GOD AND THE WORLD OF EVIL

THE problem of evil is one that is inseparable from any study of the meaning of God and from any study of religion itself. For the central conviction of religion is God, and the conviction of God means the faith that the good and the real are one, that our ideals are not empty dreams that we cherish, but are real, indeed the highest reality, the final Power in this world.

But it is one thing to see the Lord high and lifted up when we worship in the temple; it is another to go out into the world and look at nature and history and human life and say: Justice rules here, love controls, goodness is triumphant. On every hand the facts seem to contradict the thought that a good God rules the world. We look at the world of history: what a tangle of unmeaning events it shows. We look at human society: how constantly brute force and cunning and selfishness seem to have their way. Consider the years that have followed the Great War; how little, has suffering fallen upon the guilty of all lands, what woe has come to great multitudes of those whose greatest fault was to practice the virtue lauded in all our modern world of being "loyal" to your country—that is, to the political or other leaders in control! And round about us, every day what suffering do we not see of the innocent for the guilty.

It is not different if we turn to nature, except that nature seems to show, not so much injustice or cruelty, as an utter indifference. Long ago Socrates said: "If the gods do not prefer the good man to the evil, then it is better to die than to live." How utterly intolerable life would be in a world in which the Power that ruled were either itself malevolent or else wholly indifferent to good or evil. Yet nature seems to be so ruled. There is a terrible obverse to the words of Jesus when he spoke of the God who made his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sent his rain on the just and the unjust. For we must add that flood and fire come down on the good and the evil, and earthquake and pestilence destroy the just with the unjust. The nature which modern science presents us seems like a great mechanism of forces that blindly follow undeviating law, ending indifferently in life or death, in beauty or horror.

There are some answers to this problem which have had large place in the Christian thought of the past, but which cannot any longer satisfy us, though there may be larger or lesser measure of truth in them. There is the opinion taken over from Judaism and the Old Testament that evil can be explained as the consequence that follows upon sin; even the men of the Old Testament (see Job and various Psalms) saw the facts of life which made this impossible. There is the traditional idea of theology that a world which was perfectly good and free from pain and death through the single deed of one man became at a stroke wholly evil, involving in this fate all nature and the succeeding generations of mankind. For us animate creation, with its suffering and death, antedates too far the coming of man, and the supposed solution only heightens our difficulty by what it imposes on the many for the fault of the one. The traditional Calvinistic position which appeals to the inscrutable decrees of God does not meet the question, but simply gives it up. So in fact does apocalypticism, including modern premillennialism; it seeks the answer in some future age, but in doing so despairs of finding any meaning in history, which is just an unexplainable interlude in which God for some hidden reason has given over the world to the rule of evil.

There are certain fundamental facts and insights which any discussion must take into account that hopes to answer this question for the faith of a modern man. Let us state them briefly. The world of nature is everywhere under the orderly process of law. The method of God's work in the world is that of immanent power. Creation is a continuous activity of God. All spiritual life rests upon the natural and grows out of it, first that which is natural, afterwards that which is spiritual. The higher life can come only as a life of freedom, by way of conflict and slow achievement. It can come only as social life, and therefore human life must be considered never as merely individual, but always in relation to a social whole. This higher life, moral, spiritual, a life like that of God, is alone that to which we can give absolute value, and it is worth all the years and the tears and the cost of , its achievement ¹ On the basis of these considerations we might state our guiding principles in three simple words. Look at the highest, that is our clue to the meaning of the world. Look at the whole, for only in its relation to that can the meaning of any part be seen. Look at the end, "the last of life for which 1 the first was planned."

Let it be said in frankness, finally, that there is no demonstration to be offered here. We move here in the world of values which can be felt but cannot be proven. The final demand is a demand upon faith, a demand to trust the world and undertake with courage the great task of life. The final assurance will come only to a life that has responded to this demand. And yet there is light here: it is not a leap in the dark to which we call men. And it is worth following what light we have in this supreme question.

