"Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful
God."—Deut. vii. 9.

X

DOES GOD HAVE FAIR-PLAY?

A professor in one of our colleges, who is an acknowledged authority on the prophets of the Old Testament, gave a course of lectures lately on his own subject to a summer school of theology. His aim in one of these prelections was to show how the prophet Jeremiah developed himself by debate and discussion with God. At its close an elderly clergyman, shaking the lecturer by the hand, said to him: "I was delighted to hear what you said about Jeremiah. I myself have for forty years preached the right and duty of men to stand up to their Maker."

It was, to say the least, a crude way of expressing himself; but the man had a meaning, and I think I know what it was. We may, to a large extent, have grown out of the old Calvinistic representation of God; but its reflex influence abides in a greater degree than we perhaps realize. This representation puts its emphasis, not so much upon the Fatherhood as upon the Sovereignty of God. It holds man responsible for the moral quality of his actions to God; but all reference to man's claims upon God are met with the stern question: "Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus?"

Whatever the Apostle may have meant, this question has been used to support an intolerable position, and the clergyman spoke out his revolt against it. His divinely implanted instinct of justice assured him that a God, who is to command our intellectual confidence and heart-trust, must, while exercising the prerogatives of a Sovereign, accept the responsibilities of a Father. Family life would break all to pieces if we as fathers did not carry our recognition of the claims and rights of children past a severe, however just, parental authority and control into the larger realm of wise liberty and undoubted affection. And it is out of the best and highest we know of our relations to one another, that we are to understand what we ought to be to God, and what God has promised to be to us.

For God not only affirms His responsibility to us, He challenges us to say, whether, having done our part, we have weighed His part in the balance and found it wanting. It is the declaration of the Scriptures from beginning to end, that the Lord our God is a faithful God. Through the mouth of one of His prophets He confronts us with a question which, were it not His own question, would hurt us as almost profane: "What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they have gone far from me?"

We need not shrink, therefore, from talking reverently about the responsibility of God, for He asks us to build our trust, not only in His promises, but upon our experience of the faithfulness with which He has kept His promises. What, then, is our testimony? Has God been faithful to us; and if so, are we justified in assuming that the same faithfulness is the experience of others?

"Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God." Take this affirmation on its lowest grounds—as touching material things. It is not said that man does not live by bread, when it is said that he lives not by bread alone. We may insist upon it, that material concerns are not worthy to be compared with the things of the spirit; but this does not affect the truth, that while we are on this planet we must have material things. Jesus has told us that, "Our Heavenly Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him." It does not follow that the things we desire are the things we need. Christ does not pledge the divine faithfulness to our desires; it is pledged to our needs.

And how is it redeemed, even in the case of the latter? Think for a moment of the poverty there is amid all our plenty. Think of the evils and misery that are the consequence as well as the cause of poverty. There are thousands of men, and women, and children dying every year in India from want and sheer starvation. We are told that, in each case, a penny a day would mean comparative plenty. They are God's creatures, willing, and indeed eager, to work themselves to skin and bone for a penny a day, and they cannot earn it. Think again of the untold human beings nearer home, locked in a warfare from which there is no discharge but death; the grim struggle for a bare existence, with its chances at every turn of sickness, accident, no work, and then the abyss. When we have reckoned off the probable proportion of those who have done much to make the conditions in which they find themselves, we have a large percentage of people who are no more responsible for the poverty and suffering they have to endure than they are responsible for the fact that they are in the world which uses them so harshly.

For my part I can offer no explanation of these things, that can give a sensitive heart and an honest mind more than a very moderate degree of satisfaction. There are communities, and even races of people, whose existence in this world appears to have no immediate relation to their own personal happiness and well-being. They come and pass away as phases of what we must believe is an evolution towards higher things. But this is the question: Have they who compose this lonely and sombre procession no claims upon their Maker in the meanwhile?

I do not believe that one human soul will fail of absolute, abundant, and rich compensation, in those eternal years that are at God's right hand. I have a word to say about this later, but for the present I may say that I answer many questions by my conviction that what we call death does not end all. Columbus is reported to have said: "I must have another continent to keep the earth's balance true." And I must have the personal conscious future, which is to right the wrongs of the ages, if I am to believe and preach the faithfulness of God. But we must guard against an impatience which is our littleness. In the immense times of the Almighty, every dark mystery of human being can move away, and leave the "sky of Providence at last, arching over the soul with not a cloud to dim its stars." For my present faith I hold it true with one who trusts—

"That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete."

