2. Continuous Creation
This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.
Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor’s utterance: “God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.” Edwards himself says: “God’s upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.” He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not. “This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot” (A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation “is really continued creation.” Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.” 2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries: ‘Whence came evil?’ and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.” God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was: “Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.” See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.
The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force is divine will, and divine will in direct exercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that “ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.” Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently: “What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer’s mind?” Professor Fitzgerald: “All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.” Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891: “The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”
To this we object, upon the following grounds:
(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.
Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows: “The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.” The words of the poet would then be literally true: “Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.” Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte, “the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.” A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”
Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God’s regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What is nature, but the promise of God’s pledged and habitual causality? And what is spirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God’s agency is not intrusive.” William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say’st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I’ll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”
(b) It exaggerates God’s power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God’s veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God’s love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God’s will is the only force in the universe, God’s holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.
Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam’s posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards’s theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.
It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards’s idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King’s College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says: “The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature” (see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier’s Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards’s idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.
How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter’s Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, ’tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.” It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the “Exercise-system” of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards’s Idealism, see Frazer’s Berkeley (Blackwood’s Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn’s ed.), 327-334.
(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.
Lotze tries to escape from material causes and yet hold to second causes, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion’s den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.” Dorner well remarks that “Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.” On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.
IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence
(a) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God’s sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.
Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism). 1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”; cf. Eph. 1:23—the church, “which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” God’s action is no actio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God’s concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God’s working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words “wherein is the seed thereof” (Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words “his seed abideth in him” (1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).
(b) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.
In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man. Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”; Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, 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?” James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.” Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold; “so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf” (Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God’s; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).
Section III.—Providence
I. Definition of Providence.
Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with which he created it.
As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and progress.
In explanation notice:
(a) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense of _fore_seeing. It is _for_seeing also, or a positive agency in connection with all the events of history.
(b) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created things, providence is an actual care and control of them.
(c) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well as over classes.
(d) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the operation of God’s word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to obedience.
(e) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive, and determinative.
(f) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ; see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”; cf. John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”
The Germans have the word Fürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the word Vorsehung, foreseeing, seeing beforehand. Our word “providence” embraces the meanings of both these words. On the general subject of providence, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology, 1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179; 21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.
Providence is God’s attention concentrated everywhere. His care is microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes, ad finem: “All service is the same with God—With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.” Canon Farrar: “In one chapter of the Koran is the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered it. ‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king’s sin, And holp the little ant at entering in.’ ‘Nothing is too high or low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’ ” Yet a preacher began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are are all numbered”—by saying: “Why, some of you, my hearers, do not believe that even your heads are all numbered!”
A modern prophet of unbelief in God’s providence is William Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read: “When overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men’s sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.” Then he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and continues: “O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine own soul’s abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne’er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there. Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate’er my deeds, I am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear. For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken. And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The work of heaven! ’Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown God.”
In pleasing contrast to William Watson’s Unknown God, is the God of Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional: “God of our fathers, known of old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!”
These problems of God’s providential dealings are intelligible only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is the progressive manifestation of Christ’s holiness and love, and in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules over all, and that “all things work together for good to them that love God.” (Rom. 8:28).
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence
1. Scriptural Proof.
The Scripture witnesses to
A. A general providential government and control (a) over the universe at large; (b) over the physical world; (c) over the brute creation; (d) over the affairs of nations; (e) over man’s birth and lot in life; (f) over the outward successes and failures of men’s lives; (g) over things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (h) in the protection of the righteous; (i) in the supply of the wants of God’s people; (j) in the arrangement of answers to prayer; (k) in the exposure and punishment of the wicked.
(a) Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”; Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”; Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”
(b) Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”; Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”; 135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”; Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”; Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation; cf. Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”
(c) Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”; Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”; 10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”
(d) Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”; Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah’s; And he is the ruler over the nations”; 66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”; Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation” (instance Palestine, Greece, England).
(e) 1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”; Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”; Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”; Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”; Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother’s womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”
(f) Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”; Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”
(g) Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”; Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”
(h) Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”; 5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”; 63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”; 121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”; Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”
(i) Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh” (marg.: that is, “Jehovah will see,” or “provide”); Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”; Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”
(j) Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”; Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”; Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”; 32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”
(k) Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”; 11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”
The statements of Scripture with regard to God’s providence are strikingly confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in Buckle’s view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced, ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment. Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for comparatively little. “There shall be no Alps!” says Napoleon. Charles Kingsley: “The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering circumstance.” Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the ordering of God’s providence. Man’s need of fresh water leads him to rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense became also places of worship and of appeal to God.
Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position. The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned organization and law. Parcere subjectis was her rule, as well as debellare superbos. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion. Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists of several islands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to subjection.
Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth. George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271, treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no interest in science.
On God’s pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor’s farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops.
B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(a) to men’s free acts in general; (b) to the sinful acts of men also.
(a) Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”; 1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand” (Saul to David); Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all” (i. e., equally, one as well as another); Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”; 19:21—“_There are many devices in a man’s heart; But the counsel of Jehovah, __ that shall stand_”; 20:24—“A man’s goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?” 21:1—“The king’s heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will” (i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman); Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”; Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”; Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”; James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”
(b) 2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him [Shimei]: Curse David”; 24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”; Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”; 2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
Henry Ward Beecher: “There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.” John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all. “As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man’s superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.” Dr. Deems: “The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.” See Bruce, Providential Order, 183 sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231 sq.
God’s providence with respect to men’s evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:
(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.
Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech: “I also withheld thee from sinning against me”; 31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”; Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”; Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the “thorns” and the “wall” may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Bible in loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied: “Death!” Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God’s preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.
(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God’s permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.
2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him [Hezekiah], to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”; cf. Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.” Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”; Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!” Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.” Hosea 4:17—“_Ephraim __ Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone_”; Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”; Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”; 3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.” To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred 1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.” As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said: “The God of glory thundereth” (Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God’s plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In 2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in 1 Chron. 21:1 the same thing is referred to Satan. God’s providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.
Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism: “God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.” Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God’s efficiency from God’s permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.” Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of “the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.” The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.
(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.
Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”; Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory; Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”; John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com., in loco); Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”
To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh in Ex. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”; 7:13—“and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened”; 8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh’s to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.
God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh’s very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God’s will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh’s surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man’s evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God’s providence. See Rom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.” Thus the very passions which excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, on Ps. 76:10.
God hardens Pharaoh’s heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man’s heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.” The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”
(d) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God’s determining the measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God’s complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.
Job 1:12—“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand”; 2:6—“Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life”; Ps. 124:2—“If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they swallowed us up alive”; 1 Cor. 10:13—“will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it”; 2 Thess. 2:7—“For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way”; Rev. 20:2, 3—“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”
Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God’s will and man’s will is “such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men. The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will. This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God’s control of both the bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”
2. Rational proof
A. Arguments a priori from the divine attributes. (a) From the immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence. (b) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is providence. (c) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice is providence.
For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that, “quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.” Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.” Marcus Antoninus: “If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.” See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.
On the argument for providence derived from God’s benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God’s majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God’s moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.” John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.
The complexity of God’s providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall’s explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees’ nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.
B. Arguments a posteriori from the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.
The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man’s destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon “variety of environment” (H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.
“There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.” Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness. “Man proposes and God disposes” has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they “embattle and are broken.” Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness. Cf. Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”; 1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”
The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job’s friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say: “But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up” (Dan. 3:18.)
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.” Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.
James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God’s calm control of the forces of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending: “How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!” See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar’s Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn’s ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence
1. Fatalism.
Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.
To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God’s truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.
The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system. Islam = “submission,” and the participle Moslem = “submitted,” i. e., to God. Turkish proverb: “A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.” The Mohammedan thinks of God’s dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.
Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarly sensual. “The Christian and Jewish religions,” he says, “have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct; ‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’ The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion by force. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institute polygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile to secular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.” See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.
Calvinists can assert freedom, since man’s will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.
2. Casualism
Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance. Upon this view we remark:
(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.
Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God’s providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger’s conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold’s saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God’s glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first. “Love God and do what you will,” said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God’s will.
(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.
In Luke 10:31, our Savior says: “By chance a certain priest was going down that way.” Janet: “Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”
(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.
The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester. “Climate?” he replied; “Rochester has no climate,—only weather!” So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply “cosmical weather.” But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.
3. Theory of a merely general providence
Many who acknowledge God’s control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.
This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero: “Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.” “Even in kingdoms among men,” he says, “kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.” Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many. ‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’ could be grasped by no consciousness.” The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said: “It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.” So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world: “A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin’ on bein’ a dog.” This has been paraphrased: “A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”
In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:
(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.
“Nothing great has great beginnings.” “Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.” “Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.” Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai’s service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider’s web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André’s lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.
“Large doors swing on small hinges.” The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium: “We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.” E. G. Robinson: “We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.” Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey, “I wish you would learn something about those German critics.” “In the obedient spirit of those times,” writes Pusey, “I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd’s.”
Goldwin Smith: “Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.” The annexation of Corsica to France gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.” See Appleton, Works, 1:149 sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.
(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God’s general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.
Man’s care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover’s devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope’s Essay on Man: “All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.” If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.
God’s care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says: “Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one” (John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer: “I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition” (John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God’s hand for the accomplishing of God’s purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.
Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner’s Monthly for June, 1890: “Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God’s help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.” He refuses to believe that it is all the result of “luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him: “Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”
(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men’s lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.
No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature. Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits’ end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.” A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President’s subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.
“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.” For contrast between Nansen’s ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain’s calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But ‘Poor Richard’s’ sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it ‘with a rope around their necks.’ As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that ‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’ And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not ‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’ or any other piece of worldly prudence, but ‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’ ”
(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian’s prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.
Providence prepares the way for men’s conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe: “I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.” In Psalm 32, David celebrates not only God’s pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading: “I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee” (verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that we know the design, but that there is a design. Instance Shelley’s drowning, and Jacob Knapp’s prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher’s attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God’s judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.
Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,” or “the way that is with me,” i. e., my inmost way, life, character; “When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.” 1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God’s providence is all exercised through Christ. 2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V., “causeth us to triumph.” Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul. “Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.” Therefore Paul can call himself “the prisoner of Christ Jesus” (Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
IV. Relations of the Doctrine of Providence
1. To miracles and works of grace.
Particular providence is the agency of God in what seem to us the minor affairs of nature and human life. Special providence is only an instance of God’s particular providence which has special relation to us or makes peculiar impression upon us. It is special, not as respects the means which God makes use of, but as respects the effect produced upon us. In special providence we have only a more impressive manifestation of God’s universal control.
Miracles and works of grace like regeneration are not to be regarded as belonging to a different order of things from God’s special providences. They too, like special providences, may have their natural connections and antecedents, although they more readily suggest their divine authorship. Nature and God are not mutually exclusive,—nature is rather God’s method of working. Since nature is only the manifestation of God, special providence, miracle, and regeneration are simply different degrees of extraordinary nature. Certain of the wonders of Scripture, such as the destruction of Sennacherib’s army and the dividing of the Red Sea, the plagues of Egypt, the flight of quails, and the draught of fishes, can be counted as exaggerations of natural forces, while at the same time they are operations of the wonder-working God.
The falling of snow from a roof is an example of ordinary (or particular) providence. But if a man is killed by it, it becomes a special providence to him and to others who are thereby taught the insecurity of life. So the providing of coal for fuel in the geologic ages may be regarded by different persons in the light either of a general or of a special providence. In all the operations of nature and all the events of life God’s providence is exhibited. That providence becomes special, when it manifestly suggests some care of God for us or some duty of ours to God. Savage, Life beyond Death, 285—“Mary A. Livermore’s life was saved during her travels in the West by her hearing and instantly obeying what seemed to her a voice. She did not know where it came from; but she leaped, as the voice ordered, from one side of a car to the other, and instantly the side where she had been sitting was crushed in and utterly demolished.” In a similar way, the life of Dr. Oncken was saved in the railroad disaster at Norwalk.
Trench gives the name of “providential miracles” to those Scripture wonders which may be explained as wrought through the agency of natural laws (see Trench, Miracles, 19). Mozley also (Miracles, 117-120) calls these wonders miracles, because of the predictive word of God which accompanied them. He says that the difference in effect between miracles and special providences is that the latter give some warrant, while the former give full warrant, for believing that they are wrought by God. He calls special providences “invisible miracles.” Bp. of Southampton, Place of Miracles, 12, 13—“The art of Bezaleel in constructing the tabernacle, and the plans of generals like Moses and Joshua, Gideon, Barak, and David, are in the Old Testament ascribed to the direct inspiration of God. A less religious writer would have ascribed them to the instinct of military skill. No miracle is necessarily involved, when, in devising the system of ceremonial law it is said: _‘__Jehovah spake unto Moses__’__ (Num. 5:1)_. God is everywhere present in the history of Israel, but miracles are strikingly rare.” We prefer to say that the line between the natural and the supernatural, between special providence and miracle, is an arbitrary one, and that the same event may often be regarded either as special providence or as miracle, according as we look at it from the point of view of its relation to other events or from the point of view of its relation to God.
E. G. Robinson: “If Vesuvius should send up ashes and lava, and a strong wind should scatter them, it could be said to rain fire and brimstone, as at Sodom and Gomorrha.” There is abundant evident of volcanic action at the Dead Sea. See article on the Physical Preparation for Israel in Palestine, by G. Frederick Wright, in Bib. Sac., April, 1901:364. The three great miracles—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, the parting of the waters of the Jordan, the falling down of the walls of Jericho—are described as effect of volcanic eruption, elevation of the bed of the river by a landslide, and earthquake-shock overthrowing the walls. Salt slime thrown up may have enveloped Lot’s wife and turned her into “a mound of salt” (Gen. 19:26). In like manner, some of Jesus’ works of healing, as for instance those wrought upon paralytics and epileptics, may be susceptible of natural explanation, while yet they show that Christ is absolute Lord of nature. For the naturalistic view, see Tyndall on Miracles and Special Providences, in Fragments of Science, 45, 418. Per contra, see Farrar, on Divine Providence and General Laws, in Science and Theology, 54-80; Row, Bampton Lect. on Christian Evidences, 109-115; Godet, Defence of Christian Faith, Chap. 2; Bowne, The Immanence of God, 56-65.
2. To prayer and its answer
What has been said with regard to God’s connection with nature suggests the question, how God can answer prayer consistently with the fixity of natural law.
