Reason and faith

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

REASON

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I. Thk Atheistic Argument from the Existence OF Evil 9

II. The Tkeistic SoIvUTion of the Probi^em

Chapter I The Atheistic Argument From The Exist- Ence Of Evii

The whole Creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together ujitilnow, — St. Paul.

Sin in the individual soul, cherished, persisted in, practiced wantonly, is doubtless the keenest incentive to the denial of the existence of God. A holy, just, and almighty personal God, ruling and judging the world, is an intolerable thought to a consciously guilty violator of holy law ; and we can get rid of notions that breed horrors for us. But it is not my purpose to deal thus summarily with this vast and sorrowful business.

Whatever the real motive to atheism, its argument, its justification to reason, has ever been the evil of the universe. Nor is it strange that its cogency should be, to many, irresistible. The first attack, and that of most sweeping power, runs against the orthodox and historic proposition lo Reason and Faith

of a unity of being and administration, through the universe and all stages of moral existence, which carries evil in character and estate over into the after- worlds. The argument runs, — let us put it as strongly as may be, — " It is impossible to believe, it is monstrous to affirm, that a good, wise and all-powerful God should create freely innumerable souls, endow them with fairly limitless capacity for happiness or misery, bestow upon them the awful gift of immortality, and then doom them to an eternity of woe, utter and remediless."

If it be answered, ''He does not doom them so ; He simply gives them the choice of courses and lets them have their own way," the answer is short and sharp : ' ' But, though they have a certain freedom, it avails them little, for they come into the world by no choice of their own, with such physical appetites and propensities that they do, without exception, run into evil. Nay, the physical impulses and the selfish side are so much earlier in development than the intellectual or the moral that the selfish and the animal get fine start, controlling power, before reason and conscience come into the field at all ; and ever after they abide, a constant, besetting and inexpugnable energy in all men. Then the material and earthly besetment is such as to be a perpetual and overmastering pressure towards evil. The collocation of individuals into families, groups, and races of kindred frailness and evil makes extrication from it so difficult as to be practically

Reason and Faith ii

impossible for even the stoutest souls. Orthodoxy admits that sort of impossibility. Moreover, scientific and philosophic observation make it certain that heritage from ill generations gone starts us with such bias of constitutional structure as to give no man born of woman a fair chance. So clear is this that all scientific, philosophic or theological creeds have made this evil heritage the very basal point of their systems. The element of personal freedom is so encumbered by these sinister conditions as to be of very little account. As matter of fact, all races of men and all individual souls are, consciously and demonstrably, involved in evil ; and this evil is fatal, insomuch that all generations are merely born to die." All this, they say, is inconsistent with the idea of a free, good, all-wise and all-powerful God. Such a God would not, ought not, to have created such a race — a race of immortal sinners, to sin and suffer on forever. Yet here such a race is. There can be, therefore, no such God. So runs the argument.

Or, leaving the wider question of the eternities. * ' A good God of this world ? Look ! Johnstown there, a happy and prosperous community, overwhelmed by its flood. Those peaceful and industrious towns at the foot of one of Japan's glorious mountains. In a moment the mountain topples over upon them, destroying the villages and thousands of lives. Behold Chicago on fire. See the Yellow River — ' China's sorrow ' — her muddy waters full of tens of thousands of floating, ghastly bodies of dead men, women, and children ! See millions perishing of hunger in India and thousands in Cuba. Remember Europe depopulated by the ' Black Death.' Hear the death shrieks ringing almost yet from all the fair valleys and rugged mountains of Armenia. Witness the furious devastations of war, the countless dead, the agonies of the mutilated, the anguish of the millions in the homes out of which all the glory and joy are gone. Watch the mother beside her darling who writhes and dies a slow death of agony in her arms, the innocent prey of torment for which she or all the world can do nothing ! Yet this God could, by an easy act of will, have prevented it all ! Nay, say this. A man takes another's life. He is a murderer, guilty of the supreme of ghastly crimes, is worthy of detestation and of death, is not fit to live. Yet, see the generations die in pain, wasted by diseases offensive and intolerable ! What of your God who kills, by an ordinance that knows no exception, every man He has made ? He might have made them to live forever, or could just translate His children, in the midst of smiles and praises, to their happier climes, surrounding their departures out of this to the worthier worlds with every token of love, joy, and blessedness. But how He does it! Your good God, indeed ! " Answer, if you will : ' ' All this is the play of law. ' ' ' ' What of that ? Does that better the case for the lawmaker ? What He does by law. He does Himself. The builder of a bad law is worse than the doer of a bad deed. Your God is the responsible author of all law, natural and moral, if there be such a God."

