SWlGGllFOR 
 EXISTENCE 
 
 B.H.Streeter 
 
THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
God and the 
 Struggle for Existence 
 
 BY 
 
 THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN 
 LILY DOUGALL 
 
 AND 
 
 CANON B. H. STREETER 
 
 (EDITOR) 
 
 ASSOCIATION PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK : 347 MADISON AVENUE 
 1919 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY 
 
 THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF 
 
 YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 "GoD is dead," says Nietzsche's Zara- 
 thustra; and there are many who, in face 
 of the evil of the world, are afraid he may 
 be right, yet still "faintly trust the larger 
 hope." This book is written to suggest to 
 such that there are solid grounds in reason 
 for the contrary conviction God is alive, 
 and from Him we may get power ourselves 
 to really live. 
 
 CUTTS END, 
 CUMNOR, Augutt, 1919. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY .... 7 
 
 By B. HILLMAN STREETER, M.A., Hon. D.D. Edin. 
 Fellow of Queeu's College, Oxford, Canon Residentiary 
 
 of Hereford 
 Editor of "Foundations"; "Concerning Prayer"; 
 
 "Immortality"; "The Spirit" 
 Author of "Restatement and Reunion" 
 
 II. LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE . . 15 
 
 By the Most Rev. CHARLES F. D'ARCY, D.D. 
 
 Archbishop of Dublin 
 
 Author of "A Short Study of Ethics"; "Idealism and 
 
 Theology"; "God and Freedom in Human 
 
 Experience," etc. 
 
 III. THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST . 65 
 
 By LILY DOUGALL 
 
 Author of "Pro Christo et Ecclesia"; "The Practice 
 of Christianity," etc. Joint Author of "Concern- 
 ing Prayer"; "Immortality"; "The Spirit" 
 
 IV. POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE . 108 
 
 By LILY DOUGALL 
 
 V. THE DEFEAT OF PAIN ... 154 
 
 By B. HILLMAN STREETER 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 BY B. HILLMAN STREETER, M.A., 
 Hon. D.D. Edin. 
 
 Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford; Canon Residen- 
 tiary of Hereford 
 
 "!F the gods," said Socrates, "do not The 
 prefer the good man to the evil, then it j* 
 is better to die than to live." Unless we 
 are convinced that in the last resort the 
 power behind the Universe is on the 
 side of righteousness, the mainspring of 
 endeavour is broken, the lamp of hope is 
 almost quenched. But during the last 
 hundred years or so there have been not 
 a few to whom it has appeared that the 
 discoveries of modern science have made 
 the existence of God "an unnecessary 
 hypothesis." There are many more to 
 whom the experience of the war has made 
 it an incredible one. 
 
 The problem of evil, the question 
 whether life has any meaning, the doubt 
 
8 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 of the existence of God, are felt with an 
 unprecedented acuteness by the present 
 generation a generation of which it may 
 be well said that "the iron has entered into 
 its soul." And those who have drunk the 
 cup of bitterness to the dregs are apt to 
 feel a peculiar irritation at the easy opti- 
 mism of any theology or philosophy which 
 lightly tries "to justify the ways of God 
 to man." 
 
 Providence To the last generation Providence and 
 Progress. Progress were both magic words. To the 
 religious, the Universe seemed luminous 
 of divine purpose ; to the intellectuals, the 
 doctrine of Evolution through natural 
 selection implied the automatic necessity 
 of continuous advance. Religion and 
 Science might be difficult to harmonise, 
 and the ethics of Christ and those of the 
 Struggle for Existence might not seem 
 quite compatible still, whichever way one 
 chose to take it, in the last resort this 
 was a most excellent world. In an age of 
 unparalleled material comfort, the com- 
 fortably-minded of either school could 
 draw comfortable conclusions. The reli- 
 gious could say, "God's in his Heaven, 
 all's right with the world" and if some 
 things did appear not altogether right, 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 still they were God's will, and He must 
 know best. The non-religious were even 
 better off. The doctrine of progress 
 through the survival of the fittest gave a 
 biological justification for doing one's own 
 sweet will. The religious might feel the 
 difficulty of reconciling the claims of God 
 and Mammon, but these others could claim 
 the authority of science for the view that 
 individual selfishness is the high-road to 
 corporate salvation. In Economics it was 
 laid down as a law of Nature that un- 
 limited competition between individuals, 
 each seeking solely his own profit, inevi- 
 tably redounded to the benefit of all. In 
 international politics the conclusion could 
 be drawn that war was a "biological neces- 
 sity" and that the nation which could crush 
 all others was the greatest benefactor of 
 humanity, since the hope of civilisation 
 lay in the domination of the world by the 
 strongest power. 
 
 To-day the dogma that unlimited com- The Change 
 petition inevitably leads to the greatest m0utl 
 happiness of the greatest number has 
 fewer adherents: the doctrine that war 
 is a necessity for progress has fewer 
 still. . . . 
 
 Facts have refuted them. 
 
10 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 But if facts have refuted the doctrine 
 that Progress is a mechanical necessity 
 and internecine struggle the path towards 
 it, have they not equally refuted the belief 
 in a Providence that orders all things for 
 the best? On all sides we hear the cry, 
 What kind of a God is it who, having the 
 power to overrule the destinies of man, 
 could look on unmoved at the events of 
 the last five years? Surely if ever in his- 
 tory there was a time clamant for some 
 special intervention, it has been that which 
 we have lived through. 
 
 The Hope of Modern civilisation, nominally Chris- 
 
 the Future. ,. , ,. ,. j , ., ,,. /. 
 
 tian, has in practice lived by the ethics of 
 
 the struggle for existence ; and by the logic 
 of that same ethic it seems like to perish 
 through war or the class-war. This is the 
 conclusion which thinking men and women 
 everywhere are drawing. The only hope 
 for the future would seem to be a new 
 social and international morality a mo- 
 rality based not on competition but on co- 
 operation. But if the goodness, the power, 
 or the existence of God be in doubt, 
 neither the intellectual justification nor 
 the emotional dynamic of such an ethic 
 are particularly obvious. And, if the last 
 century read the lesson of Biology aright, 
 
INTRODUCTORY 11 
 
 is not that ethic necessarily a frail and 
 artificial thing, since it is built on prin- 
 ciples which the fundamental nature of 
 reality denies? 
 
 With these and like problems in their Purpose of 
 minds the authors of this volume have ^m^. 
 endeavoured to re-examine the facts. 
 Cross-questioning the Universe in the 
 light of modern science and human his- 
 tory, they ask what conclusions a clear- 
 eyed and impartial investigation will war- 
 rant both as regard the nature and 
 character of the Power behind phenomena, 
 and the fate, the value, and the hope of the 
 individual in the scheme of things. 
 
 In the following Chapter some prelim- Analysis of 
 inary questions are raised: Do the facts Contents - 
 justify the inference that there is a God 
 at all, that there is any kind of intelligent 
 direction behind the world process? If so, 
 is this Intelligence beneficent either in 
 the sense of broadly "making for right- 
 eousness" or of caring for the fate of the 
 individual man? Or do the facts suggest 
 rather a limited God, beneficent, indeed, 
 but "cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in" 
 by some fate or force or nature of things 
 of which He, like us, is to some extent the 
 victim? Or, again, is there reasonable 
 
12 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 ground for the belief that in Him Love 
 and Supreme Power can coexist? In 
 Chapter III. the primd facie view is 
 accepted, that Nature's apparent aim is 
 the producing of beings perfectly corre- 
 sponding with their whole environment, 
 but that man, though so far Nature's mas- 
 terpiece, at present very imperfectly so 
 corresponds. It is then asked, what does 
 the study of the evolutionary process as a 
 whole show to be needed to perfect that 
 correspondence; and, if that process has 
 a meaning at all, what inference, if any, 
 must we draw as to the ethical quality and 
 character of the Power of which ultimately 
 it is the expression. Chapter IV. is an 
 enquiry into the nature of Power. It 
 suggests that in the past power of a low 
 degree of effectiveness has often been mis- 
 taken for supreme power, and it questions 
 how far this error may have vitiated 
 traditional theology and ethics. The final 
 Chapter endeavours to face the question 
 of the suffering and failure of the indi- 
 vidual. Can we say to the man or woman 
 weighed down by sorrow, disappointment 
 or remorse that there is a "way out"? Is 
 the ultimate nature of things such as to 
 justify anything like that belief in "Provi- 
 
INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 dence" and "Salvation" which was the 
 very centre of the old religion? 
 
 The thought and labours of not a few of Method and 
 the keenest intellects of our age have been fc 
 concentrated on the problems we attack 
 and that thought and labour has not been 
 spent in vain. Some of the questions are 
 as old as philosophy itself, others are of 
 comparatively modern origin ; but even on 
 the oldest, new light has been thrown in 
 recent years. The authors of this volume 
 have tried to unify and bring into a small 
 compass various strands in a widespread 
 movement in the thought of the day ; and 
 in working at this task they believe that 
 on some points they have found something 
 new to offer and have some things to say 
 which either have not been said before, 
 or have been said, but not with the 
 same balance of emphasis or in the same 
 connection. But if this is so, it is because 
 they have made it throughout their first 
 endeavour to interrogate facts, not to look 
 for answers which would square with tra- 
 ditional theology. Some of the answers 
 suggested are to all intents and purposes 
 those given by traditional Christianity, 
 only stated in modern language and re- 
 lated to modern thought. Others, it should 
 
14 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 frankly be admitted, are different. But 
 it is remarkable that in every case where 
 the facts have seemed to point to a con- 
 clusion which differs from that given by 
 the old Theology, that conclusion appears 
 to be in effect a return to the religion and 
 philosophy of Christ. 
 
 Reculer pour mieuae sauter. Chris- 
 tianity moves forward whenever it goes 
 back to Christ. 
 
II 
 
 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 BY THE MOST REV. CHARLES F. D'ARCY, D.D. 
 Archbishop of Dublin 
 
 THE doubts characteristic of the present The 
 time set these two Divine attributes, stated? 1 
 Love and Omnipotence, in the sharpest 
 antagonism. If God be good, it is said 
 every day, He cannot be omnipotent, the 
 world being what it is. If He be om- 
 nipotent, He cannot be good, for the 
 same reason. He would surely exert His 
 almighty power and put things right. It 
 is an old puzzle ; the difference in its posi- 
 tion is that more people are thinking about 
 it now. People who before the war were 
 never troubled with the malady of thought 
 have caught the fever of enquiry, and 
 stand aghast at the discovery of this 
 ancient problem. 
 
 Why do we believe in God? Apart Two Ways 
 from traditional belief, and putting aside o 
 the more academic discussions of the 
 
 15 
 
16 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 schools, there are two contrasting ways in 
 which men have been able to attain to 
 faith in a Supreme Being worthy of being 
 called by the great name, God. The first 
 looks out upon the vast world of creation, 
 and finds there convincing proof of the 
 work of mind. The second looks into the 
 inner experience of the soul, and recog- 
 nises God by spiritual apprehension. In 
 modern times, opinion has swung very 
 remarkably from the former to the latter. 
 In the eighteenth century, in spite of 
 shrewd criticism, the conviction prevailed 
 that the argument from creation to the 
 Creator was inevitable. "The heavens 
 declare the glory of God; the firmament 
 showeth His handywork," sang the 
 Psalmist; and never were the words so 
 appreciated as when the discoveries of 
 astronomy were the most notable achieve- 
 ments of science. The universe was re- 
 vealed as a huge mechanism, a vast clock- 
 work, moving with perfect regularity. 
 The inference from the watch to the 
 watchmaker was so striking and simple 
 that the apologist enjoyed a popular 
 triumph. Its fruits lasted far into the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 The Darwinian revolution changed all 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 17 
 
 that. And with the growth of philosophi- 
 cal and psychological study came gradu- 
 ally to light a new world the world of 
 inner experience. During the last half- 
 century, and especially the last genera- 
 tion, men have been learning to find God 
 within, rather than without. 
 
 The coming of this change can be traced A New 
 in Tennyson and Browning. We find it Greyed!" 5 
 fully developed in the profound study of 
 the mystics which has marked the last 
 twenty years. Now we have reached a 
 position in which this inner experience, 
 regarded as a revelation of God, has be- 
 come the inspiration of a fresh and popu- 
 lar creed. It gives us, we are told, a new 
 and vivid faith in God as the representa- 
 tive of our race, the captain of our souls, 
 leading us in the conflict with evil, sharing 
 our pains, sympathising with our striv- 
 ings, using our powers of mind and body 
 in the struggle against material forces, 
 and helping us to overcome the difficulties 
 which beset us. 1 This God is a finite 
 being. He is indeed born of man's spirit- 
 ual experience. He is a synthesis of the 
 best that is in us all. From man He 
 sprang, and with man He will perish. For 
 
 1 H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King. 
 
18 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 Him, as for us, the great encircling uni- 
 verse is an alien, intractable and terribly 
 mysterious power. From this mysterious 
 power we had our origin. There dawned, 
 in the course of natural evolution, by some 
 inexplicable process, that fitful light 
 which we call the mind or soul of man: 
 strong enough to adapt some portion of 
 its material environment to its needs, it 
 was yet not able to gain any true knowl- 
 edge of its position or secure footing for 
 its existence. But from our united 
 thoughts and efforts arose a higher soul, 
 uniting and representing us all, sharing 
 our pains and helping us ; but confronted, 
 as we are, by the same insoluble problems. 
 This strange but very interesting doc- 
 trine shows what must happen if we give 
 up the revelation of God in Nature. And 
 it is well worthy of note how directly it 
 leads to polytheistic ways of thought. 
 Why should this soul of our souls be One 
 Deity for the whole human race? Why 
 should not every nation, every distinct 
 community, have its own deity? On this 
 theory, the "Old German God" may actu- 
 ally exist. The genius of ancient Athens 
 may actually have lived as the divine 
 Athena. If the League of Nations se- 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 19 
 
 cures peace on earth it may also create 
 harmony on Olympus. We are back 
 among the Homeric gods ; and can breathe 
 once more the freshness of an early world. 
 It is specially curious, however, to observe 
 what happens when we let go our belief 
 in Nature as a revelation of God. We 
 find ourselves on a descending slope, slid- 
 ing down into paganism. This is espe- 
 cially true in our day. The unity of Na- 
 ture implies the unity of God. When 
 Nature was regarded as the scene in which 
 a multitude of diverse and often opposing 
 spiritual powers operated and competed 
 with one another, polytheistic modes of 
 thought were inevitably suggested. But 
 modern science has been teaching more 
 and more clearly the unity of Nature. 
 Though that unity is not yet fully demon- 
 strated, every advance is a step towards 
 its demonstration. The instructed mind 
 of the modern man cannot look out upon 
 the world and believe that he is witnessing 
 a conflict of capricious finite deities. He 
 knows that the varied scene is the outcome 
 of one vast evolutionary process, and 
 therefore, if he holds it necessary to be- 
 lieve at all in a spiritual life in or behind 
 or around the whole, he must believe in 
 
20 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 that life as possessing a world-embracing 
 unity. But if Nature has no message 
 about God, if He be but a synthesis of 
 psychical elements, a group-soul, arising 
 out of human society, and perishing when 
 the group is dissipated, there is no reason 
 why we should believe in His unity. It is 
 much more reasonable to believe in a 
 Pantheon. 
 
 Does It is surely somewhat surprising that 
 
 RevS?God? we so se ldom endeavour, in these days, to 
 gather, by a simple observation of Nature, 
 and in as undogmatic a manner as possi- 
 ble, some ideas concerning the character 
 of the Supreme Power, if such there be. 
 Perhaps we are influenced still by the im- 
 pressive argument of Herbert Spencer's 
 First Principles, in which, after an elabo- 
 rate demonstration of the contradictions 
 which may be found in the terms used to 
 describe the being and attributes of God, 
 he concluded that the "Power which the 
 Universe manifests to us is utterly in- 
 scrutable." This he affirms to be the 
 "deepest, widest, and most certain of all 
 facts." Admitting that behind the mani- 
 fold phenomena of Nature there must be 
 some Supreme Power, he yet holds as a 
 positive creed, and as the most indubitable 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 21 
 
 of all assertions, the doctrine that this 
 Power is unknowable. Spencer's Agnos- 
 tic creed, thus presented as the result of 
 an irresistible philosophical criticism of 
 the effort to ascend from Nature to God, 
 has had an enormous influence. It puts 
 in a formal shape the conclusion which so 
 many minds have gathered hastily from 
 the difficulties and perplexities which beset 
 them as they try to adjust their traditional 
 creed to the new ideas of science and to 
 the painful problems of life. The ques- 
 tion with which we are now dealing is an 
 instance. The omnipotence of God is not 
 only difficult to reconcile with His good- 
 ness, in view of the facts of human experi- 
 ence, it is itself a conception which involves 
 contradiction. The fact must be admitted. 
 Every effort to think out the idea of 
 omnipotence will be found to end in con- 
 tradiction. We need not pursue the in- 
 vestigation: it would lead into mazes of 
 dialectical discussion, which would but ob- 
 scure the issue and afford no satisfaction. 
 But Herbert Spencer fails to note that the 
 very statement in which he presents his 
 creed is itself contradictory. The "Power 
 which the Universe manifests to us is ut- 
 terly inscrutable." We may well ask, If 
 
22 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 Difficulty 
 not Pe- 
 culiar to 
 Theology. 
 
 the Power is manifested, how is it inscrut- 
 able? It is surely clear that so far as the 
 Power is manifested, it is not inscrutable. 
 
 The truth is that an acute criticism can 
 always find contradictions in the terms 
 which express the underlying principles 
 of all branches of knowledge. This fact 
 has been amply proved in recent years. 
 There is no department of science, 
 whether physical or moral, which cannot 
 be thus undermined. Theology is not in 
 any worse case, in this respect, than other 
 branches of enquiry. But all sciences have 
 to be continually adjusting their concep- 
 tions to advancing experience and the 
 more searching criticism which it brings. 
 Nor does any science let go its old prin- 
 ciples, principles which it has found to 
 work well in the past, until it can success- 
 fully adjust itself to the altered conditions 
 in which it finds itself. 
 
 We are not, then, to cease to seek God 
 in Nature, because science has given us 
 new views of Nature, or because some of 
 our old conceptions prove difficult. The- 
 ology, like science, must ever be prepared 
 to take up its burden anew, undeterred by 
 the greatness or difficulty of the task which 
 lies before it. 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 2 
 
 Suppose then, assuming, like Herbert character 
 Spencer, that there is some great power 
 which works in the universe, and keeping 
 in mind the modern view of creation, 
 we ask the question, Is it possible to 
 gather from experience and observation 
 any clear ideas as to the character of 
 that Power? As we know a man from 
 his deeds, we ought surely to be able to 
 attain to some estimate of the character 
 of the Supreme Power by considering 
 the universe, which is the expression of 
 its activity. 
 
 Approaching this question with a reso- Natural 
 lute determination to escape the influence eauty * 
 of customary opinion, and above all keep- 
 ing clear of traditional dogma, and sur- 
 veying creation as a whole and without 
 emphasis on those aspects of it which are 
 specially attractive to our desires and 
 needs, it would appear that the Supreme 
 Power is much more concerned with the 
 production of beauty, especially beauty 
 of form and colour, than with goodness. 
 Nature produces the beautiful with a 
 lavishness which finds no parallel in the 
 works of man ; and the beauty of Nature 
 is not, as in human art, a form added to a 
 material, which is diverted from its proper 
 
24 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 use to serve the artistic purpose. The 
 beauty of Nature is intrinsic, universal, 
 penetrating. It springs into being 
 through the inevitable working of natural 
 forces. It is as perfect in the little as in 
 the great, in the snowflake and the struc- 
 ture of the minutest organism as in the 
 Alpine peak or the sunset sky. It is 
 found in the most irregular heaping to- 
 gether of fragments, a mountain slope or 
 a torrent, as in the perfect symmetry of 
 the blue dome of the sky. If it be urged 
 that the beauty of Nature is not in the 
 things themselves but in the cultivated 
 mind which has learned to appreciate it, 
 there is the ready answer that here is the 
 very point of the argument. The fact that 
 high cultivation of the aesthetic faculties 
 enables us to see ever more and more 
 beauty in Nature, is the very reason why 
 we feel bound to discern in the Power 
 behind Nature a Being to whom the 
 beautiful is an end. So far as this part of 
 our spiritual being is concerned, we dis- 
 cern that we are akin to the Supreme 
 Power. We conclude that the beauty of 
 Nature points to a certain character in the 
 Supreme. He, shall we say, produces 
 beauty because He delights in it, and 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 25 
 
 seemingly prizes it far more than He 
 prizes goodness. 1 
 
 This inference appears much more in- 
 evitable when we consider that most of 
 this beauty is, from the material point of 
 view, a waste product. It is useless. It 
 does not help individuals to live or races 
 to survive. Yet this unnecessary beauty 
 is poured out with infinite prodigality on 
 a careless, unseeing creation. In Nature 
 it is hard to find anything which is truly 
 ugly. For the ugly, one has to turn to the 
 works of man. 
 
 On the other hand, goodness, in the Goodness 
 moral sense of the term, makes its appear- m ature * 
 ance only after immense ages. It appears 
 fitfully, is maintained with difficulty, and 
 is nearly always very imperfect. Yet 
 goodness is useful as beauty is not. It is 
 the cement of societies, enabling men to 
 unite, and so become far more effective in 
 their struggle with material forces. If 
 human society were uniformly good in a 
 very high degree, there is no doubt that 
 eugenic principles would prevail, disease 
 would be very largely eliminated, indus- 
 
 1 On the argument from the beauty of Nature and for 
 a convincing criticism of Kant's objection, see J. H. 
 Kennedy, Natural Theology and Modern Thought. 
 
26 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 trial conditions would be wholly trans- 
 formed, war would be impossible the 
 world would be a very happy place, as we 
 commonly count happiness. Morality is 
 therefore a very useful thing, and the won- 
 der is that an evolutionary process, which 
 is supposed to depend upon the produc- 
 tion of the useful, has not brought forth 
 more goodness. 
 
 Now, regarding this problem from the 
 point of view of those who believe that the 
 universe is the life-work of a great Su- 
 preme Spirit, we can see a reason for this 
 difference. God makes the world beauti- 
 ful because He loves the beautiful, and 
 can produce it without the intervention of 
 finite wills. He has not made the world 
 good, because goodness can only come 
 about through the co-operation of finite 
 wills with one another and with Him. 
 First, the finite wills have to be produced, 
 and there can be no goodness in creation 
 until they arise. Secondly, when they are 
 produced, they have to come into harmony 
 with one another and with Him. And this 
 harmony is impossible without a willing 
 denial of selfish inclinations on the part of 
 the individual. When this fact is grasped, 
 the enormous difficulty of the production 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 27 
 
 of a good world is evident. It takes man 
 every man as well as God, to pro- 
 duce it. 
 
 Regarding the problem from the side of Problem 
 experience, we learn that only by educa- 
 tion and discipline can men be brought to 
 overcome their selfish inclinations for the 
 good of the whole. And this education 
 and discipline involve pain. Here, surely, 
 is the place of pain in the moral history of 
 mankind. 
 
 But this does not take in the whole 
 problem of pain. The animal creation, 
 in all its myriad races, is subject to pain. 
 Yet even here we can see that pain has 
 its place, and a very important place, in 
 evolution. The pain of hunger drives the 
 living creature to seek its food. The pain 
 of torn flesh and the fear of such pain 
 impel the hunted creature to seek safety. 
 Through the ministry of pain have come 
 about some of the most perfect and most 
 beautiful of living forms. The pursuing 
 wolf -pack gave to the horse his swiftness 
 and his strength. The leopard's claw gave 
 to the antelope its surpassing grace and 
 agility. 
 
 If this use of pain to secure progress, 
 and its service in providing moral disci- 
 
28 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 pline for man, were all, the problem of 
 pain would not be the terribly oppressive 
 thing that it is. What wrings our hearts 
 and stirs us to doubt the Divine goodness 
 is the seeming superfluity of pain the 
 torture that, apparently, does no good, the 
 sorrow that brings no blessing we can dis- 
 cern. It is our inability to see any efficacy 
 for good in so much of the appalling suf- 
 fering occasioned by the late war that has 
 aroused questioning in so many minds. 
 What good flows to themselves or to the 
 world from the martyrdom of the Arme- 
 nians, or the deportation of the women 
 and children of Belgium and Northern 
 France ? 
 
 Yet, when we view human history in a 
 large way, we must see that the way of 
 suffering is the way of progress. With 
 pain man is brought into the world: by 
 painful effort on the part of others his 
 early life is nourished and protected: only 
 with painful toil and self-denial can he do 
 his duty as a man: by painful struggle, 
 and generally severe suffering on the part 
 of many, is every onward step in human 
 development achieved. Science, art, social 
 improvement, spiritual attainment every 
 great and noble thing in human life come 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 29 
 
 about as the results of processes which 
 involve much suffering. Yes, and arise 
 out of conditions which are painful. For 
 it is the pain of need, material or spiritual, 
 which drives man ever onward on the path 
 of attainment. 
 
 This is the truth which lends plausibility 
 to the pessimism of the East. But that 
 pessimism goes too far in its argument, 
 that since all effort springs out of the pain 
 of desire, and since the satisfaction of 
 desire is momentary, all life is essentially 
 painful. It omits to consider that the 
 exercise of the completed faculty that is, 
 healthy living in its normal functioning 
 is essentially pleasurable ; and that, there- 
 fore, however painful the process may be, 
 the result is happiness. That is, pain 
 exists in order to produce happiness. It 
 is happiness in the making. That is the 
 true lesson of the psychology of the will. 
 
 When we have reached this point we Painin 
 can understand the teaching of the New ^stament 
 Testament. It is a very remarkable fact 
 that, while psalmist, poet, and prophet 
 in the Old Testament are continually 
 troubled by the problem of suffering, ever 
 returning to it, and never completely satis- 
 fied, the New Testament shows, for the 
 
30 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 most part, a complete unconsciousness 
 that such a problem exists. St Paul, in 
 one brief passage (Rom. viii. 18-26), 
 recognises it. "The whole creation," he 
 writes, "groaneth and travaileth in pain 
 together until now." But he had already, 
 in a few brief sentences, solved the prob- 
 lem on the lines of his thought. "The suf- 
 ferings of this present time are not worthy 
 to be compared with the glory which shall 
 be revealed. . . . For the earnest expectation 
 of the creation waiteth for the revealing 
 of the sons of God. For the creation was 
 subjected to vanity, not of its own will, 
 but by reason of Him who subjected it, in 
 hope that the creation itself also shall be 
 delivered from the bondage of corruption 
 into the liberty of the glory of the children 
 of God." That is, the suffering of crea- 
 tion is a temporary thing, part of the 
 preparation for a coming perfection when 
 sorrow shall be lost in joy. 
 
