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I have spoken in the foregoing chapter of certain characteristics of our Lord's ways of dealing with men. In considering these ways we find ourselves, at almost every turn, face to face with the great enigmas of life which underlie all Theology. Questions about Divine government and human freedom will, I see, force themselves upon us.

It would keep this book more close to its purpose, if I could proceed at once with the examination of what our Lord says and does, and leave all these difficulties on one side, taking it for granted that all my readers had arrived at their own views about them; or if I were to refer them to works in which they are formally discussed.

But I trust my readers will forgive me, if I suppose that it may be with them as with those I have been used to teach—that is to say, that they will be attracted by these perplexities, and that they will be impatient at being told that just what they want to ask lies outside my province. Many too, I know, would never turn to any of the [pg 029] learned works on these matters, of which I might give them the names.

I have resolved, therefore, to deal with these matters once for all, in as familiar a way as I can. I cannot, of course, give my readers solutions of these questions; I can only tell them how I manage to do without a solution myself, and put before them the view of these matters which I hold till I can get a better, so that they may more readily enter into my views of Christ's Laws of action, and understand what I write.

The characteristics of our Lord's ways which particularly bring us in contact with these mysteries, and which therefore concern us most now, are (1) His care to keep alive in His hearers their sense of being free and responsible agents; (2) His tolerance of the existence of evil in the world.

These questions of free will and the existence of evil have been for ages the battle-ground of divines, and they come before us every day. “Why did not God make every one good?” is a question which occurs to every intelligent child. He runs to his first teachers with it, and finding himself put off with an answer that is no answer—for a child is quick in detecting this—he gets his first notion that there are matters which even grown-up people know nothing about.

So, that I may not serve my readers in this way, I give them all I have myself. I can no more tell them “How” or “Why” God brought about the [pg 030] present state of things, than I can solve the great mystery which is at the bottom of all mysteries: “How, or Why, God and the world ever existed at all?” But I think I can shew that free agency in men, and the existence of evil, and also a reserve in the revelation of God's ways—a question I shall have to deal with next—are consistent with our situation in this world; supposing that the mental and spiritual development of God's creatures is the proximate end and aim of the Spiritual Order. Some hypothesis we must make as to a purpose in the world, if we regard it as the work of a mind; and this is the purpose which most seems to fall in with what I observe.

Our Lord speaks of Divine action as “The mystery of the kingdom of God.”6 He directs the thoughts of His disciples to these ways by telling them, not what they are, but to what they are like. We shall never, while on earth, perfectly know these ways, but Christ thinks it well for His disciples to strive after this knowledge, and to look for lessons in all they see to help them towards it.

Not only does Christ give us what I have called seed-thoughts on these matters, but He puts us in possession of a unique method for leading men towards the truth about them. He takes an incident of familiar life, and uses it to set forth spiritual verities. So when we must discourse of these hard matters our safest course is to follow [pg 031] our Lord's way. No doubt, He meant to shew us how to teach, as well as to tell us what to teach; so if we begin with a sort of allegory or parable, we cannot be far wrong in point of form, however feeble and faulty the execution may be. I believe that the relation of a parent to his household affords likeness enough to that of the Father to His world, to be used as the ground of a parable on God's Will and Human Freedom.

Let us suppose that the father of a family, a man of strong will, and steadfastly abhorring evil, should conceive the project of forcibly shutting it out from his home. We will suppose the household planted in a spot remote from human intercourse, in some self-supplying island or dale among the hills; and, as I do not mean to touch on physical evil, let us suppose that no external calamity comes nigh the dwelling. Here, let us suppose, the children grow up, uncontaminated by ill, knowing no temptation, reared in love and kindness, treated wisely and with such even justice that envy and jealousy find no room to enter.

The parent proposes to himself to do away with all temptation, all chance of individual aberration, and to cast his children's character in a perfect mould. He would have them merge themselves in him as much as possible, repeating his thoughts and accepting his views without questioning them, or supposing they could be questioned. All society, all books, but what he approves, [pg 032] are banished from that house, so that no whisper of evil, no pernicious notions can possibly intrude. Evil is by him regarded as a pestilent weed, which only exists, owing to some oversight in the making of the world, for which he is at a loss to account. It is at once to be eradicated whenever it is espied.

