THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.*
THE remarkable feature of this book is its violent and out- spoken protest against various Christian dogmas,—notably the doctrine of sin. The writer adopts in substance the ethical principles of Mr. Leslie Stephen and Mr. Herbert Spencer ; but the disciple far outruns his teachers in his sweeping condemnation of many of the salient features of Christianity. He says that to " characterise the doctrine of sin as immoral, is to use very feeble language." It is, he considers, a "fiction of theologians, despots, popes, and • The Problem of Boa. By Danil Greenleaf Thomson. London: Longmaus and Co. 1887.
priests." The doctrine of the Trinity is a "crude and self- contradictory fiction," involving a " mystical and revolting melange" in the Deity " of the best and worst traits of human character." The Atonement is the most " puerile, clumsy, absurd, preposterous, and nauseating dogma that was ever put before intelligent human beings as an article of faith."
If Mr. Thomson's treatment of these matters consisted merely in such invective as this, we should be content to leave it alone, remembering that " hard words break no bones." But there is a considerable body of plausible argument and ingenious misrepresentation of the doctrines he criticises which calls for detailed notice. And if this redeems the book from the charge of unsupported violence of language, it adds to the writer's responsibility in regard to the charges he prefers. There was, we believe, a law among some of the early Greek nations whereby a man who preferred a capital charge against a fellow-citizen, and was unable to make it good, was himself condemned to death. We shall not claim the right to repay Mr. Thomson in kind for his unmannerly language concerning Christian dogma if he fails to justify it ; but we think he would have done well to bear the law in mind.
We are not disposed to deny, at starting, that Mr. Thomson fastens on certain features of Christianity which have been so exaggerated by particular sects as to afford him some semblance of justification for his view. And this is one reason for looking on his book as a particularly un- fair one, on the principle that a lie which is half a truth is ever the most dangerous of lies. When he represents God as primarily a God of anger, and the " whole human race" as " under the ban of an assumed just wrath of God for things which the individuals did not commit at all," the Calvinists will have little to criticise in his account of their belief. When he contends as against Christians that a degree of self- seeking is inevitably bound up with the disposition of every man, he is opposing, at all events, a doctrine really held by the Quietists. When he expresses righteous horror at the conception of torture inflicted on human beings for original sin only, in which the agent had no responsi- bility, he is opposing the mediaeval tortures infantium, who believed that unbaptised babies endured real physical pain after death. And as these overgrowths of Christian belief have undoubtedly in their degree infected many Christians who would shrink from a naked avowal of their acquiescence in them, it is perhaps not wholly for evil that they should encounter vigorous protests, and that those whom education has deadened them to the full difficulty of entertaining them, should be awakened in the matter. If Christianity is bound up with doctrines which revolt the moral sense, it must lose its hold, for it destroys the very appeal which it has made for its own vindication,—that the soul is, in Tertullian's words, naturaliter Christiana. So far, then, we are disposed to anticipate a certain good effect from such works as the one before us, entirely unjust as they are to Christianity as a whole, from their throwing into undue relief certainly ugly excrescences which have from time to time disgraced the Christian body, and challenging true Christians explicitly to disown them.