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

It means intensely and means good;

To find its meaning is our meat and drink." ²

The seeming moral indifference of nature furnishes our first problem. Nature makes no distinction between the evil and the good. Where is the providence that watches over the children of men? What difference did nature ever make between saint and sinner? The reign of law, science calls it. But has not that idea of law changed the world from a house in which a Father rules to the semblance of a great machine? What we seem to face is a Power that neither knows nor cares, but bears us on with all else that lives toward a common doom. ³

But suppose we consider a moment what the alternative to all this would be. It seems a simple matter to ask God to adjust the happenings of nature in detail to fit our prayer or our desert. A certain saint with such a faith stood up in prayer meeting one evening and gave thanks to God for the dry summer that was just past. "When we received word last spring," he explained, "that my mother-in-law was to visit us, I knew how bad a rainy season would be for her asthma. So I prayed the Lord that we might have no rain, and I am very grateful for this answer to prayer/' And then, apparently for the first time, another angle suggested itself and he turned to the rest with the remark, "I hope it did not inconvenience any of you." Whereupon one of those frank souls, who bring the breath of reality into places where it is needed, promptly replied, "You certainly did." A world in whose physical order such constant interference or change was taking place would be in effect a world of chance, of anarchy, a world essentially incalculable.

Or consider the question from the standpoint of the character of God. What kind of a world would one expect from a God of perfect wisdom? Would it not be a world of order? And would not the same order be needed to reflect the consistency, the dependableness, to use the Old Testament phrase, the faithfulness of God? The world of ordered and uniform happening, so far from suggesting moral indifference, is demanded by the moral character of God.

But what of the moral significance of this uniform order which we call the reign of law? If it were possible without utter anarchy to have a world that would adjust natural events moment by moment to moral desert, how would it compare in moral results with the present order? Would it not seem like a world of righteousness? That depends upon our idea of a righteous world order. If it means an external system imposed upon man, then it might follow. But for most of us righteousness is not primarily such an external order; it is a passion in the hearts of men, it is an inner spirit and devotion, not a calculation of profitable results but a faith that is willing to go against appearances; it is not something furnished to man, but that which is to grow up in humanity. A God who settled up accounts every day would have a set of time-serving subjects, not a family of free sons.

Turn to the present world in which we live. (Keep in mind the large look that takes in the social whole, the long look that has regard to history and not the moment, and the high look that concerns itself with life at its best.) It is this world of inflexible order, but of order upon which a man can count, that is needed for the growing of a human race, It is a calculable, a knowable world, summoning man to understand its ways and to master its forces. It is the only kind of world that man could in real fashion know and use. Upon this order he has built his science, his engineering, his arts. So far as we can see, only in such a world could rational life develop. This is the world for the making of rational beings.

Equally it is a world for the development of moral life. We are apt to think of morality in terms of high ideals that come to command the conscience; its beginnings, however, rest back in certain habits, or customs (mores) of individual and group which were found necessary to the furtherance of welfare, Such customs were restraints upon action that otherwise merely followed impulse or passion or individual interest If there was to be human life, as above that of the beast, man had to master the impulse of the moment and look to the future, to learn self-control, to practice industry, to associate himself with others for common life and effort. What drove him to this? It was the experience that came to him in a world of inexorable order, a world where idleness was followed by hunger, and isolation by suffering, and wrong deeds by sure consequence. Even to-day, our race would go to pieces morally in a generation if our world should become one of uncertainty and chance. And let it be plainly understood, you cannot have a world of order in nature and at the same time a world in which some power from without with whatever high motive, is ever making adjustment to suit individual cases.

The second problem that faces us is that of the seeming cruelty of nature as seen in all the pain and suffering of the world. It is not simply that suffering may follow upon wrongdoing, but that pain and hardship and struggle, everywhere we turn, are inseparable from life itself, and so much of the pain seems futile.

Our first issue here is one of values. Our age has multiplied creature comforts as no other day, but it has come to put an excessive value upon ease and pleasure and physical well-being, and it has developed an excessive fear of poverty and pain and toil. We need a truer scale of values. It is life that counts, life that brings with it wisdom and patience and strength and sympathy and insight, a faith that reaches up to God, an understanding that moves out to our fellow men. If the suffering and toil are necessary to this end, then with Browning we may

          "welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough."

Let us begin with pain, which seems the most negative and useless. Why a world of pain? The physician answers, because pain is a necessary means of warning and defense. What physician would care to practice his art in a world in which there was no pain? How, indeed, could he? It is the red signal which warns the patient, guides the physician, and makes possible the healing art. It seems fair to suppose that man's higher sensibility to pain has had a relation to his higher achievement in life. It is "a spur to wise action in the process of human adjustment." ⁴ And that is true of man's advance in the higher reaches of life. From the soil of suffering there has sprung the fruitage of patience, courage, thoughtfulness, sympathy, kindliness, devotion. Would the doors to the deeper meanings of life be open in a world without struggle and pain? From out of her walls of utter darkness and silence, Helen Keller has spoken with moving words on this theme. "Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and possession. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. ... As sinners stand up in meeting and testify 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 all 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." ⁵

