LET him, therefore, who would arrive at knowledge, train his moral sense; let him act and conceive in accordance with the noble essence of his soul; and, as if of herself, nature will become open to him. Moral action is that great and only experiment in which all riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves."

Novalis, quoted 'by Henry Jones in Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher, 210.

"As sinners stand up in meeting and confess to the goodness of God, so one who is called afflicted may rise up in gladness of conviction and testify to the goodness of life. The struggle which evil necessitates is one of the greatest blessings. It makes us strong, patient, helpful men and women. It lets us into the soul of things and teaches us that, although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it."

Helen Keller, Optimism, 13, 17.

"Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be.

The last of life, for which the first was made:

Our times are in His hand

Who saith, 'A whole I planned,

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'"

Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra.

Chapter II

IS THE WORLD GOOD?

WE have left for a separate discussion that problem which a recent writer has called "The Great Objection." Materialism and naturalism and agnosticism do not so much trouble the common man. But here is an objection that comes home to all, the hardest problem for our thinking as it is for our life. It is as old as Job's cry. Its echo comes to us from Gethsemane. It meets us in every hour of sorrow and in the chamber of sickness and death. How can we believe in a good God with such a world as this.^^ It is all very well for the children to sing,

"The world is so full of a number of things,

I am sure we should all he as happy as kings." ¹

But the real world of our grown-up life is very different. How can we put goodness on the throne of the world and say that God is in all its life.^^ What we see is pain inseparable from life, sorrow and sin everywhere; and no power seems to smite the evil or comfort and shield the good. Where is there in this world the goodness in which we believe? Instead, as Professor James says: "Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither loves nor hates, but rolls all things together meaningless to a common doom."²

Here are four facts about the world that seem to belie our faith. First, nature is cruel. Life everywhere means suffering. Look at this child in mother-arms, her daughter, it may be. What may the mother look forward to for her? Health and friends and a home of her own.^^ Yes, but sorrow, too, and pangs of motherhood, and anxious care for children, and loved ones called by death, and sickness and weakness of age, and then the curtain over it all. That is just the common lot. Second, nature seems to us unmoral. She knows no guilt or innocence. Flood and fire and storm overwhelm all alike. With her inexorable laws she seems like some great machine through which our helpless lives pass on their fixed course from birth to death. This is not cruelty, for that implies a purpose, and here the terrible fact seems to be just an unknowing, unfeeling indifference. In the third place, the world seems to us not simply unmoral, but immoral. Think of the injustice. The scourge smites good and ill alike. The children bear the sins of their fathers. Day by day we see the innocent and helpless sacrificed upon altars of lust and greed. And not only is there injustice, but apparently its forces actually make for evil. It does not meet the difficulty to philosophize about freedom of the will, or judgment according to light. Here is the question: What is the actual moral impact of this particular world in which a given child is born ? Take the paganism of India, where religion and lust may be linked together, or the paganism of New York, where the child of the tenement may be cheated out of pure atmosphere for soul as well as body. What does such an environment mean? What of the heritage that comes from weak, debased parentage? It is hard enough for us to be good who have every favoring influence. What then of these, whom all life seems to conspire to thrust on the downward way? And fourth, there is the fact of moral evil, the fact of sin. Where did it come from? How can it exist at all if God be holy and if God rules?

In some ways the question is harder for us than for our fathers. We have the social vision to-day. We can not write our theology any longer from a comfortable, optimistic, middle-class point of view. We see too clearly the world of paganism abroad, the millions of India that go hungry to bed each night, the world of the poor, the underfed, the diseased of body and soul in our own land. We know too well what heredity means, what the awful handicap is of the child of weakened body, neurotic, degenerate from its birth. And we can no longer simply say: All this was caused by sin. Pain was a part of the world in long ages before man came. And for us to-day it adds to the problem, rather than settling it, to declare that the children suffer for the sins of the fathers.

That is the problem. If we face the facts and search their meaning we may find not the loss of faith, but a vision into greater depths than we could otherwise reach. And whatever light we may gain in this dark place means far more than solving a philosopher's riddle. It means hope and strength and cheer for the common tasks and the heavy burdens of life. For our faith needs not only a God in the heavens, but a God whose rule of goodness is in the world.

"This world's no blot for us, nor blank.

It means intensely and means good;

To find its meaning is our meat and drink." ³

There are three mistakes common in the discussion of this question that will need to be corrected, and these will give us the outline for our study. The first is the mistake of the low ideal. The second is the mistake of looking at the individual instead of the social whole. The third is that of looking at the moment instead of seeing life as a movement and regarding its final issue. Against these we set three principles: the moral principle, the social principle, and the principle of development. These three principles, to which we are giving more and more place in our thinking to-day, must help us here as in our other questions.

