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ON MORAL EVIL
A LETTER
FROM
A
FRIEND.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Sixpence.
�..
.. -.
�ON MORAL EVIL.
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My dear Friend,—It cannot be disguised that in
this age there is a great amount of atheism, or, what
is nearly akin to it, great distrust of God, arising from
the difficulty of reconciling the phenomena of moral
evil with the attributes of a holy and beneficent God.
For your readers there will be no necessity to enter
into any consideration of those explanations which
orthodox theology has given to account for the exist
ence of moral evil, because those explanations cannot
be reconciled with the most approved conclusions
respecting primitive man, and because the theories of
the remedy for moral evil do violence alike to our
highest instincts and to the honour of God.
I shall, therefore, confine my attention to the purely
rational side of the argument, in the hope of getting
a hearing from those wise and thoughtful men
amongst us who are willing to listen to reason, and tn
accept whatever can be shown to harmonise with the
facts of human nature and the moral instincts.
In dealing with a theme almost exhausted by con
troversy, of stupendous interest, and of very nearly
inscrutable mystery, it is impossible to refrain at the
outset from putting in a plea for indulgence, on the
score of my deeply felt incapacity to handle the sub
ject worthily; and, what is far more important, it is
necessary to caution my readers against any hasty
conclusion unfavourable to moral effort, which might
be- drawn from a sort of outside and comprehensive
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On Moral Evil.
view of the whole subject. My sole object in medi
tating on this momentous theme is to strengthen, not
to weaken my own sense of duty, to deepen, and not
to efface the moral obligations engraved upon my own
conscience. In writing therefore for others, my aim
can only be to endeavour, by setting forth the truth,
or what I believe to be the truth, to serve the cause
of pure morality and true religion, to lead my fellow
men by the shortest and most direct road to triumph
over moral evil in themselves, and to make that
triumph easier for others.
I must assume that there is a God—a moral
Governor of mankind—a Being from whom has
emanated all that we are and all that we desire, to
whom can be traced, so to speak, the ultimate respon
sibility of all that happens throughout the universe.
There was a time when I felt disposed to question
this complete and undivided sovereignty, but I per
ceive that it is no longer tenable to conceive of a First
Great Cause of all things, and yet to deny the connec
tion with that cause of any of the visible undisputed
phenomena of the world. God must be all or none;
that is to say, the Almighty power and perfect wis
dom and foreknowledge which we attribute to God,
prevent the possibility of any accidental frustration of
His purpose, or the real rebellion against Him of any
one of His creatures. Of every part of His creation,
we must at all times affirm that it is exactly what the
Creator intended that it should be then and there;
and of every thought, word, and deed, of men, we
must likewise affirm that each one is part of God's
original plan, and is the direct or indirect result of
forces which He himself, foreknowing all, set in oper
ation at the beginning of time. Find me the basest
man you know, and try if you can, to separate him and
his depraved condition, in any single point of his his
tory or antecedents, from the chain of God's order and
providence. Find one gap if you can, where a missing
�On Moral Evil.
5
link betokens an independent set of forces; shew me
but one instance in which his thoughts, words, or
deeds, are his own—independently of his Creator—■
and I will then admit that the Creator is not ulti
mately responsible for what that man is, or for what
he has done.
I know he has done worse when he might have
done better, but how was such a depraved choice
made possible to him ? Whence did he get his evil
bias ? From his companions ? or early training 1 or
from inherited moral weakness ? So far as he is con
cerned, he had no control over two of these corrupting
influences, and, in all probability, as little control over
the lot into which he was cast. As a creature, he is
the victim rather than the criminal, and in the sight
of the Creator he may be an object of pity, but never
of hatred. But his parents were wicked before him,
and transmitted the increased tendency to evil ?
Granted, and the man’s very birth into the world,
may have been the result of an unlawful, perhaps an
adulterous union. At first sight, it might seem as if
the very creation of this bad man had been taken out
of the Creator’s hands, and done in spite of His holy
will. But a moment’s consideration shews that we are
only pushing the difficulty further and further back,
and at last we should have to ask the question regard
ing the first and least corrupted of the man’s ancestors
(if the first were really the least corrupted); Who made
these people, in the first instance, what they were,
knowing what would be their debased offspring after
a thousand generations 1 It was still God at the
beginning who constituted man as he was, liable to
these moral aberrations and corruptions, and having
a certain degree of liberty within which he could do
evil instead of good; it was still God who knew all
the endless and countless variabilities of the human
will and character, and who, foreknowing it all, did
not prevent or provide for the prevention of those
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On Moral Evil.
results which we call evil. In the foregoing case you
will observe that I have admitted the worst form in
which moral evil can be imagined to take shape, viz.
—in the steady downward course of moral debase
ment, from slight weakness to actual sin, from bad to
worse, spreading and growing continually more loath
some from generation to generation, giving no hope
of amendment or of arrest in its downward course.
All we know of primitive man teaches us that just
the contrary of this has been the course of mankind,
that mankind began with a far lower moral condition
than we have now, that mankind is continually rising
and advancing (as a whole), and that superior moral
races take the place of those which are inferior. But
I took the other hypothesis, because the greater in
cludes the less. If under the worst aspect of human
depravity we must still trace the ultimate responsi
bility to our Creator, a fortiori, we must surely do so
in considering human depravity under the more
favourable aspect, which is offered to us through
modern researches into the history of primaeval man.
The atheist and the profligate may, however, be
inclined to cry exultingly that I have given them
all they ask. The atheist says, There cannot be a
God, because of all this moral evil in the world. I
admit the facts which are called evil, and I say the
ultimate responsibility of them lies with the Creator.
I cannot deny that God is the cause of all things.
The profligate and the criminal may rejoice to think
that God is to blame for what they do; and that, as
the Creator is responsible, they may as well do as they
like.
Much as one deplores the mis-use of any truth, it
affords no just ground for keeping it back, or for
putting a falsehood in its place. There ever will be
persons who must derive temporary injury from the
announcements of truths, however wholesome for the
mass, or salutary for mankind in the future. We
�On Moral Evil.
7
cannot be silent, and miss our chance; I ought rather
to say, we must not neglect our bounden duty, lest
some evil effects should mingle with the good effects
of what we have to make known. The world would
never have emerged from its primitive barbarism, had
its wise men and seers waited till all possible danger
of the mis-use of truth was past. Like one who said,
** He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” I would
only caution my readers against fastening on any one
isolated fact or truth, to the exclusion of other facts
and truths which we are equally bound to recognize.
If it be true that God is the author of all that happens,
is the ultimate cause of all which we call evil as well
as of all which we call good, there are other truths
and facts of our nature and moral organization quite
as fundamental and important, which we cannot ignore
without perverting the first cardinal truth respecting
our Creator's responsibility.
It has been well said, the use of abstract instead of
concrete terms has given rise to an enormous amount
of error in philosophy in general, and in ethics in par
ticular. The terms “evil” and “sin” when used as
abstract terms are fraught with mischief. There can
be no moral evil apart from some thought, word, or
deed, of man. There can be no sin without a sinner.
In endeavouring to discover what moral evil or sin is,
we shall go astray at the outset, if we begin to define
the abstract term, as theologians vainly do. We must
study men and women, their desires, motives, and
actions; and from that study we may come in time
to be able to generalize, and come to use abstract
terms in safety.
Let us then first consider what are the factors in
ourselves which go to produce an immoral act. We
are certainly conscious of having a body, which is the
subject of certain normal and natural desires. This
body, so far as we can discover, is in one respect
analogous to the individual beings around us, in
�On Moral Evil.
every class of animal life. The body at all times
seeks its own pleasure and satisfaction. It is en
dowed with absolute self-love, and is made dependent
on its own selfishness for its very life and power.
All its functions and its appetites are arranged for its
own good, its own safety, health, enjoyment, and that
without any regard to the safety, health, or enjoyment
of any other body, i.e., whenever such foreign interests
stand in its way.
Just as the different individuals in the vegetable
and animal worlds, each and all, struggle for existence,
if not for supremacy, so the bodies of men and women
are by nature under the same law of self-preservation;
and, but for the moral element in us which has led to
civilization and self-denial, we should differ in nothing
fundamentally from the animals around us. This is
as much God's own doing as all the rest of the Kosmos.
It is quite as necessary to our very existence, and to
the perpetuation of the race, that our bodies should be
organized as they are, as that the world should keep
its mean distance from the sun and revolve diurnally
on its axis. I find, then, all I am in search of to ex
plain the source of our wrong-doing, in the very con
stitution of our bodies and brains ; that is to say, we
are constituted by nature to gratify our bodies as we
please, just according to our several tastes, or the
varying dominance of certain appetites, utterly regard
less of any interests or pleasures but our own. Even
some beautiful instances of happiness shared with
others, do not form exceptions to this rule. I may
delight in cherishing my wife and in feeding my little
ones, but in this I only share the same lovely instinct
of many birds, quadrupeds, and insects. It adds to
my own comfort to contribute to theirs ; and I may
discharge this function all my life, without a spark of
moral goodness entering into a single act of fatherly
devotion. Another man may prefer the gratification
of being constantly drunk; and so he seeks his own
�On Moral Evil.
9
pleasure at the entire sacrifice of his family. In both
cases, the course of conduct pursued may be suggested
by the desires of the flesh, and as natural to the body
as eating when hungry, and drinking when thirsty.
By far the largest number of evil deeds belongs to
the class which we rightly call self-indulgent. And of
the rest, which are predatory, destructive, brutal—
such as the deeds of rapine, cruelty, and murder—we
can only say they are the acts of the indulgence of less
common appetites—such as envy, anger, jealousy,
revenge, and the like—which are more or less excep
tional, but which, equally with other appetites, ori
ginate in the bodily and cerebral frame. Now, it is
manifest, without the necessity for illustration, that
some appetites and natural cravings may be, and are
constantly, gratified without any sin at all; and also
that in some instances it would be a sin not to gratify
them. To these facts we must add a third, viz., all
the natural appetites whatever (and by the term
“natural” I, of course, exclude appetites which are
created or aggravated by cerebral disease) are in
themselves needful, beneficial to the welfare of indi
viduals possessing them, and, subject to certain con
trol, good for the world at large.
The appetite for sexual intercourse, which is gene
rally considered the most fruitful source of moral
evil, I believe to be, on the contrary, one of the
highest and noblest of our physical desires, and mani
festly necessary for the world’s welfare. That it has
been abused, and in many cases unduly stimulated,
is no argument against its intrinsic value. Even that
ambition or envy, which is the spring of robbery, and
the fruitful source of tyranny and injustice, is a neces
sary adjunct to our natural state. Without the desire
to emulate others, and to possess for ourselves what
we perceive has added to their comfort or advantage,
we should be infinitely less active and progressive
than we are, if indeed progress in the arts of civilisaB
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On Moral Evil.
tion were then possible at all. And that very anger
which leads to cruelty and to murder, is an element
in our constitution just as vital to the protection of
the race—to the protection not only of individuals
who are the subjects of anger, but also of others under
their care—as the desire for food and the instinct to
cherish our offspring. I cannot find a single element
in man’s nature, not even the murderous element and
love of cruelty, which has not its rightful place in the
economy of man, as an animal—and I might also add,
of man considered as a moral agent, destined for im
mortality.
I need not enlarge further on this factor of moral
evil. It must be evident to any one who will care
fully examine several instances of sin, that it invari
ably arises on one side from the action of some phy
sical impulse or appetite—that it is always an act
done to gratify the animal part of our nature. I now
proceed to consider the other factor, without which
moral life cannot be produced.
On examining ourselves, we find a principle or
power within us which is more or less in antagonism
to our natural physical impulses. It matters little to
oui* argument whether we call this inward controlling
power by the name of Reason, or Conscience, or Love.
We are considering only the thing itself, the nature
of which we shall discover from the observation of its
mode of action; and we can therefore for the present
waive discussion as to its proper name.
While a very large portion of our life is spent in
the unrestricted indulgence of some of our natural
desires, with which no voice within us interferes,
there are at the same time other natural desires which
are under the control of an inward power, antagonis
tic to their indulgence, either altogether or beyond
certain limits.
The body cannot do as it likes in all cases, without
being brought more or less under the censure of an
�On Moral Evil.
11
inward voice, which either checks the body in its wish
for gratification, or, being disobeyed, punishes the
body by reproaches or remorse. Every one knows
that he is thus under restraint, and that there is no
possibility of his doing just what the appetites and
impulses of his flesh suggest, without being opposed
from within by a power which demands the submis
sion of his will, or bitterly reproaches him when that
power is disobeyed. Illustration is scarcely required
here, but we can all recall instances of the remark
able exercise of this power. Some persons have felt
the tendency to theft or falsehood, and know that this
inward power has held them in check. Some have
had a similar tendency to intoxication, and have felt
the same restraint, whether they have obeyed it or
not. The free indulgence of sexual appetite is subject
to the same control, or punished by loss of self-respect
whenever that control has been defied.
And yet the proper indulgence of appetites has not
been thus interfered with or censured. We find anger
sometimes justified, sometimes forbidden. Love of
wealth, the same. Even strict truthfulness may some
times, and for certain ends, be relaxed. A person in
a very critical state of health may be lawfully screened
by deception from the danger of being killed by a
sudden shock, which some fatal news might cause.
Of course, cases in which deception is justifiable are
extremely rare. I only instance one, to show what I
am aiming to prove—viz., that the inward controlling
power permits, under certain circumstances, those
actions which, under other circumstances, it would
unhesitatingly forbid. There must be a law forbid
ding, an inward power or voice restraining, in order
to evolve sin out of any act of physical impulse. We
see this exemplified in human society. The existence
of law must in every case precede the birth of crime.
Different states have not always the same laws. I
may whistle for my dog in the streets of London on
�12
On Moral Evil.
a Sunday without infringing any statute or municipal
regulation. If I do the same in Glasgow, I am tapped
on the shoulder by a policeman, and reminded of the
law which turns my harmless or benevolent action
into an offence. In England bigamy is a felony. If
I am a Turkish subject, I may have four wives if I
please. Then again, some evil things are not pro
hibited at all. Many forms of fraud and extortion
are perfectly legal. Prostitution, and the use thereof,
are not crimes, nor even misdemeanours. From this
it is evident that states and governments make cer
tain crimes by enacting certain laws. That is, the
law alone is the legal measure of certain acts. Where
no law against them has been passed, the actions are
not recognised as offences.
Now, in precisely the same way, a man can only
sin when he disobeys the inner law which forbids cer
tain thoughts, words, and deeds. A certain act may
present itself to a thousand different persons as an act
which their consciences would forbid, and so they may
come to call that act immoral under all possible cir
cumstances, and no doubt they would be right in nine
hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand. For
this is how the standard of morality has been formed
in all ages, and why it is gradually rising. But we
should fall into a serious mistake if we tried to make
a leap over the one man’s conscience, and, ignoring
that, denounced him as guilty of immorality, simply
because he did what public opinion had condemned.
If the act was sinful at all, it was so only because it
was done in disobedience to the man’s own conscience.
The mere fact that a multitude of men have a common
experience about a certain act does not entitle them
to make the philosophical error of ignoring a principal
factor in the product of sin. It is not necessarily sin
ful—nay, it is sometimes greatly virtuous—to act in
direct violation of public opinion; so this in itself
would not be enough to convict a man of immorality.
�On Moral Evil.
A man does right so long as he exercises that degree
of control over his physical appetites demanded by
his inner moral sense. The moment that he oversteps
that limit, or disobeys the inward voice, he commits
an act of immorality.
Supposing he should outrage public decency in
England, so far as to marry two wives, and supposing
him at the same time to be a trained-up Mormonite,
taught from infancy to believe that polygamy is law
ful in God’s sight, we should do right in punishing
him as a felon for his felony, but we should be wrong
in accusing him of immorality, because his conscience
had sanctioned his conduct. This brings us to per
ceive that merely written laws, whether in the Bible
or in the Statute Book, are not by themselves the
other factor in the product of moral evil. Unless
there is a sense of obligation there can be no sin. There
may be crime against the State, or a violation of Bible
precept, which some may deem irreverent or impious,
but there cannot be sin, without a violation of one’s
own sdhse of moral obligation. Moreover, there may
be some laws of the State which are bad laws, and
some Bible precepts directly opposed to morality, in
which case disobedience would be virtuous, though, in
the one instance, punished by the State, and in the
other by the public opinion of the orthodox; there
may be other cases, too, in which a man might be
a grievous sinner, though he had broken no written
law anywhere.
This may be deemed a dangerous doctrine to teach,
but, in the first place, it is not a doctrine at all, but
a question of fact as to what constitutes guilt—for
guilt can only be the result of previous sense of obli
gation. And men only feel obliged or bound to do
that which they can do. They never really feel
bound to do what is known to be beyond their
power, and therefore they never can feel guilty for
omitting to do what is impossible to them, or for
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On Moral Evil.
doing what they really could not help. The previous
sense of obligation which alone can constitute a sub
sequent sense of guilt springs from within, and not
from without; it is a part of ourselves, and is one of
the modes in which the inner voice or conscience acts
upon our lower nature. It cannot be so dangerous to
speak the truth about any matter as to say what is
false—nor can it endanger morality to endeavour to
get a right understanding of the true nature and source
of immorality.
The two factors of moral evil, then, are simply the
whole physical nature on one side, and on the other,
an inward power or law which sometimes opposes
our natural instincts and seeks to control them.
The action of the physical nature by itself is neither
moral nor immoral.
The submission of the physical nature to the moral
sense is virtue. The rebellion of the physical nature
against the moral sense resulting in action is vice
or moral evil. Conscious conformity to the moral
sense is morality. Conscious disobedience to it is
immorality.
From observation and induction, we are enabled to
form moral codes, for the greater facility of education,
i.e., for the cultivation of the moral sense, and for the
welfare of society. But it is putting these cases quite
out of place, to teach that they must be obeyed merely
because they are recognised codes, or to describe the
infringement of them as immorality, upon any lower
ground than that infringement is in every case a vio
lation of individual moral obligation. In a general
way, it is true, that certain acts are immoral, done by
whom they may, and under any circumstances; but
it will only mislead us to suppose that they can ever
be immoral except in one invariable way, viz., in that
they do violence to the moral sense of every individual
who commits them.
It may here be objected : The moral sense gets
�On Moral Evil.
*5
weaker the oftener it is violated, and the appetites of
the flesh get stronger the oftener they are indulged. In
this case it is said, men may go on doing wrong, from
worse to worse, until they cease to feel any sense of
moral obligation, or any sense of guilt in the commis
sion of those acts which were once felt to be immoral;
and at last they become as hardened and indifferent
to right and wrong as the beasts of the field, and yet,
according to my theory, it is alleged, they would not
be immoral, for their conduct would not violate any
inner law or moral sense. Hence, if any one wished
to escape the unpleasantness of being morally con
trolled, and the remorse of a guilty conscience, it is
urged, he would have nothing to do but to be sinful
to the utmost of his power—-doing all he could, and
as fast as he could, to kill all conscience within him.
This would be indeed a formidable objection to the
promulgation of the statement that men are only im
moral, sinful, guilty, in exact proportion to the activity
of their moral sense, unless the objection were based
on a misconception of the possibilities of man’s nature.
The supposed case of a man extinguishing, by repeti
tion of immoral acts, all moral sense whatever, is
purely gratuitous and unwarrantable. We have no
reason for supposing that any man, unless diseased in
body or mind, can by his own act rid himself of a
sense of moral obligation. It is true that it is in our
power to increase and develop that moral sense by
cultivation and strict obedience, but it by no means
follows that it is in our power to destroy it altogether;
even, if for a time we can contrive to weaken and
resist it.* I refuse to believe in the possibility of a
* Granting that this does take place in some instances,
the fact does not overthrow the author’s theory. The de
praved man has ceased to sin by ceasing to be what God
created him. He has fallen lower than a sinner, for he
has forfeited his natural human condition. The myth of
Nebuchadnezzar would seem to have this meaning.—Note
by a Friend.
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On Moral Evil.
man thus destroying his moral sense after having
had one in normal exercise, until such a man is pro
duced and exhibited. All my experience goes to
prove that men cannot lose their moral sense, and it
more frequently happens, that the self-reproach and
remorse grow deeper, the more sin has been indulged.
But granted such a case as the objector mentions.
Some few instances of the kind among many millions
would not overturn the overwhelming testimony on
the other side. Exceptions would but prove the rule.
The great mass of mankind are incapable of losing
their moral sense, and they would not be less or more
under its influence for any theories which might be
started to account for its agency in producing moral
evil. Vast numbers are kept as they are, neither
better nor worse, through the chief agency of custom
and public opinion. Their good and their bad actions
are alike the result of moulding circumstances, and
surrounding example, rather than of any conscious
moral effort, or immoral resistance of conscience.
Times and opportunities come to all for virtue and
vice, but the even tenor of many lives is, by compa
rison, seldom disturbed by any great conflict between
the flesh and the moral sense. The usual aspect of
such lives is best described as w-moral, not as moral
or immoral at all. Great drinkers, great profligates,
and great criminals, are as much the exception as
great heroes, great moralists, and great martyrs.
Both classes, both extremes of honour and baseness,
are doubtless the products of much moral conflict, of
which the easy-going world knows little or nothing.
A celebrated preacher, a man of exemplary life and
morals, once said to me, “ If I had not been a saint, I
should have been a devil,” and, really, to look at him
was enough to make one believe his words. There
was tremendous power in his head, and the furrows
of spiritual conflict had been ploughed deep into his
very face. The very good and the very bad are near
�On Moral Evil.
*7
a,kin, depend upon it. And the judgment of God,
who knows all, may be very different from ours, as
to the exact moral status of each one—
Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman ;
Though they may gang a kenning wrang,
To step aside is human.
One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving why they do it:
And just as lamely can ye mark
How far perhaps they rue it.
Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us ;
He knows each chord—its various tone,
Each spring—its various bias:
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.*
From the foregoing observations on the source of
moral evil, we cannot but draw some important con
clusions.
(1) . There is no such thing at all as moral evil,
apart from the thoughts, words, and deeds of moral
beings, i.e., of beings endowed with a moral sense, a
power which offers resistance to the physical impulses.
Therefore, there is nothing so absurd as to suppose
that evil has originated in any spiritual being or
devil; or has been imported into man’s nature from
without, or, still less, is the result of God’s defeat, or
of some flaw or defect in His original plan.
(2) . The mere fact of man being able to commit an
immoral act furnishes evidence of his superiority over
other kinds of animal organism. He could not
sin unless he first possessed a moral sense— -a sense of
obligation. It is a mark, if anything, of divine favour,
* Burns’ Address to the Unco Guid.
