Part 69

In the preceding notices of Scripture, no sanction is given to the interpretations, if such there be, which resolve Satan into a personification, treat the temptation as a vision or an allegory, and identify the demoniac phraseology with the common language of pathological description. I believe, indeed, that, wherever the Devil and his agency are named, the only _real fact_ denoted is, the occurrence to some one of a moral temptation: and that, wherever demons are said to have been cast out, the only _historical event_ described is, the cure of some physical or mental disease. But it appears to me absurd to deny, that the writers meant more than this; to doubt that they held the popular theory of such facts, and blended it naturally with their record; that they were sincerely under the influence of the existing system of demonology, and referred the seductions of sin to the personal activity of the malignant Spirit. Nowhere, however, do they pretend to set forth these ideas as gifts of preternatural revelation, but simply take them up as part of the common media of thought belonging to the age, and use them as the incidental colouring to their narrative of facts. In different parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, as we have seen, very different, and even inconsistent notions respecting the origin of evil prevail: the conception of a powerful diabolic agent underwent a regular and natural development: and the system of pneumatology apparent in the Greek Scriptures is traceable to a foreign origin in an uninspired age. Hence we must conclude, that respecting the origin of evil, nothing doctrinal is specially revealed; that even in Palestine, the human mind has been left to grapple with this great problem by its own natural forces; and that we rise from the page of Scripture, as from the speculations of wisdom and genius, with the difficulty yet unsolved.

By no means, then, can we attain to any theoretical certainty, or logical consistency of belief, on this great topic. Revelation is silent, and philosophy perplexed; and the controversy between the Religion of Conscience and the Religion of the Understanding, is undecided still. Let the framers of systems say what they will, the thing is deeper than our minds, and what can we know? Nothing remains, but to abandon hopelessly the speculative point of view, and treat the matter as an object, not of knowledge, but of trust; to regard it as a question to be decided by its bearings on duty, rather than its materials for debate. Whenever the means of attaining to objective truth do not exist, we can but rest in those views of things which most entirely accord with our best nature. If we cannot tell what is true of God, we yet may judge what is fittest for ourselves; what state of mind, what modes of thought, prepare us best for the work of life; what mental representation of existence most nobly sustains those fundamental moral convictions, which it is the end of Christianity to fix in our implicit faith and constant practice. To this arbitration we must submit our present doubts respecting the source of evil; and, while waiting to reach the realities of reason denied us now, accept, as our best truth, the conceptions which are most just to our moral nature and relations.

III. Let us then, for final decision, consult the practical spirit of Christianity, and ascertain to what view of the origin of sin it awards the preference. Is it well, for the consciences and characters of men, to consider God,—either directly or through his dependant Satan,—either by his general laws, or by vitiating the constitution of our first parents,—as the primary source of moral evil? _or_, on the contrary, to regard it as, in no sense whatever, willed by the Supreme Mind, and absolutely inimical to his Providence? Are we most in harmony with the characteristic spirit of the gospel, when we call sin his instrument, or when we call it his enemy? For myself, I can never sit at the feet of Jesus, and yield up a reverential heart to his great lessons, without casting myself on the persuasion, that God and evil are everlasting foes; that never, and for no end, did he create it; that his will is utterly against it, nor ever touches it, but with annihilating force. Any other view appears to be injurious to the characteristic sentiments, and at variance with the distinguishing genius, of Christian morality.

(1.) Christianity is distinguished by the profound sentiment of _individual responsibility_ which pervades it. All the arbitrary forms, and sacerdotal interpositions, and hereditary rights, through which other systems seek the divine favour, are disowned by it. It is a religion eminently _personal_; establishing the most intimate and solitary dealings between God and every human soul. It is a religion eminently _natural_; eradicating no indigenous affection of our mind, distorting no primitive moral sentiment; but simply consecrating the obligations proper to our nature, and taking up with a divine voice the whispers, scarce articulate before, of the conscience within us. In this deep harmony with our inmost consciousness of duty, resides the true power of our religion. It subdues and governs our hearts, as a wise conqueror rules the empire he has won; not by imposing a system of strange laws, but by arming with higher authority, and administering with more resolute precision, the laws already recognised and revered.

This sense of individual accountability,—notwithstanding the ingenuities of orthodox divines on the one hand, and necessarian philosophers on the other,—is impaired by all reference of the evil that is in us to _any source beyond ourselves_. To look for a remoter cause than our own guilty wills,—to contemplate it as a Providential instrument, whether we trace it to Adam, to Satan, or directly to God, bewilders the simple perceptions of conscience, and throws doubt on its distinct and solemn judgments. The injury may be different in character, according to the particular system we adopt: but _any_ theory which provides the individual moral agent with participating causes of his guilt, offends and weakens some one of the feelings essential to the consciousness of responsibility.

