blessedness in its qualitative sense. The cave-dweller may have been just as content as the most cultured man of to-day, but few would claim that the latter’s range of experience was not in^ trinsically more desirable, more valuable, and more significant than the former’s.
It v will, of course, be said that the problem is not simply with death as a fact, but with all that concomitance of suffering that goes with death, and, indeed, with life as well. Nor is the suffering confined to the given individual, either in life or in death, but it extends in the form of hardship or want or grief to other life. “No man liveth unto himself and no man dieth unto himself.” The force of the objection is undeniable. Yet what have we here, after all, but one of the inevitabilities which is the price of the blessedness of existence? [14] There is every reason to Wlieve that descriptions of tjie terrible nature [ p. 88 ] of animal (sufferings have been enormously exaggerated. We must assume that animals take for granted, so to speak, whatever happens to them. They never question their own experience ; they never challenge the justice of things; they lack the imagination which, in man, pictures the desirability of a painless state or invests the act of dying with a dread significance. No one doubts that animals suffer: what is to be doubted is that their sufferings are the problem to themselves that they are to us. [15] Whatever tragedy overtakes them, they have at least lived, and their death contributes to other life, even as their own life was a contribution made in the death of others. Francis Thompson, depicting himself as being called upon to surrender first one precious thing and then another until his very soul seems stripped, is constrained to cry out, “Must Thy harvest fields be dunged with rotting death?” The question admits of but one answer: “Yes, they must!” [16]
In the human sphere, the problem is naturally more urgent. But here, again, a calm survey of the total situation is not without a helpful result. The race of man is here because the life that preceded it made it possible, and made it possible by paying a steady tribute to death. The race makes its progress to richer and fuller life on condition that it continue the tribute. Only a perfect humanity can expect to be beyond the reach of suffering and death. John the Eevealer saw a time when “death shall be no more,” but first “the former things” will have had to pass away, and “the former things” are the evils of life. The thought tempts to speculation which must be avoided but one at least gets a glimpse of vistas in [ p. 89 ] conceivably long down which humanity must pass, not only as respects the present earth, but also as respects still other spheres of existence, on its way to its destined goal. But so far as the immediate stage of “the education of the human race” is concerned, it is evident that God wants little children. If there is one thing more than another that he has guaranteed, it is that there shall be procreation. We may have become somewhat sophisticated in these matters another example of the tendency of science to outrun wisdom but if nothing else will make us wise, we shall be driven to wisdom by the reflection that a childless race is a doomed race. It is on little children let us even say on babies that God stakes his whole creative purpose. If the supply of babies were to fail, God would have to resort to a miracle, or, humanly speaking, admit defeat. Little children imply so much. They imply fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, hence homes, hence teachers^ hence all those thousand ministries of each to each in which life finds at once discipline and joy, at once the fulfillment of the past and the promise of the future. [17] A human babe is a new experiment. The ages are behind it to make it possible; still other ages are awaiting its contribution. Here is an original focusing of the universal life. The mold into which it flowed is never used twice. It implies not only the travail of a mother, but the travail of that Mother of us all the universe. All of cosmic history is required to render a complete account of a human babe. But the babe not only “looks after” : it “looks before” as well. It is not only a “consequent” : it is also an “antecedent.” Influences of incalculable sig [ p. 90 ] nificance at once begin to play upon it and to be exerted by it. The most savage mother loves her babe; and what happens to the mother because of that love, who shall say? If mother love is purely “physiological,” as we are being assured it is by certain modern psychologists, one can only marvel at the richness of content that can be put into that one word ! But as the growing life takes its place in the manifold of existence, much may happen. It will suffer ; it will make mistakes ; it will experience grief and disappointment; it will find itself in a world full of difficulties. Yet these very experiences will have their own value. By means of them, the life will be learning to stand on its own feet. It grows less dependent, more independent. It learns that if it would receive it must also give. It finds in itself capacity for suffering, but suffering now not only on its own account, but also on account of others. It finds the possibility of existing otherwise than as simply a physical organism of existing as well as a social and moral being ; and it finds that for the purposes of this social and moral experience it may use every bit of its biological heritage in other than purely biological ways.
