MR. J. J. MURPHY'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS.* This is a little
volume of very thoughtful and acute detached essays on subjects which have been forced upon men's atten- tion by the modern discoveries concerning evolution, and by the consideration of the relation of man's physical to his moral nature raised by these discoveries. Several of the essays are not very closely related to each other, and there is no attempt to make them a connected whole ; but Mr. Murphy is so masterly a thinker, and goes so thoroughly into the sub- jects he discusses, that it is impossible not to feel the highest interest in his treatment of almost every subject he takes up. His view of Professor Drummond's able essay on "Natural Law in the Spiritual World" seems to us altogether admirable, and we agree heartily with everything which he says on that very impressive but signally defective work.
For us, however, Mr. Murphy's essay on the final destiny of "the rejected" has the most interest. Mr. Murphy appears to be, if not (as we think) absolutely a universalist, at least absolutely opposed to the view that there can be any hopeless misery and lasting evil in a world ruled by a divine being; and on many sides of the question he states the view of the different prophets and apostles whose writings make up a great part of the revealed teaching of God, with exceptional lucidity and canaour. Especially he 'shows how very strongly St. Paul's teaching tends to the more hopeful side, and on that element in Scripture he achieves the greatest success. On the other hand, he does not deal nearly so effectively with the teaching of Christ himself on the same subject, nor, what seems to us still more important, with those fundamental principles of human nature which Christ always laid as the foundation of his teaching, and which we see at work now before our own eyes. Nor does he even mention the gravest of all Christ's condemnations of evil : " Good were it for that man if he had never been born." If that sentence were really pronounced literally on any one man, and still more if it applied, as we think it must, to any one class of men, it is hardly possible to conceive that our Lord did not recognise the existence of a kind of evil which could never be merged in ultimate and final restoration to the love of God. But the most remarkable defect of Mr. Murphy's essay on this subject is that while he fully recognises the law that "evil is punished by its own increase and goodness rewarded in the same way (p. 115), he does not seem to see that this is a law which appears effectually to refute the view en which he insists so strongly,—that all punishment is for the purification of the being punished. You cannot become worse and worse for your own benefit; you cannot become weaker and weaker in resisting evil for your own good; and yet, as Mr. Murphy shows, the one doctrine on which our Lord most emphatically insists, is that "to him that hath shall be given, and irons him that hath
Manta/ Selection. and Spiritual Froodom, By Joseph John Murphy, Author of"Habit and Intolligenoe" and " The Scientific Bases of Faith," London: Macmillan and Co,
not shall be taken away even that which he I: nth." Now, if at every step deliberately taken into evil the power to retrace your steps dwindles, if with every such evil action the very wish to contend with and crush evil becomes more and more feeble, how can all punishment be purifying, and of the nature of true chastening Is it, or is it not, true that with every deliberate downward step, the strength for retracing it diminishes, and the wish to retrace it lessens ? If this is true, then it is hardly possible to conceive that the will which is privy to its own paralysis, and which conspires, as it were, to undermine itself, can be really undergoing that purgatorial purification which the suffer- ings of those whose hearts are really fixed on God tend to produce. It seems to us that here, and here only, Mr. Murphy ignores that divine teaching as to the principles of human nature on which Christ grounds his severe sayings as to the "wailing and gnashing of teeth" of the rejected. So long as sin is not fully realised as separation from God, so long as the righteousness of God is hidden from the vision of the sinner, and is not consciously and deliberately rejected, it is easy to conceive that the increasing darkness which evil brings upon the soul may result in a passionate determination to recover, by God's grace, the hope that is fading into the dim distance. But if once that state of mind has given place to that paralysis of the will and that perversion of the desires, which result from deliberate sin, it seems to us more than difficult to believe in the chastening and purifying effect of the law of retribution.