But it will at once be asked,—Is it not taught that we are all under the wrath of God P Is it not taught throughout the Christian Church that without baptism all are lost P And there is enough in the traditional views of original sin, of the atonement, of eternal punishment—views which many will be slow to abandon as entirely mistaken, which seem, indeed, to be part of the very marrow of Christianity—to impress many as a real difficulty from Mr. Thomson's point of view, of their collision with the elementary principles of morality. It would carry us much too far to attempt to answer Mr. Thomson in detail on all these particulars ; but we may observe that he omits to notice those Christians who have opposed—and vigorously opposed—the doctrines he attacks. The grace controversies in the Christian schools have shown an energetic opposition on the part of such men as Molina to all that savoured of Calvinism. The definition in the Roman Church of the proposition, " God wishes all men to be saved," is but one instance of a very widely spread protest among Christians themselves—visible notably, in our own day and country, in the writings of such persons as Frederick Maurice and the Broad Church school—against the extreme doctrines as to the elect which are stigmatised by Mr. Thomson as immoral. Fenelon's condemnation prevents his doctrine from being identified with Christianity ; and the conceptions of " baptism of desire," and of the natural happiness of ut. baptised children after death, are protests on the part of Christians against the other doctrines he attacks. All this shows, not, indeed, that the views Mr. Thomson attacks have never been held among Christians, but that there has been, along with the development of Christianity, a current of thought limiting them, defining the true significance of what was at first crudely taught, showing that the form of words adopted by this or that section needed modifying and explaining before it represented the truth. And here we seem to touch on a fact of some importance, which is, indeed, the main point we wish to insist on. The true nature of Christian belief defines itself by balancing extreme doctrines, and not by direct logical statement. The Pelagian, who trusted all to free-will, may be said to balance the utter passivity of extreme Lutheranism. Abelard's rationalism is at the opposite pole from the fanaticism which has given to all ages men who believed themselves to have direct vision of God. The middle path has been generally the safest. And it has been found by the protest within the Church against extremes. This process is going on still, and it is, perhaps, helpful when Christian readers are confronted with the difficulty which such doctrines as those of original sin, and of the powerlessness of men to deserve without grace, suggest, to point to the fact that their extreme applications, the obviously unjust consequences which have been deduced from them, have been deprecated from within before they scandalised those without. It is a very different thing to believe—as it is, for instance, taught in the Catholic schools— that God deprived us of unmerited privileges in consequence of the sin of our first parents, and that those who die in infancy in the state of original sin have a natural beatitude, though they may not see God, and to maintain, on the other hand, unreservedly, that all the unbaptised are under the wrath of God, and go to eternal punishment. The wrath of God, with the explanations and limitations given, comes to have a meaning much modified from the bald statement at which Mr. Thomson is so horrified. It is interpreted by comparison with the special complacency with which man, with his supernatural gifts, was viewed by his Creator. These gifts were forfeited by his own fault, and his descendants who were not the objects, as they were destined to be, of God's special pleasure, were said in consequence to be visited by his wrath. The supernatural inheritance they might have had was gone, and only the claims of natural justice remained. They were truly suffering from God's displeasure, though the displeasure was only for personal sin in so far as it touched Adam and Eve, being for their descendants only that relative displeasure which those who might have been high and remain low in the scale of moral endowment may be said to incur. Such ex- planations, whether or no we accept them, are a part of Church history, and have been taught within the Church as probable hundreds of years ago.
We have thought it worth while to say this much of the line of argument in the book before us for the sake of pointing out a principle. Such exaggerations of the difficulties in Christian doctrine on the part of sceptics are frequent, and bear so far the appearance of an appeal to common-sense as to be dangerous. And when doctrines are explained on lines parallel to the above, writers like Mr. Thomson may say they are explained away ; that the original doctrine was immoral, and that it is only when we are attacked that we recede from it, and form a new Christianity for the occasion. It seems important to bear in mind that there is another view to be taken of the matter. We should contend that the very fact that theologians have in the past, and apart from the pressure of rationalistic attacks, so explained and modified the hardest of these doctrines, goes far to show that the spirit of Christianity has been opposed to those extreme forms of ex- pression taken literally, which have come to exist as rough state- ments of great troths balanced in reality by great truths of an opposite tendency, whose reconciliation, involving the modifi- cation of language on both sides, is necessarily a matter of time, and by no means implies giving up the older forms of Christianity, but only the more accurate adjusting and ex- plaining of its different parts. The great doctrines as to the sinfulness of man represent tendencies to evil of which we are all of us conscious ; the great doctrines of grace and God's love represent aid which we all feel equally conscious of when we turn to heaven in prayer; the great doctrines as
to human accountability represent a certain power in the individual of turning to God, and surrendering to the influence of his grace. The exact adjustment of their in- teraction in each case, and the modifying of and explaining the first unqualified language in which each class of truths is enunciated, is one of the constant works of the living Church, and involves not a drawing back from traditional doctrines, but a reconciling them with other traditional doctrines, the desertion of which might quite as well be attacked on the score of unfaithfulness to the past.
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