The Origin of Evil.

"The Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."-GENESIS ii. 16, 17.

S the existence of evil compatible with the existence of God?

Some

This is a problem which in reality admits of a comparatively simple solution. It has often however been made to appear unnecessarily difficult, and indeed unanswerable, through ignorance or forgetfulness of the nature of the process which in Logic is called abstraction. thinkers, for instance, have attempted to minimise the evilness of evil by maintaining that it did not really exist at all, that it was purely negative, the mere absence of goodness. But manifestly this argument cuts both ways. If nothing can exist which is the negation of any

thing else, goodness itself must be non-existent. Good is as much the negation of evil as evil is the negation of good. And, indeed, goodness does not exist in one sense; it does not exist as a definite concrete thing. The term merely sums up the common qualities of a certain class of actions. It is what is called an abstract term. After a number of actions have been compared, they are found to agree in certain particulars, and these particulars common to all, having been abstracted in thought from everything peculiar to each, are formed into a separate notion or conception. One of the most fruitful sources of human error has been the fact that these abstract notions are so frequently mistaken for actual concrete things. If we use the word goodness as a synonym for God, reflection will show we cannot mean that the Deity is nothing more than a quality of His own actions, but that the quality in question is the most characteristic of His divine nature. Similarily in regard to evil. It is not a concrete thing, but an abstract term. It represents the common qualities of a certain class of actions. The existence of evil, therefore, means the existence of beings who act evilly. And so the problem as to the origin of evil resolves itself simply into this,-Is God responsi

ble for the evil acts of these beings? or if not, who is ? 1

Theologians generally tell us that evil must have been permitted by God for some wise purpose; but that it is impossible to imagine what that purpose could have been. They talk as if reason, apart from faith, would suggest that God ought to have prevented evil, and that, had He done so, we should have found ourselves much more fortunately situated than we are. Now reason, I take it, teaches no such thing. It shows us, on the contrary, that the prevention of evil would have made our world not better than it is, but infinitely worse.

There are only three conceivable ways in which evil could have been prevented. (1) God might have refrained from creating beings capable of sinning; or (2), having created such beings, He might have kept them from temptation; or (3), allowing them to be tempted, He might have forcibly prevented them from yielding.

1st, Suppose that He had created only beings incapable of sinning. That would have been to

1 One of my reviewers asks, “What can we mean by ‘responsible' in relation to God?" On this subject see a sermon on the "Obligations of the Deity" in my 'Preaching and Hearing.'

create nothing higher than a brute. If He had not formed creatures capable of doing wrong, He could not have formed any capable of doing right: for the two things inevitably go together. He only is able to do right, who is able at the same time (if he please) to do wrong. Let me give you a very simple illustration. I wish this desk to hold my sermon-case, and it does so. Do I therefore thank and praise it, and feel grateful to it, and call it good and kind, for obeying me? No! Why? Because it cannot disobey; and for this reason it cannot be properly said to obey. Take, again, the case of the lower animals. At first sight it might seem as if some animals could lay more claim than many men to the possession of a conscience. But it is probable that their best actions are done merely from an instinctive and irresistible impulse of affection. They can, of course, be kept from doing certain things, by the knowledge that if they do them they will be punished: they may be cured of stealing, for example, by being whipped when they do steal. But they could not be taught to refrain from it because it was an infringement of another's rights. Since they have no language properly so called, and since (so far as we are able to judge) their reasoning is always restricted