The Ethical Principle

Let us turn first to the ethical principle. Is the world good? What do you mean by "good?" Right here is our first problem, and it is not that of a bad world, but of a bad ideal. The good that men think of in this question is too often a matter of pleasure and of freedom from struggle and pain. Our first need is not to minimize the struggle and the pain, but to hold up an ethical ideal of the good. Materialism as a philosophy is dead to-day; materialism as an ethic is very much alive. That does not imply anything gross. But there is a growing horror of pain, and worship of comfort, and praise of material well-being. We need a new message of idealism, strong, virile, ethical. The good is more than comfort. Life itself is the supreme good, life at its highest and richest.

"'T is life whereof our nerves are scant.

Life, not death, for which we pant;

More life, and fuller, that I want." ⁴

Now, the Christian ideal of life as the supreme good includes certain elements. Let me put it in three words: righteousness, love, faith. There must be righteousness, based on man's own choice, the fruit of struggle, wrought out in conduct and character. There must be love, binding man to his fellow, blessing him that gives even more than him who receives. There must be faith, giving to life its final meaning, its final hope, and its highest fellowship, the fellowship with God. The world that does not make for love and faith and righteousness is not a good world.

Let us apply the test. No world can be good that does not make for righteousness. But is not this our first stumbling-block? The world is so full of unrighteousness, of injustice and wrong, of innocence reaping evil and guilt that goes unscathed. How can a God of righteousness be ruling here? Now, there are two kinds of righteousness between which we might choose in framing our world. The first would be an inflexible world-order imposed from without. Penalty and award might follow openly at the moment of doing, or sin itself might be wholly excluded. Whatever such a world might be, it would not be a human world. There would be no chance in such a world for making men. It might be perfect on a lower plane, but it would never reach the highest. For the highest righteousness for a world is the second kind, not something finished, but something that is being wrought out; not a perfect order handed down, but a life that men choose and love and live and die for.

"Then, welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!

Be our joys three-parts pain!

Strive and hold cheap the strain;

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe." ⁵

What a world it is for this, for a righteousness that is to be built up in the character of men and in the life and institutions of the nations! It brings to man obstacle and struggle, but how can there be moral fiber without this? Power is helpless without resistance, as the engine without the friction of the rail, or the aeroplane without the resistant atmosphere. It brings to man a challenge by its indifference or injustice. But that challenge is a moral opportunity, the call to love righteousness for its otvh sake. And its very faults and imperfections are but another opportunity. They do not show an evil world, but a world that is being made, in whose making God asks us to take part.

Here is faith. It does not seem a good world for faith. We can not see God, and the hard world does not make it easy to believe that goodness rules. But is there not a misconception here? Faith is not mere assent to the fact of God. It is not a sacrifice of the intellect. But neither is it a bare act of mind. It is the moral daring of the soul. It is the surrender of the soul to its ideal convictions. Faith is always the answer to a moral challenge. It is a choice between higher and loiter. That is why faith counts for so much, because it has this moral quality. A different world from ours would make faith not easier, but impossible. A world where reward and punishment stood plain beside each deed, a world where God stood visible with penalty and gift, would be a world for belief but not for faith. There would be no Job to cry, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him;"⁶ no psalmist to rejoice in poverty so long as God were but his portion; no glory of Gethsemane, "If it be possible . . . nevertheless, Thy will be done."⁷ We might have a race of servants, but no heroes, no sons. Struggle, question, doubt, these are not the enemies of faith, only indifference and the contentment with what is low and base. Tennyson's word is true when he sings:

                    "One indeed I knew

.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

     Who touched a jarring lyre at first.

But ever strove to make it true.

"Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds.

     At last he beat his music out.

     There lives more faith in honest doubt.

Believe me, than in half our creeds." ⁸

And not merely the confidence of faith, but the insight of faith comes this way. What is the highest reach in our thought of God? It is not His wisdom or might, His transcendence or philosophical immanence. It is righteousness, not as an impersonal order, but as a flaming passion; love, not as general benevolence, but as redeeming self-sacrifice. How did man reach it? By revelation, you say. But every revelation is an experience. To whom has the experience come? Why, to the men who have loved and toiled and dared and suffered. An Amos flaming with passion at the oppression of the poor, a Jeremiah with heart doubly torn by love for his people and the certainty of righteous judgment, a Paul making himself the servant of all, a Dante in exile, and a Bunyan in his jail—these are the men whose heart of love and sorrow and whose way of pain have showed them the heart of God.