 The New Testament as a whole, and the 
 teaching and example of our Lord, go 
 even beyond this. For them suffering is 
 not a difficulty to be explained: it is a 
 source of light, a manifestation of Divine 
 love. The reason of this change of atti- 
 tude is simple and obvious : it is the fact of 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE l 
 
 the Cross of Christ. The suffering Son 
 of God reveals the greatness of the love 
 of God. God's sharing of man's pain 
 brought home the supreme truth with sav- 
 ing power to the soul. 
 
 Out of this arose the great Christian 
 idea of man as a sharer in the Divine suf- 
 fering. St Paul delights in the thought 
 that he can know, not only the power of 
 Christ's resurrection, but also "the fellow- 
 ship of His sufferings, becoming con- 
 formed unto His death." And, for some 
 centuries, suffering was regarded as the 
 surest mark of holiness, so that a confessor 
 or a martyr attracted the deepest rever- 
 ence. 
 
 Suppose, for the moment, that we en- Pain and 
 large this conception and think of the 
 agony of the world as we have witnessed 
 it, as a great work of redemption, or at 
 least uplifting, bringing about a higher 
 life for future generations of men and re- 
 sults greater than we can now realise in 
 the heavenly sphere: surely we must be- 
 lieve that the end is worth the sacrifice. 
 The main difficulty is that, in so many 
 cases, so far as we can see, the individual 
 suffers horribly without any manifest 
 good result to himself or to others ; and is 
 
32 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 very often a helpless woman or innocent 
 child, a mere victim of lust or cruelty. All 
 that can be said in answer to this is, it 
 would seem, that only a complete knowl- 
 edge of the universe to all eternity could 
 enable us to measure the result of every 
 such sacrifice. More fully, surely, than 
 the "flower in the crannied wall" is every 
 conscious individual related to the whole 
 universal scheme of things. Our belief in 
 the future life, also, enlarges without 
 measure the field of possibilities and the 
 difficulty of pronouncing judgment on the 
 worth of any particular instance of suffer- 
 ing. 
 
 Returning to our main line of argu- 
 ment, we find then that there is ample evi- 
 dence to bear out the contention that, the 
 nature of man being what it is con- 
 sciousness, desire, and will being what they 
 are pain is the necessary discipline by 
 means of which goodness must be brought 
 about. The God who could make a uni- 
 verse beautiful throughout by the normal 
 working of natural forces, could not pro- 
 duce a good universe but by the instru- 
 mentality of suffering. And this does not 
 mean that He prizes goodness less than 
 He prizes beauty. Rather, it means that 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 33 
 
 He prizes it more. He is willing to make 
 infinitely greater sacrifices in order to ob- 
 tain it. The fact of pain, then, enhances 
 our conception of the value which God sets 
 upon goodness. 
 
 It enhances all values. For, when thus 
 interpreted, it means that God so delights 
 in perfecting His creation, with all its 
 beauty, by making it as complete morally 
 as it is aesthetically, that He thinks any 
 sacrifice, no matter how tremendous, 
 whether on His own part or on the part 
 of His conscious, wilful children, to be 
 well worth while. 
 
 If we have reason to believe that God Fellowship 
 shares in every human grief, that no lonely 
 sufferer endures his agony apart from the 
 sympathy and fellowship of God, that 
 every sacrifice made is a sacrifice on God's 
 part as well as on man's, and that, in suf- 
 fering, God is calling on us to join Him 
 in his age-long struggle against evil, we 
 have a view of the world and of human 
 life which gives to all genuine moral effort, 
 whether pleasurable or painful, an in- 
 trinsic worth which cannot be estimated. 
 It will appear, as we proceed, that there 
 is reason to believe in this co-operation of 
 God with us in the struggle of life, but 
 
34 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 there is a simple consideration which pro- 
 vides a basis for confidence, and which we 
 must first make clear. 
 
 Trust- All our experiences of the world, 
 
 ofthe whether gained through our ordinary 
 
 Universe. practical activities, or through advancing 
 
 scientific research, conspire to prove that 
 
 the Supreme Power which works in the 
 
 universe is trustworthy. 
 
 We carry on all our work and make all 
 our plans for the future on the supposition 
 that there is a fundamental order in things. 
 We know that we can depend on that 
 order, and that we shall not be put to con- 
 fusion. We are quite certain that the 
 whole of things is a cosmos and not a 
 chaos: we deal w r ith the world on the un- 
 derstanding that what is true to-day will 
 be true to-morrow, that things do not 
 appear and disappear, combine or dis- 
 integrate, in an utterly aimless, unmean- 
 ing fashion; and we find that, though we 
 are often puzzled, and often reach the 
 limits of our knowledge and power, on the 
 whole we are not disappointed. 
 
 Revealed in It is also to be observed that there has 
 
 Religion?* been a steadily progressive advance in 
 
 the banishing of the expectation of the 
 
 capricious from our thoughts about the 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 35 
 
 world around us. Among primitive peo- 
 ples the world is imagined as full of spirit- 
 ual powers, whose influence may be de- 
 tected in every unaccountable event, and 
 whose actions fill human life with uncer- 
 tainty. As civilisation increases, this ani- 
 mistic belief gives place to Polytheism a 
 change which greatly adds to the sense of 
 security and of elevation, but which still 
 finds a large space for the capricious and 
 discordant. When Monotheism super- 
 venes, life attains a unification, and there- 
 fore a trustworthiness, before impossible. 
 
 The truth which we thus gather from Revealed in 
 our ordinary experience and from the his- Science - 
 tory of religions has found a magnificent 
 justification in the great career of modern 
 science. The work of science has been, 
 especially, a progressive reduction to order 
 of the seeming confusion of the physical 
 world. The discovery of the laws of Na- 
 ture, as they have been called, is really the 
 discovery of a fundamental trustworthi- 
 ness in the Universe. It is shown that 
 there is an underlying order in the succes- 
 sion of natural events, when that succes- 
 sion is understood, on which we can abso- 
 lutely depend. The essential point is, that 
 man can understand that is, that he can 
 
36 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 Human 
 Control of 
 Natural 
 Forces. 
 
 find in his own mind a measure which he 
 can adjust to the ways in which the things 
 in the natural world act and react upon 
 one another. Science is indeed man find- 
 ing himself at home in the Universe, and 
 finding that, within certain limits, he is 
 safe. Thus science may be regarded as a 
 vast demonstration that the Supreme 
 Power which works in the Universe is not 
 only trustworthy, but is not so alien in 
 character from man as to be utterly in- 
 scrutable. If man can by research and 
 experiment make himself so much at home 
 in the Universe, he must surely, to some 
 degree, be able to adjust his thoughts to 
 the Power which works in the Universe. 
 Complete Agnosticism is therefore not 
 justified by the teaching of science. 
 
 It is because of this trustworthiness in 
 things that man has been able, in so mar- 
 vellous a manner, especially in recent 
 times, to subordinate the material world 
 to his own purposes. When he has dis- 
 covered the ways in which natural forces 
 operate, he can count upon those forces 
 to produce their proper effect, and can use 
 them to modify one another, quite certain 
 that they will not fail him. All the won- 
 derful processes of engineering and of 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 37 
 
 the various applications of the physical 
 sciences, depend on this principle. They 
 show the power which man gains when he 
 finds that things are not incoherent and 
 capricious, but coherent and therefore 
 trustworthy. It is the very fact of un- 
 varying sequence in natural events which 
 gives to human mind and will their power 
 over natural forces. Man is free and 
 mighty in the world, because the Supreme 
 Power which works in the world is trust- 
 worthy. This is indeed the very charter 
 of human liberty. 
 
 It is also true that our modern delight Commun- 
 in Nature, and the rest and peace which 
 come to the soul through communion with 
 Nature, are closely related to our sense of 
 an underlying trustworthiness in the Uni- 
 verse. Why do we turn from the worries 
 and sorrows of human life, and from its 
 puzzles and problems, to the beauty and 
 greatness of Nature, and find there a 
 source of consolation and strength? It is, 
 surely, because we have found there a 
 revelation of some power or principle on 
 which we feel we can rely. It is because, 
 in some way or other, we discern in Na- 
 ture an immanent life which is not alien 
 from ourselves, and on whose strength we 
 
38 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 can lay hold. Apart from such a convic- 
 tion, there is no source of peace to be 
 found in Nature. "Red in tooth and 
 claw," Nature presents the problem of 
 continual pain in the most obtrusive man- 
 ner. To the primitive animistic mind it 
 is also filled with lurking terrors, even 
 more awful than the tiger or the snake. 
 Wordsworth is right when he traces the 
 joy in Nature to the apprehension of the 
 "presence which disturbs us with the joy 
 of elevated thought, a sense sublime of 
 something far more deeply interfused." 
 The reflective mind traces out the source 
 of its joy and finds God. 
 
 Summary. In the light of these thoughts, let us now 
 turn back on our brief examination of the 
 evidence which Nature and experience 
 afford as to the character of the Supreme 
 Power of the Universe. 
 
 We must think of that Power as one 
 which expresses itself in producing the 
 infinite variety of creation, and also in 
 giving to the forms of creation an extra- 
 ordinary abundance a superabundance 
 of beauty. In addition, it seems quite 
 clear that the Power which the Universe 
 manifests to us is essentially trustworthy 
 there is a fundamental certainty on 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 39 
 
 which both thought and life can rest with 
 confidence. These indications of character 
 seem to point to a certain degree of kin- 
 ship between the soul of man and the Su- 
 preme Power, for man enjoys the exercise 
 of creative power in all the arts which he 
 has learned to practise, and he can endow 
 the products of art with some degree of 
 beauty, and by this experience attain to 
 such an appreciation of the beautiful that 
 at last he awakens to the overwhelming 
 beauty of the world about him. Man has 
 also in his experience gained the idea of 
 goodness, and though his own attainment 
 of goodness is very imperfect, he has been 
 able to rise to the belief that goodness is a 
 quality of the Supreme Power. But he 
 finds himself perplexed and dismayed by 
 the monstrous evils which exist in the 
 world, and the doubt intrudes Can the 
 Power which gives being to the world be 
 indeed good? Or, if He be good, is He in 
 the position of an engineer who has lost 
 control of some great machine which he 
 has made? We have seen that here there 
 enters another consideration. The Su- 
 preme Power cannot make the world good 
 without the co-operation of the intelligent 
 human beings whom He has endowed with 
 
40 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 moral spontaneity. Only by a harmony 
 of all wills can a good Universe be pro- 
 duced. 
 
 state- May it not be possible that this element 
 
 Problem. introduces a final uncertainty into things, 
 and leaves the end open to doubt? Per- 
 haps, too, the trustworthiness of the Su- 
 preme ceases with the physical order. We 
 can depend upon the laws of Nature : we 
 cannot depend on human will. Why 
 should we hold that the limit which thus 
 applies to ourselves does not also apply to 
 God? Experience seems to show that here 
 God is just as much limited as we are. We 
 have seen the evil wills of ambitious men 
 plunge the world into a whirlpool of crime 
 and misery. Would not God have pre- 
 vented this if He could? And if He could 
 not prevent it in our time, why should we 
 think that He will be able to prevent 
 similar, or even worse, evils in the future? 
 We have also considered the Christian be- 
 lief that, through suffering, God is work- 
 ing out a great redemption. But, even if 
 we grant this, what security have we that 
 the effort will be successful finally and on 
 the scale of the Universe? It is quite 
 possible that suffering may be the means 
 through which certain limited goods, such 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 41 
 
 as we have considered, may be attained; 
 and yet it may be vain to look for any 
 final and complete victory over evil in this 
 way. Our common experience seems to 
 point to such a conclusion. We see many 
 cases in which, after a brave struggle, by 
 which much good is accomplished, the life 
 seems to sink down to death in unhappi- 
 ness or utter misery. Such a life seems a 
 broken thing. We think there must be 
 another half. But, even granting another 
 half, what reason have we to believe that 
 things will be better in a future life than 
 in this? 
 
 What we need to save us from the de- 
 spair to which such questions lead is a 
 principle which will carry the Divine 
 trustworthiness beyond our limited ex- 
 perience, and give us reason to believe 
 that, no matter what happens, the evil 
 must be overcome in the end, the good 
 must ultimately triumph. 
 
 We have seen that, however we ap- 
 proach the problem, we are confronted by 
 the same great difficulty the disorder in- 
 troduced into the world by the diverse and 
 discordant wills of men. There cannot be 
 goodness at all in the world but by the 
 operation of will. Goodness is essentially 
 
42 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 a quality of will. Therefore, in order to 
 produce a good world, if that indeed was 
 the purpose of the Supreme Power, it was 
 necessary that He should call into exist- 
 ence a multitude of beings endowed with 
 moral faculty able, that is, to choose be- 
 tween good and evil. This made possible 
 a good world, but it also made possible the 
 existence of evil ; and, so far as we can see, 
 there is nothing impossible in the supposi- 
 tion that it also opened the way for the 
 ultimate triumph of evil. We can im- 
 agine the terrible force of will let loose in 
 the world, growing in its self-assertion of 
 hostile principles, setting man against 
 man, community against community, na- 
 tion against nation. We can pursue in 
 thought the consequences of such a condi- 
 tion of things and see how directly it 
 would lead to the overthrow of all civilisa- 
 tion and the end of all that makes human 
 life worth living. We can feel indeed that 
 we have been very near to such a catas- 
 trophe in recent years, and that in the 
 unsettlement of all the accustomed ar- 
 rangements of ordered existence which 
 marks the present time there lurk possi- 
 bilities of social chaos that might easily 
 undo all that has been accomplished 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 43 
 
 by the painful struggles of thousands 
 of years. The condition of Russia to- 
 day stands as an awful example of such 
 a chaos. 
 
 The centre of the problem with which Centre of 
 - i i , TP Problem. 
 
 we have to deal is now presented to us. It 
 
 evil is to be overcome and the world saved 
 from the unimaginable horror we have 
 just indicated, there must supervene some 
 power which can prevail over the antago- 
 nisms of contending wills and so produce 
 harmony. There are many principles 
 which can do this in a partial way. Rea- 
 son can persuade the intellect and induce 
 those who are in opposition to come to 
 some better understanding. The appeal 
 to interest will often make men sink other 
 differences and unite in practical co-opera- 
 tion. The bonds arising from that mutual 
 interdependence in the common social 
 order which is created by the fundamental 
 conditions of our life are very strong. 
 Family ties, friendships, associations in 
 work and in pleasure, keep men from 
 pushing oppositions to an extremity. All 
 these influences work for good against the 
 disruptive power of self-asserting will. 
 But there is a principle which is deeply 
 engaged in all these, and which is yet 
 
44 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 purer and more powerful than them all 
 when once it is put forth. 
 
 Power of Love can overcome the opposition of 
 
 Love * wills, and, in doing so, bring about a 
 
 higher harmony than any which can result 
 from agreement on the basis of reasonable 
 understanding, common interest, or asso- 
 ciation. All these persuade, Love con- 
 quers. It is like Force in this. But while 
 force conquers and destroys, Love con- 
 quers and fulfils. 
 
 It is very important to observe that it is 
 only in a world in which there are wills 
 possessed of the power of choice, and in 
 which there is therefore the possibility of 
 evil, that Love can find full scope. For 
 Love must be freely given or it is not 
 Love ; and, further, it is in overcoming the 
 oppositions which it encounters, and by 
 sacrifice winning its way to victory, that 
 Love enters into full possession of its 
 kingdom. Love finds its true sphere in a 
 world in which are sin and sorrow, loss as 
 well as gain. The possibility of evil is a 
 necessary condition, as we have seen, of 
 all real goodness. It is, we now see, 
 necessary especially for the full exercise 
 of that great spiritual faculty which we 
 call Love. 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 45 
 
 What is Love? The question is not easy what is 
 to answer. Many partial answers might Love? 
 be given. Love may be described as an 
 emotion, but it is something more. It is 
 more even than the will to bless. We shall 
 come nearer to its true nature if we define 
 it as the giving of self. Love is self find- 
 ing itself in another. It is self resting in 
 the other as its end. Love makes complete 
 sacrifice for the other. Thus it annihilates 
 the opposition between self and self. It 
 attains a unity which intellect can never 
 attain, for, though reason may demand 
 such a unity, intellect has never been able 
 to think it out. Love, therefore, is a bond 
 of union among souls in a manner which 
 somehow passes beyond the grasp of 
 thought. 
 
 Christianity has ventured to affirm that God is 
 Love is the essential nature of God, and LoTe ' 
 therefore the ultimate truth of the Uni- 
 verse. "God is love, and he that abideth in 
 love abideth in God and God abideth in 
 him." If this be true, we have reason to 
 believe that, no matter how gigantic the 
 evils of the world may become, there is a 
 power which will finally overcome them 
 all. For here is a principle which exactly 
 meets the great need of the world. The 
 
46 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 world is not as good as it is beautiful, be- 
 cause goodness requires the willing co- 
 operation of human wills, as well as the 
 will of God, to produce it; and so far 
 human wills have not united wholly with 
 the will of God. But if we believe that 
 God is Love, and that He has all eternity 
 at His disposal, we cannot despair. We 
 must believe that He will finally prevail 
 over all oppositions and bring about a uni- 
 versal harmony, so making His universe 
 as good as it is beautiful. If, further, 
 we learn the lesson of the life and death 
 of Christ, and believe that the Love of 
 God shrinks from no sacrifice in order 
 to prevail over evil, we must feel that 
 the resources of the Divine Love are 
 bound to secure at last overwhelming 
 victory. 
 
 Conception In taking refuge in this solution of the 
 of God. difficulty, we have boldly assumed the 
 truth of the fundamental faith of Chris- 
 tianity. Can we, in any way, link this 
 faith with the thoughts about the Universe 
 and the Supreme Power manifested in it, 
 which we ventured to derive from observa- 
 tion of Nature and of life, and from the 
 discoveries of science? We have now 
 come to the most difficult point of all. 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 47 
 
 How is the Supreme Power related to the 
 Universe ? 
 
 At one time it was held, almost univer- Tran- 
 sally, that God may be compared to a scendence - 
 great engineer. The world is a vast ma- 
 chine, the work of His design and will. 
 According to this view, the Creator 
 stands outside and apart from His work. 
 The doctrine is therefore described as a 
 doctrine of Transcendence. Crudely pre- 
 sented, it involves endless difficulties. It 
 seems to make God the author of evil, 
 or, in the endeavour to escape from that 
 consequence, it describes Him as so im- 
 perfect a contriver that He is forced to 
 intervene from time to time to put things 
 right. In the eighteenth century the dis- 
 covery of the mechanism of the heavens 
 seemed to give a magnificent picture of 
 a world designed by a great mechan- 
 ician, and so dazzled the minds of most 
 thinkers that these difficulties were not 
 fully appreciated. But the reflection of 
 the nineteenth century brought them to 
 light, and a crude form of Atheism 
 sprang up, which still exists, and finds 
 its justification in this transcendent 
 view of the Creator's relation to the 
 Universe. 
 
48 LOYE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 imma- The nineteenth century saw also the 
 
 growth of a great scientific doctrine of 
 Creation as a gradual process. Herbert 
 Spencer taught Evolution as a philosophy 
 of the Universe, and Darwin applied the 
 principle, in the shape of a specific doc- 
 trine, to the whole world of organic life. 
 When interpreted by philosophic theolo- 
 gians these ideas yielded a fresh concep- 
 tion of the relation of the Creator to the 
 world. It was indeed an old theory come 
 back again. According to it, God is im- 
 manent in the Universe. He is the Crea- 
 tive Life, or Will, which, working in the 
 vast process, is the source of it all. This 
 grand idea was soon discerned to be in 
 harmony with aspects of Christian teach- 
 ing which had come down from the earliest 
 days. It threw light on much that had 
 been puzzling or obscure: it allowed the 
 religious mind to move freely in the new 
 worlds opened by science. 
 
 It cannot be pretended, however, that 
 the doctrine of the Immanence of God in 
 Creation solves the problem with which 
 we are now dealing. Whether the world 
 be the work of a transcendent Deity, or 
 of an all-pervading Spirit immanent in 
 the universal process, it remains that the 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 49 
 
 Supreme Power has brought forth a Uni- 
 verse in which the great problem of evil 
 presses with terrific force on every genera- 
 tion, and concerning which there is no 
 reason, provided by our scientific examina- 
 tion of Nature, for believing that evil will 
 be ultimately eliminated. 
 
 The faith which holds on to God in Faith. 
 unshaken optimism, and trusts in His 
 power and love in spite of every dis- 
 couragement, will here assert itself. This 
 faith is the inspiring soul of the highest 
 forms of religion. It springs out of the 
 depths of man's spiritual being, and finds 
 its justification in that mystical com- 
 munion with God which, in some form or 
 other, may be found in all that is best 
 in man's spiritual experience. But we 
 dare not base our argument on this faith, 
 though we must recognise it as a su- 
 premely important fact. 
 
 How are we to think of the Universe as The Uni 
 
 First, it may be a perfectly articulated of Natural 
 system of cause and effect. Every element ause 
 may be linked to every other element so 
 as to form a complete natural order. In 
 this system there is a perfect connexion 
 throughout, so that every event takes 
 
50 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 place as a necessary result of what has 
 gone before. A mind which grasped the 
 Universe with sufficient fullness and ac- 
 curacy at any moment could foretell all 
 the future. Those who hold this view 
 must believe that the will of man is but 
 one among the many causes which direct 
 the course of events, and that, like other 
 causes, the will is strictly determined by 
 preceding events. It is not spontaneous 
 free. It is but a link in the chain of 
 necessary causes, producing effects with 
 as much inevitableness as any lump of 
 matter when it is moved on being struck 
 by another : only, in the case of mind, some 
 of the causes are accompanied by psychi- 
 cal concomitants. There are feelings at- 
 tached to certain movements of the brain 
 which give us the pleasing illusion of free- 
 dom. 
 
 Divine Stated in this way, the view of the Uni- 
 
 natfon? 1 " verse as a whole which we are now con- 
 sidering may be described as an effort to 
 apply the methods of physical science 
 Universally. Those who hold this view 
 exclude, as a rule, all supposition of crea- 
 tive will. They regard the mechanism of 
 cause and effect as the final truth. But 
 there long prevailed among Christian 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 51 
 
 theologians a doctrine of the Universe 
 which was essentially the same, though it 
 was expressed in theological language. 
 God, it was held, fore-ordained every 
 event from the beginning. Some, who 
 hesitated to go so far as this, held that 
 God, though He did not fore-ordain all 
 events, fore-knew them without exception. 
 But this latter view was but a weak yield- 
 ing of the head to the heart. The old Pre- 
 destinarians were perfectly right when 
 they insisted on the strictest view of the 
 doctrine, if held at all. Starting with one 
 sole omnipotent Will and regarding all 
 creation as the outcome of its decrees, it 
 follows that the end in every detail is cer- 
 tain from the beginning. Also the human 
 will is but the instrument of the Divine 
 Will, and it is vain to try to relieve the 
 Almighty of responsibility for every hu- 
 man action, bad or good. Everything is 
 executed in perfect accord with the 
 original design. The evil man as well as 
 the good man is a means by which God 
 effects His purposes. 
 
 This doctrine, whatever the efforts Failure 
 made to qualify it or soften it away, can Doctrine 
 only be consistent by making God the 
 Author of evil. Moreover, it destroys the 
 
52 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 foundation on which it is built; because 
 in order to affirm the supremacy of the 
 Divine Will, it denies the reality of the 
 human will. Gaining our whole idea of 
 will from our experience of the faculty as 
 it exists in man, we have no right to at- 
 tribute it to God in a way which deprives 
 man of it altogether. The theory breaks 
 down philosophically as weD as morally. 
 The real problem is, how to combine in 
 one scheme of thought a whole in which 
 the human will retains its freedom of 
 choice between good and evil, and at the 
 same time the Divine Will secures the 
 Universe from moral catastrophe, and 
 realises the great purpose for which crea- 
 tion exists. Here is the difficulty which 
 has always confounded the speculative 
 theologian. If he affirms the sovereignty 
 of the Divine Will, he annihilates the hu- 
 man will: if he secures human freedom, 
 he denies the omnipotence of God. This 
 dilemma takes us to the very heart of the 
 great problem before us. 
 
 Anlmper- Before proceeding to another mode of 
 
 cepVon 1 " thinking about the Universe, we must 
 
 of the consider an imperfection in the modern 
 
 scientific conception of it as a system of 
 
 necessarily connected causes and effects. 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 53 
 
 This naturalistic doctrine, as it has been 
 called, has already occupied our attention. 
 We have seen that it implies that a mind 
 which grasped the Universe with sufficient 
 fullness and accuracy at any moment 
 could foretell all the future. Every event 
 is the necessary outcome of all that has 
 gone before. Is this true as a matter of 
 fact? We have already seen that man is 
 able to control the forces of Nature for his 
 own purposes, using those forces to 
 modify one another. This power has come 
 to man as the result of his discovery of 
 certain laws of Nature. When he finds 
 that there is an order in natural events 
 which he can depend on, he gains a very 
 large and wonderful freedom in directing 
 natural forces for his own ends. In the 
 ordinary experiences of life there is there- 
 fore no inconsistency between the uni- 
 formity of natural law and man's liberty 
 of action. As a matter of fact, the uni- 
 formity of Nature endows man with a vast 
 power to alter the course of Nature to suit 
 his design. It is only an abstract, and 
 wholly theoretical, view of natural law 
 which makes us regard the world as re- 
 duced by that law to a system of rigidly 
 determined causes and effects. The mo- 
 
54 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 merit we turn from our abstractions to the 
 concrete facts of our experience, we find 
 natural forces plastic in our hands. So 
 true is this that a recent development of 
 philosophy is able to show very strong 
 reasons for believing that the laws of Na- 
 ture, as we call them, are relative to our 
 mode of grasping our experience of the 
 physical world with a view to the satisfac- 
 tion of our needs. They have, that is, 
 been shaped by the practical aims of hu- 
 man life. 1 Thus the whole conception of 
 the Universe as a necessitated order of 
 things, in which every event is rigidly fixed 
 from the beginning, breaks down com- 
 pletely. And, it may be added, the ma- 
 terialistic conception of man as an ani- 
 mated automaton, whose movements are 
 accompanied by a series of delusive 
 psychical concomitants, has been dis- 
 credited by all recent investigations into 
 the relation between the mind and the 
 brain. 2 
 
 Having thus cleared the ground we are 
 in a position to survey our problem with 
 more unobstructed vision. 
 
 1 Bergson, Creative Evolution, Eng. trans., ch. ii. 
 2 M'Dougall, Body and Mind; Bergson, Hatter and 
 Memory, Eng. trans. 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 55 
 
 It is possible to think of the wholeness A Larger 
 of the Universe in another way. Starting 
 with the postulate that there is a genuine 
 spontaneity in every finite will, and 
 gathering from our experience that this 
 freedom of the will is not contravened, but 
 rather subserved, by the uniformity of the 
 physical world, we gain the conception of 
 the Universe as a spiritual order in which 
 the end is not wholly determined from the 
 beginning. According to this view God 
 does not necessitate the activities of His 
 finite spiritual children. The mechanical 
 necessity of the material world belongs to 
 that world when regarded in abstraction 
 from the whole of reality, as in theoretical 
 science. We know in our own experience 
 that, so far as human power extends, the 
 course of Nature is not fixed, because man 
 is able, within the limits which belong to 
 his finite constitution, to alter it. The 
 whole Universe therefore, including the 
 material world, is subject to change in 
 correspondence with the interplay of the 
 whole multitude of conscious, voluntary 
 agents. And as it is impossible to know 
 beforehand how this interplay of free 
 agencies will work out, we are bound to 
 conclude that there is a real contingency 
 
56 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 in things. The history of the Universe is 
 the history of a Great Adventure. 
 