The question of human toil and struggle is closely linked to this problem of pain. How full of burden and conflict seem the days of man. Whether he toils for his bread, or seeks to keep dread disease from his door, or craves the higher gifts of liberty and peace, nature seems ever to turn a hard face toward him and exact the fullest measure of toil and conflict and vigilance as the condition of his desire. But is nature so unfriendly ? Is not this far kinder than the foolish weakness which we sometimes show to our children? How else could strength come if there were no conflict or resistance? The lands where food is plentiful and the least of toil is needed are not the lands that have seen the highest fruitage of humanity. There are gifts that can be dropped into idle hands, but the highest goods do not come that way. You may give a man bread without cost to himself, but not strength or wisdom or freedom or peace or love. We must give assent to the words of a recent writer, who describes with sympathy the struggles of various peoples for a larger measure of freedom, and then says: "It probably will seem a very cruel thing to say, but if I were the great Holder of the Universe, I would not turn a hand or pull a cord to give the struggling, submerged peoples of the world their freedom. It is the dreaming and fighting and sacrificing that makes them worthy and prepares them for it." ⁶ No nation is deserving of political and social liberties except as it wins them again in each generation. As a matter of fact no nation ever remains in possession of such liberties unless it wins them for itself in each new day, fighting the old fight which appears with each age in some new form.

It would be easy to mistake the meaning of that fight which the men of social faith and passion are waging to-day, whose front is directed chiefly against war and social injustice. It would seem as though such men were trying to make a world in which there should no longer be toil and conflict. As a matter of fact the campaign against social injustice is not an effort to remove conflict, but to remove handicaps, to give a fair chance for all the children of men. The plea for cooperation means simply that men must find a way of turning their forces against the common foes of Ignorance and poverty instead of rending each other. And what shall we say of war? We remember the stirring words in Browning's "Luria":

"They called our thirst of war a transient thing;

The battle element must pass away

From life,' they said, 'and leave a tranquil world,'

—Master, I took their light and turned it full

On that dull turgid vein they said would burst

And pass away; and as I looked on life,

Still everywhere I tracked this, though it hid

And shifted, lay so silent as it thought,

Changed shape and hue yet ever was the same.

Why, 'twas all fighting, all their nobler life!

All work was fighting, every harm—defeat,

And every joy obtained—a victory!"

There are those whose hatred of war has made them feel that we should banish the pictures of conflict from our religious speech, that we should no longer think of Jesus as the Captain of mankind, or longer sing,

"The Son of God goes forth to war."

But Browning was right, the Browning who could say, "I was ever a fighter." What we want is not to banish war, but to change it The war which uses for weapons brute force, which sets men to starve and poison and kill their fellow men, that war is hell, and is more hellish to-day than it was two generations ago when a great general so described it. But so long as there is evil of any kind on earth, Christianity will summon men to take all the weapons of truth and love and courage and devotion and fight to the end.

Let it be said again, the highest gifts of life can come to men only as they struggle for them, nor are they less God's gifts because they come this way. He who sees this truth will ask no deliverance from the struggle.

"Let us have peace, and thy blessing,

Lord of the wind and the rain,

When we shall cease from oppressing,

From all injustice refrain;

When we hate falsehood and spurn it;

When we are men among men.

Let us have peace when we earn it,

Never an hour till then.

 

"Let us have restin thy garden,

Lord of the rock and the green,

When there is nothing to pardon,

When we are whitened and clean.

Purge us of skulking and treason,

Help us to put-them away.

We shall have rest in thy season;

Till then the heat of the fray.

 

"Let us have peace in thy pleasure,

Lord of the; cloud and .the sun;

Grant to us aeons of leisure

When the long battle is done.

Now we have only begun it;

Stead us!—we ask nothing more.