Now, the more clearly these superbiological possibilities if we may so call them come to light, the more the biological facts themselves become intelligible. Pain, hardship, calamity, want, disease, and the like, all fall in the biological order. A human being experiences such things as these because he is organic with what we may call the order of materiality: he is a physical entity, and he must take what goes with that, But the biological necessities [ p. 91 ] and experiences are the potential basis of a life of a higher rank. [18] Hunger is a biological fact, but take out of the range of human experience all that is there simply because of hunger, and one sees at once that it is better that there should be hunger, with all its many dangers, than that there should be no hunger and, therefore, none of the efforts and achievements and satisfactions that it demands or makes possible. The blessings of hunger are more significant than the terrors of starvation one must say that, even at the risk of being declared to be utterly callous and the terrors are among the inevitabilities that attend on the blessings. Pain, too, is primarily a biological fact, but an organism that was painless would be painless because it was without feeling, and an organism without feeling would be condemned to the lowest possible level of existence.- It was so great a sufferer as Sir Henry Jones who wrote, shortly before suffering ended his life, that the problem of natural evil is “relatively easy” and that an affliction may in actual fact be “the most priceless element in a man’s life.”, [19] There could be no pleasure if there were no pain, for both have the same physical basis a nervous system. Not only so, but pain sets a condition for the manifestation of some of the greatest human qualities. This is not only true in the case of the sufferer himself: it is true also in the case of those who behold his sufferings or know about them. Suffering challenges men to put it away, and no tongue can describe all that is here because men have responded to that challenge. It would be sheer brutality to minimize the stark tragedy of it all. One would not be as the carefree butterfly “preaching contentment” [ p. 92 ] to the toad impaled on the tooth of the harrow. On the other hand, if we are seeking an interpretation of the facts of life, we dare not be blind to the testimony of all that which has come to pass because men and women and little children must suffer pain. The long story of medical and surgical science, than which nothing is more moving in the annals of mankind, could not have been written if man were simply a biological specimen in perfect adjustment with a physical world. It is proper enough to insist on the desperate character of the conditions against which men must continually fight : but it is no less proper to insist on the fact that men do fight them, and thereby promote their manhood. The inevitable maladjustments of life are the conditions to the fuller revelation of all that it is in man to do and to be. In the heart of every “fact” lies a potential “value,” and the fact falls short of its final reason unless and until the value is found. We cannot escape the force of Sorley’s argument for the essential inseparability of fact and value: [20] the attempt to separate them, says Taylor, approving Sorley’s argument, involves “a false abstraction.” [21] If Aristotle is right, that tragedy achieves its purpose according as there is an effective katharsis or purification of the emotions of the spectator, [22] then while human experience of necessity contains the tragic note, it is not tragedy unrelieved by hope. Indeed, creation seen in its total sweep and purpose is rather “a divine comedy” in Dante’s sense than tragedy as ordinarily understood : at least, it is that high tragedy which is redeemed and justified, shall we say, in the very quality of the experience it pro [ p. 93 ] motes. If it be true, as we have been saying, that life is intrinsically a good, then life advances in worth as it increases in range. Whatever is required to increase its range and to advance its worth finds in that circumstance its justification. Human life is life containing the potentiality of the fullest and ~~ richest experience. To give it that potentiality is the reason for its biological history that history which makes any supreme experience of the soul continuous with that original act of the Creative Spirit whereby order began to emerge from disorder, life from death. Whether such a potentiality could have been secured under quite different conditions it is not for us to say, for we do not know. What we are faced with is the fact that the life^process in the conditions which have actually obtained have had this issue. If man is “the heir of all the ages,” and if, respecting his future, “it doth not yet appear what he shall be,” except that we have the hope that we shall be “like him” who is. “the first-born among many brethren” if this is so, then the ages are “justified of their children.” Is courage desirable? Then man must encounter hard- < ship. Is service of one’s kind desirable ? 'Then there ^ must be inequalities in the human lot. Is hope desirable? Then life must be beset by uncertainties. Is faith desirable ? Then the mind must know less than it is able to believe. Is truth desirable? Then one must be able to lie, since truth is possible only in the same conditions in which a lie is possible; just as heroism is possible only where one could be a coward, or virtue only where one could be vicious, or purity only where one could be impure. Wherefore it is to be judged that God’s purpose is [ p. 94 ] to procure in the highest type of beings the highest quality of life. Even if we accept “the new teleology” as described by Patrick, which in the spirit of Aristotle appears to leave in doubt the existence of an original foreseeing designing Mind, we still cannot doubt what the actual consequence of the creative process has so far been. [23] Comparing the present with the past, we can but say that the past has been adapted to lead up to the present, and that the present provides a key for the interpretation of the past, and that this is so irrespective of the question whether the past was in order to the present. And if we introduce the idea of purpose because it seems to us that the facts in the case justify it, then we shall also say that God’s method of securing his purpose is at the same time a vindication of his wisdom. The method carries with it concomitants that, standing alone, may well baffle and perplex us; but we must be content to look at what we do not understand in the light of that which seems clear and plain. We are to remember that we have to do with a God who, as Creator, has rights; but taking the manifest good of life as our clew, we may believe that he exercises his rights in accordance with a nature that is wholly good. In this fact of a good Creator we find a light that illumines our darkness. All the darkness may not be dispersed, for we do not know always how to use the light that we possess. It is but natural that growing minds should not be able to comprehend all the conditions of their growth. But we can at least know that the problems we cannot ourselves solve are yet not without a solution. The believer in God lives in a world he can regard as rational because [ p. 95 ] for him it is the world of a perfect Mind. The unbeliever who denies the Mind but still accepts the rationality has no good reason for his claim. The believer’s admitted inability on countless occasions to understand the connection between a given event and God is not, moreover, without its own value. It has the significance of providing the conditions for the exercise of faith ; and man is never so truly great, he never arrives at heights quite so high, he never shows so clearly all that it is in him to be, as at those moments when by the aid of what he learns in the region of the known he ventures into the unknown and finds that Another has been there before him, not only to blaze a trail, but to be his Companion as he walks it, and the Guarantor of his security.