�i8
On Moral Evil.
rather than of divine anger. It is the token of God’s
blessing rather than of God’s cursing.
(3) . It is an indication of man’s destiny. What
possible benefit could be derived from the endowment
of man with a moral sense, if this life were the only
field for its exercise 1 If this be the only sphere in
which the moral sense will ever be developed, then its
presence in human nature must be admitted to be a
profound mistake, a mere wanton disturbance of
human animal contentment, without any correspond
ing advantage. The moral sense is to some men an
incessant check on the appetites and inclinations of
the flesh, submitted to only for the sake of an eternal
moral progress, which man’s inmost heart desires, and for
which alone he is willing to make the sacrifices of his
fleshly indulgence. To undergo all this in pure delu
sion—a delusion for which no set of priests, or pro
phets, no sacred books or churches are responsible—a
delusion purely originating in the highest and noblest
part of man’s own nature, is to submit to a moral
government based on immorality—to be kept truth
ful and honourable by a lie, and to be the utter dupe
of the Creator. If men can bring themselves to be
lieve that this faith in eternal moral progress after
death is utterly false and without foundation, they
can only do so by denying the goodness of God, and
by affirming that, if there be a Creator at all, he must
be the most treacherous and cruel of fiends.
(4) . As the relative powers of the flesh and the
moral sense are absolutely due to the Creator, partly
by the constitution of each man’s nature, and by the
circumstances in which he is placed, and over which
he has often no control, it follows that the failure of
the moral sense to regulate the body must be regarded
by the Creator in a very different light to what is
generally supposed. It is, of course, right to employ
language which conveys in the most clear and forcible
manner the divine authority of the moral sense, and
�On Moral Evil.
J9
to teach young persons and men of little intellectual
culture how wicked and wrong it is not to control
themselves ; and so we naturally say, “ G-od is angry
with sin.” “ God will punish it.” I say this language
is in use among us from the exigencies of the case, and
is justifiable only so long as we find it the best by
which to convey the incontrovertible truth that it is
man’s duty to control himself, and to act in strict
obedience to the moral sense, and further, that dis
obedience will entail painful consequences in order to
train him back into obedience and virtue.
But if this be kept well in view, and insisted on by
teachers, and preachers, and parents, they will be more
successful in their efforts to promote virtue, and to
diminish moral evil, if they ascertain clearly how all
sin is really punished, and skilfully expose the num
berless fallacies commonly entertained with regard to
punishment; and if to this they add true views of
God’s relation to the world, and of His moral govern
ment, they will get rid of those dreadful notions about
the Creator which make the lives of so many needlessly
sad, and weaken morality by weakening hope. It
is not true that sin is always punished by bodily pain.
Pain administered as punishment can only serve to
discipline the body, just as little children may be
trained into civilized animals by a little wholesome
chastisement in early years, which must on no acconnt
be inflicted after the moral sense is sufficiently de
veloped to make them ashamed of having done wrong.
As a matter of fact, the body gets more punished by
virtue than by vice. Provided a vicious man is
prudent in his self-indulgence, he can secure comfort
and gratification to his body by his very sins; whereas,
in very many cases of true virtue, the body suffers by
the moral conduct of the individual. To use an old
Bible phrase which is very expressive, “ the flesh, with
its affections and lusts, is mortified.” Being called to
a life of moral excellence is, in many instances, really
�20
On Moral Evil.
being called to a life of much physical pain. Loss of
liberty, loss of pleasure, and often positive discomfort,
and even misery, have arisen purely out of the rigid
exercise of moral control. We cannot, therefore,
look for the punishment of moral evil in the region
of physical pain or bodily discomfort. As the only
reward. or compensation for virtue is to be found in
the satisfaction of the moral sense, either on account
of what has been gained by self-conquest in moral
progress, or on account of some manifest benefit which
has been conferred thereby on others; so the only
true punishment for moral evil—that is, pain which
can be felt as punishment—is in shame and remorse.
Our Creator has so ordered it that we must reproach
ourselves for all failure in duty, for all conscious
disobedience to the higher law within us. He
has so constituted us, that we blame ourselves in
exact proportion to our real guilt; that we measure
our own guilt by the previous sense of obligation,
which is, in turn, measured by the power of doing
right of which we were conscious at the time of the
sinful act. Thus a man’s own sense of guilt is the
exact measure of guilt. Of course, that sense of
guilt may not come into exercise all at once. The
better feelings may be overpowered by a delirium of
self-indulgence, which, for a time, makes him as it
were out of his mind ; but when he comes to himself,
and reviews his conduct, the full sense of guilt comes
over him, and he is tortured by shame and selfreproach. There is just this difference between
God’s moral government and ours : we cannot reach
the inner life; we can only deal with the body: and
so the criminal is punished by us in his body. We
take our revenge, just or unjust, for his offences by
various methods of inflicting pain on the cerebral
and physical frame of the offender. But God’s way
of punishing is just the opposite. For the most part
the body is left alone, or only indirectly affected
�On Moral Evil.
21
through the emotions. God makes the sinner to be
his own judge and his own executioner. The stings
of remorse are the only real ministers of divine justice.
Thus we are brought by a single step to question the
accuracy of that common sentiment, “ God is angry
with sin,” “ God will surely punish it.” These common
phrases plainly declare a change of mind or feeling in
God, and a determination on His part to interfere—
to do something—in consequence of our sin. Though
well intended and often practically useful, because
not clearly understood, these phrases are unsound and
untrue. God cannot be made angry by anything
whatever which occurs in the universe which He him
self has planned and built. God cannot be the sub
ject of variable emotions, such as are common to the
finite human being. God cannot be disturbed by any
consequence of those manifold forces which He at
first, foreknowing all, set in operation. It is quite
absurd to talk of God’s anger at all, when one con
templates the complete foreknowledge which must
have ever filled the Creator’s mind. To say that one
is displeased, or angry, is to express that the will of
the angry person has been thwarted, his plans in some
way defeated; and to ascribe such defeat to any part
of God’s plans, is to divest Him either of Infinite
Power or Infinite Wisdom. To say that God is angry
with sin, is only to use a figure of speech whereby we
wish to describe the fact that our own moral sense
has a divine authority for the control of the body in
which it dwells. Beyond that, the phrase is false and
misleading, and has done infinite mischief in the world
by representing sinful man as an object of God’s dis
pleasure, and as an offender doomed to some terrible
fate. So, too, the phrase, “ God will surely punish
sin,” misleads us by carrying away our thoughts from
the present punishment which the Creator has made
man to inflict upon himself. It originates all sorts of
absurd and cruel theories of delayed vengeance, brew
�22
On Moral Evil.
ing wrath, and a future hell of endless torment,
when, all the. while, the only just, and suitable, and
beneficial punishment is being already borne. Besides
this, the punishment of moral evil by shame and re
morse, is in itself remedial and not vindictive. It is
a pure medicine, and not the scourge or axe of an
executioner. It contains the germs of repentance and
amendment of life, and was intended to do so.
We have been too long under this horrid nightmare
of the dread of God, and the sense of His anger. It
is “ high time to awake out of sleep.” Men have been
estranged from their great Friend, who alone knew
how to help them. They have lived all their lives
under a dark cloud, or in the wild endeavour to
lighten up their gloom by the glare of reckless revel
ling. They have sometimes abandoned all efforts at
self-control, and smothered the appeals of conscience,
by trusting to “ atoning blood” or “imputed right
eousness.” They have multiplied schemes on schemes
for escaping from God, though all the while He was
their Father and Friend, and no more angry with
them than the tender mother is angry with her sick
babe.
I am not afraid myself of believing that God is not
angry with sin, and that He will not punish it by
any other method than that already in force—through
the moral sense itself. Though I have long held this
view, it has never made me careless about right and
wrong, or diminished, by the weight of a grain, the
burden of self-reproach whenever I have done amiss.
I don’t know what I might have been, or have done in
the whole range of sins, but for the constant and stedfast assurance of God’s unabated love and friendship.
It has helped and not hindered me in the struggle
between good and evil. So I am not afraid to tell the
truth to my fellowmen, whenever I can tell it wholly,
and not partially. At the same time, God’s own pro
vision for the moral progress of mankind is ample and
�On Moral Evil.
23
unassailable. We can only do temporary harm, if
even that, by our false theories. We cannot unmake
a single man, woman, or child, or wrest from them
the moral sense which God has given.
(5.) It is a relief to turn from the ugly distortions
of man's relation to God, as described by theologians
to those happier views which you have done so much
to make known. In the pamphlets on “The Analogy
of Nature and Religion” and “ Law and the Creeds,”
and others in that series, we breathe an atmosphere
of. calmness and hope, instead of the alarm and despair
fostered by the old theologies.* Moral evil is only
relative ; we create it, so to speak, by our aspirations,
by our widening knowledge, and by our increasing
desire to walk in the will of God. We learn by it
what we have been created for, and what destiny God
has in store for us. We cannot shut our eyes to the
fearful and wicked things which are done in the
world, but we ought to be thankful that we have the
power of seeing them to be wicked and fearful, the
sense of abhorrence of them, and the capacity for
struggling against their commission by ourselves, and
for making a manful attempt to remedy their bitter
consequences, and prevent them in future. We are
apt to forget that there was a time when people who
were accounted holy and saintly, and believed them
selves to be so, practised lying and fraud without a
sense of shame; f when a man fervent in piety,
and full of honest trust in His Maker’s love and
righteousness could turn brigand, and seize other
men’s wives for his own lust, and day by day make
deadly raids upon the property and dependants of the
man who was giving him a shelter and a home, and
all this without any sense of having done amiss, or
broken the law of common humanity4 The very
saint who was called the Father of the Faithful §
* This subject is also treated in “The Sling and the Stone,”
in various sermons on sin.
t Jacob, &c.
I David.
§ Abraham.
�24
On Moral Evil.
could deliberately tell a lie in order that his own wife
might be taken to be ravished in a royal couch, with
out the necessity of his being previously murdered.
What should we say now if such deeds could be done,
as they once were done, without exciting any sense of
shame or calling forth the indignation of a whole
people ?
Times have changed indeed, and morality has made
great strides. True, many fearful crimes are now
perpetrated, but they are no longer committed with
out the abhorrence of the multitude. Terrible inroads
on domestic morality have been lately revealed to us
through our Divorce Courts, but only to meet with
the reproaches and indignation which they deserve.
And to pass from classes to individuals. We have
had living amongst us in the past century, men whose
virtues had never before been reached, much less sur
passed. Such men leave their impress on the age
which follows them, by an improved standard of
morals, and so the whole race is lifted on, step by
step, up the mountain of holiness which leads to the
throne of God.
But each man, as his body falls asleep in death, wakes
up, as we believe, to a new life in the world which we
cannot see, wherein the great work begun here is
carried on more rapidly, with fewer falls and blunders
than we make in our earliest essays at moral progress
here below. There are vast differences between us on
earth, as to the degrees of the strength and develop
ment of the moral sense, but this no more hinders us
from believing that all must take the same blissful
journey upwards to light and goodness, than the fact
of pur children being of different ages prevents our
believing that they will all in succession grow up to
manhood.
Whatever view we take of evil, we can only struggle
against it as we ought when we are assured that the
contest is not hopeless, and that a great and kind
�On Moral Evil.
*5
Friend has subjected us all to it for a purpose which
shall bring infinite good to every one. If our aspira
tions are above our capacities, the result will be a
temporary sense of bitter failure; it need not involve
any sense of guilt for any failure but such as was
clearly within our power to prevent. It need not
involve any regret—still less despair—so long as we
are sensitive to our position, earnestly desiring to im
prove. And while we can take comfort from the
assurance that God cannot be angry with us, we shall
be only more angry with ourselves for not achieving
what we might have achieved, and for failing when we
wight, have prevailed. The love and friendship of
God will thus cast a bright light about us in our
deepest sadness and bitterest repentance, and will
strengthen us more than anything else to amend our
lives, and to conquer the foe that stands still be
fore us.
I have only briefly, and very imperfectly, touched
on this vast subject, but the little I have said may
lead some of your more able readers to correct my
errors and to supplement my defects.
Ever most truly yours,
*****
To Thomas Scott, Esq.,
Mount Pleasant,
Ramsgate.
�26
On Moral Evil.
POSTSCRIPT.
A Review of one of your pamphlets, “ Is Death the
End of all things for man,” in the “Rock ” of June 10th,
leads me to add a few more words, which may help to
correct the erroneous impressions now current amongst
the orthodox, respecting our views of rewards and
punishments. The writer of that Review represents
the author of the above-named pamphlet as being
‘‘shut up to one or other of the only other pos
sible doctrines—the reward of all, or the punishment of all, or haply, a temporary punishment of
some, in order to the ultimate issue of the reward or
blessedness of all.”
I cannot, of course, answer for the author of that
pamphlet, but most Theists are agreed in believing
that all men will be gradually brought to a state of
holiness at last. It is not a question with them of
reward and punishment at all, but one relating to the
good purpose of God in having created us. That, in
this process of becoming holy, the punishment of
remorse will still be used hereafter, as it is in this life,
is, to say the'least, highly probable; but it does not in
volve any notions of Purgatory, such as are referred to
by the Reviewer in the “Rock.” As to reward, the only
reward for which the Theist hopes or seeks to attain
is that of success—of becoming at last what he wishes
and tries to be—of being able to do the perfect will
of God, and to love it entirely. Happiness of any
other sort is out of all consideration, and the hope of
it has been cast away as one of the attractions of our
childhood. The blessedness of being good, of growing
up into perfect sonship to God—this alone is our
aspiration and our well-grounded hope. We do not
pretend to describe, or even to suggest, the details of
�On Moral Evil.
God’s future discipline of us, which must remain hid
den from our knowledge on this side the grave, but
only so far as analogy helps us, we believe that moral
discipline will be carried on with each of us when we
die, and that then, as now, we shall find in the pun
ishment which comes by remorse the best medicine for
faults still incurred. To compare this to the doctrine
of Purgatory is to disclose an entire ignorance of our
standpoint. The Reviewer, after stating, in his own
language, the doctrine that (til will hereafter be
blessed, goes on to say, “ It has no foundation to rest
upon excepting general notions respecting the good
ness of God, and His purpose and His power to make
His creatures happy.”
Now this hope does not rest at all on “general
notions,” many of which are rejected by the Theist,
and none of which are ever accepted by him as authori
tative, but the hope, wherever it exists, rests on the
individual’s firm belief in the goodness of God, and m
His purpose and power to make His children good.
What foundation for our hope, we ask, can possibly
be so strong, or so wide, as this conviction of God s
good purpose, and His boundless power to carry it
out ? No voices from without, no parade of Church
authority, no library full of Bibles and Testaments, no
miracles of raising the dead, no word of Christ Himself,
or of the whole army of martyrs, not even the chorus of
angels or archangels, and all the company of heaven,
could make so certain our blessed hope as this still
small voice in our own hearts, “ God is love.” Those
who cannot feel this are yet unbelievers; they do not
know what real faith is; they do not yet “understand
the loving kindness of the Lord.” From the dark
cloud of orthodox infidelity, the wind moans and the
atmosphere is loaded with profound gloom; the hope
of the final bliss of all is swept away by a scornful
scepticism which reckons on the sympathy of the
“ Christian” multitude. “ Now, with respect to this
doctrine” (i.e., the final good of all) it might be
�28
On Moral Evil.
enough, to say that it has no foundation to rest upon,
excepting general notions respecting the goodness of
God/’ &c. Can infidelity sink lower than this ?
Another fallacy lies near at hand. After errone
ously putting the term “happy” for “good” (a con
fusion which we studiously avoid, although it may
be. true that the only real happiness consists in
being good), the Reviewer asks, “ Why is there any
unhappiness in the universe at all ? God could pre
vent it, but He does not. There must be good reasons
for His refraining, and how can we tell that these rea
sons shall cease to act when men cease to live in this
world? If the existence of suffering in the world
were incompatible with the Divine goodness, the exis
tence of it for a lifetime, or for an hour, were as
incompatible with that goodness as its existence
throughout eternity. This can never be answered.”
We don’t want to answer it; we quite agree with the
Reviewer that unhappiness is in the world, might be
preventible by God, is not prevented by God for certain
good reasons. We further agree in believing that God’s
good reasons will continue to act in the next world as
in this. We accept this life with its present share of
unhappiness only and entirely on the ground that God
is working by this means, amongst others, to certain
ends, of which the chief is that every man under pre
sent discipline shall be made good at last. We do not
rebel against the suffering—nay, we would not wish
one iota of it diminished, if thereby God’s good pur
poses should risk a failure. ; We believe in Him, and
therefore we are willing to bear what He appoints.
We trust Him implicitly, and therefore are willing to
wait, in perfect confidence, in sure and certain hope.
But the Reviewer, to whom I should be sorry to
attribute, even by mistake, any opinions which are not
his, seems evidently to think his closing sentence in
the above paragraph a triumphant argument for the
endless torment in which he believes.
�On Moral Evil.
*9
The fallacy lies in his not distinguishing between
the abstract and the concrete. “ Suffering,” I beg to
remind him, implies a sufferer, or sufferers. Now, it
does make all the difference to Divine goodness
whether a human being suffers for a time, with a
view to his final good, or suffers for all eternity.
This “suffering” which exists in the universe is a
state into which multitudes of individuals are being
born, and out of which they are constantly passing.
The suffering may only be correctly described as
eternal as regards its permanence as a system, and
the unbroken succession of individuals subjected to it
(supposing that this present state of human life is to
continue on the earth for ever). But as regards the
beings who suffer, it is not only not eternal, but tem
porary; as compared with a millennium, even very
temporary, and as compared with eternity, in the lan
guage of the apostle, “ it is but for a moment.”
Were it not temporary, and inflicted for a purpose
beneficent to the sufferer, suffering would be really
incompatible with the Divine goodness; but this just
makes all the difference. The orthodox man believes
in the endless suffering of some human beings whom
God has created, who were actually born morally
weak, and who were perhaps so trained and circum
stanced that moral improvement was hardly possible
to them at all; or, to speak in more orthodox terms,
they “rejected the Saviour,” because they had not
that “faith” which the New Testament affirms “is
not of ourselves, but is the gift of God.”
To remain for ever and ever wicked and unhappy,
incurable by God, even if He had the will to redeem
and reform the poor sinner, would be a standing wit
ness of the triumph of evil over good, of the defeat of
Him whom the very orthodox call “Almighty.”
No ! the existence of suffering in the world, when
once understood, is not incompatible with the Divine
goodness, but rather one of its strongest proofs, lout
�30
On Moral Evil.
only when understood. As a means to an end, as in
flicted for a time on each individual, in order to secure
his everlasting good, it is a mark of God’s fatherlylove for us all; but without this condition it would
convey to us, an irresistible evidence that we were
the sport of a fiend, or the victims of the most gigan
tic blunder.
The Reviewer, of course, after what he hadTsaid,
could not help falling into the error of supposing that
morality would be weakened by the final prospect of
universal happiness. Taught as we teach it, the doc
trine of final good for all can only tend to strengthen
our moral sense ; and to hasten, not to retard, amend
ment. Our belief is, not that God intends us all to
be indiscriminately 1 happy,’ but that He intends to
make us all good, to make us not only obedient to
His will, but to love it, and be drawn towards it by
impulses from within corresponding to His laws with
out. That is our summurn bonum, the only fruition
of our earthly trials for which we have any right to
look to our Creator, and that of itself teaches the
supreme importance of losing no time in beginning,
and relaxing no effort in continuing, the great work
of our moral progress. I cannot do better than re
mind the Reviewer and his readers of the “ Bock,” of
these apostolic words which on this subject express
the mind of the theist so forcibly : “ Work out your
own .salvation, for it is God who is working in you, both to
will and to do of His good pleasure.”
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
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On moral evil: a letter from a friend
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Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 30 p. ; 18 p.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh. The letter, published anonymously, is written to Thomas Scott. The author attribution of Charles Voysey taken from Scott's publications list at the end of item catalogued in Conway Tracts 32, no. 13. Date of publication from British Library catalogue.
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Evil
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Conway Tracts
Good and Evil
Morality
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Text
THE
MYSTERY OF EVIL
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
11 THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD
LONDON, S.E.
1875.
Price Ninepence.
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE FULTENEY STREET
HAYMARKET.
�THE
MYSTERY OF EVIL.HIS subject is not one of mere sectarian or"
temporary interest. It touches a depth far
deeper than even the differences which separate
disciples of Naturalism from those who profess faith
in a miraculous book revelation. The following
inquiry reaches down to the “ bed rock ” of all intel
lectual and moral life, and deals with the source and
development of force in the universe, with the nature
of human actions, and with the true fulcrum which is
to bear the leverage by which this still suffering and
disordered world is to be raised towards perfect har
mony with taw, and with the highest ideal of human
intelligence and happiness.
Orthodox guides are constantly warning their
people against this proposed line of investigation. We
are cautioned that the study of such a topic is unprac
tical and unprofitable—if not actually profane —
*
that it involves a mystery which is hopelessly inex
plicable, that attempts to solve the mystery have been
made over and over again by the “ carnal ” intellect,
but always with the same unsatisfactory result—the
mocking of our hopes, the answering of our questions
by empty echoes, which but rebuke our presumption.
This has been the favourite way of silencing the
T
* To proscribe as profane, studies beyond the comprehension of a par
ticular school or sect is a very old habit. The wisest Greek philosopher
maintained that Astronomy was a subject unfit for human inquiry, and
that the gods took it under their own special and immediate control.
B
�6
The Mystery of Evil.
questionings, the difficulties, and the fears of “ doubt
ing believers;” There can be no harm, we are told
in making qurselves acquainted, as a matter of history,
with how the loyal defenders of the faith have been
accustomed to “ hold the fort ” against the “ infidel,”
for we should ever be ready to give a reason of the
hope that is in us. But to venture to reason out the
point independently for oneself is to enter on a path
beset with danger and leading to despair. Minds of
any siamma, however, and especially if familiar with
the wonderful disclosures which science and critical
scholarship are daily making, are not likely to submit
much longer to this restraint of priestly leading
strings. They will insist on the right of testing the
most “mysterious” teachings of the church for them
selves, undeterred alike by threats of ecclesiastical
taboo in this world and of divine punishment in the
next. The light of truth—formerly claimed as the
sole prerogative of a pretended “ sacred order ”—now
finds its way as freely into the poor man’s cottage as
into the palace of the archbishop, and will, sooner or
later, compel the dullest to examine for themselves
with an urgency that cannot be repressed.