When any man confronts me with the inequalities of our human lot, with the suffering many have to endure from causes they have not instituted, and circumstances over which they have no control, I may be, and often am, obliged to make him a present of much that he has to urge. But there are two things to be said, on the other side, which I can only briefly indicate, and ask you to work them out in your own mind.

I affirm as the first of the two, that the good in our life far outweighs the evil. When all is said, happiness is the rule of our normal experience, and not misery. We hear much, for example, about the suffering which is part of the order of the animal creation; how a stronger beast feeds upon a weaker, and is in turn the prey of another stronger still. While again we are told that the joys of these myriads of sentient creatures are immeasurably greater than their pains. They have pleasure more than sufficient to justify their call into existence, in spite of the drawbacks to their happiness incident to the conditions of their existence.

I am satisfied that the latter representation is true of the animal world, as I am convinced that it is true of the human. Let what may be said to the contrary, life is a mighty boon. When men bring in a verdict of unsound mind in a case of suicide, the instinct may have more to do with it than the order of evidence on which the verdict is based. We have to conclude that a man was insane before he could lay violent hands on himself. Look back upon our life, we who have travelled some distance into it, and let us say whether so far we do not account it a blessing to have lived and to be living. We have had our hard lines, and we have known the pleasant places; we have had our sorrows, and we have had our joys; we have been under the clouds, and we have lived in the sunshine. Nay, I dare go further and say, that for a day we have had of the former, we have had a week of the latter.

It is a narrow and unworthy conception of happiness to invest all our chances of it in the accident of circumstances. There is some force in the saying, that heaven is here or nowhere. If we have any thought of happiness worth turning into a fact, our life may be filled with it though the hardest possible circumstances be surrounding us. Not where we are, but what we are, makes our much or little whether of good or ill. It is an ungrateful proceeding to go through life consuming as much as possible of the fruits of a gracious present, and yet with only plaints and complaints about the legislation which tempers the blessings with the little severity needed to teach us what the blessings are.

Some one has remarked that it is the whole tragedy, and ultimately the whole power of the Christian religion, that it is attacked from every side. It is accused of faults that are hopelessly inconsistent with each other. One day it is charged with making man too responsible; the next, with not making him responsible enough. The truth is, that we need not try to make man too responsible in order to make him responsible enough. It has often been pointed out, that the Christian religion is by turns optimistic and pessimistic. St. Paul is pessimist enough where he says: "For I know that in me—that is, in my flesh—dwelleth no good thing." But who so optimistic as the same Apostle when he declares: "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."

Much of the secret of it, under God, is in a cultivated and consecrated will. Every matter, says Epictetus, has two handles, and you can choose which handle you will take. Every man has in him some promise of the gradual supremacy of character over the accidents, happenings, forces and factors of circumstances. These may be his tests; they need not be his fate. "The real vital division of the religious part of our Protestant communities," says Wendell Holmes, "is into Christian optimists and Christian pessimists." I would rank myself among the former and say again, that the good in the conditions of our life far outweighs the ill. And while maintaining this position, I would also, as the second of the two things to be urged, have us face the question, Who is responsible for the ill there is?

George Meredith, in a reference to this subject, declares that no man can think, and not think hopefully. Whether or not this be true in the case of every man who thinks, this can be said—it ought to be true. Instead of multiplying words to no profit over the old question, Why all this misery and suffering? let us think for a moment in another direction, and we shall perchance be encouraged to think hopefully.

It has been said that human wisdom has arrived at no juster and higher view of the present state, than that it is intended to call forth power by obstruction; the power of a life that is perfect and entire, by the responsibility of choice between the things that make or mar it. If God can rank in us nothing higher than character, and if character on the man side can be achieved only out of right choice translated in its kindred action—then it must follow that the power to choose the right is the power to choose the wrong. Which means in the fewest words, that sin, and all the ills and suffering that proceed out of its selfishness, are the issue of this possibility of fatal choosing. If it be asked: "Why the possibility at all?" I answer that without it men would cease to be men and become something else; and what that something else would be need not enter into our speculation. It is because we can do wrong that we can do right; and if we think about this, may we not think hopefully?

