Theological Essays/III

I suppose if any of us met with a treatise which professed to discuss the Origin of Evil, our first and most natural impulse would be to throw it aside. "The man must have great leisure," we should say, "or be very youthful, who could occupy himself with such a subject as this. After six thousand years' experience of Evil, and almost as many of hopeless controversy about its source, we may as well reckon that among the riddles which men are not to solve and pass to something else."

The resolution may be a wise one, as far as it relates to discussions, philosophical or theological, upon this topic. Possibly the chief good they have done is, that they have shown how little they can do; that they have proved how inadequate school logic is for the necessities of human life. But if we supposed, when we closed the book, that we had done with the question which it raised and which it tried to settle; if we thought it would not meet us again in the law-court and the market-place, and mix itself, most inconveniently, in all the common business of the world,—a little experience will have shown us ​that we were mistaken. We must consider the origin of Evil whether we like it or not. We are debating it with ourselves, we are conversing about it with others, we are acting on some conclusions we have formed about it, every day of our lives. Take a few instances.

1. A man cannot help perceiving that the climate he is living in has some influence on himself, and upon all who are about him. It is an influence which directly affects his body, but it does not stop there; through this, it acts in a number of ways upon his thoughts and his habits. If it affects him less or more than others, the difference is caused by a difference of temperament; that must be set down as another influence which requires to be taken account of—one of which the workings are great, and in various directions. Add the conditions of luxury, mediocrity, or poverty, into which he is born, and he is conscious of a whole system of agencies working upon him from childhood upwards, modifying apparently, if not determining his wishes, conceptions, purposes. He has not yet calculated the effect of association upon him, even taking that word in its simplest, narrowest sense, to express his intercourse with his brothers, sisters, schoolfellows. If he enlarges the word to comprehend all that he has received from the atmosphere of his country and his age, he may become well-nigh overwhelmed. For he begins to think what shape his moral code might have taken, if he had been born within certain degrees of latitude. He asks himself whether he should not almost certainly have been a Roman Catholic, if his lot had been cast in any part of the south of Europe; a Hindoo or a Buddhist, or perhaps something worse, ​if he had grown up in some of the finest regions of Asia. Without plunging into these speculations, there is the obvious and undeniable operation of those who have educated him; the operation of all the thoughts, feelings, and habits, which had descended upon them from their instructors and ancestors.

These are but a few items in an enormous calculation, a few hints which might be expanded indefinitely. What is the result? As some evil tendency or temper, which exists in him, forces itself upon his notice, or is forced upon him by the criticisms and admonitions of others, he refers it to some of these circumstances by which he is hemmed in. Has he not a right to do so? Can he not prove his case? That effeminate, slothful disposition,—cannot he explain to himself clearly, what early indulgence, what ill-health, what inherited morbidness begot it in him? That gambling fever which is consuming him, does not he know where it was caught, who gave him the infection? That loss of truth in words and deeds, cannot he trace it up to frauds practised on him in the nursery; cannot he almost fix on the hour, the moment, when one of them seemed to undermine his soul and make it false? But for riches, would he have been so hard and indifferent to others? But for poverty and successive disappointments, would he have been so sour and envious?

In this way we reason about ourselves; we deliberately assign an origin to the evil within us; can we refuse the advantage of the same plea to our fellows? Do we not blush when we tell any man, "You ought to have been so different"? Have not a thousand influences that we know acted upon him for evil, which have not acted upon us? May there not have ​been tens of thousands which we do not know? Our practical conclusion, if we are charitable, is, that we must make great allowances for him: his circumstances have been, or may have been, very unpropitious; may not much of his wrong-doing be owing to these? Here we seem to be extending a doctrine concerning the origin of evil to men generally.

And if we are aroused to exertion respecting ourselves or our brethren, it appears as if we directly applied this doctrine to practice. We fly from old associations, we bring new ones about us; we assume that those who have erred will not be better unless we can give them a different education, another social position, positive restraints imposed by us, opportunities for restraining themselves, freedom from some shackles which appear to have operated injuriously. We do not scruple, any of us, to say that there are forms of government and forms of belief which we wish to see destroyed, because we suppose individual morality can scarcely exist under their shadow.

From these data it is not wonderful that some persons, anxious to set the world right, should have generalised the conclusion, that all evil has its origin in circumstances; that when you make them good, you make men good. It is not wonderful that they should strive to point out how the first object may be accomplished here and everywhere; how the second is necessarily involved in it. We must submit to be charged by them with great logical inconsistency, for going with them so far, and yet stopping short at what seems to them the inevitable consequence.