Say: *' There is much of beneficence, happiness, true weal in the universe, perhaps more than of evil. " " But that is impossible to prove, ' ' they answer. Taking into account the absolute sway of death and the awful numbers who go out of this world after wretched lives, enmeshed in evil still, with fearful probabilities of evil futures, it can not be shown that the good overbalances the evil.

' ' But why any evil at all ? Belittle it as you may, why this appalling sum of human suffering and ill, w^hich can not be disputed or made less than frightful ? Why, if God be great and wise and good ? ' '

So the tide of unbelieving challenge rolls on and whelms the faith of multitudes in our day. Not only do the IngersoUs exultingly cry, ' ' I could have done better, ' ' but throngs of humbler and more reverent spirits cry out in agony of mortal question. Multitudes doubt any God who do not deny Him. They shrink back and say, *'I don't know." They doubt, shrink and say — nothing ! They live on, doing as best they can, to meet what may be, with such hope as is possible in this deathful, rascal earth. What answer is to be made to this awful atheistic argument, which does hold with a wide and ruinous grasp on the souls of many men of all classes in our time ? It is an imperious question which must find answer, fair and frank and full, or ever the tide be turned.

The first answer attempted is that of Materialistic Evolution — the answer of allowance — assent to atheism. " There is no God. There is, indeed, no soul. Intellect, will, feeling, love, loyalty, patriotism, heroism, worship, are all merely the play of the material atoms in the physical organism. When the organism goes to the dust heap all is gone. There is no good or evil, sin or holiness. There is no freedom of will. Everything is the play of automata, freak of fate. Matter, without God or soul, is merely playing out its nature." To be sure, there is sad puzzle as to how matter got its " Nature," or got to be at all, — whence its inherent ''I^aw" had origin. But that is of no consequence, since philosophy itself is but the inexplicable fracas of the material atoms of the brain, and rational cause there is none, and reason itself is but a phantasmal jargon of material stuiF in transient and chance activity. All this, indeed, so conflicts with the verdict of consciousness, so contradicts the facts of conscience and the phenomena of all society and life, so reduces to blank absurdity all the modes of possible social law, all the dicta of duty, reward and penalty, order and government, as to make it a miracle that any sane soul should hold it. Nay, to hold it, souls have to deny their own existence, leaving themselves without the faculties for either rational denial or afl&rmation of anything ; making all the pompous seeming of reason a sheer diddle of automata. To one's wonder, those who hold the doctrine are always talking and acting, most absurdly out of all logical consistency, about freedom and dignity and guilt and obligation, and right and wrong, and blaming and ridiculing people whose atoms don't play the fool just like their own. Let us laugh ! They have even held that the old notions of God and duty ought to be taught the average man for his restraint, as if automata could be taught ! as if there were any ^' ought" at all !

A second answer has been made by affirmation that into this roil and moil of evil God has introduced a power to reverse and overcome it. That He has by His Son made it possible, even easy, for every man to be rid of the disorders of his nature by consent to its sublime re-creation ; to be rid of the curse of evil done, by repentance of it and its free, full pardon ; to be lifted into such right, loving, holy behavior and character as shall fit him for, and assure him of, an immortalit}^ of blessedness. That, so far, is well, were that the universal destiny. But this scheme of the Gospel was so long in coming and is, yet, so far from having come to all men — so many refuse its grace when they do know it, and go on all the worse for it ; it has, so, no advantage for so vast numbers of the human race ; so many have absolutely no chance at it ; so many candid spirits are perplexed by it — can not see their way to it ; it has visibly worked for relatively so few the great salvation ! Let now the largest answer be made that is consistent with broadest orthodoxy, namely, that the vast multitudes who die in infancy receive its benefits. Nay, let it be said that the general work of the Holy Spirit reaches all races, even outside the specific knowledge of the Historic Christ, so preparing a multitude, however great, to a grace by which they virtually receive Him, or do accept Him when, perhaps in the very hour of dying. He is revealed to them and so enter into glory renewed souls ; say all that, and that so the great majority of the human race may have been saved.