Let us suppose that all goes well in our imagined household—that the children love their father and believe implicitly in him; that they are so happy in their home and home pursuits that they do not look beyond; and that the healthy labour, which their common wants necessitate, gives room for all their energies. Hence, there is no repining at their narrow sphere, no longing for more strenuous activity or more varied life. Each does his daily work, and returns to pleasant rest and a happy home, and no more asks himself whether he is happy than he asks whether the valves of his heart are opening and closing as they should. The father, then, looks around him, and sees his ideal accomplished. He has a family of which no member does anything but what he approves, or has a thought but what he shares with him: not one of them sets up an opinion different from what he holds. It never occurs to them to doubt the wisdom of any injunction. Life presents to them no moral difficulties, because, as soon as any question occurs to them, they run with it to their father, and on receiving his reply put aside the [pg 033] matter, as being decided and disposed of for good and all.

We might suppose the parent would look around with unalloyed satisfaction. But a moment comes when he finds something wanting. He is not so thoroughly satisfied as he had expected to be with the ideal which he has worked out. Some misgiving obtrudes itself. He asks himself—Is this condition, this merging of my children's wills in mine, what is best for them or what is best for me? Is not this goodness of theirs too negative? Is it not rather the absence of evil than the presence of good?

Further he asks, am not I substantially alone? Is not mine the only independent mind in the place, of which all the rest are mere reflections? Am I not intensifying my loneliness and all the moral disadvantages that attach to it, by thus rendering all who surround me merely portions of myself? For my children are not separate persons, but bits of me. Are not whole provinces of moral activity shut out from me, by the very fact of my having everything my own way? Are there not virtues which require opposition to call them out? Is it not good to have to ask ourselves whether we are dealing fairly with opponents? Is it not good to forgive wrongs? Is it not good to reach out a helping hand, and lift one who has stumbled, back into his self-respect? I engage in no struggles. In my world there are no misdoings [pg 034] to forgive and no misdoers to restore. Have I not closed against myself whole worlds of moral action and of moral life?

Then, as to my children, “Have I not been wrong in supposing that they must be good because they have never done wrong? They have been so kept from the suggestion of evil that they could hardly help going right. But could they resist temptation if it came? They have never been braced by a struggle with it, nor marked the ill fruits of evil. They take it on trust from me that evil brings sorrow; but it usually comes in disguise and declares itself harmless, and how should they recognise it if it came?” So, question after question suggests itself, all destructive of his satisfaction. “Can it be,” he says at last, “that I have brought up these children so as to be fit for no world but that which I have carefully constructed for them? I used to delight in their goodness; but since I have suspected it to be mainly instinctive—an innocence that is the outcome of ignorance—my satisfaction in it is half gone.”

At length, he is harassed with the idea that he may have given up his life to a mistake, that what he has done has cramped his own mental and moral expansion, and that the excellence of his blameless family is only fair-weather goodness after all. He casts about to think why it is that they have “neither savour nor salt,” and concludes “What they want is personality—and how should they have [pg 035] got it, living in a household where I have taken care to be all in all?”

Then his thoughts run upon evil, which he has been at such pains to shut out, closing against it every cranny and chink. “God,” he may say, “has let evil into His world—was I right in keeping it forcibly out of mine? May not the resisting and assuaging of evil give occasion for good to grow up, and feel its own strength? Are there not many kinds of goodness, brought out in this way, which we could no more have without evil than we could have light in a picture without shade? If there is no room for my children to go wrong, what moral significance,” he asks, “is there in saying that they go right?”

So he is disheartened with his project, and gives it up. He abandons his isolated way of life, and gives his children freedom. He encourages them to act and judge for themselves. Henceforth they can choose their own books, their own friends their own pursuits, and go forth into life, outside their charmed circle.

Of course this involves the giving up of his absolute power; this is inherent in the nature of things. A man cannot be an autocrat and have free people about him. If he would have intercourse with free intelligences, in order to get the advantages to his own cultivation and expansion of character which spring from such intercourse; this must be purchased by abdicating some of his [pg 036] powers, or putting them in abeyance. So the parent forbears using his power, in order that his children may learn to be free, and that he may hold communion with free, loving hearts, and engage in discussion with unfettered minds.