Tyndall (see reference above), while repelling the charge of denying that God can answer prayer at all, yet does deny that he can answer it without a miracle. He says expressly “that without a disturbance of natural law quite as serious as the stoppage of an eclipse, or the rolling of the St. Lawrence up the falls of Niagara, no act of humiliation, individual or national, could call one shower from heaven or deflect toward us a single beam of the sun.” In reply we would remark:
A. Negatively, that the true solution is not to be reached:
(a) By making the sole effect of prayer to be its reflex influence upon the petitioner.—Prayer presupposes a God who hears and answers. It will not be offered, unless it is believed to accomplish objective as well as subjective results.
According to the first view mentioned above, prayer is a mere spiritual gymnastics—an effort to lift ourselves from the ground by tugging at our own boot-straps. David Hume said well, after hearing a sermon by Dr. Leechman: “We can make use of no expression or even thought in prayers and entreaties which does not imply that these prayers have an influence.” See Tyndall on Prayer and Natural Law, in Fragments of Science, 35. Will men pray to a God who is both deaf and dumb? Will the sailor on the bowsprit whistle to the wind for the sake of improving his voice? Horace Bushnell called this perversion of prayer a “mere dumb-bell exercise.” Baron Munchausen pulled himself out of the bog in China by tugging away at his own pigtail.
Hyde, God’s Education of Man, 154, 155—“Prayer is not the reflex action of my will upon itself, but rather the communion of two wills, in which the finite comes into connection with the Infinite, and, like the trolley, appropriates its purpose and power.” Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 42, apparently follows Schleiermacher in unduly limiting prayer to general petitions which receive only a subjective answer. He tells us that “Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer in response to a request for directions how to pray. Yet we look in vain therein for requests for special gifts of grace, or for particular good things, even though they are spiritual. The name, the will, the kingdom of God—these are the things which are the objects of petition.” Harnack forgets that the same Christ said also: “All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them” (Mark 11:24).
(b) Nor by holding that God answers prayer simply by spiritual means, such as the action of the Holy Spirit upon the spirit of man.—The realm of spirit is no less subject to law than the realm of matter. Scripture and experience, moreover, alike testify that in answer to prayer events take place in the outward world which would not have taken place if prayer had not gone before.
According to this second theory, God feeds the starving Elijah, not by a distinct message from heaven but by giving a compassionate disposition to the widow of Zarephath so that she is moved to help the prophet. 1 K. 17:9—“behold, I have commanded a widow there to sustain thee.” But God could also feed Elijah by the ravens and the angel (1 K. 17:4; 19:15), and the pouring rain that followed Elijah’s prayer (1 K. 18:42-45) cannot be explained as a subjective spiritual phenomenon. Diman, Theistic Argument, 268—“Our charts map out not only the solid shore but the windings of the ocean currents, and we look into the morning papers to ascertain the gathering of storms on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains.” But law rules in the realm of spirit as well as in the realm of nature. See Baden Powell, in Essays and Reviews, 106-162; Knight, Studies in Philosophy and Literature, 340-404; George I. Chace, discourse before the Porter Rhet. Soc. of Andover, August, 1854. Governor Rice in Washington is moved to send money to a starving family in New York, and to secure employment for them. Though he has had no information with regard to their need, they have knelt in prayer for help just before the coming of the aid.
(c) Nor by maintaining that God suspends or breaks in upon the order of nature, in answering every prayer that is offered.—This view does not take account of natural laws as having objective existence, and as revealing the order of God’s being. Omnipotence might thus suspend natural law, but wisdom, so far as we can see, would not.
This third theory might well be held by those who see in nature no force but the all-working will of God. But the properties and powers of matter are revelations of the divine will, and the human will has only a relative independence in the universe. To desire that God would answer all our prayers is to desire omnipotence without omniscience. All true prayer is therefore an expression of the one petition: “Thy will be done” (Mat. 6:10). E. G. Robinson: “It takes much common sense to pray, and many prayers are destitute of this quality. Man needs to pray audibly even in his private prayers, to get the full benefit of them. One of the chief benefits of the English liturgy is that the individual minister is lost sight of. Protestantism makes you work; in Romanism the church will do it all for you.”
(d) Nor by considering prayer as a physical force, linked in each case to its answer, as physical cause is linked to physical effect.—Prayer is not a force acting directly upon nature; else there would be no discretion as to its answer. It can accomplish results in nature, only as it influences God.
We educate our children in two ways: first, by training them to do for themselves what they can do; and, secondly, by encouraging them to seek our help in matters beyond their power. So God educates us, first, by impersonal law, and, secondly, by personal dependence. He teaches us both to work and to ask. Notice the “perfect unwisdom of modern scientists who place themselves under the training of impersonal law, to the exclusion of that higher and better training which is under personality” (Hopkins, Sermon on Prayer-gauge, 16).
It seems more in accordance with both Scripture and reason to say that:
B. God may answer prayer, even when that answer involves changes in the sequences of nature,—
(a) By new combinations of natural forces, in regions withdrawn from our observation, so that effects are produced which these same forces left to themselves would never have accomplished. As man combines the laws of chemical attraction and of combustion, to fire the gunpowder and split the rock asunder, so God may combine the laws of nature to bring about answers to prayer. In all this there may be no suspension or violation of law, but a use of law unknown to us.
Hopkins, Sermon on the Prayer-gauge: “Nature is uniform in her processes but not in her results. Do you say that water cannot run uphill? Yes, it can and does. Whenever man constructs a milldam the water runs up the environing hills till it reaches the top of the milldam. Man can make a spark of electricity do his bidding; why cannot God use a bolt of electricity? Laws are not our masters, but our servants. They do our bidding all the better because they are uniform. And our servants are not God’s masters.” Kendall Brooks: “The master of a musical instrument can vary without limit the combination of sounds and the melodies which these combinations can produce. The laws of the instrument are not changed, but in their unchanging steadfastness produce an infinite variety of tunes. It is necessary that they should be unchanging in order to secure a desired result. So nature, which exercises the infinite skill of the divine Master, is governed by unvarying laws; but he, by these laws, produces an infinite variety of results.”
Hodge, Popular Lectures, 45, 99—“The system of natural laws is far more flexible in God’s hands than it is in ours. We act on second causes externally; God acts on them internally. We act upon them at only a few isolated points; God acts upon every point of the system at the same time. The whole of nature may be as plastic to his will as the air in the organs of the great singer who articulates it into a fit expression of every thought and passion of his soaring soul.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 155—“If all the chemical elements of our solar system preëxisted in the fiery cosmic mist, there must have been a time when quite suddenly the attractions between these elements overcame the degree of caloric force which held them apart, and the rush of elements into chemical union must have been consummated with inconceivable rapidity. Uniformitarianism is not universal.”
Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, chap. 2—“By a little increase of centrifugal force the elliptical orbit is changed into a parabola, and the planet becomes a comet. By a little reduction in temperature water becomes solid and loses many of its powers. So unexpected results are brought about and surprises as revolutionary as if a Supreme Power immediately intervened.” William James, Address before Soc. for Psych. Research: “Thought-transference may involve a critical point, as the physicists call it, which is passed only when certain psychic conditions are realized, and otherwise not reached at all—just as a big conflagration will break out at a certain temperature, below which no conflagration whatever, whether big or little, can occur.” Tennyson, Life, 1:324—“Prayer is like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels, when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide.”
Since prayer is nothing more nor less than appeal to a personal and present God, whose granting or withholding of the requested blessing is believed to be determined by the prayer itself, we must conclude that prayer moves God, or, in other words, induces the putting forth on his part of an imperative volition.
The view that in answering prayer God combines natural forces is elaborated by Chalmers, Works, 2:314, and 7:234. See Diman, Theistic Argument, 111—“When laws are conceived of, not as single, but as combined, instead of being immutable in their operation, they are the agencies of ceaseless change. Phenomena are governed, not by invariable forces, but by endlessly varying combinations of invariable forces.” Diman seems to have followed Argyll, Reign of Law, 100.
Janet, Final Causes, 219—“I kindle a fire in my grate. I only intervene to produce and combine together the different agents whose natural action behooves to produce the effect I have need of; but the first step once taken, all the phenomena constituting combustion engender each other, conformably to their laws, without a new intervention of the agent; so that an observer who should study the series of these phenomena, without perceiving the first hand that had prepared all, could not seize that hand in any especial act, and yet there is a preconceived plan and combination.”
Hopkins, Sermon on Prayer-gauge: Man, by sprinkling plaster on his field, may cause the corn to grow more luxuriantly; by kindling great fires and by firing cannon, he may cause rain; and God can surely, in answer to prayer, do as much as man can. Lewes says that the fundamental character of all theological philosophy is conceiving of phenomena as subject to supernatural volition, and consequently as eminently and irregularly variable. This notion, he says, is refuted, first, by exact and rational prevision of phenomena, and, secondly, by the possibility of our modifying these phenomena so as to promote our own advantage. But we ask in reply: If we can modify them, cannot God? But, lest this should seem to imply mutability in God or inconsistency in nature, we remark, in addition, that:
(b) God may have so preärranged the laws of the material universe and the events of history that, while the answer to prayer is an expression of his will, it is granted through the working of natural agencies, and in perfect accordance with the general principle that results, both temporal and spiritual, are to be attained by intelligent creatures through the use of the appropriate and appointed means.
J. P. Cooke, Credentials of Science, 194—“The Jacquard loom of itself would weave a perfectly uniform plain fabric; the perforated cards determine a selection of the threads, and through a combination of these variable conditions, so complex that the observer cannot follow their intricate workings, the predesigned pattern appears.” E. G. Robinson: “The most formidable objection to this theory is the apparent countenance it lends to the doctrine of necessitarianism. But if it presupposes that free actions have been taken into account, it cannot easily be shown to be false.” The bishop who was asked by his curate to sanction prayers for rain was unduly sceptical when he replied: “First consult the barometer.” Phillips Brooks: “Prayer is not the conquering of God’s reluctance, but the taking hold of God’s willingness.”
The Pilgrims at Plymouth, somewhere about 1628, prayed for rain. They met at 9 A. M., and continued in prayer for eight or nine hours. While they were assembled clouds gathered, and the next morning began rains which, with some intervals, lasted fourteen days. John Easter was many years ago an evangelist in Virginia. A large out-door meeting was being held. Many thousands had assembled, when heavy storm clouds began to gather. There was no shelter to which the multitudes could retreat. The rain had already reached the adjoining fields when John Easter cried: “Brethren, be still, while I call upon God to stay the storm till the gospel is preached to this multitude!” Then he knelt and prayed that the audience might be spared the rain, and that after they had gone to their homes there might be refreshing showers. Behold, the clouds parted as they came near, and passed to either side of the crowd and then closed again, leaving the place dry where the audience had assembled, and the next day the postponed showers came down upon the ground that had been the day before omitted.
Since God is immanent in nature, an answer to prayer, coming about through the intervention of natural law, may be as real a revelation of God’s personal care as if the laws of nature were suspended, and God interposed by an exercise of his creative power. Prayer and its answer, though having God’s immediate volition as their connecting bond, may yet be provided for in the original plan of the universe.
The universe does not exist for itself, but for moral ends and moral beings, to reveal God and to furnish facilities of intercourse between God and intelligent creatures. Bishop Berkeley: “The universe is God’s ceaseless conversation with his creatures.” The universe certainly subserves moral ends—the discouragement of vice and the reward of virtue; why not spiritual ends also? When we remember that there is no true prayer which God does not inspire; that every true prayer is part of the plan of the universe linked in with all the rest and provided for at the beginning; that God is in nature and in mind, supervising all their movements and making all fulfill his will and reveal his personal care; that God can adjust the forces of nature to each other far more skilfully than can man when man produces effects which nature of herself could never accomplish; that God is not confined to nature or her forces, but can work by his creative and omnipotent will where other means are not sufficient,—we need have no fear, either that natural law will bar God’s answers to prayer, or that these answers will cause a shock or jar in the system of the universe.
Matheson, Messages of the Old Religions, 321, 322—“Hebrew poetry never deals with outward nature for its own sake. The eye never rests on beauty for itself alone. The heavens are the work of God’s hands, the earth is God’s footstool, the winds are God’s ministers, the stars are God’s host, the thunder is God’s voice. What we call Nature the Jew called God.” Miss Heloise E. Hersey: “Plato in the Phædrus sets forth in a splendid myth the means by which the gods refresh themselves. Once a year, in a mighty host, they drive their chariots up the steep to the topmost vault of heaven. Thence they may behold all the wonders and the secrets of the universe; and, quickened by the sight of the great plain of truth, they return home replenished and made glad by the celestial vision.” Abp. Trench, Poems, 134—“Lord, what a change within us one short hour Spent in thy presence will prevail to make—What heavy burdens from our bosoms take, What parched grounds refresh as with a shower! We kneel, and all around us seems to lower; We rise, and all, the distant and the near, Stands forth in sunny outline, brave and clear; We kneel how weak, we rise how full of power! Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong, Or others—that we are not always strong; That we are ever overborne with care; That we should ever weak or heartless be, Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer, And joy and strength and courage are with thee?” See Calderwood, Science and Religion, 299-309; McCosh, Divine Government, 215; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 178-203; Hamilton, Autology, 690-694. See also Jellett, Donnellan Lectures on the Efficacy of Prayer; Butterworth, Story of Notable Prayers; Patton, Prayer and its Answers; Monrad, World of Prayer; Prime, Power of Prayer; Phelps, The Still Hour; Haven, and Bickersteth, on Prayer; Prayer for Colleges; Cox, in Expositor, 1877: chap. 3; Faunce, Prayer as a Theory and a Fact; Trumbull, Prayer, Its Nature and Scope.
C. If asked whether this relation between prayer and its providential answer can be scientifically tested, we reply that it may be tested just as a father’s love may be tested by a dutiful son.
(a) There is a general proof of it in the past experience of the Christian and in the past history of the church.
Ps. 116:1-8—“I love Jehovah because he heareth my voice and my supplications.” Luther prays for the dying Melanchthon, and he recovers. George Müller trusts to prayer, and builds his great orphan-houses. For a multitude of instances, see Prime, Answers to Prayer. Charles H. Spurgeon: “If there is any fact that is proved, it is that God hears prayer. If there is any scientific statement that is capable of mathematical proof, this is.” Mr. Spurgeon’s language is rhetorical: he means simply that God’s answers to prayer remove all reasonable doubt. Adoniram Judson: “I never was deeply interested in any object, I never prayed sincerely and earnestly for anything, but it came; at some time—no matter at how distant a day—somehow, in some shape, probably the last I should have devised—it came. And yet I have always had so little faith! May God forgive me, and while he condescends to use me as his instrument, wipe the sin of unbelief from my heart!”