Say more, that in the long future of a rapidly evangelizing world, of a fully evangelized world, these majorities of the redeemed will sweep up to the huge outnumbering of all that ever have or ever shall miss the eternal salvation ; say all this, as orthodoxy does dare to say it, still that awful remainder — the whole of earthly suffering, the whole of the after-penalties of the unsaved ! Go outside of this orthodox answer. Say, with the Universalist : '' All men are to be saved at the long! last. Sin is to be punished here and hereafter ; but all punishment is remedial, and all will come home, at last, to God in peace and glory.'' Still the remainder! Earthly suffering in vast volume and suffering beyond the grave, how long and serious you know not ! Still the heart rises up in the face of Johnstown, beside the famine-stricken millions of India or the flooding woe of China's devouring river, or Armenian horrors, or Cuba's starving tens of thousands ; or beside the wan face of the child in helpless agony, to demand, "How is this, if God be almighty, if God be good ? Man ought to have been made, if made at all, holy and happy here, and so forever to demonstrate the wisdom, power, and goodness of his Creator, nay, to prove His existence at all, or to make it possible to believe in Him.'' Unbelieving reason goes further and says, ' * In the day in which He made man, He, being infinite in knowledge and in power, must have foreseen all the issues of His creative work." There was no compulsion upon Him to create. Freely, of His own will, He created all, knowing all that should come of it, to every creature, as well as to the whole creation. In that executive act of creation, therefore, He did, in fact, determine all that was to be. In that Divine decree, which is not aflfirmed by revelation or in theology merely, but which is axiomatic in any philosophic thought of an all-knowing, creative God — an absolute postulate of theistic thought, all must have been determined. No use to say that you believe in an all-knowing and all-powerful God who, creating all things, did not know the issue of all things. That were to bar out from His infinitude the outcome of His own act, to cut ofi* from His all-knowledge the whole future of His own creation. You can not save his goodness by denial of His Deity. What a God you have, then, shorn, finite, bewildered, overwhelmed ! It is mental imbecility to say that a God who knew all futures, all issues of His creative act, then freely created, yet did not determine the things that were to be. It is contradiction in terms, impossible to reason. The decrees of God are necessary to the conception of an inj&nite creative intelligence. He knew what was to be ? It '* was to be '' then ! Who settled that ''it is to be" ? Who but He who freely created the thing that *' is to be '* ? The decree of a foreknown creation was the decree of all that was to come of it, all that ever has come of it or ever will.

Could we see, now, that all this creation were running well, working the weal of the orders of being which compose it, for the present and for the eternities, then we could have no trouble in the way of faith in God. Could we even see, through the veils and mists of present evil, suffering, sorrow, sin and death, surety of a to-morrow of eternal weal for all, we could veil our faces before the mystery of the present and wait the unrolling of the scrolls of futurity, singing the songs of an assured faith and a grateful love. THAT we can not find in the revelation from which we learn all that we know of the future, most of what we know of God, and all that we know to alleviate the conscious and the observed miseries of this human life and death. That revelation has doleful voices of foreboding. Thunders of judgment reverberate through its corridors. The woes of the present waken echoes from within the barred gates of the grave. The chances that lie over there are the very motive of the revelation. The analogies of the present life make fearsome suggestion of hurt for those who venture, sinful and unrepentant, out of this into the worlds to come. If so much of sin and the woe of it, covering, blighting, cursing life be permitted here, who is to say that, under the administration of the same God, there is to be none of it in other and after worlds ? Who is to say that, under the fuller development of the evil that is regnant in many souls to the last of the earthly life, there is not to come in the long hereafter the fuller measure of ill which the fuller measure of developed desert must bring ? None has looked for ground of such affirmation in the Divine Word more eagerly than have I. None would rejoice more than I should such new light break forth of it. It does not. That it did not come when I waited for it long, flung me once, not into denial that there was any God, but into an awful hatred of Him. I could not deny Him but only His holiness and goodness. For, to deny His being, and see the universe shorn of all meaning, purpose or reason, bow down to the mere grind of luck or law that had no maker ; to see the races going to the dust heaps of the ages without significance ; to hear mankind wailing its woes and raving its wraths and mooning its inane laughters out upon the mere grind of a soulless fate or an idiotic chance, which grinds us all to death and oblivion, — O that were too ignoble, too horrible! That were worse than any hell ! To believe myself and man nothing ; to learn that honor, virtue, heroism, worship — all that makes for dignity and

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worth in man — are phantasms, of no more quality than the craving of hunger or of lust, or than the automatic convolutions of the worm beneath your foot, this is to deny every conscious fact of your own constitution and of the society of man, is to degrade and deny yourself !