The familiar question, “Is God Limited ?” is to be answered according to the considerations now advanced. The only limitations that God is under are the limitations that arise out of his own self-deter^ mined nature and that naturally go with his chosen purpose. Why the nature of God should be as it is this is. one of those ultimate questions to which we can give no answer. To say that his nature as good is self-determined marks no advance in thought, since God must already be good in order to determine himself to the good. We must agree with Whitehead that “no reason can be given for the nature of God” any more, shall we add, than for his existence. [24] If from among many possible purposes* God chooses one purpose, and if from among many possible methods he chooses one method (“we speak as men”) then the choice of that purpose and of that method will necessarily determine his specific activities. He having [ p. 96 ] made his choice, it is but our recognition of simple self -consistency on his part when we say that he “cannot” act contrary to it. “God cannot deny himself.” The world is a system : so far as we can tell, it must be that or nothing. A system means coherence, continuity, relationship. In a system, the parts are as they are and where they are because of the requirements of the whole. This surrender to the spirit and the needs of the whole is the price the part must pay for its own existence. The maintenance of the world as a systematic whole is nothing at all but God’s respect for his own chosen procedure. Here again it is a simple matter of his right. He has a right to devise a system, and he has a right to maintain its integrity. There is no reason why we should not concede that he has a right also to cliange his procedure, but so long as we can detect continuity or see evidences of it we shall have to suppose that God is not exercising this right. [25] The people who make it a condition to believing in God that he shall perform a miracle in their sense of smashing his order every time they are in danger or are the subjects of some urgent need, simply do not know what they ask. The inevitabilities of life are those features of life that go with God being what he is and doing what he does for the purpose for which he is doing it. So far, therefore, as his essential being is concerned, God is the utterly unlimited One who himself sets the limit to all else and then in the very act of doing that he limits himself by, so to speak, “posting a guarantee” that he will deal with “all else” according to the nature he has given it. Of such a God we shall say that he never “began” and that he will never “end.”
[ p. 97 ]
Respecting his creation, there is no place where he is not and no time when he is not. There is no rational deed that he cannot perform; no possible fact that he cannot know. It is easy enough to ask inane puzzle questions, such as “Can God reverse the time-process?” “Can God create in a moment a -~ man forty years old ?” “Can God make two and two equal five?” and then, because such questions (fortunately!) must be answered negatively, conclude that God is limited. But in what proper sense is the inability to perform an act, whose very description involves in itself a contradiction, a limitation ? There are certain rational ultimates which cannot be gainsaid. But such ultimates pertain to the very nature of the Eternal Being himself. They are so because he is so. That the first must come before the second, that if one thing is more, it is because another thing is less, that two things cannot be the same thing, and so on -these are fundamental rationalities which do N not limit the divine nature in some arbitrary fashion, but express it. There is a science called geometry and a spience called mathematics for just one reason — because the ultimate Eeality is an eternal Mind, and the structure of nature reflects this Mind, and v created mind answers to it in its own most characteristic processes. “God geometrizes,” which is one condition to man himself being a geometer. How could existence itself be rational if there were not the category of the impossible ? It is finally God who determines alike all possibilities and all impossibilities, and he determines them not by arbitrary acts of will as Duns Scotus supposed, but by the normal functioning of his own nature. The inevitabilities, [ p. 98 ] whether they be positive or negative, whether they pertain to thought or to action, whether they have to do with the conditions of life or with the results of these conditions, are determined by God manifesting himself in nature, life, and history, according to the requirements of a freely chosen purpose.