Soon, he finds that he has to encounter opposition. The children are free to go wrong, and wrong some of them will go: evil appears in that household where it was not known. The father sorrows over this, but when he reviews his condition he finds that he has a countervailing comfort; the good that is left about him is now real good. It is the good of persons who have known and resisted evil. Besides this, there is more life and greater vigour of character in his family, than there was before. They no longer sit with folded hands always waiting for direction; they have the air of persons who see a purpose before them; and they move along their way “with the certain step of man.” So he concludes that it is better that all should engage in the struggle with evil, even though some should fail, than that they should move along paths ready shaped out for them, shewing a merely mechanical goodness.

A great change has come over his life in another respect, he is now no longer alone. Other wills come into contact, sometimes into collision, with his will; a host of qualities, which had been folded up and laid by for years, come again into use. He is no longer among echoes of himself, but there [pg 037] are real voices in his new world. His views may still prevail, but it must be, not merely because they are his, but because they stand on solid ground. He may still lead in action; but it must be because he has the leader's strength, because he will venture when others waver, and decide when others doubt.

Here we must leave him, and say a word or two before making the obvious application of the parable: We must not press the application too closely or draw conclusions from the mere machinery of the parable: it must not, of course, be supposed that I conceive God to have dealt with man as the father does with his children; that is to say, to have kept him at first in tutelage, and then found it desirable to enfranchise him. The sole object of the story is to familiarise the reader with the need of freedom in moral growth. It shews that for education to be carried out, the will must be free to act. When we have brought this home to his mind, we shall be the better able “to justify the ways of God to man” in some important particulars.

The parable is designed to apply to the condition of men on earth on the supposition, that their education—in the largest sense of the word—is the main work held in view: all depends on the hypothesis that man is placed on earth to develop his powers. The need of freedom for members of the imagined family depends on their being in a [pg 038] state of growth. The parable would not apply to spiritual beings, if we could conceive such, whose qualities and character were unalterable. Perfected beings have done with growth and struggle, and have attained to the highest condition, viz. existence in unison with God. But for imperfect beings, struggling on to their goal, freedom is required and the opposition of evil is indispensable, in order that the moral thews and sinews may harden.

Whenever we come upon an objection to the ways of God's ordering of the world, which is put in the form of a question, such as “Why was not the world made in this way or that?” we shall find it a good plan, to follow out the line indicated in the complaint, and see what would have come about, supposing that God had made the world in the way which is suggested.

From the imaginary case here put, we see to what the common child's question leads us—the question “Why did not God make all people good and keep them so?”—If people had been “made good and kept good,” that is to say if they had been constructed by God so as always to act as His will prompted, then they would not in the proper sense of the word have been people at all; they would have been mechanisms worked by God, and so they could not have been “good” in the sense in which we use the word of a man, but only in that in which we apply it to a watch. There [pg 039] could be no moral life without freedom; there could be no growth of character without temptations and difficulties to overcome; no heroism, no self-denial, no sympathising tenderness, no forgiving love, without suffering or wrongdoing to call them forth.

Moreover if not only people on earth, but all created intelligences had, in like manner, been constrained to respond to every motion of the Divine will, God would have been the one spiritual being in the world and would therefore have been absolutely alone.

Let us now suppose, and the supposition falls in with what our conscience and the Bible tell us, that in God all goodness dwells. This goodness cannot lie stored away as in a treasure-house, so as to be merely an object of contemplation, it must be active and in operation. This is essential to our idea of goodness, and it agrees with the view of God which Christ presents to us, which is that of a being ever operating. “My Father worketh hitherto,” says our Lord, “and I work.” For good to unfold, and advance toward perfection in its manifold ways, an arena is wanted. The world we know of affords the arena required; in this, God has been working from the first One kind of His work we can conceive to be the suggesting thoughts to men; but if it be so, He leaves the will free either to entertain or to reject the suggestions, as we might those of a friend.