But here the evil is. Here are we in it, for indubitable and awful fact ! To deny the existence or the goodness of God abates no jot of the horror, but adds the element of an absolute hopelessness, — a blank despair. If there be a God who can overrule, we find a ray of hope. If a God wise, mighty, and good, there may be complete relief for reason and sanity. There must be such a God or the universe is without reason, — an unmitigated terror, and the ending of it by universal suicide and oblivion the only rational hope. Our disbelievers cut us off" from that by telling us that matter is eternal, was never created and can never cease its cursed play. From this grind of aimless and hideous curse, I flee to God as the only escape from madness !

Here the evil is. We are all involved in it. And here God is. There must, then, be some theory of the universe and the permission of evil in it couvsistent with these facts, — sinful and suffering man and a holy, almighty, all-wise and allloving God. If this permitted evil shall prove, after all, but the mode and necessary process for the development of the loftiest of possible created moral Being and definitely designed to effect it, as I suppose and will try to show, we can unite in exultant Hallelujahs to His great and blessed Name. The evil and suffering of the worid shall redound to the glory and joy both of God and man.

After all, I can only close as I began. The common, practical source of atheism is no speculative diflSculty, but consciousness of guilt and free refusal to turn from it. That consciousness raises the certainty that, with a holy God reigning and judging, it will go hard with guilt everywhere and forever. So men can and do fight down and out their own intuitive and rational certainty that there is such a God. In so far, atheism is sin. To live in God's world, the life He gives and sustains, as if there were no God, is easily the supreme of all evils that are in the earth and the source of all the curses of time and of eternity, — occasion of all the wailings that have been, are, or shall be.

CHAPTKR II

THE THKISTIC SOI.UTION OF THE PROBLEM OF

EVIIv IN THE WORI.D

Who are these which are arrayed in white robes ? and whence came they? These are they which came out of great tribulation^ and have washed their robes and made them, white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in His temple ; and He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst a^iy more: neither shall the sun light on them nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed t-hem, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. — St. John.

Many kindly and thoughtful souls, touched by the miseries of this present life, and haunted by the dread consequences of evil in the eternity that is coming, — wretchednesses which do visibly harrow with tribulations multitudes here, and which do, presumably, hang over the future of so many of our fellows, — are ever standing, perplexed and baffled, before the agonized question, *'Why is evil permitted in the universe?" Failing of satisfactory answer, from the doors of that awful problem multitudes have been thrown into anger against the very order of the world, into denial of the inspired Word, into refusal to believe even in the existence of any God at all. With Huxley, they say, ''Since thousands of times a minute, if our ears were sharp enough, we should hear sighs and groans of pain like those Dante heard at the gates of hell, the world can not be governed by what we call benevolence." At any rate, they are tossed into angry rejection of the doctrine of any persistence of evil and misery beyond the grave, or, like Tyndall, into a confused agnosticism in the whole sphere of religious and, sometimes, of moral truth. The strain which this fact of evil puts on the hearts of all men and upon the faith of many is almost or altogether too heavy to be borne.

But here the evil is past contradicting. Here it has been from earliest history and reaching out into the future of this world, ravenous as ever, and here it is as a foreboding of the eternities, in spite of us. It must be consistent with some scheme of the universe. What scheme, then ? A chance universe ? Too much of plan, order, adjustment of means to ends for that, and too much, I may say, of hopeless horror for any soul to let it rest in that. Fate ? That answers no question, for a fate requires an arbiter of fates, a God ! A malignant Power, then, over and under all ? Too much of beneficence, of wisdom, power, and skill directed to world's weal for that. The normal order of Nature is for weal. On the whole, the vast majority of men are glad that they live, have lived, and are to live yet. After all, men do, almost universally, feel that Goodness is on the throne. Hardly a blasphemer in his wrath is able to say, ' ' This Power of the universe is malignant, and the God is the Devil ! ''

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Well, then, is it a God who, having made the world and set it running, then retired from business, out of all its processes, and left it alone to work out its own destinies ? Hardly that. He could not do that. He could have had no right to do that. He must, creating, have known all the issues of its evil ; could have had no right to set it out and let it run its course of evil, unobstructed and uncared for. On such terms, it is not irreverent to say, ' ' He had no right to create at all. " A God were that like the creator of the Frankenstein, with a horrible and uncontrollable thing for a universe on His hapless hands to mock His powerlessness or His heartless unconcern. Either the Creator can interfere and will not, or He would interfere and can not. In either case He were something else, and other, than our God.

