[ p. 106 ]
EXPERIENCE involves the transformation of the possible into the actual. The possibility of moral evil necessarily goes with human life : sin is the responsible actualizing of this possibility. There can be freedom only as there may be slavery; right judgments only as there may be wrong judgments; holiness only as there may be sinfulness. What is sought in each case is the freedom, the truth, the holiness, but it is being sought in conditions that render it certain that there will be instead slavery, error, sinfulness. There is much wrong for which there is no ascertainable responsibility, and there is responsible wrong that still is not sin. The moral shadow exists only as God exists, since sin is the denial of God’s right to rule. The representative of God in every man is the man’s own moral ideal, and relative to that ideal the man may succeed or fail. Complete success, however, is impossible. That is to say, sin is an inevitability in the human lifeprocess, although not all sins are 'inevitable. Sin is therefore no surprise to God. He allows for it not only as possibility, but also as fact. He is therefore in a real sense implicated in it: the burden of the world’s sin is both God’s and man’s.
[ p. 107 ]
WHAT has so far been written leads to the conclusion that no process may be properly judged until it is complete, or at least until there is some idea of what its completion will be. The world is to be conceived as process. As such, it must be supposed to have a beginning, and to be moving toward a goal or end. This does not necessarily preclude the presence of goals or ends by the way: rather than this, it implies them. Each attained step in a process is a goal or end relative to what goes before it, even though it is at the same time a condition to what comes after it. This view of the world-process as purposive is allowed even by a philosopher like Whitehead, who, paradoxically enough, as it would seem, nevertheless feels no need of an eternal purposive Mind. [1] Any process is a way of getting something done: at least, it is always productive of a result, whether the result is “intended” or not. The purpose pervades the process as immanent idea. Teleologythe process viewed in the light of its result is therefore not only a justifiable method of interpretation : it is, as Galloway has so clearly shown, the only method that takes due account of every element in the situation. [2]
On the other hand, a knowledge of the meaning and purpose of the whole throws light on the parts. A [ p. 108 ] process is a series of related events. Each event is therefore both something in itself and part of a larger whole. The event falls where it does and as it does because of the requirements of the whole process and its purpose. Whether a house is built according to a plan or not, it is still true that what is purposed is a house, and that this purpose controls all that is done. If there is a world-purpose at all, an intended result of the world-process, then that purpose must be held to exercise a determinative influence on its own conditions. The whole sets the place and meaning of the part : hence the Hegelian principle, “The truth is in the whole.” A nest in a tree is a thing in itself, but the reason for it is the nestlings ; just as, in turn, the nestlings have their reason in something else the perpetuation of the species. Boyhood is not simply a preparation for manhood : it is a period with its own joys, its own responsibilities, its own satisfactions, and a boyhood that never issues in manhood cannot therefore be said to have no justification. And yet in the normal span of life boyhood is but a part, and self -contained though it may be held to be, it still has relations backward to infancy and forward to manhood. Hence we make certain expectations of boyhood, and we surround it with certain opportunities and privileges, because we know that “the boy is father of the man.” Conceive the whole of life as process, and boyhood as an event, or, preferably, a lesser process within the larger process, and both lesser and larger are seen to be mutually dependent^ Without the one there could not be the other. Nevertheless, the final interpretive principle is supplied by the larger. Even boyhood must be judged in the [ p. 109 ] light of the whole life-purpose, and not simply in the light of its own intrinsic restrictions.
The analogy has its limitations, but it may perhaps help us to grasp the principle, full of importance for an- adequate philosophy, that there are certain features of life which are what they are precisely because they are required by what life is for. The various “natural calamities,” for example, that so often perplex us are clearly enough events determined by natural process. [3] Properly speaking, there is nothing “unnatural” about cyclones or earthquakes or famine or drought. All have their own ascertainable causes, and are expressions of “the reign of law.” The very fact of any event, no matter what it may be, is the evidence that it was provided for in the scheme of things. This does not mean at least, not where a will is involved that as actuality it was determined, but only that as possibility it was demanded. In living things, hunger is fundamental. Starvation is never more than a few days away: so slender is the thread by which life hangs. Hunger is what says to life, “Keep moving.” It promotes activity, and the mere act of satisfying it adds to the zest of life. Nevertheless, it may not be possible to appease the hunger, in which case suffering and death ensue. That suffering and death are as much provided for in the process as anything else. Similarly of the whole instinctive equipment of man. It is relative to the very purpose of his being, and yet it may lead to his destruction. The nature that is friendly is also the nature that is hostile. Any gift that life possesses is always a possible danger but who would have it otherwise? “The greatest gains,” wrote Bergson, [ p. 110 ] “lie along the path of the greatest risks” but the danger of failure is* correspondingly great. [4] The ascent and the descent are complementary. The price of the joy of climbing is the possibility of the 'shame of sinking. He who can climb the highest can fall the lowest. If we want complete security, we must eliminate from life the alternative, and if that were done life, for man, would lose its chief charm. The charm of life, in part, is in its being a continuous adventure into the unknown. But adventures are always costly, and the adventure of life is the costliest of all. William James said that he was willing to “take the world as really dangerous,” by which he meant that he was willing to regard it as a place in which there were “real losses and real losers.” [5] The cost of life may be death. The cost of freedom may be chains. The cost of holiness may be sinfulness. It is this last fact that calls for fuller consideration. The world and human life are evidently so constituted that sin appears among the inevitabilities.