2. There is one great hindrance to the acknowledgment of that consequence; perhaps to some persons it is the only one. They cannot persuade themselves that ​human creatures would receive so many evil impressions from the surrounding world, if there was not in them some great capacity for such impressions. They cannot suppose that the bad circumstances produce the susceptibility to which they appeal, however they may increase it. How, they ask, did the circumstances become bad? Perhaps the elements are good, but they are ill-combined. What produced that bad combination? Who put them out of order? Or there is some one of them that was bad, and disturbed the rest. That one must have become so, independently of its circumstances. There must," they say, "be some evil, which was not made so by the accidents that invested it; you will be involved in a wearisome circle, an endless series of contradictions, if you do not admit this. And if you do, is it not more reasonable," they ask, "to say that this evil belongs to the very nature of man, that it is a corruption of blood? Will not that account both for the growth of bad circumstances, and for the reaction of them upon you, upon us, upon all? Confess that the infection you speak of is in us all, confess that we are members of a depraved race, and you can explain all the phenomena you take notice of; on any other hypothesis they are incomprehensible."

This view of the origin of Evil is also pregnant with practical consequences; it never can become a mere theory. It must lead all who hold it to inquire whether this corruption is necessary and hopeless, or may be cured; whether the cure may come by the destruction of the substance in which it dwells, or whether that may be reformed; in either case, what the seat of the malady is, how the amputation may be effected or the new blood poured in, and the man himself survive. The world's history is full of the ​most serious and terrible answers to these questions,— answers attesting how real and radical the difficulty was which suggested them. "The disease is in my body, this flesh, this accursed matter;"—here was one often-repeated, never-exhausted reply; "the flesh must be destroyed; till it is destroyed I can never be better." All the macerations and tortures of Indian devotees had this justification. "No, it is not there; it is in the soul that you are corrupted and fallen; the body is but the tool and handmaid of its offences." That was another, seemingly a more hopeful conclusion. And this soul must try to recover itself, must seek again the high and glorious position which was once its own. By what ladder? "It must think high thoughts of itself; it must not allow itself to be crushed and overpowered by low bestial instincts; it must refuse to be degraded by the mere animals in the form of men among whom it dwells." This was one prescription. "Ah no!" said the mystic, after bitter trial of that method; "it must not rise, but sink; the soul must desire annihilation for itself; till it dies it will never know what life is."

These conclusions, we might fancy, affected only a few individuals. Oh no! the whole society in which they are found is coloured and shaped by them. I do not deny that there may come a time when they may lose their power, when the large mass of notions and practices which they have created through a series of ages may begin to upheave, when a general unbelief may take the place of an all-embracing credulity. But out of that unbelief you will see forms arising which will prove that the old notions are not dead; that they cannot die. They are about you while you are despising them; they are within you while you are denying them; ​if you can find no clue to them, no explanation of them, they will still darken your hearts and the face of the whole universe.

3. This is equally true, I believe, of another, an older, we may think quite an obsolete, method of accounting for the existence of Evil. The belief in Evil Spirits, in Powers of Darkness, to which the bodies and spirits of men are subject, which haunt particular places, which hold their assemblies at certain times, which claim certain men as their lieges, from whose assaults none are free; this belief we may often have been inclined to look upon as the most degrading and despicable of all, from which a sounder knowledge of physics, and of the freaks and the capacities of the human imagination, has delivered us. Are we sure that the deliverance has been effected? Are we sure that fears of an invisible world,—of a world not to come, but about us,—are extinct, or that they may not rush in with great force upon rich and luxurious people, as much as upon the poorest and the least instructed? Are we sure that they may not press the discoveries of physical science, and the possibilities of the vast undiscovered regions above and beneath to which it points us, into their service? Are we sure that all our discoveries, or supposed discoveries, respecting the spiritual world within us, may not be equally appealed to in confirmation of a new demoniac system? Are we sure that the very enlightenment, which says it has ascertained Christian stories to be legends, will not be enlisted on the same side, because, if we will only believe these facts, it will be so easy to show how those falsities may have originated?