If I looked upon the question under consideration
as simply affording scope for curious speculation, I
should be content at once to relegate it for decision
to the learned hair-splitters who make it their busi
ness solemnly to adjust the distinction between
“ homoousion ” and homozousion.” But I am fully
convinced that the alleged “ mystery of evil ” is
essentially a practical question, and one upon which
hangs the true theory of the universe, a right concep
tion of man’s physical and moral relations, and a just
understanding of the nature of the human will and
human accountability. Moreover, the vulgar notions
on this subject will have to be abandoned before the
many philanthropic persons whom theological super
stitions have misled, are likely to unite in any effectual
�The Mystery of Evil.
7
attempt at man’s physical, rational, and moral eleva
tion. With all becoming reverence for the earnest
and often profound efforts of the wise and the good
in past times to master the difficulties of this subject,
we, in this age of riper learning and more extensive
scientific acquisition, occupy a vantage ground in
discussing it which was not possible to any previous
generation.
“ Evil ” is a term having a theological origin,
though it has in some measure been adopted in the
language of common life. We usually understand by
it whatever is contrary to our ideas of moral rectitude
and tends to interfere with the general happiness
of mankind physically, morally, and socially. It is
but too easy to find endlessly varied traces of the
wretchedness and wrong that seem to defy all
attempts to reconcile them with the rule of infinite
power, wisdom, and goodness in the universe.
What shall we say of the tribes and races that
have been permitted to live many centuries in inter
necine strife, ignorance, filth, and pestilence, and to
perish without contributing one thought worth pre
serving to the stock of human ideas ? And still it is
often around the haunts of the wandering savage or
the uncultivated boor, who is incapable of appreciat
ing the sublime, that nature puts forth her grandest
feats of power and beauty. Then what shall we
think of the havoc and sorrow which are the heritage
of multitudes born into the world with constitutions
naturally predisposing them to suffer pain or to
violate the sentiments of justice and humanity, and
brought up in homes that infallibly foster vice, cruelty,
and crime. Nor does it relieve the difficulty to view in
temperance, the sickly frame, the life-long disease, the
plague and the pestilence as being, directly or remotely,
penalties for the neglect of sanitary and moral laws ;
for reason will persist in asking, “ Why, if the universe
be ruled by a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and
�8
The Mystery of Evil.
love, was not this deep turbid river of misery stemmed
at the fountain ? ” Nay, there are forms of suffering
yet more appalling and that yet more perplex and
overpower us: the storm that dashes a thousand
helpless vessels in pieces in spite of every expedient
tried by the crews to escape an ocean grave; the
earthquake that engulfs towns and cities so quickly
that science and forethought are powerless to avert
it; the explosion of the mine that suddenly scorches
to death many an honest toiler and deprives many a
family of its bread-winner. And if we turn from the
fury of the unconscious elements to the conscious
and troubled inward experience of human beings, the
cloud of “ natural ills that flesh is heir to,” thickens.
The tangled affairs of social and moral life is patent
to us all. Why, in this century for instance, should
law and order, truth and right, have so little influence
upon civilised nations, to say nothing of those we
deem barbarians ? Look back, too, in history, and
behold the long perspective of prophets and martyrs,
who have sealed their loyalty to truth and righteous
ness with their blood, while the tyrants who slew
them died without one pang of remorse. Look
around and see all ages cut down, apparently at ran
dom ;—in many cases the wise and vigorous, the use
ful, the talented, and benevolent, withering away in
the morning or noontide of their days with their
gifts increasing in number and activity, while the effete
and the stupid, the besotted, the selfish, the useless,
are spared. Knavery arrayed in purple and fine
linen fares sumptuously, and at its gate honest
poverty clothed in rags, desires in vain to eat of the
crumbs that fall from the rich charlatan’s table.
Consider the millions that have innocently pined in
the dungeon, or that have been worked as beasts,
flogged as beasts, and sold as beasts. Consider the
throng of once blooming maidens ruined by heartless
human monsters. Think of nations in the first rank
�The Mystery of Evil.
9
of civilisation, bowing at the same altar, and rising
from their devotions to slay each other by weapons
of fiendish ingenuity. And with the spectacle also
before us of the greed of ambition, the vapourings
of pride, the treachery of the false, the meanness of
the little, the vices of the bad, and the frailties of
the good, the moral instinct within us cannot help
reiterating the question, “ Is this the sort of world
we should have expected under the government of a
Deity clothed with the attributes of perfection ? The
good man—crude though his ideal be—if he had the
power as he has the wish, would at once reduce this
chaos to order ; and does not the Theist believe in a
God infinitely better than the most benevolent of
men ?
An eminent living physical philosopher has said
“ Nature seems to take some care of the race, but
bestows very little on individuals.” And in brooding
on the dark side of this problem, a man of literary
note once exclaimed, in a private circle, “For the
credit of our conception of what goodness ought to
be, let us hope there is no God.” This, too, rightly
or wrongly, was the very thought put by Byron into
the mouth of Gain in his reply to Lucifer :
Why do I exist ?
Why art thou wretched ? why are all things so ?
Even He who made us must be as the Maker
Of things unhappy ! To produce destruction
Can surely never be the work of joy;
And yet my sire says He’s omnipotent.
Then why is evil ?—He being good ?
The same thought is strongly expressed by Mrs.
Browning:—
My soul is grey
With pouring o’er the total sum of ill.
*****
With such a total of distracted life
To see it down in figures on a page,
Plain, silent, clear
*
*
*
�IO
The Mystery of Evil.
*
*
*
That’s terrible
For one who is not God, and cannot right
The wrong he looks upon.
*
This problem of evil has stirred deeply inquiring
minds from the earliest times. In the ‘ Naishadha
Charita ’ (xvii. 45), a Charvaka, or materialistic
Atheist, is represented as addressing Indra and other
gods on their return to heaven from Damayantis
Svayamvara, and ridiculing the orthodox Indian doc
trines of the Vedas :—“ If there be an omniscient and
merciful God, who never speaks in vain, why does
he not, by the mere expenditure of a word, satisfy
the desires of us his suppliants ? By causing living
creatures to suffer pain, though it be the result of
their own works, God would be our causeless enemy,
whilst all our other enemies have some reason or
other for their enmity. ”f
Sophocles has lines to the same effect:—“ It is
strange that those who are impious and descendants
of wicked men should fare prosperously, while those
who are good and sprung from noble men should be'
unfortunate. It was not meet that the gods should
thus deal with mortals. Pious men ought to have
obtained from the gods some manifest advantage,
while the unjust should, on the contrary, have paid
some evident penalty for their evil deeds, and thus
no one who was wicked would have been pros
perous.” J
It may be convenient at this point to glance at
some of the methods that have been employed to
ease or remove the contradiction between the painful
phenomena of life and the credited rule of an allmighty, all-wise, and all-good Father. We shall
* ‘Aurora Leigh.’
t ‘ Additional Moral and Religious Passages, Metrically rendered
from the Sanskrit, with exact Prose Translations ”—Scott's Series.
t Quoted by Dr. Muir in the ‘Additional Moral and Religious
Passages.’
�The Mystery j)f Tvil.
ri
thus have an opportunity of detecting the fallacies
which lurk under all such methods of harmonising,
and which render them nugatory.
Epicurus, from a Theistic point of view, stated the
case very comprehensively when, in syllogistic form,
he said :—“ Why is evil in the world ? It is either
because God is unable or unwilling to remove it. If
he be unable he is not omnipotent. If he be
unwilling, he is not all-good. If he be neither able
nor willing, he is neither all-powerful nor all-good; ”*
and it is difficult to see how escape is possible from
between the horns of this dilemma on the supposition
that an infinite God exists.
The Manichseans believed good and evil or pleasure
and pain to be rival powers in the universe. This
was also virtually the Persian theory on the subject,
only the latter was clothed in oriental dress.f Bolingbroke and the sceptics of his day, accounted for the
phenomena referred to on an aesthetic principle—the
proportion of parts in the scale of sentient being.
Every animal has bodily members of varied grades
of honour and importance, and all in harmonious
subserviency to the general convenience of their
possessor. Every picture has an arrangement of
colour producing light and shade. All harmony
must consist of voices attuned from alto to bass.
Every considerable dwelling must have apartments
in the attic as well as on the ground floor, and of
greater or less capacity. So the world is formed
on a gradational plan from high intelligence, by
imperceptible degrees down to life of so doubtful a
* The great Lord Shaftesbury, in his “ Inquiry concerning Virtue,”
‘Characteristics,’Vol. II.,page 10,puts the case thus:—“If there be
supposed a designing principle, who is the cause only of good, but
cannot prevent ill which happens . . . then there can be supposed, in
reality, no such thing as a superior good design or mind, other than
what is impotent and defective; for not to correct or totally exclude
that ill . . . must proceed either from impotency or ill-will."
t Ormuzd and Ahriman. This is also the germ of the Christian
dogma of God whois “ Light,” and the Devil “ The Prince of Darkness.”
�12
The Mystery of Evil.
character that it is impossible to determine whether
it be vegetable or animal. In the moral sphere,
too, there is a ladder whose top reaches the loftiest
unselfishness, and whose rounds gradually descend
to the grossest forms of moral life. It is argued
that the world would be tame and monotonous
without these inequalities in the structure of
universal life, and that it is the constant fric
tion between beings of high and low degree which
helps to give that healthful impulse to human activity
that keeps the universe from stagnating; and
unavoidable accidents but quicken the forethought
and contrivance of men to provide against such
occurrences. It will be felt, however, by the most
ordinary thinker, that such a theory utterly fails to
cover all the facts, and fails especially to account for
the more formidable sufferings of humanity. It is
but the view of an artist who lives in a one-sided and
unreal region, surrounded by plenty, who simply
looks out upon the world through a colewr de rose
medium, and projects the image of his own luxurious
home upon the landscape outside.
There is another theory popular with a large class
of airy minds, which regards evil as a modification
of good. Right and wrong, truth and falsehood pro
ceed from the same source, and are degrees of the
same thing. Lust is only a lower form of love, and
what would be described as cruelty inflicted upon
others is not intended to cause suffering as cm end,
but only occurs in some rather abrupt and uncere
monious attempt being made by a person to reach
some object much wished for. But the one who
suffers happens to be, unconsciously perhaps, an
obstacle in the way of that object being attained;
and the suffering is occasioned simply by accident,
just as we stumble against a neighbour who has
the misfortune to cross our path at the moment
when our attention is fixed on something we
�The Mystery of Evil.
13
eagerly want to get at on the opposite side of
the street. So much the worse for the neighbour if
he sustain injury by the impact, but it is no fault
of ours !•
AVhat goes by the name of meanness, according to
the same theory, springs as truly from a wish to be
happy in the mean nature as nobility does when
manifested by a noble nature. As little harm is
intended by the one nature as by the other. But it
seems only necessary to state this method of meeting
the difficulty in order to see its inadequacy. Even
granting that the misery occasioned by men to each
other were reconciled by this mode of reasoning,
there is a class of troubles which are wholly beyond
human agency and control that remains utterly
unaccounted for ; and respecting the evils which the
theory professes to explain away, the question crops
up afresh, why, if the government of the world be
conducted by a Being of infinite power, wisdom and
love, is so much distress permitted to be caused,
howeu&r casually, by men to one another ?
Perhaps the most elaborate and closely-reasoned
attempt ever made to harmonise existing evil in the
world with perfect wisdom, power, and goodness, in
a Creator, was the celebrated “ Essay on the Origin
Qf Evil,” by Archbishop King. The writer postu
lates, as an axiom, that the universe is the work of a
God of infinite intelligence, power, and goodness ;
and he deals in precisely the same manner with the
alleged existence of freedom and responsibility in
human beings. The pith of the Archbishop’s explana
tion of moral evil is contained in the following
passage: “ The less dependent on external things,
the more self-sufficient any agent is, and the more it
has the principles of its actions within itself, it is so
much the more perfect; since, therefore, we may con
ceive two sorts of agents, one which does not act
unless impelled and determined by external circum
�1’4
The Mystery of Evil.
stances, such as vegetable bodies; the other, which
have the principle of their actions within themselves,
namely, free agents, and can determine themselves to
action by their own natural power, it is plain that the
latter are much more perfect than the former; nor
can it be denied that God may create an agent with
such power as this; which can exert itself into
action without either the concourse of God or the deter
mination of external causes, as long as God preserves
the existence, power, and faculties, of that agent;
that evil arises from the uniawful Use of man s faculties ;
that more good in general arises from the donation of
such a self-moving power, together with all those
foreseen abuses of it, than could possibly have been
produced without it.”
The gist of the Archbishop’s reasoning is in ’the
words : “ Evil arises from the unlawful use of men’s
faculties.” But this is a mere begging of the
question, and a shifting rather than a settlement of
the difficulty ; for even granting the assumption putforward, the inquiry naturally recurs: Why, in a
world created and sustained by such a perfect Being
as Theism recognises, was any arrangement tolerated
by which men should exercise their faculties unlaw
fully—especially as the results are so painfully dis
cordant with our notions of happiness ? It is assumed
by the Archbishop that man and not his maker is
responsible for the moral chaos that has always
characterised the condition of the race. But this is
only a repetition of the now exploded theologioal
fiction that man was created with his faculties and
circumstances equally and entirely favourable toobedience; and that his departure from law was his
own voluntary choice—a choice determined upon by
him with a full consciousness that he ought to have
acted differently, and that he was free to have done
so. By the voluntary depravation of his own mind
and by the force of his bad example he involved all
�Fvr.1
The Mystery of Evil.
i5
his descendants in the moral and physical conse
quences of his transgression. But with the undeni
able revelations of modern scientific and historical
research before us such a view is too absurd to need
refutation. In any case we are justified in holding
that on the hypothesis of a miracle-working God,
there is no tendency to disobedience, error, or vice,
in mankind that might not have been easily checked
in its first outbreak by an act of omnipotence. The
power that is asserted to have rained manna from the
skies, arrested the setting of the sun, changed water
into wine, and raised the dead, might surely have
been exerted in a way more worthy the dignity and
goodness of an infinite God, in stopping the first
outburst of moral disorder that has filled the world
until now with cruel and deadly passions and over
whelmed millions of sensitive spirits in intense
anguish.
By the same superficial and evasive reasoning, has
this writer disposed of those calamities which cannot
owe their origin, anyhow, to the will of man. He
coolly tells us that “ it is no objection to God’s good
ness or his wisdom to create such things as are
necessarily attended with these evils . . . and that
disagreeable sensations must be reckoned among
natural evils as inevitably associated with sentient
existences, which yet cannot be avoided. If anyone
ask why such a law of union was established, namely,
the disagreeable sensations which sentient creatures
experience, let this be the answer, because there could
be no better ; for such a necessity as this follows ; and
considering the circumstances and conditions under
which, and under which only, they could have exist
ence, they could neither be placed in a better state,
nor governed by more commodious laws.” That is
to say, God in his wisdom and goodness did his best
to secure the general well-being of the universe and
signally failed, as the physical accidents and agonies
�i6
The Mystery of Evil.
endured by innocent multitudes, prove! Yet this is
a book of which a distinguished Theistic philosopher
said: “ If Archbishop King, in this performance,
has not reconciled the inconsistencies, none else need
apply themselves to the task.” If the data of Arch
bishop King as regards the existence of a personal
Deity, clothed with infinitely perfect physical and
moral attributes, and as regards the free agency of man,
had been correct, the most logical course for him
would have been to have simply admitted the hopeless
irreconcilableness of these data with the state of the
world as we find it, and to have betaken himself to
the favourite retreat of orthodoxy,—mystery,—and
spared himself the pains of elaborating a tissue of
metaphysical fallacies which only make the confusion
to be worse confounded. But I reserve his data for
fuller examination afterwards.
The only other theory, which I shall notice, as
differing from the one to be subsequently proposed,
is that of fatalistic Deism, which was held in the last
century by a large class of European philosophers,
and sought to be refuted by Butler. The following
is an epitome of the argument of this school:—The
existence of Deity, as infinite and uncreated, is a
necessary fact, intuitively perceived. If God’s exist
ence be necessary, the conditions of his existence—
physical, mental, and moral,—and the modes of its
action and development, must be alike necessary. As
the visible universe is the outcome of this necessary
existence, all the forms of being contained in the
universe must also be necessary, by which we are to
understand that we cannot conceive the possibility of
their being otherwise than they are. If so, then all
the orders of existence in the universe, proceeding
from the depths of his infinite nature and constantly
dependent upon his support, are fated to form links
in one chain of eternal and unalterable necessity, and
to be precisely as they are. Therefore the develop-
�The Mystery of Evil.
17
ment of human beings, and of every other variety of
life, is destined to assume the particular form under
which they are found to exist at any given stage of
the evolution of the universe. Consequently, what,
in the vocabulary of mortals, is called freedom, is but
an illusion,—the actions and characters of rational
beings of all degrees of intelligence and moral
culture being included in that ceaseless development
which is controlled by the same central and allembracing principle of unexplainable necessity.
*
It is further maintained by the same class of
Deists that amidst all the apparent confusion that
prevails, indications of a process of orderly develop
ments are discernible, whether we trace the con
solidation of the earth’s crust, or the progressive
advance of vegetable and animal forms upon it,
or the gradual uplifting of the human species.
This evolution, it is asserted, is either caused
and directed by some controlling Intelligence,
or is the result of chance, or arises from some
inherent spontaneous power in the universe itself.
But our conception of chance excludes it from the
rank of a causal and regulating force, for we only
understand by the term what is fortuitous, blind,
undesigning, and impotent. Again, to suppose that
some inherent spontaneous power in nature itself is
shaping and directing universal progress would be to
endow the universe with physical, rational, and moral
power; in other words, to identify it with God, or to
view it as God. Therefore, it is concluded,—these
alternatives failing to satisfy the demands of logical
consistency,—the only tenable view left is that the
framework and development of the universe, is the
work of a Deity answering to the 0eos of Homer,
who represents the God of his conception, as being
* The reader will be reminded of a remarkable passage in the
‘Prometheus Vinctus ’ of uEschylus: “Even Jove is not superior to
the Fates.”
�The Mystery of Evil.
the source of all the good and evil of life. I confess
that for a time, while my own mind was passing from
supernaturalism to naturalism, and while I believed
that my choice in dealing with “ the mystery of evil ”
lay alone between rival forms of Theism, this notion
of God as the primal cause alike of happiness and
misery was the only one which seemed co-ordinate
with all the facts, and effectually to solve the mystery.
But, as will appear later in this paper, two objec
tions ultimately arose in my mind which shook my
fatalistic Deism to its foundation. The first of these
was, that the God I thought myself bound to believe
in fell far short of the ideal of virtue and goodness
at which an average high-minded man felt himself
obliged to aim, and thus I was conscious of doing
violence to my better nature in holding to such a
faith. The second objection was that the intuitive
idea of Deity was found by me to be a gratuitous
assumption which, with other beliefs of this descrip
tion, collapsed under the unsparing analysis to which
the intuitive philosophy has been subjected by the
inductive philosophy—the latter being the only one
which seems to me to accord with the universal
principles of truth.
After the preceding statement of attempted solu
tions of this alleged mystery by Theistic and Deistic
theories, it will probably be admitted that any method
of accounting for the existence of evil based on the
twofold hypothesis of an Almighty God of omniscience,
wisdom, and goodness, and the doctrine of the free,
self-determining action of the human will, cannot
escape from the charge of mystery—or, more properly,
of palpable logical contradiction. In presence of
these two conceptions, evil must inevitably remain a '
mystery. Let them be surrendered, however, and the
mystery instantly vanishes.
When a scientific analyst discovers that a hypo
thesis fails to cover and explain all the phenomena,
�The Mystery of Evil.
he unhesitatingly abandons it, and there is no other
alternative left to an inductive theologian—if there
be such a person—when he is placed in a similar
position. The facts in the present instance are
agreed upon by all. There is a large proportion,
if not preponderance, of what is known as JBvil
in the world; and if the idea of an infinitely
wise and good personal Deity tend to embarrass
instead of allaying the difficulties we have been
examining, clearly the idea of an universal ruler
ought, in loyalty to truth, to be removed from the
category of our beliefs, let the sentimental associa
tions be ever so hallowed and strong that have
gathered round it, and the same remark applies to
the allied dogma of free will in man.
As regards the first of these points, the justice of
the course recommended is strengthened when we
consider that the existence of such an almighty
person is incapable of scientific or any other kind of
proof worthy consideration. At the same time, in
venturing this remark, I wish emphatically to dis
claim all sympathy with positive Atheism; for a
dogmatic negation of any vitalizing and controlling
force in the universe, not being itself the universe, is
almost as objectionable as the most dogmatic form of
Theism. All I contend for is, that there is no ground
for believing in what theologians call a personal God,
in other words, “ a magnified man ” invested with
certain characteristics of humanity attributed to him,
these attributes being only infinitely extended.
Doubtless Theists, and particularly Christian Theists,
will be ready to adduce in reply their usual argu
ment for the existence of a personal Deity derived
from their intuitions. This, consistently enough, is
also the stronghold of Christian faith in the doctrine
of “ a supernatural gospel,” namely, “ its felt adapta
tion to the spiritual wants of Christian believers.”
And the more rapidly and convincingly the evidences
�20
The Mystery of Evil.
of science and historical criticism accumulate on the
non-supernatural and non-Theistic side, they shut
their eyes the closer, scream the louder against “ the
wickedness of Atheistic materialism,” and plunge
deeper into the sentimental abyss of their “ intuitions.”
Here is a passage a propos, written by one of the
ablest and best read leaders of the reactionary, semi
mystic, evangelical school which owes its origin (as
opposed) to the “ fierce light ” of modern thought,
against which the writer lifts a warning voice.
“ But whether we represent a ‘ new school ’ or a
theological ‘ reaction ’ we say frankly that, in our
judgment, the exigencies of the times require that
Christian Churches, and especially Christian ministers,
should meet the dogmas of materialism and anti-super
naturalism with the most direct and uncompromising
hostility. It is not for us to permit men to suppose that we
regard the existence of the living God as an open ques
tion. Nor shall we make any deep impression on the
minds of men if our faith in Jesus Glvrist rests on
grounds that are accessible to historical, scientific, or
philosophical criticism. If we are to meet modern
unbelief successfully we must receive that direct
revelation of Christ which will enable us to say ‘ we
have heard him, we have seen him ourselves and
know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour
of the world! ’ ” The great object of this school
seems to be to make a religious “impression ” in
Evangelical fashion, and stamp out all that frustrates
their doing so, proceeding from the sceptical camp.
The historical truth or error of the thing taught
seems to be of secondary consideration provided it
can be made to dovetail with Evangelical intuitions.
These intense believers deliberately tell us that it is
of no use our calling their attention to discrepancies
in the Gospel narratives by which these sources of
Christian facts are rendered historically untrust
worthy. They assure us that such criticism is idle
�The Mystery of Evil.