It is the fashion in our day to write and talk as though heredity, and the effects of the accumulation of heredity, were somehow sinister enough to drape the heavens in black, and silence all the songs of the angels. This law, we are told, can have no moral interpretation consistent with freedom and responsibility. The more than tendency of much that is being written and said is to depress the mind with a sense of the relentless force of general laws and influences, and to diminish in the individual the conviction of his power to contend against them. I would avoid dogmatism about this matter and simply say that this seems plain to me: for one drawback we meet along the pathway of inheritances, we have a very legion of resource and help through the gains of time, and of the race. The penalties we have to pay for transgression against law are not a just indictment of the law, they are the penalty of its transgression; a by-product, which is always a decaying product as the character of the race heightens.

The purpose of God in us is character, and once we have it, established in divine grace and ensphered in the human will of a sufficient number of us, we shall soon make our new and better world. Without this character we may hope for nothing, with it we need despair of nothing.

Granted then for a moment that we had but a little more of this God-fibre running through our individual and our collective life, such an experience as physical want would become but a memory of a hideous past. This good old mother-earth can yield us, not only enough to go round, but enough to go round in generous abundance. Why is it that a few have so much more than they can use, and so many have less than they need? Do we think that God wills it? Can we conceive of it as having any part in the economy of the Kingdom which Jesus came to establish on the earth? It is not God, but our selfishness that wills it; a selfishness that has its length of days and its malign power in the widespread folly and culpable ignorance that play into its hands.

Think again for a moment about the effects on society as a whole of the intemperate use of strong drink. They are incarnated in horrors, look where we will. The injuries which simply swarm out of our licensed temptations to drunkenness are not exceptional and irregular; they are, as one of the most eminent of our publicists has said, "uniform as the movements of the planets, and as deadly as the sirocco of the desert or the malaria of the marshes." There is not a profession round which drink has not thrown the spell of its sorcery; scarcely a household that has not been despoiled by its leprous pollution. And who is responsible for it? Does any one doubt that if the Christian Churches looked at this accursed traffic through the eyes of God, and attacked it with faith in His omnipotence, that we could not break its back within the next ten years?

Long as we are content merely to run the eyes of our intelligence over the episodes of this great battle of wrong against right; to mark down its critical moments, and to analyse its issues while careful above all things not to implicate ourselves in the agonies of its crises, then let us not challenge the faithfulness of God for wrongs and sorrows brought into the world, and kept here by our selfishness. Those of us who have part or lot in this selfishness—and most of us have—let us, at any rate, play the game, and accept our own responsibility.

I do not wonder at the severity there is in the human world; for hard as it falls in places, it is yet the sign-manual of its uplifting and hope. We sometimes talk bitterly about the crucifixions in our life; but believe it when I say, that a world without them would be a dark and terrible vision. If we could do evil with impunity, if its punishment were a mere peradventure, it would mean that evil was the heart of the world. We may be profoundly thankful that wrong and suffering are cause and effect which nothing can break. Were it not so, it would mean that under skies dark and pitiless, a brutal scramble to survive would be the law, as in the animal world it is said to be the instinct. I know that many come into the world and leave it, never having had the chance to be all they might have been in more gracious circumstances. But I can trust them with Him who is too wise to err, and too good to be unjust.

This, then, is as far as I have got with the general merits of the subject before us. To say there are experiences in the lives of individuals, and even of communities, which we cannot explain, is no proof that the universe is immoral. I submit to you, that the good in our lot infinitely outweighs the ill for which we are not directly responsible; and that the consequences of the ill for which we are directly responsible are intended to chastise it out of existence.