(b) In condescension to human blindness, God may sometimes submit to a formal test of his faithfulness and power,—as in the case of Elijah and the priests of Baal.
Is. 7:10-13—Ahaz is rebuked for not asking a sign,—in him it indicated unbelief. 1 K. 18:36-38—Elijah said, “let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel.... Then the fire of Jehovah fell, and consumed the burnt offering.” Romaine speaks of “a year famous for believing.” Mat 21:21, 22—“even if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” “Impossible?” said Napoleon; “then it shall be done!” Arthur Hallam, quoted in Tennyson’s Life, 1:44—“With respect to prayer, you ask how I am to distinguish the operations of God in me from the motions of my own heart. Why should you distinguish them, or how do you know that there is any distinction? Is God less God because he acts by general laws when he deals with the common elements of nature?” “Watch in prayer to see what cometh. Foolish boys that knock at a door in wantonness, will not stay till somebody open to them; but a man that hath business will knock, and knock again, till he gets his answer.”
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 102, 103—“God is not beyond nature simply,—he is within it. In nature and in mind we must find the action of his power. There is no need of his being a third factor over and above the life of nature and the life of man.” Hartley Coleridge: “Be not afraid to pray,—to pray is right. Pray if thou canst with hope, but ever pray, Though hope be weak, or sick with long delay; Pray in the darkness, if there be no light. Far is the time, remote from human sight, When war and discord on the earth shall cease; Yet every prayer for universal peace Avails the blessed time to expedite. Whate’er is good to wish, ask that of heaven, Though it be what thou canst not hope to see; Pray to be perfect, though the material leaven Forbid the spirit so on earth to be; But if for any wish thou dar’st not pray, Then pray to God to cast that wish away.”
(c) When proof sufficient to convince the candid inquirer has been already given, it may not consist with the divine majesty to abide a test imposed by mere curiosity or scepticism,—as in the case of the Jews who sought a sign from heaven.
Mat. 12:39—“An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet.” Tyndall’s prayer-gauge would ensure a conflict of prayers. Since our present life is a moral probation, delay in the answer to our prayers, and even the denial of specific things for which we pray, may be only signs of God’s faithfulness and love. George Müller: “I myself have been bringing certain requests before God now for seventeen years and six months, and never a day has passed without my praying concerning them all this time; yet the full answer has not come up to the present. But I look for it; I confidently expect it.” Christ’s prayer, “let this cup pass away from me” (Mat. 26:39), and Paul’s prayer that the “thorn in the flesh” might depart from him (2 Cor. 12:7, 8), were not answered in the precise way requested. No more are our prayers always answered in the way we expect. Christ’s prayer was not answered by the literal removing of the cup, because the drinking of the cup was really his glory; and Paul’s prayer was not answered by the literal removal of the thorn, because the thorn was needful for his own perfecting. In the case of both Jesus and Paul, there were larger interests to be consulted than their own freedom from suffering.
(d) Since God’s will is the link between prayer and its answer, there can be no such thing as a physical demonstration of its efficacy in any proposed case. Physical tests have no application to things into which free will enters as a constitutive element. But there are moral tests, and moral tests are as scientific as physical tests can be.
Diman, Theistic Argument, 576, alludes to Goldwin Smith’s denial that any scientific method can be applied to history because it would make man a necessary link in a chain of cause and effect and so would deny his free will. But Diman says this is no more impossible than the development of the individual according to a fixed law of growth, while yet free will is sedulously respected. Froude says history is not a science, because no science could foretell Mohammedanism or Buddhism; and Goldwin Smith says that “prediction is the crown of all science.” But, as Diman remarks: “geometry, geology, physiology, are sciences, yet they do not predict.” Buckle brought history into contempt by asserting that it could be analyzed and referred solely to intellectual laws and forces. To all this we reply that there may be scientific tests which are not physical, or even intellectual, but only moral. Such a test God urges his people to use, in Mal. 3:10—“Bring ye the whole tithe into the storehouse ... and prove me now herewith, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.” All such prayer is a reflection of Christ’s words—some fragment of his teaching transformed into a supplication (John 15:7; see Westcott, Bib. Com., in loco); all such prayer is moreover the work of the Spirit of God (Rom. 8:26, 27). It is therefore sure of an answer.
But the test of prayer proposed by Tyndall is not applicable to the thing to be tested by it. Hopkins, Prayer and the Prayer-gauge, 22 sq.—“We cannot measure wheat by the yard, or the weight of a discourse with a pair of scales.... God’s wisdom might see that it was not best for the petitioners, nor for the objects of their petition, to grant their request. Christians therefore could not, without special divine authorization, rest their faith upon the results of such a test.... Why may we not ask for great changes in nature? For the same reason that a well-informed child does not ask for the moon as a plaything.... There are two limitations upon prayer. First, except by special direction of God, we cannot ask for a miracle, for the same reason that a child could not ask his father to burn the house down. Nature is the house we live in. Secondly, we cannot ask for anything under the laws of nature which would contravene the object of those laws. Whatever we can do for ourselves under these laws, God expects us to do. If the child is cold, let him go near the fire,—not beg his father to carry him.”
Herbert Spencer’s Sociology is only social physics. He denies freedom, and declares anyone who will affix D. V. to the announcement of the Mildmay Conference to be incapable of understanding sociology. Prevision excludes divine or human will. But Mr. Spencer intimates that the evils of natural selection may be modified by artificial selection. What is this but the interference of will? And if man can interfere, cannot God do the same? Yet the wise child will not expect the father to give everything he asks for. Nor will the father who loves his child give him the razor to play with, or stuff him with unwholesome sweets, simply because the child asks these things. If the engineer of the ocean steamer should give me permission to press the lever that sets all the machinery in motion, I should decline to use my power and should prefer to leave such matters to him, unless he first suggested it and showed me how. So the Holy Spirit “_helpeth our infirmity; for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself __ maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered_” (Rom. 8:26). And we ought not to talk of “submitting” to perfect Wisdom, or of “being resigned” to perfect Love. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 2:1—“What they [the gods] do delay, they do not deny.... We, ignorant of ourselves, Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers Deny us for our good; so find we profit By losing of our prayers.” See Thornton, Old-Fashioned Ethics, 286-297. Per contra, see Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 277-294.
3. To Christian activity
Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.
(a) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.
Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as “cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.” Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner: “Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.” Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote 2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa “sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.” They forget that the “physicians” alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides: “Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”
Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God’s regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning’s Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.” Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who had escaped drowning.” “So like Provvy!” Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared. “Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.” We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12, 13).
Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God. “If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?” Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith? “Tie your camel,” said Mohammed, “and commit it to God.” Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor’s application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.” Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”; Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.” On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.
George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says: “I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord’s will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God’s will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”
We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm. “Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.” As God feeds “the birds of the heaven” (Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion: 1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.” The test is the revealed word of God: Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.” See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.
(b) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential working is so adjusted to the Christian’s nature and necessities as to furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious character, and needed help and comfort in trial.
In interpreting God’s providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances. While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a fine sense of God’s providential purposes with regard to us, which will make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain it to others.
The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, in Ps. 106:13, “They waited not for his counsel,” the true believer has wisdom given him from above. Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”; Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”; Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment” (αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment); James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth (τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) to all liberally and upbraideth not”; John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”; Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”
God’s Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck: “The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God’s secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.” Hutton, Essays: “Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.” So the Christian hymn, “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!” likens God’s leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself “the prisoner of Christ Jesus” (Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God’s providence. Greek proverb: “He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.” On God’s Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.
Abraham “went out, not knowing whither he went” (Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance. Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.” So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson: “Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.” Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon: “Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.” Chinese proverb: “The good God never smites with both hands.” “Tact is a sort of psychical automatism” (Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is “led by the Spirit of God” (Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say, “for the possibility of being mistaken.”
When Luther’s friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God’s providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God’s will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man’s nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God’s will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”
Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared: “It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.” How much better is Wordsworth’s faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe’er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.” Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”
4. To the evil acts of free agents
(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.
Bp. Wordsworth: “God foresees evil deeds, but never forces them.” “God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.” Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man’s sin. Man’s powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.
(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man’s intent, has set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas’s treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel’s apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”
Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters’ bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”
The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra’s cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.” See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster’s speech in the case of Knapp at Salem: “It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”
(c) In cases of persistent iniquity, God’s providence still compels the sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been created, namely, the manifestation of God’s holiness. Even though he struggle against God’s plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it. His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.
Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.” Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago: “He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification: “consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.” Pharaoh’s ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson: “My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.” See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.
Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,” i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.” But this means, not that all things are good, but that “_all things work together __ for good_” (Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley: “God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.” Sermon on “The Devil’s Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul’s imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.
“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made. ‘Nothing can be done with that,’ the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David’s grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter’s pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord’s forgiveness and gentle dealing.” So “men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things” (Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).
Section IV.—Good And Evil Angels
As ministers of divine providence there is a class of finite beings, greater in intelligence and power than man in his present state, some of whom positively serve God’s purpose by holiness and voluntary execution of his will, some negatively, by giving examples to the universe of defeated and punished rebellion, and by illustrating God’s distinguishing grace in man’s salvation.
The scholastic subtleties which encumbered this doctrine in the Middle Ages, and the exaggerated representations of the power of evil spirits which then prevailed, have led, by a natural reaction, to an undue depreciation of it in more recent times.
For scholastic discussions, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa (ed. Migne), 1:833-993. The scholastics debated the questions, how many angels could stand at once on the point of a needle (relation of angels to space); whether an angel could be in two places at the same time; how great was the interval between the creation of angels and their fall; whether the sin of the first angel caused the sin of the rest; whether as many retained their integrity as fell; whether our atmosphere is the place of punishment for fallen angels; whether guardian-angels have charge of children from baptism, from birth, or while the infant is yet in the womb of the mother; even the excrements of angels were subjects of discussion, for if there was “angels’ food” (Ps. 78:25), and if angels ate (Gen. 18:8), it was argued that we must take the logical consequences.
Dante makes the creation of angels simultaneous with that of the universe at large. “The fall of the rebel angels he considers to have taken place within twenty seconds of their creation, and to have originated in the pride which made Lucifer unwilling to await the time prefixed by his Maker for enlightening him with perfect knowledge”—see Rossetti, Shadow of Dante, 14, 15. Milton, unlike Dante, puts the creation of angels ages before the creation of man. He tells us that Satan’s first name in heaven is now lost. The sublime associations with which Milton surrounds the adversary diminish our abhorrence of the evil one. Satan has been called the hero of the Paradise Lost. Dante’s representation is much more true to Scripture. But we must not go to the extreme of giving ludicrous designations to the devil. This indicates and causes scepticism as to his existence.
In mediæval times men’s minds were weighed down by the terror of the spirit of evil. It was thought possible to sell one’s soul to Satan, and such compacts were written with blood. Goethe represents Mephistopheles as saying to Faust: “I to thy service here agree to bind me, To run and never rest at call of thee; When over yonder thou shalt find me, Then thou shalt do as much for me.” The cathedrals cultivated and perpetuated this superstition, by the figures of malignant demons which grinned from the gargoyles of their roofs and the capitals of their columns, and popular preaching exalted Satan to the rank of a rival god—a god more feared than was the true and living God. Satan was pictured as having horns and hoofs—an image of the sensual and bestial—which led Cuvier to remark that the adversary could not devour, because horns and hoofs indicated not a carnivorous but a ruminant quadruped.
But there is certainly a possibility that the ascending scale of created intelligences does not reach its topmost point in man. As the distance between man and the lowest forms of life is filled in with numberless gradations of being, so it is possible that between man and God there exist creatures of higher than human intelligence. This possibility is turned to certainty by the express declarations of Scripture. The doctrine is interwoven with the later as well as with the earlier books of revelation.
Quenstedt (Theol., 1:629) regards the existence of angels as antecedently probable, because there are no gaps in creation; nature does not proceed per saltum. As we have (1) beings purely corporeal, as stones; (2) beings partly corporeal and partly spiritual, as men: so we should expect in creation (3) beings wholly spiritual, as angels. Godet, in his Biblical Studies of the O. T., 1-29, suggests another series of gradations. As we have (1) vegetables—species without individuality; (2) animals—individuality in bondage to species; and (3) men—species overpowered by individuality: so we may expect (4) angels—individuality without species.
If souls live after death, there is certainly a class of disembodied spirits. It is not impossible that God may have created spirits without bodies. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 110—“The existence of lesser deities in all heathen mythologies, and the disposition of man everywhere to believe in beings superior to himself and inferior to the supreme God, is a presumptive argument in favor of their existence.” Locke: “That there should be more species of intelligent creatures above us than there are of sensible and material below us, is probable to me from hence, that in all the visible and corporeal world we see no chasms and gaps.” Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 193—“A man may certainly believe in the existence of angels upon the testimony of one who claims to have come from the heavenly world, if he can believe in the Ornithorhyncus upon the testimony of travelers.” Tennyson, Two Voices: “This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse. Think you this world of hopes and fears Could find no statelier than his peers In yonder hundred million spheres?”
The doctrine of angels affords a barrier against the false conception of this world as including the whole spiritual universe. Earth is only part of a larger organism. As Christianity has united Jew and Gentile, so hereafter will it blend our own and other orders of creation: Col. 2:10—“who is the head of all principality and power”—Christ is the head of angels as well as of men; Eph. 1:10—“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth.” On Christ and Angels, see Robertson Smith in The Expositor, second series, vols. 1, 2, 3. On the general subject of angels, see also Whately, Good and Evil Angels; Twesten, transl. in Bib. Sac., 1:768, and 2:108; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:282-337, and 3:251-354; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 78 sq.; Scott, Existence of Evil Spirits; Herzog, Encyclopädie, arts.: Engel, Teufel; Jewett, Diabolology,—the Person and Kingdom of Satan; Alexander, Demonic Possession.
I. Scripture Statements and Imitations
1. As to the nature and attributes of angels.
(a) They are created beings.
Ps. 148:2-5—“Praise ye him, all his angels.... For he commanded, and they were created”; Col. 1:16—“for in him were all things created ... whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers”; cf. 1 Pet. 3:32—“angels and authorities and powers.” God alone is uncreated and eternal. This is implied in 1 Tim. 6:16—“who only hath immortality.”
(b) They are incorporeal beings.
