Part 14 (1/2)

V

Before too confidently, however, we accept this conclusion, there is one objection to be heard. So far is the world from being absolved from cruelty, on the plea of moral purpose, one may say, that _its injustice is the very crux of its offense_. See how negligent of justice the process of creation is! Its volcanoes and typhoons slay good and bad alike, its plagues are utterly indifferent to character; and in the human world which it embosoms some drunken Caesar sits upon the throne while Christ hangs on the cross. Who for a single day can watch the gross inequities of life, where good men so often suffer and bad men go free, and still think that the world has moral purpose in it? The Bible itself is burdened with complaint against the seeming senselessness and injustice of G.o.d. Moses cries: ”Lord, wherefore hast thou dealt ill with this people? Neither hast thou delivered thy people at all” (Exodus 5:22, 23); Elijah laments, ”O Jehovah, my G.o.d, hast Thou also brought evil upon the widow, with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?” (I Kings 17:20); Habakkuk complains, ”Wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace, when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?”

(Hab. 1:13); and Job protests, ”Although thou knowest that I am not wicked, ... yet thou dost destroy me” (Job 10:7, 8). Man's loss of faith springs often from this utter disparity between desert and fortune. The time comes to almost every man when he looks on, indignant, desperate, at some gross horror uninterrupted, some innocent victim entreated cruelly. He understands Carlyle's impatient cry, ”G.o.d sits in heaven and does nothing!”

Natural as is this att.i.tude, and unjust as many of life's tragic troubles are, we should at least see this: _man must not demand that goodness straightway receive its pay and wrong its punishment_. He may not ask that every virtuous deed be at once rewarded by proportionate happiness and every sin be immediately punished by proportionate pain. That, some might suppose, would put justice into life. But whatever it might put into life, such an arrangement obviously would take out _character_. The men whose moral quality we most highly honor were not paid for their goodness on Sat.u.r.day night and did not expect to be. They chose their course _for righteousness' sake alone_, although they knew what crowns of thorns, what scornful crowds about their cross might end the journey.

They did not drive close bargains with their fate, demanding insurance against trouble as the price of goodness. They chose the honorable deed for honor's sake; they chose it the more scrupulously, the more pleasure was offered for dishonor; their tone in the face of threatened suffering was like Milne's, Scotland's last martyr: ”I will not recant the truth, for I am corn and no chaff; and I will not be blown away with the wind nor burst with the flail, but I will abide both.”

Every man is instinctively aware and by his admiration makes it known, that the kind of character which chooses right, willing to suffer for it, is man's n.o.blest quality. The words in which such character has found utterance are man's spiritual battle cries. Esther, going before the King, saying, ”If I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16); the three Hebrews, facing the fiery furnace saying, ”Our G.o.d whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace; and he will deliver us out of thy hand, O king. But if _not_, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy G.o.ds” (Dan. 3:17, 18); Peter and the apostles, facing the angry Council, saying, ”We must obey G.o.d rather than men” (Acts 5:29); Anaxarchus, the martyr, crying, ”Beat on at the case of Anaxarchus; Anaxarchus himself you cannot touch”; Luther, defying the Emperor, ”Here stand I; I can do no other”--most words of men are easily dispensable, but no words like these can man afford to spare. They are his best. _And this sort of goodness has been possible, because G.o.d had not made the world as our complaints sometimes would have it._ For such character, a system where goodness costs is absolutely necessary. A world where goodness was paid cash in pleasant circ.u.mstance would have no such character to show. Right and wrong for their own sakes would be impossible; only prudence and imprudence for happiness' sake could there exist. Out of the same door with the seeming injustice of life goes the possibility of man's n.o.blest quality--his goodness ”in scorn of consequence.” Many special calamities no one on earth can hope to understand. But when one has granted that fitness to grow character is the only worthy test of creation, it evidently is not so simple as at first it seemed to improve the fundamental structure of the world.