May I counsel you to think about what has been said? Remember there are some things God cannot do for us, and yet leave us men. He cannot make a better world without the consent of our individual obedience and the co-operation of our will. I should, I trust, be the last man to ask people to be content, or even patient, with things as they are in the life that now is, on the assumption merely that they are to be better in the life that is to be. I do not say that heaven is here or nowhere; but I do believe that it ought to be here, in its degree, as truly as anywhere else. If we can think of contempt as part of the Being of God, surely this must be His feeling for much of the wrong and suffering that finds a place in the human world. It is so gratuitous, so insensate, so unnecessary. Is it not a terrible reflection upon some of us, that after the Cross has been silently teaching the world these well-nigh two thousand years, it can yet be said with some show of reason, that the two forces that keep society, as we know it, together, are the ignorance and the patience of the poor? Why should they be so long ignorant? Why should they be so chronically patient? The sorrow of God must be, not only that they suffer, but that they are so patient under it as to make it scarcely distinguishable from content. And why are they so patient? This is the question God is asking through every thoughtful and humane man of us; and one day—man with God speed its coming—we shall be numerous enough, and in earnest enough, to establish some real harmony, some true correspondence, between the inner dignity and the outward lot of the individual, and, through him, of the community. In the meantime, then, instead of asking, how can God be God and permit wrong to be in the world? let us face the truth, however it may smite us, the truth that wrong is in the world for this reason—that we permit it.

Growing out of what has been advanced, suffer me to press the subject a little further, under one or two statements. I purpose to do little more than indicate them, and to ask for them your good consideration.

God is faithful: therefore good must be possible. I was talking some time ago with a very intelligent man, who has a well-known name in the world of letters, and he said to me: "I admit that we have made something that answers to progress in material things, but I deny that we have made any advance in moral attainment. A few rise above the average level, for the rest it is the old story of cycles of abortive effort with no lasting good to the race. We may theorize and idealize as we like," he went on to say, "but Bebel is right when he tells us that 'every man is the product of his times and the instrument of his circumstances.'"

It was talk that exactly expresses much of the "time-spirit" of our modern day. It is a doctrine with no God in it, and no invisible world. It assumes that man has no vision and no volition; that he is a mere billiard-ball in the game of existence, which goes whithersoever the cue of blind fate sends it. That one man rises, and another falls, is neither the virtue of one nor the vice of the other, but the necessity of both. We follow the better if we have the accident of certain gifts, or we take hold of the worse, if we have not. In either case we are no more responsible for our direction than we are responsible for the fact that we have to take a direction at all.

I shall not build up words in trying to answer this position. I can conceive of no man who has some conscience left, however he may seek a refuge from himself in this doctrine of moral irresponsibility, who, at the soul of him, does not know it to be a lie. We commonly use the terms evil and sin as interchangeable; and in doing so we are apt to fall into confusion. Evil is, as it were, embedded in our nature; and for that we are not accountable. Sin, as I have said before, is in yielding to the evil, and that is our responsibility. St. Paul speaks of the evil he found in his nature, and while he admits its malignant power, he does not represent himself as powerless to contend against it. He accepts no responsibility for the fact that evil is there; but he does accept responsibility for what he does with it, or what it does with him.

"Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall."

I know with any man the power of evil in my heart; and while it may come, as it were, in spite of myself, I can determine the question as to whether it shall stay. It is the vilest heresy of our day to preach and believe that circumstances can absolve us from our duty; or that they can prevent us from following the right. The battle is hard, at times very hard, but what battle is not hard that is worth winning? Put religion out of the question, and do we find that the prizes of the world offer us easier terms?

It is the greatness of the Christian religion, that it not only tells us what it were good to do, but it offers to us the power to do it. The great teachers of the world have said to their disciples: "Accept our ideas"; Christ says: "Accept Me." "He makes everything centre in His Own Personality." And the men who have helped to make what so far in our human world is grand and glorious, have shown us that Christ's word is a real word, meaning a real thing.

One who has the right to testify has told us that, when we do the will of God as if it were our own will, we realize that God is doing our will as His own. There is a great truth in this. We so often fail because ours is a broken obedience. We expect God to do His part, while we keep back part of the price of our own, and what response we have is the sense of being mocked in ourselves. We have to find out that we cannot serve two masters. However we fall short in practice, the intention must be all for God, or it will be none. But let us be genuine co-workers with Him in this great work of personal character-building; and we find that we have a power not ourselves, and infinitely greater than ourselves. Our achievements are not so much a question of gift, as of dynamic. They are not in the machinery, but in the driving power.