What theory of the creation is left, then ? Only this, that a wise, good and almighty God, creating, set afoot the best, worthiest, loftiest scheme of things that could be and presides over it for its highest welfare. I can see no other alternative. Still, this evil is here and often intolerable and overwhelming,

I^et us go reverently back past the ages, beyond the stars, into the Eternity when none but God is. He alone fills immensity. But his soul stirs in creative purpose. Somewhat shall be beside himself. Somewhat, then, worthy of Himself, the highest and best then of creative possibilities.

This work of a Creating God, — what will it be ? No wonder of worlds beautiful as earth and stars

Reasoji and Faith 25

will be lacking or sufl&cient. They will come into being and harmonious order. They will be filled and clothed with every exquisite class of vegetable life, springing from every fitness of earth and soil and water and air and light and heat for their growth and splendor. But all is insentient still, so not the highest. All good in its realm, but not the best that can be. Sensation, motion, intelligence wait. So then the multiform and beautiful orders of animal life, exquisite in structure, keenly alive in sensibility, amazing in power and variety of function. A wonderful world of life teeming in water and air and over all lands. Every mote or mammoth contributes a definite sum of pleasure to the volume of the enjoyment of the universe and, so, a definite element of motive to the creative plan of a God who loves happiness and creates it and for it. But, after all, is this an object ample enough to become THE motive in this immense visible creation ? Certainly not, if aught higher be possible. And higher there surely is. He Himself is intelligence, free and holy. He is goodness, love, character. He is a free moral intelligence, acting, that is, always under the clear discrimination between right and wrong and always with the right. Now the crown and motive of this new and grand creation shall be a thing created, indeed, and so finite, but created in His own image — a royal creature, with power to discriminate between right and wrong, like Himself, under all the obligations of righteousness, and with a free will to act in view of this eternal distinction so in His Image. A creature this shall be with capacity of vast intelligence, with indefinite possibilities of culture and growth, with keen susceptibilities to pleasure and pain, all fitted for indefinite development, with an eternity of time and a universe of opportunity for it. A creature, this, capable of all the grand passions of love and joy and beauty and holiness ; of a grandeur in being only less than His own as the finite must be less than the infinite, and like himself in character. A Being, a Character, — grandly worthy of love, for society with Himself in interplay of holy sympathy and fellowship forever !

An exquisite machine is admirable, but can not elicit respect or affection. We can not enter society or sympathy with it. A beautiful and graceful animal is admirable and you may come to love it in a way, but it can never win your respect, your love in the higher human and moral ranges of it. The difficulty is that it can not achieve character, has no morality, is below the ranges of the higher being. Character only can aspire to moral praise or blame, to be respected, honored, loved. No creation, save one crowned with a race capable of character and of grandeur in it, would have been at all worth a creator's while. That is what we want to find for object and sovereign in this creation, and that is what we find in man, — a soul capable of character, and majesty in it, immortal and equal to the fortunes of an infinite spiritual universe. Character is the thing essential.

What, then, is essential to character? First, an everlasting and necessary distinction between right and wrong, a distinction of contrast in the very nature of things. Second, an intelligence capable of discriminating between them. Third, a discriminating intelligence which must ever recognize its obligation to the right and the personal guilt of wrong-doing. And, fourth, freedom, under that sense of obligation to choose at will the one or the other. These are the essentials to character-making. Without them, or either of them, character is impossible and morality a phantasm. This style of being, given the law of growth, time and opportunity, will come to grandeurs enough to account for and reward any lavishness of expenditure on the creation of which it is the crown, and the scheme of things that shall accommodate and develop it.

This we should rationally forecast as the creative design, and this, as matter of fact, we find.