It was said in the last Chapter that pain is the price of the possibility of pleasure, and that pain is inevitable. Just as inevitable is error, understood here in the sense of a mistake of judgment. Given nerves, and there will be pain; given reason, and there will be error. Reason that never erred because it could not would have to be omniscient and at the same time belong to a perfectly holy being. Such omniscient reason is not something to be achieved: it is the necessary attribute of uncreated and creative Mind, and there can be only one mind like that. Reason under a law of growth cannot avoid error, since [ p. 111 ] error is one of the necessary conditions of the growth. To refuse to attempt something new until you were assured that you could do it perfectly would be to remain in a state of permanent inaction. We learn to jio by making mistakes, by doing wrongly. There is, of course, an “instinctive skill.” In fact, Hocking defines an instinct as a skill automatic, untaught, and unteachable. [6] But .then reason and judgment do not enter into such skills at all. Besides, in man instinctive skill is not much, after all, and what there is derives much of its significance from the fact that it becomes the basis for acquired skills. Any acquired skill is fallible, and it was acquired only at the cost of much effort, by the method of “trial and error.” One can find the right way to go only by venturing along a way that may be wrong and oftentimes will be wrong. One learns to stand only by risking falls and some falling is inevitable. Eeason is prone to error, but that is the cost of whatever proneness it may have for truth. This is not to deny the possibility of the acquisition of such a mastery of truth or fact as amounts to virtual infallibility in the use of it. But the mastery is over a very limited field : wisdom at one point is no guarantee of wisdom at another. What can be more astonishing than the judgment of savants when they leave their own fields? Deep and wide is the shadow thrown across the path of human history by errors of judgment or by deficient knowledge. “If only I had known !” But that, after all, is only the debit side of the account. There is a credit side as well, and when the account is cast, while the debit can never be otherwise than it is, the “business” of life if the [ p. 112 ] metaphor may be continued is seen to be on a paying basis in the values which it has produced. On the one hand are wrong judgments and wrong decisions with their devastating consequences; on the other hand are right judgments and right decisions, which initiate actions designed to offset the consequences of the wrong. The same mentality functions in both cases. If there is to be that kind of mentality, then there must be that kind of twofold result. The only world in which there could b6 no error would be a world in which there was no free intelligence. We must take life as it is, and those who are most saddened by the spectacle of it seem nevertheless to find some compensations. Who ever heard of a sick pessimist refusing the services of a physician ? The blunders of the past are obvious, and we may expect that there will be others just as serious. It is easy enough to bemoan history, but it was that kind of history or none at all. [7] Given man, with his capacities and limitations, and the rest follows. The custom of such men as Bertrand Kussell, of savagely criticising the past while yet apparently advocating a metaphysical theory which supposes that the past could not have been otherwise than it was, is a clear fallacy. [8] The determinist who is also a critic is certainly in a strange case. Error is possible, and conditions being as they are the materializing of the possibility is inevitable. But since life itself is justifiable, history, which is life in action, is also justifiable. Not that it is justifiable in all its details anything but that but that the thing itself is. History is process controlled by purpose, and there necessarily enters into the process whatever the pur [ p. 113 ] pose requires. The purpose requires that men shall be fallible because it requires that they shall be free. Intelligence that is free and inexperienced and under necessity of learning is bound to go astray. As a matter of theory, it might be admitted and Walter Lippmann, in somewhat naively inquiring why God “did not make men good in the first place” and so avoid the necessity of experience, seems to suppose its possibility, although he finally rejects God altogether [9] it- might be admitted that God could have created a universe in which there were no conflicts, and that in this perfect setting he could have placed intelligent beings whose minds would have functioned automatically and infallibly. Perhaps “angels” are such beings. But if they are, what man who appreciates the meaning of his own manhood would want to be an angel? It were better to be able to make mistakes and to make them than not to make them because we were not able. Indeed, both Plato’s “myth” of the pre-existent souls who “dropped to earth” from “the top of the dome of heaven,” becoming entangled in time and sense, because they could not maintain their native status, [10] and the late Jewish doctrine of “fallen angels” both alike suggest that even created virtue had no guarantee of permanence. There may, perhaps, be times when, like Huxley, we would fain be wound up like a clock and assured of infallibility for the next twenty-four hours. [11] But Huxley would have been the first to rebel against the condition. What satisfaction would he have found in conducting, for example, an experiment in biology or chemistry or physics, if he had known that the right result was assured in every case the first time?