And it is a good world for love. It could not be a good world without this, for the final wealth of life lies here. I know the long tale of strife and hatred, of that law of struggle which begins with "nature red in tooth and claw"⁹ and ends with the war of nations and the fierce conflict of our competitive system. But has not all this speech hidden from us the deeper fact? Life is the great opportunity for love. Here is the relation of man and woman. What a fruitage of sentiment and ideal and affection have sprung from this soil! Look at those conditions of nature and life which have brought men together in widening circles of association: family, clan, tribe, city, nation, world. See how the circle has deepened in widening. At first a bond of necessity, men standing together because they had to fight that way or fall, it has become purer and nobler. The fine flower of kinship, friendship, loyalty, patriotism, and at last world-brotherhood has come slowly this way. It is a good world that makes for these.

But there is more here. The very struggle and pain and suffering are the fountain out of which the purest love and compassion have come forth. It is helpless childhood that has called out mother-love. Wrong and suffering, not comfort and

plenty, have made men lovers of their race. I can imagine a world with no pain to summon sympathy, with no sorrow to kindle compassion, with no helplessness to stir fine chivalry, no want to call forth service, no overwhelming danger to join a nation together or cement it in a baptism of blood, no great disaster to thrill a world with sympathy and show all men as kin, where each man stood self-sufficient and no want uttered its cry. There might be fewer clouds in such a world, but life would be unutterably poor. The great souls of our race, patriot and hero and lover and saint, would not be there. The purest strain in the lyric of our life would cease. The great scenes of sacrifice that filled our life with a purer purpose and a tide of compassion would be forever blotted out. I do not say that love will cease when pain is gone. Love will abide, but it was this hard road by which it came. And this makes the hard road richly worth the while.

"For life, with all its yield of joy and woe.

And hope and fear ,

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,

How love might be, hath been indeed, and is." ¹⁰

We need a new appraisal of pain and toil. Our danger lies not in atheism or any heresy; it is in the base materialism of life, shunning tasks, seeking ease. It is no mere chance that the high achievements of our race have none of them been wrought in tropical zone. Men have reached the heights when they have had to fight. And the highest of all has come where men have fought and borne pain, and so won victory for others. The world's greatest way of triumph was the road that led from a judgment hall with a crown of thorns to a hill that bore a cross.

"The cry of man's anguish went up unto God:

          'Lord, take away pain—

The shadow that darkens the world Thou hast made.

          The close-coiling chain

That strangles the heart, the burden that weighs

          On the wings that would soar—

Lord, take away pain from the world Thou hast made.

          That it love Thee the more!'

 

"Then answered the Lord to the cry of His world:

          'Shall I take away pain

And with it the power of the soul to endure.

          Made strong by the strain?

Shall I take away pity, that knits heart to heart.

          And sacrifice high?

Will ye lose all your heroes that lift from the fire

          White brows to the sky?

Shall I take away love, that redeems with a price

          And smiles at its loss?

Can ye spare from your lives, that would climb unto Mine,

          The Christ on His cross?'"

The Social Principle

Consider, second, the social principle. We have not understood this world or seen its goodness because we have looked only at the individual, and not at the social whole. Our theology is gaining because it is growing more social. But so far our chief advance has been in seeing social duty more clearly. We still need social insight. Here is the great social fact first of all. Nolens, volens, we are all tied together. The world nowhere shows the bare individual of our traditional thought; always families, classes, races, nations. It is true that at last the soul must stand alone in the presence of God. It is true that the final relationship of life here is that of man and God. But there is so much more than that. The vision of God comes through the life with men. The life with God is only lived out in this way. Even the life from God is expressed by the great apostle in social terms: righteousness and love and peace. And the Bible never in Old Testament or New expresses the final purpose of God in terms of the mere individual. Christianity knows only a social salvation. It is a kingdom, a brotherhood, a family, a new race.

I know that the first glimpse of the social fact seems to make our problem harder. It is the essence of love that it individualizes, but God seems to mass us all together. Justice means fair play for the individual, but God does not seem to care for the single life. This man is ignorant and careless; upon his neighbor falls the typhus scourge. This man is greedy, and in his darkened tenements the white plague slays the children of the poor. The city thinks only of fine boulevards and "big business," and from the unsanitary homes of its poor and the places of legalized vice the physical and moral plague spreads to high and low, to guilty and guiltless alike. This man sins, and the curse of his sin falls upon the pure woman to whom he is joined and the innocent children, blighted of body and soul, that come into a world that is not of their choosing. How can God be good when each reaps the harvest from the sin of all, when the single soul can never escape from the social web in which we are all caught.?