There is no persuasion, for example, more indispensable to this state of mind, and, consequently, no impression which Christianity more profoundly leaves upon the heart, than that of the _personal origin and personal identity of sin_,—its individual, incommunicable character. Our own secret souls, and that divine gospel which confirms all their sincere decisions, alike declare that _my_ sin cannot be _your_ sin; that by no compact, even by no miracle, can any exchange of responsibilities, or transfer of moral qualities, be effected. What indeed is guilt in its very nature, but a violation of some venerated rule of action,—a contravention of our own sentiments of equity, truth, purity, or generosity? and what is the guilty mind, but a system or habit of desire, which successfully resists the control of reason and conscience? That mind which is the seat of the delinquent will,—which hears the remonstrances of right, and heeds them not,—is the sole proprietor of the sin, deriving it from none, imparting it to none: its dwelling is in his volition; and unless that can cease to be his, the criminality can admit of no alienation. He may have accomplices indeed: but they are so many additional agents, each with his separate amount of guilt, and not partners among whom his one act of free-will is distributed. The trains of thought and emotion, the adjustment of tastes and affections, are different in every soul: each has its own moral complexion; each, its separate moral relations; each, its distinct responsibility in the sight of God. In no sense is the gift or transfer of character more possible, than a barter of genius, or an interchange of sensation. God may call new life into existence, and determine what its consciousness shall be: he may annihilate life, and plunge its memory and experience into nothing: but to shift the feelings and aims which constitute the identity of one being into the personality of another, is no more possible, than to alter the properties of a circle, or to cancel departed time.

To trifle in any way with this plain and solemn principle, to invent forms of speech tending to conceal it, to apply to moral good and ill, language which assimilates them to physical objects and exchangeable property, implies frivolous and irreverent ideas of sin and excellence. The whole weight of this charge evidently falls on the scheme, which speaks of human guilt as an hereditary entail; a scheme which shocks and confounds our primary notion of right and wrong, and, by rendering them impersonal qualities, reduces them to empty names. No construction can be given to the system, which does not pass this insult on the conscience. In what sense do we share the guilt of our progenitor? His concession to temptation did not occur within our mind, or belong in any way to our history. And if, without participation in the _act_ of wrong, we are to have its _penalties_,—crimes in the planet Saturn may be expected to shower curses on the earth; for why may not justice go astray in space, as reasonably as in time? If nothing more be meant, than that from our first parents we inherit a constitution _liable_ to intellectual error and moral transgression;—still, it is evident, that, _until_ this liability takes actual effect, no sin exists, but only its possibility; and _when_ it takes effect, there is just so much guilt and no more, than might be committed by the individual’s will: so that where there is _no_ volition, as in infancy, cruelty only could inflict punishment; and where there is _pure_ volition, as in many a good passage of the foulest life, equity itself could not withhold approval.