[ p. 114 ]
What we want is not to be infallible, but to be able to find infallibilities and then use them. The value of infallibilities is in the fact that they may become the instruments of free intelligence. The relations of angles are necessitated and infallible: the pleasure of the mathematician is in discovering and using these relationships. But the discovery and the use are the action of mind working on its own account. The free conquers the necessary by learning its law and then bending it to its own uses, and there can be no greater triumph than that. The knowledge of how to control fire is worth a great many burned fingers. There could not be the free if there were not the fixed, and the final reason for the fixed is that the free might use it.
Error is not necessarily sin. In fact, the most disastrous error is quite compatible with moral integrity and spiritual purity. It is easy at this point to become lost in fine distinctions, but the distinctions are here. Perfection of reason would not of itself guarantee sinlessness, nor is sinfulness exclusively the result of the imperfection of reason. One may know what to do and still be unwilling to do it, just as one may be quite wrong in what one is doing and yet at the same time may be willing the right. In other words, the category of simple error cannot be made sufficiently comprehensive to include all the varieties of human failure. The bookkeeper who, weary at his desk, unintentionally carries forward a false balance has certainly erred, and the fact is likely before long to come to light, but he has not sinned. There is inculpable error, and there is culpable error. Inculpable error is certainly not sin, [ p. 115 ] nor yet is all culpable error. Whether culpable error is sin or not depends on its relation to what we most conveniently describe as “the moral order.” The question of morals does not enter some fields of human endeavor where yet culpable error is a possibility. The moral order has a narrower range than the total human order, a narrower range even than error. This is why, in addition to the category of error, we need the category, much more restricted, of sin. Sin is the intention to commit a moral wrong. Just where the line falls in every case between moral wrong and wrong that is not moral may be difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine, but this does not destroy the fact that the two classes of wrong are different. Sin is always culpable: so-called sin that is not culpable becomes simple error. To say with a recent writer that there can be sin for which no one is guilty is either to be afraid to challenge a hoary theological dogma, or it is to use the same word to describe facts of a radically different character. [12] Sin is responsible and blameworthy fault in the realm of the moral the moral, for the purpose of this definition, being necessarily conceived as expressing or representing the nature and will of God. There is enough sin in the world even when it is limited to fault of this kind: it seems hardly worth while to increase it by the simple device of expanding a definition. Nor is sin to be determined simply by certain visible consequences. One can be sorry for an error, and one can suffer for it and see the suffering extend to others, and yet the error may not have the status of sin. And one may know in his heart how deeply he sinned, at the same time that the knowledge is hidden from [ p. 116 ] every other human being. Sin is not a matter of mere publicity: Lady Macbeth and Arthur Dimmesdale knew that, and it is proved by confessions to priests and ministers every day. The realization of sin, of course, may not come until after the deed is committed. But even this would not be possible but for the self -identity of the sinner. By virtue of that fact he is able to attribute to himself to-day as sinful the deed he did yesterday in complete moral indifference. A deed implies a doer, and the doer is always continuous with himself. The fact may have given rise to much morbidness, but the fact is indispensable to moral history, as to all other. Kant describes remorse, repentance, and their concomitants as a voluntary and vicarious suffering of “the new man” for “the old man.” [13] We can accept this view of the case, while yet repudiating as psychologically and metaphysically unsound Kant’s curious theory that a complete break with all the past precedes every new moral volition. We must agree, however, that actual sin is always relative to the total given situation, which is why it is never possible to judge sin simply by its “descriptive characters” alone, as Hocking would say, [14] nor yet by its “organic consequences,” as Bowne would say. [15] Neither may sin be judged by reference to some sharply defined objective standard, as Jesus so often reminded the legalists and casuists of his day. [16]
Sin involves man’s general power to conceive an ideal, recognize obligation to it, and judge himself in its light. A being lacking this power could not sin. There can be sin only where there can be a difference between what is and what might be or ought to be.
[ p. 117 ]
If a given purpose, motive, volition, or deed could not possibly have been otherwise than it is, sin is there an impossibility. The essence of sin is in an unnecessary and therefore responsible discrepancy between a certain kind of actual and a certain kind of ideal. The emphasis is on the “certain kind.” Not all failure to reach an ideal is sin : the nature of the ideal must be considered. An ideal is essential to all human progress. There is, we must believe, a progress which is the result of a,’ vis a tergo a push from behind : the only voice heard speaking in the present is then the voice of the past. Purely naturalistic and mechanistic evolution might be so described although, curiously enough, certain mechanists are beginning to argue for the determining influence exerted on the present by the future. [17] At least so far as human life is concerned, that there is a progress due to a pull from in front is one of the most certain of facts. The immediate action is determined with reference to something that is yet in the future something that is as yet purely ideal. The voice that is heard speaking in the present is, then, not only the voice of the past but also the voice of the future. There is no reason why the result may not still be called “evolution,” but it will be evolution as co-operating with free intelligence a quite different? thing, as Conklin has shown, from evolution in which free intelligence plays no part. [16:1] 'This power to conceive an ideal and then to work for it is what has lifted man above his “natural” level meaning here fty “natural” that condition which would be his were we to count out the results of his own deliberate choice or conscious effort at self-improve [ p. 118 ] merit. Failure to realize the projected ideal, on both its individual and its social side, has been plentiful enough, but not all of this failure can be called sin in any proper sense. For one thing, uncontrollable forces may operate to prevent the realization; for another, ideals differ immensely in their nature, and some of them have no moral bearing whatever, except as loyalty to any ideal is morally meaningful. The significant thing about the ideal in relation to human activity is not so much that there may be failure to realize it completely as that it is the reason for whatever progress is made. 'The betterment of life is the result of the effort to incorporate the ideal in the actual. Human history may very well be, on the one hand, an illustration of the operation of impersonal, biological and sociological laws; but it is also, on the other hand, an illustration of the lifting force of the ideal engendered, *as all ideals must be, out of the contact of free intelligence with the actualities of life, and thereby made the motive or reason of action. [18] Every ideal bears witness to a felt need, and inspires the search; for a method of its satisfaction.
