CHAPTER IV.

EVIL TEMPORARY.

"What if God, willing to show His wrath, and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction?".

We have now shown that the doctrine of eternal evil resulting from an event in time is dualistic, and that Theodicy does not relieve this limitation of the divine power. Before we proceed to the scriptural argument, we will offer some reasons to show that evil is temporary, and thus consists with a true Theism.

$ 1. EVIL NOT NEEDful.

Besides the theodicies we have examined, various arguments are adduced to show either an eternal necessity or an eternal economy of evil. These may be classified as the epidictic, eudaimonic, and disciplinary theories.

I. The epidictic theory supposes evil needful in order to display some divine attribute. E. g.:

1. The Divine Power.-Thus we are often told that the destruction of revolted subjects could only be a dernier resort of the Sovereign Ruler, and proof of His weakness. "Why," it is asked, "should God strike them from existence, unless because it is impossible to uphold and rule them for ever in revolt, in a manner worthy of his perfections, and compatibly with the safety of his government over his other subjects? But an inability to reign over them in such a manner would be an imperfection; and to annihilate a vast crowd of creatures because of such an inability would be a public acknowledgment and demonstration of that imperfection. It would form an indisputable proof that He was unequal to his station; that He had called beings into

existence whom He was unable to uphold and rule conformably to their character, in such a manner as not to defeat the ends for which He created them." Such a destruction, we are told, would furnish Satan with an excuse for rebellion, and a boast of triumph over God.1

The reply is two-fold. (1.) What are "the ends for which God created" his rebellious subjects? Certainly the end of government is obedience, and not the mere display of statesmanship. Hence it may be doubted whether God can rule rebels "for ever in revolt, in a manner worthy of his perfections." But, waiving this limitation of the divine power, the transparent fallacy of the argument is (2.) an assumption that what God can do, He must do. Who ever doubted that the Omnipotent can manage his creatures, in some way, so long as He keeps them in being? He can do this eternally, if any sceptic should ask such proof of his power. But He is able also not to do this. As true courage fears not the cry of cowardice, so God may contemn the charge of weakness, though in so doing He should remind us of his power to create by un-creating the worthless. But, by the argument in hand, God's capacities are made divine necessities. If He can conserve the rebellious, He must do so, lest Satan should deride Him, and all the people distrust Him. He is therefore bound hand and foot, by the green withes of our theology, until the trumpet shall sound: "The Eternities be upon thee, O Lord!" Until then, the bands, we doubt not, will strengthen some sort of faith.

2. The display of Divine Justice.-We have already shown that eternal suffering is not to be claimed as the right of God's justice. But it is urged that such endless punishment is wanted, to exhibit this eternal attribute of God. "Sin and its power in the world could not be missing, because that contrast of the two divine attributes, of punitive justice on the one hand, and mercy on the other, quite dualistically exhibited, required objects in which to reveal itself." 2

1 D. N. Lord, Theol. and Lit. Journal, Jan. 1851, p. 401.

2 Müller, (stating the view of Beza), Chr. Doc. of Sin, I. 421.-See also the critique of Leibnitz, Théodicée, Part. II. § 238; and of Bayle, Réponse aux

Here the reply is also two-fold. (1.) If this divine attribute. needed an eternal suffering not strictly its due, the deplorable want might be supplied from an eternal succession of the sinning and perishing. But (2.) we deny the impoverishing need. The law of God asks obedience, to be rewarded with blessing. The recompense of reward is the display of justice which God desires. He needs nothing which He forbids. All penal suffering is the necessity not of God's infinite fulness, but of man's wickedness and weakness.

3. The display of God's Holiness." May not divine wisdom," it is asked, "find a fitting end in keeping the wicked in endless existence as an endless and requisite expression of the divine displeasure and abhorrence toward sin? Such a living and actual expression may alone be adequate to bring out the mind of God before His creatures."1

This is to suppose that the holiness of God, of which the Shekinah was the sacred symbol, can not shine brightly enough by its own light, but needs the hideous deformity and blackness of sin for its illustration. God needs that which it is his very nature to detest, and it must be a feature of the eternal world if not a part of his plan,- that his abhorrence of it may appear! The whole theory is a contradiction, which reminds one of the supposed wisdom of keeping up the fire upon the altar of the temple of Ephesus, by digging down the coal foundations on which it rested. It justifies the remark of Möhler upon the theory of Beza just named: "It was thus the part of the Deity to call forth somehow an evil sentiment, in order to attain his ends; that is to say, He must annihilate his sanctity, in order on its ruins to attain to compassion and justice."