In Heb. 1:14, where a single word is used to designate angels, they are described as “spirits”—“are they not all ministering spirits?” Men, with their twofold nature, material as well as immaterial, could not well be designated as “spirits.” That their being characteristically “spirits” forbids us to regard angels as having a bodily organism, seems implied in Eph. 6:12—“for our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against ... the spiritual hosts [or “things”] of wickedness in the heavenly places”; cf. Eph. 1:3; 2:6. In Gen. 6:2, “sons of God” =, not angels, but descendants of Seth and worshipers of the true God (see Murphy, Com., in loco). In Ps. 78:25 (A. V.), “angels’ food” = manna coming from heaven where angels dwell; better, however, read with Rev. Vers.: “bread of the mighty”—probably meaning angels, though the word “mighty” is nowhere else applied to them; possibly = “bread of princes or nobles,” i. e., the finest, most delicate bread. Mat 22:30—“neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as angels in heaven”—and Luke 20:36—“neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels”—imply only that angels are without distinctions of sex. Saints are to be like angels, not as being incorporeal, but as not having the same sexual relations which they have here.
There are no “souls of angels,” as there are “souls of men” (Rev. 18:13), and we may infer that angels have no bodies for souls to inhabit; see under Essential Elements of Human Nature. Nevius, Demon-Possession, 258, attributes to evil spirits an instinct or longing for a body to possess, even though it be the body of an inferior animal: “So in Scripture we have spirits represented as wandering about to seek rest in bodies, and asking permission to enter into swine” (Mat. 12:43; 8:31). Angels therefore, since they have no bodies, know nothing of growth, age, or death. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 133—“It is precisely because the angels are only spirits, but not souls, that they cannot possess the same rich existence as man, whose soul is the point of union in which spirit and nature meet.”
(c) They are personal—that is, intelligent and voluntary—agents.
2 Sam. 14:20—“wise, according to the wisdom of an angel of God”; Luke 4:34—“I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God”; 2 Tim. 2:26—“snare of the devil ... taken captive by him unto his will”; Rev. 22:9—“See thou do it not” = exercise of will; Rev. 12:12—“The devil is gone down unto you, having great wrath” = set purpose of evil.
(d) They are possessed of superhuman intelligence and power, yet an intelligence and power that has its fixed limits.
Mat. 24:36—“of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven” = their knowledge, though superhuman, is yet finite. 1 Pet. 1:12—“which things angels desire to look into”; Ps. 103:20—“angels ... mighty in strength”; 2 Thess. 1:7—“the angels of his power”; 2 Pet. 2:11—“angels, though greater [than men] in might and power”; Rev. 20:2, 10—“laid hold on the dragon ... and bound him ... cast into the lake of fire.” Compare Ps. 72:18—“God ... Who only doeth wondrous things” = only God can perform miracles. Angels are imperfect compared with God (Job 4:18; 15:15; 25:5).
Power, rather than beauty or intelligence, is their striking characteristic. They are “principalities and powers” (Col. 1:16). They terrify those who behold them (Mat. 28:4). The rolling away of the stone from the sepulchre took strength. A wheel of granite, eight feet in diameter and one foot thick, rolling in a groove, would weigh more than four tons. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 86—“The spiritual might and burning indignation in the face of Stephen reminded the guilty Sanhedrin of an angelic vision.” Even in their tenderest ministrations they strengthen (Luke 22:43; cf. Dan. 10:19). In 1 Tim. 6:15—“King of kings and Lord of lords”—the words “kings” and “lords” (βασιλευόντων and κυριευόντων) may refer to angels. In the case of evil spirits especially, power seems the chief thing in mind, e. g., “the prince of this world,” “the strong man armed,” “the power of darkness,” “rulers of the darkness of this world,” “the great dragon,” “all the power of the enemy,” “all these things will I give thee,” “deliver us from the evil one.”
(e) They are an order of intelligences distinct from man and older than man.
Angels are distinct from man. 1 Cor. 6:3—“we shall judge angels”; Heb. 1:14—“Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation?” They are not glorified human spirits; see Heb. 2:16—“_for verily not to angels doth he give help, but he giveth help to __ the seed of Abraham_”; also 12:22, 23, where “the innumerable hosts of angels” are distinguished from “the church of the firstborn” and “the spirits of just men made perfect.” In Rev. 22:9—“I am a fellow-servant with thee”—“fellow-servant” intimates likeness to men, not in nature, but in service and subordination to God, the proper object of worship. Sunday School Times, Mch. 15, 1902:146—“Angels are spoken of as greater in power and might than man, but that could be said of many a lower animal, or even of whirlwind and fire. Angels are never spoken of as a superior order of spiritual beings. We are to ‘judge angels’ (1 Cor. 6:3), and inferiors are not to judge superiors.”
Angels are an order of intelligences older than man. The Fathers made the creation of angels simultaneous with the original calling into being of the elements, perhaps basing their opinion on the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus, 18:1—“he that liveth eternally created all things together.” In Job 38:7, the Hebrews parallelism makes “morning stars”—“sons of God,” so that angels are spoken of as present at certain stages of God’s creative work. The mention of “the serpent” in Gen. 3:1 implies the fall of Satan before the fall of man. We may infer that the creation of angels took place before the creation of man—the lower before the higher. In Gen. 2:1, “all the host of them,” which God had created, may be intended to include angels. Man was the crowning work of creation, created after angels were created. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 81—“Angels were perhaps created before the material heavens and earth—a spiritual substratum in which the material things were planted, a preparatory creation to receive what was to follow. In the vision of Jacob they ascend first and descend after; their natural place is in the world below.”
The constant representation of angels as personal beings in Scripture cannot be explained as a personification of abstract good and evil, in accommodation to Jewish superstitions, without wresting many narrative passages from their obvious sense; implying on the part of Christ either dissimulation or ignorance as to an important point of doctrine; and surrendering belief in the inspiration of the Old Testament from which these Jewish views of angelic beings were derived.
Jesus accommodated himself to the popular belief in respect at least to “Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22), and he confessed ignorance with regard to the time of the end (Mark 13:32); see Rush Rhees, Life of Jesus of Nazareth, 245-248. But in the former case his hearers probably understood him to speak figuratively and rhetorically, while in the latter case there was no teaching of the false but only limitation of knowledge with regard to the true. Our Lord did not hesitate to contradict Pharisaic belief in the efficacy of ceremonies, and Sadducean denial of resurrection and future life. The doctrine of angels had even stronger hold upon the popular mind than had these errors of the Pharisees and Sadducees. That Jesus did not correct or deny the general belief, but rather himself expressed and confirmed it, implies that the belief was rational and Scriptural. For one of the best statements of the argument for the existence of evil spirits, see Broadus, Com. on Mat. 8:28.
Eph. 3:10—“to the intent that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God”—excludes the hypothesis that angels are simply abstract conceptions of good or evil. We speak of “moon-struck” people (lunatics), only when we know that nobody supposes us to believe in the power of the moon to cause madness. But Christ’s contemporaries did suppose him to believe in angelic spirits, good and evil. If this belief was an error, it was by no means a harmless one, and the benevolence as well as the veracity of Christ would have led him to correct it. So too, if Paul had known that there were no such beings as angels, he could not honestly have contented himself with forbidding the Colossians to worship them (Col 2:18) but would have denied their existence, as he denied the existence of heathen gods (1 Cor. 8:4).
Theodore Parker said it was very evident that Jesus Christ believed in a personal devil. Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 35—“There can be no doubt that Jesus shared with his contemporaries the representation of two kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the devil.” Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:164—Jesus “makes it appear as if Satan was the immediate tempter. I am far from thinking that he does so in a merely figurative way. Beyond all doubt Jesus accepted the contemporary ideas as to the real existence of Satan, and accordingly, in the particular cases of disease referred to, he supposes a real Satanic temptation.” Maurice, Theological Essays, 32, 34—“The acknowledgment of an evil spirit is characteristic of Christianity.” H. B. Smith, System, 261—“It would appear that the power of Satan in the world reached its culminating point at the time of Christ, and has been less ever since.”
The same remark applies to the view which regards Satan as but a collective term for all evil beings, human or superhuman. The Scripture representations of the progressive rage of the great adversary, from his first assault on human virtue in Genesis to his final overthrow in Revelation, join with the testimony of Christ just mentioned, to forbid any other conclusion than this, that there is a personal being of great power, who carries on organized opposition to the divine government.
Crane, The Religion of To-morrow, 299 sq.—“We well say ‘personal devil,’ for there is no devil but personality.” We cannot deny the personality of Satan except upon principles which would compel us to deny the existence of good angels, the personality of the Holy Spirit, and the personality of God the Father,—we may add, even the personality of the human soul. Says Nigel Penruddock in Lord Beaconsfield’s “Endymion”: “Give me a single argument against his [Satan’s] personality, which is not applicable to the personality of the Deity.” One of the most ingenious devices of Satan is that of persuading men that he has no existence. Next to this is the device of substituting for belief in a personal devil the belief in a merely impersonal spirit of evil. Such a substitution we find in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:311—“The idea of the devil was a welcome expedient for the need of advanced religious reflection, to put God out of relation to the evil and badness of the world.” Pfleiderer tells us that the early optimism of the Hebrews, like that of the Greeks, gave place in later times to pessimism and despair. But the Hebrews still had hope of deliverance by the Messiah and an apocalyptic reign of good.
For the view that Satan is merely a collective term for all evil beings, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 131-137. Bushnell, holding moral evil to be a necessary “condition privative” of all finite beings as such, believes that “good angels have all been passed through and helped up out of a fall, as the redeemed of mankind will be.” “Elect angels” (1 Tim. 5:21) then would mean those saved after falling, not those saved from falling; and “Satan” would be, not the name of a particular person, but the all or total of all bad minds and powers. Per contra, see Smith’s Bible Dictionary, arts.: Angels, Demons, Demoniacs, Satan; Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 16-26. For a comparison of Satan in the Book of Job, with Milton’s Satan in “Paradise Lost,” and Goethe’s Mephistopheles in “Faust,” see Masson, The Three Devils. We may add to this list Dante’s Satan (or Dis) in the “Divine Comedy,” Byron’s Lucifer in “Cain,” and Mrs. Browning’s Lucifer in her “Drama of Exile”; see Gregory, Christian Ethics, 219.
2. As to their number and organization
(a) They are of great multitude.
Deut. 33:2—“Jehovah ... came from the ten thousands of holy ones”; Ps. 68:17—“The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands upon thousands”; Dan. 7:10—“thousands of thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him”; Rev. 5:11—“I heard a voice of many angels ... and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands.” Anselm thought that the number of lost angels was filled up by the number of elect men. Savage, Life after Death, 61—The Pharisees held very exaggerated notions of the number of angelic spirits. They “said that a man, if he threw a stone over his shoulder or cast away a broken piece of pottery, asked pardon of any spirit that he might possibly have hit in so doing.” So in W. H. H. Murray’s time it was said to be dangerous in the Adirondack to fire a gun,—you might hit a man.
(b) They constitute a company, as distinguished from a race.
Mat. 22:30—“they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as angels in heaven”; Luke 20:36—“neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are sons of God.” We are called “sons of men,” but angels are never called “sons of angels,” but only “sons of God.” They are not developed from one original stock, and no such common nature binds them together as binds together the race of man. They have no common character and history. Each was created separately, and each apostate angel fell by himself. Humanity fell all at once in its first father. Cut down a tree, and you cut down its branches. But angels were so many separate trees. Some lapsed into sin, but some remained holy. See Godet, Bib. Studies O. T., 1-29. This may be one reason why salvation was provided for fallen man, but not for fallen angels. Christ could join himself to humanity by taking the common nature of all. There was no common nature of angels which he could take. See Heb. 2:16—“not to angels doth he give help.” The angels are “sons of God,” as having no earthly parentage and no parentage at all except the divine. Eph. 3:14, 15—“the Father, of whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named,”—not “every family,” as in R. V., for there are no families among the angels. The marginal rendering “fatherhood” is better than “family,”—all the πατριαί are named from the πατήρ. Dodge, Christian Theology, 172—“The bond between angels is simply a mental and moral one. They can gain nothing by inheritance, nothing through domestic and family life, nothing through a society held together by a bond of blood.... Belonging to two worlds and not simply to one, the human soul has in it the springs of a deeper and wider experience than angels can have.... God comes nearer to man than to his angels.” Newman Smyth, Through Science to Faith, 191—“In the resurrection life of man, the species has died; man the individual lives on. Sex shall be no more needed for the sake of life; they shall no more marry, but men and women, the children of marriage, shall be as the angels. Through the death of the human species shall be gained, as the consummation of all, the immortality of the individuals.”
(c) They are of various ranks and endowments.
Col. 1:16—“thrones or dominions or principalities or powers”; 1 Thess. 4:16—“the voice of the archangel”; Jude 9—“Michael the archangel.” Michael (= who is like God?) is the only one expressly called an archangel in Scripture, although Gabriel (= God’s hero) has been called an archangel by Milton. In Scripture, Michael seems the messenger of law and judgment; Gabriel, the messenger of mercy and promise. The fact that Scripture has but one archangel is proof that its doctrine of angels was not, as has sometimes been charged, derived from Babylonian and Persian sources; for there we find seven archangels instead of one. There, moreover, we find the evil spirit enthroned as a god, while in Scripture he is represented as a trembling slave.
Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:51—“The devout and trustful consciousness of the immediate nearness of God, which is expressed in so many beautiful utterances of the Psalmist, appears to be supplanted in later Judaism by a belief in angels, which is closely analogous to the superstitious belief in the saints on the part of the Romish church. It is very significant that the Jews in the time of Jesus could no longer conceive of the promulgation of the law on Sinai, which was to them the foundation of their whole religion, as an immediate revelation of Jehovah to Moses, except as instituted through the mediation of angels (Acts 7:38, 53; Gal. 3:19; Heb. 2:2; Josephus, Ant. 15:5, 3).”
(d) They have an organization.
1 Sam. 1:11—“Jehovah of hosts”; 1 K. 22:19—“Jehovah sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left”; Mat. 26:53—“twelve legions of angels”—suggests the organization of the Roman army; 25:41—“the devil and his angels”; Eph. 2:2—“the prince of the powers in the air”; Rev. 2:13—“Satan’s throne” (not “seat”); 16:10—“throne of the beast”—“a hellish parody of the heavenly kingdom” (Trench). The phrase “host of heaven,” in Deut. 4:19; 17:3; Acts 7:42, probably = the stars; but in Gen. 32:2, “God’s host” = angels, for when Jacob saw the angels he said “this is God’s host.” In general the phrases “God of hosts”, “Lord of hosts” seem to mean “God of angels”, “Lord of angels”: compare 2 Chron. 18:18; Luke 2:13; Rev. 19:14—“the armies which are in heaven.” Yet in Neh. 9:6 and Ps. 33:6 the word “host” seems to include both angels and stars.