 Here is a thought to stir us to hope and 
 effort. But there is also the difficulty that 
 the great adventure may end in failure. 
 What reason have we to think that success 
 is assured? When the outlook on earth 
 is as black as it has been in recent years, 
 why should we believe that things are 
 going better, or will ever go better, in the 
 whole vast domain of being? 
 
 A Final The only answer we can give, on philo- 
 
 Unification. gQpjjj^j grounds, is that we cannot believe 
 in a fundamental contradiction in the ulti- 
 mate nature of things. There must be a 
 final unity. If there is such a thing as 
 meaning, if the indications which point 
 to an inherent trustworthiness in things 
 are not utterly misleading, there must be 
 some great overruling truth which recon- 
 ciles, from the highest point of view, the 
 elements which stand in antagonism to one 
 another from our point of view. This is 
 the faith on which rest all life, all thought, 
 all sanity. It means that the Universe is 
 a whole a cosmos, not a chaos. 
 
 Granting this, let us see how it works 
 out in relation to the statement of our 
 problem which we have now reached. 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 57 
 
 Every effort at solution based on the 
 supposition that the Universe is the ex- 
 pression of a single omnipotent will ends, 
 as we have seen, in complete failure. How 
 are we then to make any progress? By 
 considering the adequacy of our terms. 
 The result of such an enquiry will show 
 that the term Will is not adequate to the 
 task imposed on it. Having arrived at the 
 conclusion that the Supreme Power of the 
 Universe is no mere unthinking force, but 
 a Being who expresses Himself in Crea- 
 tion and in the overwhelming beauty of 
 Creation, and who is also revealed to us in 
 our study of the natural world as funda- 
 mentally trustworthy, we are compelled 
 to think of Him in terms of personality, 
 the highest terms we know. We therefore 
 speak of Him as Wise, Mighty, Good. 
 We think of His work as the outcome of 
 conscious, intelligent Will. In this we are 
 certainly correct. But the difficulties we 
 have so recently encountered in the appli- 
 cation of the idea of Will to His action 
 must warn us that, however true these 
 terms may be, they are not good enough to 
 contain the full truth of His Nature. 
 
 When we reflect calmly on the nature Limitation 
 of our knowledge and the impossibility 
 
58 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 of framing any statement which is not 
 open to dialectical criticism, we must 
 become aware that we, in our life in this 
 world, do not stand on any mountain- 
 peak of vision from which we can survey 
 the whole domain of being. There must 
 be a Reality higher than we are. There 
 must be a Unification beyond the grasp 
 of our thought. We use the best language 
 we have got and find it insufficient. 
 
 Now when we speak of God as Omnip- 
 otent, we are thinking of Him definitely 
 in terms of Will: we are assuming that 
 the language of Will is able to express 
 with exactness the fullness of His Nature. 
 Is it any wonder that we find ourselves 
 in difficulties ? This consideration not only 
 shows why the problem is bound to arise; 
 it also warns us against supposing that 
 by any skilful definition of the word 
 Omnipotence, or by any limitation of its 
 sphere, we can escape trouble. 
 
 Love the Let us now turn from our philosophical 
 
 Unifier. argument to the vision of Love conquer- 
 ing evil which has been given us by our 
 Christian faith. We have seen that Love 
 in its great work of overcoming the 
 antagonism of opposing wills passes be- 
 yond the limits of exact definition. It 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 59 
 
 can bring about a unification of soul with 
 soul which nothing else in our experi- 
 ence can accomplish. It can annihilate 
 the opposition between self and self, so 
 that each finds its end in the other. If 
 Love be indeed the best expression we 
 can find of the ultimate nature of God, 
 we have reason to believe that, however 
 powerful evil may be, it cannot finally 
 prevail. Love, supreme and all-embrac- 
 ing, and with all eternity before it, will 
 surely find out a way to overcome every 
 opposition. If we believe that God is 
 Love, we must believe that He cannot fail 
 in bringing about a universal reconcilia- 
 tion, and so creating that Kingdom of 
 Love which is the summum bonum of all 
 creation. Love as it is in God is, if this 
 be true, that which brings into unity the 
 multitude of wills. It is the great bond 
 of union in the spiritual world. 
 
 Here we have an indication of the char- 
 acter of the final truth for which we are 
 seeking. When we keep strictly to the 
 language of personality we are unable to 
 get beyond the antagonism of personal 
 wills : we can find no means of overcoming 
 it. But, we have seen, there must be a 
 Higher Reality in God. What is its 
 
60 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 nature? Surely it is now clear that it 
 must be a capacity to gather up into one, 
 in a higher form of life, all the discon- 
 nected warring elements of the spiritual 
 world. The great problem which con- 
 founds us can be, and will be, solved in 
 God. It must be, if there is to be coher- 
 ence, or meaning, anywhere. For every- 
 thing in heaven and earth depends upon 
 its solution. There must be an all-inclu- 
 sive Life in which we and all created 
 things live and move and have our being. 
 We cannot think this out in the form of a 
 consistent philosophy, because we do not 
 stand high enough in the scale of being; 
 but we can feel it in all the experiences 
 of love and sacrifice, we can find it flash- 
 ing on the consciousness of the mystic as 
 he loses himself in the beatific vision, we 
 can hear it in the song of the poet as he 
 discerns the presence which disturbs him 
 with the joy of elevated thought. 
 Meaning We can now understand the true mean- 
 
 ing of the terms Omnipotent and Omnis- 
 cient. They are ways of indicating the all- 
 inclusiveness of the life of God. They use 
 a very imperfect language, the language 
 expressive of personality as it exists in 
 man. They think of God as One who 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 61 
 
 knows and wills, and are so far correct, 
 but they omit that higher side of God's 
 nature which passes beyond all defini- 
 tion in terms of knowledge and will. As 
 applied to God these terms are poetic 
 rather than scientific. And all our 
 troubles with them arise from the fact 
 that we insist on using them as if they 
 were scientific. 
 
 One important consequence of their 
 imperfection is that they separate the life 
 of man from the life of God, and give 
 the impression that God is a remote, all- 
 knowing, Almighty Sovereign, reigning 
 in solitary glory and untroubled happi- 
 ness in some far-off heaven, while man is 
 toiling and groaning in the labours and 
 sorrows of his life on earth. Here is a 
 very great mischief which has, for many, 
 undone a large part of the good of Chris- 
 tianity. God is not remote from us. We 
 share His life and He shares ours. Truly 
 He is above us, but it is in the order of 
 being, not by reason of any sovereign 
 aloofness. He is Life of our life, and 
 Home of our spirits. In all our afflictions, 
 He is afflicted; and in all our joys, He 
 takes part. His love encircles us, and will 
 never let us go, even though our wilful 
 
62 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 hearts may often rebel. That Love will 
 finally prevail over all rebellions. 
 
 It would seem, therefore, that the terms 
 Love and Omnipotence point to precisely 
 the same truth, but Love is a higher, more 
 perfect, expression of this truth than 
 Omnipotence. Love is not capable of 
 exact scientific definition for the very same 
 reason that leads us to believe that our 
 thought cannot fully comprehend God. 
 Love is that which overcomes the isolation 
 of souls. It creates a bond of union 
 among selves. It possesses always, in 
 some degree, the same kind of inclusive- 
 ness that God possesses in the highest 
 degree. Therefore Love expresses the 
 nature of God as nothing else can ex- 
 press it. 
 
 The All- How, then, are we to think of the 
 
 whole the Universe, included in the all- 
 encircling life of God? It is not a me- 
 chanical system in which every event is 
 settled beforehand. There is no such 
 thing as fate. It is a multitude of spirits 
 sharing a common life. On the lower side 
 this common life is presented to us as the 
 vast world of Nature. From a higher 
 point of view it is the all-embracing life of 
 God. And God is the All-inclusive, not 
 
LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 63 
 
 by virtue of a mere selfhood standing in 
 perpetual antithesis to the natural world, 
 as some idealist theories represent; but 
 because He is higher (properly the High- 
 est) in the Order of Reality, and there- 
 fore more than Personal. 1 Possessing all 
 the attributes which constitute person- 
 ality, He yet, as the Supreme All-inclu- 
 sive, passes beyond personality. Within 
 his super-personal life the Universe 
 moves forward to an end which is deter- 
 mined by the Divine Freedom co-operat- 
 ing with the innumerable freedoms of all 
 spiritual beings. The end is not settled 
 beforehand, because it depends on an in- 
 numerable multitude of free decisions. 
 The life of the Universe is a vast adven- 
 ture. All that we can really know about 
 the end is that it will be the triumph of 
 Love. It must be, because God is all- 
 inclusive. 
 
 Thus we realise the meaning of the 
 term Omnipotence. It means that God's 
 Nature is such that things cannot go 
 finally wrong. It means that all oppos- 
 ing wills must and shall be subjugated by 
 the power of Supreme Love. 
 
 1 On this conception see the writer's God and Freedom 
 in Human Experience. 
 
64 LOVE AND OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 But to reach the triumph of love in the 
 great final consummation, measureless 
 sufferings may have to be endured, meas- 
 ureless evils overcome. Only by the awful 
 path of sacrifice can the Eternal Love 
 move to victory over the oppositions of 
 perverse wills. Here is the eternal signifi- 
 cance of the Cross of Christ. 
 
 But for such an end NO sacrifice is 
 too great. It is all worth while. Life is 
 worth living, and death is worth dying, 
 and every pain is worth enduring; for 
 Love is supreme in the Universe, and the 
 end for which Love is working will surely 
 be attained. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE SURVIVAL OF THE 
 FITTEST 
 
 BY LILY DOUGALL 
 (Author of "Pro Christo et Ecclesia") 
 
 IN the last few years we have all met 
 men and women, not without claim to be 
 regarded as thinkers, who asserted that 
 the war, with its unreasoning passions, 
 recrudescent superstitions and tyrannies, 
 its harnessing of so much applied science 
 to destructive ends, had proved, either 
 that the evolutionary process is aimless 
 and chaotic and that there is no such thing 
 as human progress, or that the condition 
 of further advance is frankly to repudiate 
 our present moral values in favour of 
 class- and race-selfishness and the will to 
 dominate our fellow-man. 
 
 The present paper is an enquiry as to 
 whether a steady tendency toward any- 
 thing that may be called good can be 
 discovered in the processes of biological 
 development as a whole; and, if so, to 
 
 65 
 
66 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 what further human development that 
 line of tendency points. 
 What is the Whether or no there is any breach in 
 the continuity of development between 
 
 Natural "star-dust" and the beginning of life it 
 
 Evolution? . -C* u 
 
 is not my purpose to enquire. Jb or such 
 
 a breach we have only negative evidence, 
 and it is only romantic persons who build 
 much on negative evidence. Personally I 
 see no more difficulty in expecting to 
 discover the development of life from 
 what we call "the inanimate" than in ac- 
 cepting the fact of some of the subsequent 
 changes within the sphere of animate 
 existence which we know have been 
 brought about by biological development. 
 Be that as it may, we know, at any rate, 
 that there is no real breach of continuity 
 between the most primitive forms of life 
 and humanity. We know, too, that man 
 as an animal, since he reached the human 
 stage, has done far more to alter other 
 forms of life on this earth than has the oak 
 or the rose, the horse or the bee ; indeed, he 
 has even done something to modify the 
 weather conditions of "the great globe it- 
 self and all that it inhabit." We are justi- 
 fied, then, in taking man as Nature's 
 masterpiece, and, having accepted within 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 67 
 
 limits the story science tells of the road he 
 has so far travelled, we shall proceed to 
 enquire whither natural evolution would 
 appear to be taking him. 
 Perfect correspondence with environ- What is the 
 
 . . ,T j, AT , - Goal of 
 
 ment is the aim of Nature for every or- Human 
 ganism. This is a biological common- Solution? 
 place. Adopting this principle as our 
 starting-point, we may reasonably ask 
 what we may conceive the tendency of 
 human development to be. And if we 
 conceive some powerful intelligence be- 
 hind Nature, we are still more impelled 
 to ask what, in view of past evolution, 
 should we reasonably assume to be the 
 further purpose of that intelligence with 
 regard to man. Humanity at present 
 corresponds very imperfectly with its en- 
 vironment. From this imperfection arise 
 all those calamities in which humanity 
 fights a losing battle with the forces of 
 destruction, and succumbs. But if there 
 can be said to be any ascertainable aim in 
 natural evolution, it must be the attain- 
 ment of a more perfect correspondence of 
 man with his whole terrestrial environ- 
 
 ment - What Does 
 
 It is of first importance, then, that we such Corre- 
 
 should enquire what such correspondence involve? * 
 
68 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 (i) Bodily 
 Fitness. 
 
 (ii) Mental 
 Fitness. 
 
 would involve. What type of man does 
 our present degree of intelligence tell us 
 the race must produce if humanity is to 
 correspond perfectly with its environ- 
 ment? 
 
 We shall agree that the most funda- 
 mental requisite is physical health and 
 strength. Any race of plants or animals 
 which succumbs easily to blight or disease 
 fails to persist. By some system of 
 eugenics and hygienic environment it 
 might be possible, in the course of a very 
 few generations, to produce a type larger, 
 stronger, more beautiful and more prolific 
 than man now is a type also more im- 
 mune from disease. Such a type would 
 mark a fresh stage in development. 
 
 But physical fitness is not enough. 
 Herd animals roaming fertile plains in 
 the past have exceeded anything that 
 man has attained in health and strength, 
 beauty, fecundity, and immunity from 
 disease, and were yet at the mercy of cold 
 and famine, and, above all, of man and his 
 weapons. Mere physical fitness might be 
 developed without increasing intellectual 
 power. As it was by reasoning from 
 observation that men learned to overcome 
 difficulties of climate by means of gar- 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 69 
 
 merits, huts and fire, to use tools and 
 weapons, and to make the simplest rules 
 of social organisation, it is obvious that the 
 ascendency of the human race on the earth 
 has been due to the development of intel- 
 lect. Man's further correspondence with 
 his physical environment must be by 
 means of applied science of which it may 
 be here observed that eugenics itself is one 
 of the youngest and crudest branches. 
 We must, as a race, learn not only to com- 
 bat but to prevent disease, not only to 
 reap the fruits of the earth, but to im- 
 prove those fruits and increase their yield. 
 We must learn either so to adapt our 
 industries to the weather, or so to control 
 the weather, that droughts and floods 
 shall no longer bring us destruction. We 
 must learn to make the ocean not only a 
 highway, but a safe highway; and the 
 same must be done for the highway of the 
 air; and many other discoveries we must 
 make. 
 
 Now all this will mean a high degree of 
 reasoning power and scientific imagina- 
 tion. Therefore the type of man to which 
 the lines of tendency in Nature point must 
 be not only physically but intellectually 
 superior. If we conceive of such a superior 
 
70 SUEVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 class developed in all countries which have 
 now a high civilisation, we shall perceive 
 that they would be markedly different 
 from the majority who either had not 
 been selected for improving, or from vari- 
 ous motives had refused to improve, them- 
 selves. Perhaps most of us would need 
 to think of ourselves as remaining in the 
 inferior grade. 
 
 (iii) Ability Again, before the higher grade of men 
 oflSerior can ^ e ^ ree f rom peril of disease, false 
 Races, ideas and social ferment, the problem of 
 the more weak, more ignorant and back- 
 ward members of the human race must be 
 grappled with and solved. The militarist 
 has always a very simple answer to the 
 problem of inferior races subjugate or 
 else destroy. He is, indeed, a simple per- 
 son, and can give no other sort of answer. 
 But as long as multitudes of the lower 
 type exist anywhere upon the earth they 
 will be a constant source of physical dis- 
 ease and false ideas, which might attack 
 the children of the higher type unless they 
 could be completely segregated from 
 them. Would such segregation be pos- 
 sible? 
 
 As a matter of fact the strictest barrier 
 the world has been able to set up has been 
 
SUEVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 71 
 
 caste. This may prevent intermarriage 
 and social companionship; it cannot pre- 
 vent infection of physical disease or of 
 passions and ideas. When rage or panic 
 seize a populace no caste within it will 
 remain unmoved. Of two classes, either 
 may be the object of the other's rage, but 
 the rage will be infectious. Either may 
 be the object of the other's fear, but the 
 fear will become common to both. Each 
 may express its emotions in its own way, 
 but the emotion, if it be passionate, will 
 surge from class to class. Ideas in the 
 same way leap the barrier of caste. 
 
 Intellect, which is the eye of the 
 mind, may originate evil as well as good. 
 The unintellectual herd animal is never 
 tempted to take up with either the better 
 or the worse habits of those of another 
 herd. He cannot form attractive pictures 
 of novelty within his mind and brood upon 
 them until they obsess him. But man, 
 the more mentally developed he is, the 
 more is he open, through a lively imagina- 
 tion, to the forces of suggestion, imitation 
 and sympathy. 
 
 It follows, therefore, that if we had 
 upon the earth a race of beings physically 
 so much superior, and mentally so much 
 
72 SUEVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 more active, than we now are, that they 
 were able to dominate the forces of Na- 
 ture, their children would be quick to 
 observe and keen to interest themselves in 
 all humanity. They would discover a 
 thousand reasons for companionship with 
 the rest of us. Through compassion, mere 
 love of novelty, affection, or through lust, 
 contamination with the notions of such 
 civilisations as we now have would take 
 place. The sons of the gods would take 
 to themselves wives of the daughters of 
 men: the daughters of the gods, "divinely 
 tall and most divinely fair," would develop 
 most unaccountable attraction for inferior 
 men. The dream of the eugenist, or in- 
 deed of any other scientist, can never be 
 fully realised until the stupid, weak or un- 
 wholesome human beings harboured by 
 our present civilisation have left the earth. 
 By (a) But even supposing a class of supermen 
 
 Means. could effectively solve this problem of a 
 subjugated race, it appears to be a pure 
 assumption that the quality that enables a 
 man to subjugate and domineer will al- 
 ways be the quality supremely necessary 
 for persistence and development. Even 
 the conquering races of history have, as a 
 matter of fact, passed away. Does his- 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 73 
 
 tory show that any people who have so 
 established their dominions by conquest as 
 to have no fear of invasion or revolution, 
 have thereupon settled down to agree 
 among themselves? We all remember 
 toiling in our childhood over the complex 
 conditions that marked the internal dis- 
 integration of military states. In the his- 
 tory of Rome, for instance, it was com- 
 paratively easy to render some account of 
 our lesson while we were following the 
 exhilarating accounts of conquering 
 armies; but when it came to the quarrels 
 of factions in the victorious State, we re- 
 member what a sense came over us of a 
 warring world of which we could form no 
 satisfying imaginative picture. If we 
 look at the matter psychologically we are 
 bound to admit that any set of people 
 trained in habits of warfare will naturally 
 tend to continue to settle their differences 
 by that method. They will remain united 
 only so long as, either in reality or in their 
 belief, they are opposed by an external 
 foe. Take away the foe and you will not 
 give peace to the belligerent. Belliger- 
 ence is a habit of mind; it is more than 
 that, it is the outcome of the deep, funda- 
 mental animal instinct of combativeness, 
 
74 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 which, if turned against mankind and 
 trained into the active habit of killing men, 
 will not subside into quiescence simply 
 because external enemies are vanquished. 
 
 The soldier who is so trained that skill 
 in arms and strategy are both the game 
 and the purpose of his life has naturally 
 small faith in other methods of dealing 
 with an obstinate opponent. The super- 
 man, if he is to conquer the world by arms, 
 must be such a soldier; and if he is such a 
 soldier, when he has conquered the world 
 he will not agree with all his fellows as to 
 the best form of government, nor settle 
 down in loyalty and obedience to a gov- 
 ernment he dislikes. Such supermen 
 would inevitably practise the noble art of 
 war upon one another. They will indeed 
 have been trained to believe war to be 
 necessary for a man's right correspond- 
 ence with his environment ; it could not be 
 otherwise. 
 
 But should war once break out between 
 the supermen of the scientist's dream, 
 their end is near. War and eugenics can- 
 not be practised together at any stage of 
 development, for warfare eliminates the 
 most fit, and that usually before they be- 
 come parents. It contributes to the popu- 
 
SUKVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 75 
 
 lation not only the maimed, the halt, the 
 blind, but the neurasthenic. If the ever 
 fresh discoveries of science are to render 
 men's engines of war more and more de- 
 structive, if the higher vitality and intelli- 
 gence produced by the eugenist are to 
 be exercised in fiercer and fiercer conflict, 
 the race of supermen must soon destroy 
 itself. 
 
 It thus becomes evident that if man is (b) Social 
 to correspond more and more perfectly Means - 
 with his environment he must outgrow 
 the use of such weapons as will finally be 
 turned upon himself, and learn to get rid 
 of backward humanity by some other 
 method than subjugation or destruction. 
 
 We have seen that the race which is to 
 inherit the earth must develop superior 
 physique and superior mind. And this is 
 not enough ; it must also develop superior 
 social talent. The leaders of the human 
 family must have social faculties and 
 social skill which will enable them to get 
 rid of the inferior races by getting rid of 
 racial inferiority. To discover what social 
 faculties and what skill would be required 
 to raise the whole human race, let us make 
 a brief survey of the past progress of 
 civilisation. 
 
76 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 The story Let us trace this general progress as 
 
 Progress! seen * n ^ e case ^ an apple-grower a 
 man who devotes a certain bit of ground 
 to apples in order to eat them, barter them, 
 or distribute them over the community in 
 exchange for an income. Historically we 
 first meet this gentleman building his rude 
 hut under a wild apple tree ; in fact, he is 
 perhaps at this stage a woman (as an 
 Irishman might say) ; for men are migra- 
 tory and husbands are various. She builds 
 her hut because she must shelter and rear 
 her children; and she throws stones at 
 other women from adjacent huts if they 
 try to take the apples. Perhaps she in- 
 vents the first rude bow or sling. In later 
 generations we find one man settled down 
 with one woman under the tree. He 
 defends the property now from other 
 couples in the same group. These tree 
 people are slow in forming common laws, 
 but by degrees it is found convenient that 
 a number of men with apple trees should 
 agree not to steal from one another, and 
 to join together to defend their property 
 against external foes. At this stage they 
 are beginning to improve the culture of 
 grains and fruits; but let us talk only of 
 our typical apple. Obviously here, for 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 77 
 
 the first time, there is a little leisure and 
 wit to devote to the cleaning of bark and 
 the pruning of branches and the sowing 
 of pips. By degrees, as the community 
 becomes more consolidated, and there are 
 longer periods without invasion, the sys- 
 tem of grafting is invented. The apples 
 become sweeter and larger, and are of 
 more value to the community. No great 
 advance, however, will be made as long as 
 the owner has to spend a part of his time 
 in warlike exercises and a part in actual 
 war, and while he still knows that he and 
 his rights of possession are liable at any 
 time to be swept away by a stronger 
 enemy. When, with the next advance in 
 civilisation, it is decided to set apart a 
 certain number of men for war, and allow 
 the apple-grower to concentrate on apples, 
 the bit of land becomes more prolific and 
 the owner richer. Ah, richer! Compara- 
 tive wealth brings in a new set of thieves. 
 The poorer men of his own community 
 have now to be guarded against, as well as 
 hostile armies. If he began with a friendly 
 alliance of men who all had equal wealth, 
 it is different now. Some have failed; he 
 has prospered; and he sets up a wall, a 
 gun, and a man-trap to defend his goods 
 
78 SUKVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 against the vicious poor. This, again, 
 takes part of his time. His cultural 
 operations are not purely scientific until 
 another lot of men are set apart to defend 
 the orchards of the rich from the thieving 
 class of their own nation. This gives a 
 security never known before, and what 
 may be called the real science of pomi- 
 culture begins. Science is the accumula- 
 tion and classification of the world's 
 knowledge upon any subject, with fresh 
 observation and experiment on the basis 
 of this tabulated knowledge. Science can 
 only progress when a community has ar- 
 rived at a large degree of security, and 
 when living is no longer a fight for the 
 necessities of life. 
 
 Perhaps we are inclined to think we 
 have now brought the apple-grower to 
 such a degree of success that nothing fur- 
 ther is to be desired or looked for. Let us 
 consider. He is paying a large tax now 
 for army, navy and police, money which, 
 from the point of view of apple-growing, 
 could be better spent upon scientific appli- 
 ances of all sorts, and investigation into 
 the nature and cure of apple diseases and 
 apple pests. But that is not all. The 
 police, however active, do not exterminate 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 79 
 
 the vicious or careless poor, and to these 
 belong ill-kept apple trees, which are a 
 fruitful source of disease germs and pests, 
 travelling lightly on the highway of the 
 air and ever making fresh havoc with the 
 rich man's trees. Much of his time and 
 money is spent upon the war of defence 
 against these invisible marauders. Again, 
 a man's mind does its best work when his 
 spirits are tranquil or exhilarated, and 
 this man's spirits are constantly worried, 
 not only by these same pests, but by the 
 fact that there is always a certain amount 
 of thieving in his community which the 
 police, however efficient and well paid, 
 cannot prevent. The spirit of the thief is 
 infectious. It gets into trade ; it gets into 
 labour; and as long as detection and coer- 
 cion are the methods relied upon for fight- 
 ing it, it will be there to defy them by 
 invisible means the over-reaching and 
 deception of buyer and seller, the laziness 
 of the labourer. The man who is really 
 keen to get at Nature's best secrets con- 
 cerning apples, and to produce the best 
 and the most from any bit of ground, can- 
 not long be either jolly or serene with 
 pests and dishonesty bred at home. We 
 had almost forgotten the national enemies, 
 
80 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 but they are still a menace. What is the 
 condition to-day of the apple-orchards of 
 Belgium, of Northern France, of Serbia, 
 of Roumania, of Poland, of south-east 
 Russia? And yet in all these countries 
 security was supposed to be bought by 
 setting apart a large number of men to 
 defend the national boundaries from hos- 
 tile armies and the orchards from thieves. 
 We are to-day living in the stage of civili- 
 sation to which we have brought our apple- 
 grower. Clearly his plight is not satisfac- 
 tory. If we consider how he could learn 
 to correspond better and better with his 
 environment, it is obvious that without the 
 financial tax on his resources and the men- 
 tal worry caused by the dishonesty of his 
 community he could, even in times of 
 peace, produce a better apple and a better 
 orchard, while in war areas, under present 
 conditions, he and his apples are wholly 
 destroyed. 
 