"How is it"—was a question recently asked concerning one of the most useful men in the Christian ministry—"that with his obvious limitations he has accomplished so much?" And the answer was: "Because he has made it possible for God to use him for all he is worth." Failure is impossible in the man who can say: "I live, and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." We cannot explain the power; but it is there, and we all may have it by obedience to the conditions through which it can be given. "I have been down deep in the hell of moral failure," writes one, "and by the grace of God I have come out of it. I may not be able to explain His grace to the satisfaction of others; but will others explain me to my own?" Our lives may be the living evidences of this power. The world asks for no more; the world will accept no less. Our day, we are told, has ceased to believe in such miracles. It were truer to say that it has ceased to believe in anything else.

Goodness is possible; and not to achieve it is to defeat the purpose for which we were born into this world. Let us believe in goodness. Let us learn to love goodness because it is goodness. Let us say, and live our word, that there are no charges we can pay which we are not prepared to pay to be, and to do, that which is possible to us—and God will not fail us. Any man who is putting out all his strength in work and prayer to build up his higher nature need have no devil-fear that his strength will not be equal to his day. He may not be able to choose his circumstances; but he can show that he, and not the circumstances, is the master. He can offer to the world the living proof that the triumph of good is possible to him whose power is the faithful God.

And once more: Because He is faithful who has promised, we may safely leave the issues of our life in His keeping. If by the help of God we are trying to do the will of God, nothing else really matters. The crooked places of to-day will be made straight to-morrow. After all, it is not more knowledge we need, but more power to use the knowledge we have. Much of our unrest only means that we want to know more than the silent God sees fit to tell us. We know enough for the wise ordering of life; and the highest, holiest thing any of us can do, is to do the wisest and best we know, in whatever honest sphere circumstances have placed us. The riddles of the universe, and the perplexities and heartache which come out of our attempts to reconcile much that we know and see with the rule of an Almighty, an all-wise and faithful God—these will be here long after we are gone. We must just take the Master at His word when He says: "What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter."

"We cannot," says a wise teacher, "take up a drop of water, and find in that drop the flow of the tides, and the soft and then loud music of calm and storm. To see the ocean we must grasp it in all its rocky bed, bordered by continents." So before the very present troubles of life, we cannot see all the government of the faithful God. It has boundaries wider than these. Human life is but a fraction of the sum of life. The tides of the mind, the music and the tumult of human waters, cannot be heard and felt in this drop of existence.

We may believe that the moral government of the world is in the hands of Him whose love and law are both the same; and we may, at the same time, have to recognize the fact, that so many suffer grievously from forces they have not called into being, and which they are almost helpless to control. We may have to reconcile as best we can, a general Providence, with much apparent severity in its particular operation. Unless this be understood, some parts of this address will appear inconsistent with each other. I leave this order of suffering—not its causes—with the responsibility of God; and, for myself, I am persuaded that our last word about it will be one of praise, and not of reproach—

"Right for a while may yield to wrong,
And virtue be baffled by crime,
But the help of our need and the might of our creed
Are faith, patience, courage, and time."

But to say that the faithfulness of God cannot be fully measured now is not to say that it cannot be measured at all. Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, and our life will not only come out right at the end, it will come out right all the way. The lesson for us to learn is to labour and to wait; to give God and ourselves space to work in. Whether God is in His heaven or not, of this I am sure, that, given time, right always comes to its own, and all wrong, sooner or later, is defeat and disaster. Time forgets nothing, it omits nothing which God requires at our hands. It may not be ours to choose our task, but we can choose to do it well. What is really everyday religion is to do common things in an uncommon spirit. There is nothing for us in the world that needs a lie; nothing that excuses us from the wise admonition—

"Count that day lost whose low descending sun
Views by thy hand no worthy action done."

Then let us just go on doing the highest we know, and the best we can. The reward may not seem to be to-day, nor yet to-morrow; but we shall see that it was everyday and all the way, when we look back upon it from the shores of the life eternal. Let us trust the faithful God, and we shall be taught to regard the troubles that test, and the limitations that perplex us, as the agents of His Providence through the courses of time. And as we see in each new revelation of His goodness and mercy towards us an added circle of splendour in His halo of light, we shall learn to say of ourselves, and the race of which we form a part—

"The God of Truth and Love,
The Ancient Friend of man,
Makes every age an onward stage,
And has, since time began;
Sing ye praises, oh, sing praises,
God has a glorious plan."

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