Ideals, however, call not only for a power of appropriate action (it is required of an ideal that it be regarded as falling within the region of possibility) but also for a power of self -judgment. Man is forever appraising his own achievement with a resultant sentence of approbation or blame. Idealization, free effort, self-criticism these necessarily belong together. They are required by the very idea and purpose of human life. All that we mean by progress apart from the impersonal influences already referred [ p. 119 ] to is conditioned on man being able to make a distinction between what is and what might be, and acting according to that “might be.” Responsible failure relative to this “might be” yields “wrong” in the generic sense. When the “might be” is conceived as falling in the order of the moral, that is to say, as having to do with inward states dispositions, attitudes, character and the relations through which they are expressed, its failure yields “sin.” For any ideal of this sort is in effect a person’s God : it represents his invasion by the eternal. It is the evidence of the existence of an authority that he does not make, but finds. Failure at this point is therefore failure respecting the believed will of God. That is to say, it is sin.
The possibility of sin, it is being argued, naturally goes with the basal structure of human life, as the possibility of pain goes with nerves and the possibility of error goes with reason. That the possibility of sin has been turned into actuality goes without saying. There is no more need to prove that man is a " sinner than to prove that he is a sufferer or a blunderer. Even if we grant, as we very well may, that there is much about human life that is difficult to classify morally, there can be little doubt about the central issue. The central issue is whether a given individual recognizes an “ought” which, falling within the order of the moral, represents a Reality independent of his own will and existence, whether he believes he is obligated to it, and then whether he fails to respect the felt obligation. It may freely be admitted that there has been much alleged sin which was not actual sin, that there has been much unnecessary [ p. 120 ] self-torture, and that there has been much unwarranted social ostracism, ecclesiastical censure, and the like, based on false judgments of human actions. “The new psychology” is giving us ample room for serious reflection at this point. [19] But even if much so-called sin is “sickness” Julian Huxley says “like the measles,” and something to be as little ashamed of and as little proud of [20] and therefore not sin at all, no man who is entirely frank will. want to acquit himself altogether of moral culpability. And even when he is not to blame, it is just as well if he does not insist on the fact too strenuously. Conscience is often enough abused, but it can hardly be abolished on that ground alone. A man wholly conscienceless would have ceased to be a man. His power to lay on himself a demand is the last thing he could lose. It belongs to any man to find himself in situations in which there is more than one possibility. In such a situation he cannot but choose. Sometimes the choice carries with it no particular moral connotation : failure will be charged up simply to error of judgment or to the use of a faulty standard. But sometimes the choice is morally significant. The store that one enters to make a purchase is ordinarily chosen, but it is hardly a moral choice : but the purpose not to pay for what one selects in the store certainly falls in the category of the moral. Socrates notwithstanding, itj.s_pqssible to decide against what at the time one believes is best and the believed best is always a right. [21] Such a choice is a self -revelation. It proves the presence of conflict at the very center of the life, conflict issuing in moral defeat. The chooser has betrayed himself; he a^ted below his own possible [ p. 121 ] level; as Royce would say, he was “disloyal to his cause.” [22] In making the choice, the chooser has played false to his own most characteristic quality, namely, the power to do a right thing in the same situation in which a wrong thing also was possible, but a power whose final reason is not that the wrong might be done but the right. We are meant to believe, but we are not meant to believe the false; and we are meant to choose, but we are not meant to choose the wrong.