Satan is “the ape of God.” He has a throne. He is “the prince of the world” (John 14:30; 16:11), “the prince of the powers of the air” (Eph. 2:2). There is a cosmos and order of evil, as well as a cosmos and order of good, though Christ is stronger than the strong man armed (Luke 11:21) and rules even over Satan. On Satan in the Old Testament, see art. by T. W. Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:22-34. The first mention of Satan is in the account of the Fall in Gen. 3:1-15; the second in Lev. 16:8, where one of the two goats on the day of atonement is said to be “for Azazel,” or Satan; the third where Satan moved David to number Israel (1 Chron. 21:1); the fourth in the book of Job 1:6-12; the fifth in Zech. 3:1-3, where Satan stands as the adversary of Joshua the high priest, but Jehovah addresses Satan and rebukes him. Cheyne, Com. on Isaiah, vol. 1, p. 11, thinks that the stars were first called the hosts of God, with the notion that they were animated creatures. In later times the belief in angels threw into the background the belief in the stars as animated beings; the angels however were connected very closely with the stars. Marlowe, in his Tamburlaine, says: “The moon, the planets, and the meteors light, These angels in their crystal armor fight A doubtful battle.”
With regard to the “cherubim” of Genesis, Exodus, and Ezekiel,—with which the “seraphim” of Isaiah and the “living creatures” of the book of Revelation are to be identified,—the most probable interpretation is that which regards them, not as actual beings of higher rank than man, but as symbolic appearances, intended to represent redeemed humanity, endowed with all the creature perfections lost by the Fall, and made to be the dwelling-place of God.
Some have held that the cherubim are symbols of the divine attributes, or of God’s government over nature; see Smith’s Bib. Dict., art.: Cherub; Alford, Com. on Rev. 4:6-8, and Hulsean Lectures, 1841: vol. 1, Lect. 2; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:278. But whatever of truth belongs to this view may be included in the doctrine stated above. The cherubim are indeed symbols of nature pervaded by the divine energy and subordinated to the divine purposes, but they are symbols of nature only because they are symbols of man in his twofold capacity of image of God and priest of nature. Man, as having a body, is a part of nature; as having a soul, he emerges from nature and gives to nature a voice. Through man, nature, otherwise blind and dead, is able to appreciate and to express the Creator’s glory.
The doctrine of the cherubim embraces the following points: 1. The cherubim are not personal beings, but are artificial, temporary, symbolic figures. 2. While they are not themselves personal existences, they are symbols of personal existence—symbols not of divine or angelic perfections but of human nature (Ex. 1:5—“they had the likeness of a man”; Rev. 5:9—A. V.—“thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood”—so read א, B, and Tregelles; the Eng. and Am. Rev. Vers., however, follow A and Tischendorf, and omit the word “us”). 3. They are emblems of human nature, not in its present stage of development, but possessed of all its original perfections; for this reason the most perfect animal forms—the kinglike courage of the lion, the patient service of the ox, the soaring insight of the eagle—are combined with that of man (Ez. 1 and 10; Rev. 4:6-8). 4. These cherubic forms represent, not merely material or earthly perfections, but human nature spiritualized and sanctified. They are “living creatures” and their life is a holy life of obedience to the divine will (Ez. 1:12—“whither the spirit was to go, they went”). 5. They symbolize a human nature exalted to be the dwelling-place of God. Hence the inner curtains of the tabernacle were inwoven with cherubic figures, and God’s glory was manifested on the mercy-seat between the cherubim (Ex. 37:6-9). While the flaming sword at the gates of Eden was the symbol of justice, the cherubim were symbols of mercy—keeping the “way of the tree of life” for man, until by sacrifice and renewal Paradise should be regained (Gen. 3:24).
In corroboration of this general view, note that angels and cherubim never go together; and that in the closing visions of the book of Revelation these symbolic forms are seen no longer. When redeemed humanity has entered heaven, the figures which typified that humanity, having served their purpose, finally disappear. For fuller elaboration, see A. H. Strong, The Nature and Purpose of the Cherubim, in Philosophy and Religion, 391-399; Fairbairn, Typology, 1:185-208; Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:87; Bib. Sac., 1876:32-51; Bib. Com., 1:49-52—“The winged lions, eagles, and bulls, that guard the entrances of the palace of Nineveh, are worshipers rather than divinities.” It has lately been shown that the winged bull of Assyria was called “Kerub” almost as far back as the time of Moses. The word appears in its Hebrew form 500 years before the Jews had any contact with the Persian dominion. The Jews did not derive it from any Aryan race. It belonged to their own language.
The variable form of the cherubim seems to prove that they are symbolic appearances rather than real beings. A parallel may be found in classical literature. In Horace, Carmina, 3:11, 15, Cerberus has three heads; in 2:13, 34, he has a hundred. Bréal, Semantics suggests that the three heads may be dog-heads, while the hundred heads may be snake-heads. But Cerberus is also represented in Greece as having only one head. Cerberus must therefore be a symbol rather than an actually existing creature. H. W. Congdon of Wyoming, N. Y., held, however, that the cherubim are symbols of God’s life in the universe as a whole. Ez. 28:14-19—“the anointed cherub that covereth”—the power of the King of Tyre was so all-pervading throughout his dominion, his sovereignty so absolute, and his decrees so instantly obeyed, that his rule resembled the divine government over the world. Mr. Congdon regarded the cherubim as a proof of monism. See Margoliouth, The Lord’s Prayer, 159-180. On animal characteristics in man, see Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 105.
3. As to their moral character
(a) They were all created holy.
Gen. 1:31—“God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good”; Jude 6—“angels that kept not their own beginning”—ἀρχήν seems here to mean their beginning in holy character, rather than their original lordship and dominion.
(b) They had a probation.
This we infer from 1 Tim. 5:21—“the elect angels”; cf. 1 Pet. 1:1, 2—“elect ... unto obedience.” If certain angels, like certain men, are “elect ... unto obedience,” it would seem to follow that there was a period of probation, during which their obedience or disobedience determined their future destiny; see Ellicott on 1 Tim. 5:21. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 106-108—“Gen. 3:14—‘Because thou hast done this, cursed art thou’—in the sentence on the serpent, seems to imply that Satan’s day of grace was ended when he seduced man. Thenceforth he was driven to live on dust, to triumph only in sin, to pick up a living out of man, to possess man’s body or soul, to tempt from the good.”
(c) Some preserved their integrity.
Ps. 89:7—“the council of the holy ones”—a designation of angels; Mark 8:38—“the holy angels.” Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4:3—“Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.”
(d) Some fell from their state of innocence.
John 8:44—“He was a murderer from the beginning, and standeth not in the truth, because there is no truth in him”; 2 Pet. 2:4—“angels when they sinned”; Jude 6—“angels who kept not their own beginning, but left their proper habitation.” Shakespeare, Henry VIII, 3:2—“Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition; By that sin fell the angels; how can man then, The image of his Maker, hope to win by it?... How wretched Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favors!... When he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again.”
(e) The good are confirmed in good.
Mat. 6:10—“Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth”; 18:10—“in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven”; 2 Cor. 11:14—“an angel of light.”
(f) The evil are confirmed in evil.
Mat. 13:19—“the evil one”; 1 John 5:18, 19—“the evil one toucheth him not ... the whole world lieth in the evil one”; cf. John 8:44—“Ye are of your father the devil ... When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof”; Mat. 6:13—“deliver us from the evil one.”
From these Scriptural statements we infer that all free creatures pass through a period of probation; that probation does not necessarily involve a fall; that there is possible a sinless development of moral beings. Other Scriptures seem to intimate that the revelation of God in Christ is an object of interest and wonder to other orders of intelligence than our own; that they are drawn in Christ more closely to God and to us; in short, that they are confirmed in their integrity by the cross. See 1 Pet. 1:12—“which things angels desire to look into”; Eph. 3:10—“that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God”; Col. 1:20—“through him to reconcile all things unto himself ... whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens”; Eph. 1:10—“to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”—“the unification of the whole universe in Christ as the divine centre.... The great system is a harp all whose strings are in tune but one, and that one jarring string makes discord throughout the whole. The whole universe shall feel the influence, and shall be reduced to harmony, when that one string, the world in which we live, shall be put in tune by the hand of love and mercy”—freely quoted from Leitch, God’s Glory in the Heavens, 327-330.
It is not impossible that God is using this earth as a breeding-ground from which to populate the universe. Mark Hopkins, Life, 317—“While there shall be gathered at last and preserved, as Paul says, a holy church, and every man shall be perfect and the church shall be spotless.... there will be other forms of perfection in other departments of the universe. And when the great day of restitution shall come and God shall vindicate his government, there may be seen to be coming in from other departments of the universe a long procession of angelic forms, great white legions from Sirius, from Arcturus and the chambers of the South, gathering around the throne of God and that centre around which the universe revolves.”
4. As to their employments
A. The employments of good angels.
(a) They stand in the presence of God and worship him.
Ps. 29:1, 2—“Ascribe unto Jehovah, O ye sons of the mighty, Ascribe unto Jehovah glory and strength. Ascribe unto Jehovah the glory due unto his name. Worship Jehovah in holy array”—Perowne: “Heaven being thought of as one great temple, and all the worshipers therein as clothed in priestly vestments.” Ps. 89:7—“a God very terrible in the council of the holy ones,” i. e., angels—Perowne: “Angels are called an assembly or congregation, as the church above, which like the church below worships and praises God.” Mat. 18:10—“in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” In apparent allusion to this text, Dante represents the saints as dwelling in the presence of God yet at the same time rendering humble service to their fellow men here upon the earth. Just in proportion to their nearness to God and the light they receive from him, is the influence they are able to exert over others.
(b) They rejoice in God’s works.
Job 38:7—“all the sons of God shouted for joy”; Luke 15:10—“there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth”; cf. 2 Tim. 2:25—“if peradventure God may give them repentance.” Dante represents the angels that are nearest to God, the infinite source of life, as ever advancing toward the spring-time of youth, so that the oldest angels are the youngest.
(c) They execute God’s will,—by working in nature;
Ps. 103:20—“Ye his angels ... that fulfil his word, Hearkening unto the voice of his word”; 104:4 marg.—“Who maketh his angels winds; His ministers a flaming fire,” i. e., lightnings. See Alford on Heb. 1:7—“The order of the Hebrew words here [in Ps. 104:4] is not the same as in the former verses (see especially v. 3), where we have: ‘Who maketh the clouds his chariot.’ For this transposition, those who insist that the passage means ‘he maketh winds his messengers’ can give no reason.”
Farrar on Heb. 1:7—“He maketh his angels winds”; “The Rabbis often refer to the fact that God makes his angels assume any form he pleases, whether man (Gen. 18:2) or woman (Zech 5:9—‘two women, and the wind was in their wings’), or wind or flame (Ex. 3:2—‘angel ... in a flame of fire’; 2 K. 6:17). But that untenable and fleeting form of existence which is the glory of the angels would be an inferiority in the Son. He could not be clothed, as they are at God’s will, in the fleeting robes of material phenomena.” John Henry Newman, in his Apologia, sees an angel in every flower. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 82—“Origen thought not a blade of grass nor a fly was without its angel. Rev. 14:18—an angel ‘that hath power over fire’; John 5:4—intermittent spring under charge of an angel; Mat. 28:2—descent of an angel caused earthquake on the morning of Christ’s resurrection; Luke 13:11—control of diseases is ascribed to angels.”
(d) by guiding the affairs of nations;
Dan. 10:12, 13, 21—“I come for thy words’ sake. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me ... Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me ... Michael your prince”; 11:1—“And as for me, in the first year of Darius the Mede, I stood up to confirm and strengthen him”; 12:1—“at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince who standeth for the children of thy people.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 87, suggests the question whether “the spirit of the age” or “the national character” in any particular case may not be due to the unseen “principalities” under which men live. Paul certainly recognizes, in Eph. 2:2, “the prince of the powers of the air, ... the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience.” May not good angels be entrusted with influence over nations’ affairs to counteract the evil and help the good?
(e) by watching over the interests of particular churches;
1 Cor. 11:10—“for this cause ought the women to have a sign of authority [i. e., a veil] on her head, because of the angels”—who watch over the church and have care for its order. Matheson, Spiritual Development of St. Paul, 242—“Man’s covering is woman’s power. Ministration is her power and it allies her with a greater than man—the angel. Christianity is a feminine strength. Judaism had made woman only a means to an end—the multiplication of the race. So it had degraded her. Paul will restore woman to her original and equal dignity.” Col. 2:18—“Let no man rob you of your prize by a voluntary humility and worshiping of the angels”—a false worship which would be very natural if angels were present to guard the meetings of the saints. 1 Tim. 5:21—“I charge thee in the sight of God, and Christ Jesus, and the elect angels, that thou observe these things”—the public duties of the Christian minister.
Alford regards “the angels of the seven churches” (Rev. 1:20) as superhuman beings appointed to represent and guard the churches, and that upon the grounds: (1) that the word is used elsewhere in the book of Revelation only in this sense; and (2) that nothing in the book is addressed to a teacher individually, but all to some one who reflects the complexion and fortunes of the church as no human person could. We prefer, however, to regard “the angels of the seven churches” as meaning simply the pastors of the seven churches. The word “angel” means simply “messenger,” and may be used of human as well as of superhuman beings—see Hag. 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah’s messenger”—literally, “the angel of Jehovah.” The use of the word in this figurative sense would not be incongruous with the mystical character of the book of Revelation (see Bib. Sac. 12:339). John Lightfoot, Heb. and Talmud. Exerc., 2:90, says that “angel” was a term designating officer or elder of a synagogue. See also Bp. Lightfoot, Com. on Philippians, 187, 188; Jacobs, Eccl. Polity, 100 and note. In the Irvingite church, accordingly, “angels” constitute an official class.
(f) by assisting and protecting individual believers;
1 K. 19:5—“an angel touched him [Elijah], and said unto him, Arise and eat”; Ps. 91:11—“he will give his angels charge over thee, To keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, Lest thou dash thy foot against a stone”; Dan. 6:22—“My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not hurt me”; Mat. 4:11—“angels came and ministered unto him”—Jesus was the type of all believers; 18:10—“despise not one of these little ones, for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father”; compare verse 6—“one of these little ones that believe on me”; see Meyer, Com. in loco, who regards these passages as proving the doctrine of guardian angels. Luke 16:22—“the beggar died, and ... was carried away by the angels into Abraham’s bosom”; Heb. 1:14—“Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation?” Compare Acts 12:15—“And they said, It is his angel”—of Peter standing knocking; see Hackett, Com. in loco: the utterance “expresses a popular belief prevalent among the Jews, which is neither affirmed nor denied.” Shakespeare, Henry IV, 2nd part, 2:2—“For the boy—there is a good angel about him.” Per contra, see Broadus, Com. on Mat. 18:10—“It is simply said of believers as a class that there are angels which are ‘their angels’; but there is nothing here or elsewhere to show that one angel has special charge of one believer.”