VI

Indeed, when one in imagination a.s.sumes the task of omnipotence and endeavors to construct a universe that shall be fitted for the growth of character, he cannot long hesitate concerning certain elements which must be there. _A system of regular law_ would have to be the basis of that world, for only in a law-abiding universe could obedience be taught. If the stars and planets behaved ”like swarms of flies” and nothing could be relied upon to act twice in the same way, character and intelligence alike would be impossible. In this new world, remolded, ”nearer to our heart's desire,” _progress_ also would be a necessity. A stagnant world cannot grow character. There must be real work to do, aims to achieve; there must be imperfections to overpa.s.s and wrongs to right. Only in a system where the present situation is a point of departure and a better situation is a possibility, where ideal and hope, courage and sacrifice are indispensable can character grow. In this improved world of our dreams, _free-will_ in some measure must be granted man. If character is to be real, man must not in his choice between right and wrong be as Spinoza pictured him, a stone hurled through the air, which thinks that it is flying; he must have some control of conduct, some genuine, though limited, power of choice. And in this universe which we are planning for character's sake, individuals could not stand separate and unrelated; _they must be woven into a community_. Love which is the crown of character, lacking this, would be impossible. What happens to one must happen to all; good and ill alike must be contagious in a society where we are ”members one of another.”

No one of these four elements could be omitted from a world whose test was its adaptability for character. Men with genuine power of choice, fused into a fellows.h.i.+p of social life, living in a law-abiding and progressive world--on no other terms imaginable to man could character be possible. _Yet these four things contain all the sources of our misery._ Physical law--what tragic issues its stern, unbending course brings with terrific incidence on man! Progress--how obviously it implies conditions imperfect, wrong, through which we have to struggle toward the best! Free-will--what a nightmare of horror man's misuse of it has caused since sin began! Social fellows.h.i.+p--how surely the innocent must suffer with the guilty, how impossible for any man to bear the consequence of his own sin alone! We may not see why these general conditions should involve the particular calamities which we bewail, but even our finite minds can see thus far into the mystery of suffering: _all our trouble springs from four basic factors in the universe, without any one of which, great character would be impossible_.

While, therefore, if one _deny_ G.o.d, the mystery of goodness lacks both sense and solution; one may _affirm_ G.o.d and find the mystery of evil, mysterious still but suffused with light. G.o.d is working out a spiritual purpose here by means without which no spiritual purpose is conceivable. Fundamentally creation is good. We misuse it, we fail to understand its meaning and to appropriate its discipline, and impatient because the eternal purpose is not timed by our small clocks, we have to confess with Theodore Parker, ”The trouble seems to be that G.o.d is not in a hurry and I am.” In hours of insight, however, we perceive how little our complaints will stand the test of dispa.s.sionate thought. Our miseries are not G.o.d's inflictions on us as individuals, so that we may judge his character and his thought of us by this special favor or by that particular calamity. The most careless thinker feels the poor philosophy of Lord Londonderry's petulant entry in his journal: ”Here I learned that Almighty G.o.d, for reasons best known to himself, had been pleased to burn down my house in the county of Durham.” One must escape such narrow egoism if he is to understand the purposes of G.o.d; one must rise to look on a creation, with character at all costs for its aim, and countless aeons for its settling. In the making of this world G.o.d has _limited himself_; he cannot lightly do what he will. He has limited himself in creating a law-abiding system where his children must learn obedience without special exemptions; in ordaining a progressive system where what _is_ is the frontier from which men seek what _ought to be_; in giving men the power to choose right, with its inevitable corollary, the power to choose wrong; in weaving men into a communal fellows.h.i.+p where none can escape the contagious life of all. What Martineau said of the first of these is true in spirit of them all: ”The universality of law is G.o.d's eternal act of self limitation or abstinence from the movements of free affection, for the sake of a constancy that shall never falter or deceive.”

When once a man has risen to the vision of so splendid a purpose in so great a world, he rejoices in the outlook. Granted that now he sees in a mirror darkly, that many a cruel event in human life perplexes still--he has seen enough to give solid standing to his faith. What if an insect, someone has suggested, were born just after a thunderstorm began and died just before it stopped--how dark would be its picture of creation! But we who span a longer period of time, are not so obsessed by thunderstorms, although we may not like them. They have their place and serve their purpose; we see them in a broader perspective than an insect knows and on sultry days we even crave their coming. A broken doll is to a child a cruel tragedy, but to the father watching the child's struggle to accept the accident, to make the best of it and to come off conqueror, the event is not utterly undesirable. He is not glad at the child's suffering, but with his horizons he sees in it factors which she does not see. So G.o.d's horizons infinitely overpa.s.s our narrow outlooks. There is something more than whimsy in the theologian's saying, which President King reports, that an insect crawling up a column of the Parthenon, with difficulty and pain negotiating pa.s.sage about a pore in the stone, is as well qualified to judge of the architecture of the Parthenon, as we of the infinitude of G.o.d's plans. Seeing as much as we have seen of sense and purpose in the structure of creation, we have seen all that our finite minds with small horizons could have hoped. We have gained ample justification for the att.i.tude toward suffering which Dolly Winthrop in Silas Marner has immortalized: ”Eh, there's trouble i'