2

4. The display of God's Mercy.—This theory is suggested in some of the passages already cited. By one writer it is stated as the Church doctrine, as contained in the old expression:

Questions, Part. II. c. 152. Compare Jurieu, Jugement sur les Méthodes, § 13;Emmons, Serm. on Rev. xix. 3.

1 T. M. Post, New Englander, Feb., 1856, p. 131. Compare Jurieu, De Pace ineundâ, p. 188;- Hopkins, Works, II. 459.

2 Symbolism, b. 1, part 1, § 4.

It is specially favored by a supralapsarian theology, which supposes the work of Redemption, as the richest possible display of divine love, to be an essential if not the main feature of the plan of creation. In this view, man's failure was the necessary prelude of God's success. That is, the creation would have been a

failure if man had not fallen!

Besides a few passages of Scripture that seem to represent the plan of grace as the choice work of God, and the subjects of it as special favorites of Heaven, this theory finds an apparent support in the devout gratitude which becomes the redeemed. All the blessings we receive are a pure mercy and gratuity; the wealth of divine goodness to man is a grant of God's compassion. And all the genuine goodness or love which man has toward God, is wrought by His undeserved love and pity in the gift of his Son as our Savior. And since Redemption is every thing to man, and the work of salvation is crowned with shoutings of Grace! Grace! unto it,-it is easy for man to think of grace as the best of all possible things, and that the universe would be poor if sin had not given occasion for display of its riches.

But while the tender and blessed sense of sins forgiven, of pangs relieved, of sorrows assuaged, and of poverty enriched, suggest the thought that guilt is a happy thing in the world,the moral sense, the conscience, remonstrates. What parent, shedding tears of joy over a wayward child, subdued and improved by chastening or sickness, would not experience a strange revulsion of feeling, if the child should congratulate its past waywardness as the occasion of its amendment, and repeat the saying: Felix culpa! As sin is in its very idea that which ought not to be, so it is implied in sorrow for it that the penitent shall ever wish he had not sinned. The most wondrous display of God's undeserved love can only inspire the more ardent wish that one had not abused that love. It has been well said, by

1"O! felix culpa, quæ talem ac tantum

Meruit habere Redemptorem!"- Werdermann, Theodicee, I. 156.

one who even holds that infinite evil may be for infinite good: "Throughout eternity man's state must imply and refer to his past disobedience, and his corrupt state of sin and death, and the suffering of Christ himself, which no redeemed soul can for an instant forget, or remember without sorrow." 1

And the passages of Scripture that may seem to support this notion of the economy of evil, will hardly sustain it. When we are told of the "joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance," allusion is made, probably, not to those who were truly righteous, but to the self-righteous.2 The style of thought is the same as when Christ says: "The whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick." Heaven rejoices more in the humble publican, than in the proud Pharisee. And though Paul shows that where sin did abound, grace did superabound, yet, to the suggestion that men should sin that grace may abound, he instantly replies, as though it were a blasphemy: "whose condemnation is just."

The whole theory of sin as the happy occasion of mercy also forgets that God's infinite love might have bestowed perhaps greater blessings on men than they can now receive, with their faculties impaired by the Fall. And when we are told of the condescension of Christ, in humbling himself to suffering and death for our sake, it is forgotten that Christ might have been incarnate, as our Elder Brother, leading us on more rapidly in an eternal progress, if our guilt had not crowned him with thorns, and bidden him to enter the grave for our rescue.

But it is asked, did not God from eternity provide a Redemp

1 Ruskin, Modern Painters, II. 117. But in his "Stones of Venice," III. 138, 139, he says: "The good succeeds to the evil as day succeeds the night, but so also the evil to the good. Gerizim and Ebal, birth and death, light and darkness, heaven and hell, divide the existence of man, and his futurity. The love of God is, however, always shown by the predominance or greater sum of good, in the end; but never by the annihilation of evil. The modern doubts of eternal punishment are not so much the consequence of benevolence, as of feeble powers of reasoning. Every one admits that God brings finite good out of finite evil. Why not, therefore, infinite good out of infinite evil?" Compare Thompson, Christian Theism, pp. 421, 422. Here again, we think, is the Romance of Faith. 2 Alford, Comm. on Luke xv. 7.