 If we go back we shall find that the 
 first security of the primitive apple- 
 grower was procured by his social talent 
 rather than by his belligerence. As long 
 as he defended his apple tree single- 
 handed he had no security, and it produced 
 only small, sour fruit; it was only as his 
 
SUEVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 81 
 
 social alliance with a larger and larger 
 number of human beings was secured that 
 the peaceful periods of successful apple- 
 growing became longer and longer. It 
 may be urged that this was because the 
 larger community, and then the larger 
 nation, had stronger armies and finally a 
 stronger police force. That is true, but 
 it is not the whole truth, because the 
 strength of the large army and the large 
 police force depended quite as much upon 
 the development of social virtues in those 
 men as upon their warlike training and 
 equipment. If as large an army or police 
 force could have been got together out of 
 savage tribes, no amount of training in 
 war or of equipment would have kept 
 them from quarrelling with one another. 
 It is therefore only by the development of 
 a reasonable temper and a regard for the 
 common interest within the area of the 
 nation that a large measure of security 
 has been realised. Is it not, then, strictly 
 scientific to assume, as a working hypoth- 
 esis, that it is by the further develop- 
 ment of these social virtues, in himself and 
 in all other men, that the apple-grower 
 will attain the higher ideal which he is now 
 able to conceive, and that, with perfect 
 
82 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 security and a greater vital energy, he and 
 his fellows may at last succeed so well that 
 there may not be a little child anywhere 
 on this earth's surface that will not have 
 the pleasure of eating a large, juicy apple 
 every day? 
 
 The upshot of this survey is that if man 
 is to correspond to his environment he 
 must learn to correspond entirely to its 
 chief factor, his fellow-man; and to do 
 that he must learn to deal with hostility 
 and dishonesty by some social means more 
 effective than the anti-social way of de- 
 struction or suppression. 
 
 Dangers Psychology has taught us that instinc- 
 
 pression. tive impulses which are driven under 
 through fear i.e. suppressed against the 
 will and emotional tendencies of the sub- 
 ject produce evil consequences in the 
 subject, and hence in the community. 
 This is equally true whether the impulse 
 be for what the apple-grower, or modern 
 moralist, would call good or evil. The 
 instincts themselves are non-moral, for 
 they grew lusty in the race before those 
 social values we call moral were formed. 
 They are all capable of wholesome (i.e. of 
 social) or unwholesome (i.e. of anti- 
 social) satisfaction. If anti-social satis- 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 83 
 
 faction is sought, it is necessary for the 
 salvation of society either to kill off the 
 seeker or to educate him to find a social 
 satisfaction for his instinctive impulses. 
 Merely to suppress his impulses and save 
 him alive is to keep a plague spot of moral, 
 mental and physical evil in active ferment. 
 We must ultimately find some other way 
 of dealing with objectionable habits and 
 propensities than the way of the sword 
 and the prison. 
 
 Our only course is so to develop, by 
 education and political arrangements, the 
 social virtues of ourselves and all our 
 neighbours that our natural instincts will 
 find wholesome expression, and the im- 
 pulses arising from them be trained to 
 serve social ends; and this must be done, 
 not by any external authority, but by these 
 persons themselves. We must find some 
 way of persuading and helping every man 
 to reform himself from within. 
 
 And what is true within the nation will 
 obviously be equally true in international 
 affairs. The impulse to be a criminal 
 nation must be so dealt with by educatiofx 
 and example that the nation feeling the" 
 impulse will control and supersede it. 
 
 In such persuasion of criminal neigh- 
 
84 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 bours or criminal nations what part can 
 the sword, the gun and the man-trap play? 
 Or even if all swords are beaten into 
 policemen's batons, what part is the baton 
 to play? We are not here considering 
 ethical values, still less making moral or 
 religious assumptions; we are simply 
 enquiring how the apple-grower may cor- 
 respond with his environment of domestic 
 thieves and hostile nations. If our psy- 
 chological premises be correct, it is evident 
 that the area of the sword and the baton 
 must be gradually reduced until the crimi- 
 nal maniac, among individuals and among 
 nations, is regarded as the only fit subject 
 for their exercise. 
 
 Man a Many will say, "That might be all very 
 
 Animalf we ^ ^ ^ were possible, but it is not. Man 
 has always been a fighting animal and 
 always will be. Without the outlet for 
 his fighting instinct he would never de- 
 velop his other powers." There is both 
 truth and folly in this retort ; and first let 
 us consider the element of truth. 
 
 We have seen that man's combative 
 instinct is one of the deepest in his nature, 
 and that it must always have play. It 
 does not follow that he need always be 
 fighting with his fellow-man. It is man's 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 85 
 
 combative instinct that makes him refuse 
 to be beaten by circumstances of any sort. 
 In all adventure, in all enterprise, the 
 combative instinct comes into play, for 
 it is the desire to overcome rather than 
 yield to circumstance that makes advance 
 possible. If man had more ambition to do 
 and dare in the fields of applied sociology 
 and the other sciences, he would get full 
 exercise for the combative instinct without 
 quarrelling with his fellow-man. If there 
 are such beings as angels in a condition 
 we call heaven, they cannot accomplish 
 any difficult task without vanquishing 
 difficulties; and if they have no difficult 
 tasks they are not in our spiritual universe. 
 
 Even in early stages of biological prog- HOW De 
 ress each step up has been taken by crea- 
 tures who refused to yield to circumstance. 
 At every stage in evolution Nature has, 
 so to say, put out an advertisement: 
 "Wanted, a number of combative folk 
 prepared for adventure at all costs." She 
 did this when all the little life germs in 
 the warm mud were hesitating as to 
 whether they would go in search of food 
 or wait for it, and those who answered the 
 advertisement became the ancestors of the 
 animal world. Another time when she 
 
86 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 advertised for adventurers, some of the 
 water lizards who responded took to the 
 dry land, some, later, to the air, and be- 
 came the parents of the mammal and the 
 bird. Each advance was made at the risk 
 of life, and was always a great adventure, 
 a great achievement. The first mother who 
 went hungry to linger over the care of her 
 child a day longer than necessary had 
 answered the same advertisement ; and the 
 first ape who risked his standing in his 
 tribe for a new idea became the father of 
 men. 1 Nature is still hanging out a 
 placard with the old advertisement 
 "Who will make the new adventure? who 
 will risk all for an idea?" When people 
 venture their all for a new ideal, the result 
 is the development of new powers. 
 
 We have much to do if the use of force 
 upon human beings is to be pushed 
 steadily backward until it is only required 
 for the temporary restraint of the maniac ; 
 and if such diplomacy as may be described 
 as the art of getting the better of your 
 
 1 In discussing man's relation to allied vertebrates and 
 mammalia, Professors J. A. Thomson and P. Geddes, 
 Evolution (Home University Library), p. 99, remark, 
 "The real distinctiveness of man from his nearest allies 
 depends on his power of building up general ideas, and of 
 controlling his conduct in relation to ideals." 
 
SUEVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 87 
 
 neighbour by veiling some part of the 
 truth is to be considered a disgraceful ex- 
 pedient, except as a last resort in dealing 
 with lunatics. To attain such an end men 
 must learn, by taking the utmost pains 
 and by enduring persecution and mishaps 
 with the greatest hardihood, to acquire 
 new insight into justice, to see with an 
 opponent's eyes as well as with their own, 
 and to believe in the opponent's virtues 
 as well as in their own. It is necessary to 
 convince the leading spirits among the 
 youth of every nation that the welfare of 
 their race depends upon their bringing 
 all their powers of reason, humour and 
 endurance to the reconciliation of man 
 with man and class with class and nation 
 with nation, and that the sanctions of war 
 and criminal law are, at the best, a tem- 
 porary expedient. It will require all the 
 enthusiasm, the ingenuity, the courage 
 and endurance of the young and the in- 
 telligent to master the problem and be- 
 come efficient in any branch of conciliatory 
 and remedial work. Here indeed is work 
 enough, risk enough, for all the best facul- 
 ties of anyone who would give his life for 
 the good of his country or of the world. 
 By devotion to such work a new and 
 
88 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 higher faculty of human tact would de- 
 velop. Tact is the power to conduct com- 
 bats of mind with mind on the higher 
 plane of goodwill. Possibly with right 
 eugenic conditions and proper environ- 
 ment, in two or three generations a race 
 might arise who, while approving only 
 right conduct in their neighbours, and act- 
 ing with entire frankness and sincerity, 
 would yet be able to live on sympa- 
 thetic terms with the unthankful and the 
 evil. 
 
 If ultimately no such race arise, we shall 
 be pushed off the board by some other and 
 different race. Unless our sun should 
 enter the Milky Way and crash into some 
 other star, astronomers now predict that 
 our earth may turn for some hundreds of 
 millions of years under its genial rays. 
 That would give plenty of time for 
 humanity to decline and for some new 
 kind of monkey to develop a greater social 
 intelligence than ours. If we failed, the 
 push of life would be in that direction, 
 for, as we have seen, the tendency of 
 biological development is toward the pro- 
 duction of some animal who will perfectly 
 correspond with the whole of terrestrial 
 conditions. But the younger and more 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 89 
 
 hopeful among us will think twice before 
 abandoning man's claim to inherit the 
 earth. 
 
 We proceed now to consider the falsity 
 involved in the sentimental cry that man 
 has always been a fighting animal and 
 must always fight. 1 The only reasonable 
 ground for the idea that man's com- 
 bative instinct can only find expression 
 in quarrelling with his fellows lies in 
 the implied assumption that man cannot 
 change his ways. Such an assumption 
 can now only be made by those who 
 think in terms of a past generation, that 
 supposed human history to have begun 
 only four thousand years before Christ 
 and to be nearing its end in the nine- 
 teenth century. 
 
 Since the Eolithic Age is there any can the 
 department of life in which man has not 
 changed his habits? Men did not, in the Spots? 
 beginning, wear clothes, yet the habit 
 of wearing clothes is now tolerably well 
 established. Again, man's anatomy 
 proves that he was originally a vegetarian 
 like the apes; yet he became a parasite 
 upon his herds, first drinking their milk 
 and then eating their superfluous young; 
 
 1 See page 84. 
 
90 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 in fact, whether for good or evil, he has 
 become carnivorous; and if we reflect on 
 the apparent impossibility of the horse, 
 the cow or the monkey eating flesh, 
 we may realise what an extraordinary 
 power man has of changing his habits. 
 Again, there was a time when man was 
 a migratory creature, changing his abode 
 with the seasons, acquiring no property 
 or sitting lightly to his booths and crude 
 plantings. Or, again, there was a time 
 when the idea of each man or woman 
 having only one mate seems scarcely to 
 have been conceived; whereas now it has 
 become quite a prevailing habit. And 
 these changes have involved the regula- 
 tion and training of instincts quite as 
 fundamental as that of combat. 
 
 What are we to think about the Palaeo- 
 lithic men who developed the high art of 
 painting animals and of carving in stone 
 and ivory? Where did their civilisation 
 disappear to, with all that their art 
 implies? The men who occupied their 
 place in the Neolithic ages knew nothing 
 of art; their attempts at it were of the 
 crudest. Here was change, but this time 
 for the worse, and that may happen again. 
 And these Neolithic men, whose blood 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 91 
 
 may still persist in our veins, what of their 
 habits? 
 
 We know that between the time when 
 human beings first began to use iron in- 
 struments and to make pottery, and the 
 time, let us say, of written history, they 
 had in many ways completely changed 
 their social habits. It is mere ignorance 
 of the dawn of history, of folk-lore, and 
 even of the Old Testament, that makes 
 any one say that "history repeats itself," 
 or that man cannot change. 
 
 And in historic times we can see that, 
 although changes sometimes come so 
 slowly as to be scarcely perceptible in the 
 course of ages, they sometimes proceed 
 with great rapidity. There is the case of 
 modern Japan; while in China and India 
 we find ideas and customs clearly de- 
 scribed in literature dating before the 
 Christian era, and that have remained 
 unchanged until some twenty years 
 ago, are now in some parts rapidly disap- 
 pearing. Or, again, examine the case of 
 the Negro transplanted from savagery 
 into Christian civilisation. I have seen, 
 in the mountains of North Carolina, 
 small holders of pure African breed living 
 in all respects in a more refined and 
 
92 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 intellectual way than the poor whites 
 beside them. We have changed our 
 habits before, for better or worse, and 
 shall again. 
 
 At this hour whether we consider the 
 peace settlement satisfactory or not the 
 most enthusiastic militarist may well 
 stand appalled at the havoc of war. The 
 following is a conservative estimate of 
 loss, given by one of our most reliable 
 newspapers, and based only on the death 
 returns admitted by the various armies: 
 
 "The total losses of the Powers opposed 
 to Germany and Austria during the whole 
 or part of the war were about 5,500,000, 
 excluding the very large number of deaths 
 of French civilians, of which we have no 
 trustworthy estimate at hand. 
 
 "On the other side, Germany has re- 
 ported 1,611,104 dead; Bulgaria has 
 201,224; and those of Austria-Hungary 
 and of Turkey respectively are cautiously 
 estimated at 800,000 and 300,000, giving 
 a total of a little over 2,900,000. Added 
 to the Allies' total this gives some 8,400,- 
 000. The American Committee for 
 Armenian and Syrian Relief estimates at 
 4,000,000 the number of Armenians, 
 Syrians, Jews, and Greeks massacred by 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 93 
 
 the Turks during the war, and it is be- 
 lieved that over 1,000,000 Serbian civilians 
 died through massacre, hunger, or disease 
 caused by the war. Medical experts have 
 more roughly estimated at 4,000,000 the 
 additional mortality from influenza and 
 pneumonia attributable to war conditions. 
 With the addition of some 7500 neutrals 
 (mostly Norwegians) killed by German 
 submarines, the grand total approaches 
 seventeen millions and a half. But of 
 course it is impossible to calculate the 
 enormous number of other deaths to which 
 the war has contributed." 1 
 
 And for each one slain we may surely 
 count another who lives on hopelessly 
 maimed or wrecked. 
 
 Since these facts were published the 
 medical estimate of human losses by 
 influenza has arisen to more than twice 
 4,000,000. This pestilence is but one of 
 the diseases that are the camp followers 
 of war; but it is the most notable, not 
 only for the tale of its victims, but because 
 it seems to reflect the very temper of the 
 God of War in choosing for destruction 
 the young and the strong, who ought to 
 be the parents of the coming age. If the 
 
 1 Manchester Guardian, February 27, 1919. 
 
94 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 human race is to survive we must some- 
 what change our habits. 
 
 Shall Man All the facts of biological evolution 
 Become Be- deny that history repeats itself, or that 
 generate? the future shall be like the past. The ages 
 of the process of development are many 
 and long, but nothing remains the same, 
 not even the hills that we call eternal. 
 Since the time when man was merely a 
 pack animal he has developed individual 
 self -consciousness, which has brought the 
 need for more frequent adjustments of 
 social life. The change going on in hu- 
 manity, as in everything else, must be 
 either toward social development or social 
 degeneration. 
 
 The Victorians, by the mouth of Tenny- 
 son, asked a pertinent question: 
 
 A monstrous eft was of old the Lord and Master of 
 Earth, 
 
 For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing 
 ran, 
 
 And he felt himself in his force to be Nature's crown- 
 ing race. 
 
 As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for 
 his birth, 
 
 So many a million of ages have gone to the making of 
 man: 
 
 He now is first, but is he the last ? is he not too 
 base? 1 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 95 
 
 The more recent Georgians put the 
 same misgiving in another way : 
 
 "The plasticity of the organic type is 
 the one thing which gives us hope for the 
 future. Was there not some prophetic 
 significance of this kind in the words 
 spoken by Ophelia in her madness: 'They 
 say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord! 
 we know what we are, but we know not 
 what we may be'? 
 
 "But Rome was not built in a day, and 
 the change which can be effected in a 
 single generation will be infinitesimally 
 small. And though we cannot hold the 
 extreme form of belief in this plasticity 
 which was entertained by Ophelia, who 
 quotes without comment but, as the con- 
 text shows, with approval the statement 
 that the owl was a baker's daughter, we 
 may effect some alleviation in the suffer- 
 ing caused by the knowledge of what we 
 are from the fact, now established, that we 
 know not what we may be." 1 
 
 What has all this to do with Chris- TheOther 
 tianity? Nothing at all, many people 
 would say; for Christianity, they hold, is tianity. 
 a system of religion designed solely to 
 
 1 An Introduction to a Biology, by A. D. Darbishire, 
 pp. 112-113. 
 
96 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 educate the human spirit to correspond- 
 ence with a spiritual world quite different 
 from this earth, and failure to desire and 
 correspond with this present material life 
 is the best preparation for the Christian 
 heaven. They tell us that many of the 
 greatest Christian saints have exemplified 
 their entire incapacity to correspond to 
 the things of earth, and that their Divine 
 Master was in this respect their prototype, 
 that the most characteristic of His sayings 
 exhort His followers to the renunciation 
 of all earthly ambitions and cares, and 
 demand that they should follow Him in 
 disregarding the things of earth in order 
 to attain an immortal heaven. 
 
 Now, of course, the religion Christ 
 taught is centred in the unseen in two 
 ways. First, the life of the individual is 
 conceived as only having its beginning in 
 the animal body of sense, and to the indi- 
 vidual a future is offered that will redress 
 the injustice of the present; and, secondly, 
 the life of the individual is conceived as 
 sustained here and now by the strength 
 of God, and enlightened by the vision of 
 God. But to suppose that the duty and 
 privilege of the individual is not concerned 
 chiefly with the welfare of the future race 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 97 
 
 on earth is, I venture to believe, a mis- 
 taken interpretation of Christ's teaching. 
 
 My reason for thinking so is twofold. First 
 In the first place, man's advent involved totheTra- 
 
 the success of the adventurers among the 
 protozoa, among the lizards, among the 
 early mammals, among the monkeys. If, 
 then, God made man in order that his 
 eternal good should involve failure to 
 correspond with his terrestrial environ- 
 ment, it is certainly odd that His way of 
 making this animal whose glory was to 
 be his failure was the evolutionary 
 method, which involves a series of pre- 
 paratory terrestrial successes extending 
 over some hundred million years. If we 
 bring God into the matter at all as the 
 Christian is bound to do it certainly 
 looks as if the push of life toward the 
 terrestrial masterpiece must be some mani- 
 festation of God's mind. Secondly, a Second 
 closer study of the Gospel records sug- Ob J ection - 
 gests that the "world" which the Christian 
 is urged to give up is not the terrestrial 
 environment of the Christian Society. 
 Such phrases as declare that God's King- 
 dom ought to come and His will be done 
 on earth, or that Christ must return to 
 earth to reign, may indeed admit of 
 
98 SUKVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 diverse interpretation; one thing they 
 cannot mean whether they be taken 
 literally or as poetic allegories they can- 
 not mean that the Christian Society ought 
 to fail from off the earth in order that 
 some fitter community may survive. 
 
 . If, on the other hand, we regard Chris- 
 
 Principle of . . ,, , i T 
 
 Adventure, tiamty as par excellence the religion of 
 
 adventure for social ends, we see through 
 the whole course of evolution that the 
 mainspring of progress is the principle of 
 hazardous adventure for racial ends. 1 
 This was dimly manifested in the earlier, 
 more clearly in the later, stages, but first 
 made completely explicit in the life of 
 Christ. 
 
 Many of the more recent works on 
 biology dwell upon the element of adven- 
 ture, even within the sphere of subcon- 
 scious life, at the turning of the ways in 
 biological destiny. 
 
 1 The scientific acknowledgment of the disinterested 
 element in evolution is seen in the following passage: 
 "That increase of parental care, that frequent appearance 
 of sociability and co-operation, need far other prominence 
 than they can possibly receive even by some mildewing 
 attenuation of the classic economic hypothesis of the 
 progress of the species essentially through the internecine 
 struggle among its individuals." Thomson and Geddes, 
 op. cit., pp. 246-247. 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 99 
 
 "Far and away the most interesting 
 question which can confront the student 
 of life (is) whether evolution is a process 
 of which a simple mechanistic explanation 
 has been discovered, or whether it is not a 
 mysterious process which we are scarcely 
 able to understand at all yet, but which 
 may, perhaps, be due to deliberate striv- 
 ing (the italics are mine) on the part of 
 the animals and plants which have taken 
 part and are taking part in it. And many 
 will lean to the latter interpretation, be- 
 cause they find it inconceivable that we 
 should know as much about so vast and 
 complex and close a thing as evolution 
 as we should do if the mechanistic ex- 
 planation of it by natural selection were 
 true." 1 
 
 Professor Bateson, a leading exponent 
 of the Mendelian School, remarks: "The 
 conception of evolution as proceeding 
 through the gradual transformation of 
 masses of individuals by the accumulation 
 of impalpable changes is one that the 
 study of genetics shows immediately to 
 be false. . . . For the facts of heredity 
 and variation unite to prove that genetic 
 variation is a phenomenon of individuals. 
 
 1 Darbishire, op. cit., p. 113. 
 
100 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 Each new character is formed in some 
 germ-cell of some particular individual, 
 at some point of time." * 
 
 At any rate, whatever may be the 
 explanation in these early stages, later 
 evolutionary changes have always come 
 about through conscious adventure, when 
 the adventurer is called upon to give up 
 the familiar "world," i.e. to set forth upon 
 some unknown path and that always 
 at the risk of loss; for where the herd 
 or flock or pack or tribe is concerned, 
 the adventurer runs the risk of being 
 done to death by his fellows before he 
 can suffer much of the loneliness and 
 difficulty which, if he survive, he is cer- 
 tain to incur. 
 
 "It is certain that man did not arise 
 from any of the known anthropoid apes 
 (gorilla, chimpanzee, orang and gibbon), 
 but from a stock common to them and to 
 him; therefore it is likely that the human 
 stock had diverged before the time when 
 the anthropoid apes are known to have 
 been established as a distinct family, 
 namely, in the Miocene. It is possible 
 that a man arose as a mutation, as an 
 anthropoid genius in short, but the fac- 
 
 1 MendeV s Principles of Heredity, W. Bateson, p. 289. 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 101 
 
 tors that led to his emergence are all 
 unknown." l 
 
 Well, suppose an anthropoid ape genius 
 was the first man. Is it not likely that 
 he was stoned to death by his tribe for 
 violating some of their taboo? That is 
 the way apes treat a freak. We may 
 imagine that his daughter, finding herself 
 an outcast, cradled her baby, who so far 
 had hung round her neck, and built a little 
 shelter to keep off missiles. Inheriting her 
 father's genius, she would be bound to run 
 the gauntlet, and if she survived she might 
 thus launch the human race. Social habit 
 or custom is the law because it is the only 
 security of the animal herd and the human 
 tribe; but without deviation from it there 
 can be no progress ; though, on the other 
 hand, if such deviation were not punished 
 there would be no safety. Between this 
 Scylla and Charybdis the human race has 
 had to steer its way. 
 
 "We are apt to think of the savage as "The 
 a freakish creature, all moods at one 
 moment a friend, at the next moment a 
 fiend. So he might be, if it were not for 
 the social drill imposed by his customs. 
 So he is, if you destroy his customs, and 
 
 1 Thomson and Geddes, op. tit., p. 101, 
 
102 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 expect him nevertheless to behave as an 
 educated and reasonable being. Given, 
 then, a primitive society in a healthy and 
 uncontaminated condition, its members 
 will invariably be found to be on the 
 average more law-abiding, as judged from 
 the standpoint of their own law, than is 
 the case in any civilised state. . . . Mean- 
 ingless injunctions abound, since the value 
 of a traditional practice does not depend 
 on its consequences, but simply on the 
 fact that it is the practice. . . . How to 
 break through the 'cake 'of custom/ as 
 Bagehot called it, is the hardest lesson 
 that humanity has ever had to learn. . . . 
 To break through custom by the sheer 
 force of reflection, and so to make rational 
 progress possible, was the intellectual feat 
 of one people, the ancient Greeks ; and it 
 is at least highly doubtful if, without their 
 leadership, a progressive civilisation would 
 have existed to-day. . . . Just as a boy 
 at school who happens to offend against 
 the unwritten code has his life made a 
 burden by the rest of his mates, so in the 
 primitive community the fear of a rough 
 handling causes 'I must not' to wait 
 upon 'I dare not.' One has only to read 
 Mr. Andrew Lang's instructive story of 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 103 
 
 the fate of 'Why Why, the first Radical,' 
 to realise how among savages and is it 
 so very different among ourselves? it 
 pays much better to be respectable than 
 to play the moral hero." 
 
 Every fresh stage in human evolution The 
 has come through the genius who sees that 
 it is necessary to break through the "cake Prophet, 
 of custom," and the hero who responds to 
 the call. We have various words to denote 
 such seers ; we call them discoverers, phil- 
 osophers, or prophets. A prophet is one 
 who sees into the inner truth of things, 
 sees what is necessary and eternal in con- 
 trast to what is provisional and passing, 
 with which other men are absorbed. If 
 the race to which the prophet belongs 
 listen to his word, the future accords with 
 his vision and he is said to have foreseen; 
 but if his fellows do not attend to him the 
 future does not accord with his vision. 
 Insight, not foresight, is his characteristic. 
 
 At every stage of man's evolution his The 
 progress has depended upon men who oMfce ? 
 would walk by insight or faith in an idea Persecuted, 
 rather than by what was obvious in their 
 environment. Such men were persecuted, 
 
 1 Anthropology (Home University Library), R. R. 
 Marett, pp. 183-187. 
 
104 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 but, bringing salvation to their race, they 
 might well rejoice. They might well say 
 of their fellows, all following one another 
 and approving one another, "Woe unto 
 you when all men speak well of you." In 
 an evolutionary sense these things have 
 been true in every crisis, small or great, of 
 our racial history. 
 
 Hence it follows that whoever would be 
 the apostle of an essential idea which the 
 world around him has not yet assimilated, 
 must, if that idea is to generate new cus- 
 toms, be first and foremost an adventurer, 
 a crusader. He must always be willing, 
 nay, eager, to break with the traditional 
 world around him, to "hate" his kindred 
 who have no ideas but those common to 
 that world in comparison with the love 
 he has for the new idea, the new custom, 
 or the great personality that embodies 
 these. He can only do this at the risk 
 of all that he has formerly held dear, and 
 at many times and places at the risk of 
 life itself. In a word, he must know the 
 meaning of Christ's injunction, "Follow 
 me." And in so far as Christ's teaching 
 is "other-worldly," in so far as He re- 
 affirms the most ancient of human beliefs, 
 that life does not end with the dissolution 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 105 
 
 of the body, He does so whilst declaring 
 that it is not the respecter of the taboo or 
 the conventionally moral person, but the 
 adventurer, "he that will lose his life," 
 who will gain the next life. If so, we may 
 divine that the next life will be a life of 
 further adventure in which the conven- 
 tional would not feel much at home ; per- 
 haps also that the adventurer will con- 
 tinue to be cognisant of the beneficent 
 earthly results of his adventure. In fact, 
 Jesus Christ affirms that even on selfish 
 grounds the pioneer of a better day may 
 rejoice even though he be miserably done 
 to death in this world, and not even canon- 
 ised afterward. 
 