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That we may not lose ourselves in the immensity of God and eternity, we will withdraw our gaze from the rest of the Universe, and fix it on this planet of ours, when organic life first began to appear upon it. The spiritual and material world might, before this, have been going on, each apart, through countless ages; but a moment came when the spiritual and the material were wondrously blended, and life began upon the earth. Different orders of being succeeded each other, and fresh forces came into play. We may suppose that God sympathised with all His creation, and that the qualities that appeared in it reflected something in Himself. God may have rejoiced in seeing the animal creation happy. The animals were in a degree free, but they were not self-conscious; they did not know that they were happy, or that they were loved, and God may have required for the full unfolding of His infinite capacity for sympathy and love, to be in relation with beings who could know Him and love Him, and know that they loved Him.

Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, in his excellent book on the Spiritual Order, says “Is there not a comfort in the doctrine of the eternal Sonship, as a deliverance from the thought of a God, whose very nature is Love, dwelling in absolute solitude from all eternity without an object of love?” We may extend this observation to other qualities besides love, from the exercise of which, a being who is [pg 041] alone in the world is necessarily debarred. Is it not likely that a God of mercy, truth and justice would frame a world of beings, in His dealing with whom all these qualities should find scope and exercise? Without self-conscious beings having free wills, how could this be done?

Close by the side of this question of free will, lies that of the existence of moral evil, in a world made by a being who, by the hypothesis, is perfectly good. When we supposed the world to be formed for the evolution of moral goodness, we, perhaps without knowing it, introduced the idea of moral evil, implied in that of goodness; for actual good is evolved in resisting evil and repairing the mischief it has done; indeed many forms of it can no more exist without evil as an antagonist, than a wheel can turn without the friction of the road.

Now, as I have said, if men be left free, they must have liberty to go wrong. For if they had been originally made so perfect that they could not go wrong, this would only mean that they were like watches very excellently fabricated; they could only move in one particular way, viz. the way in which they had been designed to move by God. Inasmuch as such beings would not be persons, we could not feel gratitude or anger towards them, nor influence them in any way. If men were like this, there could be little or no growth, little or no action of man on man. If, to take another supposition, man had been so made that it would be [pg 042] possible for him to go wrong, but that he had been sedulously kept out of temptation and placed in an abode where innocence reigned undisturbed; then we come to a case very like that sketched in the foregoing parable.

There is a third case possible. God might make men capable of going wrong, but might watch over them and protect them, whether they craved His help or not, whenever temptation approached. This constant supernatural interference would soon have destroyed all self-helpfulness; men would never have formed habits of avoiding or resisting temptation. “God,” the man would say, “will not let me sin—I may go as near to danger as I like, and need take no care of myself, because I am sure of God's protection.” We know that a child does not learn to take care of himself, so long as he feels that it is the nurse's business to see that no harm happens to him. We come then to this result. God requires free self-conscious beings, for the full exercise of the moral goodness in Himself and for its development and manifestation in the world.

But He cannot give others freedom, and at the same time provide that they should act only in the way that He approves: because this in itself would be a contradiction, and a contradiction not even Divine power can effect. Hence these free, intelligent beings must be at liberty to go wrong, and God must, in exchange for having free wills about him, forego part of His absolute prerogative: [pg 043] and so He must allow evil a place in the world because this is involved in the “liberty to go wrong” just spoken of.

This brings us to the mystery of the “origin of evil.” I shall not lay myself open to the charge made against divines, “That they no sooner declare a subject to be a mystery than they set to work to explain it.” I can see that if man is to be left free, evil must needs come, and that without evil in the world none of the more masculine virtues can be brought to the birth—that is to say, I see that evil, being in the world, serves to discharge a function—but I do not pretend to say how it came. I do not maintain that it came, solely, from man's misuse of his freedom.

From what we see in the world arises a fancy that every thing must have its opposite, that light presupposes darkness, and pleasure pain, and so good may presuppose evil; but this fancy is not substantial enough to build upon. Our Lord's words on the occasions when He deals with evil, are, to my judgment, most easily reconciled with one another, and with the circumstances which call them forth, by supposing Him to recognise a personal spiritual influence, presenting evil thoughts to the minds of men; the man remaining free to choose whether he will entertain these suggestions or not.