And why is this belief at least as potent as either of the others, often mixing with them and giving them ​a new character? Because there is in men a sense of bondage to some power which they feel that they should resist and cannot. Because that feeling of the "ought" and the "cannot " is what forces not upon scholars, but upon the poorest man, the question of the freedom of the will, and bids them seek some solution of it. Has not every one wondered that the deepest problem in metaphysics,—the one which so many professional metaphysicians relinquish as desperate, that respecting which divines cry out in pulpits, "Ask nothing, it is so hard; there is some truth in each view of it,"—should exercise and torment peasants in ten thousand ways; that they should have listened, as they did when Covenanters and Puritans were preaching, to the most elaborate as well as the most startling expositions of it; that if they cannot have the knot untied for them, they always find some intelligible superstition wherewith to cut it? Oh! let us give over our miserable notion that poor men only want teaching about things on the surface, or will ever be satisfied with such teaching? They are groping about the roots of things, whether we know it or not. You must meet them in their underground search, and show them the way into daylight, if you want true and brave citizens, not a community of dupes and quacks. You may talk against devilry as you like; you will not get rid of it unless you can tell human beings whence comes that sense of a tyranny over their own very selves, which they express in a thousand forms of speech, which excites them to the greatest, often the most profitless, indignation against the arrangements of this world, which tempts them to people it and heaven also with objects of terror and despair.

Here, then, are three schemes of the universe, all developed out of the observation of facts, or, if you like ​that form of speech better, out of the consciousness of men, all leading to serious results affecting our well-being in this as well as in other periods of history. Each has given birth to theories of divinity, as well as to a very complicated anthropology. They show no symptoms of reconciliation; yet they exist side by side, and gather new votaries from various quarters, as well as new confirmation from each of these votaries. Shall we ask what Christian Theology, not according to any new conception of it, but according to the statements which have embodied themselves in creeds, and are most open to the censures of modern refinement, says of them?

1. First, then,—there is no disguising it,—the assertion stands broad and patent in the four Gospels, construed according to any ordinary rules of language;—the acknowledgment of an Evil Spirit is characteristic of Christianity. I do not, of course, mean that the dread of such a Spirit did not exist in every part of the world before the Incarnation of our Lord. Powers which are plotting mischief against men enter into, every heathen religion; gradually those religions came to signify little else than the conciliation of such powers. In the highest. civilisation of the Roman Empire, when unbelief in the Divine had become habitual, the fear of the devilish expressed itself in a devotion to magic and prophecy, which was as real as the devotion of frivolous people can be. The Jew was taught throughout all his history that there were enemies within as well as without, who were contending against him. He realised the conviction in his prayers to the God of his fathers. He could not believe that Philistines or Moabites were tormenting ​him in his chamber. He learnt that the secret, impalpable enemies there were his country's tyrants, even more than the visible ones. The Pharisee of later times, with no feelings for his country except as it reflected his vanity or ministered to his contempt of others, wrapt up in the desire to get what he could for himself in this world and the next, had wrought out of the hints which the living men of former days supplied him a very extensive Demonology. Beelzebub, the prince of the devils, occupied a large place in his theory; he could always be resorted to for the explanation of any more than usually startling difficulty. And this being was unconsciously becoming the object of Jewish worship. All his features were gradually transferred by the imagination of the self-seeker to the God of Abraham.

When, then, I speak of the belief in the existence and presence of an Evil Spirit as characteristic of the Gospels, I mean this: that in them first the idea of a spirit directly and absolutely opposed to the Father of Lights, to the God of absolute goodness and love, bursts full upon us. There first we are taught that it is not merely something in peculiarly evil men which is contending against the good and the true; no, nor something in all men; that God has an antagonist, and that all men, bad or good, have the same. There first this antagonist presents himself to us, altogether as a spirit, with no visible shape or clothing whatsoever; there first the belief that Evil may be a rival creator, or entitled to some worship,—a belief which every reformer in the old world had spent his life in struggling with,—is utterly put to flight; the vision of a mere destroyer, a subverter of order, who is seeking continually to ​make us disbelieve in the Creator, to forsake the order that we are in, takes place of every other. With these discoveries another is always connected; that this tempter speaks to me, to myself, to the will; that over that he has established his tyranny; that there his chains must be broken; but that all things in nature, with the soul and the body, have partaken, and do partake, of the slavery to which the man himself has submitted.

I simply state these propositions; I am not going to defend them. If they cannot defend themselves, by the light which they throw on the anticipations and difficulties of the human spirit, by the hint of deliverance which they offer it, by the horrible dreams which they scatter, my arguments would be worth nothing. But I am bound to show how this part of the divine revelation affects those two other hypotheses of which I spoke first.