 We come to another point of connection The In- 
 between Christianity and man's fitness for O f the* 
 survival. We have seen that when human Friendly, 
 evolution had reached the stage at which 
 man had so far developed individual self- 
 consciousness and reason as to be able to 
 direct his natural instincts into social 
 rather than anti-social channels, his fur- 
 ther advance depended upon his power of 
 friendship, that just in so far as his ca- 
 pacity for reasonable friendship exceeded 
 his quarrelsome tendencies, he corre- 
 sponded with his terrestrial environment, 
 
106 SUKVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 
 
 and just in so far as he remained quarrel- 
 some he has failed so to correspond; and 
 we have come to a crisis in the world's 
 history when his failure is perhaps almost 
 more apparent than his success, and many 
 are questioning whether he is going back- 
 wards or forwards, whether degeneracy 
 or a new impulse of life is going to set in. 
 Do we not find that Christianity and 
 Evolution teach the self -same lesson as to 
 what must be the way of progress for 
 humanity? 
 
 Christ taught that a time would come 
 when man should live in a blessed con- 
 dition of perfect correspondence with his 
 environment that is, not only with God 
 the Creator of all, but with men and with 
 all the conditions of life. This state of 
 things He expressed in the phrase "the 
 kingdom of heaven," "the kingdom of 
 God." Now, the type of man that should 
 thus make a success of life is described in 
 various ways. He is to be complete in 
 goodness as God is complete, i.e. he is 
 not only to be negatively inoffensive, but 
 positively and triumphantly generous to 
 the unthankful and the evil, to those who 
 do right and to those who do wrong. He 
 is to love, not only his friends but his 
 
SUEVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 107 
 
 enemies. He is to endeavour to under- 
 stand rather than to condemn, by clear- 
 ing away from his own vision all that 
 impedes it. 
 
 In fact, if we want to find out what is 
 the relation between the teaching of Jesus 
 and man's correspondence with his en- 
 vironment we had better discover what 
 the word npdog means. We shall find that 
 it does not mean poor-spirited. The 
 7rpa6f etyi of Matt. xi. 29 is spoken by 
 Jesus the lion-hearted, who stood alone 
 against the whole world. Of the poor in 
 spirit Jesus had something else to say; 
 but of those who triumph by the dignity 
 of gentleness He said, (idKapioi ol -xpaelg 
 "Blessed are those who proceed with sweet 
 reasonableness, for they shall inherit the 
 earth." 
 
IV 
 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 BY LILY DOUGALL 
 
 Force THERE are few words the significance of 
 
 Direction, which is more vaguely conceived than the 
 word "power." There is physical force 
 directed to no definite end or purpose 
 the power of the storm or the earthquake. 
 There is physical force harnessed to some 
 useful end as when we speak of horse 
 power and water power. Wild horses 
 course the plains; the waves of the sea 
 swell and break ; electricity flows over the 
 earth's surface and visibly cracks and 
 sparkles in the clouds; but we only call 
 these power when they can be used as the 
 tools of purpose. So, too, with persons. 
 A strong man had an invalid wife ; he was 
 able to lift and carry her, and people 
 spoke of his physical power. All the 
 neighbours knew, however, that she, being 
 a fretful woman, could make him do just 
 what she liked. One of them, who had 
 
POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 109 
 
 just referred to him as a "powerful man," 
 remarked, with unconscious repetition of 
 the word, "She is the power in that house." 
 The essence of power is thus seen to lie 
 less in force than in direction of force. 
 
 We may often see two children trying Lower Con- 
 to play together with toy bricks. The 
 elder, having reached the constructive age, 
 is endeavouring to build a castle, church 
 or tower. The younger only desires to 
 see the erection big enough for him to 
 knock down with a clatter. Here we get 
 two sorts of power pitted one against the 
 other construction against destruction. 
 The elder child is quite strong enough to 
 injure the little one in such a way as to 
 prevent his constant mischievous onset; 
 but, being civilised by more years in the 
 nursery, he controls his temper and perse- 
 veringly circumvents the mischief-maker. 
 If we were asked which child showed the 
 greater power, we should say that the 
 power of mischievous destruction was 
 negligible compared with the power shown 
 in the ability to construct and in self- 
 control. In the household nursery no one 
 would question this judgment. We are 
 not as ready, however, to say in the larger 
 nursery of souls which we call the world 
 
110 PC WEE HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 Omnipo- 
 tence and 
 Choice of 
 Means. 
 
 that the ability to construct is power in 
 comparison with which the ability to de- 
 stroy is negligible; or that the ability to 
 bear with a mischief-maker and circum- 
 vent him is power compared to which the 
 ability to injure him is not worth calling 
 power. At the root of our respect for 
 injurious and destructive power in the 
 world is the time-honoured belief that 
 God wields such power. Yet it is possible 
 that by further investigation we may 
 come to question this belief. 
 
 What is involved in saying of any 
 person that, in his sphere of life, he has 
 supreme power? Our ideas are not clear. 
 A factory manager may be able to use 
 horse power or steam power or electricity 
 to run his machines, but he must choose 
 between them; whichever he instals pre- 
 vents the use of the others on the same 
 machines. Clearly supreme power, or 
 omnipotence, in the factory does not 
 mean the power to use them all. 
 
 What would supreme power mean in 
 the elder of the two children trying to 
 play with the toy bricks? The baby 
 knocks down his brother's tower before 
 it is half finished. The elder has the 
 power to construct his tower and to knock 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 111 
 
 down his little brother ; but the thing that 
 he set out to do was to build the tower 
 with the little one's help, to show the little 
 one how to build. His real purpose being 
 to play with his brother, he cannot accom- 
 plish this by the use of physical strength. 
 He is obliged to apply the constructive 
 ability with which he is manipulating the 
 bricks to the little one's character, and 
 contrive by peaceable methods to make 
 him desire to see the tower properly built. 
 He cannot both coerce the little one 
 physically and also have a happy hour 
 with him. He must choose between the 
 exercise of one form of power and the 
 other. And if he is looking to the future 
 he must choose peaceable methods if he is 
 to have any enjoyment in nursery com- 
 panionship. The ordinary child will, of 
 course, choose neither one course nor the 
 other, but vary between the two, some- 
 times trying physical coercion, sometimes 
 amiable management. But we all recog- 
 nise that the more intelligent the bigger 
 child is, the less he will knock about his 
 little brother. 
 
 Let us revert to the case of the man 
 with the invalid wife. For this man to 
 be omnipotent in his household he must 
 
112 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 be able, not only to carry his wife as he 
 choose, but to direct her thoughts and her 
 will instead of being directed by her sick 
 fancies. Let us suppose this the fact, and 
 the man's will dominant. If she remained 
 miserably ailing he would require the 
 power to heal and strengthen her. But if 
 he succeeded in getting her on her feet he 
 obviously could not both use his power iio 
 carry her about and at the same time use 
 his power in getting her to walk of herself. 
 The physical power he had exercised 
 would fall into disuse because incom- 
 patible with the power to teach her to 
 walk unsupported. He could not both 
 habitually pick up the woman and carry 
 her to the shade of an apple tree, and also 
 exercise his higher power to enable and 
 incite her to take herself there. He must 
 habitually cease to do the one thing before 
 he can habitually succeed in doing the 
 other. This is evident. 
 
 Further, if he wanted a friend and a 
 helpful companion in his wife, she must 
 cease to be the mere mental automaton 
 controlled by his ideas and wishes. If 
 he were a normal man he would want her 
 to bring her own contribution of ideas 
 and purposes to enrich their common life. 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 113 
 
 But if he desired that, he would need to 
 cease his mental control over her thought 
 and will. He could not both cause her to 
 go from the house to the shade of the apple 
 tree and also cause her to choose what she 
 will do whether remain in the house or 
 sit under that or some other tree. He 
 cannot both control her mental life and 
 have an intelligent and responsive com- 
 panion. His power to control her mind 
 must fall into disuse if his power to evoke 
 a responsive friendship in her is to be 
 exercised. The power to do the thing 
 he most wants to do, and the thing best 
 worth doing, requires for its exercise the 
 abrogation, not only of physical force, but 
 of any form of mental influence which 
 even approximates to compulsion. 
 
 In the light of this conception of the 
 highest kind of power, let us review the 
 religious hypothesis of the Divine govern- 
 ment of the Universe, and in particular 
 the belief that the material and spiritual 
 environment in which humanity developed 
 was the expression of the power of a 
 beneficent Creator. In so doing we must 
 realise that God cannot use incompatible 
 powers to attain an end. We must set 
 before us all the facts of development as 
 
114 rOWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 we know them, and then ask ourselves to 
 what sort of spiritual power they bear 
 witness. 
 
 The The historic teacher of mankind has 
 
 Sanction of i . . i i , 
 
 Conse- been experience experience which teaches 
 
 quence. what are the consequences, good or evil, 
 which follow from certain acts. When we 
 think of human life in its first beginnings, 
 when the mother carried about her babe 
 as do the apes still clinging round her 
 neck till a year old, when clothes and huts 
 were not yet invented, the sanction for 
 any action evidently was the advantage 
 to be gained or the disadvantage to be 
 avoided by doing it. He or she who could 
 best foresee the results of any action and 
 act accordingly, would thrive. The dog 
 who picks quarrels with dogs he cannot 
 master is soon finished in the fight, or if 
 he rashly wriggle too far into a fox-hole 
 he is entombed, or if he try to swim too 
 swift a river he is drowned. It is thus 
 by the sanction of consequences that dogs 
 have learned to be wary of catastrophe. 
 In their case we do not enquire whether 
 such catastrophe be the punishment of a 
 moral governor; the system of calculable 
 results is the government under which 
 they live. In the same way man, at his 
 
POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 115 
 
 first emergence must, we should all admit, 
 have been educated by natural conse- 
 quence. Every other form of education 
 is more rapid, though less effective, than 
 the education of experience; but possibly 
 man had time to learn by the education of 
 experience, for geologists tell us that it 
 may be some 250,000 years since man 
 began to use stone implements. We may 
 well believe that the Divine Mind con- 
 trived the school of experience, and that 
 the Divine Spirit quickened man's mental 
 powers in that school to discover the good 
 and to avoid the bad; but his discoveries 
 were made, as far as we know, by observa- 
 tion and trial. 
 
 And the human mind, groping for an Historical 
 interpretation of its material and spiritual J|J ) ^^ ie 
 environment, made childish guesses at the Power: 
 truth. Everywhere we find primitive man 
 firmly believing in unseen deities who 
 demand that he shall do things on other 
 than experimental grounds. Everywhere 
 we find man living under the supposed 
 sanctions of Divine rewards and punish- 
 ments other than those of natural conse- (a) The 
 quence. He thought of God's power as 
 chiefly shown in arbitrary punishments. 
 In every primitive religion man attributed 
 
116 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 his customs or morals (mores) to revela- 
 tion, and assumed Divine punishments as 
 their sanction. Thus Mr. Marett tells us 
 that "almost insensibly we are led on to 
 the subject of religion from the study of 
 the legal sanction; this very term 'sanc- 
 tion,' which is derived from Roman law, 
 pointing in the same direction, since it 
 originally stood for the curse which was 
 appended in order to secure the inviola- 
 bility of a legal enactment." * 
 
 The schoolboy who remarked that in 
 ancient times God liked a great deal of 
 cursing was unconsciously criticising the 
 early notion of revelation. Human im- 
 agination, playing about the unseen and 
 unknown, invented what it called revela- 
 tion, and the proof of this is the childish 
 and often vicious nature of the so-called 
 revelation. 
 
 "There is no end to the curious and 
 absurd customs, generally supported by 
 supernatural sanctions, by which the ac- 
 tions of savages and barbarians are com- 
 (6) The monly surrounded and hemmed in. We 
 Fantastic 1 ! 1 ^ ave to remember that, in the case of exist- 
 ing savage communities, the growth and 
 multiplication of customs may have been 
 
 1 R. E. Marett, op. cit., p. 203. 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 117 
 
 proceeding through all the ages during 
 which the few progressive peoples have 
 been evolving their civilisation. But 
 enough is now known of the primitive age 
 of ancient Greece and Rome to show that 
 the great civilisations of these States took 
 their rise among peoples bound hand and 
 foot by religious customs and law as 
 rigidly as any savages, and to show also 
 that the dominant religious emotion was 
 fear." l 
 
 We are not on this account driven to 
 deny that man has been the subject of 
 such revelation as comes by the quicken- 
 ing of his own judgments of beauty and 
 truth and social value. The progress that 
 on the whole and in the long run has been 
 made in these affords a strong presump- 
 tion that the fetch of human genius is the 
 prompting of some greater Spiritual 
 Reality. 
 
 But my point here is that the chief 
 exercise of power attributed in primitive 
 times to God was destruction, and the 
 chief sentiment attributed to the Divine 
 mind was legal or moral indignation. We 
 can easily understand how this came 
 about. Among gregarious animals we 
 
 1 Social Psychology, Professor M'Dougall, p. 308. 
 
118 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 know that if one animal transgresses the 
 habits of the herd, even when circum- 
 stances compel it, the herd will turn upon 
 it and put it to death. This action is part 
 of the instinct of self-preservation; for 
 what binds the herd together and makes 
 it strong in the face of solitary beasts of 
 prey is that all its members act together, 
 in fight or in flight, under one impulse. 
 Humanity, gathered in tribes, had the 
 same instinct. It was entirely necessary 
 for the preservation of primitive groups, 
 and as reason developed a reasonable ex- 
 planation was sought and ostensibly 
 found. 
 
 Professor M'Dougall thus explains the 
 process. Primitive man, like ourselves, 
 was apt to let pass the genial and regular 
 processes of Nature by which he con- 
 stantly profited, while disastrous events 
 struck upon his nervous system and 
 aroused his fear and indignation. Death, 
 pestilence, famine, storm, flood, required 
 explanation. Standing out, as they did 
 for him, with no background of natural 
 causes, these were attributed to whatever 
 god or gods he could conceive. 1 
 
 1 Pace the earlier archeologists, the normal good cheer 
 and happiness of primitive man appears to me clearly 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 119 
 
 "The cause of every calamity befalling 
 either the individual or the community 
 would be sought in some offence given to 
 the beings thus vaguely conceived; and 
 primitive man would be apt to regard as 
 the source of offence any action at all 
 unusual, at all out of the ordinary, whether 
 of individuals or of the community. Result on 
 Hence the conceptions of these awe- Emotion, 
 inspiring beings would lead to increased 
 severity of social discipline in two ways: 
 firstly, by causing society to enforce its 
 customary laws more rigidly; . . . sec- 
 ondly, by producing a very great increase 
 in the number and kinds of customary 
 prohibitions and enforced observances. 
 . . . Although many of the modes of con- 
 duct prescribed by primitive and savage 
 custom and enforced by supernatural 
 sanctions are not such as we regard as 
 moral, . . . yet we must class the observ- 
 ance of such custom as moral conduct. 
 For the essence of moral conduct is the 
 performance of the duty prescribed by 
 society, as opposed to the mere following 
 of the promptings of egoistic impulses. 
 
 suggested by the fact that he was shocked and impressed 
 by misfortunes, which must therefore have been the 
 exception, not the rule. 
 
120 POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 . . . No matter how grotesque and, from 
 our point of view, how immoral the pre- 
 scribed codes of conduct of other societies 
 may appear to be, we must admit con- 
 formity to the code to be moral conduct; 
 and we must admit that religion from its 
 first crude beginnings was bound up with 
 morality." l 
 
 "If my next-door neighbour breaks a 
 taboo, and brings down a visitation on 
 himself, depend upon it some of its un- 
 pleasant consequences will be passed on 
 to me and mine. Hence, if some one has 
 committed an act that is not merely a 
 crime but a sin, it is every one's concern 
 to wipe out that sin, which is usually done 
 by wiping out the sinner." 2 
 
 This anger on account of a breach of 
 Genesis of . , . _. TTT 
 
 Moral in- custom or law is moral indignation. We 
 
 dignation. a jj reme mber the story of Achan and 
 the "wedge of gold" and the "goodly 
 Babylonish garment." It was the thought 
 of the moral indignation of Jahveh against 
 Achan's disobedience that caused the chil- 
 dren of Israel to slay him. Samuel ex- 
 pressed what he believed to be the moral 
 indignation of Jahveh against Saul be- 
 
 1 Prof. M'Dougall, op. cit., pp. 306-7, 313. 
 S R. R. Marett, op. cit., p. 201. 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 121 
 
 cause he had not slain the cattle of the 
 Amalekites. In such times there was no 
 distinction drawn between the impulse of 
 indignation or moral anger and the im- 
 pulse of retribution. Anger and the will 
 to punish were regarded as one thing. The 
 punishment followed the crime not as a 
 natural consequence but because it roused 
 God's indignation. It was necessary to 
 change the indignant feeling in God's 
 mind if the punishment was to be stayed. 
 No doubt many primitive guesses at the 
 interpretation of life were less melancholy. 
 Prosperity of all sorts very soon came to 
 be attributed to the favour of the unseen 
 Power just as disaster was attributed to 
 God's anger at breach of custom or law, 
 or, as we should say, his moral anger 
 and joy in this favour gave rise to the 
 gentler religious sentiments of gratitude 
 and reverence. What I would here 
 emphasize is that over untold ages and 
 over all parts of the earth man has re- 
 garded Divine power first and chiefly as 
 destructive, and has attributed to God 
 such moral indignation and such vindic- 
 tive punishments as we, at our present 
 stage of development, cannot possibly be- 
 lieve to have been Divine. Let us also 
 
122 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 notice that whenever moral indignation 
 Godliness an( j punitive action was attributed to God, 
 Cruelty. the members of the human group took 
 upon themselves to mediate the Divine 
 punishment by themselves evincing the 
 same moral anger and by devoting the 
 offender or offenders to death or outlawry, 
 and the power of the State rested on the 
 right and the will to injure the wicked. 
 Thus we see that from untold generations 
 we have inherited an aptitude for moral 
 anger, a disposition to regard this moral 
 anger as the first essential of a religious 
 character in individual or nation. In the 
 past it has undoubtedly been one chief 
 factor in binding together human groups, 
 but it has hindered the development of an 
 aptitude for charity and social forgiveness. 
 We may undoubtedly observe a large 
 difference between the more primitive and 
 the more advanced morality: the first 
 is, in the main, a slavish imitation of out- 
 ward acts; the second becomes more and 
 more an effort to adapt principles of con- 
 duct held in common by a group to ends 
 approved by the group. It still remains 
 true that the sentiment of outraged pro- 
 priety at any action which defies a com- 
 monly accepted rule of right, and the 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 123 
 
 determination that it shall be punished, 
 are the same in the Red Indian of the 
 Saskatchewan and in an Oxford don, was 
 the same in ancient Israel or in ancient 
 Babylon or Rome as it is in a modern 
 Wesleyan preacher, and by each and all 
 has always been attributed to the God or 
 gods in whom they trusted. 
 
 It is therefore important to notice Summary, 
 that, whether from the beginning man's 
 development might have followed a higher 
 line or not, in the line it actually followed 
 his conception of God as vindictive, with 
 its accompaniment of human "righteous 
 indignation," has in the past been both the 
 cement which held together human groups 
 until they were strong enough for expan- 
 sion, and the prison which bound them so 
 that they could not expand into higher 
 social developments. 
 
 Thus we have reason to suppose that in 
 this historic conception of Divine power, 
 and its consequent conception of human 
 duty or righteous sentiment, there was 
 something right and something wrong; Wanted, a 
 and if we are going to survive by improv- Morality, 
 ing on the past, this is the most important 
 matter for analysis and revision. Most 
 of the human groups of the early world 
 
124 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 failed to emerge into nations because they 
 were hide-bound by the fear of Divine 
 anger and the strength of their own moral 
 angers ; by their consequent lack of charity 
 and failure to exalt the kindliness which 
 seeks to understand rather than condemn. 
 But some groups which had attained large 
 development seem to have fallen to pieces 
 because they lost vivid belief in Divine 
 government and ceased to have passionate 
 moral sentiments. We must not avoid 
 Scylla by casting our ship into Charybdis. 
 We must stop and think. Vindictive and 
 punitive passion is destructive, and in the 
 past God has been thought of as destruc- 
 tive. One curious witness to this is the 
 phrase, "act of God," still used in all our 
 bills of lading, meaning, "unforeseeable 
 disaster." But we have seen that the vital 
 principle is always constructive; life is 
 always evolving higher and higher organ- 
 isms. Man's mind is predominantly con- 
 structive. God's mind must be wholly so, 
 and the Power of God will express itself 
 only in ways that are constructive. 
 
 Education by religious experience has 
 been, and must still be, a constructive force. 
 At first sight many have been inclined to 
 say that neither in the process of natural 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 125 
 
 or of religious evolution can we trace any 
 evidence whatever of Divine action. But 
 we have agreed there is reason to believe 
 God's mind is seen in the trend of natural 
 evolution, and, a fortiori, we may see God 
 in the educative power of experience by 
 which man's spiritual life has developed. 
 Further, we have direct evidence of the 
 sense of God in that we find humanity 
 busy, from first to last, seeking to corre- 
 spond with an unseen spiritual reality. It 
 is true that men have, for the most part, 
 attributed false notions and false disposi- 
 tions to God, and so misinterpreted their 
 own daily duty. But this very fact must 
 lead us to mistrust our own preconceived 
 notions of the Divine will and the divinely 
 appointed moral sanctions, it does not 
 justify the assumption that we are living 
 in no environment of Divine government 
 closely concerned with the detail of our 
 lives. It must eventually lead us to 
 cast about for a conception of Divine 
 government as it concerns daily duty 
 which will more closely fit the facts of 
 human development. 
 
 God is not God unless He is power. Power as 
 Omnipotence belongs to our conception 
 of God. Unless He govern our Universe 
 
126 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 He is not really God, but only a minor 
 deity. But we have seen that an omnipo- 
 tent being cannot use all sorts of forces 
 indiscriminately to one end. If God has 
 brought our world into being in order that 
 life may develop under the training of 
 experience into free intelligence, able to 
 have communion with Himself, it must be 
 a world bound by the law of inevitable 
 consequence, it must be a natural system 
 of calculable effects. Physical disasters 
 must follow ignorance or neglect of physi- 
 cal law; mental degeneration must follow 
 the lower spiritual choice. God cannot, 
 while teaching by experience, be acting as 
 a deus ex machina, by direct fiat of His 
 will adjusting physical disasters to those 
 who fail in such virtues as justice, mercy 
 and probity, adjusting such psychic effects 
 as hard-heartedness and self-deception to 
 those who fail in applied science. The 
 lack of domestic virtues could not, in the 
 nature of things, have brought on the 
 Flood or a plague of poisonous serpents, 
 nor could failure in religious ritual have 
 brought a pestilence or the invasion of a 
 foreign army. The causes of such dis- 
 asters are lack of precautionary measures 
 or of cleanliness or of diplomacy. We 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 127 
 
 have for the most part reached a stage 
 where we are all ready to accept this. We 
 realise that if, as Christians are bound to 
 believe, the Divine Spirit is brooding over 
 humanity to bring forth a people which 
 will freely choose the good, the natural 
 results, both physical and spiritual, of all 
 actions must be allowed to have full sway. 
 The Divine power must be sustaining a 
 system of cause and effect. Kind action 
 and clever action will each have different 
 sorts of beneficial results on the soul of 
 the doer and on the community. Both 
 sorts will be necessary to make the good 
 life the good man or the good civilisa- 
 tion. The stupid and cruel actions will 
 have their results; both will be necessary 
 to bring about degeneration. 
 
 The sustaining of this calculable Uni- 
 verse is one manifestation of the power of 
 God, and it is a manifestation without 
 which this could not be a training ground 
 for souls. Yet other, and in a sense more Power as 
 characteristic, manifestation of His power 
 may be seen in that inspiration of souls 
 by virtue of which they can learn wis- 
 dom, transmute suffering into joy by the 
 alchemy of purpose, and evil into good by 
 forgiveness; and these powers are fully 
 
128 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 compatible with that dependability of God 
 which we call in the reign of law. 
 
 First, with regard to inspiration of the 
 intellect, it must be, as all would admit, 
 of the nature of tutoring. Our own earlier 
 and cruder method of teaching was by 
 imparting accumulated scraps of knowl- 
 edge, and beating the pupil who did not 
 acquire them by rote, under which method 
 only those with some great aptitude ac- 
 quired much knowledge. Now we have 
 learned by long experience that the best 
 tutor is he who helps the pupil to discover 
 the needed knowledge for himself, and to 
 reflect fruitfully upon his discoveries. 
 Under this new method a much larger 
 proportion of pupils become able to 
 make their own contribution to the 
 world's wisdom. We cannot attribute 
 to the Divine educator the cruder method. 
 But the bestowal of spiritual help to 
 discover and to reflect is quite compatible 
 with the exercise of the spiritual power 
 that sustains the sequence of cause and 
 effect. 
 
 This is also true of the gift of such 
 inspiration as would show man how to 
 conceive a purpose and end that would 
 convert his suffering into joy. We know 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 129 
 
 that hardship, even most painful and long 
 hardship, is counted all joy for the sake 
 of winning a race, or gaining a game, or 
 discovering a "pole," or making a fortune 
 or a reputation. The parent who would 
 restrain a youth from such enterprise 
 would be, not kind, but tyrannical. The 
 inspiration, then, that enables man to 
 conceive a glorious goal for the race and 
 for each individual, could cause him to 
 count it all joy to fall into divers dis- 
 tresses without any abrogation of the sanc- 
 tion of consequence involved in the reign 
 of law. 
 
 An even more signal exercise of Divine Power as 
 power would surely be to transmute the Ration?" 
 evil of wrong choice into good without 
 interfering with the psychological law 
 of cause and effect. Is this possible? 
 Nowadays we hold no brief for the theory 
 of man's total depravity. We are ready 
 to believe that from the first to the pres- 
 ent time the natural good and evil in him 
 have been pretty equal ; but it would seem 
 inevitable that his evil acts and disposi- 
 tions should estrange him from his Divine 
 spiritual environment. But, mark this, 
 when man has done what could repel a 
 spiritual being, he has done a spiritual 
 
130 POWEE HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 act, and thereby entered into a realm of 
 being higher than the animal or non- 
 spiritual life. And what if God will not 
 be estranged? Then surely the whole 
 spiritual Universe, instead of being an- 
 tagonised, has its antagonism transmuted 
 into a greater opportunity for the erring 
 soul. 
 