I will not minimize the social evils. But are these not the mere background and incident of the social good? The first lesson that a thinker on life must learn is the lesson of alternatives. We are always wanting character without struggle, love without pain, righteousness with no possibility of sin, the vision at the summit without the long climb. The principle applies here. I know that the social tie means all these ills, but it means the good without which life is a blank. When I have said home and friend and country, I have spoken the words whose want would make our world a waste. The stars might shine and the harvests come, but the heart of the world would be cold and dead and the light of its sun gone out. The meanest soul that suffers and loves is richer than he who walks his way prosperous and painless, but alone. Bind us together if need be. Let the mother suffer with the pain of her child and the children from the sins of their fathers. Let the pestilence which comes from the ignorance of the few smite guilty and innocent together. If only there may be a world of love and friendship and home and kindred and country.

But the social suffering is more than the incidental cost which we must pay for the sake of the higher good. It is the source of that power which must lead us on. The mere appeal to selfish interest has never inspired any great forward movement. We shall never wipe out brothel and saloon and slum by simply pointing out that their evil influences will reach our comfortable lives. We live our selfish and evil life and are ready to bear the consequence. And then some day we see that the consequence is not individual. Our sin is dragging the world of our brothers down. It is because of our selfish indifference that they can not rise. And then we look with new eyes on all this social misery. Our life is part of it. The hands of none of us are clean. There is not one but must cry: Peccavi! Peccav! That is the tragic fact that God is using to prick the dull conscience of men. It is not useless, this suffering at which we stumble. Out of it is being born the new social conscience and social passion. These are what shall lead us to the new Kingdom. Aye, these are the very spirit of the new Kingdom. They breathe its sympathy, its brotherhood, its self-sacrificing love.

The Principle of Development

Let us note, third, what the principle of development means as applied to our problem. Life is not a finished something. For the individual man and for the race it is in the making. No man can judge life rightly who simply studies a cross-section, no matter how minutely. Our question can not simply be, what is it.?—but, what is it becoming? It is the issue that decides.

Take the case of the individual life. To the man who sees only one day of pain and sorrow, life is a riddle, a tragedy. But the test of life is the fruit of life. The test of the world is not the pleasure that it yields us, but the kind of man that it makes out of us. We are here to be made men, and the hard way of the world is just the means for this making. And this principle of development, this thought of perspective, will help us with a harder problem, that of apparent failure. Here is the man that never had a fair chance in life. The evil of the world was not a school to train him. It was a force that overwhelmed him. Or here is the child of whom we spoke above, coming into the world corrupted in its very blood and borne upon by all the tides of evil.

I do not know how we shall find room for these lives and the good God together if we see only this world. I can not at all agree with Principal Fairbairn when he says, "Time should have within itself its own apology, and not require an appeal from itself to eternity."¹¹ Only faith can ever settle this question, and faith is always saying. This is but part, "see all, nor be afraid."¹² There is no answer here apart from the vision of the eternal, and the eternal means the enduring as well as the invisible. The true man says with Browning's scholar:

"Leave now to dogs and apes!

Man has Forever."¹³

With this eternal perspective, suffering is dwarfed. "Our light affliction is but for a moment."¹⁴ With this perspective, opportunity finds larger place. And even the problem of apparent failure is not without its light. How can we measure the possibilities of God and life by the few years that we see, if the supreme meaning of life be the making of man? Do we not need a little more Christian agnosticism and a little more Christian hopefulness for the life that seems to have failed? Ours is not time, but eternity. The goal that The have set is what counts, not the length of the course that we have run.

"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist,

     Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty nor good nor power

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist

     When eternity affirms the conception of an hour." ¹⁵

But the largest meaning in this idea of development is seen when it is applied to the race. We stumble over the laws of nature. How cruel, how unfeeling these forces are in their working! They do not ask whether we intended wrong before they overwhelm us. They join in the ruin of flood and fire the innocent and guilty alike. But that stem tuition has made the race diligent and careful, sober and responsible, men and not babes. We ourselves have tried to be kinder and have been more foolish. We kindergartenize our education, even in the college. We sentimentalize in our charity as in our correction. We must have every path pleasant. What we really need is a new sense of inexorable and stem authority, and a new spirit of reverence and obedience. Here is the law of heredity. If the day counts alone, what a tragic fact it is! But we are making a race, and the end counts. Heredity is God's warning and God's help. What a Sisyphus task it would be without this, always the long climb for each new generation, as though others had never toiled before! Instead we stand to-day on the foundations of the past.