No insistence on the wide variability of the standard of judgment among different people, or on the social method whereby the standard is attained, or on the changes that take place in the standard of a given individual during his lifetime, must be allowed to obscure the fact that a man may fail of his standard, and may know that he has failed, and may hold himself responsible for the failure. A man’s knowable best has the significance of an absolute at least of a temporary absolute. We do not need to embarrass our claim by championing some highly debatable theory of an intuitive knowledge of right and wrong. We can, if need be, even accept evolutionary ethics, so far as it concerns the theory of the origin and development of moral ideas, provided only that we shall claim that a being who is not moral in fundamental nature and capacity could not learn to be moral. . ‘The behaviorist claims’ that all the wide range of human conduct and experience is a natural development of “six prepotent reflexes.” [23] But even so, he lias to assume that prepotency. He will, of course, account for it on purely biological grounds. The theist ? on tjie other hand, while not denying the [ p. 122 ] surface facts, will read them to mean that the difference between rational and ethical man and the earlier stages of the process whereby he has come to be is due to an increasing self -manifestation of a creative Mind or Spirit. To say that the theistic explanation is not reasonable, but that the behavioristic explanation is this is simply to “play the fool with language,” to use a characteristic phrase of Dean Inge. Experience involves a subject, and the nature of the subject determines the nature and the possible range of the experience: we follow Kant there. But though a given person may be but a bare remove from the brute, though his environment may be wholly lacking in the essentials of fine living, though he may be heir to a social situation which would seem to foster all that was low and debasing, there nevertheless belongs to him the power to create out of certain elements of his heritage, his environment, and his instruction, un authority which, so far as he himself is concerned, he will recognize as absolute. That is what he ought to obey, or that is what he ought to do, or that is what he ought to be. It cannot be said too often or too emphatically the significant thing is not so much the actual character of the “that” as the bare fact of it ; not so much the embodiment of it in specific deeds as the purpose or the power to order the life on its principle. For every man there is a highest. It may, as a matter of fact, be very low, judged by another man’s highest. But a highest that is in itself low is the promise of a highest that shall be higher. “We build the ladder by which we rise.” A given highest may even be far lower than it would have been had the man always been true to his light : [ p. 123 ] this, indeed, is probably the case with all of us, since involved in complete loyalty to the highest is the obligation to utilize every opportunity to make the highest still higher and who will say that he has invariably done that ? But it is easy to become confused by these fine distinctions, and then to allow the confusion to become an excuse for giving up the whole problem. Too often in discussions of sin so many qualifications are introduced, so many distinctions are made, so many questions are raised as to the bearing of this and that, that the final result is doubt as to whether any clear ideas on the subject can be reached at all. The abstract needs continual correction by the concrete, just as the concrete needs to be viewed as illustrations of the abstract. We shall therefore be satisfied with such statements as the following, statements that cover equally the concrete fact and the abstract principle, namely, that sin is inner disloyalty to what is taken to be right and therefore obligatory, or that it is the failure of the will to indorse a moral judgment. It belongs to a human being to be capable of such disloyalty and failure. From the lowest savage to the ripest Christian saint none is exempt from the possibility. To deny this were simply to close one’s eyes to palpable facts. But if we recognize it, we can hardly avoid raising still other questions.
For one thing, we have to ask whether actual sin is among the inevitabilities, like natural calamity, physical pain, mental suffering, and intellectual error. Moral fault, we have been saying, arises out of the general situation which calls for the necessity of an ideal if there is to be progress. But achievement so [ p. 124 ] often lags behind the ideal. It does that throughout the whole of life, and moral fault is simply one phase of a universal failure. We need have no hesitation in admitting that there is much moral fault that cannot be helped. Not all of the world’s moral wreckage expresses the intent of human wills. The close articulation of life with life, and of life with the law-abiding forces of nature, brings to pass conditions and results that oftentimes seem out of all proportion to the original cause. The cause may be a moral fault, andi yet a moral fault of such a character that it is impossible to apportion the responsibility. It may, indeed, oftentimes be that the central figures in a moral debacle are rather to be pitied than to be blamed: their fault is due to their being in turn the 'victims of the fault of others, or to their being the victims of the operation of impersonal law which puts them in a situation to which they proved morally unequal. Some people have never done some things simply because they never were where they could have done them. Nothing less than omniscience could track down all the influences that come to their issue in a great wrong; and while “to know all” is not necessarily “to forgive all,” since the knowledge that justifies forbearance at one point may call for severity at another, nevertheless our ignorance should at least lead us to temper justice with mercy. The moral fault that cannot be helped is still to be included in the evil of the world its helplessness does not neutralize it; nevertheless, it cannot properly be described as sin. [24] But not all moral fault is unavoidable. It is here as it is with other ideals : some of the failure need not ~be. That a person should keep [ p. 125 ] himself at a state of moral perfection from the beginning to the end of his life is impossible : nobody but a theorist spinning a purely logical web would contend that it could be done. There is no person who, on occasion, could not have done better than he did. He falls short of his own possibility. It is not only true that men may sin ; it is also true that they will sin that was certain, and God knew it, before ever a human being existed; and it is also true that they will sometimes have a feeling of helplessness, as though they were in the grip of some vast impersonal force the belief of certain Gnostics, as well as of ancient fatalists and more modern determinists at the very moment when they are doing what they fain would not do. [25] Paul’s familiar words, “The good I would I do not,” and the words of Ovid, “I see and approve things excellent, I follow after things base,” embody a universal experience. [26]