Peace—rest—but not till we've won it—

Never an hour before." ⁷

With the third aspect of the problem of evil we turn from nature to human nature, and that on the social side; the problem is that of the unjust suffering which comes to man because of his relation to his fellow men. Nothing in life seems more tragic or unfair than this. Back of our great wars there lies not the suffrage of the many, but the selfish aims or folly of the few; yet the multitudes must suffer, the children starve, the women go lonely, the men be slaughtered or maimed, and the toilers bear intolerable burdens for generations. Men go on their way of heedless lust and little children are cursed with sightless eyes or blighted bodies and souls. On every side the punishment of greed and hate and folly seems to fall on the innocent '

Here again we must face the fact of alternatives. In our loose thinking it is so easy to demand of God a justice that shall be purely individual, each man suffering only for his own misdeeds, while yet we ask for all the goods that come from a social life. But right here we must reckon with the full meaning of the social fact: the highest life, in fact any human! life, is possible only as we are bound together, and! that high life is worth the cost. Human personality never could appear in a solitary individual; Tarzan of the apes is possible only in fiction. And the higher we move in the scale of life the more closely are men united and the wider the scope of that union. A man may feel by himself and work by himself, but if there is to be love he must join himself to another. The greatest treasures of life are inseparable from these social bonds, from home, community, friendship, church, country. Truth, beauty, justice, loyalty, love, these have come to being only in the associated life of men.

Such association heightens of necessity the possibility of human suffering. One branch does not feel it when another is sundered from the trunk, but when one member suffers the whole body bears the pain. Yet every day reveals again the willingness of men to endure the cross and despise the shame for the joy that is set before them. Every friendship means increase of responsibility and sympathy and possible suffering. The home gives proof that in the closest fellowship joy and pain are inseparably intertwined. This does not mean that individually we sit down and conclude that we will take the evil because it is a condition of the higher good. It is rather that men, seeing the joy that is set before them, life with all its. high meaning, count the toil and pain not as negligible incident, but as that which is to be borne willingly and bravely.

And then, with the Christian conception, we go one step further. We gain the idea of vicarious suffering, suffering that has a meaning, suffering for others and ' in the place of others*, suffering that has love in its heart and so is transformed in its inner nature. The Christian faith declares that the cross of Christ was not accident and not tragedy, however great the guilt of human agents in that event; it declare that God was acting there, that God himself was suffering there, and that in that suffering there was healing for human life. Such love and suffering, it declares, is not an incident, but is eternal in the nature of God. As Browning has put it:

"This is the authentic sign and seal

Of godship, that it ever waxes glad

And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts

Into a rage to suffer for mankind, A

nd recommences at sorrow, drops like seed.

Surely it has no other end and aim

Than to drop, once more die into the ground,

Taste cold and darkness, and oblivion there;

nd thence rise, tree-like grow through pain to joy,

More joy and most joy—do man good again."

Christianity calls to man and says: In all your affliction God is afflicted; he suffers in all the pain of men. That pain is not useless. And he who brings to it the right spirit drinks the cup which Jesus drank and, so doing, enters into the highest life of God.

The fourth element of our problem comes when we think of the individual in relation to the idea of development. There is, of course, a real help for faith in this thought of development. It gives to history a meaning. All that apocalypticism could say was that some time the good would be established, but it could give no meaning to the evil ages that lay between. We see more clearly now that humanity must reach) its goal by growth, that whatever may be our dependence, upon God for that triumph, the future must come out, of the past. Our toil and pain then are not without meaning. In them God is working toward his great end. So we count our affliction as light, while we look to the things that are not seen and yet are sure and eternal. And while history gains a meaning, so does our individual life; we have a chance in this growing world, we may have a part in. its making. There may be souls who would prefer a world that was perfectly safe and made for comfort and ease, but we may be sure the highest souls answer to a different call. For in the highest life there is something of the spirit of a Paul, pressing on from the fields where the real work has been done to some untried Spain which calls to courage and offers high opportunity. ⁸

But what of the individual himself in this long story?. Modern science has made us think of human history on this globe in terms of scores and even hundreds of thousands of years. What of the long generations who had little knowledge and less help in the years that lie before history dawned?

"Oh, the generations old

Over whom no church bell tolled.

Christless lifting up blind eyes

To the silence of the skies!"

For us as Christians it is not enough to say that their lives found their meaning as a necessary first step for that which was to come; for us, human life in its least members can never be a mere means to some one  else's end. And what of the lives imperfect, frustrated, failures in our own day?

I am not raising here the question of sin and its punishment, nor asking whether man may so use opportunity that a fixed and unchangeable character results for which there is no help here or beyond, Our question concerns the lives without opportunity and , the lives that were not fixed. And here Christian thought is far less dogmatic and far more hopeful than it once was. So much at least we can say. Before we charge to God's score these lives that had so much of pain, so little of chance, let us be sure that his long years have not for them more in store than hard and fast theories have fixed in the past.