I return to my immediate subject—the function that evil performs in the existing moral world. We [pg 044] read in the Book of Genesis that the earth was to bring forth “thorns and thistles,” and that man was “to eat bread in the sweat of his brow.”7 This is the result of a change worked, we are told, “for man's sake.” It was indeed for man's sake—though in a different sense—that this was so. He would have remained a very poor creature if the earth had produced just what he wanted, without any labour of his. This illustrates the function of evil in the ordering of the world. Man's qualities, moral and physical, are developed by it. It subserves the progress of the human race.

We should have less heroism, without cruelty and oppression from without; and could have no self-restraint, without temptation from within. Piety and love indeed, when they had once come into being, might exist without evil; we may believe that they satisfy the souls of the saints in heaven; but among men they commonly owe their birth to a feeling of shelter against evil, and to a sense of pardoned wrong.

Another office which evil performs is this. The contention with it helps to bring out the difference between man and man. If any members of the family of my parable had possessed the germs of a strong character, they could hardly have brought fruit to perfection: the conditions of their innocent life tended to uniformity. But as soon as temptations came, latent differences would forthwith [pg 045] appear; the strong would grow stronger and the bad worse. Now there is need of strong men for human progress. They form the steps in the stairway by which the race mounts. If life were smooth and easy, men would, as it were, advance in line, and the stronger men would not so surely come in front of the rest. It is in times of trouble that men are most apt to recognise worth and capacity, and make much of them. So that the trials and difficulties of human life which come of evil, have this good effect among others, they help to pick out the men who are fitted to be the leaders of human movements and of human thought.

It may have struck us as strange that Christ does not deal directly with these perplexing questions which trouble so many minds. We shall see, later on, that His not doing so is quite consistent with the uniform “tenour of His way.” But though our Lord does not lay down dogmas on these points, yet His own actions and expressions would, of course, accord with what He knew: if, then, when we hit upon some view of this “riddle of the painful earth,” which commends itself to our minds, we find that it clashes with what our Lord does or says, then we may throw it aside at once: and, on the other hand, if we arrive at a way of looking at the matter which seems to harmonise with what falls from Him; then, we may hope, not indeed that we have found a solution of the riddle, but that our hypothesis will not mislead us, so [pg 046] long as we own it to be an hypothesis, and nothing more.

We may be supposed then to have arrived at this position. We assume the existence of a mighty Divine being, in whom all goodness dwells. We suppose that this world is an arena in which a struggle is to be carried on between good and evil by the agency of free intelligent beings; that by means of this struggle the better natures will be strengthened and developed, and come more and more into action; we suppose also that God whispers counsel and comfort on the side of good. Further than this we need not now go.

As regards the presence of evil in the world, there are several sayings of our Lord which might be noted. I must confine myself to one or two of the most important.

First let us consider the following passage from St. John's Gospel:8

“And as he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind? Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”

Here the disciples take it for granted, that the blindness was a punishment for sin, either on the part of the man or his parents. It is our Lord's practice—and [pg 047] a practice so uniform that we may call it a Law of proceeding—not to enter into controversy about wide-spread mistaken views on merely speculative subjects: He usually gives a hint, and leaves it to work in the hearer's mind.

Our Lord's answer in this case means, not, of course, that the man and his parents had never committed sin, but that the blindness was not the result of that sin; and He passes rapidly on to state His view of one purpose answered by this infliction.

In His few words of answer our Lord lets fall one of those hints, seed thoughts, as I have called them, which lie so thickly in the Gospels.

Our Lord tells us, that the works of God were to be made manifest by this man's infirmity. A light is thrown by these words on one of the “uses of adversity.” Suffering gives room for moral goodness to come into play. The world is full of instances easy enough to note. Does not a sick child in a family educate all around it to tenderness and self-denial? What more touching lesson in patience can be given than the sight of the little sufferer, grieved at nothing so much as the trouble it causes, making the most of every alleviation, grateful beyond measure for every look or word of love. Rough brothers learn forbearance and gentleness; and to all the household it becomes natural to think of something else before, or at least beside, themselves. Wordsworth tells us of [pg 048] a half-witted boy whose helplessness and simplicity fostered a spirit of kindliness in all the poor of the village, and taught them to respect affliction.