We cannot stop, therefore, with the simple distinction of moral fault as unavoidable and avoidable, the unavoidable being invariably blameless and the avoidable being invariably blamable. We have to go farther and say that there is such a certainty that men will be as they should not be and will do what they should not do as requires us to regard sinfulness as at once a normal and a blamable human trait. The theologians of the past, from Augustine on, who held that man was born to be a sinner and that there were specific sins for which he was directly accountable, were not wrong. No man, when he is faced with the facts, would want to acquit himself altogether of responsibility for all his moral failures, yet there is no man who could altogether have avoided moral [ p. 126 ] failure. Looking at a babe, one may say with complete confidence : “If he lives long enough, he will do wrong. He will sometimes do wrong without realizing it, but afterward will impute to himself responsibility and blame for the deed ; and he will sometimes do wrong knowing at the time that it is wrong and that he need not do it ; and he will also sometimes do wrong knowing at the time that it is wrong and yet feeling himself helpless to avoid doing it.” No normal human career would ever invalidate such a prediction. In a word, we find that the conditions of right are established for us, and have dictatorial power over us, but that the conditions are too severe for our human nature invariably to fulfill. Kant, in his doctrine of the good will, seemed to simplify the process of the moral life. That will, he said, is good which always wills the good for no other reason than that it is the good, and the goodness of such a will remains unaffected even though circumstances prevent the volition from being carried out. But Kant did not permit his theory to cause him to lose sight of the actual facts. He therefore acknowledged the presence of “a radical evil in human nature,” such as the older theology described as “depravity” or “original sin,” and such as the new psychology describes as “the disintegration of selfhood.” [27]
Is there any way of relating these conclusions to belief in a God almighty, wise and good ? There are, of course, those who assert that such a question need not be raised at all. The facts adduced, they say, may all be explained on a purely naturalistic basis, and “the hypothesis of God is not needed.” Moral failure is “nothing to worry about,” the more so that [ p. 127 ] much of it is purely imaginary. So far as it is real at all, it is but a part of human failure in general, and the general failure is simply what is to be expected in the case of a creature whose power to conceive a better naturally and necessarily runs ahead of his power to achieve it. Man has more reach than grasp. That goes with his nature. It keeps him moving forward. What is it but a simple biological device to save him from stagnation and content? To have no reach at all would be fatal : betterment would be impossible. To have reach and grasp always exactly equal would be scarcely less fatal : never to know the challenge of threatening and possible defeat would be almost as deadly as invariable and inevitable failure. Sin, if we are still to call it that, is nothing at all but a by-product of individual and social evolution. Indeed, Bertrand Eussell assures us that there is “something abject” in the sense of sin, and since it makes us unhappy, and we have a right to be happy, the sooner we get rid of it the better. [28] The advice would have more weight if it were accompanied by some wise counsel as to how we might cease doing those things which create the sense of sin in the first place.
But while one may talk this way who sees in a human life nothing more than a biological and sociological unit, to be explained solely with reference to an impersonally conceived cosmic process, one who believes in God cannot so easily deal with the problem. Indeed, the very fact that men are so persist- > ently haunted by the sense of sin may turn out to be? one of the most incontrovertible signs of the being* and the nature of God. Sin in a Godless universe [ p. 128 ] would certainly have no ultimate significance, although it is worth while to note that even Julian Huxley believes that sin and the sense of sin “will always be with us.” [29] But sin in a universe held to be the creation of a God of perfect goodness, wisdom, and power must necessarily be considered relative to the character and purpose of such a God. If the Final Fact be God, if every notion of right involves God in some way, if the attainable moral standard of a given individual at a given time is the representative of Qod in that individual, then sin becomes the repudiation of God, the denial of his right to rule. The creature defies the Creator. Sin viewed in that light even with the concession that the Creator is never taken unawares by it necessarily takes on a much more solemn and serious character than when it is viewed as purely naturalistic.
After all, however, ought not God himself to be the one to “worry about” our sins ? Is not the final responsibility his? Is it not “he that hath made us, and not we ourselves” ? The problem cannot be solved quite so easily as that. We shall fully recognize the fact in due time that God is the most completely obligated being in the universe and he accepts the obligation. Nevertheless, he is against sin, and he means us to be against it. Let it be granted that man is so , constituted that it is certain that he will sin ; but let it not be forgotten that he is also so constituted that if he is satisfied in his sinfulness, he finds a whole vast array of facts becoming hostile to him. It may be true that “man is made that he might be a sinner,” but this is only because ultimately he is “meant to be a saint.” The way to saintliness involves the same [ p. 129 ] general facts as are involved in the way to sinfulness. The psychological process of moral ascent is absolutely identical with the psychological process of moral descent. It does not take away from the moral badness of sin to say that the presence of sin; is involved in God’s total plan and purpose for human life. Nor is God deprived of the right of attaching penalties to sin because he has created man so that sin is inevitable. For the certainty of sin as a feature of human life does not mean that every particular sin is necessitated. Because we start life with “an outfit for the earthly road” that will not prove equal to every emergency does not provide us with an excuse for every separate time we have failed to fight the good fight and remain in possession of the field; Even if we count out all wrong that was done under apparently irresistible pressure, enough is still left about whose perfect freedom there can be no doubt. This much at least God has the right to punish, in t&e sense of attaching to it appropriate consequences that will fall in either the inner or the outer realm. But he has also the right to punish moral fault for which the direct human responsibility cannot be found; or if the word “punish” is objected to here, then let us say that he has the right to visit the fault with consequences, which shall declare what he thinks about it. How else could the world be a system ? How else could we speak of law and order? If there is, as Virgil long since expressed it, “a Mind animating the entire^ material frame,” consequences of any sort will have the character of recording that Mind’s consistency. In the same spirit, a modern thinker, Urban, manfully defending what he calls “the Great Tradi [ p. 130 ] tion” in philosophy, namely, that the wo$d is intelligible because it manifests a logically a priori Intelligence, clings to “internal consistency” as “the ultimate touchstone of all thought.” [30] In a meaningful because coherent universe, every volition and every deed must register. God makes provision for the existence of both right and wrong responsible and irresponsible right, responsible and irresponsible wrong. Both alike enter into the intimate involutions of the life-movement. If right is to be consequential, wrong must be consequential too. The unintentional equally with the intentional bears its harvest. The unavoidable deed equally with the avoidable must illustrate the causal relationship but for which there could be no cosmos, no organisms, no processes. All this is said of a God claimed to be infinite in wisdom, goodness, and power. Is the claim thereby supported ? Or is the claim thereby rendered incredible ?