In whatever way, then, you define this hypothesis, it directly denies the personal character and personal identity of sin, and thus enfeebles the most essential element comprehended in the sentiment of responsibility. The practical result will inevitably be, a system of false views and fictitious feelings, with respect both to our own characters, and to those of our fellow-men. That which can be vicariously incurred, or vicariously removed, cannot be guilt; cannot therefore, be sincerely felt as such; can awaken no true shame and self-reproach, and draw forth no burning tears when we meet the eye of God. It is a shocking mockery to call sorrow for an ancestor’s sin by the name of penitence, and to confound the perception (or, as it is termed, ‘application,’) of Christ’s holiness with the personal peace of conscience: the one can be nothing else than moral disapprobation, attended by the sense of personal injury; the other, moral approval, attended by the sense of personal benefit: and mean and confused must be the sentiments of duty in a mind which can mistake these for the private griefs of contrition, and the serenity of a self-forgetful will. Only counterfeit emotions, and self-judgments half sincere, can consistently arise from a faith which mystifies the primitive ideas of moral excellence, and destroys all distinct perception of its nature. It is always with danger that we turn away from the _natural_ hand-writing of God upon the conscience: from heedless eyes the divine symbols fade away; unless, indeed, in some preternatural awakening of our sight, they blaze forth once again, to tell us that the kingdom of true greatness hath departed from us. Let each consider his own life as an indivisible unit of responsibility, no less complete, no less free, no less invested with solemn and solitary power, than if he dwelt, and always had dwelt, in the universe alone with God. There is confided to him, the sole rule of a vast and immortal world within; whose order can be preserved or violated, whose peace secured or sacrificed, by no foreign influence. We cannot, by ancestral or historical relations, renounce our own free-will, or escape one iota of its awful trusts. No faith which fails to keep this truth distinct and prominent, no faith which shuffles with the sinner’s moral identity, contains the requisites of a “doctrine according to godliness.” It must pervert, moreover, our estimates of others’ characters, no less than of our own. If guilt can be hereditary,—guilt meriting infinite and indiscriminate punishment,—it must be universal: and whether we see it or not, we must believe it to exist, with no appreciable variation of degree, in every human heart. Thus it becomes a prime duty to regard every thing in life, except its wretchedness, every thing in human nature, except its displays of foulness and of ruin, as a delusion and a cheat. We strongly protest against this miserable distrust of our best and truest perceptions. We maintain the intelligible and appreciable character of all moral qualities, in opposition to all schemes which make distinction between natural and theological excellence, and which propose imaginary standards of right, different from those that recommend themselves to a discerning conscience. Sin is no mysterious thing, no physical poison, no taint in the blood, which may lurk venomously within us, giving no symptom, and exciting no consciousness, of its presence. However insidious in its approaches, and subtle in its manifestations, vigilance only is needed to detect it: its stealthiness affords, indeed, a sound reason for circumspection; but not for superstitious horror at its possible existence, without discoverable trace, in ourselves or others. To look on the spectacle of vice, and not feel abhorrence, indicates a depraved state of sentiment:—to look on the spectacle of virtue, and believe it sin, to witness all the outward expressions of goodness and suspect interior corruption, to be invited by natural emotion to moral admiration, and, by theological stimulants, to galvanise the heart into loathing (or even “pity”) instead, implies a falsehood of conscience no less malignant. Let me not be told that, in thus speaking, we assign too high a value to mere external moralities, which are but treacherous indications of character, and may be the visible fruit of various and dubious motives. We never cease to teach, that no Epicurean respectabilities, no conformity with conventional rules of order, can satisfy the claims, or afford any of the peace of duty, unless they be the native growth of a perceptive, devout, and loving heart:—that it is not in the hand which executes, but in the soul which devises and aspires, in the secret will which makes sacrifice of self, in the conscience which grapples with temptations and overmasters fears, that true and immortal virtue dwells; since acts are evanescent, while the affections are eternal. But it is monstrous to infer from this superficial character of outward morality, that there is probably no substratum of genuine goodness. Nay, it is a mean and degrading scepticism which distrusts, without assignable cause, the reality of any of the symptoms of excellence; is tempted by theories of divinity to insinuate that they are an empty semblance; and plies its pious ingenuity to blacken the great human heart. He that is pledged to make out a case against mankind at large, must find of difficult attainment that charity that “hopeth all things and believeth all things.” How blunted must be the delicacy of moral perception, where the gradations of excellence are swept away into the dark abyss of universal depravity! and to effect this reduction of all minds to the same level, what vehement distortion, what wretched sophistries, what devotional scandal and romance, must become habitual! How much less place for delusion and insincerity is there, when we maintain a reverential faith in the natural moral sentiments, repress no generous admiration, disbelieve no genuine expression of disinterestedness and integrity, and instead of whining over guilt, dare to bless God with a manly voice, for all varieties of noble virtue!

Thus does the habit of tracing sin beyond the individual will to a progenitor, spread confusion over the moral perceptions, by mystifying the nature of guilt, and destroying that feeling of its personal character and identity which belongs to the Christian sentiment of responsibility.

By a different and directer method the same tendency operates, when we refer our temptations to the agency of the Devil, rather than to our descent from Adam. An invisible power, foreign to ourselves, is held chargeable, to an undefined extent, with the evil of our own wills; and the conscience can as ill bear the present distribution, as the past transmission of its guilt. It is said indeed, that man is not “less culpable, because Satan seduces him, and blinds his mind” since there is no power on earth or hell to _compel_ him to transgress; that he is a willing captive, and no more to be excused than when a human accomplice entices him to crime, without (it is admitted) relieving him of any portion of his criminality.[566] But the cases are obviously not parallel. Man stands up before his fellow man, equal with equal; his weapons are fairly measured against his danger, by the great Arbiter himself; and therefore is he summoned to close with his temptations, and condemned as a traitor if he yields or flies. And should it ever be otherwise,—should the feeble-minded and inexperienced be misled by the cunning of the strong-headed and practised seducer, the instinctive justice of mankind mitigates its sentence, and commiserates the fall. With how much greater force, then, must this palliation be felt, when the Tempter is admitted to be “possessed of capacity and power immensely surpassing ours,”[567]—a “master-spirit” of majestic intellect, with whom we are as an infant in the giant’s grasp! With such a being, the broken energy, the purblind vigilance, of a fallen man, can hardly be expected to cope; at least they will be induced, in so plausible a case, to _esteem themselves_ unfairly matched against so exalted a competitor. While it were earnestly to be desired that the wretched conscience should be allowed no evasion, and for awhile no alleviation, under the condemning sentence of its memory and its God,—this doctrine calls up, inevitably and reasonably, the feeling of a divided criminality, of which the weaker nature has the smaller share.