(g) by punishing God’s enemies.
2 K. 19:35—“it came to pass that night, that the angel of Jehovah went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand”; Acts 12:23—“And immediately an angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.”
A general survey of this Scripture testimony as to the employments of good angels leads us to the following conclusions:
First,—that good angels are not to be considered as the mediating agents of God’s regular and common providence, but as the ministers of his special providence in the affairs of his church. He “maketh his angels winds” and “a flaming fire,” not in his ordinary procedure, but in connection with special displays of his power for moral ends (Deut. 33:2; Acts 7:53; Gal. 3:19; Heb. 2:2). Their intervention is apparently occasional and exceptional—not at their own option, but only as it is permitted or commanded by God. Hence we are not to conceive of angels as coming between us and God, nor are we, without special revelation of the fact, to attribute to them in any particular case the effects which the Scriptures generally ascribe to divine providence. Like miracles, therefore, angelic appearances generally mark God’s entrance upon new epochs in the unfolding of his plans. Hence we read of angels at the completion of creation (Job 38:7); at the giving of the law (Gal 3:19); at the birth of Christ (Luke 2:13); at the two temptations in the wilderness and in Gethsemane (Mat. 4:11, Luke 22:43); at the resurrection (Mat. 28:2); at the ascension (Acts 1:10); at the final judgment (Mat. 25:31).
The substance of these remarks may be found in Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:637-645. Milton tells us that “Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.” Whether this be true or not, it is a question of interest why such angelic beings as have to do with human affairs are not at present seen by men. Paul’s admonition against the “worshiping of the angels” (Col. 2:18) seems to suggest the reason. If men have not abstained from worshiping their fellow-men, when these latter have been priests or media of divine communications, the danger of idolatry would be much greater if we came into close and constant contact with angels; see Rev. 22:8, 9—“I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which showed me these things. And he saith unto me, See thou do it not.”
The fact that we do not in our day see angels should not make us sceptical as to their existence any more than the fact that we do not in our day see miracles should make us doubt the reality of the New Testament miracles. As evil spirits were permitted to work most actively when Christianity began its appeal to men, so good angels were then most frequently recognized as executing the divine purposes. Nevius, Demon-Possession, 278, thinks that evil spirits are still at work where Christianity comes in conflict with heathenism, and that they retire into the background as Christianity triumphs. This may be true also of good angels. Otherwise we might be in danger of overestimating their greatness and authority. Father Taylor was right when he said: “Folks are better than angels.” It is vain to sing: “I want to be an angel.” We never shall be angels. Victor Hugo is wrong when he says: “I am the tadpole of an archangel.” John Smith is not an angel, and he never will be. But he may be far greater than an angel, because Christ took, not the nature of angels, but the nature of man (Heb. 2:16).
As intimated above, there is no reason to believe that even the invisible presence of angels is a constant one. Doddridge’s dream of accident prevented by angelic interposition seems to embody the essential truth. We append the passages referred to in the text. Job 38:7—“When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy”; Deut. 33:2—“Jehovah came from Sinai ... he came from the ten thousands of holy ones: At his right hand was a fiery law for them”; Gal. 3:19—“it [the law] was ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator”; Heb. 2:2—“the word spoken through angels”; Acts 7:53—“who received the law as it was ordained by angels”; Luke 2:13—“suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host”; Mat. 4:11—“Then the devil leaveth him; and behold, angels came and ministered unto him”; Luke 22:43—“And there appeared unto him an angel from heaven, strengthening him”; Mat. 28:2—“an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled away the stone, and sat upon it”; Acts 1:10—“And while they were looking steadfastly into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel”; Mat. 25:31—“when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory.”
Secondly,—that their power, as being in its nature dependent and derived, is exercised in accordance with the laws of the spiritual and natural world. They cannot, like God, create, perform miracles, act without means, search the heart. Unlike the Holy Spirit, who can influence the human mind directly, they can influence men only in ways analogous to those by which men influence each other. As evil angels may tempt men to sin, so it is probable that good angels may attract men to holiness.
Recent psychical researches disclose almost unlimited possibilities of influencing other minds by suggestion. Slight physical phenomena, as the odor of a violet or the sight in a book of a crumpled roseleaf, may start trains of thought which change the whole course of a life. A word or a look may have great power over us. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 276—“The facts of hypnotism illustrate the possibility of one mind falling into a strange thraldom under another.” If other men can so powerfully influence us, it is quite possible that spirits which are not subject to limitations of the flesh may influence us yet more.
Binet, in his Alterations of Personality, says that experiments on hysterical patients have produced in his mind the conviction that, in them at least, “a plurality of persons exists.... We have established almost with certainty that in such patients, side by side with the principal personality, there is a secondary personality, which is unknown by the first, which sees, hears, reflects, reasons and acts”; see Andover Review, April, 1890:422. Hudson, Law of Psychic Phenomena, 81-143, claims that we have two minds, the objective and conscious, and the subjective and unconscious. The latter works automatically upon suggestion from the objective or from other minds. In view of the facts referred to by Binet and Hudson, we claim that the influence of angelic spirits is no more incredible than is the influence of suggestion from living men. There is no need of attributing the phenomena of hypnotism to spirits of the dead. Our human nature is larger and more susceptible to spiritual influence than we have commonly believed. These psychical phenomena indeed furnish us with a corroboration of our Ethical Monism, for if in one human being there may be two or more consciousnesses, then in the one God there may be not only three infinite personalities but also multitudinous finite personalities. See T. H. Wright, The Finger of God, 124-133.
B. The employments of evil angels
(a) They oppose God and strive to defeat his will. This is indicated in the names applied to their chief. The word “Satan” means “adversary”—primarily to God, secondarily to men; the term “devil” signifies “slanderer”—of God to men, and of men to God. It is indicated also in the description of the “man of sin” as “he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God.”
Job 1:6—Satan appears among “the sons of God”; Zech. 3:1—“Joshua the high priest ... and Satan standing at his right hand to be his adversary”; Mat. 13:39—“the enemy that sowed them is the devil”; 1 Pet. 5:8—“your adversary the devil.” Satan slanders God to men, in Gen. 3:1, 4—“Yea, hath God said?... Ye shall not surely die”; men to God, in Job 1:9, 11—“Doth Job fear God for naught?... put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will renounce thee to thy face”; 2:4, 5—“Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy face”; Rev. 12:10—“the accuser of our brethren is cast down, who accuseth them before our God night and day.”
Notice how, over against the evil spirit who thus accuses God to man and man to God, stands the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, who pleads God’s cause with man and man’s cause with God: John 16:8—“he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment”; Rom. 8:26—“the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Hence Balaam can say: Num. 23:21, “He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, Neither hath he seen perverseness in Israel”; and the Lord can say to Satan as he resists Joshua: “Jehovah rebuke thee, O Satan; yea, Jehovah that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee” (Zech. 3:2). “Thus he puts himself between his people and every tongue that would accuse them” (C. H. M.). For the description of the “man of sin,” see 2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“he that opposeth”; cf. verse 9—“whose coming is according to the working of Satan.”
On the “man of sin,” see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. As in Daniel 11:36, the great enemy of the faith, he who “shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every God”, is the Syrian King, Antiochus Epiphanes, so the man of lawlessness described by Paul in 2 Thess. 2:3, 4 was “the corrupt and impious Judaism of the apostolic age.” This only had its seat in the temple of God. It was doomed to destruction when the Lord should come at the fall of Jerusalem. But this fulfilment does not preclude a future and final fulfilment of the prophecy.
Contrasts between the Holy Spirit and the spirit of evil: 1. The dove, and the serpent; 2. the father of lies, and the Spirit of truth; 3. men possessed by dumb spirits, and men given wonderful utterance in diverse tongues; 4. the murderer from the beginning, and the life-giving Spirit, who regenerates the soul and quickens our mortal bodies; 5. the adversary, and the Helper; 6. the slanderer, and the Advocate; 7. Satan’s sifting, and the Master’s winnowing; 8. the organizing intelligence and malignity of the evil one, and the Holy Spirit’s combination of all the forces of matter and mind to build up the kingdom of God; 9. the strong man fully armed, and a stronger than he; 10. the evil one who works only evil, and the holy One who is the author of holiness in the hearts of men. The opposition of evil angels, at first and ever since their fall, may be a reason why they are incapable of redemption.
(b) They hinder man’s temporal and eternal welfare,—sometimes by exercising a certain control over natural phenomena, but more commonly by subjecting man’s soul to temptation. Possession of man’s being, either physical or spiritual, by demons, is also recognized in Scripture.
Control of natural phenomena is ascribed to evil spirits in Job 1:12, 16, 19 and 2:7—“all that he hath is in thy power”—and Satan uses lightning, whirlwind, disease, for his purposes; Luke 13:11, 16—“a woman that had a spirit of infirmity ... whom Satan had bound, lo, these eighteen years”; Acts 10:38—“healing all that were oppressed of the devil”; 2 Cor. 12:7—“a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me”; 1 Thess. 2:18—“we would fain have come unto you, I Paul once and again; and Satan hindered us”; Heb. 2:14—“him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” Temptation is ascribed to evil spirits in Gen. 3:1 sq.—“Now the serpent was more subtle”; cf. Rev. 20:2—“the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan”; Mat. 4:3—“the tempter came”; John 13:27—“after the sop, then entered Satan into him”; Acts 5:3—“why hath Satan filled thy heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” Eph. 2:2—“the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience”; 1 Thess. 3:5—“lest by any means the tempter had tempted you”; 1 Pet 5:8—“your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
At the time of Christ, popular belief undoubtedly exaggerated the influence of evil spirits. Savage, Life after Death, 113—“While God was at a distance, the demons were very, very near. The air about the earth was full of these evil tempting spirits. They caused shipwreck at sea, and sudden death on land; they blighted the crops; they smote and blasted in the tempests; they took possession of the bodies and the souls of men. They entered into compacts, and took mortgages on men’s souls.” If some good end has been attained in spite of them they feel that “Their labor must be to pervert that end. And out of good still to find means of evil.” In Goethe’s Faust, Margaret detects the evil in Mephistopheles: “You see that he with no soul sympathizes. ’Tis written on his face—he never loved.... Whenever he comes near, I cannot pray.” Mephistopheles describes himself as “Ein Theil von jener Kraft Die stäts das Böse will Und stäts das Gute schafft”—“Part of that power not understood, which always wills the bad, and always works the good”—through the overruling Providence of God. “The devil says his prayers backwards.” “He tried to learn the Basque language, but had to give it up, having learned only three words in two years.” Walter Scott tells us that a certain sulphur spring in Scotland was reputed to owe its quality to an ancient compulsory immersion of Satan in it.
Satan’s temptations are represented as both negative and positive,—he takes away the seed sown, and he sows tares. He controls many subordinate evil spirits; there is only one devil, but there are many angels or demons, and through their agency Satan may accomplish his purposes.
Satan’s negative agency is shown in Mark 4:15—“when they have heard, straightway cometh Satan, and taketh away the word which hath been sown in them”; his positive agency in Mat. 13:38, 39—“the tares are the sons of the evil one; and the enemy that sowed them is the devil.” One devil, but many angels: see Mat. 25:41—“the devil and his angels”; Mark 5:9—“My name is Legion, for we are many”; Eph. 2:2—“the prince of the powers of the air”; 6:12—“principalities ... powers ... world-rulers of this darkness ... spiritual hosts of wickedness.” The mode of Satan’s access to the human mind we do not know. It may be that by moving upon our physical organism he produces subtle signs of thought and so reaches the understanding and desires. He certainly has the power to present in captivating forms the objects of appetite and selfish ambition, as he did to Christ in the wilderness (Mat. 4:3, 6, 9), and to appeal to our love for independence by saying to us, as he did to our first parents—“ye shall be as God” (Gen. 3:5).
C. C. Everett, Essays Theol. and Lit., 186-218, on The Devil: “If the supernatural powers would only hold themselves aloof and not interfere with the natural processes of the world, there would be no sickness, no death, no sorrow.... This shows a real, though perhaps unconscious, faith in the goodness and trustworthiness of nature. The world in itself is a source only of good. Here is the germ of a positive religion, though this religion when it appears, may adopt the form of supernaturalism.” If there was no Satan, then Christ’s temptations came from within, and showed a predisposition to evil on his own part.
Possession is distinguished from bodily or mental disease, though such disease often accompanies possession or results from it.—The demons speak in their own persons, with supernatural knowledge, and they are directly addressed by Christ. Jesus recognizes Satanic agency in these cases of possession, and he rejoices in the casting out of demons, as a sign of Satan’s downfall. These facts render it impossible to interpret the narratives of demoniac possession as popular descriptions of abnormal physical or mental conditions.
Possession may apparently be either physical, as in the case of the Gerasene demoniacs (Mark 5:2-4), or spiritual, as in the case of the “maid having a spirit of divination” (Acts 16:16), where the body does not seem to have been affected. It is distinguished from bodily disease: see Mat. 17:15, 18—“epileptic ... the demon went out from him: and the boy was cured”; Mark 9:25—“Thou dumb and deaf spirit”; 3:11, 12—“the unclean spirits ... cried, saying, Thou art the Son of God. And he charged them much that they should not make him known”; Luke 8:30, 31—“And Jesus asked him, What is thy name? And he said, Legion; for many demons were entered unto him. And they entreated him that he would not command them to depart into the abyss”; 10:17, 18—“And the seventy returned with joy, saying, Lord, even the demons are subject unto us in thy name. And he said unto them, I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven.”