The answer to the question depends on whether or not we are willing to take the long look. “The truth is in the whole.” Sin looked at entirely in its own light becomes an insoluble problem in the universe of such a God as we believe God to be. We must simply refuse to believe that God would sustain an order of things in which the possibility and certainty of sin is the last word. Sin is a fact: it is an evil which is part of a still wider evil. But it shares the character of all other evil in bearing witness to a perfection which we can at least conceive and relative to^which all evil is judged to be evil. All judgment involves a standard. Criticism is impossible without a canon. In judging something to be evil, therefore, we neces [ p. 131 ] sarily call attention to a good. This does’ not mean that all good implies evil. But it does mean that the kind of good that God seeks for men cannot be except as evil is provided for in the very process of its attainment. Francis Thompson found that God “must char the wood ere he could limn with it.” [31] It does not follow from this, however, that on considering the dreadful cancer of the world’s sin, and asking the question, “Does God want this,?” one must answer, “Yes.” Bather is one to answer : “No ; God does not want this. He hates it with the perfect hatred of absolute holiness. He sets himself against it to root it out. The consequenees that it leads to are the consequences that he ordains. All that happens because of sin shows what God thinks of sin, and what sin essentially is. The results of selfishness on both the subject of it and the object of it, are God’s sufficient comment on selfishness. No ; God does not ‘want’ sin. What he ‘wants’ is virtue, moral goodness, holiness. Only, he can have this only by having sin as well. And he would rather have sin as an inevitable concomitant of the process whereby he seeks and obtains goodness than not have the goodness because he would not have! the sin.” Some such answer as that is all that is open to us if God is what we believe he is, and if sin is what we believe it is, and if human goodness is worth its own cost. The only condition on which there could have been a sinless universe was that there should have been no provision for the existence of such a being as man is. But there is still the hope of a sinless universe as an ultimate goal, and God’s way of getting it shall we say the only way of getting it ? is through just such a universe as we know [ p. 132 ] now. As with man, so with God, the given deed gets its meaning from what it is aimed at. Could we but stand where God stands, and see what he sees, and know what he knows, we should if he actually is what it seems to us he must be understand the reason for everything. The sentiment of the pious mind, “Trust God, see all, nor be afraid,” is entirely compatible with a profound philosophy. It is a philosophy that holds that God is never surprised, and that he is never baffled by any circumstance, however dreadful. Meanwhile, however, “we have but faith, we cannot know.” There are good reasons for our faith, and that makes our faith rational. But faith outstrips its own reasons : it must do that to be faith. We contemplate the ways of God, and we would fain justify them. That, however, is something we cannot wholly do : the most we can do is to believe with good reasons that they are justifiable. Justification is still of faith, and that holds even of God. He is justified by our faith in him, and by his faith in us.