21
and beside the mark, and they console themselves
with the belief that these discrepancies are only
apparent, and that if we could but compare the
original documents (which, by the way, nobody has
ever seen or can find the least trace of) instead of
the mere copies of them (these pretended copies
being all we possess), we should be immediately
convinced !
*
So in regard to the existence of a personal Deity,
instead of looking at the facts as they are, they
assure us that, if we could only know all the compli
cations of the divine government, our difficulty in
believing in their Deity would disappear. But those
who fall back on the fitness of their conception of
Deity to their intuitions as a proof of his existence,
while perhaps feeling that this argument affords
perfect satisfaction to themselves, place an insuper
able barrier against all interchange of reasoning
between themselves and those who hold opposite
convictions. Any one who hides in the recesses
of his intuitions, has sunk into a state of intel
lectual somnolency from which no argument can
wake him.
’
There are some Theistic apologists, however, who
still have unshaken faith in the argument from design,
as establishing the existence of a beneficent designer.
But the fallacy of this argument is obvious. The
premises and conclusion stand thus :—“Every object
which bears marks of design necessarily points to
the existence of an intelligent designer. The universe
is such an object, therefore it had an intelligent
designer.” But it is usually forgotten that this con
clusion is arrived at by comparing the universe with
an object—a watch for example, that can bear no
* The weak point in this intuitional argument is that it proves too
much. It is the favourite proof with large sections of the adherents
of Buddhism, Brahminism, Fire-worship, and Mahometanism respec
tively, by which these systems are all Jett to be supernatural revela
tions. Therefore by proving too much it proves nothing.
�22
The Mystery of Evil.
analogy to it. It is taken for granted that the uni
verse sustains the same relation to a personal Creator
which a piece of mechanism does to a mortal con
triver.
Now, it might be perfectly fair to compare one piece
of human handiwork with another, and infer that
both suggested the application of power and intelli
gence equal to their construction. But in comparing
the universe—there being only one, and that one
infinite, with articles of man’s invention, which are
many and finite—are we not comparing the known
with the unknown, and carrying the principle of
analogy into a region where it can have no place ?
It may be just to infer that as one work of human
arrangement naturally implies skill in the maker, so
another work bearing marks of human contrivance,
should, in like manner, suggest to us the action of a
thinking mind. But science is so far in the dark as
to the mainspring of life, motion and development in
the one universe that we should be totally unwarranted
by the laws of thought in arguing from the origin of
what is discoverable to the orgin of what is undiscover*
able
To reason, therefore, from design in the
operations of man to design in the operations of
nature is illogical and impossible.
One of the most remarkable signs of change, of
late, in the conception of Deity, among progressive
thinkers, who still cling to the skirts of recognised reli
gious institutions, is the effort that has been made to
reconcile an impersonal Power influencing and shaping
the evolution of the universe with the teachings of
the Bible. The line of thought in Mr. Matthew
Arnold’s ‘ Literature and Dogma ’ has very decidedly
this leaning. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say
* Axiom V., in the Tractates Theologico-Politicus of Spinoza is
decisive on this point. “ Things that have nothing in common with
each other cannot be understood by means of each others i.e., the.concep
tion <f the one does not involve the conception of the other."
�The Mystery of Trail.
23
that this writer labours to turn the current notion of
a personal God into ridicule, and even seeks to prove
that, at least, the ancient Hebrews were not in sym
pathy with such a notion. Some will take leave to
doubt whether Mr. Arnold’s views of the Hebrew
conception of God be not more ingenious than accu
rate, and whether he may not have foisted far-fetched
theories of his own upon the text of the Bible in his
zeal to make out his case. But, at any rate, we have
the phenomenon of a writer cherishing devotion to
the teaching of Scripture and concern for the main
tenance of the national Church, and yet sapping the
foundations of orthodoxy, and actually sneering at
the idea of faith in a personal Deity, though pro
fessed gravely by eminent bishops—the two whose
names he repeats ad nauseam throughout the essay.
Another recent book of essays, written with a
similar purpose, but in a more reverent and philo
sophic spirit, is not unworthy of notice. The author
*
is a Nonconformist minister, and a member of the
London School Board—a gentleman of marked ability
and wide culture. The peculiarity of his position is
that while, like the Broad Church clergy, conducting
his service with a liturgy and a hymn-book, fashioned
after orthodox models, he has openly renounced the
dogma of the Supernatural in his pulpit teaching, and
rejected the notion of a personal God. He has chosen
to represent himself as a “ Christian Pantheist,”—a
term which we may be excused for deeming para
doxical—and strives throughout the volume to bring
his statements into accord with certain passages in
the New Testament. The essays reveal more than an
average (as well as a discriminating) acquaintance
with ancient and modern philosophy and theology,
and with the results of modern science in relation to
* 1 The Mystery of Matter, and other Essays.’ By J. Allanson Picton,
M.A. Macmillan. 1873.
�24
The Mystery of Evil.
the nature of the Universe. His thoughts are, now
and then, diffuse, but they are always expressed with
a wealth of language and sometimes with an eloquence
•not ordinarily met with in theological disquisitions.
There are, however, as it seems to me, weak points,
I had almost said occasional contradictions, in his
reasoning, into which he may have been unconsciously
led by his unique ecclesiastical relations, but which it
is beyond the scope of the present paper to criticise
at length. Nevertheless, he forcibly opposes the old
error which made a distinction between matter and
spirit, and he reduces the Universe, with Professor
Huxley, to a unity, namely, substance, of which what
have been vulgarly described as matter and spirit are
simply the phenomena. He further boldly rejects all
theories which regard Deity as one amidst a host of
other beings, and while, with religious fervour, recog
nising the presence of an efficient though unnameable
energy as vitalising and controlling all molecular
forces, he seems, at the same time, to identify that
unkown efficient energy with universal substance,
and accords to it the right and title to be formally
worshipped. I respectfully think he is not always
clear and consistent in this part of his theme. Some
times he refers—as Spinoza himself does—to this
vitalising and all-comprehending essence as if it were
invested with attributes of intelligence, wisdom, and
goodness, without which attributes the writer’s insistance upon the worship of universal substance as deity
would be a misnomer. And yet, difficult though it be
to discover homogeneity between certain parts of
these essays, in one respect the author’s aim through
out is unmistakeable. He emphatically pronounces
against the existence of a personal Deity. Some of his
remarks in opposition to the design argument are
especially worth quoting :—
“ It is demonstrable that there must be some fallacy
in such an argument as that of Paley. For if it be
�The Mystery of Evil.
25
rigorously applied, it cannot prove what Paley cer
tainly wished to establish—the existence of an omni
potent and omniscient worker. . . . If we are to
see design only when we can compliment nature on
an apparent resemblance to operations of human skill;
and if, the moment that resemblance ceases, we are
to confess our ignorance and to refrain from carrying
the analogy further, would it not be better, seeing
’how infinitely larger is our ignorance than our know
ledge, to recognise in both bearings of the analogy
an appearance only which, though for some purposes
practically useful, is infinitely below the divine reality.
. . . Of whatever value the analogy of human
design may be, no one would think of insisting upon
its admitted imperfections as a part of the argument;
and yet, without pressing those imperfections, it is
impossible to make the argument consistent. But if
it be fairly carried out, what it proves is this, that an
omnipotent designer, intending to produce a beautiful
and perfect work, went through millions of opera
tions, when a single fiat would have sufficed; that
these operations consisted not in clearly-aimed and
economical modifications of material, but in the evolu
tion of a thousand imperfect products, amongst which
some single one might form a step to the next stage,
while all the rest were destroyed; and thus the living
material wasted was immensely greater than that
which was used; that myriads of weaklings, were
suffered to struggle together, as though omniscience
could not decide, without experiment, which were
the better worth preserving; that in each successive
modification the worker preserved, as far as was pos
sible, the form of the previous stage, until it was found
to be inconsistent with life; nay, that he carefully
introduced into each successive product parts which
had become obsolete, useless, and even dangerous—
and all not through any inevitable conditions—for
omnipotence excludes them, but in pursuit of a
�26
The Mystery of Evil.
mysterious plan, the reasons for which, as well as its
nature, are acknowledged to be utterly inscrutable.
Analogies which lead to such issues surely cannot be
of much value for the nobler aims of religion.” *
The other cause of the difficulty encountered in
probing “ the Mystery of Evil ” is the traditional
notions entertained by many, of the action of the
human will. Man is represented by the orthodox as
a “free agent ” (I except, of course, hyper-Calvinists
who now form a very small minority among Chris
tians), and the doctrine of volitional liberty has
acquired prominence in theological and philosophical
discussions; not from any practical influence the doc
trine can exert, one way or another, on the actual
conduct of life, but simply from the accident that the
question whether the will was absolutely free or deter
mined by necessity happened to be thrown to the
surface, in the fifth century, in the theological battle
between the Augustinians and the Pelagians. The
inquiry is itself interesting and important, but many
mental philosophers from that period until recently,
having a dread of the odium theologicum, have been
desirous it should be known that they were “ sound ”
on the subject, and have been particular in declaring
themselves on the orthodox side. The strong enun
ciation of one view has called forth an equally vigor
ous statement of the opposite theory, and hence
philosophers have filed off into two sharply defined
parties—libertarians and necessitarians—so that the
importance that has come to be attached to the
free-will controversy is, in a great measure, adven
titious.
The introduction of moral evil into the world, as
before stated, has been ascribed by the greater number
of Christians to the voluntary disobedience of the pro
genitor of the race. Tradition has handed down the un
scientific and unhistoric story of an original man who,
♦ ‘ Mystery of Matter,’ pp. 330, 340,345.
�The Mystery of Evil.
i7
having been severely plied with temptation in order
to test bis virtue, voluntarily broke a certain arbitrary
and positive command of his maker, and involved him
self and his posterity in tendencies to wrong-doing
which could only be corrected by supernatural means.
But, without debating the wide question of the origin
■of mankind, manifestly men are so constituted and
surrounded that limitations are placed as indubitably
upon their volitional faculty as upon their other men
tal powers. So that in no libertarian sense can we
be said to be free agents. The form a man’s charac
ter takes is necessarily dependent on his innate pre
dispositions and capacities—the form and size of
brain and cast of temperament which he derives from
his parents—and on the nature and extent of the in
fluences under which he is trained. Some natures
are constitutionally more attuned to intellectual and
moral harmony than others, and when impelled by
favourable influences from without, there is little
merit in their moving in the line of conformity to
truth and right. There are other natures that inherit
less fortunate tendencies, to whom virtue must always
be the result of conscious effort, and especially if
they be encircled with influences unfriendly to the
culture of a high and noble life. It is certain that if
such persons attain any considerable degree of good
ness, the end will be reached through the experience
.of error and folly and of the natural penalties attach
ing to both. As far as I can understand, the chief
ground of the alarm affected by a certain class of phi
losophers and theologians at the idea of human actions
being determined by necessity is the morbid and ficti
tious weight they have given to the doctrine of indi
vidual responsibility; I say morbid and fictitious, be
cause whether a man violates the laws of nature or of
society he is sooner or later made to bear more or
less of his share of responsibility in enduring the
natural punishment due to the offence. Had the
�28
The Mystery of Evil.
same amount of concern been felt by society about
their collective share of responsibility in reference to
the physical, intellectual, and moral well-being of
individuals as is felt about the influence of necessi
tarianism upon “ men’s felt sense of individual respon
sibility ” the results to the community and the race
■vyould have been much more rational and beneficial.
I am persuaded that the individual conduct of citizens
—be they good or bad—is not affected in the slightest
degree, for better or for worse, by the views they
may entertain of the philosophy of the human will.
This might be proved demonstratively did space
permit.
The kernel of this controversy, then, lies in the
inquiry, Whether the will is absolutely self-determina
tive, and capable of arbitrarily kicking the beam,
when motives present to the mind, and tending in
opposite directions, seem to be evenly balanced; or
whether, in every instance, the motive, embracing a
great variety of considerations in the mind itself as
well as in the circumstances around it, do not infal
libly determine the character of the choice that is
made. If the libertarian view be the right one, no
certainty can be ever predicated as to the effect upon
the conduct of uniformly good or bad motives, and,
consequently, the most earnest and philanthropic ex
ertions to improve the world are, at best, dishearten
ing. But since it can be demonstrated that the for
mation of human habits is governed by necessary
laws, and that these laws can be ascertained and acted
upon with the undoubted assurance that correspond
ing results may be anticipated, the labours of science
and philanthropy are animated by a well-founded
hope that they need not be expended in vain. What,
then, is “ will ” but simply that faculty or power of
the mind by which we are capable of choosing ? And
an act of will is the same as an act of choice. That
which uniformly determines the will is the motive which,
�The Mystery of Evil.
29
as it stands in the view of the mind, is the strongest.
The motive is that which excites or invites the mind
to volition, whether that be one thing singly or many
things conjointly. By necessity, in this connection, is
meant nothing more than the philosophical certainty
of the relation between given antecedents and conse
quents in the production of actions. Man, like every
other sentient being, is necessarily actuated by a
desire for happiness, according to his particular esti
mate of it. It would be a contradiction to suppose
that he could hate happiness, or that he could desire
misery for its own sake, or with a perception that it
was such. He is placed in circumstances in which a
vast variety of objects address themselves to this
predominating desire, some promising to gratify it in
a higher degree, some in a lower, some appealing to
one part of his nature and some to another. He
cannot but be attracted to those objects and those
courses of conduct which his reason or his appetites,
or both combined, assure him are likely to gratify
his desire of happiness. The various degrees or kinds
of real and apparent good, promised by different ob
jects or courses of conduct, constitute the motives
which incline him to act in pursuance of the general
desire of happiness which is the grand impulse of
his nature. Sometimes he really sees and sometimes
he imagines he sees (and as regards their influence
on the will they come to the same thing) greater
degrees of good in some objects or proposed courses
of conduct than in others; and this constitutes pre
ponderance of motive, that is, a greater measure of
real or apparent good at the time of any particular
volition. This preponderance of motive will be as is
the character of the moral agent and the circum
stances of the objects, taken conjointly. This pre
ponderance of motive will be, therefore, not only
different in different individuals, but different in
different individuals at different times. That which
�30
The Mystery of Evil.
at any particular time is or appears to promise the
greatest good, will uniformly decide the Will. This
*
necessarily flows from the tendency of a sentient
nature to seek happiness at all, and is, indeed, only a
particular application of the same general principle;
inasmuch as it would imply as great a contradiction
that a being capable of happiness should not take
that which it deems will confer, all things considered,
a greater degree of happiness rather than that which
will confer a less, as it would be to imagine it not
seeking happiness rather than the contrary, or some
happiness rather than none. This certainty of con
nection between the preponderance of motive and
the decisions of the will is what is meant by necessity,
as simply implying that the cause will as certainly
be followed by the appropriate effect in this instance
as in any instance of the mutual connection of cause
and effect whatever,f
Motive sustains a dynamical relation to will, as a
cause does to an effect in physics. Therefore the only
liberty which man possesses or can possess, is not the
liberty of willing as he will—which is an idea philo
sophically absurd—but of acting as he wills, accord
ing to the laws of necessity. Otherwise he would
be independent of cause; and, indeed, libertarians
actually assert that a motive is not the cause, but
only the occasion of choice.^ Either human volitions
are effects or they are not. If they are effects, they
are consequents indissolubly associated with the an
tecedent causes or motives which precede them;
• “ The greatest of two pleasures or what appears such, sways the
resulting action, for it is this resulting action that alone determines
which is the greatest.”—Bain on the ‘ Emotions and the Will,’ p. 447.
t This is the course of argument adopted by Edwards in his re
markable book on the Will, and it is admirably summarised by Henry
Rogers in his ‘Essay on the Genius and Writings of Edwards,’pre
fixed to the Complete Edition of his Works, pp. xx to xxiv.
I For this distinction, enforced by Drs. Clarke and Price, see remarks
in Bain’s ‘ Mind and Body,’ p. 76; also in ‘ The Refutation of Edwards,’
by Tappan.
�The Mystery of Evil.
31
and therefore “ the liberty of indifference ” is im
*
possible.
If human volitions be not effects, the
actions of men are independent of condition or rela
tion, undetermined by motives or antecedents, and
for that reason removed beyond the domain of that
principle of necessary law which is the sole guarantee
for the order’and progress of the Uni verse, f
The elimination from this problem, therefore, of
the conception of a Deity clothed with personal and
moral attributes and of the notion of a self-deter
mining will in man, liberates it from all mystery and
difficulty whatsoever; for if there be no personal
God the existence of physical evil casts no imputa
tion upon the infinite character attributed to him.
And if there be no “ liberty of indifference ” in man,
he is exempt from the charge of being, in any sense,
the originator of moral evil, as the circumstances
that constitute his motives are made for him and not
by him; and therefore the praise of virtue and the
blame of vice and, in fact, the whole theory of con
science as held by the vulgar, are annulled.
What is the distinct reality left to us, then, after
we have parted with these two inventions of fancy ?
The pith of the matter may be conveniently summed
up in a few simple propositions :—
* Definition VII. In the ‘Tractatus’ of Spinoza runs thus:—“That
thing' is said to be free which exists by the sole necessity of its own nature,
and by itself alone is determined to action. But that is necessary or
rather constrained which owes its existence to another and acts according
to certain and determinate causes.”
+ The controversy on Free Will and Necessity has, within the last
quarter of a century, passed from the region of mere theological wrang
ling into the circle of scientific studies, and has assumed to the social
and moral Reformer practical importance. The subject now claims the
attention of all who would have intelligent views of the moral condi
tion and prospects of Humanity and who seek to work hopefully for
its regeneration. It is not within the province of this Essay to par
ticularise the various recent phases of the controversy, but those who
are alive to the importance of the subject cannot fail to find intensely
interesting those chapters bearing upon it in sucii works as Mill’s
• Lximination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy,’ Bain’s ‘Com
pendium or Mental ana McrcL Science,’ and Herbert Spencer’s ‘ Study
■of Sociology.’
�32
The Mystery of Evil,
1. All we can know of the Universe is phenomena,
—(including the molecular force-centres into which
existing organisms are resolvable by scientific analysis)
—and the fixed uniformity of the laws that regulate
and control the physical and moral evolutions and
developments of universal substance; but of noumena
we can know nothing, and consequently any dogmatic
definition—positive or negative, of a primal cause, in
or beyond substance, or not in or beyond substance
—is totally unsustained by facts. Therefore the sys
tems of Theism, Deism, Pantheism, and Atheism
are mere hypotheses, which all involve unproved
assumptions. As regards the existence of any over
ruling power, we are in a state of nescience. As
regards motives and actions, all we know is the uni
form and necessary relation of sequence that exists
between them—nothing more.
2. The universe, or, at least, the portion of it with
which we have immediate acquaintance, is being
slowly and gradually developed from rudimental
elements, from confusion and discord to order and
harmony ; and this remark applies, throughout, to
physical, intellectual, and moral life. Thus it follows
that the generations of mankind, up to the present,
having been brought upon the planet before it has
reached the state of complete development and per
fect equipoise of forces, are fated to suffer those
physical trials which arise from storms, floods, earth
quakes, droughts, blights, and other casualties, which,
when the material agencies around us have attained
more perfect equilibrium, may be expected to dis
appear. There are many more physical inconveniences
experienced by the race by reason of their still
necessarily limited knowledge of the operations of
nature, of the laws of being, and of their true
relations to the world and humanity, and by reason
of the yet very imperfect stage of human culture.
It is inevitable, therefore, that numerous diseases and
�The Mystery of Evil.
33
sufferings should be encountered, which a broader
intelligence and a clearer forethought will, in the
distant future, be able to anticipate and prevent.
3. “ Evil ” is a word which originated with theolo
gians, and which, from its vagueness and ambiguity,
has introduced much of the mystification and error
that have beclouded past investigations of the subject.
In its primitive signification and as applied in theo
logy, evil had a penal character assigned to it, and it
derived that character from the childish tradition long
believed by adherents of churches, that physical dis
asters, including disease and death, were the result of
a trivial transgression committed by “ Adam.” The
same cause has been adduced to account for all the
moral obliquities which have brought pain and misery
upon the descendants of the first man. “ Sin,” which
denotes the moral side of evil, in the language of
theology, is represented as being at once an effect
and a cause of the first transgression. But with the
rejection of the idea of a personal Ruler of the world,
“ evil ” and “ sin ” in the sense in which they are
usually understood by the orthodox, are rendered
meaningless. Both these terms point back to a period
in the intellectual and moral childhood of mankind,
before the universal and uniform action of Law was
dreamt of, and when human duty was held to consist
only of a series of positive commands, formally pro
claimed by an infinite personal governor, and con
stituting his “ revealed will,” for the direction of his
creatures. And for the perpetuation of this anti
quated belief down to the present we are indebted to
stereotyped creeds, which clergymen and ministers of
religious bodies still solemnly pledge themselves to
maintain. But the light of science presents the
source of duty and the nature and standard of
morals, in our time, in an altered aspect. In this
amended view there is nothing corresponding to the
theological ideas of evil and sin in the world, at all.
�34
The Mystery of Evil.
What is caZZed evil is simply a synonym for imper
fection in the material or moral circumstances of
humanity, or in both. The earth has not yet attained
its ultimate and perfect form, and the mind
of man has not yet acquired a full and prac
tical knowledge of the working of law so as to
guard successfully against collisions with the more
violent and dangerous agencies of nature, and so as
to use nature as a minister of good. What is known
as sin or wrong-doing is nothing more than the
result of human ignorance, which is but another form,
again, of imperfection. Many acts, I am aware, are
called sinful by clerics and their votaries, but such
transgressions, though ranked by orthodox teachers as
equally obnoxious to divine displeasure with acknow
ledged natural immoralities, are found when looked
into to be only ecclesiastical sins—sins of priestly
manufacture which have no place in nature and no
recognition in the enlightened conscience. That this
is the only true account of the matter is evident
from the fact that, as men become familiar with the
uniform operations of nature in their bearing on
human welfare, the ills of life perceptibly diminish,
and the necessity of conforming, in every sphere of
existence, to natural law comes to have the force of
a safe and efficient guiding impulse. No sane being
ever did wilfully what he knew to militate against
individual or social happiness as an ulterior end, and
no one ever continued to practise habits having this
tendency a single moment after his mind became
really sensible, of the character and influence of his
doings. That acts mischievous and cruel are too
often committed there can be no doubt; but the
mischief or the cruelty is always and only accidental
to the design the malicious person has in view.
Many, it is true, persist in doing what they profess to
know is at variance with the principles of justice,
honour, and utility, and hence the apparent anomaly
�The Mystery of Evil.