What is then needed is not a natural, but a preternatural transformation of character, not a regeneration of the man as
he is, but a miracle which changes the man as he really is into a totally different person, separated by every imaginable chasm from the being whose regeneration was required. The difficulty is not in God, but in the nature of man. We heartily agree with Mr. Murphy that it is impossible to conceive a God of love drawing a line at death and saying, "After death I will not so much as allow a man to turn from evil and embrace good." That could not be the decree of a perfectly righteous and loving being. The difficulty is with man. If we really snake to any extent our own characters, we cannot imagine them unmade by almighty power without giving up the belief in character alto-
gether. A being who had made himself evil, and was then trans- formed into a good being by divine interference, would not
really be himself, but a new person. All regeneration must found itself on the germs of good left in the nature to be regenerated. And if a man has really cast away his own
power of will and his own power of desiring God, by a long series of evil actions, we fail to see where arc the germs on which the regenerating power is to act. This difficulty seems to us to be completely ignored by Mr. Murphy. And yet it is the very centre of Christ's teaching. What does the parable about the evil spirit who finds seven other spirits worse than itself, and returns with them into the man whose last state is. "worse than his first," mean, unless it means that there is a condition of human nature, voluntarily incurred, which is to all intents and purposes desperate P We fully agree with Mr. Murphy that there is much of an opposite tendency in Revelation, and especially in St. Paul's prophecies. Nothing can be more truly and eloquently put, for instance, than the following as Mr. Murphy puts it :—
"Thus, when we are told, on the strength of the apparent gram- matical meaning of passages of Scripture, or of logical inference from them, that there is no hope for those who depart out of the present life unreconciled to God, we have a right to say The Lord Jehovah, the Eternal, wiN not always chide : neither will He keep His anger for ever. Christ is the Prince of Peace ; God is the God of Hope, and his name is Love. The Prince of Peace cannot for ever be at war with those over whom He reigns ; the God of Hope cannot leave any in Hopelessness; and the God who is Love will sooner or later be reconciled to all. When we are told that we shall lose for eternity any of those whom we have loved on earth, we have a right to reply, He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, shall He not also with Hitn freely give us all things.? We are more than conquerors through Him, that loved us—conquerors not only for ourselves, but for others. God is able to do exceeding abundantly abovo all that we can ask or think; and why should He remind us of this, unless He were not only able but willing P Whether the world, or life, or death, or things present or things to. conic; all are ours ; and we are Christ's ; and Christ is God's. When we are told that the possibilities of God's mercies are bounded by place and time—by the limits of this world and of the present life— we have a right to say, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, yea. and for ever. When we are told that His mercy is for those only who are the favoured of His own arbitrary election, we have a right to say, The Lord is good to all: and His lender mercies are over all His works. The Lord upholdeth aZ/ that fall, and raiseth all that be bowed down. When we are told that the death of the body is a.
barrier which the mercy of God through Christ is unable to overpass, we have a right to say that Christ, while on earth= a power girt round with weakness '—was able to raise the dead to life ; and now that He is enthroned at the right hand, of the Majesty on high,' as Lord of both the dead and the living,' and endowed with all authority in heaven and earth, it is impossible that His power to save can stop short at the gate of death. It is not the will of our Father in Heaven—so Christ has said—that one of the little ones should perish. Every human being either is, or has boon, a little child ; and it is not possible that the will of God can be for ever defeated. When we are reminded of Christ's declaration that many indeed are called but few chosen, we have a right to reply that although this is obviously true of the present world, yet he has suggested a very different hope of the ultimate fate of mankind in the plrable of the one sheep that strays away while the ninety and nine remain in safety. A parable asserts nothing ; but the suggestion of this parable is, that as nod's power is not limited by space nor His knowledge by time, so His mercy and His love are not limited by number ; and that He eares for each one of His intelligent creatures as if it were the
• 0 nly one in the universe. And when we are told that for a large part—perhaps the majority—of mankind, it would have been better not to have been born, we have a right to say that the yoke of Christ is easy and His burden is light, and He cannot require His people to bear the overwhelming and crushing burden of such a belief. Such sayings as these are as decisive of the infinity and universality of the grace of God, as is the declaration I am the God of Abraham' of the truth of immortality : these are ground enough for eternal hope, even without the more definite declara- tions on which we have dwelt in a previous chapter. But besides declarations of this kind, Our Lord's appeal remains= Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right P' declaring that the revela- tion of God is not meant to supersede, but to evoke, the naturally given power of discerning truth from falsehood and good from evil. And certainly it is worthy of the Divine character, that we should trust God to be not less but more gracious than even His own words—to fulfil all, and more than all, the hopes which His most gracious words excite. It is only from human goodness that we can form any conception of Divine goodness ; and he is not the beat man or the most like to God, of whom it can be said that he may be trusted to keep his promise to the letter, but that no im- portance must be attached to any expression or suggestion of his goodwill which does not amount to a promise."
But certainly that does not exhaust the question, and no one can deny the very remarkable fact that, on the whole, the severer view of the destiny of the evil is given in Christ's own words, and the more hopeful view in that of his prophets and apostles. There is something of the greatest significance in Newman's remark that Christ reserved for his own lips the more awful side of the teaching that is conveyed on this subject in Revelation. Nor do we see that Mr. Murphy at all succeeds in explaining that more awful teaching away. Of course, there is no question as to the relative numbers of those who pass the limits at which recovery is possible, and of those who return to God. With that we have, fortunately, nothing to do, and undoubtedly the best men are the most ihapeful on that head. But if there be even a single being, much more a class (however limited) of human beings, for whom it had been well never to have been born,—and that is, as we understand it, our Lord's .own assertion,—there is enough reason for dread, as well as for hope.
We have dealt with only one of Mr. Murphy's subjects, and there are many essays of the greatest possible interest, not the least interesting being that on the "Physical Theory of Moral Freedom," though a better name for it would, we think, have been, "Indeterminateness in the Physical World." After all, moral freedom cannot result from physical causes. Mathe- matical indeterminateness is only the indeterminateness of our insufficient knowledge, and what we want in the case of moral freedom is not merely the indeterminateness of inadequate knowledge, but the indeterminateness proceeding from full and conscious power to take either of two alternative ways.
Still, the essay is a very interesting and curious one, and brings out very well that what moral freedom really effects is to alter the direction of the various forces of the world, not to increase their quantity,—to liberate the energy in us at one time rather than another, and for one purpose rather than another. The whole book is valuable.
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