Process and Reality, pp. 343-353. Cf . the discussion of “God and the World” in pt. v, chap, xi, of the same volume. See, however, note [24:1] on Chapter III above. ↩︎
Philosophy of Religion, pp. 343-353. Galloway pertinently says that those who would banish “ends” from nature “generally reintroduce them under some other name” (p. 350). ↩︎
See Buckham’s consideration of the thesis, in The Humanity of God, pp. 128n% that “events in the natural world are not the immediate acts of God.” Cf. J. Arthur Thomson, The System of Animate Nature, vol. ii, lect. xviii. ↩︎
Creative Evolution, Eng. trans., p. 143. ↩︎
See the entire impressive statement of “pragmatic meliorism” in Pragmatism, p. 296. ↩︎
Human Nature and Its RemaMng, rev. ed., p. 54. Cf . McDougall’s two articles on “Men or Eobots?” in Psychologies for 1925, pp. 273ff., for a criticism of the beIjavioristic denial of instinctive skills. ↩︎
Cf. the chapter of “Conclusions,” by W. R. Inge, in Science, Religion, and Reality, ed. J. Needham, for evidence that history of all sorts can be critically surveyed for constructive purposes. ↩︎
See, for example, Russell’s chapter on “The Harm That Good Men Do,” in Skeptical Essays, pp. lllff., and the discussion of “free will” in Our Knowledge of the External World, pp. 247-256. Eussell says that we are “free” in the only sense that is important, namely, that our volitions are “the result of our own desires.” But if we cannot control our desires, what is such freedom worth? ↩︎
Preface to Morals, p. 215. [ p. 134 ] ↩︎
Phcedrus, 246-249. Cf . Taylor, Plato, pp. 307-309. On “fallen angels,” see Kohler, Jewish Theology, chap. xxxi. ↩︎
See Life and Letters of T. E. Huxley, vol. i, pp. 352-355. ↩︎
Barbour, Sm and the New Psychology. “There is such a thing as sin for which a person is not guilty” (p. 86). The whole discussion reveals a confusion between “wrong” and “sin.” Cf. the statements that “unwitting deviation” from Christ’s standard is sin (p. 82) , and that there can be “blameworthiness” where there is no responsibility for the deed (p. 94). Even in Hocking’s fine discussion (op. tit., chaps, xvi-xx) it is not always kept clear that “sin” is primarily a religious conception. The nontheistic humanist may do wrong and admit it; but it is difficult to see how he could commit sin and confess it. Tennant, Concept of Sin, p. 22, quotes approvingly Martineau’s description of sin (in Types of Ethical Theory, second edit., vol. ii, pp. 123-124) as wrong action in relation to God. ↩︎
Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason, sect, ii, the division on “The Struggle of Good and Evil.” Cf. the discussion in E. Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Kant, vol. ii, pp. 569-573, and in Webb, Kant’s Philosophy of Religion, pp. 120-122. ↩︎
Op. tit., pp. 144. ↩︎
Studies in Christianity, pp. 150-151; cf. Atonement, p. 79. ↩︎
See The Direction of Human Evolution, new edit., chap. vi. [ p. 135 ] ↩︎ ↩︎
Cf. the statement of W. B. Smith (of “Christ-myth” fame, and author of Ecce Deus), “It is To-morrow and not Yesterday that makes To-day what it is,” quoted as from the Monist by Patrick, The World and Its Meaning, p. 165. ↩︎
See Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, chap, i, on “Ethical Evolution” and cf. Kidd, The Science of Power, with its passionate defence of the thesis that civilization must depend on “the science of the passion for the ideal” (p. 158). ↩︎
See Moxon, The Doctrine of Sin, chap, viii, on “The Psychological View of Sin.” ↩︎
Religion Without Revelation, p. 366. ↩︎
See Plato, Protagoras, 352. “Knowledge is a noble and commanding thing, which cannot be overcome, and will not allow a man, if he only knows the difference of good and evil, to do anything which is contrary to knowledge, but that wisdom will have strength to help him.” (Jowett’s trans.) Cf. Taylor, Plato, p. 259, note: also Windelband, History of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 131-133, the discussion of Socrates’ formula of the identity of virtue and knowledge. ↩︎
See The Problem of Christianity, vol. i, the chapter on “Time and Guilt.” Anyone who has a will of his own, says Eoyce, may become “a conscious and deliberate traitor” to an ideal or a cause he may become “disloyal.” Cf. also The Philosophy of Loyalty, and the chapter with that title in The Sources of Religious Insight. ↩︎
Cf. Finney’s chapter on “Behaviorism and Value” in Behaviorism: A Battle Line, p. 180. ↩︎
The inevitability of moral fault, with, however, provision also for that type of responsible moral fault which is truly sin and constitutes guiltiness, is presented in such works as Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, vol. iv ; Tennant, The Origin of Sin and The Concept of Sin; and S. A. McDowall, Evolution and the Need of Atonement. For a criticism of the view, see Moxon, op. cit., pp. 202-216. ↩︎ ↩︎
Cf . Angus, The Religious Quests of the Grceco-Roman World, pp. 3642 ; see also E. F. Scott, Colossians, Ephesians, Philemon, pp. 7-10, in the Moffatt New Testament Commentary, and The Gospel and Its Tributaries, pp. 210-212. [ p. 136 ] ↩︎
Metamorphosis, vii, 17 : “Video meliora, proboque, deterioria sequor.” Cf. Les Soirees de Samt-Petersbourg, by T. de Maistre, vol. i, p. 190. The Count says “Vous avez lu tout comme nous,
‘Mon Dieu, quelle guerre cruelle!
Je trouve deux hommes en moi.’ ”
To which the Knight replies: “Sans doute, et même je crois que chacun est oblige en conscience de s’ecrier comme Louis XIV, Ah! que je connais Men ces deuce, hommes-la!” ↩︎
See Webb, Kant’s Philosophy of Religion, pp. 92-115, for an exposition of Kant’s theory. ↩︎
The Conquest of Happiness, p. 106. See also chaps, i and vii. ↩︎
Op. tit., p. 289. ↩︎
The Intelligible World, p. 44. ↩︎
The Hound of Heaven, stanza iv. ↩︎