35
of proper knowledge and improper conduct some
times being found united in the same person. But
the anomaly is only apparent; for the individual
professing to know what befits his relations to the
universe and to society, and yet doing what contra
dicts that knowledge, deceives himself that he
possesses suitable knowledge at all. Knoioledge, in
such a connection, is confounded with notions. A
man may have a notion or a dim idea of what he
ought to do or to be, in his imagination or his memory,
but in this instance the notion is held by the mind as
an impotent sentiment or a barren tradition, the mere
semblance of actual knowledge. The notion of a
thing is but a theoretic or hypothetical conception, and
does not penetrate the mind and touch the springs of
action. All knowledge, worthy to be so designated,
enters into us and becomes conviction, modifying
thought, feeling, and will. So that all the faults—
so-called—committed by individuals and communities
have proceeded from their not knowing better. Even
the crucifixion of the founder of Christianity is
ascribed, in the New Testament to this cause. “ I
wot,” says St. Peter, “ that ye did it ignorantly.”
This point receives irresistible confirmation on every
hand. The vast proportion of crimes of violence,
such as wife-beating, garotte-robbery, manslaughter,
and murder, are confined for the most part to one class
of society—those who live beyond the pale of education
and refinement, agencies by which feelings of decency
and humanity are fostered. And the only cause of
the difference between this social stratum and the one
above it is that the training of the better class of
people is favourable to the controlling of their
■passions, at least as regards the commission of
crimes of that hue. The sexual vices, again, are not
confined to any particular social grade. They are
probably indulged in as great a ratio by the well-to-do
as by the lower orders. But if we compare the victims
�3^
The Mystery of Evil.
of licentiousness, of whatever social grade, with the
philosophic and the devout who have been taught to
hold these vices in abhorrence, we here, again, find
the same rule hold good. The culture of the pureminded has been specially directed to the instructing
of the mind in the bad consequences of this sort of
vice, and to the habituating of the mind to the
moderation and government of animal appetencies.
In like manner the difference between the false ideas
and practices of many at one period of their lives,
and their improved ideas and practices at another,
lies alone in the fact that they have come to know
better.
The drift of this reasoning is plain. The ever
widening circle of knowledge, the knowledge of mani
fold truth in physics and morals, is the grand power by
which the upward march of Humanity is to be secured.
But, as has been already observed, knowledge, con
sidered as the great curative principle, is not. a mere
fortuitous concourse of facts, however good and useful
in themselves, thrown into the mind, any more than
food is muscular strength. Our diet must first become
assimilated with the tissues; and so knowledge, which
strengthens, renovates, and elevates, is the concen
trated essence of principles which the thoughtful
mind extracts from any given collection of facts.
This representation of the case is as consoling as
it is true; for it reveals a “silvery lining” in the
cloud of prevailing human suffering, which inspires
joy and hope as we contemplate the future of the
world. It is a law of nature that every common
bane should carry with it a common antidote, and
a careful inspection of history makes it clear that
it is the tendency of each separate species of error
and wrong-doing to wear itself out. The discovery of
imperfection, usually made through enduring the
painful results thereof, leads towards perfection in
every department of human interests. Every dis
�The Mystery of Evil.
37
comfort, physical and moral, that vexes the lot of
man, reaches a crisis; human effort is immediately
braced up to grapple with the crisis, and inventive
brains are excited to devise expedients for its removal.
Thus have all social and political improvements been
effected.
The method of viewing the problem of evil whicn
has been adopted in the preceding pages is the only
one compatible with an unruffled state of mind in
presence of the defects of our race that frequently
offer us such bitter provocation in daily life—bigotry,
cruelty, stupidity, selfishness, ingratitude, and pride.
A wise man once remarked ironically : “ There are
words in Scripture that afford me unspeakable conso
lation when I have to encounter a person who is
unreasonable and unjust. ‘ Every creature after its
kind.’ If such a man attempts to over-reach or insult
me; if he show treachery or unkindness; if he deceive
or malign me, I look at him with pity, and my sym
pathy for his misfortune in inheriting a defective
organisation, or in lacking efficient intellectual and
moral discipline, neutralises the anger I should other
wise feel towards him.” Thus the practical philosopher
remains undisturbed by the turbulent passions that
blind and warp the minds of the mass, who are
affected chiefly by superficial effects, the causes of
which they have not the patience or the capacity to
discriminate.
When the principles that have been enunciated
become intelligently and generally recognised, they
will not fail to produce a revolution in our whole
system of dealing with vice and legislating for crime.
The popular way of treating offences of all kinds at
present is as absurd as it would be, after the fashion
of our ancestors, to carry a bay-leaf as a preventive
of thunder, or to remove scrofula by hanging round
the neck a baked toad in a silk bag. Social irregu
larities of whatever kind, in a more rational age, will
D
�38
The Mystery of Evil.
no longer be visited with inflictions of corporeal pain,
whether deficient nourishment, the application of the
cat, confinement in a dismal cell, imposition of aimless
grinding labour or chains. Far less will the mur
derous propensity to kick or beat or stab or poison a •
fellow-creature, be punished by so preposterous an
instrument as the gallows or the guillotine. When
acts of violence against society come to be viewed as
the result of an imperfect nature or deficient know
ledge and culture, care will be taken by the State to
lay hold of the child through the influence of the
school, and insist by compulsion on every citizen from
tender years being taught the laws, social and legal,
under which he is expected to live. And when any
are found in riper years to give suspicion that the
lessons of their youth are overborne by innate bad
tendencies, public opinion, then enlightened as it
will be by science, will, in a spirit of philosophic
sympathy for the misfortune of the wrong-doer,
demand his prompt separation for a time, at least,
from his more fortunate neighbours, and his subjection
before any extreme manifestation of his propensity
accrues, to a beneficent regime, partly educational and
partly medical, to enable him, as far as possible, to
obtain the mastery over his besetting morbid tenden
cies, and merit a place once more, if possible, among
well-conducted members of the community. The
attempt, as now, to set the world right by teaching
theological dogmas and by the agitations of revivalistic
or ritualistic fanaticisms, or by the existing lex talionis
of our criminal law, is mere ridiculous and wasteful
tinkering. To permit a system of commerce which
offers the worst temptations for the commission of
fraud and fosters a heartless competition, that often
*
drives the honest and the weak to the wall, and then
* The noble-souled Robert Owen used to denounce it as “that
monster, competition; ” and by the way.it is worthy of remark, that
the evident tendency of social reform now is in the very wake of the
�The Mystery of Evil.
39
to treat as outcasts the victims of intemperance and
poverty which this unnatural system contributes to
produce, and punish them with the degradation of
the jail or the workhouse, is as senseless and cruel as
to sanction gins and snares in the highway and then
whip men for falling into them. These social absur
dities, arising from crass ignorance of the constitution
of man, and of physical and moral law, cannot last
for ever. They may be hallowed by prestige, pom
pous judicial ceremony, and Parliamentary prece
dent, but they belong to a transitional stage of social
life which is doomed before the triumphs of science
and philosophy. The old shallow and mischievous
scheme of reformation which exhibits a jealous Deity
consigning wrong-doers to eternal death and the ma
gistrate as “a terror to evildoers,” will be superseded
by a method of government in which the revolting
penal code now practised by civilised nations will
have no place, and in which, without exception, the
reform of the offender will be the supreme considera
tion, while the peace and safety of society will be
found to be promoted thereby. And surely such
happy anticipations for the race are a satisfactory
compensation for the sacrifice truth compels us to
make in parting with the illusions of our intellectual
childhood,—the dogmas of a personal God and a self
determining will.
The world is, indeed, racked and torn by selfish
ness, cruelty, ignorance, and folly. Communities
and individuals have writhed under burdens of sorrow
from the beginning. But manifestly the natwral
tendency of physical and moral law is not to produce
system of Owen which the “ respectable classes ” used to smile at as
Utopian. Most intelligent men are either tacitly or openly coming
round to the persuasion that “ Man is the Creature of Circumstances.
Mr. Owen probably inadvertently left out certain factors, indispensable
to the success of his “New Moral World.” But he has pointed out
for us the only true path, and the failure of his scheme was a grand
success.
�40
The Mystery of Evil.
these effects, but quite the contrary; and the com
plete happiness of the race is to be attained through
the knowledge of law and yielding submission to it.
But this great consummation can only be accom
plished by slow degrees. A thousand years in this
business is “ as a watch in the night.” If it should
be asked, why should this training to perfect virtue
and happiness be sb slow and painful, and why
should such slow and painful discipline be the only
safe and solid basis on which the progress of
humanity can be established, there is no answer
except that in the nature of things it must be so.
Suppose that we were living on some fair and perfect
planet when the earth was in its once fluid state, and
that we saw the huge animals belonging to that
geological period wallowing in the mire and obscured
by the dense fogs which then enveloped the half
formed world. If that had been our first introduc
tion to the present abode of man we should probably
have concluded, had we no previous experience of
such a state of things elsewhere, that a world of sea
and mud, with volcanoes ever and anon spouting
forth their lava and steamy vapours shutting out
the light, could never become fitted for human
habitation. But this, nevertheless, was the elemental
chaos, out of which our globe was, in the course of
countless ages, evolved. So the present development
of the moral world bears some analogy to the physi
cal state of the earth in the primeval ages. It is
still very gradually emerging out of its original intel
lectual and moral formlessness, and is yet a long
way from the harmony and beauty with which
humanity will, in future ages, be crowned. For any
one, therefore, to judge of the tendency and goal of
the universe from the seething troubles and pangs
that harass the world’s life now in its slow transition
state, would be as rash as for the imagined spectator
of the chaotic earth before man came upon it to
�The Mystery of Evil.
41
suppose that it could never be built up into a
habitable world. The error consists in judging the
whole circle of material and moral development by
the very small segment of the circle which we have
an opportunity of seeing. But a retrospect of
human history justifies the assurance that in nature
there underlies all present contradictions and incom
patibilities, a moulding principle that will eventually
transmute all incongruities into palpable consistency.
The very tardiness, therefore, of the process by which
humanity is to attain its highest possible life may be
taken as a guarantee for the permanent advance of
that life when it is realised. It is not for us now
living, or for immediately succeeding generations to
participate in this Elysium of prophetic forecast, at
least in our present state of existence; but instead
of moping Over our inevitable fate, and groaning
over the woes of the world, it is more becoming w cul
tured manhood to bear that fate with philosophic
fortitude, make the best of it, and help our. fellow
mortals to do the same. The idea of “ the Colossal
Man,” first worked by a great German writer, and
repeated in the retracted essay of Dr. Temple, looks in
the direction to which these remarks point. Humanity
must be viewed as a whole. Particular nations may
decay, but man is destined to rise to a higher plane
of being. For an indefinitely long period he is kept
under the tutelage of grievous trials, which, in the
wonderful economy of nature, have the effect of
unfolding and invigorating his powers, that he may
rise to the highest possible knowledge, and use that
knowledge in correcting his faults, so that at length
he may be brought into perfect accord with his own
noblest moral ideal, and with the general progressive
movement of the universe. Even if, for scores of
thousands of years, vast continents and islands of
savage or semi-barbarous people live and then perish,
there is no waste. Neither is there waste anywhere
�42
The Mystery of Evil.
in the laboratory of nature’s forces. Had .we seen
the germs which afterwards developed into primeval
forests, when these germs were just beginning to
sprout in the bare rocky earth, we could not have
dreamt of so mighty a use in store for them. But
could we come back to the spot centuries afterwards
when these tiny beeches and pines had grown into
giant trees, the function of the insignificant germs
would be obvious. The yearly shedding of the leaves of
the trees into which they have grown has covered with
mould the once barren surface in which they were
planted, and supplied land suitable for the sowing of our
crops. So the primeval trees in the forest of humanity,
the first races, to all appearance not worth the power
expended on their existence and support; these early
races and tribes—so unproductive for ages—have
been permitted to shed their millions of human
leaves to make soil in the moral world. The bar
barism that once reigned over the greater part of
the earth is a pledge, in the arrangements of nature,
that humanity will never, as a whole, return to
barbarism again. The child cannot grow into the
shrewd, cautious, enterprising man, but through the
tumbles and bruises of childhood and the mistakes
of passionate youth. Our measured intelligence,
charity, and tolerance in the present century, has
grown out of the ignorance, superstition, and intoler
ance of all the ages that have preceeded. The primi
tive races were allowed to live a life of low civilisa
tion, and so by the picture of wretchedness they
present for the warning of those who come after
them, prove at once a beacon of warning and an
effectual safeguard against the higher races that come
after, sinking back to the same condition. The same
consoling reflection applies to all the pains and dis
comforts which the good and the bad alike suffer in
our present condition. These untoward circumstances,
dark though they be, are not a mere waste of power,
�The Mystery of Evil.
43
but mark an epoch in universal progress—needful,
disciplinary, transitional, leading to grander issues,—
to universal conformity to the standard of universal
harmony. If in this unique development the interests
of individuals and races,—whose lot happens to be
cast in the early or intermediate periods of that
development,—are not so favoured as those of mankind
will be in the happier and more remote future, such a
consideration is subordinate, and not to be named in
comparison with the final result—the expansion,
culture, and coherent use of all the faculties of
humanity, the extinction of disease, want, strife, and
suffering of every kind ; and if such an end is only
to be gained, for a permanence, through physical and
moral suffering in preceding ages of the world, the
result may possibly well repay the cost. Nay, I
think science justifies me iji going farther. I might
venture to add that the trials to which individuals
and nations have ever been exposed in this life are
introductory to a state of being beyond the present,
when the island earth will be one in spirit with the
invisible “ summer-land,” when free and pleasant
communion between the embodied in the former
state, and the disembodied in the latter, will be
possible, when the sea of material and moral discord
that now divides the one state from the other will
be dried up, and when the last speck of imper
fection that sullied the purity and splendour of
regenerated humanity will be effaced.
In the immortal words of our Laureate :
“ 0! yet, we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubts and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When Nature makes the pile complete.
�44
The Mystery of Evil.
That not a worm is cloven in vain,
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire
Or but subserves another’s gain.
Behold we know not anything—
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last—to all,
And every winter change to spring.”
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�
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The mystery of evil
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 44 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Misc. Tracts 4. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, Haymarket, London. Includes bibliographical references. No author given.
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Evil
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Good and Evil
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GOOD AND EVIL—THEIR ORIGIN.
BY PBOR ANDRÉ POËY.
PINIONS are profoundly divided with regard to the origin
and nature of good and evil. For Theologians : God is the
good, and the Devil is the evil. Tradition, Christ, the
apostles, the doctors, the councils, the Christian dogmas,
teach us that God has existed from eternity infinitely powerful, wise
and holy. The world and man, formed out of nothing, are the work
of his hands, and these same hands which imparted life to man, will
also give him happiness in a heavenly home. As the world is naturally
divided between good and evil, evilis the result of a fall due to his free
will, which precipitated man into sin, suffering, and eternal death.
But the omnipotent goodness of God ransomed man from the error of
his ways at the price of an infinite victim ; hence the coming of the
Messiah, the Word, and the Son * * * when divine grace was dif
fused anew over the earth. “ Here,” says M. Littré, “ the dogma is
engaged in obscure questions between this divine grace, predestination,
the small number of the elect on the one side, and on the other the free
will of man, and the goodness of God.” At flast men rise from the
dead, and are judged according to the deeds done in the flesh. The
good are rewarded, the bad punished ; the heavenly Jerusalem opens
its gates, and hell opens its portal for an order become unchangeable,
and a time become eternal. “ Viewed in its ensemble,” says M. Littré,
“ this dogmatism is a philosophy giving enough light to satisfy the
faithful about the author of the world, the world itself, man, his duties
and his destiny, while in its origin it is the rival of philosophy. It is
important to note that each theology emanating from an antecedent
theology, always carries with it a supernatural history. To be inti
mately connected with a supernatural history is the character of a pri
mordial philosophy or theology.” *
Consequently, in the theological philosophy evil is the result of a
fall due to free-will, and free-tvill, according to Bossuet,f belongs to the
soul, which, being an immaterial substance, has the faculty of willing
for its own sake, without the intervention of any motive as a deter
mining cause of its resolutions.
O
* “ La Philosophie positive.”
H&oue, 1867, vol. i, p. 9.
f “ Traité sur le Libre arbitre.”
20
�154
GOOD
AND
EVIL.
This theological conception of free-will is still the most advanced,
for some Christian sects and established churches have, on the con
trary, professed a bond-will, holding that, in the presence of divine
omnipotence and omniscience, man’s freedom was an impiety, a chi
mera, an immorality. According to the Presbyterian Church’s prin
ciple of predestination, the sin being foreseen, man has to submit to
free-will personified in the immutability of G-od’s omnipotence. Men
are therefore fatally foreordained to be, while on earth, good or bad,
according to their celestial missions.
If from this theological or divine conception we pass to the meta
physical or abstract, as found in the most advanced school of Locke,
J. Stuart Mill, and Prof. Bain, we find that free-will, as the theologians
understand it, is a psychological error, and that volition is not a
taculty determined by its own momentum toward this or that motive.
On the contrary, that the resolution urged by the will is determined by
this and that motive. In a word, that it is not motives which obey
volition, but volition which obeys motives.
Thus, according to theological and metaphysical philosophy, the
knowledge and practice of good and evil depend upon the will, and
this last is determined either by itself, independently of all extraneous
causes, or else by volition which obeys motives of some kind. All this,
in the first case, leaves us in the most absolute vagueness about their
origin, and in the second, we are only furnished with a point of de
parture whence we plunge into the greatest obscurity with regard to
the psychological explanation of good and evil, and their mental evolu
tion in human morality.
Theology and metaphysics being wholly powerless to furnish us the
origin of good and evil, lgt us seek it in positive psychology. When
anatomy and physiology were advanced enough in the knowledge of
the simpler functions of the human body, they were compelled to take
up immediately the more complicated functions of the brain and in
telligence. They were at once struck with the close alliance of these
two facts: that everything which changed the organ, also altered the
state of its function. Then it was observed that all the impressions
furnished us by the external world as well as our own internal im
pressions, were immediately received and transmitted by our conducting
nerves into the depths of the nerve-cells of which the cerebral mass is
composed. These cells have then as their irreducible property the
translation of these impressions into ideas and sentiments, their con
servation, their association, and their elaboration into combinations, more
or less complicated, according to the nature of the given impressions.
Although the analysis of the anatomical conditions and physiological
functions of the organs of the brain may in part be unintelligible to
some readers who are not on a level with the latest discoveries in
biology, I cannot pass it over in the conception of the new positive
doctrine which I shall shortly propound. This analysis has conducted
1
-
�GOOD
AND
EVIL.
155
us to the great discovery: that the brain is at the same time the seat
of the affections, as well as that of the intelligence. The heart has no
other function but that relating to the circulation of the blood and the
preservation of life. Gall reclaimed the intellectual functions from the
vegetative viscera, where they were believed to be situated, to place
them in the brain. Now we exclude the affective functions from the
heart, in order to bring them back to theii’ true place in the cells of
the brain, where they are elaborated simultaneously with the intellectual.
By considering the brain as the seat of the intelligence and affections,
we do not say that it has the power of creating them. The brain
creates nothing; it merely receives impressions external and internal,
and elaborates them. The function of the brain is limited to the build
ing up, so to speak, of ideas and sentiments out of the materials which
come to it from without and within our organism: that is to say, out
of external sensorial impressions, and internal instinctive impressions.
In this respect the nerve-cells of the head have a triple basis: intel
lectual, affective, and esthetic. Intellectual, or that which is attached to
the sensorial impressions; affective, or that which is dependent upon
the needs of individual life and that of the species; esthetic, or that
connected with what is emotional and pleasing in certain auditory and
visual impressions. In this the subjective or internal impression is
always blended with the objective or external impression, and can only
mean the faculty of elaboration on the part of the nerve-cells of the
brain’s hemispherical lobes. All this in the esthetic faculty gives rise
to music, architecture, sculpture, painting and poetry, idealized and
constituting with ideology and morality the psychical phenomena of
human reason.
Now that we have an idea (exact enough for our purpose) of the
anatomy and physiology of the intellectual and affective faculties, let
us proceed to consider from a more elevated point of view, the latter
only, as they are less known and accepted.
We have already said that the impressions which affect our nervous
system are of two kinds: the one, sensorial or of the senses; the other,
instinctive. At present we shall add that sensorial impressions are the
source of ideas, and instinctive impressions, the source of sentiments.
The instinctive impressions are also of two kinds: those which apper
tain to the instincts for preserving the individual life, and those which
belong to the instinct for preserving the species. The instinct of indi
vidual life depends upon self-love, which degenerates by reason of
vicious direction into selfishness. The instinct-life corresponds to love
of others, in its primordial forms of sexual attachment, maternal, filial,
national love, and finally love for humanity, by the preponderance of
altruism over selfishness. Thus, however complex may be our ideas,
they can always be reduced to ideas, the simple products of our sensa
tions ; in the same manner, however complex may be our sentiments,
they can always be reduced to one of two fundamental sentiments.
�156
GOOD AND
EVIL.
Hence the founder of the positive philosophy, Auguste Comte, has
very judiciously divided all our sentiments into selfish and altruist.
The selfish sentiments relate to the conservation and safety of the indi
vidual, and the altruist sentiment to the conservation and safety of the
community or of the human species.
According as we ascend the zoological scale from the inferior ani
mals to man, we always see altruism prevail over selfishness. Among
fishes, which are cerebrally at the lowest point in the vertebrate scale
and have no conception of either family or children, the instinct
remains purely sexual. But the sentiment to which it gives birth com
mences to be manifested in many mammifers and birds; only it is but
temporary in the greatest, number of instances. Among men, the
family raises in the children love of parents, and in the parents love of
children. Afterwards are formed between families bonds of the same
kind as between the members of the family itself. In fine, from this
union and this fraternity, sociability arises here and there, and is more
and more developed.
Now mark the following: it is precisely upon this power of socia
bility, which increases from the inferior beings up to man, that Auguste
Comte has founded his static law, which serves as the basis of the
science of sociology (the present politics). This law is in its turn so
dependent upon the constitution of the brain, that it is effaced accord
ing as the cerebral mass diminishes among animals. This constitutes
among men the foundation of political economy.
Whence man is a moral being, capable of acting under selfish impulses or under altruist impulses, according as these or those prevail.
Barbarous people and certain narrow natures * in the bosom of our
society are found exactly in the former condition, on account of the
small development of their intellectual and affective faculties. Praise
worthy actions spring by the side of detestable ones, and dispute with
them the supremacy. It is only later, when man learns the profound
abyss which exists between selfish and altruist sentiments, that he can
only establish a rule of conduct.