2. That there is a pravity or depravity in every man, and that this pravity or depravity is felt through his whole nature, the Gospel does not assert as a principle of Theology, but concedes as an undoubted and ascertained fact of experience, which no one who contemplates man or the universe can gainsay. What it does theologically with reference to that experience is this: as it confesses an Evil Spirit whose assaults are directed against the Will in man, it forbids us ever to look upon any disease of our nature as the ultimate cause of transgression. The horrible notion, which has haunted moralists, divines, and practical men, that pravity is the law of our being, and not the perpetual tendency to struggle against the law of our being, it discards and anathematises. By setting forth the ​Spirit of Selfishness as the enemy of man, it explains, in perfect coincidence with our experience, wherein this pravity consists; that it is the inclination of every man to set up himself, to become his own law and his own centre, and so to throw all society into discord and disorder. It thus explains the conviction of the devotee and the mystic that the body must die, and that the soul must die. Self being the plague of man, in some most wonderful sense he must die, that he may be delivered from his pravity. And yet neither body nor soul can be in itself evil. Each is in bondage to some evil power. If there is a God of Order mightier than the Destroyer, body and soul must be capable of redemption and restoration.

3. And thus this Theology comes in contact with that widespread and most plausible creed, which attributes all evil to circumstances. Every one of the facts from which this creed is deduced it fully admits. Every husband, father, ruler, brings his own quota of selfishness to swell the general stock. It accumulates from age to age. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation. The idolatrous habit, the sensual habit, goes on propagating itself, so that the cry,

is the ordinary complaint of intelligent observers. And because it is so, the prudential alleviations of the evil to which, as I admitted, we all do and must resort, have the highest justification in principle. Take away from a man all the injurious influences ​that it is possible to take away, not because circumstances are his rightful masters, but because these influences lead him to think that they are, and to act as if they were. Take them away that he may know what has robbed him of his freedom, whose yoke needs to be broken if he is not always to be a slave. And since the man soon discovers,—since his worship of circumstances is itself an acknowledgment of the discovery,—that the tyranny which is over him is a tyranny over his whole race, we shall never give him any clearness of mind, or any hope, unless we can tell him that the Spirit of Selfishness is the common enemy, and that he has been overcome.

I cannot be ignorant that in this Essay I have encountered one of the most deeply-rooted aversions in the minds of Unitarians. They have always regarded the doctrine of the existence and personality of the Devil as the least tenable figment of orthodox theology. They scarcely think that any one who professes to hold it in the present day can be sincere. They are very tolerant—can give us credit for much invincible ignorance; but they do not believe that any man in the nineteenth century is quite fool enough for that.

I perfectly understand this feeling. I know that it is very widely diffused. I shrink with instinctive cowardice from saying, "I maintain this dogma." should like exceedingly to hide it under some respectable periphrasis. I will tell you why I cannot. I believe that some of what seem to me the hardest, most mischievous theories of our modern popular divinity, -those which shock the moral sense and reason of men most, those which most undermine the belief in God's infinite charity, arise from this timidity, of ​which I am conscious myself, and which I see in my brethren. When men in the old time would have said bravely, meaning what they said, "We are engaged in a warfare with an Evil Spirit; he is trying to separate us from God, to make us hate our brethren," we talk of the depravity of our nature, of the evil we have inherited from Adam. Now, that every child of Adam has this infection of nature, I most entirely and inwardly believe. But to say that this infection forces us to commit sin is to say what the Jews of old said,—what the Prophets denounced as the most flagrant denial of God,—We are delivered to do all these abominations. And it is the very close approximation which we make in some of our popular statements to this detestable heresy, which has called forth an indignant and a righteous protest from many classes of our countrymen, the Unitarians being in some sort the spokesmen for the rest. When we try to avoid this censure, it is by the very feeble and pusillanimous course of introducing modifications into the broad phrases with which we started, modifications that make them mean almost nothing. We maintain the "absolute, universal, all-pervading depravity" of human nature; but then there are "beautiful relics of the divine image," "fallen columns," etc.;—pretty metaphors, no doubt; but who wants metaphors on a subject of such solemn and personal interest? Who can bear them when they reduce assertions, which we were told had the most profound signification, into mere nonentities?

What is pravity or depravity,—affix to it the epithets universal, absolute, or any you please,—but an inclination to something which is not right, an inclination to turn away from that which is right, that ​which is the true and proper state of him who has the inclination? What is it that experiences the inclination; what is it that provokes the inclination? I believe it is the spirit within me which feels the inclination; I believe it is a Spirit speaking to my spirit, who stirs up the inclination. That old way of stating the case explains the facts, and commends itself to my reason. I cannot find any other which does not conceal some facts, and does not outrage my reason. And of this I am sure, that when I have courage to use this language, as the expression of a truth which concerns me and every man, the whole battle of life becomes infinitely more serious to me and yet more hopeful; because I cannot believe in a Spirit which is tempting me into falsehood and evil, without believing that God is a Spirit, and that I am bound to Him, and that He is attracting me to truth and goodness.