 Let us try, for just one moment, to for- 
 get all theological definitions of sin or 
 expiation, all definitions of Jew and Gen- 
 tile and Christian, and think only of the 
 agelong drama of human development, of 
 the men and women and children of the 
 old Stone epochs and the new Stone 
 epochs and of the three Bronze ages, of 
 the cave dwellers and the lake dwellers, 
 the forest dwellers and the tribes of the 
 grass lands and the corn growers of the 
 river valleys, all products of a greater 
 antiquity, all gone before our histories 
 begin, and each one if the Christian faith 
 is worth anything dear to the heart of 
 God. If we mean anything by "the 
 fatherhood of God" we mean that in sym- 
 pathy God must have been with them in 
 this world system of cause and effect, and 
 that through all the school of experience 
 He must by sympathy have rejoiced in 
 
POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 131 
 
 their joys and suffered in their pains. 
 There must have been a sufficient end, an 
 end worth this Divine suffering; and that 
 end, as far as we can see, seems to have 
 been the making of souls or spirits capa- 
 ble of uniting in a perfect social environ- 
 ment or whole. In these souls there were 
 three elements of what we should call evil 
 action. There were the hereditary charac- 
 teristics of the ape or the tiger or as we 
 may also say of the donkey, which would 
 often overmaster the newer impulses of 
 intelligence and rational values. There 
 would also be what we now call neuras- 
 thenic reactions. Just as animals that 
 have been cruelly treated or greatly 
 frightened become, as we say, "vicious," 
 so man must often have become abnormal 
 through disaster. Evil done through 
 these causes God could only pity and con- 
 done, for the individual man or genera- 
 tion was not responsible. There is a third 
 element of deliberate wrong choice, when 
 an opportunity of doing something good 
 is seen and rejected. However small this 
 element of free choice between good and 
 evil may have been in the life of primitive 
 man, it is by this element that he becomes 
 a free spirit, a reasonable soul. It is only 
 
132 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 as an intelligence freely chooses to em- 
 brace or neglect an opportunity that it 
 proves itself free, that it becomes free in 
 the choosing. And whether the choice be 
 right or wrong, it is a spiritual act. Such 
 acts when right would naturally bring 
 man into better understanding of God and 
 make him open to Divine inspiration. 
 Only by such free acts when wrong could 
 man antagonise a just God. But what 
 if God refused to be antagonised? If 
 through His pain of disappointment He 
 transmuted what tended toward estrange- 
 ment into a closer bond of continued in- 
 spiration, that would be an act of personal 
 power of a higher sort than any other we 
 can conceive. 
 
 Mercy and Now this is just what the religious mind 
 Wrath. Q ^.j ie p as ^ groping in many directions 
 
 after truth, has often grasped as "mercy" 
 and seen as a correlative of God's reputed 
 tendency to wrath and destruction. God's 
 mercy has often been apprehended by 
 spiritual souls and expressed in visions of 
 surpassing beauty, but unfortunately it 
 has always been swiftly hedged about by 
 doctrines which conditioned the Divine 
 mercy while declaring the Divine wrath 
 to be unconditioned. At best, it has been 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 133 
 
 held, God only forgives when man first 
 repents. 
 
 Let us, for the time, forget these doc- Forgiveness 
 trines and ask ourselves how, when primi- 
 tive man first began to make free choices ance. 
 between good and evil, God's forgiveness 
 might have waited for his repentance. 
 Nothing is more perfectly obvious in 
 studying early religions than that man's 
 notion of good and evil did not represent 
 the realities. In this the repeated cry of 
 Hebrew prophets corroborates anthropo- 
 logical research. Justice and mercy were 
 overlaid in primitive minds by ritual 
 exactions. For example, cannibals might 
 repent and offer propitiation for a breach 
 of fantastic taboo, but they did not repent 
 that attitude of heart which caused them 
 to devour their enemies. Yet these same 
 tribes are found to have such glimmerings 
 of real mercy toward child and beast as 
 could only be won by possibility of de- 
 liberate choice between good and evil. 
 Opportunities of pity seen for a moment 
 and, when rejected, as swiftly forgotten, 
 could not be repented of. And yet such 
 rejection of better impulses would be the 
 real sins of the savage against God. Can 
 we suppose that God's forgiveness here 
 
134 POWEE HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 waited on human repentance? If, on the 
 contrary, God's love transcended the 
 offence, that means that God took some 
 other way of dealing with and overcoming 
 the evil. The true alternative to punitive 
 anger is not, as our doctrinaires often 
 assume, laisser faire, nor is it indifference 
 
 True and or good-natured tolerance. These disposi- 
 False For- , -t , i i i 
 
 giveness. tions are good on their right occasion, but 
 
 very evil on an occasion that requires 
 either punitive anger or that tremendous 
 achievement of love which transforms the 
 evil into a higher good by the self -giving 
 of the injured spirit. Whatever else for- 
 giveness be, it is not, and never can be, 
 indifference to the repetition of the sin. 
 The pious voices which resound from half 
 the pulpits in Christendom to warn us 
 against supposing that God forgives too 
 easily are the voices of men who never 
 themselves really forgave. The experi- 
 ence of true forgiveness would bring home 
 to them its essential cost. It is as intelli- 
 gent to talk of easy suffering or easy 
 agony as of easy forgiveness. Forgive- 
 ness, in the heart of a child or an arch- 
 angel, in the heart of man or of God, is 
 in essence the struggle between the uni- 
 versal spiritual evil and universal spiritual 
 
POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 135 
 
 good, a conflict in which good triumphs 
 only through the voluntary suffering of 
 the injured. Each being who forgives 
 endures to the extent of his capacity the 
 whole spiritual conflict. No one who has 
 suffered agony desires to suffer again. 
 Suffering is not suffering unless it create 
 the desire to get rid of its cause. To for- 
 give indicates the most eager desire that 
 the offender shall not repeat the offence. 
 It involves such self-giving as may be 
 possible to the end that the offender may 
 reform himself till offensive actions be- 
 come impossible to him. In the atmos- 
 phere of realised forgiveness offence by 
 a responsible agent gradually becomes 
 impossible. Even in human society it is 
 easy to see that the supreme power is 
 forgiveness in that it accomplishes the 
 highest possible achievements in reforma- 
 tion of the highest natures. 
 
 We can see, too, that, for the attainment Forgiveness 
 of this particular end, forgiveness and Ispower * 
 moral wrath are not compatible methods, 
 nor is habitual forgiveness and habitual 
 wrath possible in the same character. If, 
 then, it be God's will that in an atmos- 
 phere of more and more clearly recognized 
 forgiveness offences should become im- 
 
136 POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 possible to responsible spirits, He is 
 exercising supreme power if, while sus- 
 taining this whole universe of cause and 
 effect, He is forgiving every offence of 
 each sentient creature that develops moral 
 responsibility by the education of experi- 
 ence. 
 
 We live amid much confusion of 
 thought about forgiveness. One says, 
 "I forgave the poor devil because I felt 
 sure he could not help what he did." An- 
 other says, "I forgave because he knew 
 no better." A third will calmly tell us 
 that he forgives easily "because it is not 
 worth while to worry over offences." 
 Nothing of all this is forgiveness. It is 
 quite true, as has been said, that it is well 
 to overlook most of our neighbours' an- 
 noying ways on these grounds. Just as 
 we cannot forgive a storm or a fire for the 
 injury it does us, so we cannot forgive a 
 human agent unless we believe him to be 
 responsible. Nor do we forgive if we are 
 passing over offences for the sake of our 
 own peace. We can only forgive when 
 we suffer acutely under an injury and 
 know that the agent was fully responsible. 
 We can only forgive by setting the wel- 
 fare of the offender before our own wel- 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 137 
 
 fare. Forgiveness is the greatest achieve- 
 ment of human love, and accomplishes 
 more than anger can to elevate both the 
 soul that forgives, the soul forgiven, and 
 the community. 
 
 If that be so with men, in transferring How God 
 the figure of forgiveness to God we must Forgive, 
 believe that His forgiveness is infinitely 
 more more costly, more efficacious. 
 
 But in our thought of God's forgiveness 
 there is the same confusion, inverted as it 
 were. One says, "I do not see what God 
 has to forgive in human conduct. Man's 
 evil deeds are mostly due to heredity and 
 environment ; ignorance, unmanageable 
 passions and ill-balanced nerves account 
 for most of them. Men do not ask to be 
 born ; God is responsible for the mess they 
 make of things." Here, again, we suffer 
 from our own armchair or cloistered doc- 
 trinaires, we who in the past have too often 
 talked as if every man carried a rule of 
 ideal conduct and could, if he would, con- 
 form all his conduct to it, so that he must 
 always think of God as displeased with all 
 his shortcomings. Such absurd teaching 
 naturally causes men to blaspheme. We 
 cannot believe that God can forgive the 
 lion for tearing its prey, or the ape for its 
 
138 POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 chattering mischief, or the donkey for its 
 most distressing lamentations. Whether 
 these creatures have or have not developed 
 along the line of God's ideal, the indi- 
 viduals are in no way to blame for their 
 habits. And so with man. The successive 
 generations bring with them stupidities 
 and irritabilities innumerable. They per- 
 form millions of horrid actions, for which 
 no individual is responsible. God, who 
 sustains the fabric of the ages, must look 
 upon all such evils with indulgence and 
 kindly excuse, must see an educational 
 purpose so great that they are related to 
 it as nursery faults are related to the adult 
 life. But it remains true that just in so 
 far as each human person has a reasonable 
 soul, is in any sense a free spirit, he has his 
 glimpses of a higher possibility, his mo- 
 ments, or it may be hours, of higher oppor- 
 tunity, which, if he would, he could em- 
 brace. If we consider that God is in sym- 
 pathy with all the pain, as well as all the 
 joy, of the long creative process, if we 
 have set aside the old, impossible doctrine 
 that all is predetermined, we can under- 
 stand somewhat of the disappointment 
 God must suffer when man rejects his 
 opportunity. It is this pain of disappoint- 
 
POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 139 
 
 ment inflicted by man that must evoke 
 either punitive anger or forgiveness. 
 
 And that it has evoked forgiveness Proof that 
 follows from this consideration: forgive- Forgiven, 
 ness refused would have meant inspiration 
 withheld. And if God had withdrawn 
 His inspiration from unrepentant man be- 
 cause of his free rejection of opportunity, 
 mankind could not have gone on to de- 
 velop more and more freedom of choice. 
 For by our hypothesis which is that God 
 helps man by indwelling him in so far 
 as man will accept that indwelling we 
 are driven to believe that all progress in 
 the attainment of truth and beauty and 
 brotherly love comes by the inspiration of 
 God constantly proffered to the develop- 
 ing mind. We must believe that whenever 
 man sees his opportunity and makes the 
 higher choice, he opens, as it were, the 
 doors of his soul to this inspiration, and 
 the result is not only a tendency to develop 
 a good habit, but clearer vision. And if 
 he make the wrong choice, his power to 
 make it involves at least a momentary 
 glimpse of a higher good. He must have 
 perceived the opportunity that he has re- 
 jected. He is therefore on a higher plane 
 of being than if he had not perceived ; and 
 
140 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 God's 
 Character 
 and Man's 
 Conduct. 
 
 this advantage must in some way be 
 utilised by God if His purpose is the ele- 
 vation of man's soul. If man's rejection 
 of the good caused this advantage to be 
 entirely lost, by causing the withdrawal 
 of God's friendly environment and in- 
 spiration, there would be no human prog- 
 ress. If, however, God, by His forgive- 
 ness, transmutes the evil of rejection into 
 further opportunity, we can understand 
 the progress which has taken place. 
 
 It would thus seem that the mere fact 
 of human progress tends to establish the 
 presumption that the true God, so far 
 from being, as man has supposed, in a 
 condition of almost incessant anger and 
 constantly engaged in launching thunder- 
 bolts, has surrounded His developing 
 creation from first to last with a spiritual 
 atmosphere of gracious friendliness and 
 free forgiveness. 
 
 If we thus conceive of Divine omnip- 
 otence if we believe that God's character 
 is truly love, and not the amalgam of 
 hostility and love which has so long been 
 accepted it will naturally have a great 
 effect upon our conception of duty. From 
 the earliest days until now godliness has 
 always been the attempt to be Godlike. 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 141 
 
 All human justice has been the mediation 
 of what was supposed to be God's will 
 and God's action. If God's attitude 
 towards men is one of constant helpful- 
 ness in their increasing realisation of 
 truth and beauty and love, then of course 
 that must also be our attitude and our 
 business. If, in this helpfulness, God 
 excuses men for all the evil-doing they 
 are pushed into by heredity and environ- 
 ment, then we also must find means to 
 excuse them. If He freely forgives them 
 their actual sins, then we also must freely 
 forgive them. 
 
 What is commonly called man's for- inPor- 
 
 n / t i , giving Does 
 
 giveness of an offence presupposes felt Q O & 
 
 pain, and hostility to the offender, and 
 consists in a change of mind involving in- 
 stead an outflow of generous sentiment 
 toward him. But when we try to apply 
 the conception to God our difficulty is that 
 though we conceive God as meeting our 
 offences with personal forgiveness, we 
 cannot believe in any change of His mind. 
 With God, as with man, forgiveness must 
 imply pain caused by the wrong done, but 
 instead of the hostility felt towards the 
 offender there is, we may humbly believe, 
 a combative determination to overcome the 
 
142 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 evil with good which involves no change 
 of mind, but is compatible with that gen- 
 erous outgoing of heart to the offender 
 that we believe to be eternal in God, and 
 which we call His forgiveness. As far as 
 we in our limited way can understand, this 
 is the Godlike reaction to all evil, which 
 we should seek to share, and which, when 
 attained, does not involve in man, any 
 more than in God, that unfixity of pur- 
 pose which is confusing to our sense of 
 right, blinding us to the true righteous- 
 ness of God. 
 
 Two Now, two objections against this view 
 
 jec ions. Q human d u ty are constantly urged the 
 one, that it is contrary to the revelation 
 of God in Christ; the other, that it is 
 subversive of all law and order, and con- 
 sequently militates against correspond- 
 ence with environment and fitness to 
 survive. 
 
 (i) The We must all admit that if we have in 
 
 Teaching Christ a final revelation of God, that 
 
 of Christ, revelation must be patient of progressive 
 
 interpretation. Life is never static, and 
 
 even by the time the Fourth Gospel was 
 
 written it was clearly realised that there 
 
 was large room for the Spirit to take of 
 
 the things of Christ and interpret them 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 143 
 
 to the men of that age. If we regard our 
 Lord as the supreme religious genius; if 
 we believe that His spiritual nature was 
 such that, while living under our condi- 
 tions He was aware of Reality and saw 
 the actual truth of God's attitude to man 
 and what it involved in man's duty, we 
 must perceive that in mediating this to 
 men he must have been hampered, not 
 only by their preconceived and obstinate 
 notions of God and duty, but by the lan- 
 guage, and still more by the mental pic- 
 tures, which these religious beliefs had 
 created. We must therefore expect that 
 in any account of His life we shall find 
 the teaching which was subversive of the 
 religious notions of His time would be 
 that which was most original to Him, and 
 that into the first report of His words and 
 actions, and into all subsequent editings 
 of that report, the shadows of ancestral 
 tendencies of belief and traditional ideas 
 would be sure to press. Such a clue to the 
 interpretation of the Gospels is not sub- 
 jective. It is a legitimate method of criti- 
 cism applicable to any ancient teaching. 
 
 We know that all down the ages the Incompat- 
 conception of God which is set forth in jjfth^oid 
 the vindictive Psalms the conception of Testament. 
 
144 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 the Divine heart as in a constant ferment 
 of righteous indignation had descended 
 from untold generations of primitive men, 
 while such glimpses of Divine love as we 
 find in the 23rd and 103rd Psalms are 
 rare, and were at the Christian era com- 
 paratively recent. The whole world, 
 therefore, into which Christianity was 
 introduced tended to believe in the efficacy 
 of Divine wrath and human punishments 
 to bring about the ideal state at which all 
 nations aimed. And as human nature in- 
 variably attempts to produce a reasonable 
 basis for the sentiments it inherits, most 
 rational argument ran on the same lines. 
 It is, however, also true that spiritual in- 
 sight manifest in a thread of nobler rea- 
 soning had come down the ages. "As 
 the heavens are high above the earth, so 
 are my thoughts higher than your 
 thoughts, saith the Lord." "As far as the 
 east is from the west, so far hath he re- 
 moved our transgressions from us." 
 "Like as a father pitieth his children, so 
 the Lord pitieth them that fear him." The 
 supreme religious genius of Jesus Christ 
 took up this theme, and by teaching and 
 living He showed that not to the God- 
 fearing alone but to all men was God 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 145 
 
 gracious. By living and dying, and by 
 giving proof of His continued existence 
 and triumph beyond the grave, He set the 
 Divine seal upon this interpretation of 
 God's ways with men. Such interpreta- 
 tion of God made irresistible appeal to 
 human insight. For the most part, as 
 soon as men have understood it they have 
 accepted it. When "lifted up" before 
 human minds in any intelligible represen- 
 tation, His light has been seen to be light. 
 But the difficulty has been that it has been 
 easier for man to hold two contradictories, 
 to try to live by two incompatible beliefs, 
 than, violating recognised custom, to face 
 the persecution that must come with the 
 breaking of taboo, or to make the adven- 
 ture into unknown seas that is necessary 
 for the discovery of new worlds. God 
 and Nature called for adventurers, and in 
 the Christian Church the adventurers only 
 set out in cockle-shells and hugged the 
 shore. 
 
 We are very busy yet with the effort to and in 
 interpret the good news of the Kingdom w^ 
 so that it will harmonise with the terrors tianity. 
 of Mount Sinai. During the war there 
 has been, even on the part of some of our 
 younger and more progressive theologians, 
 
146 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 a good deal of writing in praise of the 
 righteous anger which Jesus expressed 
 against the scribes and Pharisees, of the 
 blaze of manly wrath with which He is 
 supposed to have violently turned the 
 crowds from the Temple courts. All of 
 which is held to sanctify and consecrate 
 our vindictive anger toward our enemies. 
 But, after all, it is well to recognise that 
 this view of Christ makes His character 
 inconsistent with His own teaching. In 
 theological circles we call inconsistency 
 paradox, which sounds mystic and won- 
 derful but does not alter the fact. Or else, 
 if we desire consistency, we whittle away 
 our Lord's teaching in order to make 
 room for the wrath that we so senti- 
 mentally love. 
 
 Another But the words and actions of our Lord 
 
 tatfon. re " are susceptible of quite a different inter- 
 pretation. Take, for instance, the Temple 
 incident. Anyone who will patiently work 
 out the size of the court of the money- 
 changers and observe from contemporary 
 records that it must have been thronged 
 with men of all nations, will perceive 
 that the physical violence of one man 
 could not possibly have cleared the court. 
 Again, the reproaches addressed to the 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 147 
 
 Pharisees, even if not exaggerated and 
 altered by indignant editors, could all 
 have been said in exactly that temper in 
 which He wept over Jerusalem or prayed 
 that His torturers might be forgiven be- 
 cause of their ignorance. A mother whose 
 whole heart's affection was centred in a 
 reprobate son, who cherished in her heart 
 nothing but forgiveness toward him, once 
 stood up and with strong emotion told 
 him exactly what she thought was the 
 cause of his evil deeds, exactly what she 
 believed would be the natural result if 
 they were continued. Her language was 
 modern and not so poetic as that of the 
 East two thousand years ago ; but it came 
 in substance to very much what our Lord 
 said to the Pharisees. It was the verbal 
 expression of her moral vision when ap- 
 plied to her son's life; it came out of a 
 whirlwind of moral aspiration that broke 
 down all reserve, but had in it nothing of 
 the emotion that we call anger. What she 
 saw was the natural consequences of sin; 
 the expression of her vision was the warn- 
 ing of love, exactly the same sort of love 
 as would have made her fly to his aid had 
 he been walking blindfold over a precipice 
 or into a furnace. According to our in- 
 
148 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 herited sentiments we do not think that 
 sort of thing sufficiently manly for a man. 
 It is all right in a mother, but had it been 
 father or brother we should think him 
 feeble if incapable of rage. Still, it is 
 quite possible that what we yet call manly 
 we shall learn to call brutal. And, that 
 being so, we have no right to lay it down 
 as an established fact that the conception 
 of God as never angry, as always kind to 
 the unthankful and the evil and always 
 forgiving to seventy times seven, is not in 
 harmony with the revelation of Him 
 through Jesus Christ. 
 
 (ii) The It is further objected that the concep- 
 
 of a Law tion of God's character and our corre- 
 and Order, spending duty which I am urging, is sub- 
 versive of law and order. The late war 
 has already proved very nearly subversive 
 of all law and order in Europe. If that 
 order is to be saved from complete col- 
 lapse it cannot be by more militarism and 
 repression, but by those compromises and 
 friendly overtures between class and class 
 and nation and nation which are prompted 
 by forgiveness and brotherhood. But the 
 late war itself is the measure of the failure 
 of centuries of Christian teaching which 
 had been one long effort to harmonise the 
 
POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 149 
 
 cruelties of the God of primitive Israel 
 with the character and teaching of Jesus 
 Christ. The time has come when we must 
 halt no longer between two opinions about 
 God. 
 
 One chief reason why men suppose that 
 extinction of moral anger would cause the 
 disruption of society is that they have 
 never really grasped the fact that we live 
 in a world in which psychic or spiritual 
 cause and effect is just as calculable and 
 acts just as inevitably as do the laws 
 which govern matter. Even if men do, 
 by loving and forgiving their neighbours, 
 abolish all human punishment, deterrent 
 or disciplinary, they cannot possibly alter 
 the fact that consequences discipline and 
 consequences deter. The system of Na- 
 ture which we believe God by His power 
 upholds is an order majestic and invari- 
 able. This splendid characteristic of Na- 
 ture cannot be abolished by any human 
 effort. Every sin brings its own measure 
 of psychic disturbance and incapacity for 
 pleasure, and psychic disturbance means 
 ultimately physical degeneration, and de- 
 generation in the individual means degen- 
 eration in the community. The only pos- 
 sible way to mitigate this unfortunate 
 
150 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 result is by the practice of a virtue that 
 will bring about a greater good. In only 
 one way can God or man save sinners, and 
 that is by persuading them to practise 
 virtues that will bring about a greater 
 corresponding good. If that be so, and 
 if the forgiveness that means the continu- 
 ance of friendly help and brotherly affec- 
 tion is in reality the quickest and best way 
 of making men good, it cannot be sub- 
 versive of law and order. We have seen 
 that social goodness is necessary for hu- 
 man survival; it is correspondence with 
 human environment. 
 
 Principles But, of course, to see the truth of this 
 Practice. principle and to arrive at the application 
 of it are two things separable in time. 
 We learn to walk by falling; we solve 
 our problems as we go along, and we only 
 discover new worlds by setting forth 
 bravely upon uncharted seas. It is im- 
 possible to hold the conception of God's 
 power, and therefore glory, which we have 
 been considering, impossible to conceive 
 thus of God's action in the world, without 
 being out of harmony with very much that 
 is of the fabric of our present civilisation. 
 Possessing such convictions, we cannot 
 live without contributing something to its 
 
POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 151 
 
 disintegration by initiating the growth 
 of a better. We cannot live well without 
 working consciously to that end. But it 
 is very easy to live very ill indeed if, in 
 order to uphold God's constructive 
 power, we take destructive short cuts. If 
 we believe, as we must, that the progress 
 of life is the manifestation of God's power, 
 we must remember that the method of 
 life is construction, that even when it 
 brings about alterations or terminates 
 other lives, it does so in supplanting what 
 is by calling into existence something 
 fresh. In deciding upon a practical course 
 of action it is necessary also to think much 
 of the nature of life as exhibited in the 
 long biological process the distinction 
 between evolution and revolution, the long 
 patience of supersession of higher by 
 lower. We have so much to do that we 
 cannot afford to do it other than in a 
 Godlike way, for only thus shall we avoid 
 the undoing of our own work and toilsome 
 repetition. 
 
 Just as certain ideas are fruitful in the creative 
 construction of, let us say, a dwelling or Ideas - 
 a political constitution, producing what 
 bears the storm and stress of life, so cer- 
 tain ideas are fruitful in bringing eleva- 
 
152 POWER HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 tion and enlargement to the inner life, and 
 consequent harmony between the soul and 
 what is most desirable in domestic and 
 public activity. The study of comparative 
 religion has made it appear that man's 
 spiritual life has developed by trial and 
 observation. By these we have learned 
 that hostility to the evil-doer is not God's 
 method nor a Godlike method that hos- 
 tile passions do not develop our fullest 
 powers. 
 
 Spreading By experience we must also learn how 
 to bring this light to the world. We need 
 a true religious science of missionary 
 work. We are only at the very beginning 
 of this; but at least one law of the soul's 
 development in this direction has already 
 been established. We must regard every 
 moral problem as subsumed under the 
 splendour of the whole, and see it set in 
 relation to all the lavish beauty of the 
 Universe, all the gaiety and humour, all 
 the serene joy, all the natural goodness 
 and kindliness of life, as well as in relation 
 to wrong, ugliness and pain. Only by 
 such sweep of thought can we realise the 
 importance of each bit of reformatory 
 work; for the fineness of the whole lends 
 importance to each detail. Only by such 
 
POWEK HUMAN AND DIVINE 153 
 
 sweep of thought can we obtain patience 
 and a sufficient sense of power to do the 
 work magnanimously and magnificently, 
 with the Divine generosity that God in- 
 spires. 
 
 It is not true that if God be with us 
 man cannot prevail against us. Those 
 who break with tradition are always con- 
 demned, stoned and often crucified; but 
 it is true that if God be with us, not only 
 in our aim but in our method, nothing 
 can prevail against the cause for which 
 we work ; and if we believe in immortality 
 we must believe that in the triumph of 
 the cause we shall also triumph immor- 
 tally. 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 The Indi- 
 vidual and 
 the Race. 
 
 Practical 
 Aim of This 
 Chapter. 
 
 BY B. HILLMAN STREETER 
 
 THE facts and considerations which have 
 been adduced in the earlier chapters of 
 this volume go a long way towards 
 establishing the conclusion that viewed as 
 a whole the tendency which has expressed 
 itself in the course of biological evolution 
 is one "that makes for righteousness." 
 It is much to have found grounds for the 
 conviction that a glorious consummation 
 awaits the long struggle of humanity but 
 there still remains the problem of the fate 
 of the individual man meanwhile. It is 
 a great thing to know that the column will 
 reach its destination but what of the 
 many who drop out on the march? 
 
 In this chapter I approach the problem 
 of the pain and moral failure of the indi- 
 vidual, and I do so with an interest not so 
 much theoretical as practical. I attempt 
 no explanation of its origin or purpose. 
 Pain (whatever its explanation) is part of 
 
 154 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 155 
 
 the environment in which we have to live. 
 I ask how we can adapt ourselves to that 
 environment, or rather how we can adapt 
 the environment to ourselves for to do 
 that is the unique biological distinction of 
 man. Can we, instead of being crushed 
 by the difficulties we have to face, use 
 them rather as a stimulus along the route 
 to individual as well as social progress? I 
 ask whether, in regard to the moral failure 
 and the suffering past, present and to 
 come which falls within the experience 
 of any individual, we can say, "There is is there ^a 
 a way out." I suggest that, along lines 
 indicated in the New Testament and con- 
 firmed by the teaching of modern science, 
 each one of us may find a way in which 
 to cope successfully with that particular 
 share of the world's evil with which he or 
 she personally is brought in contact. In 
 the first part of the chapter I shall 
 treat of pain as such, without any at- 
 tempt to discriminate between pain which, 
 like remorse, is connected with the con- 
 sciousness of moral failure and the pain 
 which is not so caused. Pain can be 
 discussed scientifically as a purely psycho- 
 logical phenomenon; it can also be con- 
 sidered in its bearing on moral values. I 
 
156 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 begin with the simpler, and proceed later 
 to the more complex, problem. 
 