These tendencies, so far as they have been truly stated, must continue to act, so long as we trace the evil that is in us to _any_ foreign agent. Hence it appears impossible to defend the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity,—which presents God to us as the author of sin and suffering,—from the same charge of invading the sense of personal responsibility. Not that we are for a moment to sanction the vulgar error which confounds this scheme, in its theoretical structure and practical effects, with the system of fatalism; or to imagine, that an abdication of all free-will, and a total indifference to moral distinctions, would be its proper and consistent results. Though, however, it leaves room for individual pursuit, and motive to individual perfection, one of its chief and most vaunted features undoubtedly is, the encouragement which it affords to the _passive virtues_: and it will be found, I greatly fear, that it is their _passiveness_, more than their _virtuousness_, which puts them under the protection of this doctrine. Doubtless, he who can look on all men as the instruments of heaven, and recognize in their mutual injuries and crimes the chosen methods of the Divine government, must learn submission to many a triumph of wrong, and consider anger against the profligate and oppressor as insubordination against God. He who is haunted by the immutability of things, and feels himself locked in with the universal mechanism, will chafe himself with no rash spirit of resistance, nor vainly thrust his hand against the fly-wheel of nature. He who believes that all things are right, that absolute evil does not exist, that whatever men may be, and whatever they may do, nothing could possibly be better, must needs discover that his own wishes are no criterion of good, and look with a contented eye over the whole surface of the past, as well as a serene trust on the prospect of the future. Nor can there be any self-exaggeration in a mind conscious of possessing but an infinitesimal fraction of the universal power,—and even that little wielded and directed by an uncontrollable sovereignty, that turns the hearts of men whithersoever it pleaseth. Complacency with every lot, resignation to all events, forbearance under injury, an equal tenderness for all men, and the lowliest attitude before God, are the unquestionable results of this religious philosophy. But all this is attained by a process which, I would submit, the moralist is bound to regard as illegitimate;—by an appeal to external mechanical necessity, rendering any thing but these states of mind intellectually improper; not by any considerations of _duty_, or any perception of their _intrinsic obligation_. The whole efficacy of the system is negative, not positive. It prostrates and destroys the turbulent elements of our nature, and its quietude is the residue left by their exhaustion: it crumbles beneath us the heights of passion, and deposits us upon a placid level beneath the infinite expanse. Its characteristic dispositions are reached by the sacrifice of the feelings which are distinctively _moral_:—the feelings, that is, of which right and wrong acts and propensities are the appropriate objects;—the feelings of approbation and aversion, which recognize merit and demerit, and impel to praise and blame. The Necessarian sees, neither in himself nor others, any good or ill desert to justify such feelings: he regards natural and moral qualities in the same light,—contemplating benevolence as a species of health, and selfishness as akin to disease: if he utters censure or applause, it is not _from_ an impulse in himself, but _for_ an effect upon their object. In his love to men moral distinctions have no place; for as their sins justify no alienation, their virtues give no claim to admiration: he loves them apart from the perceptions of conscience,—without veneration,—without praise,—by the mere force of the sympathies which take interest in sentient beings as capable of happiness and misery:—loves them, may we not say, because there is no cause for hate; resentment, impatience, disgust, being out of place towards creatures who are what they were meant to be, nothing remains but to include them in his complacency. Nor does the _humility_ which this system inculcates, bear the true and Christian stamp. It is not the irrepressible aspiration after moral perfection, the pursuit of an image in the conscience infinitely beautiful and great, the devoted worship of the holy, good, and true, which draw forth tears of contrition for the past, and dwarf the attainments of the present, though reckoning their thousand victories; but it is rather a sense of physical and mental insignificance, which annihilates all worth except such as we may derive from sharing the regards of God: it is not a perception of want of merit in our character, but a consciousness of incapacity for it in our nature.