These descriptions of personal intercourse between Christ and the demons cannot be interpreted as metaphorical. “In the temptation of Christ and in the possession of the swine, imagination could have no place. Christ was above its delusions; the brutes were below them.” Farrar (Life of Christ, 1:337-341, and 2:excursus vii), while he admits the existence and agency of good angels, very inconsistently gives a metaphorical interpretation to the Scriptural accounts of evil angels. We find corroborative evidence of the Scripture doctrine in the domination which one wicked man frequently exercises over others; in the opinion of some modern physicians in charge of the insane, that certain phenomena in their patients’ experience are best explained by supposing an actual subjection of the will to a foreign power; and, finally, in the influence of the Holy Spirit upon the human heart. See Trench, Miracles, 125-136; Smith’s Bible Dictionary, 1:586—“Possession is distinguished from mere temptation by the complete or incomplete loss of the sufferer’s reason or power of will; his actions, words, and almost his thoughts, are mastered by the evil spirit, till his personality seems to be destroyed, or at least so overborne as to produce the consciousness of a twofold will within him like that in a dream. In the ordinary assaults and temptations of Satan, the will itself yields consciously, and by yielding gradually assumes, without losing its apparent freedom of action, the characteristics of the Satanic nature. It is solicited, urged, and persuaded against the strivings of grace, but it is not overborne.”
T. H. Wright, The Finger of God, argues that Jesus, in his mention of demoniacs, accommodated himself to the beliefs of his time. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 274, with reference to Weiss’s Meyer on Mat. 4:24, gives Meyer’s arguments against demoniacal possession as follows: 1. the absence of references to demoniacal possession in the Old Testament, and the fact that so-called demoniacs were cured by exorcists; 2. that no clear case of possession occurs at present; 3. that there is no notice of demoniacal possession in John’s Gospel, though the overcoming of Satan is there made a part of the Messiah’s work and Satan is said to enter into a man’s mind and take control there (John 13:27); 4. and that the so-called demoniacs are not, as would be expected, of a diabolic temper and filled with malignant feelings toward Christ. Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 38—“The popular belief in demon-possession gave form to the conceptions of those who had nervous diseases, so that they expressed themselves in language proper only to those who were actually possessed. Jesus is no believer in Christian Science: he calls sickness sickness and health health; but he regards all disease as a proof and effect of the working of the evil one.”
On Mark 1:21-34, see Maclaren in S. S. Times, Jan. 23, 1904—“We are told by some that this demoniac was an epileptic. Possibly; but, if the epilepsy was not the result of possession, why should it take the shape of violent hatred of Jesus? And what is there in epilepsy to give discernment of his character and the purpose of his mission?” Not Jesus’ exorcism of demons as a fact, but his casting them out by a word, was our Lord’s wonderful characteristic. Nevius, Demon-Possession, 240—“May not demon-possession be only a different, a more advanced, form of hypnotism?... It is possible that these evil spirits are familiar with the organism of the nervous system, and are capable of acting upon and influencing mankind in accordance with physical and psychological laws.... The hypnotic trance may be effected, without the use of physical organs, by the mere force of will-power, spirit acting upon spirit.” Nevius quotes F. W. A. Myers, Fortnightly Rev., Nov. 1885—“One such discovery, that of telepathy, or the transference of thought and sensation from mind to mind without the agency of the recognized organs of sense, has, as I hold, been already achieved.” See Bennet, Diseases of the Bible; Kedney, Diabolology; and references in Poole’s Synopsis, 1:343; also Bramwell, Hypnotism, 358-398.
(c) Yet, in spite of themselves, they execute God’s plans of punishing the ungodly, of chastening the good, and of illustrating the nature and fate of moral evil.
Punishing the ungodly: Ps. 78:49—“He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, Wrath and indignation, and trouble, A band of angels of evil”; 1 K. 22:23—“Jehovah hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets; and Jehovah hath spoken evil concerning thee.” In Luke 22:31, Satan’s sifting accomplishes the opposite of the sifter’s intention, and the same as the Master’s winnowing (Maclaren).
Chastening the good: see Job, chapters 1 and 2; 1 Cor. 5:5—“deliver such a one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus”; cf. 1 Tim. 1:20—“Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I delivered onto Satan, that they might be taught not to blaspheme.” This delivering to Satan for the destruction of the flesh seems to have involved four things: (1) excommunication from the church; (2) authoritative infliction of bodily disease or death; (3) loss of all protection from good angels, who minister only to saints; (4) subjection to the buffetings and tormentings of the great accuser. Gould, in Am. Com. on 1 Cor. 5:5, regards “delivering to Satan” as merely putting a man out of the church by excommunication. This of itself was equivalent to banishing him into “the world,” of which Satan was the ruler.
Evil spirits illustrate the nature and fate of moral evil: see Mat 8:29—“art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” 25:41—“eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”; 2 Thess. 2:8—“then shall be revealed the lawless one”; James 2:19—“the demons also believe, and shudder”; Rev. 12:9, 12—“the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world ... the devil is gone down unto you, having great wrath, knowing that he hath but a short time”; 20:10—“cast into the lake of fire ... tormented day and night for ever and ever.”
It is an interesting question whether Scripture recognizes any special connection of evil spirits with the systems of idolatry, witchcraft, and spiritualism which burden the world. 1 Cor. 10:20—“the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to God”; 2 Thess. 2:9—“the working of Satan with all power and signs of lying wonders”—would seem to favor an affirmative answer. But 1 Cor. 8:4—“concerning therefore the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that no idol is anything in the world”—seems to favor a negative answer. This last may, however, mean that “the beings whom the idols are designed to represent have no existence, although it is afterwards shown (10:20) that there are other beings connected with false worship” (Ann. Par. Bible, in loco). “Heathenism is the reign of the devil” (Meyer), and while the heathen think themselves to be sacrificing to Jupiter or Venus, they are really “sacrificing to demons,” and are thus furthering the plans of a malignant spirit who uses these forms of false religion as a means of enslaving their souls. In like manner, the network of influences which support the papacy, spiritualism, modern unbelief, is difficult of explanation, unless we believe in a superhuman intelligence which organizes these forces against God. In these, as well as in heathen religions, there are facts inexplicable upon merely natural principles of disease and delusion.
Nevius, Demon-Possession, 294—“Paul teaches that the gods mentioned under different names are imaginary and non-existent; but that, behind and in connection with these gods, there are demons who make use of idolatry to draw men away from God; and it is to these that the heathen are unconsciously rendering obedience and service.... It is most reasonable to believe that the sufferings of people bewitched were caused by the devil, not by the so-called witches. Let us substitute ‘devilcraft’ for ‘witchcraft.’... Had the courts in Salem proceeded on the Scriptural presumption that the testimony of those under the control of evil spirits would, in the nature of the case, be false, such a thing as the Salem tragedy would never have been known.”
A survey of the Scripture testimony with regard to the employments of evil spirits leads to the following general conclusions:
First,—the power of evil spirits over men is not independent of the human will. This power cannot be exercised without at least the original consent of the human will, and may be resisted and shaken off through prayer and faith in God.
Luke 22:31, 40—“Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you as wheat.... Pray that ye enter not into temptation”; Eph. 6:11—“Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil”; 16—“the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one”; James 4:7—“resist the devil, and he will flee from you”; 1 Pet. 5:9—“whom withstand stedfast in your faith.” The coals are already in the human heart, in the shape of corrupt inclinations; Satan only blows them into flame. The double source of sin is illustrated in Acts 5:3, 4—“Why hath Satan filled thy heart?... How is it that thou hast conceived this thing in thine heart?” The Satanic impulse could have been resisted, and “after it was” suggested, it was still “in his own power,” as was the land that he had sold (Maclaren).
The soul is a castle into which even the king of evil spirits cannot enter without receiving permission from within. Bp. Wordsworth: “The devil may tempt us to fall, but he cannot make us fall; he may persuade us to cast ourselves down, but he cannot cast us down.” E. G. Robinson: “It is left to us whether the devil shall get control of us. We pack off on the devil’s shoulders much of our own wrong doing, just as Adam had the impertinence to tell God that the woman did the mischief.” Both God and Satan stand at the door and knock, but neither heaven nor hell can come in unless we will. “We cannot prevent the birds from flying over our heads, but we can prevent them from making their nests in our hair.” Mat 12:43-45—“The unclean spirit, when he is gone out of a man”—suggests that the man who gets rid of one vice but does not occupy his mind with better things is ready to be repossessed. “Seven other spirits more evil than himself” implies that some demons are more wicked than others and so are harder to cast out (Mark 9:29). The Jews had cast out idolatry, but other and worse sins had taken possession of them.
Hudson, Law of Psychic Phenomena, 129—“The hypnotic subject cannot be controlled so far as to make him do what he knows to be wrong, unless he himself voluntarily assents.” A. S. Hart: “Unless one is willing to be hypnotized, no one can put him under the influence. The more intelligent one is, the more susceptible. Hypnotism requires the subject to do two-thirds of the work, while the instructor does only one-third—that of telling the subject what to do. It is not an inherent influence, nor a gift, but can be learned by any one who can read. It is impossible to compel a person to do wrong while under the influence, for the subject retains a consciousness of the difference between right and wrong.”
Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 330-335—“Some persons have the power of intentionally calling up hallucinations; but it often happens to them as to Goethe’s Zauberlehrling, or apprentice-magician, that the phantoms gain power over them and will not be again dispersed. Goethe’s Fischer—‘Half she drew him down and half he sank’—repeats the duality in the second term; for to sink is to let one’s self sink.” Manton, the Puritan: “A stranger cannot call off a dog from the flock, but the Shepherd can do so with a word; so the Lord can easily rebuke Satan when he finds him most violent.” Spurgeon, the modern Puritan, remarks on the above: “O Lord, when I am worried by my great enemy, call him off, I pray thee! Let me hear a voice saying: ‘Jehovah rebuke thee, O Satan; even Jehovah that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee!’ (Zech. 3:2). By thine election of me, rebuke him, I pray thee, and deliver me from ‘the power of the dog’! (Ps. 22:20).”
Secondly,—their power is limited, both in time and in extent, by the permissive will of God. Evil spirits are neither omnipotent, omniscient, nor omnipresent. We are to attribute disease and natural calamity to their agency, only when this is matter of special revelation. Opposed to God as evil spirits are, God compels them to serve his purposes. Their power for harm lasts but for a season, and ultimate judgment and punishment will vindicate God’s permission of their evil agency.
1 Cor. 10:13—“God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it”; Jude 6—“angels which kept not their own beginning, but left their proper habitation, he hath kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.”
Luther saw Satan nearer to man than his coat, or his shirt, or even his skin. In all misfortune he saw the devil’s work. Was there a conflagration in the town? By looking closely you might see a demon blowing upon the flame. Pestilence and storm he attributed to Satan. All this was a relic of the mediæval exaggerations of Satan’s power. It was then supposed that men might make covenants with the evil one, in which supernatural power was purchased at the price of final perdition (see Goethe’s Faust).
Scripture furnishes no warrant for such representations. There seems to have been permitted a special activity of Satan in temptation and possession during our Savior’s ministry, in order that Christ’s power might be demonstrated. By his death Jesus brought “to naught him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb. 2:14) and “having despoiled the principalities and the powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,” i. e., in the Cross (Col. 2:15). 1 John 3:8—“To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” Evil spirits now exist and act only upon sufferance. McLeod, Temptation of our Lord, 24—“Satan’s power is limited, (1) by the fact that he is a creature; (2) by the fact of God’s providence; (3) by the fact of his own wickedness.”
Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 136—“Having neither fixed principle in himself nor connection with the source of order outside, Satan has not prophetic ability. He can appeal to chance, but he cannot foresee. So Goethe’s Mephistopheles insolently boasts that he can lead Faust astray: ‘What will you bet? There’s still a chance to gain him, If unto me full leave you give Gently upon my road to train him!’ And in Job 1:11; 2:5, Satan wagers: ‘He will renounce thee to thy face.’ ” William Ashmore: “Is Satan omnipresent? No, but he is very spry. Is he bound? Yes, but with a rather loose rope.” In the Persian story, God scattered seed. The devil buried it, and sent the rain to rot it. But soon it sprang up, and the wilderness blossomed as the rose.
II. Objections to the Doctrine of Angels
1. To the doctrine of angels in general.
It is objected:
(a) That it is opposed to the modern scientific view of the world, as a system of definite forces and laws.—We reply that, whatever truth there may be in this modern view, it does not exclude the play of divine or human free agency. It does not, therefore, exclude the possibility of angelic agency.
Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 332—“It is easier to believe in angels than in ether; in God rather than atoms; and in the history of his kingdom as a divine self-revelation rather than in the physicist’s or the biologist’s purely mechanical process of evolution.”
(b) That it is opposed to the modern doctrine of infinite space above and beneath us—a space peopled with worlds. With the surrender of the old conception of the firmament, as a boundary separating this world from the regions beyond, it is claimed that we must give up all belief in a heaven of the angels.—We reply that the notions of an infinite universe, of heaven as a definite place, and of spirits as confined to fixed locality, are without certain warrant either in reason or in Scripture. We know nothing of the modes of existence of pure spirits.
What we know of the universe is certainly finite. Angels are apparently incorporeal beings, and as such are free from all laws of matter and space. Heaven and hell are essentially conditions, corresponding to character—conditions in which the body and the surroundings of the soul express and reflect its inward state. The main thing to be insisted on is therefore the state; place is merely incidental. The fact that Christ ascended to heaven with a human body, and that the saints are to possess glorified bodies, would seem to imply that heaven is a place. Christ’s declaration with regard to him who is “able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mat. 10:28) affords some reason for believing that hell is also a place.
Where heaven and hell are, is not revealed to us. But it is not necessary to suppose that they are in some remote part of the universe; for aught we know, they may be right about us, so that if our eyes were opened, like those of the prophet’s servant (2 Kings 6:17), we ourselves should behold them. Upon ground of Eph. 2:2—“_prince of the __ powers of the air_”—and 3:10—“the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places”—some have assigned the atmosphere of the earth as the abode of angelic spirits, both good and evil. But the expressions “air” and “heavenly places” may be merely metaphorical designations of their spiritual method of existence.
The idealistic philosophy, which regards time and space as merely subjective forms of our human thinking and as not conditioning the thought of God, may possibly afford some additional aid in the consideration of this problem. If matter be only the expression of God’s mind and will, having no existence apart from his intelligence and volition, the question of place ceases to have significance. Heaven is in that case simply the state in which God manifests himself in his grace, and hell is the state in which a moral being finds himself in opposition to God, and God in opposition to him. Christ can manifest himself to his followers in all parts of the earth and to all the inhabitants of heaven at one and the same time (John 14:21; Mat. 28:20; Rev. 1:7). Angels in like manner, being purely spiritual beings, may be free from the laws of space and time, and may not be limited to any fixed locality.
We prefer therefore to leave the question of place undecided, and to accept the existence and working of angels both good and evil as a matter of faith, without professing to understand their relations to space. For the rationalistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:670-675. Per contra, see Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 1:308-317; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 127-136.