“ Such a rule,” says M. Littré, “ which appears a very light bridle to
repress the passions, is nevertheless invincible. Its force is in nature,
which has created it; and even by this it can never be annihilated, but
is always maintained. Fixed in the mind and become a moral force, it
takes where it is violated the form of remorse in the individual, the
form of reprobation in opinion, and the form of punishment in society
and among humanity.” f
<
According as humanity grows and develops, it forms intermediate
associations of sentiments and rules, which determine and characterize
the different moralities arising in the advance of the ages. It is thus
* Unfortunately every-day business concerns place us in contact with too many
of such selfish natures.
f “ La philosophie positive.” Revue, 1867, vol. i, p. 359.
�GOOD
AND
EVIL.
157
that the moral sense, having a foundation wholly physiological and, as
a result, constant, is none the less variable, according to times and
peoples. We therefore see that, for morality as well as for human in
telligence, there is a primitive state destitute of both. In the primitive
epoch of humanity, the morality is as weak and faulty as the intelli
gence is infantile. It has been only in the lapse of time that the senti
ments have been developed, associated, and regulated, without having
yet attained in our day either form or definite stability.
Let us resume our researches into the origin of good and evil in the
three philosophies we have passed in review. In the Theological school,
free-will is a faculty of the soul, without control, and independent of
our volition; or else the free-will is in God, and man is irrevocably
predestined to act well or ill. In the first case we have only prayer,
invocation of the Supreme Being to preserve us from evil, at last pun
ishment or reward in eternity. In the second the bond-will absolves
us always in the evil as well as in the good. In the Metaphysical
school, as its principles always repose upon intimate causes, and not
upon laws, the volitional faculty is synonymous with the faculty of an
immaterial soul in the psychological properties of the brain. It is its
absolute origin which destroys the concrete cause of the determining
faculty of the volition in free-will.
In the Positivist school, soul, free-will, volition, good, evil, and all
the psychical faculties, are the simple result of the transformation of
impressions from without and within, by a physiological elaboration in
the nerve-cells of the brain into ideas and sentiments. Good and evil
become thus unstable sentiments, while the two media (external and
internal) undergo variations more or less considerable; and they can
not be morally determined so long as these media have not taken their
normal course—that is to say, so long as the sociological laws jire not
definitely known and fully practised. Hitherto not a single example
can be found where evil was not in certain circumstances the parent of
good, or vice versa. The proverb that “ there is no evil which may not
become a good,” has here its most brilliant confirmation. .
In the Positive Philosophy, instead of having recourse to personal
or divine absolution always at hand to give us peace, in order to fall
anew into the same sin, our rule of conduct and our moral force, in a
word, are powerfully rooted in the noble remorse for a bad deed, while
in the reprobation of public opinion we impose a punishment from the
hands of society and entire humanity, much keener than the vain
absolutions, punishments, and rewards, personal and selfish, beyond the
grave.
Let it be particularly noted that what we have said above about
psychical phenomena, and about the transformation within the nerve
cells of the brain of external and internal impressions into ideas and
sentiments—that all this is by no means Materialism in the sense of
the ancient school of Epikurus, of Condillac, of Locke, of D’Holbach,
�158
•
t
GOOD
AND
EVIL.
and of Buchner in our own days. They are simply facts of observa
tion, experiment, and comparison, obtained by modern anatomy and
physiology.
Following the diverse vibrations suffered by inert matter, do we not
see as remarkable effects produced in the thousand properties of heat,
light, sound, electricity, and magnetism ? Are not the physical proper
ties of inorganic matter as marvelous as the psychical properties of
organic matter ? Here, as in the cerebral mass, it is always the inor
ganic or organic matter which is manifested under the impulse of a
form of vibration determined in the diverse properties—physical, vital,
and psychical.
Thus in fine we are in possession of three grand series of funda
mental properties of matter. First—Universal Gravitation, which is
an immanent principle of matter inorganic or inert. Second—Life,
which is an immanent principle of matter organic or animated. Third
—Intelligence and Affection, which form the immanent principle of
nervous or thinking matter.
Having signalized the origin of good and evil according to theolog
ical, metaphysical and positive interpretations, let us now proceed to
establish the static and dynamic laws which govern the theory of hu
man reason.
Hippokrates and Aristotle have shown that there is nothing in the
intelligence which has not come from sensation. This law was later
badly interpreted by the materialists, who suppressed the intelligence
and only admitted the impression of sensation. Leibnitz rectified the
primitive law by saying that there are outside of us facts which we
perceive by our senses. But if we do not wish, like idiots, to contem
plate uselessly these facts, we must connect them together in order to
construct theories and establish laws. This concurrence between the
brain anc! the world for the formation of any notion whatever, has been
established above in the distinction between subjective and objective.
Completing Hippokrates, Aristotle and Leibnitz by Kant, Auguste
Comte has in fine established that the mind is not and cannot be pas
sive in its relations to the world, and that the state of the subject
causes always a modification in the appreciation of the object. All our
conceptions being at the same time objective and subjective, Comte
has thus established his first intellectual and static law: that “our
subjective constructions are always subordinated to our objective materials.”
But as in our greater flights of imagination we never cease to draw
from without the materials with which to construct our fancies, this
first law applies as well to the state of madness as to that of sanity.
In order that the internal may be subordinate to the external, it is not
sufficient that the foundation of our thought comes from sensation,
the sensation must preponderate. Hence Comte’s second law is that
“ the internal images are less vivid and exact than the external impres
sions whence they emanate.”
�GOOD
A ND
EVIL.
159
“ It is thus alone,” adds Comte, “ that a veritable subordination of
the brain to its truly preponderant medium can be established. With
out such a condition the mental intercourse of man with the world ad
mits of no fixed rule. For our internal impulses come always to dis
turb our external impressions, being on the point, at times, of over
whelming our weaker appreciation.” * Nevertheless this second static
law does not altogether complete the normal state of the understand
ing, for any object whatever may create, according to the diversity of
circumstances, many different images. If these images, for example,
though all inferior to their corresponding impressions, were notwith
standing equal to each other, there would result in the mind an insur
mountable confusion. This is what takes place in symptoms of insan
ity. Comte’s third law following is still necessary : that “ the normal
image is more vivid than those which the cerebral action brings simul
taneously into existence.”
The static theory of human reason is finally completed by these
three laws. The within ceases to have power to disturb the without, but on
the contrary yields to its necessary preponderance. The external order
becomes thus, by its relation to the brain, an aliment, a stimulant and
a regulator, as it does toward all other classes of biological phenomena.
As every judgment we form results from a certain medley of ob
jective impressions and subjective elaboration, we must inquire what is
the exact degree of each of the two elements constituting the normal
state. This .degree cannot be rigorously fixed, seeing that there is no
precise boundary between reason and madness, health and sickness.
The existence of a being allows of variations within certain limits, and
it is only when their extent is overpassed that it becomes impossible.
But we can fix an ideal mean around which the reality oscillates. This
mean which the human reason always tend's to approach, furnishes us
the logical law of the First Philosophy, so well forecast by Bacon, which
consists in this new law of Comte, prescribing us “ to construct always
the simplest hypothesis permitted by the facts.”
Seeing that all our theories must finally end in representing the
world as it is, the brain will become, as far as possible, a faithful mirror of the external order. But to see things as they are, it must be
deprived of all exaggerated sentiments of malevolence, and even of
benevolence. We say with reason that hate is blind, but we also say
it of love, which amounts to the recognition that all excessive passion
hinders us from seeing justly, and forces us to make complex hypo
theses, either to condemn or to absolve. But as the mind, in a state
of unity, can think only under an affective impulse, selfish or altruist,
positive logic prescribes us to guard especially the malevolent impulses,
which are the most violent and imperious. The influence of benevo
lence is likely to become exaggerated only in case of madness, when
* “ Systeme de Politique positive,” t. iii, p. 19.
�160
/
GOOD
AND
EVIL.
the mind ceases to be the minister of the heart, in order to become its
slave. So, to be as simple as possible, Comte has established as an
complement to the anterior logical law, that “ our hypotheses
must be stripped as much of malevolence as of benevolence?’
The ensemble of the three static laws with the logical law of the
first philosophy and its affective complement just given, only furnish
the character of human reason in opposition to madness, but not the
*
stability of opinions whence it emanates.
If the opinions were unstable (even the variations they suffer by
more extended observation, or by the changes to which age makes our
sentiments yield), or if they were not submitted to any law, they would
then be arbitrarily free. This dynamic law which is connected with
the intellectual development of the human mind, was also discovered
by Comte and formulated in these terms: “ All human conceptions pro
ceed from the theological or fictional state to the positive or scientific
state by passing through the metaphysical or abstract state?’
Considered by itself, this law at first appears inexact. In fact, we see
illustrious geniuses recognizing the existence of a superior volition, and
bowing before it, while almost all our contemporaries are at the same
time theologians or metaphysicians in politics, and positivists in
geometry or chemistry. Does the normal state of our intelligence con
sist in employing different methods, according to the nature of the
subject of which we treat ?
A second complementary law resolves this apparent contradiction :
it is the law of the classification of our abstract conceptions into six
philosophies of the irreducible sciences, according to the complexity and
specialty increasing, or the simplicity and generality decreasing of the
phenomena with which each of them deal. The intelligence is thus
conducted from the simplest and most general speculations to those
most complex and special, in the hierarchal order of the Sciences fol
lowing, established by Comte: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology, (this last comprehending psychology,
esthetics, ideology, and morality.)
The first four sciences embrace the study of the cosmological Medium,
or inorganic creation, and the two latter the vital and social Medium,
or organic creation. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry
being the simplest, are the earliest emancipated from all supernatural
and metaphysical intervention. Among those who the most resolutely
invoke divine mediation in human affairs, no one pretends to deprive
a railway train of all velocity by means of prayer. On .the contrary,
in biological or sociological phenomena, confined especially to psychol
ogy, or the intelligence and affections, by their greater complexity,
theology and metaphysics are yet deeply rooted.
* Eugène Sémérie., “ Des Symptômes intellectuels de la folie.”—Thèse. Paris,
1867.
�GOOD
AND
EVIL.
161
The different degrees of velocity with which each science, according
to its complexity, is susceptible of attaining its final state of positivity,
is a capital fact which confirms beyond a doubt the exactness of the
dynamic law' of the three phases of human intelligence in the inter
pretation of natural phenomena.
But from the moment that the positive method has furnished us
the true psychological and sociological laws, these theological and
metaphysical phantoms disappear from the sciences never to return.
The creation of the sociological and moral sciences conducts us then
to mental unity by a complete cerebral harmony, or, in other words,
to the stability of ideas by the Positive Philosophy, replacing definitely
the two primitive philosophies.
The study upon the origin of good and evil which we have termi
nated, is at the same time positive and negative. Positive, by the
physiological and psychical laws we have established; negative, by the
relative impotence in which we remain for want of a sufficient number
of laws to fix the true limits which separate good and evil.
But a great truth has been irrevocably acquired: 1st, that the intel
lectual and affective faculties have their single and sole seat in the
brain, where they are united by bonds of strict and intimate solidarity;
2d, that the affections arise from internal instinctive impressions, while
the ideas or intelligence are derived from external sensorial impressions;
and 3d, that the instinctive or affective impressions are of two orders:
those appertaining to the instincts for preserving the life of the indi
vidual, and those relating to the instincts for preserving the life of the
species. The first are beyond a certain limit selfish, and the second
are always altruist,
• After the affective and spontaneous faculties of the brain which
constitute human morality, follow the intellectual faculties and rules
which determine human reason. Between these two is placed a third
order of faculty, called esthetic or emotional.
The reason being merely outlined, morality in our day is in only an
embryonic state. Good and evil depend upon false and true, that is to
say, upon intellectual reasoning. We do ewl because we have a false
idea of the true, in the same way that we do good because we have a
true idea of the false. In the state of mental anarchy in which society
is sunk, we frequently confound the noblest sentiments with the basest
passions. For- example, impersonal pride is mistaken for personal self
ishness. We should only be proud of a noble and just action in the
unique interest of goodness, as it relates to our fellow-beings; but if
this pride has no other aim than our own satisfaction, what in the
first case was a legitimate virtue, in the other degenerates into un
worthy self-love. Should one be badly appreciated in his noble im
personal pride, he must never blame the author without taking into
account the extenuating and powerful circumstances which often, alas!
are but very fallacious. After a disappointment, one can only pity the
21
�162
GOOD
AND
EVIL.
object of his attachment, not by high disdain, but by compelling him
to return to better sentiments. In a word, pride can become a noble
and pure passion only on condition of forgetting itself. We have taken
as an example pride, because it is at once the noblest and the vilest
of passions, according to the use, good or bad, legitimate or illegitimate,
which is made of it, and according as personal selfishness or imper
sonal altruism predominates. Thus evil limits good, and they are
transmitted, the one into the other, in the form of perturbation, with
out which we cannot seize the true law which governs these two ex
treme terms.
The cause is very plain: in the affective faculties biology is not ad
vanced enough to furnish us the law of the instincts for the preserva
tion of individual life, and sociology is too much in its infancy to give
us the law of the instincts for the preservation of the species-life. Do
we not perceive in this ensemble of incontestable facts that Morality
is yet in process of creation by the sole means of human reason ?
In a second part we will regard good and evil from the dynam
ical stand-point, its evolution and periodical recurrences. In the first
case we have applied Broussais’s law upon the assimilation of the
pathological state to the physiological (or health), the former differ
ing only in a greater amplitude from the normal state which then
degenerates into perturbation. In the same way the psychical facul
ties of the nerve-cells of the brain may be exalted from the normal
state or the good to. the perturbed state or the evil. So the origin of
evil is .an exaggeration of the good. In the second place I will show
how the periodical recurrences of astronomical and physical phenom
ena, also occurs in morality, as well in the individual as in society.
As in the physical, so the more complex moral phenomena are,
the more difficult it is to foresee the period of revolution, and the
cycle is more extended. The same relation exists between eclipses
and comets of very long periods. The last part of this work is en
tirely personal, although its principles are more or less based upon
those of the Positive Philosophy.
September, 1869.
�A
THE three mental crises
OF AUGUSTE COMTE.
BY PROF. ANDRÉ
POËY.
LITTRÉ has charged Auguste Comte, since his death,
with having changed the method in the elaboration of
his two great works. In his Philosophic positive the ob
jective method presides, while in his Politique positive,
on the contrary, the subjective method principally reigns.
*
M. Littré finds the cause which drove Comte into the subjective
method in a purely psychological effect—in a word, in a mental crisis
experienced by him in 1845, preceded and followed by the following
circumstances:
“Since he finished in 1842,” says he, “the Systeme de philoso
phic positive, he never ceased to revolve in his mind his promised
book upon positive politics. Yet, not until 1845 were its character
and plan settled. This initial elaboration of his second great work
(Comte’s own expression) coincided with a grave nervous illness.” f
M. Littré cites afterwards two of Comte’s letters to Mr. J. S. Mill,
of June 27, 1845, and May 6, 1846. In tlm first, Comte speaks of in
teresting details (necessarily deferred) upon a grave nervous illness, pro
duced, doubtless, by the resumption of his philosophical composition,
which occurred some days after his last letter (May 15).
M. Littré remarks that this letter is mysterious; that one does not
promise interesting details upon a fever or fluxion ; but that this was
really a crisis in which Comte’s mind suffered profound impressions
and durable modifications. He finds this plainly set forth in the fol
lowing extract from his second letter to Mill: “. . . . The decisive
invasion of this virtuous passion (for Mme. Clotilde de Vaux) coincided
last year with the initial elaboration of my second great work. You
can thus imagine the true gravity of a nervous crisis, up to the present
imperfectly known, in which I have run a true cerebral risk, and from
the forcible personal recollections of which I have been happily saved,
without any vain medical interference ...”
In this second letter Comte speaks, not of an illness, but of a ner
vous disease. Before 1845, this disease was indeterminate, adds M.
M
* “ Auguste Comte et la Philosophie positive.” Paris, 1863, p. 126.
f Id., pp. 580-591.
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T H JE THREE
MENTAL
CRISES
Littré. “ But the fatiguing effort of thought, as it neared completion,
encountered the impassioned love inspired by Mme. de Vaux. From ,
this time the disease took a determinate form, impressing the
seal of sentiment upon the conception elaborated. So, between pro
found meditation ruling his intellect, and passionate tenderness capti
vating his heart, the obstacles which had hitherto stopped him disap
peared, the scales fell from his eyes, and the subjective method appeared
to him a luminous guide which introduced him at the most distant
future to a humanity altogether devoted to love. From this time his
work was traced throughout; it was only a question of deduction and
combination ; and what greater mind for concatenating and following
out combinations ever existed than his ? ”
Such are the only proofs brought forward by M. Littré on Comte’s
mental crisis of 1845. His physician and one of his three testament
ary executors, Dr. Robinet, does not mention it in his life of Comte.
Mr. Lewes’ objection to Littré is very inconclusive. It is that, if the
great crisis of 1826 had no deleterious effect upon the Positive Philos
ophy, how could the trivial one of 1845, even granted that it took
place (for Lewes doubts it) vitiate his subsequent constructions ? * He
appears to think that all cerebral crises are of like character and have
similar effects. This is improbable, and Comte himself, in the present
instance, asserts the contrary, as will be seen below.
To solve this delicate question, it will suffice to refer to Comte him
self, which Littré and Lewes have not done. If they had, they would
have seen, in an affectionate profession de foi, addressed to Clotilde de
Vaux, August 5, 1845 (two months aftei' his last nervous illness), that
Comte himself acknowledges three cerebral crises, determining their
ch aranteristics and their influences upon his philosophical elaboration.
He traces with a steady hand his life, past and future, public and
private, and invokes his love, to finish his task.
These three crises took place in 1826, 1838, and 1845. This extract
from Comte establishes their existence. “To conceive more clearly the
true general relations of the two crises which circumscribe the only
part of my past career, public or private, directly interesting to you, it
will be useful to indicate a kind of intermediate crisis of less pro
nounced character but of similar nature, determined in 1838, by pass
ing from the purely scientific preamble of my great philosophical
construction to the biological element which definitively constitutes it.”
In fact, the third volume of the Positive Philosophy, closing with
Biology, bears date of February 24, 1838, and its fourth, volume, with
the dogmatic part of social Philosophy, is dated December 23, 1838.
From these two dates, his second crisis occurred in this interval of
nine months.
Comte, in continuation, determines its happy influence upon his
* “ The Fortnightly Review.” 1866, vol. iii, p. 403.
�01’
AUGUSTE
COMTE.
165
philosophical conception, in the following words : “ Although in this
second and principal half of that prolonged task, the social standpoint
had to remain almost wholly speculative, and hence could not tend to
develop in me so powerfully as at present the affective needs, still thai
epoch forms a remarkable phase in so intimate a history of my double
existence. Its principal marked result consisted in a vivid and perma
nent stimulation of my taste for the different Fine Arts, especially
poetry and music, which then received a considerable increase. You
feel immediately the spontaneous affinity with my ulterior tendency
towards a life principally affective ; and further, it very happily im
proved my work in all relating to the esthetic evolution of humanity.
In domestic affairs, this period has some interest as also intermediate
between two essential crises ; for I ceased then, for the first time, solic
iting, while still permitting a postponement of a temporary separation,and signified my firm resolution of making in the future any similar
occurrence irrevocable.”
Comte finishes the estimation of these three crises by a singular
property which has much assisted him in the clear remembrance of
them. One of his small philosophical secrets is to consolidate and aid
every intellectual or affective improvement by joining it with some phys
ical improvement, directed especially towards the continual improvement
of the diet. “ From this principle,” says he, “ is derived all the essentials
of the positive theory of sacraments, of which priestly empiricism feels
confusedly the bearing, as physical signs of different degrees of spiritual
progress. In the same way I can say that the three essential crises of
my double personal evolution, in the years 1826, 1838, and 1845, are
rendered familiarly sacred to me by the durable dietetic symptom that I
have definitely abstained, at first from coffee, next from tobacco, and
now from wine. Such are, my dear friend, the different secret indica
tions which complete the ostensible part of my difficult explanation of
the new character, public and private, belonging to the second half of
my career.” *
Thus, beyond any question, Comte’s three mental crises are fully
acknowledged by himself. The psychological study which he made
upon these affections is curious. Indeed, he states in his public covrses
and in his second work the valuable observation made upon his own
cerebral illness of 1826. An empiric treatment, he says, which pro
longed the disturbance for eight months, permitted him the better
to estimate its different states. He was able to doubly verify his “ law
of three states,” which characterizes human evolution, by going through
all its essential phases, at first inversely, then directly, without their
order ever changing.
These are his own words : “ The three months in which medical
influence developed the illness made me gradually descend, from positi
* “ Notice sur l’Œuvre et sur la Vie d’Auguste Comte,” par le Dr. Robinet.
Paris, 1864, pp. 211-213.
�66
THE
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MENTAL
CRISES
vism to fetishism, stopping at monotheism, and longer at polytheism.
In the five following months, according as my spontaneity, despite the
remedies, restored normal life, I slowly reascended from fetishism to
polytheism, and from it to monotheism, whence I promptly recovered
my previous positivity. By procuring me a direct and decisive confir
mation of my ‘ law of the three states,’ and making me more plainly
feel the necessary relativity of all our knowledge, this terrible episode
aided me in identifying myself more easily with any of the human
phases. The assistance furnished by it to the whole of my historical
meditations, makes me hope that suitably instructed readers can also
utilize this summary indication of a memorable anomaly.” *
These psychological studies upon the three mental crises of Comte
deserve to be taken into serious consideration in our researches upon
the faculties and psychical products of the nerve-cells of the brain.
We deeply regret not having been able to consult the recent work of
Dr. G. Audiffrent, which would probably have thrown great light upon
this question.f It should always be remembered that these three crises
had a very diverse influence upon Comte’s philosophical elaboration.
In the first his ideas passed and repassed through the three great
periods of theology, from monotheism to fetishism, stopping at the
intermediary station of polytheism and vice versâ, until the return to
his primitive positivity. It is, moreover, a curious fact that he has
skipped, so to speak, the transitional phase of metaphysic, which he
does not mention. In fiis second crisis, Comte suffered a first though
small effusion of affection which he interprets as “ a vivid and perma
nent stimulation of his taste for different Fine Arts, especially poetry
and music.” At last, in his third crisis, this affection took colossal
dimensions under the influence of his impassioned love for Clotilde de
Vaux. “ Its influence was mystic,” says M. Littré, very truly, “ es
pecially when death, which soon came, had consecrated the recollection ;
and the mysticism was an aggravation of the subjective method.” J From
this influence arose the fine inspiration of the Religion of Humanity,
the principle of which I adopt as a moral power, but reject the form.