 PAIN 
 
 Pain We are apt to underestimate the extent 
 
 Physical |_ o ^jjj^ p am j s o f m ental origin. Anxiety 
 Mental. and disappointment, fear and regret, 
 humiliation and remorse, the sense of 
 desolation and despair, constitute the main 
 burden of civilised man ; and all these are 
 of the mind. In normal times the amount 
 of suffering due to causes entirely physi- 
 cal wounds, accident or disease would, 
 for the majority of men, be a relatively 
 small proportion of the whole; for the 
 present generation the war has vastly 
 altered the proportion. But even the pain 
 caused by physical injury is determined 
 by mental conditions more than is com- 
 monly supposed. There are stories from 
 the front of men in the excitement of 
 battle or retreat being for a long while 
 actually unconscious of wounds received. 
 Experiments in hypnosis, by which sensi- 
 bility to pain can be either enhanced, so 
 that the touch of a finger feels like a hot 
 iron, or reduced, so that the patient feels 
 nothing under the surgeon's knife, point 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 157 
 
 in the same direction. Quite apart from 
 these exceptional conditions, every doctor 
 or nurse knows that the extent and acute- 
 ness with which pain is felt varies enor- 
 mously with the mental attitude of the 
 sufferer. That patient feels pain most 
 who most dreads it and who concentrates 
 his or her attention on it most. Again, 
 still more important is the fact that the 
 actual quality of pain and its mental and 
 physical effects differ according as it is 
 borne with cheerfulness or despair, with 
 acceptance or resentment. 
 
 If, then, most suffering is predomi- Man and 
 nantly mental in origin, and if the mental Dances." 
 element so conditions both the amount and 
 the quality of suffering purely physical in 
 origin, it is not enough to attack the 
 problem of the world's suffering from the 
 physical side alone. It must be attacked 
 from that side, but it is far more essential 
 to approach it from the side of mind. 
 And precisely for this reason the indi- 
 vidual may have hope. He may find him- 
 self he often does find himself up 
 against hard facts which he cannot alter, 
 or burdened with a physical disability 
 which cannot be cured. But where cir- 
 cumstances cannot be altered it may still 
 
158 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 be possible to alter one's reaction towards 
 them. 
 
 The Especially is this true in regard to the 
 
 Suffering: . . i .1 i 
 
 of the Past, past: this cannot be undone, but my re- 
 action to it can be fundamentally changed. 
 I cannot unmake the sins, sorrows and dis- 
 appointments of the past, but may it not 
 be possible so to change my attitude 
 towards them as completely to transform 
 their consequences in the living present, 
 and thereby, so to speak, to remake the 
 past? Christ taught that this is possible, 
 that the broken-hearted can be healed 
 and that sins can be forgiven. In the 
 following pages I shall attempt to show 
 that both the experience of everyday life 
 and the conclusions of modern psychology 
 prove that Christ was right. 
 
 The Spirit Parts of the New Testament are unin- 
 
 Letteria telligible to those who have no special 
 knowledge of the literature of the age in 
 which it was written. Parts, again, show 
 obscurities and inconsistencies which we 
 must attribute to the fact that its authors 
 were trying to express new conceptions 
 and new intuitions by means of language 
 and modes of thought originally adapted 
 to a very different religious outlook and 
 that one from which they themselves were 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 159 
 
 only partially emancipated. If we would 
 get at the great ideas which are its essen- 
 tial contribution to human thought and 
 progress, we must turn aside from that 
 exaggerated respect for the exact exegesis 
 of single texts which still hampers many 
 even of those who think they have out- 
 grown the theory of verbal inspiration; 
 otherwise we shall get an impression dis- 
 tracted and confused. But leave on one 
 side exegetical and archaeological detail, 
 concentrate only on central ideas, and 
 there stands out from its pages a philoso- 
 phy of God and man, and in particular a 
 way of approach to the problem of suffer- 
 ing, as clear as it is simple, adequate and 
 inspiring. 
 
 In the New Testament, then, so inter- God and 
 preted, I find no attempt to produce a theWorld * 
 theory of why evil is permitted to exist. 
 Certainly there is no suggestion that this 
 is "the best of all possible worlds." On 
 the contrary, so far from being the best 
 of all possible worlds, it is a world that 
 God meant to be a great deal better than 
 it is. It is a world that has gone awry, 
 and that mainly through the ignorance, 
 the folly, the malice, the greed, and the 
 passions of men. But though the world 
 
160 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 is not now what it should be, God intends 
 to make it so. In fact, He is actually 
 engaged in making it so; for God does 
 not stand outside the world serenely con- 
 templating the misery and the strife. He 
 is no doubt in a sense outside and beyond 
 the world, but He is also inside it, im- 
 manent in it, as the philosophers say ; and 
 by the fact of His immanence He takes 
 His share in the suffering; and God's 
 share is, if I may use the phrase, the lion's 
 share. 
 
 Creative But this suffering is not just mere 
 
 suffering with no end or result beyond 
 itself. It is a means to an end, the means 
 by which the ignorance, folly, malice, 
 greed and evil passions may be overcome, 
 the evil wills remade, and the results of 
 evil action transmuted and undone. But 
 it is not all suffering which has this virtue. 
 The suffering which has power is suffer- 
 ing like Christ's suffering, that is, faced 
 for the sake of causes and ideals like those 
 for which He worked and died, or borne 
 in the spirit in which He bore His. Christ, 
 however, is not merely our leader and our 
 pattern. He is also, as St Paul puts it, 
 "The portrait of the invisible God." His 
 attitude both to suffering and to evil is 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 161 
 
 also God's. God shares in the suffering 
 and captains in the fight. And God sum- 
 mons us to assist Him in the task, to enter 
 into partnership with Him and that not 
 only in the suffering but also in the vic- 
 tory which it brings. 
 
 This view of the power and possibilities Suffering 
 of suffering requires analysis. Much cant Degrades, 
 is talked about the ennobling and purify- 
 ing effect of suffering. To an animal pain 
 may be useful as a warning of danger or a 
 spur to activity, but beyond the limited 
 amount required for that purpose it de- 
 bilitates and depresses. So too with man, 
 the most natural effect of suffering is not 
 to ennoble but to embitter, not to purify 
 but to weaken. Joy is a necessity of life, 
 of the highest life as well as of the lowest. 
 The natural and normal reactions of 
 the organism to suffering are vindictive- 
 ness, degradation, peevishness and de- 
 spair. Where the contrary result is found 
 it is because there is something in man, or 
 in some men, which can counteract these 
 "natural" reactions. And this something 
 does exist. 
 
 That is the secret, dimly grasped by The "Con- 
 heroic men and women throughout all * 
 the ages, which Christianity first publicly 
 
162 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 proclaimed: the natural consequences of 
 suffering can, by the spirit and manner in 
 which it is borne, be not only avoided but 
 actually reversed. Look upon suffering 
 as a necessary condition of labour for any 
 cause worth working for whether it be 
 the learning of a lesson, the production 
 of a work of art, the bringing up of a 
 family or the steering of a ship to port 
 and its character is changed. Realise that 
 the stupidity, the indifference, the malice, 
 and the selfishness of man have always 
 been such an obstacle to progress that 
 every forward step must be paid for in 
 blood and tears; that, because casualties 
 are the price of victory, sacrifice, pushed 
 at times to the point of martyrdom, 
 though not in itself desirable, is necessary 
 and worth while and things are seen in 
 a new light. If it is in this way and in 
 this spirit that the Divinity immanent in 
 the world is suffering, striving, overcom- 
 ing, then to take one's share in the work 
 is to be allowed, as St Paul puts it, to 
 pay part of "the unpaid balance of the 
 sufferings of Christ." 1 Then, indeed, not 
 perhaps every day and always, but at 
 least in our moments of deeper vision, 
 
 1 Col. i. 24, 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 163 
 
 such pain becomes no longer a burden but 
 a privilege. 
 
 No great cause has ever lacked its Suffering 
 martyrs, and it is not hard to see how Desolates, 
 suffering of this kind suffering volun- 
 tarily risked, or even actually challenged, 
 by the sufferer for the sake of a great 
 work or a great ideal may ennoble and 
 inspire. But a kind of suffering harder 
 to be borne is that which, whether it comes 
 from accident, disease, or from the negli- 
 gence or malevolence of man, is in no 
 sense connected with, or the direct result 
 of, our efforts for a good work or a great 
 cause. Such suffering, so far from being 
 a price which we pay, and pay willingly, 
 for the sake of the work, is often the 
 greatest of all impediments to it, a knock- 
 out blow which, humanly speaking, makes 
 nugatory all our hopes and our achieve- 
 ments. 
 
 The old theology said, "Calamity is the Calamity 
 will of God: submit." But is calamity win of 
 the will of God? The subject is one upon God - 
 which there is much confusion of thought. 
 No doubt, since God created and sustains 
 the Universe, He is ultimately respon- 
 sible for everything in it; whatever hap- 
 pens is the result of something He has 
 
164 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 willed. But in that sense sin, quite as 
 much as suffering, is the will of God yet 
 the very meaning of sin is that it is some- 
 thing contrary to His will. But a reason- 
 able solution is not far to seek. God is 
 responsible for making a world which is 
 a connected system a system in which 
 causes always produce their appropriate 
 effects, where good produces good, and 
 evil, evil, and where suffering is one of the 
 effects produced by ignorance and sin. 
 But God is not responsible for the extent 
 to which, by the voluntary choice of 
 created spirits, that system has got out of 
 gear though, if the conception of His 
 work and character implicit in Chris- 
 tianity be correct, He has made Himself 
 responsible, at bitter cost to Himself, for 
 setting it right again. 
 
 Character It is often argued that without some 
 flic t . n " element of strain and conflict the highest 
 type of character could not be produced; 
 and again, that unless the consequences 
 of folly, ignorance or evil choice were 
 really bad, life would be only a game in 
 which, in the last resort, nothing really 
 mattered. But granting this, granted 
 that a world in which suffering and sin 
 are possible is better than one where 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 165 
 
 everything were necessarily smooth and 
 easy, and therefore a world better worth 
 while creating, what follows? We may 
 readily admit that this actual world can 
 be a nursery of noble souls while Lotus 
 land could not be, yet it does not follow, 
 either that the total amount of evil in the 
 world or the proportion of suffering which 
 falls to the lot of each particular indi- 
 vidual is an exact expression of God's will. 
 
 To refuse to accept the view that what- Providence, 
 ever happens is in accordance with the 
 will of God, does not mean the denial 
 either of God's prescience or of His provi- 
 dence. An Intelligence which itself up- 
 holds the great interconnected system of 
 cause and effect that we call Nature, and 
 to which the secrets of all hearts are open, 
 cannot but know the trend and tendencies 
 of things, cannot but possess an actual 
 foresight of the future which, though 
 falling short of that absolute foreknowl- 
 edge which is only compatible with pre- 
 destination, may yet, in comparison with 
 our human foresight, be styled omnis- 
 cience. Again, the experience of all reli- 
 gious men points to the conclusion that 
 "there's a Divinity that shapes our ends, 
 rough-hew them how we will." Whether 
 
166 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 it be individuals or groups, evidence does 
 suggest that those who "wait upon the 
 Lord," who endeavour, that is, to concen- 
 trate their minds upon the Highest in 
 quiet meditation, and act in response to 
 the inspiration which they get, are enabled 
 to overcome difficulty, to escape danger, 
 and, in spite of loss and failure, to achieve 
 high ends. The facts point to a Provi- 
 dence watching over us, guiding us to 
 wise and salutary choice, leading us to the 
 help of others and others to our help ; but 
 they also suggest that by reason of deaf- 
 ness and unresponsiveness on our part or 
 on theirs God's plan may temporarily 
 miscarry. The experience of religious 
 people is that they do often, to an extent 
 quite unexpected, actually avoid disaster, 
 they can "tread upon the lion and adder" ; 
 but also, where disaster does come, a way 
 of recovery equally unexpected is in the 
 long run provided. Where God does not 
 prevent, He cures. 
 
 Bearing The conclusion that we ought not to 
 
 o^r^Abmty re g ar d the accidents and calamities that 
 to "Love ' come to us as directly sent by God is one 
 of the first importance for practical reli- 
 gion. It is almost if not quite impossible 
 to look upon the loss or the disease which 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 167 
 
 crushes or debilitates as a direct expres- 
 sion of the will of God and still whole- 
 heartedly regard Him as our heavenly 
 Father. In the past, and even in the 
 present, there seem to be some who have 
 succeeded in this apparently impossible 
 endeavour; but certainly from ordinary 
 human nature it is too much to ask for a 
 real and true love of God if they are 
 taught to regard all the evils that fall 
 upon them as visitations deliberately sent 
 by Him as chastisement or discipline. Of 
 course, if such a doctrine were true we 
 must teach it and take the consequences, 
 but if, as we have seen reason to believe, 
 it is not true, then to decline frankly and 
 emphatically to repudiate it is to take 
 away the key to the kingdom of heaven 
 and hinder those from entering in who 
 otherwise might do so. 
 
 The explanation of the old theology The 
 that sickness or calamity is to be regarded 
 as the will of God we discard; but the the Old 
 practical moral which the old religion 
 drew from it was, up to a point though 
 only up to a point quite sound. 
 
 To repine or to give way to resentment "Submis- 
 in the face of undeserved calamity is fatal. "Accept- 
 Unfortunately either repining or resent- 
 
168 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 merit is the natural instinctive attitude to 
 take up; and in so far as "submit to the 
 will of God" meant "put such feelings 
 right away/' it was good advice. But the 
 right attitude to adopt is, to my mind, 
 far better described if instead of "submis- 
 sion" we say "acceptance." Mere sub- 
 mission to the will of an external power 
 is negative, it is a dull, drab thing; but 
 acceptance of a share, still more the will- 
 ing acceptance of more than our full 
 share, in the tragedy of life a tragedy 
 in which God as well as man is an actor 
 is positive, it has about it something 
 vitalising. 
 
 The Pain, like other elemental forces in 
 
 Attitude Nature, can be turned to use, but only if 
 
 towards f^ ] aws o f it s operation are first under- 
 stood and then conformed to. Natura 
 parendo imperatur, but the "obedience" 
 by which Nature can be mastered is no 
 mere passive submission but an activity 
 which may be called obedience only be- 
 cause it functions always in conformity 
 to laws and principles clearly understood. 
 So it is with pain. Those who meet it 
 clear-eyed and with a positive and active 
 acceptance, who "face the music," as the 
 slang phrase has it, those who are ready 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 169 
 
 not only to "do their bit" in the world's 
 war but to "bear their bit" in the world's 
 sorrow, make a strange discovery. They 
 find, not only that they are enabled to 
 bear their sorrow in a way which hurts 
 less for what hurts most in the bearing 
 is that which is most resented, what is 
 most freely accepted hurts least but that 
 they achieve an enrichment and a growth 
 of personality which makes them centres 
 of influence and light in ways of which 
 they never suspected the possibility. 
 
 Few things can so inspire and re-create Heroic 
 the human heart as can the spectacle of 
 crushing misfortune cheerfully and 
 heroically borne; and the unconscious 
 influence which those who do this exert 
 is far greater than they or others compre- 
 hend. Here is the element of truth in the 
 common talk about the ennobling and 
 purifying power of suffering; though it 
 is not the suffering but the way it is borne 
 that ennobles. Pain, not just submitted 
 to but willingly accepted, makes the suf- 
 ferer socially creative. A man counts in 
 this world to the extent that he has 
 thought and to the extent that he has felt, 
 provided always that he has thought and 
 felt in the right way. Suffering rightly 
 
When 
 We Have 
 
 Failed. 
 
 The 
 
 Retrieval 
 of Past 
 Errors. 
 
 170 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 borne is constructive work. He who has 
 "borne his bit" has also "done his bit," 
 and pain conquered is power. 
 
 A few are able to bear their sufferings 
 in this way. Most of us have failed to do 
 so, or have succeeded very partially. We 
 have allowed resentment and depression 
 which, I must repeat, are after all the 
 natural consequences, physical and psy- 
 chological, of a severe blow to enter 
 into, if not to predominate in, our out- 
 look. The suffering which, if we had 
 accepted it as a privilege or utilised it as 
 an opportunity (which is Christ's way), 
 would have enriched, ennobled and forti- 
 fied our personalities, we have faced in a 
 way which has had the contrary effect. 
 We have let it depress our enthusiasms, 
 dim our ideals, sap our vitality. Is there 
 a remedy for this? 
 
 There is : but it is one which has rather 
 fallen out of sight in Christian teaching. 
 We are familiar with the idea later on 
 I shall attempt to justify it that sins 
 can be forgiven, that if we look back upon 
 past errors in the right spirit they can be 
 retrieved. We have all been taught that 
 the degeneration which is the natural in- 
 evitable consequence of sin can be trans- 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 171 
 
 formed, that it need not remain as a 
 standing source of debility in the soul, 
 and that the repentance following after 
 wrongdoing may actually bring about an 
 enrichment and deepening of the per- 
 sonality "to whom little is forgiven, the 
 same loveth little." But in ordinary Chris- 
 tian teaching this idea has only been 
 applied to breaches of certain fundamental 
 moral laws. It is not ordinarily applied 
 to the failure to meet suffering in the 
 right way, though this failure is a moral 
 one as much as any other; it differs from 
 other moral failures only in being less 
 commonly recognised as such. But if it 
 be true that sins of one kind can be, as we 
 say, "forgiven" that is, if their naturally 
 evil consequences upon our personalities 
 can be transmuted by a subsequent change 
 in our attitude towards them and God, 
 so that what once was sheer loss may in 
 another way become a form of gain the 
 same must surely be true of this kind of 
 moral failure also. 
 
 And experience shows that we can The 
 transform the past in this regard. We 
 can bring up clearly into memory the 
 times when we have suffered and have let 
 that suffering fill us with resentment and 
 
172 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 despair. We can realise our error and 
 deplore it, we can say to ourselves: "No; 
 all said and done, I am glad that in the 
 great tragedy of humanity I have borne 
 my part; I am glad that I have tasted of 
 the cup which is the heritage of man." 
 And in proportion as we can say this, and 
 mean it, our whole outlook on life, our 
 attitude to God and man, is changed. We 
 are filled with a new joy richer by rea- 
 son of what we have endured; we are in- 
 spired with a sense of vitality and inner 
 strength more deeply rooted because of 
 the experience we have passed through. 
 The draught which when first drunk was 
 poison is transformed into wine. The 
 past cannot be undone, but the bitterness 
 and weakness which are its living conse- 
 quences in the present are not only can- 
 celled but reversed. 
 
 Learn Suffering is not man's only teacher, 
 
 or Suffer i . .* 
 
 More. as some have seemed to urge there are 
 
 things, for instance, which can only be 
 learnt through joy and it is the teacher 
 whose lessons are the most difficult of all 
 to learn. If at first we decline to learn 
 them, we suffer more; for then we must 
 endure, not only the original pain, but the 
 growing resentment or the life-draining 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 173 
 
 melancholy which it entails. From this 
 further suffering, consequent on our re- 
 fusal to learn the lesson first offered to 
 us, another and a different lesson can be 
 learnt. But the actual learning of it 
 awaits a fundamental change of attitude 
 and outlook on our part, a perdvoia, which, 
 like any other form of "conversion," may 
 come to one man by stages slow and im- 
 perceptible, to another with a sudden 
 flash, and to others not at all. 
 
 There remains the most difficult prob- The Pain 
 lem of all. How are we to take the suf- 
 fering of others, especially of those we 
 love, which we are compelled to witness 
 but are unable to alleviate, and which in 
 many cases we can see is not being borne 
 and under the circumstances can hardly 
 be expected to be borne in a way which 
 can be otherwise than degrading and de- 
 pressing? What of this? There are times 
 when, though we cannot alleviate, we can 
 help them to bear their suffering in the 
 right way; could we completely succeed 
 in this we might perhaps, though with an 
 effort, be content. But there are also 
 times when, called upon to be spectators 
 of physical agony, crushing calamity, or 
 desolating bereavement, all our theories 
 
174 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 about suffering and its uses simply shrivel 
 up, and, if we try and put them into 
 words, we seem to ourselves to be as those 
 that mock. 
 
 Co-opera- Conquer by accepting. The principle 
 tionwith , ' / .1. *. 4-u- M. 
 
 God. that pain is to be met in this spirit, and 
 
 not with resentment or despair, needs 
 special reassertion when we thus contem- 
 plate the pain of others. For it may be 
 given to us by an act of penetrating 
 sympathy to enter into their suffering 
 and, so to speak, accept it for them, and 
 thereby, either at the time or later on, help 
 them to a right acceptance. Still more 
 necessary is it to remind ourselves that 
 God feels this pain as much as we do, in- 
 deed much more, by reason of His more 
 perfect sympathy. This fact points to 
 the solution: "Cast thy burden upon the 
 Lord, he shall sustain thee." God, too, is 
 bearing the suffering, but He is bearing 
 it in the right way; and in so far as we 
 can open up our souls to Him, and 
 through communion and meditation enter 
 into His mind, we also begin to bear it in 
 the right way. God's way of bearing suf- 
 fering, like everything else He does, is 
 creative and constructive; in so far as we 
 bear it in His way, the negative attitude 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 175 
 
 of repining and resentment will drop 
 away, and we too shall become construc- 
 tive and creative. The right act or the 
 right forbearance, the right word or the 
 right silence, will be given us; and when 
 these are impossible or inappropriate, the 
 right thought, the right feeling and the 
 right prayer. And often these may be 
 the most effective things of all. Men are 
 all bound together by unseen telepathic 
 ties of mutual influence. Each of us, by 
 merely being what he is, contributes, for 
 better or for worse, more than he knows 
 to the mental and moral outlook of those 
 he lives with, and probably of others to 
 him unknown. He who is trying to bear 
 the suffering of those he loves, with God, 
 for God and in God's way, cannot fail 
 to help them, and to help others also, 
 though he may sometimes have to wait a 
 long while for visible results. 
 
 And in one respect we can afford to The 
 wait, for what we have found to be true 
 in our own case must hold good in theirs 
 also. Pain, we have seen, even though 
 wrongly borne at the time, may yet be 
 transformed in retrospect, and defeat 
 turned into victory in later days. If, then, 
 we believe that the growth of souls con- 
 
176 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 tinues after this life, we can in a measure 
 understand how that suffering which, 
 because it was not rightly borne, has been 
 wholly unprofitable and demoralising in 
 this life may one day be changed in quality 
 and made the condition of a richer, deeper, 
 nobler life in the Beyond. 
 
 The Upon many souls the dead-weight bur- 
 
 th World's den f *h e world's sufferings acts as a 
 Hi* paralysis to thought and effort. Con- 
 
 siderations like those just urged may help 
 such to turn from passive desolation to 
 active energy. In the lives of most highly 
 sensitive natures there are moments when 
 the individual feels as if he were an Atlas 
 bearing up alone the burden of the world's 
 ill. It is not so. In the last resort it is 
 borne up by God, and there are always 
 "seven thousand in Israel," unsuspected 
 and unknown, who are helping us and 
 Him to do it. 
 
 MORAL FAILURE AND ITS RETRIEVAL 
 
 In a chapter which is primarily a dis- 
 cussion of pain, it would be out of place 
 to attempt a comprehensive discussion 
 either of the nature of sin or of the mean- 
 ing of forgiveness. So much pain, how- 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 177 
 
 ever, is directly the result of sin that it 
 seems necessary, however briefly, at least 
 to indicate some of the main grounds for 
 regarding the forgiveness of sin as a pos- 
 sible and a reasonable idea. And I would 
 ask that what I have written be consid- 
 ered as a contribution merely to this 
 limited department of the problem. 
 
 Nothing is more remarkable in human Eva and 
 nature than the varying degree to which 
 in different individuals the moral con- * it. 
 sciousness is awake. You will find men 
 and women who are perfectly unconscious 
 that their lives are one long expression of 
 "envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitable- 
 ness," who yet feel paroxysms of contri- 
 tion because they are haunted by impure 
 dreams. You will find others quite easy 
 in their minds about a long course of 
 sexual depravity but burdened with re- 
 morse for an unkind word. We do not 
 "see ourselves as others see us," much less 
 as God sees us. Few of us know where 
 our moral weakness really lies. Sin and 
 the consciousness of sin are quite a differ- 
 ent matter. 
 
 There is a second no less remarkable The 
 fact one, indeed, which largely explains 
 the former. The guilt of an action is of Regret. 
 
178 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 directly proportionate to the extent to 
 which the doer knows that it is wrong. 
 Its injurious effect, however, upon his 
 moral character is inversely proportionate 
 to the extent that he regrets it. This 
 point is so important that it requires 
 expansion. Every act is the expression 
 of a previous tendency or disposition in 
 the character; the doing of the act stimu- 
 lates that tendency; repeated acts of the 
 same kind rapidly create a habit, which 
 becomes a chain by which we are tied and 
 bound. Not only that; conscience defied 
 becomes less sensitive. An act which on 
 the first occasion was done with shrinking, 
 after constant repetition is performed 
 with equanimity. The "natural" conse- 
 quence of the commission of wrong is not 
 the awakening but the dulling of the sense 
 of sin. But, if this be so, a conclusion of 
 immense importance follows. To feel 
 constant and growing pain at the contem- 
 plation of one's own past guilt is already 
 to have begun to reverse its natural conse- 
 quences within the self. The conscious- 
 ness of moral failure I mean, of course, 
 only when it rises to the height of acute 
 discomfort is a sign that the old self of 
 whose character the act deplored was a 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 179 
 
 natural expression is already dead or 
 dying, and a new self coming to the birth. 
 Repentance is itself an evidence of moral 
 advance already actually achieved. Its 
 smart is the smart of "growing pains/' 
 
 But in order to bring the new self to God 
 the birth the individual must firstly gain a 
 clear perception of the nature and mean- 
 ing of that pain, and secondly, must bring 
 it into relation with the thought of his own 
 value, actual and potential his actual 
 value being in the last resort what God, 
 in spite of all his failure, thinks of him; 
 his potential value being what God, in 
 spite of all his weakness, can yet make of 
 him. At bottom this is what the tradi- 
 tional Christian doctrine of the forgive- 
 ness of sins was really driving at, though 
 obscured by language derived from the 
 Jewish sacrificial system and by an obso- 
 lete psychology. Christianity has proved 
 to be a "Gospel" just in proportion as it 
 has stressed the idea (shown in the previ- 
 ous chapter to be Christ's most character- 
 istic contribution to our conception of 
 God) that the creative power of the all- 
 pervading Divine stands there ever "de- 
 clining to be estranged," that is, still con- 
 tinuing to regard the offender as a being 
 
180 THE DEFEAT OF PAItf 
 
 of priceless value for whom, in spite of 
 all, He feels affection undiminished and 
 hope unlimited. 
 