this world, and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on.

And all as we've got to do is to trusten, Master Marner--to do the right thing as far as we know and to trusten. For if us, as knows so little, can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know--I feel it i' my own inside as it must be so.”

VII

We may not truthfully leave our subject in such a case that faith's concern with human misery will seem to lie merely in giving adversity an explanation. Faith is concerned not alone to _explain_ misery but to _heal_ it. For while it is impossible without hards.h.i.+p to develop character, there are woeful calamities on earth that do not help man's moral quality; they crush and mutilate it; they are barbarous intruders on the plan of G.o.d and they have no business in his world. Some ills are such that no theory can reconcile them with the love of G.o.d and no man ought to desire such reconciliation; in the love of G.o.d they ought to be abolished. Slavery must be a possibility in a world where man is free; but G.o.d's goodness was not chiefly vindicated by such a theory of explanation. It was chiefly vindicated by slavery's abolishment. The liquor traffic and war, needless poverty in a world so rich, avoidable diseases that science can overcome--how long a list of woes there is that faith should not so much explain as banis.h.!.+ When some ills like drunkenness and war and economic injustice are thrust against our faith, and men ask that the goodness of G.o.d be reconciled with these, faith's first answer should be not speculation but action. Such woes, so far from being capable of reconciliation with G.o.d's goodness, are irreconcilable with a decent world. G.o.d does not want to be reconciled with them; he hates them ”with a perfect hatred.” We may not make ourselves patient with them by any theory of their necessity. They are not necessary; they are perversions of man's life; and _the best defense of faith is their annihilation_.

Indeed, a man who, rebellious in complaint, has clamorously asked an explanation of life's ills as the price of faith in G.o.d, may well in shame consider G.o.d's real saints. When things were at their worst, when wrong was conqueror and evils that seemed blatantly to deny the love of G.o.d were in the saddle, these spiritual soldiers went out to fight. The winds of ill that blow out our flickering faith made their religion blaze--a pillar of fire in the night. The more evil they faced, the more religion they produced to answer it. They were the real believers, who ”through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises.” In comparison with such, it is obviously paltry business to drive a bargain with G.o.d that if all goes well we will believe in him, but if things look dark, then faith must go.

Many a man, therefore, who is no philosopher can be a great defender of the faith. He may not weave arguments to prove that such a world as this in its fundamental structure is fitted to a moral purpose. But he can join the battle to banish from the world those ills that have no business here and that G.o.d hates. He can help produce that final defense of the Christian faith--a world where it is easier to believe in G.o.d.

CHAPTER VII

Faith and Science

DAILY READINGS

The intellectual difficulties which trouble many folk involve the relations of faith with science, but often they do not so much concern the abstract theories of science as they do the particular att.i.tudes of scientists. We are continually faced with quotations from scientific specialists, in which religion is denied or doubted or treated contemptuously, and even while the merits of the case may be beyond the ordinary man's power of argument, he nevertheless is shaken by the general opinion that what ministers say in the pulpit on Sunday is denied by what scientists say all the rest of the week. In the daily readings, therefore, we shall deal with the scientists themselves, as a problem which faith must meet.

Seventh Week, First Day

No one can hope to deal fairly with the scientists, in their relations.h.i.+p with faith, unless he begins with a warm appreciation of the splendid integrity and self-denial which the scientific search for truth has revealed.

=Canst thou bind the cl.u.s.ter of the Pleiades, Or loose the bands of Orion?

Canst thou lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season?

Or canst thou guide the Bear with her train?

Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens?

Canst thou establish the dominion thereof in the earth?