2. To the doctrine of evil angels in particular
It is objected that:
(a) The idea of the fall of angels is self-contradictory, since a fall determined by pride presupposes pride—that is, a fall before the fall.—We reply that the objection confounds the occasion of sin with the sin itself. The outward motive to disobedience is not disobedience. The fall took place only when that outward motive was chosen by free will. When the motive of independence was selfishly adopted, only then did the innocent desire for knowledge and power become pride and sin. How an evil volition could originate in spirits created pure is an insoluble problem. Our faith in God’s holiness, however, compels us to attribute the origin of this evil volition, not to the Creator, but to the creature.
There can be no sinful propensity before there is sin. The reason of the first sin can not be sin itself. This would be to make sin a necessary development; to deny the holiness of God the Creator; to leave the ground of theism for pantheism.
(b) It is irrational to suppose that Satan should have been able to change his whole nature by a single act, so that he thenceforth willed only evil.—But we reply that the circumstances of that decision are unknown to us; while the power of single acts permanently to change character is matter of observation among men.
Instance the effect, upon character and life, of a single act of falsehood or embezzlement. The first glass of intoxicating drink, and the first yielding to impure suggestion, often establish nerve-tracts in the brain and associations in the mind which are not reversed and overcome for a whole lifetime. “Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” And what is true of men, may be also true of angels.
(c) It is impossible that so wise a being should enter upon a hopeless rebellion.—We answer that no amount of mere knowledge ensures right moral action. If men gratify present passion, in spite of their knowledge that the sin involves present misery and future perdition, it is not impossible that Satan may have done the same.
Scherer, Essays on English Literature, 139, puts this objection as follows: “The idea of Satan is a contradictory idea; for it is contradictory to know God and yet attempt rivalry with him.” But we must remember that understanding is the servant of will, and is darkened by will. Many clever men fail to see what belongs to their peace. It is the very madness of sin, that it persists in iniquity, even when it sees and fears the approaching judgment of God. Jonathan Edwards: “Although the devil be exceedingly crafty and subtle, yet he is one of the greatest fools and blockheads in the world, as the subtlest of wicked men are. Sin is of such a nature that it strangely infatuates and stultifies the mind.” One of Ben Jonson’s plays has, for its title: “The Devil is an Ass.”
Schleiermacher, Die Christliche Glaube, 1:210, urges that continual wickedness must have weakened Satan’s understanding, so that he could be no longer feared, and he adds: “Nothing is easier than to contend against emotional evil.” On the other hand, there seems evidence in Scripture of a progressive rage and devastating activity in the case of the evil one, beginning in Genesis and culminating in the Revelation. With this increasing malignity there is also abundant evidence of his unwisdom. We may instance the devil’s mistakes in misrepresenting 1. God to man (Gen. 3:1—“hath God said?”). 2. Man to himself (Gen. 3:4—“Ye shall not surely die”). 3. Man to God (Job 1:9—“Doth Job fear God for naught?”). 4. God to himself (Mat. 4:3—“If thou art the Son of God”). 5. Himself to man (2 Cor. 11:14—“Satan fashioneth himself into an angel of light”). 6. Himself to himself (Rev. 12:12—“the devil is gone down unto you, having great wrath”—thinking he could successfully oppose God or destroy man).
(d) It is inconsistent with the benevolence of God to create and uphold spirits, who he knows will be and do evil.—We reply that this is no more inconsistent with God’s benevolence than the creation and preservation of men, whose action God overrules for the furtherance of his purposes, and whose iniquity he finally brings to light and punishes.
Seduction of the pure by the impure, piracy, slavery, and war, have all been permitted among men. It is no more inconsistent with God’s benevolence to permit them among angelic spirits. Caroline Fox tells of Emerson and Carlyle that the latter once led his friend, the serene philosopher, through the abominations of the streets of London at midnight, asking him with grim humor at every few steps: “Do you believe in the devil now?” Emerson replied that the more he saw of the English people, the greater and better he thought them. It must have been because with such depths beneath them they could notwithstanding reach such heights of civilization. Even vice and misery can be overruled for good, and the fate of evil angels may be made a warning to the universe.
(e) The notion of organization among evil spirits is self-contradictory, since the nature of evil is to sunder and divide.—We reply that such organization of evil spirits is no more impossible than the organization of wicked men, for the purpose of furthering their selfish ends. Common hatred to God may constitute a principle of union among them, as among men.
Wicked men succeed in their plans only by adhering in some way to the good. Even a robber-horde must have laws, and there is a sort of “honor among thieves.” Else the world would be a pandemonium, and society would be what Hobbes called it: “bellum omnium contra omnes.” See art. on Satan, by Whitehouse, in Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible: “Some personalities are ganglionic centres of a nervous system, incarnations of evil influence. The Bible teaches that Satan is such a centre.”
But the organizing power of Satan has its limitations. Nevius, Demon-Possession, 279—“Satan is not omniscient, and it is not certain that all demons are perfectly subject to his control. Want of vigilance on his part, and personal ambition in them, may obstruct and delay the execution of his plans, as among men.” An English parliamentarian comforted himself by saying: “If the fleas were all of one mind, they would have us out of bed.” Plato, Lysis, 214—“The good are like one another, and friends to one another, and the bad are never at unity with one another or with themselves; for they are passionate and restless, and anything which is at variance and enmity with itself is not likely to be in union or harmony with any other thing.”
(f) The doctrine is morally pernicious, as transferring the blame of human sin to the being or beings who tempt men thereto.—We reply that neither conscience nor Scripture allows temptation to be an excuse for sin, or regards Satan as having power to compel the human will. The objection, moreover, contradicts our observation,—for only where the personal existence of Satan is recognized, do we find sin recognized in its true nature.
The diabolic character of sin makes it more guilty and abhorred. The immorality lies, not in the maintenance, but in the denial, of the doctrine. Giving up the doctrine of Satan is connected with laxity in the administration of criminal justice. Penalty comes to be regarded as only deterrent or reformatory.
(g) The doctrine degrades man, by representing him as the tool and slave of Satan.—We reply that it does indeed show his actual state to be degraded, but only with the result of exalting our idea of his original dignity, and of his possible glory in Christ. The fact that man’s sin was suggested from without, and not from within, may be the one mitigating circumstance which renders possible his redemption.
It rather puts a stigma upon human nature to say that it is not fallen—that its present condition is its original and normal state. Nor is it worth while to attribute to man a dignity he does not possess, if thereby we deprive him of the dignity that may be his. Satan’s sin was, in its essence, sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there can be no “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), since it was choosing evil with the mala gaudia mentis, or the clearest intuition that it was evil. If there be no devil, then man himself is devil. It has been said of Voltaire, that without believing in a devil, he saw him everywhere—even where he was not. Christian, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, takes comfort when he finds that the blasphemous suggestions which came to him in the dark valley were suggestions from the fiend that pursued him. If all temptation is from within, our case would seem hopeless. But if “an enemy hath done this” (Mat. 13:28), then there is hope. And so we may accept the maxim: “Nullus diabolus, nullus Redemptor.” Unitarians have no Captain of their Salvation, and so have no Adversary against whom to contend. See Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 17; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 78-100; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:291-293. Many of the objections and answers mentioned above have been taken from Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:251-284, where a fuller statement of them may be found.
III. Practical uses of the Doctrine of Angels
A. Uses of the doctrine of good angels.
(a) It gives us a new sense of the greatness of the divine resources, and of God’s grace in our creation, to think of the multitude of unfallen intelligences who executed the divine purposes before man appeared.
(b) It strengthens our faith in God’s providential care, to know that spirits of so high rank are deputed to minister to creatures who are environed with temptations and are conscious of sin.
(c) It teaches us humility, that beings of so much greater knowledge and power than ours should gladly perform these unnoticed services, in behalf of those whose only claim upon them is that they are children of the same common Father.
(d) It helps us in the struggle against sin, to learn that these messengers of God are near, to mark our wrong doing if we fall, and to sustain us if we resist temptation.
(e) It enlarges our conceptions of the dignity of our own being, and of the boundless possibilities of our future existence, to remember these forms of typical innocence and love, that praise and serve God unceasingly in heaven.
Instance the appearance of angels in Jacob’s life at Bethel (Gen. 28:12—Jacob’s conversion?) and at Mahanaim (Gen. 32:1, 2—two camps, of angels, on the right hand and on the left; cf. Ps. 34:7—“The angel of Jehovah encampeth round about them that fear him, And delivereth them”); so too the Angel at Penuel that struggled with Jacob at his entering the promised land (Gen. 32:24; cf. Hos. 12:3, 4—“in his manhood he had power with God: yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed”), and “the angel who hath redeemed me from all evil” (Gen. 48:16) to whom Jacob refers on his dying bed. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: “And is there care in heaven? and is there love In heavenly spirits to these creatures base That may compassion of their evils move? There is; else much more wretched were the case Of men than beasts. But O, th’ exceeding grace Of highest God that loves his creatures so, And all his works with mercy doth embrace, That blessed angels he sends to and fro To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe! How oft do they their silver bowers leave And come to succor us who succor want! How oft do they with golden pinions cleave The flitting skies like flying pursuivant, Against foul fiends to aid us militant! They for us fight; they watch and duly ward, And their bright squadrons round about us plant; And all for love, and nothing for reward. Oh, why should heavenly God for men have such regard!”
It shows us that sin is not mere finiteness, to see these finite intelligences that maintained their integrity. Shakespeare, Henry VIII, 2:2—“He counsels a divorce—a loss of her That, like a jewel, has hung twenty years About his neck, yet never lost her lustre; Of her that loves him with that excellence That angels love good men with; even of her That, when the greatest stroke of fortune falls, Will bless the king.” Measure for Measure, 2:2—“Man, proud man, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As makes the angels weep.”
B. Uses of the doctrine of evil angels
(a) It illustrates the real nature of sin, and the depth of the ruin to which it may bring the soul, to reflect upon the present moral condition and eternal wretchedness to which these spirits, so highly endowed, have brought themselves by their rebellion against God.
(b) It inspires a salutary fear and hatred of the first subtle approaches of evil from within or from without, to remember that these may be the covert advances of a personal and malignant being, who seeks to overcome our virtue and to involve us in his own apostasy and destruction.
(c) It shuts us up to Christ, as the only Being who is able to deliver us or others from the enemy of all good.
(d) It teaches us that our salvation is wholly of grace, since for such multitudes of rebellious spirits no atonement and no renewal were provided—simple justice having its way, with no mercy to interpose or save.
Philippi, in his Glaubenslehre, 3:151-284, suggests the following relations of the doctrine of Satan to the doctrine of sin: 1. Since Satan is a fallen angel, who once was pure, evil is not self-existent or necessary. Sin does not belong to the substance which God created, but is a later addition. 2. Since Satan is a purely spiritual creature, sin cannot have its origin in mere sensuousness, or in the mere possession of a physical nature. 3. Since Satan is not a weak and poorly endowed creature, sin is not a necessary result of weakness and limitation. 4. Since Satan is confirmed in evil, sin is not necessarily a transient or remediable act of will. 5. Since in Satan sin does not come to an end, sin is not a step of creaturely development, or a stage of progress to something higher and better. On the uses of the doctrine, see also Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 1:316; Robert Hall, Works, 3:35-51; Brooks, Satan and his Devices.
“They never sank so low, They are not raised so high; They never knew such depths of woe, Such heights of majesty. The Savior did not join Their nature to his own; For them he shed no blood divine. Nor heaved a single groan.” If no redemption has been provided for them, it may be because: 1. sin originated with them; 2. the sin which they committed was “an eternal sin” (cf. Mark 3:29); 3. they sinned with clearer intellect and fuller knowledge than ours (cf. Luke 23:34); 4. their incorporeal being aggravated their sin and made it analogous to our sinning against the Holy Spirit (cf. Mat. 12:31, 32); 5. this incorporeal being gave no opportunity for Christ to objectify his grace and visibly to join himself to them (cf. Heb. 2:16); 6. their persistence in evil, in spite of their growing knowledge of the character of God as exhibited in human history, has resulted in a hardening of heart which is not susceptible of salvation.
Yet angels were created in Christ (Col. 1:16); they consist in him (Col. 1:17); he must suffer in their sin; God would save them, if he consistently could. Dr. G. W. Samson held that the Logos became an angel before he became man, and that this explains his appearances as “the angel of Jehovah” in the Old Testament (Gen. 22:11). It is not asserted that all fallen angels shall be eternally tormented (Rev. 14:10). In terms equally strong (Mat. 25:41; Rev. 20:10) the existence of a place of eternal punishment for wicked men is declared, but nevertheless we do not believe that all men will go there, in spite of the fact that all men are wicked. The silence of Scripture with regard to a provision of salvation for fallen angels does not prove that there is no such provision. 2 Pet. 2:4 shows that evil angels have not received final judgment, but are in a temporary state of existence, and their final state is yet to be revealed. If God has not already provided, may he not yet provide redemption for them, and the “elect angels” (1 Tim. 5:21) be those whom God has predestinated to stand this future probation and be saved, while only those who persist in their rebellion will be consigned to the lake of fire and brimstone (Rev. 20:10)?
The keeper of a young tigress patted her head and she licked his hand. But when she grew older she seized his hand with her teeth and began to craunch it. He pulled away his hand in shreds. He learned not to fondle a tigress. Let us learn not to fondle Satan. Let us not be “ignorant of his devices” (2 Cor. 2:11). It is not well to keep loaded firearms in the chimney corner. “They who fear the adder’s sting will not come near her hissing.” Talmage: “O Lord, help us to hear the serpent’s rattle before we feel its fangs.” Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 215—The pastor trembles for a soul, “when he sees the destroyer hovering over it like a hawk poised in midair, and would have it gathered beneath Christ’s wing.”
Thomas K. Beecher: “Suppose I lived on Broadway where the crowd was surging past in both directions all the time. Would I leave my doors and windows open, saying to the crowd of strangers: ‘Enter my door, pass through my hall, come into my parlor, make yourselves at home in my dining-room, go up into my bedchambers’? No! I would have my windows and doors barred and locked against intruders, to be opened only to me and mine and those I would have as companions. Yet here we see foolish men and women stretching out their arms and saying to the spirits of the vasty deep: ‘Come in, and take possession of me. Write with my hands, think with my brain, speak with my lips, walk with my feet, use me as a medium for whatever you will.’ God respects the sanctity of man’s spirit. Even Christ stands at the door and knocks. Holy Spirit, fill me, so that there shall be room for no other!” (Rev. 3:20; Eph. 5:18.)