 The Sinner The dawning consciousness of moral 
 811 * failure and of its true nature is itself, as 
 we have seen, the beginning of a new 
 birth, and contains and implies the possi- 
 bility of further growth. But whether 
 that possibility will be realised or not de- 
 pends largely on the extent to which the 
 individual recognises this attitude of the 
 Divine, and thereby gives God, so to 
 speak, the opportunity of fanning into 
 flame the spark of higher aspiration. This 
 is the profound truth underlying the old 
 evangelical exhortation to "lay hold of 
 the salvation freely offered," or to "rest 
 in the finished work" phrases which un- 
 fortunately disguise from our generation 
 the truth which to our fathers they made 
 luminous. Let the repentant soul realise 
 that, in spite of all, he still has an infinite 
 value for God, that there is still a work 
 he can do for man, and that because of 
 and by reason of his repentance he has 
 already begun to establish a personal con- 
 tact with a Higher Power then at once 
 the consciousness, and therefore the in- 
 tensity and effectiveness, of that contact 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 181 
 
 is indefinitely enhanced. A stimulation 
 of vitality and moral invigoration begins 
 which cannot but lift him right out of that 
 past which already, by the mere fact that 
 he condemns it and deplores, he has 
 partially outgrown. 
 
 The forgiveness of sins does not mean The Conse- 
 that either a past act itself or its inevitable $%** 
 consequences to other people can be un- giveness. 
 done. A repentant murderer cannot call 
 his victim to life again; he may be fortu- 
 nate enough to have an opportunity to 
 make some amends, as, for instance, by 
 providing for the orphaned children; but 
 that does not undo the past. Yet, follow- 
 ing upon genuine repentance, a moral 
 re-creation is possible which can reverse 
 the otherwise inevitable consequences 
 upon a man's own life and character, and 
 so make his sum total contribution to 
 mankind beneficent even if he cannot 
 overtake and make substantial amends to 
 the actual victims he has wronged or 
 rescind the consequences of his folly on 
 his fortunes or his health. More than 
 that, a character so re-created can effect 
 certain things which seem to be outside 
 the range of those who have never fallen 
 and risen again. St Paul's conversion 
 
182 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 will serve to illustrate both these points. 
 It could not bring Stephen to life again, 
 but it turned the harsh fanatic energy 
 which had found expression in that act of 
 persecution into the passion which made 
 him "labour more abundantly than they 
 all." In addition it gave him an insight 
 into the human heart, into the nature of 
 the moral struggle and into the meaning 
 of Christ's life and teaching, which made 
 him, next to his Master, that one who has 
 made the deepest mark on the heart and 
 mind of Europe. And, on a lesser scale, 
 we all know men whose power for good 
 seems to be directly conditioned by the 
 fact that they have known evil and over- 
 come it. Plato says that a physician 
 should not be one who has always enjoyed 
 the best health; and one who has himself 
 failed may sometimes be the better physi- 
 cian to the souls of others. 
 
 Ofelix Then, is it better to have sinned and 
 
 cu/paP b een forgiven than never to have sinned 
 at all? In St Paul's time, too, there were 
 some who drew the same conclusion: 
 "Shall we continue in sin that grace may 
 abound?" We may leave the answer 
 where St Paul left it. Logically it may 
 be "Yes"; practically that answer could 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 183 
 
 be given only by one who has never 
 felt the experience from the inside. Such 
 know that in all moral failure there is real 
 loss. Some good thing which they might 
 have done will, by reason of their failure, 
 remain eternally undone. And yet they 
 know that but for the power and insight 
 which they derived from the fact that they 
 had failed and been restored, some other 
 good thing would have remained un- 
 done. It would seem that the task of 
 bringing about the Kingdom of God re- 
 quires the co-operation of very different 
 types. There is one work for Mary Mag- 
 dalene, another for Mary the mother of 
 Christ. We cannot question which of the 
 two will stand higher in that Kingdom; 
 but the other may still stand high. 
 
 In current religious teaching there is an A Current 
 idea directly contrary, as it seems to me, ^J|| ous 
 to the teaching of Christ about God, and 
 no less contrary to the lessons of modern 
 psychology. I mean the idea that we 
 should continually contemplate and brood 
 upon our sins and work ourselves up into 
 agonies of contrition about them. 
 
 If God is just He will estimate a man's Healthy 
 responsibility for his offences, not by the Contrition ' 
 standard of an ideal man, but by the 
 
184 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 standard which he individually had 
 reached at the time when he committed 
 them. 1 If he has come to realise that the 
 offence is much worse than he supposed, 
 that is a sign of growth in him; it is there- 
 fore a reason for thankfulness. The con- 
 trition which is the natural consequence 
 of fairly facing up to his responsibility, 
 the recognition of the fact that he not 
 only "ought to have known better" but 
 that he did know better, is healthy. 
 Unhealthy It is quite otherwise if he tries to exag- 
 Contntion. g era ^ e j^ responsibility, and therefore his 
 contrition, beyond what the facts war- 
 rant. The tendency to do this is partly 
 the result of conceiving God as an 
 offended potentate who' is likely to be 
 propitiated by an apology in proportion 
 as the nature of the offence is exaggerated 
 the precise conception of God which 
 Christ did His best to unteach it is 
 partly the reflection of wounded self- 
 respect. The humiliation which a man 
 feels at discovering that he was and is a 
 
 1 Particularly in regard to the burden of remembered 
 offences, committed in early youth, often the best advice 
 one can give is to minimise their seriousness to make the 
 person see the offence as something which, though in a 
 grown man an enormity, in a boy deserved "a flogging and 
 have done with it." 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 185 
 
 greater "rotter" than he had dreamed, is 
 the measure of the Pharisee in him. In so 
 far as this is the case, the endeavour 
 artificially to stimulate contrition is really 
 to stimulate spiritual pride. Once a man 
 knows he is a "worm" and cheerfully 
 accepts the fact, he can begin to rise above 
 the worm. So long as he grovels and 
 broods on his "wormanity" he retards the 
 process for the secret of moral advance 
 is to transform interest in oneself into 
 interest in the Kingdom of God. Christ 
 taught that God freely forgives but that 
 it is the publican who most easily avails 
 himself of the fact. To the worm that 
 knows it is only a worm, God gives wings. 
 
 But whatever view we take on the reli- A Warning 
 gious issue, from the psychological point 
 of view this emphasis on the duty of 
 brooding over the enormity of the past 
 is bound to be disastrous. Indeed, it is 
 largely responsible for the most depress- 
 ing of all facts in the experience of reli- 
 gious people the incapacity to overcome 
 habitually recurrent sin. So many spend 
 their time bitterly repenting of, and after 
 a brief interval exactly repeating, the 
 same act. Their failure has a simple 
 psychological explanation. To concen- 
 
186 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 trate attention on the enormity of an 
 offence, and upon the blackness of heart 
 and the weakness of will which can con- 
 stantly repeat it, is really to submit one- 
 self to a form of auto-suggestion which 
 can only make the repetition of the act 
 inevitable. The advice given by con- 
 fessors in these cases is often the worst 
 possible. So far from being told to 
 deplore the past and dread its repetition 
 in the future, the penitent should be ad- 
 vised to turn away his attention from the 
 thought of his own weakness and sin, to 
 concentrate on the power and the desire 
 of God to help him, to think no more of 
 past failure but of the possibility of doing 
 useful constructive work in the world. It 
 may take some time to undo the work of 
 long-continued auto-suggestion, and to 
 free the mind completely from the influ- 
 ence of bad advice and wrong conceptions 
 meanwhile let him cease to bother about 
 this particular weakness. 1 Psychology 
 
 x Bad habits, physical and mental, whether the result 
 of youthful misconduct, accident, or the lack of good 
 advice, often get beyond the control of the conscious will. 
 If and when this stage is reached, or all but reached, 
 they should be regarded not as sin, but as disease. In 
 which case the patient is only morally to blame if he 
 declines forthwith to take the necessary steps, and if need 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 187 
 
 confirms the teaching of St Paul leave 
 behind the Law, with its associations of 
 failure and of fear, throw yourself on the 
 power and love of God as seen in Christ, 
 and sin shall have no more dominion over 
 you. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND RECENT PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 The shell-shock hospitals have provided 
 an unprecedented opportunity for the 
 study of the nature and origin of mental 
 disease. Theories and methods evolved 
 by the great specialists before the war 
 have been tested and developed, and new 
 ones have been invented. The result is a 
 great advance in the understanding of the 
 psychology of the human soul. 
 
 As yet there has not been time for the some Pro- 
 materials collected to be completely di- 
 gested, and there is still a plentiful dis- 
 agreement among practitioners of differ- 
 ent schools even in regard to points of 
 
 be to seek the best medical advice, to cure the disease. 
 The mere suggestion that a bad habit or an obsession 
 should be transferred from the category of sin to that 
 of disease, to be treated quasi-medically, as one would a 
 nasty ulcer, sometimes at once, more often after con- 
 centrated reflection on the idea, effects a cure. If not, a 
 doctor or a nerve specialist should be consulted. 
 
188 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 fundamental importance. There are, how- 
 ever, certain conclusions as to which there 
 is sufficient agreement among those com- 
 petent to pronounce an opinion to justify 
 an outsider in accepting them as at least 
 provisionally established and among 
 these are some which, once recognised as 
 established, cannot be ignored in any 
 treatment of the subject of this chapter. 
 "The One point in particular is peculiarly 
 
 Complex." relevant. Man has a natural instinct to 
 try to hide away from himself and from 
 others, experiences which have deeply 
 wounded in particular acute humilia- 
 tion, undetected moral lapses, occasions 
 of acute terror or long-drawn-out appre- 
 hension. Supposing we succeed in half 
 smothering or even completely obliterat- 
 ing the memory of these, so much the 
 worse for us. To suppress all recollection 
 or expression of such incidents is like 
 applying a plaster to a boil. The emotion 
 associated with the original occasion re- 
 mains as a suppressed poison in the mind. 
 It is always seeking to find expression by 
 investing the circumstances of a man's 
 subsequent life with an atmosphere of 
 unnecessary apprehension, difficulty, or 
 pain, thus burdening the personality in 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 189 
 
 the present with the shame, the fear and 
 the agony of the past. The result is de- 
 pression, neurasthenia and, in some cases, 
 physical paralysis, moral breakdown, or 
 loss of reason. 
 
 If, however, the patient can be induced "Reasso- 
 to remember clearly and to speak about 
 the buried memory the "repressed com- 
 plex" as it is technically called relief at 
 once begins. It is as if the boil were 
 opened and the poisonous matter let out. 
 It becomes possible for the patient, either 
 for himself or with the help of the psycho- 
 therapeutist, to begin a process of re- 
 adjustment or "reassociation," i.e. of asso- 
 ciating the event in his mind with an 
 emotion of an opposite kind. He can, for 
 instance, see for himself, or be taught by 
 another to see, what was once a legitimate 
 cause of acute terror or anxiety, either as 
 a trifle which he can now look back on 
 with a smile, or as a real disaster, but yet 
 one which he can contemplate with a feel- 
 ing of thankfulness in that he has some- 
 how won through; or, again, for the de- 
 pression of a vaguely realised disgrace he 
 can substitute the satisfaction of failure 
 retrieved or of guilt atoned for. Once 
 this is done, especially if the patient can 
 
190 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 be made to see a clear relation between 
 the emotion associated with the past shock 
 or act and that which he experiences in 
 connection with some present anxiety, 
 mental health begins rapidly to accrue. 1 
 Painful This lesson of psychology has a very im- 
 
 portant bearing on everyday life. Among 
 men who have served in the fighting line, 
 I notice, on the one hand, an instinctive 
 indisposition to talk about the war. On 
 the other, when speaking among intimates, 
 and especially among men who themselves 
 have seen service, there is a constant tend- 
 ency to recur to it. But in each man's 
 experience there are some things of which 
 he never speaks even to his most intimate 
 friends things which, when they start 
 up in memory, he strives, sometimes suc- 
 cessfully, more often not, to exorcise from 
 consciousness. And what is true of men 
 who have fought in the trenches is true, 
 
 1 In acute cases of nervous breakdown it is sometimes 
 found that hypnotic suggestion is required to complete the 
 necessary "reassociation." But in many cases even of 
 acute neurasthenia, the mere fact that the "repressed 
 complex" has been brought into consciousness, and that 
 the patient can speak about it clearly and fully, enables 
 him to put behind him both the memory and the emotions 
 associated with it, and, as it were, permanently to detach 
 himself from this incident in his past; which, until he 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 191 
 
 though to a lesser extent, of most men and 
 women. Which of us has not memories 
 from the past which stab and burn, 
 memories of things seen, things suffered, 
 things done, things left undone ; memories 
 of loss, disappointment, humiliation, which 
 we try, but try in vain, to bury? 
 
 The habitual reserve that is character- Reserve, 
 istic of the English and the Scotch, in so 
 far as it means that one does not carry 
 one's "heart upon one's sleeve for daws 
 to peck at" or is unwilling to be for ever 
 wearying one's friends with the recital 
 of minor troubles or petty peccadilloes, is 
 to be commended; in so far as it is the 
 expression of a high courage which dis- 
 dains to exaggerate or seem to shirk its 
 full share of the burden and the suffering 
 of the race, it is to be admired. But 
 psychology bears out the ancient proverb, 
 "A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved." 
 And though to be always seeking confi- 
 dants for one's troubles or one's sins 
 inevitably leads either to morbid intro- 
 spection or to shallowness of character, 
 an occasional unburdening of the soul is 
 
 clearly remembered and frankly spoke about it to some 
 one else, had in a kind of way lived on and formed part 
 of his present mental outlook. 
 
192 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 good for most of us. But it must be an 
 "unloading" of fears, worries, sorrows and 
 disappointments, and not only a confes- 
 sion of sins. 
 
 The Accordingly anyone who is haunted by 
 
 of r outh. the memory of some fright, some fault, 
 some snub in early life, which he has never 
 confided to a single person, should do so 
 not to all the world, but to some judicious 
 friend who will listen sympathetically to 
 the recital of these things. Once they are 
 expressed in words one can for ever 
 detach oneself from that self of long ago 
 which did, thought and felt these painful 
 things. One can view that old self with 
 the eyes of an outsider and join one's 
 confidant in a smile of sympathy for the 
 misfortunes, or of pardon for sins, of the 
 "poor little devil," upon the stepping- 
 stone of whose dead self the present man 
 has risen to higher things. But and this 
 is the essential lesson of psychology until 
 the failures of the dead past have been 
 so expressed its putrefying corpse may, 
 though we know it not, be still poisoning 
 the present. 
 
 The It is harder to find the right person to 
 
 5totSity. 0f whom to confide painful incidents of ma- 
 
 turer years the moral failures, the slights 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 193 
 
 of which the most humiliating thing is 
 that we feel them as humiliations at all, 
 the moments of panic, the unworthy fore- 
 bodings and apprehension, the disappoint- 
 ments in love or in ambition, the haunting 
 fear of loss, failure, or detection which 
 hangs above the head like a sword of 
 Damocles; the follies, lapses, agonies of 
 those we love. It is not only more diffi- 
 cult to find the right person to whom to 
 speak of things like these; when found 
 it is more difficult to bring oneself to use 
 him or her at the critical moment. We 
 are so often withheld from speech by the 
 reflection that even when the cupboard 
 door is opened the skeleton will still re- 
 main a skeleton. But this reflection is the 
 excuse, partly of our ignorance, partly of 
 our desire to escape the humiliation of 
 confession. The skeleton, it is true, will 
 still remain a skeleton, but once the fresh 
 air is let in it will if our confidant be 
 one who can give wise advice become a 
 specimen in the museum instead of the 
 festering remains of a dead self. 
 
 Many would do well to avail themselves The 
 "of some discreet and learned minister of 
 God's Word," and were clergy and minis- 
 ters trained to be "soul doctors" one might 
 
194 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 universalise this advice. Unfortunately 
 they are rarely so trained, and what train- 
 ing they do receive is based on an obsolete 
 psychology. Spiritual advice will do more 
 harm than good unless it is based on a 
 clear recognition of the distinction be- 
 tween sin and disease, that is, between 
 what is entirely, and what is not entirely, 
 under the control of the conscious will. 
 But to ascertain, in any given case, the 
 exact degree to which the individual is 
 responsible is a far more difficult and 
 delicate process than most people seem 
 to think. At least an elementary knowl- 
 edge of pathological psychology is re- 
 quired, and more than an elementary 
 knowledge of human nature. Precisely 
 because his advice is likely to be taken 
 more seriously, an unwise priest, like an 
 ignorant doctor, can do more harm than 
 other men; and whatever else may result 
 from the laying on of hands, it does not 
 in itself convey a knowledge of the human 
 heart. Still, given sympathy, experience 
 and common sense, the pastor, next to the 
 doctor, has unique opportunities of quali- 
 fying in that subject. Again, the ordi- 
 nary man always approaches a minister 
 of religion with the subconscious expecta- 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 195 
 
 tion that he is a man easily to be 
 * "shocked" especially if the burdened 
 soul be unorthodox in his beliefs. And 
 since it is hard not to live up to what every 
 one expects of one, it may often cost the 
 minister an effort to free himself from this 
 conventional role. But let him make that 
 effort; the minister of Christ is called upon 
 to be not the Judge but the Physician of 
 the soul. 
 
 Happy, however, are those who from The 
 childhood have been habituated to cast 
 
 i i i -r / 
 
 their burden upon the Lord, to give free, 
 frank, and natural expression in confident 
 and spontaneous prayer to contrition, sor- 
 row, fear, on each occasion, great or small, 
 as it arises, realising God as the unseen 
 Friend ready to forgive sins, able and 
 anxious to bind up wounds, a tower of 
 defence in danger. Such find their prayer 
 is answered by a courage enhanced and 
 an insight sharpened, which enables them 
 to look trouble and failure in the face, and 
 before the bitterness has time to sink into 
 the soul, to effect for themselves whatever 
 "reassociation" is required. 
 
 It is an interesting reflection that the The 
 teaching of Christ and His apostles has 2?ckriSf. 
 in some respects anticipated, in others 
 
196 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 gone beyond, not, of course, the actual 
 discoveries of recent psychology, but their 
 practical lesson for everyday life. Psy- 
 chology teaches that the first condition of 
 healing is to bring up into the daylight of 
 clear recognition the exact nature and 
 quality of the wound to be healed; the 
 New Testament bids us look suffering in 
 the face, recognise and confess our sins. 
 The next step, says the psychologist, is to 
 reassociate the remembered episode, to 
 re-educate the mind and heart, to change 
 our attitude towards the past; Christ says 
 the same: "Thy sins are forgiven"; 
 "Sorrow shall be turned into joy." Both 
 say, "First face up to the past ; then turn 
 your back upon it"; "Believe that power 
 is yours and according to your faith it 
 will be done unto you." So far they seem 
 to say the same thing. But there is this 
 great difference Christ has behind Him 
 a religion, a reasonably grounded phil- 
 osophy of life. 1 Hence the reassociation 
 made by Him is more revolutionary and 
 more profound; for He says of the 
 
 *In practice successful psychotherapists largely ac- 
 complish their cures by suggesting ideas of hope, con- 
 fidence, and consolation, which is in effect providing the 
 patient with at least the practical deduction of a Chris- 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 197 
 
 wounds of the past, not only that they 
 can be healed, but that out of them and 
 by reason of them can be won an actual 
 enrichment of the present; and He gives 
 as the ground of this confidence the love 
 and the power of God. Indeed, one 
 might almost say that the essence of 
 Christianity is its peculiar "reassociation" 
 of the idea of suffering. In the New 
 Testament, as has been pointed out in 
 a previous chapter, 1 suffering is no longer 
 a problem but a source of light, no longer 
 a thing to be avoided, but a privilege 
 to be claimed ; and that because it is some- 
 thing shared by God Himself and the 
 means of His accomplishing the sublimest 
 of all ends. 
 
 THE WAY AND THE POWER 
 
 I have tried to show that, whatever our 
 view of the origin and purpose of the 
 suffering and evil in the world, there is 
 a way out a way which, for the indi- 
 
 tian philosophy of life. Owing, however, to the tragic 
 feud between Science and Religion a feud which, it may 
 be hoped, our generation will see healed few eminent 
 scientific men are in a position conscientiously to make 
 full use of this source of power. 
 1 Cf. pp. 29 ff. 
 
198 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 vidual, is at once the most perfect adapta- 
 tion to environment and the line of moral 
 progress. "Granted," some will say, "but 
 'straight is the gate and narrow is the 
 way/ When the bitterness, the agony, 
 and the desolation is on us, or when it 
 comes back to us in vivid memories of the 
 past, it is not enough to be told there is 
 a way out, we lack the power to tread it." 
 Religion Precisely at this point religion is seen 
 
 as Power. to fee yita j to every( j a y life. For, in 
 
 exact proportion to its truth and our 
 sincerity, religion is power. Conceive of 
 God as Christ conceived Him, make a 
 genuine effort to trust Him and to follow 
 Christ, and experience shows that prayer, 
 communion, meditation, will prove to be 
 the road to power. "Salvation" that 
 is, inspiration and deliverance in one is 
 within our grasp. "Ask, and it shall be 
 given you; seek, and ye shall find." 
 
 But, if this be said, in the same breath 
 a warning must be added against an un- 
 questioning submission to the guidance, 
 not only of popular manuals of devotion, 
 but even of the great classics. Even in 
 the best of them, language is occasionally 
 used which cannot but suggest the idea 
 that God is a jealous Potentate needing 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 199 
 
 and liking to be placated by ostentatious 
 grovelling. But to the precise extent in 
 which any surviving elements of this pre- 
 Christian conception affect our attitude 
 towards Him, our prayer is likely to be 
 a source of weakness not of power. A 
 parent or a teacher can do very little for 
 a child who is simply abject, and it is hard 
 for God to speak to us unless we first 
 obey the order, "Son of man, stand upon 
 thy feet." 
 
 There is another avenue to spiritual 
 power, less important but, because less 
 familiar, needing special emphasis. 
 
 Modern psychology has shown that The Sub- 
 what I can or cannot do depends not only Mind. iOUB 
 on the desires and the effort of my con- 
 scious self, but on the hopes, fears and 
 convictions which have sunk deep into my 
 subconscious mind. 1 If my conscious 
 mind believes in God but I am for ever 
 anxious for the morrow, it is because my 
 subconscious mind does not believe. The 
 
 1 1 use the term "subconscious mind" for its obvious 
 convenience to describe that part of the mind which 
 happens to be for the time being outside the field of full 
 consciousness. Anything, however, or practically any- 
 thing, in the subconscious area of the mind can on occa- 
 sion come into the field of consciousness, and anything in 
 the conscious mind may be withdrawn from consciousness. 
 
200 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 subconscious mind is always learning from 
 the conscious, but it both learns and for- 
 gets more slowly. And the lessons it takes 
 to heart most deeply are not the purely 
 intellectual notions of the conscious mind, 
 but the values and emotions associated 
 with them. A man, for instance, may 
 believe with his conscious mind that God 
 is good and men are brothers, but only 
 if he plans and acts towards the Universe 
 and man as if these things were true will 
 his subconscious mind believe it also. If 
 his conscious mind affirms the principle of 
 love but he schemes injury to the brother 
 whom he hath seen, it is the attitude of 
 hate that the subconscious mind will learn. 
 Its It is, therefore, not enough to assent 
 
 on ' with the mind to a philosophy that proves 
 that the Power behind the Universe is one 
 that works for righteousness; it is not 
 enough to recognise with the intellect that 
 for the individual sufferer there is a way 
 out; we must so realise the meaning and 
 the implications of these beliefs for feel- 
 ing, thought and conduct, that they be- 
 come part of our inmost being. But for 
 this to happen, the values and emotions 
 dominant in our conscious mind must 
 dominate the subconscious also. Con- 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 201 
 
 scious and subconscious act and react on 
 one another ; but the conscious, if it knows 
 and wills, can in the long run direct the 
 whole by selecting the ideas and values 
 upon which to ponder deepest in moments 
 of quiet meditation. 
 
 You may call this "auto-suggestion" if "Auto-sug- 
 you like; auto-suggestion is only a bad ges 
 thing if the idea suggested is evil or un- 
 true, and it is often of the utmost value. 
 But in any case a certain amount of it is 
 a psychological necessity. Do what we 
 will, we cannot keep our minds a vacancy. 
 The conscious mind is ever brooding, ever 
 dwelling on thoughts, hopes and fears 
 which inevitably act as "suggestions' 1 to 
 the subconscious. We cannot avoid some 
 form of auto-suggestion; we can choose 
 the form. Let us, then, select what our 
 intellect at its keenest sees to be most true, 
 what our insight at its acutest sees to be 
 most beautiful or best, and meditate on 
 this. "Whatsoever things are true, what- 
 soever things are honourable, whatsoever 
 things are just, whatsoever things are 
 pure, whatsoever things are lovely, what- 
 soever things are of good report ; if there 
 be any virtue, and if there be any praise, 
 think on these things." Above all, as we 
 
202 THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 
 
 compose ourselves to rest at night, let us 
 remember to govern mind and thought. 
 We cannot but "suggest" to ourselves 
 some thoughts, the effect of which will 
 follow us next day. We have got to make 
 a choice between thoughts of confidence 
 or despair, of power or weakness, of love 
 or hate. One way or the other, we cannot 
 but decide whether our attitude to life and 
 to the Universe and that means to God 
 is one of doubt or trust, and in regard 
 to pain, one of acceptance or resentment. 
 Then let the choice made reflect, not the 
 mood of the moment, but the conviction 
 of a life. 
 
 The In the perplexities, the anxieties, the 
 
 L?ght. n smarting pains of life, such self-control, 
 such government and direction of our 
 thoughts is hard. We need some focal 
 point round which to centre our philoso- 
 phy of power and help; we seek some 
 beacon light upon the cliff visible how- 
 ever dark the night. 
 And this we have. 
 
 Direction, inspiration, strength can all 
 be had from one source. Only let the 
 needle of life's compass be magnetised 
 and free to move, so that it points always 
 towards the Pole, Steer boldly straight 
 
THE DEFEAT OF PAIN 203 
 
 ahead, "looking unto Jesus, the author 
 and finisher of our faith, who for the joy 
 that was set before Him endured the 
 Cross" courage victorious and love 
 triumphant. Let prayer and meditation 
 centre always round the thought of the 
 Love and Power of that infinite and all- 
 pervading Spirit of whom Christ is the 
 portrait, and it will be possible to rise 
 above the natural consequences of evil 
 happenings, to make of suffering an 
 opportunity, of loss a stepping-stone to 
 gain, and to find in failure retrieved and 
 pain conquered the secret of power. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
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 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
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