And thus another very unsightly, and to me quite portentous, imagination of modern divines is shown to be utterly inconsistent with the faith which we and our forefathers have professed. There is said to have been a war in the Divine mind between Justice and Mercy. We are told that a great scheme was necessary to bring these qualities into reconciliation. When I attribute this doctrine to modern divines, I do not affirm that there may not be very frequent traces of it in the argumentative discourses of old divines; but I mean that, with the strong belief which they had, that an Evil Spirit was drawing them away both from mercy and righteousness,—was tempting them to be both unjust and hard-hearted—they had a practical witness against any notion of this kind, which we have lost, or are losing. They could not but feel that ​to be in a healthful moral state they must be both just and merciful; that there must be a perfect unity and harmony between these qualities; that whatever puts them in seeming division comes from the Evil Spirit; that it is treason to ascribe to the archetypal mind that which destroys the purity of the image. The God who was to deliver them from this strife could not Himself be the subject of it. I believe, then, that the change which the Unitarians perceive in us, and which they consider the blessed effect of civilisation and progress upon minds naturally averse from either, has introduced darkness into our views of God, feebleness into our struggles for good as men. As soon as we return to the practical faith of the old teachers, we shall fling their theories and our own to the winds when they interfere with the absolute righteousness and love of God; we shall know that there must be an All-Good on the one side, or that we shall be at the mercy of the All-Evil on the other.

And now, having applied this principle to our own condemnation, I have a right to turn round upon the Unitarian and ask him whether the same causes are not at work upon him as upon us. I complained in my first Essay that the Unitarians of the last century substituted a mere amiable, good-natured Being for a God of perfect Charity. I referred in the last to their superficial notions respecting Sin. I said that they could not tell us anything about the actual conflict of life; that the deepest wants of which human beings are conscious were unknown to them; that they could only teach us to preserve quietness and propriety, when there is little to ruffle the air or the sea. Is not that refinement which will not face the fact of an Evil Spirit,—the scorn of such ​a belief as vulgar,—at the root of a weakness which is alienating not merely other men, but the youthful and earnest members of their own sect, from them?

For these younger men, I know, do confess the reality of spiritual conflicts. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress they regard as a book of great significance. They have no doubt that Christian must, in some sense, fight with Apollyon. "And who," they ask, "can object to an allegory which clothes so much of real experience in a robe of fantasy? Of course," they continue, "you would not take the whole of that story for gospel, would you? And if we are quite willing to take what is universal in it apart from its old Hebrew drapery, what more do you want? We allow there are abysses and eternities with which men have to do,—valleys of the shadow of death, if you like that language. When you speak of the Devil, we suppose you mean that, or a conceit of your own, or a dream of the past."

One word, dear friends, only one word, just that we may understand each other. If you do maintain the universal truth which lies in that story of Apollyon, I am thoroughly content; let all the outsides pass for what they are worth; let them be acknowledged as the mere dress suitable to a story, not to fact; to the seventeenth century, not to the nineteenth. But mark it is the outside which I give up; to the inside I hold fast. I am very sorry to say that these eternities and abysses of yours look to me very like outsides, mere drapery; the fashionable dialect of a certain not very earnest, rather fantastic period. The dress of the old people being stripped off, as we are agreed it shall be, there remains—what? The history of some mental process? No doubt;—but the nature of the ​process? Is it a shadow-fight? Is it a game of blacks and whites, the same hand moving both? These are questions of some importance to the sincerity of our acts and thoughts. I tell you plainly you have not resolved them, as I have a right to demand, on my own behalf and on behalf of my kind, that they should be resolved. And though I would not for the world that you should anticipate by one hour the decision of your own consciences upon them,—though I honour you for not adopting phrases of ours, or of the Bible, which do not express something substantial to you,—yet I cannot conceal my conviction, the result of my own experience, that your minds will be in a simpler, healthier state, that you will win a victory over some of the most plausible conventionalisms of this age, that you will grasp the truth you have more firmly, and be readier to receive any you have not yet apprehended, when you have courage to say, "We do verily believe that we have a world, and a flesh, and a Devil, to fight with.

And before you believe it, or know that you do, I shall claim you as men who are actually engaged in this struggle, and I shall go on to show that in your heart, as much as in mine, there is a witness for righteousness and truth, which world, and flesh, and Devil have been unable to silence.