Again in the parable of the Prodigal Son, we are taught how there is “a soul of goodness in things evil.” The wickedness of the prodigal is made a means of revealing to him and to all the bystanders the Divine beauty and efficacy of forgiving love.

We will now9 turn to the history of the cure of the Dæmoniac in the country of the Gadarenes. I take the history in what seems to me the plain literal sense, and I must suppose that our Lord recognised some real evil existence, which had possessed itself of the man, and which, by its presence in him, had unhinged his whole mental or nervous organisation. This existence is separable from him, but it requires, it would seem, some body to inhabit and to work upon. The dæmon begs not to be suppressed or annihilated, and our Lord grants his petition and lets him go among the swine. He saves the man—what other evils this dæmon may work in the world, so that he lets men go, is no concern of His. The Son of Man is concerned only with lives and souls—not with property in any way.

The point for us to note is this: Our Lord does not annihilate evil. He does not regard it as an outlawed intruder who had eluded God's notice, [pg 049] and who, as soon as he is discovered, is to be expelled from the universe at once. His Father has suffered evil to be, and He, Christ, follows in His Father's ways: evil may still do its work, only not on men. This evil influence, we must observe, is something external to the man; it would seem to belong to an order of existences, engaged in working ill as their congenial business; whispering bad counsel, something in the way that God's Spirit whispers good, only, of course, not in such deep authoritative tones; and, in these cases of possession, it masters the whole being of the sufferer. Why this was allowed to be, is of course a mystery, but yet it is hardly a greater mystery than why evil in its other forms should be allowed to exist, and without evil in some shape, as we have seen, this earth would be a very imperfect exercise-ground for mankind.

To represent this case to our minds, let us imagine some malignant “germ” that has caused a plague amongst men, and which in time takes a slightly different form, so that it is no longer adapted to human beings, but finds its prey in cattle instead. Then the plague among men is exchanged for a murrain among cattle, which, as a matter of fact, has been known to happen: this answers to the allowing the dæmon to go to the swine. Evil is not forcibly exterminated, but it is transferred from man to the lower animals.

So our Lord is gentle even with the powers of [pg 050] evil. They had their function, or they would not have been there, and they were not to be crushed out of existence before the time.

If it be, as I have argued, that evil had a function in the world, then we can see why it could not be removed by a universal decree. But a single act of relief might be admissible in order to testify to the presence of an exceptional power; this would not engender in people the habit of helplessly throwing themselves upon God. For instance, Christ cures the son of the centurion merely by speaking the word, but if He had abolished all fevers by one decree, this would have been to disorganise the existing order in the universe. A King going on a royal progress relieves the misery that comes in his way; his own kindliness, his royal dignity, and the need of impressing on the people that their King delights in doing good, and can do it, require him so to do. But a regal donation for the relief of all distress in the kingdom would turn it into a nation of paupers. So our Lord bestows His bounty on those who fall in His way.

He who asks, Why did not Christ suppress evil? may naturally ask also, Why did not Christ sweep away all human error as to the relations of God with man? And why did He not so vouch for the authenticity of His communication that any doubt about it should be impossible? Now we believe, that God has revealed Himself to man, [pg 051] and yet has left men in some degree free as to what they will think about Him, and as fully at liberty to examine the credentials of those who have claimed to be His messengers, and to judge of their authenticity, as they would be in a purely human matter.

We find, as a matter of fact, that men who have accepted Christ's revelation are not fettered in mind by it; but are most often enterprising, energetic and bold searchers after truth. I believe that it would have been unfavourable to the preservation of this vigour of mind and to the temper which should “try all things and hold fast those which are good,” if the full and absolute revelation which some demand had been delivered to mankind, and all the problems which beset human life had thereby been settled once for all. To the questions “Why we are told what we are told?” “Why we are not told more?” and “Why doubt and ambiguities are not all cleared away?”—we cannot hope to give answers, but we may find ways of looking at them which shall help in some degree

“To justify the ways of God to man.”

It will be best to discuss this subject in a separate Chapter.

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