English
Good is alone eternal and positive, and Evil is its instrument. The opposition therefore is but temporary, or seeming ; so far as it is real, it must pass away, and so far as it abides, it must effect good. Thus it is a beginning of doctrine, with both Israelites and Christians, that the eternal God made the worlds out of nothing : not out of evil matter, but out of nothing ; for until you imagine goodness un- derneath as a cause, there is nothing but blank, and no reason for anything, such as we find being, to be. How far, indeed, the Eternal Spirit should be conceived of as limited by time EVIL. 341 in the effects of His goodness, any more than in its being, or whether the effect may for ever have partaken of the eternity of its causer, is a question of metaphysics rather than of religion; and I will not entangle myself in it. Since, however, that which we call evil, comes of eternal possibilities, or of necessities con- ditional to creation, so it has, in one sense, its root nowhere else than in the mind of the Creator. Thus the greatest of the Hebrew prophets is not afraid to imagine the Lord God as Baying, / make peace^ and I create evil; I the Lord do all these things. But in so far as the possibility thus created, or conceived, comes of Grod, it is also a capacity of a preponderat- ing weight of good ; and so far as it goes off in aberration or overflow, its effect is but as a spray of the ocean, which is dried up in the sun. Surely, to the eye of true faith tlie domain of good is ever enlarging itself, and that of evil becoming only a field of subordinate instrumentalities, and of conflicts which are capa- cities of something better. Of the physical world this is most manifestly true. Thus, if in any ruder age, the storm or the darkness should have been thought a messenger of some malig- nant demon, and nature have seemed as full of Rdcshasas as of deities, even though such a conception should have tinged the popular sayings of religious teachers whom we venerate, neither our science nor our faith will suffer it to endure. For science says, that all storms are parts of the great scheme of nature, which its Author must have designed, and experience answers that their operation is in many ways wholesome, and our faith remembers how the Hebrew Psalmists of old represented storm and lightning and earthquake as messengers of Jehovah, and how the Hebrew prophet conceives of the same Jehovah as saying, I form the lights and I create darkness. In short, * the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof.' Again, in human nature, we can strike out* radically no appetite, passion, or impulse, without destroying also a capacity for good, which our * This topic is handled in the first sermon in a volume called "Rational God- liness;" London, 1854. 342 THE ENEMY. Maker designed. Only the abuse or perversion of such things is evil, and this neither our Maker designed, nor we can inno- cently fall into, but we avoid it in proportion as we enter His kingdom and do His will. But if we, having reason and con- science and choice, hang back from fulfilling His will in our- selves, we can neither wonder at senseless elements coming short of it, nor complain of hinderances from confrision in the vast theatre of their play. " Some of the wisest Christians, finding evil thus evanescent rather than essential in the scheme of the world, and in human nature, so far as its capacities are given by God, think that the same vanishing extends into the region of spiritual beings, as we learn more of it. Just as the rain-cloud of the Vedic hymns was transformed into a giant, and the smallpox is thought by some of your simpler people to be a goddess becoming incarnate, so agencies which seemed hostile have everywhere been shaped by rude imaginations into personalities reflecting that of the observer; and especially in the Zoroastrian lore, the play of seeming opposites, such as light and darkness, in nature, sug- gested an eternal duality of the Good and Evil Spirits. Much more in the region of mind, the quick play of thought, and the oppositions of passion, conscience, and remorse, suggest a duality, as of God and the great enemy. That which seduces, or irritates, or alarms and drives to despair with accusations'^, may well seem a devil, that is, an accuser, or a satan, that is, an enemy. Yet such things in the mind, no less than the tempests in nature, * The word Denl meana an accuser, and Satan an enemy. Both are applied i n Holy Scripture, often to men; as in Psalm cix. 6, i St Peter v. 8, where the hos. tile informer is compared to a roaring lion. Satan also, or his messenger, seems a term given to any obstacle in good, as a sickness, or a persecution : also to Death, as the last enemy; but in the widest generalisation, to the spirit of all hostile agen- cies considered collectively ; yet most properly of an evil spirit working in ditobeditnt men. No scripture older than the Babylonian exile speaks of S atan as a personal demon or fallen angel, unless it be the story of the serpent in Genesis, which the Jews did not so interpret, though St Paul, in his manner, adapts it. The Satan to Balaam is the angel of the Lord; and in Job is an accusing angel, conceived dif- ferently from the evil demon, bound in chains and darkness, of a later age. THE ENEMY. 343 may be bom out of capacities for good, or be remedies for the evil we create to ourselves by simiing. Thus a man inflamed mth desire, or swollen with anger, or trembling at the dark images which accusing conscience conjures up before him, is possessed with a legion of evil impulses, which are evil breath- ings or spirits in him ; but if he could be turned truly to Gk)d, and sobered by deep penitence, and cleansed by confession, the mansions of his soul would be swept clean, and the perversion of better things having vanished, the thought of Gt>d might cany out its own design in the man, and he would be delivered from evil. " Perhaps the friends of this theory do not quite remember, tliat we acknowledge human agents to have the power of creating evil in themselves by the volition of their spirits ; and as this does not hinder the design of our Maker from being good, neither need it, if a like perversion is self-chosen by spiritual agents whom we do not see. Again, as men use the instincts of lower animals towards ends which the animals are not conscious of, though their agency in the acting is spontaneous, so it is con- ceivable that malignant spirits might use for ends of their own the spontaneous passions of sinfril men. But I will not argue this nicely; for, no doubt, the field open to such spirits would be ever limited alike by the encompassing providence of God, and by the determination of our own free will; and again, the Christian faith is in God, rather than in any enemy, and not so much in evil, as in God's delivering us from it. Some phrases current among simpler Christians, may partly come of that per- sonifying power which must last as long as the human imagi- nation, and partly be echoes caught lightly from older faiths, or times in which the same power was more vivid. Nor does it much matter, whether with an eye of imagination tinged by sense, we see the great enemy and his armed battalions quailing before the host of Seraphim, as in Milton's great poem, or whether impalpable evil fades like darkness before our fuller consciousness of the outcoming of the goodness of God. In 344 THE KINGDOM ETERNAL. either case, we say, * Blessed be God, who putteth every enemy under our feet.' The last enemy that is overcome is death. He who leadeth not into temptation, but delivereth from evil, shews also His law pervading all that nature, over parts of which a hostile prince was once thought to have power, and brings daily more to light His thought evolving itself in man- kind, and turns hostile accidents to good, or at least makes them tolerable by giving us an inward peace ; He also comforts us through every bereavement and death, by a persuasion that neither height, nor depth, nor life, nor death, nor time, nor eter- nity, can ever separate us from the embrace of that power which made all things to be, and that love which brings all things to good. ^^ For thine is the htngdam^ (See, Here the Christian hope of immortality falls in with the great instinct of mankind, and the aspirations of most of the noblest reasoners everjrwhere.