Unfortunately, Comte returned in his last days to a positive theol
ogy, personified in the Grand-Fetiche or the earth, the Grand-Milieu
or space, and the Grand-Etre or humanity ; § nevertheless this
positive trinity overpasses the limits of our poor human intelligence.
“ Comte’s thought,” says M. Littré, “ wavered between fictions and
chimeras ; but the idea of the cultus in the end excluded the first and
imposed the second.”
Comte’s reasoning is as follows : Subjectivity must prevail in the
universal synthesis, and fetishism, having introduced it spontaneously,
* “ Système de Politique positive.” Paris, 1853, vol. iii. p. 75.
t “ Du cerveau et de l’innervation d’après Auguste Comte,” Paris, 1869,1 vol., 8vo.
f Work cited, p. 583.
§ “ Synthèse subjective ” Paris, 1856. 8vo, pp. 840.
�OF
AUGUSTE
G 0 AI T E.
167
it must reappear in the latest period of human evolution which re
produces the initial type. The only difference is that the new fetish
ism will be subordinated to natural laws which the old did not know.
In this case we can apply to Comte his own judgment upon “ Vico’s
aberrations in the strange theory of social circularity, by specially pro
claiming the general superiority of the modern régime over the an
cient.” * M. Littré remarks that this is a “ gratuitous assertion, the
falsity of which is at once apparent, on applying it to biology, in
which neither manhood nor old age reproduces infancy.” Still, it
must be avowed there are many points of contact, yet unknown, be
tween childhood and old age, and hence the saying to fall into infancy,
specially applied to mental affections.
Comte’s life presents three great periods, distinctly characterized :
that of his philosophical construction, that of his political construc
tion, and that of his religious construction. He was, despite himself,
led insensibly from the first to the second, and from it to the third.
In the first he established an objective philosophy for the first time, in
the third he restored the primitive subjective philosophy, basing it
upon laws more or less empirical or fictional, while in the second period
his mind and heart wavered between the two methods, impelled by a
supreme effort at harmonizing them. He sought a point of union be
tween the subjective and the objective, between mind active and mind
passive, according to Kant’s fine conception. His idea was grand but
premature, and his task being placed beyond his power by fatal natural
laws, he had to succumb before the force of circumstances—that is to
say, through the failure of scientific data upon such complex problems.
Still, the sociological and moral bases established by him remain im
perishable, and will serve posterity as a foundation. The objective
Philosophy remains intact, and in the third edition (1869) M. Littré
asserts that the discoveries of forty years (since its first issue) have not
altered the organizing principle of the Positive Philosophy.f Another
century, and the great encyclopaedic series will receive its final corona
tion. A fine law of nature also places an impassable limit to the
human mind, according to the stage of intellectual progress attained
by it. Kepler, after founding celestial geometry, failed in celestial dy
namics, holding the theological conception that “ angels ” guided the
movements of the stars. His successor, Descartes, also failed, holding
the metaphysical conception in his renowned vortices. The positivity
of celestial mechanics was only reached by Newton’s discovery of the
law of universal Gravitation.
I will conclude by saying that cerebral attacks, similar to Comte’s
often occur. “ Many celebrated men,” adds M. Littré, “ have had men
tal shocks which greatly modified their characters.” Saint Paul, on
the way to Damascus, affords one of the most memorable examples.
* Letter to J. S. Mill in “ Auguste Comte et la Philosophie positive,” by Littré,
p. 460.
f “ Preface d’un disciple,” p. vii.
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THE
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MENTAL
CRISES.
Mr. Lewes also says : “ There is nothing remarkable in the fact that Lucretius and
Cowper wrote their immortal poems during the lucid intervals of frequent cerebral
attacks. The philosophy of Lucretius has indeed been often affiliated on his in
sanity ; but the sweet piety, the delicate humor, and the sustained excellence of
Cowper have not been thus branded, and they show that the mind is lucid in its
lucid intervals. The list of illustrious madmen is a long one. Lucretius, Mahomet,
Loyola, Peter the Great, Haller, Newton, Tasso, Swift, Cowper, Donizetti, sponta
neously occur as the names of men whose occasional eclipse by no means darkens
the splendor of their achievements. To these we must add the name of Auguste
Comte, assured that, if Newton once suffered a cerebral attack without thereby for
feiting our veneration for the ‘ Principia ’ and the ‘ Optics,’ Comte may have like
wise suffered without forfeiting his claims on our veneration for the ‘ Philosophic po
sitive.’ But the best answer to this ignoble insinuation is the works themselves. If
they are the products of madness, one could wish that madness were occasionally
epidemic.” *
These temporary cerebral perturbations of great men should in no wise astonish
us, as we can trace their existence in Humanity according to the similar laws of
physical and moral phenomena, individual and collective. In fact, in 1841, Auguste
Comte pointed out that our opinions, while “ having ceased to be purely theological
without being able to become wholly scientific, constitute the metaphysical state,
regarded as a sort of transitional chronic malady, belonging to this impassable
phase of our mental evolution, individual and collective.” f Comte, in 1852, de
clared that, “ since the original dissolution of the ancient theocracies, modern
anarchy constitutes only the last term of an immense perturbation.” Consequent
ly, “ analyzed cerebrally, the occidental malady constitutes a chronic madness, es
sentially intellectual but habitually complicated with moral reactions, and often
accompanied with physical outbreaks.” J In fine, in 1855, he was still more explicit
in his letter to Dr. Audiffrent, in which he resumes the synthetic theory of diseases
by the sociological definition of the brain as an instrument for the action of the
dead upon the living. Occidental anarchy constitutes a true disease consisting in a
continuous insurrection of the living against the dead, which tends to produce a
chronic disturbance of cerebral economy. Comte connects medicine with morality,
by formulating the subjective definition of the brain thus : The double and perma
nent placenta between man and Humanity. By “ double ” he means the two simul
taneous orders of subjective relations to the past on one side, and to the future on
the other. The gravity of the disease tends to break the placenta in two ways. §
In accordance with these ideas of Comte, I propose the following definitions :
“ Mental diseases result from a failure of moral unity between two cerebra, that
is, between the individual cerebrum and the collective, between man and Human
ity.”
“ The mental diseases of nations result from a want of moral unity between the
worn-out past and the developing future.”
Individual moral perturbations, being more complex, depend simultaneously
upon the collective moral perturbations of nations, and these upon those of Human
ity at large.
Though thirty years have elapsed, it would be impossible to trace with more
fidelity the state of Europe in 1870. We are perhaps on the verge of a profound
revolutionary crisis, occasioned by political chicanery, and this evening the ultima
tum of the Emperor Napoleon to Prussia will decide the fate of Europe. Yes,
anarchy of the heart and head is deeply rooted in the bosom of our families, in
our political circles, on the rostrum, in our scientific institutions, at the church.
We are everywhere rushing against the revolutionary debris, bequeathed to us by
that portion of the eighteenth century which followed the great French crisis of 1789.
Nothing can satisfy our desires, our doubts, and our restlessness, incessantly re
newed. Always the same question without reply :—What can we do? This crisis
will only be terminated by the installation of the new spiritual power demonstrated
by science, in place of the old revealed and imposed power. On a future occasion,
I will examine the reasons which may have caused Comte to change his method in
Politics and in Religion, as well as the objections raised by M. Littré.*
§
* “ The Fortnightly Review.” 1866, vol. iii, p. 394.
f “ Cours de Philosophie positive.” Vol. V, p. 277. ■
j “ Système de Politique positive.” Vol. II, pp. 458, 459.
§ Robinet, “Notice sur l’œuvre et sur la vie d’Auguste Comte.” Paris, 1864, p
533.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Good and evil - their origin
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Poey, Andre
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Place of publication: [New York]
Collation: [153]-168 p. ; 26 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Modern Thinker, no. 1, 1870. Includes bibliographical references.
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[American News Company]
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[1870]
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G5421
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Ethics
Evil
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Conway Tracts
Good and Evil
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W/L03
ON THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL.
BY THE LATE
EEV. JAMES CEANBEOOK,
EDINBURGH.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
Price Threepence.
��ON THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL.
HE existence of evil has constituted a problem which
men’s speculative intellect has attempted to solve
ever since speculation began. Throughout all the
world there are suffering, pain and death. The young,
the beautiful and the prosperous, no less than the aged,
deformed and poor, are subject to them. The brightest
prospects suddenly become clouded, the dearest hopes are
dashed to the ground, the intensest enjoyments suddenly
are turned into wormwood and gall, the most promising
career ends in disaster. And it is not the immoral
and irreligious alone that thus suffer; the virtuous and
pious are equally the victims.
The same thing
happeneth to the just and the unjust.
Nor can the evil always be traced to causes which
might have been avoided. It is sometimes inevitable,
at all events inevitable by us. The elements of nature
may combine against us—movements in society which
work the general good may produce our ruin—friends
may prove foes by their very friendliness. And even if
we could trace all suffering to our own moral defects it
would only be putting the question a step further back.
Whence these moral defects ? how came they into the
world ? how did they originate ? and why are they not
remedied ? It is perplexing and full of mystery.
I may have something to say upon the method in
which the question should be dealt with, towards the
conclusion, but for the present I wish to call your
attention to the way in which it was dealt with in
ancient times. And it is with the oriental method I
am now more concerned. Evil did not present itself
T
�6
On the Existence of Evil.
to the Greeks in those same despairing colours that it
appeared to the Orientals in. They lived in the enjoy
ment of the present, a free happy life; and nature
seemed to them full of beauty and gladness. When
the subject of evil came before them therefore, it came
in a tempered form, and they were calmer to answer it
than the Orientals were. Besides that, we know very
little of Grecian thought and speculation before the
scientific spirit had begun to dawn upon them. Con
sequently when their authentic history begins the
primitive beliefs are already modified and come before
us considerably toned down. Yet that they felt the
existence of evil a very mysterious problem their
tragedians very impressively testify. They resolved it,
however, all into the operations of a dark fatality, of
which there was none to give an account, and which lay
beyond the control alike of gods and men.
It was in later and more corrupt times that the
notion arose that evil comes from the envy of the gods
—a notion however, which could only arise out of a
sense of prevalent happiness. The authentic history
of the Hebrews begins about the time of the Babylonian
captivity, but we get some glimpses into their theo
logical conceptions before that time. So far as their
sacred books inform us, however, the subject of evil
does not seem to have weighed very heavily upon their
minds. The account given in Genesis of its introduc
tion into Paradise must have originated in very
primitive, that is barbarous times, and has very much
the appearance of being an importation from some
foreign source. None but the rudest people could have
imagined that tale about the serpent’s tempting Eve and
the curse subsequently pronounced upon the reptile.
And the account seems never to have made any very
deep impression on the Hebrew mind, or to have
recurred in their history until a much later period.
For we can hardly take the very contradictory myth of
Moses healing the children of Israel by a brazen serpent
�On the Existence of Evil.
7
as having any reference to the one in Paradise. And
yet this narrative in Genesis seems the only attempt to
explain the origin of evil until the period of the prophets,
if we can say an attempt was made then. But the
truth is, we know so little of the Jews during the inter
vening period that it is difficult to say what their
thoughts and speculations were. The book of Job
indeed is wholly composed for the purpose of discussing
this question of evil; but in the first place, it belongs
to the period of the Babylonian captivity and in the
second place it has been doubted whether it is Jewish
in its origin at all. My own opinion is in favour of its
late Chaldaic or Hebrew origin. For the introductory
part which is anti-Hebraic, giving that account about
Satan appearing before God and bringing evil upon Job,
is no integral part of the book, and it is most note
worthy that whilst in those introductory two chapters
all Job’s evils are directly attributed to Satan, in the
remaining forty chapters he and his doings are not once
referred to as offering any solution of the mystery of
evil, but the evil is directly and immediately, after the
Hebrew method, referred to God.
At the time of the Jewish captivity, however, a new
element was introduced into the Hebrew theology,—the
doctrine of evil spirits. I do not mean to deny that
they had some notions of their existence before; for
they naturally arise amongst nearly all barbarous people,
and it is difficult to suppose the Hebrews escaped.
But during the captivity and after, the doctrine became
elaborated, and henceforth formed a more and more
prominent feature in their theology. It is generally
said they derived these notions from the Persians. It
is certain they brought them from Babylon. Amongst
both Babylonians and Persians, and indeed the whole
of those nations lying round about the regions of the
Euphrates, these speculations concerning the source of
evil occupied a very large measure of thought. Natural
constitution and temperament acted on by climate,- and
�8
On the Existence of Evil.
the vicissitudes of their ever-changing fortune seem to
have forced them upon them. I can here only refer to
the doctrine by which the Persians attempted to solve
the mystery. Evil is so mingled with the good that the
only explanation seemed to them to be, that there are
two creators and rulers of the world, the one evil and the
other good; that these two rulers are perpetually at
strife with each other; that as the one prevails good
follows, as the other prevails evil follows ; and this
strife will go on until at last the good will prevail over
the evil, and the evil spirit will be held in eternal
bondage. I am not clear whether the notion of a yet
higher existence than these two creators whose inter
ference ultimately ends their strife, is of so early a date
as that I am now referring to ; but the probability, at
all events, is that it did not belong to the original
conception of the theory. Now each of these creative
spirits has caused to emanate from himself other spirits
through whom he carries on the government of the
world, the good spirit giving existence to angels, the
evil spirit giving existence to devils or demons.
Now it is clear the Hebrews could only embrace this
doctrine in a modified form, and probably the Chaldaeans only held it in a modified form, since, if we may
trust tradition, the doctrine of the divine unity came from
them. Be that however as it may, those who held, as
the Hebrews held, the strict doctrine of Monotheism,
could only hold the doctrine respecting the evil spirit
and his emanations in a very subordinate sense. The
evil spirit must be a creation of the Supreme, and
therefore if not originally good, he can at all events
have no power beyond what the Supreme permits him
to exercise. Only one passage in the Old and New
Testaments that I recollect refers to the fall of these
evil spirits from a primitively purer state; but the Jews
had determined their whole history long before the
canon of the New Testament closed. In First Chron.
chap. xxi. ver. 1, Satan is said to have stood up against
�On the Existence of Evil.
9.
Israel, and provoked David to number Israel. This
book of Chronicles belongs to the age after the
Babylonian captivity, and strikingly illustrates the
later growth of this doctrine of evil spirits ; for in
Second Samuel chap. xxiv. ver. 1, which is a more
early composition than that of Chronicles, God himself
is said to have been the instigator of David; and that
is much more in accordance with the purer Hebrew
idea. In the writings of the Apocrypha most of which
belongs to the centuries immediately preceding the
New Testament books, the doctrine. of evil spirits
comes out much more prominently, and you are enabled
by a careful study to trace its growth with tolerable
accuracy up to New Testament times.
I need not say how prominent the doctrine is made
in the New Testament. Satan is invested with all but
infinite powers, and all evil is traced up to his agency.
The account given us of the temptation of Christ at
the beginning of his ministry is one of the most
extraordinary and extravagant conceptions in the world,
and yet it is evident how deeply it laid hold of the
Hebrew mind from the repetition of it in the three books
of the evangelists. There, as you will recollect, Satan
appears in person, and not only tempts Christ, but
carries him sailing through the air to a pinnacle of the
temple, and then whirls him away to the top of an
exceeding high mountain, whence he shews him all the
kingdoms of the world in an instant, the Indian, Persian,
Roman, extending from the far east to the British Isles.
The rationalists say, this was only a vision; but that
shews, first, the rationalists will say anything to get
out of a difficulty; and secondly, their ignorance of
Jewish literature, which makes it plain that there
would be nothing extravagant in this narrative to the
Jewish mind. The Jews then could have believed
more absurd things than this, if any one could have
invented anything more absurd about the Devil. And
therefore when the plain and evident meaning is the
�io
On the Existence of Evil.
literal one, it is as immoral as it is unscientific to seek
for any other.
In the writings ascribed to St Paul, we find the
doctrine of evil spirits employed to account for nearly
all evil. The chief of these spirits is the “ prince of
the power of the air working in the children of dis
obedience,” “the God of this world, blinding the
minds of them which believe not,” and, with his hosts,
he constitutes the “ principalities and powers ” against
whom all spiritual warfare has to be maintained. All
not regenerated are “ the children of the devil,” and
“ his seed remaineth in them,” so that they cannot
cease from sin. Here you see is a trace of the old
Persian doctrine of Satan’s part in the creation of the
world. Wicked souls are created by the evil spirit—
and have their wickedness. The notions respecting
these evil spirits were taken up thus into the Christian
Church and developed there with the same absurdities
that we find amongst the later Jews. Some of the
Rabbi contended that they were created by God with
all their evil propensities, on the second day of the
work of creation at the same time that hell was created.
Others that their creation was on the sixth day, and
that God originally intended to provide them with
bodies, but that immediately on the creation of their
spirits the Sabbath commenced, so that there was no
time to complete this part of the work.
I must here make what may seem almost like a
digression to tell you a rabbinical story about Lilith,
but which also accounts for the origin of evil spirits.
Modern critics have noticed a contradiction between
the narrative given of the creation of woman in the
first and second chapters of Genesis. In the first she
appears to have been created at the same time with
Adam, and in the same way. In the second she is
created after him and out of his side. Now the Rabbi
saw the contradiction but explained it easily. They
are in fact the narratives of two distinct creations, said
�On the Existence of Evil.
11
they. First of all God did create a woman out of the
dust of the earth along with Adam. Her name was
Lilith. But as soon as created, she began, like some
modern ladies, to contend about her rights. Adam
said, It behoves thee to be obedient; I am to rule over
thee. Nay, said Lilith, we are on a perfect equality, for
we were both formed out of the same earth. So
neither would submit to the other. But Lilith finding
she was getting the worst of it, pronounced the Shemhamphorash—i.e., the forbidden name Jehovah.
Instantly she was carried away through the air and
became the mother of the evil spirits. God, to console
Adam, afterwards created Eve out of his rib.
Amongst all barbarous people that have any idea of
the supernatural at all the conception of evil spirits is
found. It seems to the barbarous mind the natural
counter-part of the notion of good spirits, and is as
necessary to explain existent evil as that of good spirits
is to explain existent good. Many of these nations pay
far more attention to the worship of the evil one than
they do to the worship of the good, because I presume
fear is a more predominant feeling with them than trust.
But now, it is a curious and not uninstructive
inquiry, how comes it to pass that so many people,
apparently quite independent of each other, conceived
this method of explaining the existence of evil, both
physical and moral? Nay, that many people, and some
of them those who are called well educated, in the
present day cling to this method still ? That even if
we grant the existence of evil spirits, it would be no
solution of the problem of evil, any thoughtful person
I should think can discern. It would only remove the
difficulties a step further back. For if evil spirits lead
men to evil, how came they to be allowed such a power,
and how came they to be evil ? The Persian doctrine
can be the only ultimate one in this direction, and
that cuts the knot of the difficulty but does not untie it.
Now, it seems to me easy enough to account for the
�12
On the Existence of Evil.
method, for it arises out of the same principle asfetishism, polytheism and all those animations of the
objects of nature which prevail in rude and barbarous
periods. The tendency of all uncultured minds is to
ascribe their own qualities to all the active powers in
nature. And hence every thing seems to them moved
by will, and is possessed of consciousness. By and
by a little culture slightly modifies this tendency.
As the natural object gives no sign of feeling, its
possession of volition begins also to be questioned.
Then comes the second, the polytheistic stage, when
the moving power, the will, and the consciousness are
supposed to reside not exactly in the natural objects
themselves but in genii or spirits belonging to them,
All nature is still instinct with life, but it is a life also
above and besides nature. It is at this period the
notion of evil spirits arises. Before, the natural object
that brought the evil was in men’s apprehension the
person who did it and was blamed. Now, it is the
spirit that moves the object for the purpose of inflicting
the evil. And when once the notion of an evil spirit,
above and beyond the object in nature which brings to
one evil is conceived, every terror, every calamity
multiplies the number and increases the dread of them.
Our great poet has supplied us with the illustration of'
this in the “ Midsummer Night’s Dream ” when Puck
frightens away the mechanics of Athens by introducing,
their companion with an ass’s head on his shoulder.
When they him spy,
As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,
Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort,
Rising and cawing at the gun’s report,
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,
So at his sight away his fellows fly :
And, at our stamp, here o’er and o’er one falls ;
He murther cries, and help from Athens calls.
Their sense thus weak, lost with their fears thus strong,.
Made senseless things begin to do them wrong ;
For briers and thorns at their apparel snatch ;
Some sleeves ; some hats ; from yielders
All
things catch.
�On the Existence of Evil.
*3
Now this is precisely the principle. Fear converts
the briers and thorns, catching their garments as they
flee, into spirits dwelling in the hnshes, overpowers
their senses, and drives them headlong before unseen
beings. And so before terrible calamities men became
overwhelmed with fear, and construed the calamities
as the work of evil spirits. It is the advance of science
which has expelled these evil spirits from the domain
of the physical world, and which is expelling them
from the domain of the mental world. In the physical
world the work is almost complete, so far as the Western
nations are concerned. What was formerly considered
the resrdt of the agency of good and bad spirits, angels
and demons, is now proved to be the effect of natural
forces acting according to fixed and unchanging laws.
Storms, plagues, earthquakes, and such like things are
now reduced to the categories of science, and the demons
are exorcised from them. A nation visited with
pestilence, and an old woman who has lost her cow, no
longer think it the work of the devil, but know it is
traceable to some natural cause.
The same cannot be said with the like extent of the
domain of mind. There are numbers, and some of
them so-called educated people, who not only believe in
the existence of evil spirits, but also that they have
power over the human mind to suggest evil thoughts,
and to arouse evil passions. The reason that the
notion lingers so much longer in the domain of mind
is quite evident. Thought and feeling have only of
late been made the objects of scientific enquiry, and
perceived to be subject to law. The metaphysicians
here have ruled with few to dispute their sway, and
whilst they have not been slow to admit the existence
of law in the order of the suggestion of thought and
the excitement of feeling, their dogmas concerning the
freedom of the will have overridden this law, and after
all made it a fitful uncertain thing. But the more
rigid investigations of modern biologists having reduced
�14
On the Existence of Evil.
thought, feeling, and will to the condition of functions
of animal life, have made them as severely subject to
natural law as any of the physical. functions are.
Thought and feeling originate in a definite order, and
by a force strictly correlated with nerve force. There is
no room left therefore for the play of evil spirits ; and
of necessity they become superannuated. But this
knowledge has not yet become widely spread, and those
ignorant of it are therefore left free to the play of their
fancies or the indulgence of their credulity. As soon
as fancy becomes chastened by knowledge they too will
lay aside such creations for facts.
But now, abandoning such a method of accounting
for evil, where are we ? What other shall we adopt ?