One other thought comes with this idea of development. The world is imperfect, but it is a growing world. Do we want to live in any other.? Would any other be good? Here is a world in the making, and life itself as a share in the great task! Is there any higher conception of life, any higher good than that ? We are sharing in God's continuous creation. Christianity says to every man: Come on, there is real fighting, real work in the world, and it is work that shall last. Our college professors need not worry about substitutes for war. War is the surest fact in our life. Wrong, injustice, oppression, poverty, sickness are far more than problems for our faith. They are the open doors of life. And we

"Rejoice we are allied

To that which doth provide

     And not partake, effect and not receive!

A spark disturbs our clod;

Nearer we hold of God

     Who gives, than of His tribes that take,

          I must believe." ¹⁶

And finally this principle of development throws light on the darkest problem, that of moral evil. We can see that sorrow and suffering are relative evils. We can understand how they might need to be if something higher were to come. But sin is absolutely evil. How can there be any place for it in God's world at all? How can a good God ever have allowed it to enter His world or to live on? Here again it behooves us to be modest in saying what can and what can not be done. But so much is clear, the only moral character that we know or can conceive comes by growth, by development. That applies to moral insight as well as to moral deed and moral strength. It is what we see with every child. It is what took place with the race. So far as we can see, if there is to be moral life at all, if there are to be any beings of love and righteousness who can have fellowship with God, then that life must come this way. There will be ignorance and weakness and failure before strength and purity and clear moral vision and proved moral character can be. And if there is to be real moral character, then there must be growth from within. That means the man's own soul, groping, choosing, striving, falling, rising. There can be no moral life without freedom. If God wants machines. He can make them. If God wants servants. He can compel them. If God wants sons whose love and loyalty shall be real, then their free surrender to Him involves the chance of their refusal as well.

Practically speaking, then, the idea of development makes it inevitable that there will be the sin of failure, and the idea of moral freedom that there will be the sin of positive transgression. But why should either of these involve any compromise with sin, or any contradiction in God's character .^^ Looking at sin from either point of view, we are sure of one thing. Sin is here only to be overcome. All the forces of God are summoned for its extirpation. And the cross is the final measure of His opposition.

But always we must remember one thing. The opposition! to sin is not the only element of God's loving holiness. Side by side is His regard for righteousness and love. His holiness means the building up of righteousness, not simply the casting out of sin. And His end will not be reached till a communion of men joined in righteousness and love shall be established in the earth. That is why His method with sin is not prevention on the one hand or destruction on the other. The cross measures His opposition, but it marks His method as well. That is the method of a loving and patient tuition by which God is overcoming sin in the heart of humankind.

If we will leave the logic of the philosopher and turn to the experiences of common life, it will not be hard to understand. This father is righteous. Shall he refuse to bring sons into the world because at least some sin will be inevitable in their life.'* And if the sin appears, shall he overcome it by casting out his son, or by the patient upbuilding of a righteous life in him.'* And if the father loved God and his kind, which will show his greater devotion to righteousness, to refuse to bring forth the sons that might some time do evil, or to train young men to live righteously and to establish righteousness in the world.''

The Answer for Faith

In its final solution the problem of evil is to be settled by faith. That is so with every question of religion. The final answer comes not to the logical mind, but to the obedient will. That answer comes to the man who trusts in God despite of ill, and it comes in three ways.

First, with the knowledge of God. This is not the knowledge of reason, but that personal knowledge which is religion. He who trusts thus in darkness and doubt and sorrow comes at last to know that Power

"Which makes the darkness and the light,

And dwells not in the light alone." ¹⁷

God is, and God is good: that conviction comes to be for him surer than life itself.

Second, he sees evil overcome in his own life. He has met with courage and trust every dark thing that has come to him. Now he learns at last that for the man who meets it aright, there is no pure and final evil. There is a transmuting power in the spirit of faith and obedience. The darkest hour hid some heart of light. The conviction comes at last that, whatever may have caused the ill, God has made it serve for good.

Third, he sees evil as that which is being overcome in the world, as that which is doomed, which is here only to be destroyed. That does not ans\^er all questions as to why evil is and whence it came. It does declare that in this world it is God that reigns, not evil. The men who are most confident in God and the winning of good are not the closet philosophers who theorize about evil. They are the men who are fighting with evil hand to hand, \^ho know best its blackness and its power, but who see it being overcome and set at naught day by day by the power of purity and love and simple truth and goodness—^by the power of God. That is the answer of Jesus. He did not say. Be of good cheer; there is no evil. He said, "Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." ¹⁸ And so here, as elsewhere, our working faith is not an easy theory, but a stirring challenge. And he that doeth the will shall know.¹⁹