The relation of man’s freedom to God’s- action must be understood in the same way. If man is in some measure free, and if God made him so, then whatever God is led to do because man is free will be itself an expression of the absolute divine will. Here, of course, we touch bottom metaphysically. 'The God who creates free spirits and then gives their freedom the law, is not thereby any less free himself, nor is the range of his power any less extensive. The- freedom of man represents the freedom of God. At the risk of being seriously misunderstood, we would even go so far as to say that whatever man freely wills to do or to be, God is satisfied to have him will it. The volition he does not approve he nevertheless sanctions: the distinction is subtle enough for a Scholastic, but if it is not valid, we might as well give up the effort to make the theistic faith rational. The supreme evidence, indeed, to God’s absolute power is in the very fact of this his creation of the free. What seems on a superficial view to dethrone him is seen on a profounder view to be most completely his coronal. Only an almighty God would “dare” to create other wills. Because now he has to justify himself to the wills he has made. Through these wills he has to work his own will. He has to reckon with the possibility, even with the certainty, of their opposition. Various “cannots” therefore necessarily enter [ p. 99 ] into the situation. We saw that this was so even with the unfree: much more is it so with the free. God “cannot,” for example, compel men to love him. There is, of course, a constraint of love, but always there goes with it the consent of the lover. You cannot “make” a person love, any more than you can “make” him obey in the real sense of a moral obedience. But here again the “cannot” arises out of the very nature of the case, and the case is of God’s own making. Having chosen to win man’s love and obedience, because -a love and an obedience that are won have a worth and significance infinitely, greater than that which is coerced f even if there could be that at all), God therefore creates the conditions required for the winning, and this necessarily precludes its coercion. Not that man can finally be a complete rebel. Besides the obedience of the son there is the obedience of the slave, and one or the other will eventually be rendered to God by every man. In the striking words of Olin Alfred Curtis, “the rim of destiny is by God’s decree, but the personal center of destiny^is by man’s choice.” [26] God seeks the type of obedience that is represented by sonship the obedience of reverence, love, and free surrender. What is to be the ultimate fate of those who, refusing to be his sons, have become his slaves, serving him not from love, but from fear and hate, is a question upon which we may not dogmatize. They may or may not come at last under a law of personal dissolution, passing out of an existence whose deepest reason they have repudiated: we simply do not know. But even if souls may at last be lost, lost everlastingly, reprobate in the most complete sense, even that is no [ p. 100 ] limitation imposed on God by the will of another. Salvation and damnation are equally of the will of God: Augustine was right in his conclusion there even though he were wrong in his reasoning. God wills the salvation of any soul that wills to be saved, and God wills the damnation of any soul that wills not to be saved: what else can we say but that? There is more moral significance in a soul lost irrevocably and forever as the result of the free operation of its own fundamental law than there would be in its being saved at the cost of the arbitrary violation of that law if even that were possible. In a sense which the cynic has never comprehended, souls may be “damned for the glory of God” yes, and damned for their own glory too. For no animal could become reprobate, nor could any creature that was unable to choose what it would be. Only men can be lost. Their chains equally with their freedom are “obtained by a great price.” Let it be granted that these are “hard sayings,” sayings that should be sobbed rather than shouted. But what do they do for the charge of a “facile optimism” sneeringly laid at the door of “traditional theism” ?