I shall not enter into the metaphysical explanations,
which are numerous. None of them can possibly
satisfy the mind, for they rest on no basis of fact, and
often seem nothing better than a cloud of obscure words
from which one cannot draw one ray of light. It avails
nothing to be told that “ evil is good in making,” that
it is “ the negation of good, and arises out of the
imperfection necessarily characterizing all finite things,”
and that it is “ the permitted means by which God
raises us to a higher condition.” Such phrases explain
nothing. They leave the facts only more obscured.
Bailing therefore all methods of explanation allow me
to urge upon you the only wise course left open to us.
And that is to give up all quest into the mystery, and
just deal with the facts as they are so as to remedy the
evil. All those teleological questions about the design
the creator had in this thing and in that; the questions
about the reasons of this and the other, are idle and
absurd. We know nothing of what lies beyond us, in
regions our senses cannot penetrate. We know nothing
of God’s mind, designs, or aims, beyond what is actually
done in nature. Let our theories therefore be ever so
well constructed upon mere ideas and fancies they
remain nothing but ideas and fancies still, and these
�On the Existence of Evil.
15
are not worth one moment’s care so long as they are not
tested by facts. And there would be no practical good,
even supposing it were possible, in solving such a
question as the origin and the reason of evil. It would
not make the pressure of the evil one whit the less. It
would not give us one particle of help towards removing
its pressure. What we really want to know is those
laws of nature by observing of which we may prevent
the evil, or if it come remedy it. And that, whether
we speak of physical or moral evil, we can only do by
the direct and careful study of nature—nature I mean
in her physical and moral aspects. And the long ages
that have been wasted in speculations about demons
and evil spirits, or in metaphysical fancies, are chiefly
to be regretted as so much time gone which might have
been devoted to the pursuit of this useful knowledge,
had men but cared more for facts than fancies, and
known how limited their powers are.
But their
absurdities and failures may teach us wisdom if we be
wisely inclined. Let us give up the foolish fanciful
pursuits of our fathers. Let us take the world as we
find it—let us study the order of its phenomena, and
the imposed conditions of human well-being and happi
ness. And then, although we may leave the mysteries
of evil unsolved, we shall daily become more free from
the evil.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS PRINTERS, EDINBURGH,
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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On the existence of evil
Creator
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Cranbrook, James
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 15 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Date of publication from British Library catalogue.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1874
Identifier
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RA1603
CT106
Subject
The topic of the resource
Ethics
Evil
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (On the existence of evil), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Good and Evil
-
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THE
CRIMINAL’S ASCENSION
A DISCOURSE
Given March 2nd 1879.
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
MINISTER OF SOUTH PLACE SOCIETY, AND AT THE
ATHENASUM, CAMDEN ROAD.
FRIGE TWOPENCE.
��THE CRIMINAL’S ASCENSION
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To a rational eye it would be difficult to picture a
more startling, scene than a man with the hangman on
one side preparing to strangle him, and a clergyman
on the other promising him bliss at God’s right hand.
But no eye can rationally take in at once a scene so
familiar. It requires patient analysis to discover the
full significance of a situation in which human society
by one officer decides that a man is unfit to live on
-earth, by another officer pronounces him quite fit for
the society of the beings it worships. In the majority
of modern executions, the gallows has been looked
upon by the criminals as a stepping-stone to eternal
glory; and no clerical voice have I ever heard denying
their probable ascension to Heaven. Theology still
represents a Christ saying to the malefactor, “ This
day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” The old
story was recently repeated when an exceptionally
base criminal exclaimed, “ I am going to Heaven/’
�4
and the chaplain said, “Lord Jesus receive his soul.”
I am glad to observe that the public conscience is
shocked, and common sense recoils.
Such ever-recurring facts reveal a fearful chasm
dividing the practical needs of man from the alleged
requirements of God. They disclose the awful fact
that “religion” and morality use totally different
weights and measures. The vilest scoundrel to one
may be a saint to the other. What moral laws pro
nounce a life of villainy outraging man and woman,
“ religion ” says may be outweighed by a few moments
of prayer to God and compliments to Jesus.
I think it is not going too far to say that it is
impossible for the masses of a community to obtain
any apprehension of the real nature of crime, so longas the religious instruction provided for them teaches
that the supreme rewards of existence are attainable
without reference to life and character. It does not
materially affect the case that the Ten Commandments
are solemnly repeated. The power of any law to
control human passions depends on the sanctions it
carries; and these sanctions are penalties. A whole
code of mere remonstrances against theft were vain.
The Decalogue, so far as it is enacted law, is powerful
simply because a punishment is affixed to each com
mand. But if the Legislature should provide that
every individual violating any law might escape its.
�5
< penalty by kneeling before the Queen, it would be
equivalent to abrogation of the law. Society could
not exist under such conditions.
The moral sentiment of a community is not repre
sented by its lawyers, but chiefly by its religious
teachers. The law-books represent certain practical
interests of society which may be of moral importance,
but may not. One law preserves the life of a pheasant,
-another the life of a man; the same code punishes
fictitious offences, like fishing out of season, and
immoralities. It is a business-like matter, and, were
there no moral or religious sentiment, a man might
take his day of sport out of season, or his neighbour’s
property, and run his risk, and feel no worse morally
for either.
There are indeed moral forces that can supplement
social laws, forces that for some wield heavy rewards
and punishments. There are men and women who
live lives of honour, honesty, and virtue with as little
reference to the law-books as to any future world.
But, unfortunately, for the less refined but more
tempted masses of the world, all the moral induce
ments to self-control are rendered nugatory by a
sacred system which transfers the sanctions, the
■rewards or penalties, from moral action to a ceremony,
to a motion of the lips, to that last abjectness of
.arrested villainy called repentance.
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The voice most authentic to the masses says tothem,—In the name of God we declare to you that
no merits of your own are of any importance in His
eyes. He sees not as man seeth. Your thefts, murders,
adulteries, cruelties, and general baseness, may be to
man of vast importance; but to God the one question
is, do you believe in his Son or not ? If you do, the
crimes, scarlet to men, are to Him white as snow.
Shew by kneeling, praying, accepting Christ as your
' Saviour, that you are all square towards God, and it
matters little what the world says and does to you. What
need one care for men if God is for him, and Jesuswaiting to take him to His bosom ? Fear not them
that kill the body and after that have no more that
they can do, but fear Him who is able to cast both
soul and body into hell fire 1
Those who have been liberally instructed mayimagine
that I am stating too strongly the voice that goes forth
to the masses in the name of religion; but, in truth, I
am stating not only what is largely taught, but what is
the necessary sense of all teaching, however interlarded
with morality, which gives man as his highest end and
aim something unconnected with morality. However
disguised by and for the cultivated, to the masses it
must mean that at last. There is in every mind in the
country which has not out-grown it a formula called
the Plan of Salvation.
It is declared by every
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church, every sect—substantially the same, under
superficial variations—to be a scheme formed by God
for raising man to angelic perfection, divine virtue,
eternal joy. And in this Plan of Salvation no provision
is made for morality. Not one item in it refers to
morality. Morality is not made a condition, nor im
morality a disqualification, for its full enjoyment. Its
conditions are confined to repentance for an ancient
personal offence—not a moral offence—committed by
Adam to his Maker, and an acceptance of a human
and divine sacrifice offered for that sin. It is a corol
lary of that Plan that no amount of crime can prevent
him who uses the charm from summoning the Holy
Ghost to his side, and enjoying all the favours which
God can bestow.
This Plan of Salvation may appear to you so irra
tional and immoral as to excite wonder how any one
can believe it, and doubt whether any human lives are
really practically guided by it. And this, indeed, is
the vital point. Our question is not whether this
notion of Salvation be really true, but whether it is
genuinely believed by those most tempted to evil, and
least surrounded by refined restraints. My own con
viction is that no system could be conceived more
exactly adapted to the rudimentary reason of the
ignorant, to the pauper sense of justice, and none can
so readily explain to the suffering masses the hard lot
�8
in which they are cast. In their hereditary disease
and despair, they have daily proof of hereditary sin;
the pedigree of their sorrow may as well go back to
Adam as to their grandfathers; they suffer for sins
' they never committed. And how shall they be saved?
Is it reasonable to say they can only be saved by being
moral, virtuous, honest, self-denying, truthful? Would
it be just in God to set on Heaven a price they cannot
pay ? By his decree their lot is amid ignorance, vice,
temptation, grossness; how then can he demand a
harvest where he has not sown ? The so-called Plan
of Salvation is an evolution out of ages of superstition
to meet just that low state of mind, that hard lot of
the ignorant and suffering, of which the intelligent and
the happy have little conception. High ethical science
has no meaning for them; but it appeals to their sense
: of right that their Maker should make Heaven as cheap
as earthly happiness is dear. It seems but fair to them
that one of the Godhead should bear the guilt of all
their sins, which grow out of that vile lot which the
Godhead arranged. They did not choose a life down
in the social mire. They do not feel the guilt of the
immoralities besetting that lot; and they listen favour: ably to the preaching which tells them they will go,
: like the penitent thief, straight from the prison or the
scaffold to the side of Jesus, there to be equals of the
proudest and greatest who despised them on earth.
�9
So runs a hymn—
“ Let the world despise and leave me,
Once they left my Saviour, too.”
In the course of its long experience, Roman
Catholicism had found the danger of this notion, and
the necessity of modifying the bold dogma of salvation
by faith alone, and had devised a purgatory. It said
to the evil man that he might be saved eventually,
however wicked, but in proportion to his bad conduct
would be the length and severity of his purification
after death. In the course of time, this dogma of
purgatory lost its value, deliverance from its pains
being offered for money, and Protestantism threw
away not only the theory but the experience of ages
which underlay it Protestantism offered the whole
world of men the indentical salvation, irrespective
of their merits or demerits.
Nay, we cannot disguise from ourselves, however
divines around us may try to disguise it from them
selves and us, that the logic of Protestant Christianity
goes even farther, and necessitates the position that
mere morality is a danger to the soul. The man of
cultivated reason has been found likely to trust his
reason ; the man of good works has a tendency to trust
to his good works ; and such have been proved less
amenable to the plan of trusting solely to the divine
scheme above reason and to the merits of Christ.
Under pressure of this experience, the sects have been
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reduced to the necessity of building up their strength
from those less addicted to reason and to good works,
and have evolved the doctrine that God looks with
special favour on the mind that fancies itself humble
when it is only uninquiring, and the character which
confuses its weakness with dependence on Christ.
This positive discouragement of the formation of
. self-reliant and moral character has, unhappily, found
a means of diffusing itself which theology could not
command,—namely, by hymns. Those especially of |
sects that deal with the masses are pervaded with I
contempt of good works.
The Wesleyans sing—
‘ ‘ Let the world their virtue boast
Their works of righteousness;
*•
I, a wretch undone and lost,
Am freely saved by grace.
Other titles I disclaim ;
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This, only this, is all my plea—
I the chief of sinners am,
But Jesus died for me.”
This special claim to Jesus’s favour—that one. is L
the chief of sinners—has passed to many hymns, from I t
the Bible. Unhappily, there is much in the New
Testament, when detached from its own time and
place, to confirm the faith of the coarse and ignorant
in their miserable conceit. Their teachers have perverted the liberalism of Christ and Paul to these
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meanest ends. Christ, in trying to do away with the
bigotry around him, seeking to expand Jewish minds
so as to include Samaritans, Greeks, Romans, as
children of a divine Father, sought to win them to
charity by sweet parables. He told them of the mer
chant who paid so largely for the pearl ; and what
- pearl was more beautiful than Greece ? He told them
of how the woman rejoiced when she found the lost
coin, the shepherd when he found the lost lamb, the
father when his prodigal son returned. All these
were pictures of the hated Gentiles. They are our
lost sheep, taught Christ, our wandering brother; if
they will mingle with us, let us not repel them—rather
we will kill the fatted calf and make merry, because
the lost is found. And in his enthusiasm he may
have said, 11 There should be more joy in our new
kingdom over one such returning wanderer—one
fraternal Gentile—than over ninety-nine that never
went astray from the true God after images.” When
these poetic metaphors were written down in the
doctrinal period—in the Gospels—Jesus was more
than a hundred years dead, Jerusalem was destroyed,
the parables had lost their special point, and so the
moral was made universal and false by saying,“ There
is joy among the angels over one sinner that repenteth
more than over ninety-nine just persons who went
not astray,” a text either absurd, or a direct encourage
ment of vice.
�12
According to that text the roughs of England may
not only behold in that chief of sinners, who ascended
at Sheffield, a hero bold, who long defied Great
Britain, and, when overpowered, died happy, but they
may also see him causing an equal commotion among
the angels, though one of delight, as they leave the
humdrum souls who never went astray to rejoice over
this dear, daring, sensational fellow, whose salvation
illustrates the potency of divine magic so much better
than that of a mere moral man.
Paul has been put through the same process of per
version as Christ; his admirable statements for one
situation wrested for another, and stereotyped into
dogma. In furthering Christ’s broad inclusiveness j
Paul had to confront the new difficulty that his J ewish
brethren were disposed to insist on the Gentiles sub
mitting to their ceremonial law. They were willing
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to receive the Gentiles as returning prodigals, but
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they must consent to obey all the regulations of the
father s house that is, the house of Israel. To this
the Gentiles would not submit; and it cost Paul the
labours of a life, and all his resources of eloquence
and art, to persuade the Jewish wing that a common
faith in Christ was all-sufficient without exacting from
Greeks and Romans the deeds of the law—that is, of
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course, the rites and ceremonial deeds of the Jewish
religion, circumcision and the like. When this argu-
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ment was detached from its point and purpose, when
it was read letter by letter by the eye of bibliolatry—
as little able to see its whole meaning as a fly the
statue over which it creeps—Paul’s “ deeds of the
law” were supposed to be the moral law—English
law; not circumcision and Sabbath, but laws against
theft and violence; and so Paul was brought at last
to sanction the dogma that men are saved by faith in
Christ, without requiring any good deeds, or con
formity with human laws.
It is greatly to the credit of human nature that this
.kind of teaching has not utterly corrupted Christian
society. If human nature had been half as bad as
theology says, the Christian name would to foreigners
have been synonymous with barbarism. But a great
many influences have intervened between the dogmas
and large numbers of the people—the saving grace of
common sense, pictures of virtue and vice on the
stage—these and other forces too complex to be now
considered have supplied some counterpoise to dogmas
that despise human merit. But there is a yet very
large class which may be called the potential criminal
.class—and against that class society is left with no
defence but that of superior force. It is a. war for
■advantages to the burglar, the murderer, in which he
:may be defeated, but in which he does not feel much
/disgrace or guilt, if any. His life is being lived in a
�general way under the necessity that knows no law,
and particular crimes are mere accidents in the
current that masters him. And he will remain somastered—without conscious responsibility or guilt—■
until a will is stimulated within him by some motive
of action stronger than that which tempts him. Now,
what is to stimulate in a person of strong appetites
the will to control those appetites ? Remember, our
problem now is not that of punishing crime, but of
how to keep people from committing crime. Can
Christianity do that ? What are the motives to which
it appeals ? Judgment Day and eternal Hell ? Now,
these would be very strong if they were penalties for
immorality, but Christianity repudiates that idea.
Hell it declares is for those who forget God, or donot believe on his Son. Consequently the criminal
may snap his fingers at the Day of Judgment. Hell
is a mere display of fireworks to the man who is
insured against it by the blood of Jesus. Charles
Peace, on the morning of execution, arose from
pleasant sleep, breakfasted heartily, then sat down and
wrote as follows :—“ To my dear wife and family,—I
tell you this great joy that I could not tell you yesterday.
No fear now, for it is all cleared up as to where I
am going to. I am going to heaven, or to the place
where the good go to that die in the Lord; or where
is the place appointed by God for the good to wait
�i5
until the resurrection of the dead. So do not forget!
Our meeting place is in heaven. So do come at the
last and you will find me there. This letter is wrote25 minutes before I die, so I must say good bye to
all. I am going to heaven.” A few moments after
he is on the scaffold preaching to the reporters, says
he is going to rest with the good till Judgment
Day, forgives his enemies, and says, “ I wish them tocome to the Kingdom, to die as I die.” That is hisbest wish for us all, to die as he died ! And that iswhat Judgment Day and Hell amounted to in the
eyes of this criminal. But what other motives canChristianity arouse now that it has enabled the criminal
to quench Hell with a drop of Christ’s blood? It
may say that it sets before him the life of Christ,—the perfect life,—-and so makes an affecting appeal toall the good in him. Be like Christ, it says. But that
ideal too it destroys by declaring Christ to be God.
The criminal is not a god. The virtues of a god are no
example to him. So far as Christ was a man his expe
riences are not attractive. We are now in Lent, and
Christendom recalls a poor man wandering in a wilder
ness 40 days, cold and hungry, resisting all temptations,
to get his living by evil ways. From a loaf of bread to
the kingdoms of the world, all the temptations were
offered him and resisted. What did he get by it ?*
A gallows. He might, to the criminal mind, he-
�i6
might well envy the happy end of our latest ruffian.
One sacrificed himself for others, and at execu
tion cried, “ My God, why hast thou forsaken me ?”
the other sacrificing others to himself, exclaims, “1
.am going to heaven.” So far as the virtuous, selfsacrificing, human life of Christ is concerned the re
ligion called after him goes into the criminal’s prison,
and in a few moments enables him to show vice tri.umphant, beside virtue agonizing on the cross of its
own Saviour. So it is on earth; and Christianity
.assures the criminal, converted after he can sin no
more, that heaven has the same place and rewards
for the life of crime and the life of virtue. He gets
.after a life of evil just what Christ gets after a life of
moral excellence. There are many Christians who
me moral, many who are wiser than their creed, but
-they cannot alter the remorseless logic of their
system. Either it is the blood of Jesus that saves
men or it is not. If man is saved by the sacrifice
and merits of Jesus, then he cannot be saved by his
-own merits or sacrifices. Consequently, so far as
eternal bliss and blessedness are concerned, he may
do without any merits or morality at all.
And in this claim, the very basis of Christ’s atone
ment, lies the fact that the criminal mind finds in
rthe orthodox system precisely its own method. For
what is the criminal mind ? It is a mind which seeks
�to gain advantages without working for them,—that
.it is, without fulfilling the conditions with which justice-
'di to others surrounds them. The criminal mind seeks
iri nothing that may not be fairly sought. This miser
able man, just executed, wanted beauty in dress, a
He:ai is quite credible when he declared that he never
fit? harmed living creature except when they were inter
fering with his appropriation of things he desired.
No man loves crime for itself. But the moral law>
says you must seek these things by patiently working
reft for them, not by snatching in a moment that for5
W which others have toiled, enriching yourself throughiiil the merits of others, or by sacrificing their lives to
ey your own happiness. But the criminal may point to
M a law holier than morality; to every Christian creed
iw which is on his side. Just as he gets his neighbour’smljewellery without toil, so is he to get paradise. Without
)fn| money and without price is he to attain the bliss of
eternity. By a great human sacrifice he is enabledj Oil to dispense with all toilsome conditions and
enjoy
jibj the celestial raiment and rubies that represent theheaven of every criminal’s dream—everything pretty
ms and pleasant, and no work to obtain them.
I
The essential superstition represented by the crimiteiil nal’s ascension to the right hand of God, by divine
aig grace, is as gross as anything among the Zulus. When
Sfi neat wagonette and horses, violins, and money.
�i8
'the chaplain, said, “Lord Jesus, receive his soul,” it
either meant that the vulgarest and meanest murderer
was a fit companion for Christ; or else it meant that
■a miracle was to be then and there wrought, and
villainy at once transmuted to perfection. The ascen
sion of the dead body through prison walls would be
no greater miracle than the ascension of that evil
mind to any realm of purity.
It is a superstition to suppose that animal had any
soul. Nevertheless, he might have had one had he
been born in a world that had made the best instead
■of the worst of him. From first to last his “ career,”
■as he grandly called it, reflects the unreason which
from the past has come to bind the present. A pre
tended religion turns his earthly life to a transient
trifle under the eternity to come ; and tells him that
his good or evil deeds here are equally unimportant;
•that heaven is had for the asking. Had religion told
him the truth, that this life is the only one he is sure
of, and that it is the only possible life he could have,
unless he developed moral powers useful elsewhere,
he might have ascended from animalism to manhood.
When this solemn sanction of his indolence and
worthlessness have borne their evil fruit, the law pro
ceeds to make him a hero, the sensation of months.
Biographies of him, reminiscences of him, myths and
legends, accounts of his down-sitting and up-rising;
�19
and all because he is slain like some formidable
prisoner of war. “ I want you, sir,” he said to the
clergyman, “to preach a special sermon over my case
. . . to hold me and my career up as a beacon ”—
such is his grand phraseology—“ that all who see may
avoid my example.” But is that the effect of his emi
nence ? Thousands of the wretched around us now see
how their obscure lives may achieve fame. As the
Saturday Review said, no statesman, author or artist
could hope to receive such obsequious attention at
death. Whereas it had been easy to put that man in
a particoloured dress with a chain gang, paving roads
for honest men, and make him a living witness to the
criminal’s disgrace and degradation, as he now is of
the criminal’s glory and ascension. He said, “ I hope
God will give me strength to go like a hero to the
scaffold. I had much rather die than live in penal
servitude.” Why not, when death meant ascension
to glory, and the other meant just that hard work it
was the aim of his life to avoid. Years ago he at
tempted suicide to escape a term of hard labour. I have
no sentiment about the death of such people, except
that I believe such death too good for them. My ob
jection is not sentimental, but scientific. It is a terrible
error for society to suppose that swift death is the
severest punishment. The Bible represents Satan as
believing that all that a man hath he will give for his
�20
life; but that was written by a people who believed
in no future life, and it was said about a man who had
a great deal to lose. But our criminals come of classes
to whom earth means poverty and misery, and heaven
means luxurious idleness. It is a great error to believe
that death is the chief deterrent to these. The main
terror of it fled when theology allowed salvation to alL
That was the practical abolition of hell. It has pro
claimed to the scoundrel world that it may cheat men
in this life, and then cheat the devil in the next. It
has added to the criminal’s morbid satisfaction in
creating a sensation, the assurance of ascension to
heaven by a more painless death than Charles Peace
had twice sought by his own act.
Waterlew & Sons Limited, Printers, London Wall, London.
�
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The criminal's ascension : a discourse given March 2nd 1879
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Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 20 p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Printed by Waterlow and Sons, London Wall. Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2.
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[1879]
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G3344
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Crime
Evil
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English
Crime and Punishment
Crime-Religious Aspects-Christianity
Good and Evil
Morris Tracts
Salvation
Social Problems