The discussion of the problem of evil is inevitably of a somewhat negative and apologetic character. In it faith is put upon the defensive. And yet in summing up we can discern more positive conclusions. First of all, modern thinking helps us to a stronger position than was possible for the traditional viewpoint. We are not dealing with a finished world which has been turned out as the direct product of sheer omnipotence. From that standpoint it is impossible to justify the ways of God with man. We have a truer appreciation of how power is conditioned, of the manner in which it must work when it deals with life, and especially moral-spiritual life. The world for us is a growing world, not one that is fixed arid finished. Life itself is in the making and we cannot judge human life, in whole or in its individual members, till we see the end. In the second place, the very study of this problem leads us to deeper insight and truer conception of the character of God and his way with the world. In the light of this discussion how shall we sum up our faith?

We believe in a God of utter goodness, in whom righteousness and truth and love have even now their full and true being. We believe that this God has in himself fullness of life and that all life comes from him and all being depends upon him. Because of his very goodness, which is love, this infinite Spirit seeks for other being to which he may give of his life, a world of nature in which beauty and wisdom shall appear, but above all a world of personal being which can make response to him in understanding and loyalty and love, in a true personal fellowship of a life like his own. And here we face one of those final facts, those ultimate data which cannot be further grounded in reason: life itself, if it is to be individual being, if it is to have character and meaning, must have a certain freedom, a chance at self-achievement through growth with all of effort and conflict and possible error that is involved. And so creation comes to be, not mechanical but a vital process, a method that has large place for trial and error, a way that is long and slow and hard and full of toil and pain. And yet the Eternal Spirit does not stand outside the life of his world. He is not simply at the beginning and at the goal; he is help and direction in it all. And in the long story of mankind, he is comrade and toiler and fellow-sufferer. And he is the assurance of victory. Not because he will force the conclusion at last when freedom fails, but because the forces which he employs in the way of freedom are mightier than all that oppose: love stronger than selfishness, good will mightier than hate, truth more potent than darkness, justice more enduring than unrighteousness. And life, life like this, seems good, life which calls for faith and courage, life which brings suffering and labor, yet which in all this may be conscious of the fellowship of God, life which is sure of final triumph.

Such a vision cannot but give to him who holds it courage for life and joy in living. And yet this is not the last word of Christianity nor the first. This is an appeal to the mind and, if I may make the contrast so bald, the final appeal of Christianity is to the will. It summons men to an act of faith, that faith which is neither knowledge nor blind credulity, but the courage of a soul that will act out its life on the basis of the highest that it knows, supremely on the basis of that vision of God and of the meaning of life which comes to us in Jesus Christ. He who thus loyally gives himself will find another kind of answer to the problem of 'evil, whether he finds further light for the mind or not He will discover that this Good to which he surrenders himself is real, that the God in whom he trusts is good. He will find that this Good in the world of his soul as in the world about him is mightier than evil; more and more he will be sure that evil is here only to be overcome. And he will discover that, with the right attitude on his part, there takes place a strange transmutation by which evil itself becomes for him the occasion and means of good. ⁹

1) See Troeltsch, Art, "Theodizee," Bd, V, Sp. 1189, "Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart."

2) Browning, "Fra Lippo Lippi, 11

3) Sec William James, "The Will to Believe," page 41,

4) See article on "The Meaning and Use of. Pain," Dr. Lawrence Irwell, the Medical Times, quoted in the Literary Digest of February 10, 1917. It is a well-known fact that increasing sensitiveness to pain marks the ascent in the scale of life. The same is true when we come to the human race and the advancing stages of culture. We may lament this as an incidental misfortune or a mark of weakness. Is it not rather a condition of advance at each stage, physical, cultural, spiritual?

5) "Optimism," pages 13, 17,

6) Frazier Hunt, "The Rising Temper of the East," page 243.

7) Bert Leston Taylor, in the Chicago Tribune.

8) Compare William James, "Pragmatism," page 290.

9) See L, P. Jacks, "Religious Perplexities," page 80. "In its essence the Gospel is a call to make ... the experiment of fellowship, the experiment of trusting the heart of things, throwing self-care to the winds, in the sure and certain faith that you will not be deserted, forsaken, .or betrayed, and, that your, ultimate interests are perfectly secure in the hands of the Great Companion. This insight, this sure and firm apprehension of a spirit at hand, swiftly responsive to any trust we have in its, answering fidelity, coming to our way the moment we beckon it motionless and irresponsive till we hoist the flag of our faith and claim its fellowship, but then mighty to save—this is the center, the kernel, the growing point of the Christian religion, which, when we have it all else is secure, and when we have it not all else is precarious."

For further discussion of the general problem see Chapter II of the author's "A Working Faith."