See Ms chapter on “A 'Struggling God,” in My Idea of God, ed. Newton, p. 118. ↩︎
Belief Unbound. Montague’s plea for “a Promethean religion” is one of the best recent statements of the case for a growing God. ↩︎
For a review of these attempts, see Sheen, Religion Without God, chap. i. ↩︎
Of. the preface in Huxley, Religion Without Revelation. ↩︎
Op. cit. f p. 114. ↩︎
Figgis, The Witt to Freedom, p. 9 ; Foster, Friederich Nietzsche, p. 195. ↩︎
The closing words of the essay on “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Mysticism and Logic, pp. 56-57. How either “man” or “freedom” or “religion” could get into such a world as .Russell conceives this world to be it is quite impossible to say. ↩︎
The Quest of the Ages, pp. 209, 212. ↩︎
Bowne, in Personalism, speaks caustically of “the grotesque assumption that empty time does something” (p. 184). ↩︎
For example, Huxley, op. tit., categorically repudiates all belief in a personal God, “in any sense in which that phrase is ordinarily used” (p. 30), and yet he writes a description of man’s origin, development and capacities (pp. 355-356) which assumes a power in “the raw material [ p. 102 ] of substance” which he is constrained to characterize as “miraculous,” “wonderful,” “surprising.” ↩︎
The Problem of God, pp. 186-193. Brightman must have forgotten the New Testament when he wrote (p. 136) that in “the traditional view” God “stands apart from the [human] struggle in spotless white.” Was there not “a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”? (Rev. 5. 6, 9, 12; 13. 8.) ↩︎
A Faith That Enquires, p. 234. ↩︎
Cf. F. J. McConnell, The Christlike God, espec. chap. v, on “The Divine Power”; also Is God Limited ? passim. There is much false supposition as to the proper meaning of omnipotence. No responsible Christian thinker, with very few exceptions, ever defined it as meaning that “God could do anything.” The omnipotence repudiated by even so well-informed a scholar as Brightman (op. cit.) is largely hypothetical. Galloway, Philosophy of Religion, pp. 483-485, gives a statement of the case that it would be difficult to improve upon. ↩︎
Such men as Huxley, Sellars, Holmes, Lippmann, Krutch, Joad, Schmidt, Barnes, and Haydon find in these concomitants of life an insuperable objection to the traditional theism. But the concomitants remain on any theory. Haydon proposes “the organization of life by scientific method” (op. cit., p. 196) as a substitute for a “Cosmic Companion” (Sellars, Religion Coming of Age, pp. 202ff.), and the idea is accepted by others. But no such organization will ever avail to lift men above the possibility of experiences which will invest life with a tragic element and the more tragic because the “Great Companion” will be dead. ↩︎
See Buckham, The Humanity of God, pp. 142-146, for a pertinent discussion of this question. ↩︎
The Hound of Heaven, stanza iv. ↩︎
See Hocking, Human Nature and Its RemaMng, rev. ed., chaps, i-iii, and espec. chap, v, on “Education.” Henry Drummond’s great chapter on “The Struggle for the Life [ p. 103 ] of Others” in The Ascent of Man is still worth reading. “That an Other-regarding principle should sooner or later appear on the world’s stage was a necessity if the world was ever to become a moral world. And as everything in the moral world has what may be called a physical basis to begin with, it is not surprising to find in the mere physiological process of Reproduction a physical forecast of the higher relations, or, more accurately, to find the higher relations manifesting themselves at first through physical relations,” etc. (p. 285). ↩︎
Behaviorism of the type represented by J. B. Watson appears to overlook precisely this fact. See, for example, Behaviorism, chaps, vii and viii, on “Emotions.” It is assumed in the entire discussion that an account of the physiology of the emotions gives the last word about them. As though a description of how a thing comes to be gives also what the thing is! ↩︎
Op. cit., p. 188. Ward’s remark, in The Philosophy of Value, p. 83, note 42, that “Jones was, of all men, hypothetical,” simply shows to what an extent critical obsessions may warp the judgment. ↩︎
Moral Values and the Idea of God, lect. vi. ↩︎
The Faith of a Moralist, vol. i, pp. 3-38. Of. PringlePattison’s observation, in The Idea of God, p. 45, that the claim that the world of values and the world of facts have no organic relation to each other is “the one intolerable conclusion.” ↩︎
Poetics, vi, 1449b, 24. ↩︎
The World and Its Meaning, pp. 160-165. Patrick’s thesis is that “the end actually determines the means.” For his definition of “what God means to us,” see p. 176. Even Bergson, in Creative Evolution, in explaining the process whereby the elan vital supersedes the “instinctive” with the “intelligent,” is compelled to speak about the elan, notwithstanding his alleged rejection of “finalism” elsewhere, in personal and purposive terms. See pp. 88-97, 101-105, Eng. trans, [ p. 104 ] ↩︎
Science and the Modern World, p. 257. It is proper to add, however, that Whitehead does not accept the usual idea of God, whom he describes as “the Principle of Concretion” (p. 250) the phrase taken over by Wieman in The Wrestle of Religion with Truth, chap. xi. The phrase is curiously reminiscent of HaeckeFs “integration of protoplasm.” Whitehead’s account of “The Nature of God,” in Religion in the Making, pp. 149-160, is difficult to reconcile with the definition given above. ↩︎
Of. Spinoza, Ethics, def. vi. God, says Spinoza, as Infinite Being must have an infinite number of attributes. It would follow that such a Being would be capable of doing an infinite number of things. ↩︎
The Christian Faith, p. 469. Curtis’ entire chapter on “Men Outside the New Eace” has never made a popular appeal, but it is a striking example of the courage of a great Christian thinker to “follow whither the argument leads,” even although personally he woud fain have resisted the conclusion. ↩︎