The Things Which Remain by Daniel A. Goodsell
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Daniel A. Goodsell >> The Things Which Remain
[Sidenote: Among the Bees.]
[Sidenote: A Small Departure from Nature.]
The virgin queen bee produces males in abundance, but can not produce
females until she has made her nuptial flight and met her mate in an
embrace invariably fatal to him. Nor does she ever need to meet
another. From that time on, she is the fruitful mother of every kind of
bee life the hive needs; the undeveloped females called neuters and
those who become queens by being fed on royal food. Virgin birth is
therefore imbedded in nature's order. To occur in the human species
nature need call in no novelty. Christ, if born of a virgin, was born
with the smallest possible departure from the order of nature. A process
known in a lower form of life was carried into the higher to produce the
unique being called for by the spiritual needs of mankind.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Historical Statement.]
Passing over the historical assertions which follow the doctrine of the
virgin birth, "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and
buried," because there is nothing in these statements difficult or
incredible, we reach the doctrine of His resurrection, "the third day
He rose from the dead," a doctrine next to that of the virgin birth in
natural difficulty of acceptance.
[Sidenote: Christ's Resurrection.]
[Sidenote: Surprise of Disciples.]
[Sidenote: The Fact Accounts for History.]
Faith in this seems to me to depend on how far we have accepted Christ's
Deity and His incarnation. If by the Holy Ghost we have been able "to
say that Jesus is the Lord;" if by that blessed energy we perceive His
Divine mastership; if by the same energy we feel that He has transformed
us into the image of His dear Son; raising us "from the death of sin
into the life of righteousness" it is not difficult to believe that
Jesus "the power of the Resurrection" rose from the dead. "The fact of
the Resurrection and belief in the fact is not explicable by any
antecedent conditions apart from its truth."[5] The disciples did not
expect what they saw. His death was for them so far as we can see,
without hope. They were not able yet to interpret His prophecy that He
would build again His temple, nor understand the spirituality of His
kingdom. These facts seem to me utterly to demolish the theory of a
vision called up by eager, yea, agonizing, expectation. The idea of the
Resurrection justifies His prophecies as to Himself and the fact
accounts, better than any theory which denies the fact, for the faith
and founding of the early Church as well as for the course of subsequent
history and of the believer's experience.
[Footnote 5: Westcott. The Revelation of the Risen Lord.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Slow Belief in Resurrection.]
It is much to see that belief became belief only with great difficulty.
The idea of the Resurrection was strange and alarming to the disciples.
"They were terrified and affrighted and supposed they beheld a spirit."
Slowly by tests of sense as well as by persuasions of teaching did the
disciples come to believe that the Christ of the Resurrection was the
same Christ who suffered on the cross.
[Sidenote: Not an Invention.]
[Sidenote: An Eye-witness Story.]
It seems impossible that the Resurrection could have been an invention
or that the account of it could be a work of the imagination. The last
is almost as great a miracle as the Resurrection itself. In detail, in
naturalness, even in the presence of difficulties and hindrances to easy
belief of the story, the narrative seems that of an eye-witness. No
reasoning can bring faith, however, to one who denies the miraculous. As
a fact, the Resurrection is incapable of naturalistic explanation. To
those who deny the miraculous I can only again point out how Huxley cuts
out the _a priori_ argument from Hume as worthless. As quoted in his
biography, Huxley says: "We are not justified in the _a priori_
assertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to us,
can not change. The assumption is illegitimate because it involves the
whole point in dispute."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Ascent into Heaven.]
[Sidenote: The Ascension.]
[Sidenote: Nature not Wholly Love.]
[Sidenote: Evil and Good.]
Necessarily miraculous also is the doctrine, "He ascended into heaven."
In this He passed from the visible into the invisible; from the
conditions of human life to those of the life of a spirit; from the work
of redemption to that of intercession. If His resurrection be accepted,
His ascension presents no difficulties to faith. This, with His
incarnation, and the facts of His earthly life are the manifestation of
the tender side of God to the senses even as His wisdom and power are
shown to the senses by the facts and laws of nature. As to the doctrine,
"God is love," nature's word can never be conclusive. In the natural
kingdom joy and sorrow, ease and pain, love and hate, kindness and
cruelty, trust and terror exist side by side, as do life and death. No
man concludes, from nature alone, that God is ruled by love. Because man
can not conclude this, Ormuzd and Ahriman are found substantially in all
religions, as in that of the Parsees, except in the Christian. Here the
warfare is not to be eternal. The victory of good is to come. Divine
help is promised, that it may be secured in every soul. The conquest of
evil by good is within that Christian omnipotence which Paul knew. "I
can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me." It requires a
Christ to show that the path to rest is through toil; that the way to
ease is through suffering; that the highway to life passes through
death. Only thus can "mortality be swallowed up of life."
[Sidenote: The Meaning of Jesus.]
[Sidenote: Christ as Revealer.]
In the unity of the Godhead, Christ is God in manifestation, redemption,
intercession, judgment. In the Trinity, in which we must believe God
exists, Jesus Christ is the personality expressive, at first visibly and
now invisibly, of the tender qualities of the Divine nature which,
manifested in part in the world of nature, are there so linked with
severity as to require special and peculiar revelation in the person of
Jesus Christ in order that God may be understood both as transcending
nature and as eternal love.
* * * * *
Surely the doctrine, "I believe in the Holy Ghost," will remain. It is a
misfortune that the word "ghost" has, in our English use, an unworthy
and terrifying significance. On this account it were well if we could
substitute for constant use the word "Spirit."
[Sidenote: The Holy Ghost.]
[Sidenote: The Energy of God.]
[Sidenote: The Interpreter.]
The Holy Spirit is the energy of God, whether working as Creator or in
the processes of redemption. It stirs us to the depths when we consider
that the Author of the worlds, the Source of the energies is He who
transforms, renews, sanctifies, and witnesses in us. There is no
question as to the pervasiveness and competence of the Power which
"works in us to will and to do of His good pleasure." We are taught to
trace all our religious uplift to the highest possible source. We gather
a great sense of our worth by the dignity of this association as we do
of the condescension of our Lord in making His home in our hearts. This
Holy Spirit is in all Christians the energy of the entire spiritual
life. By this we do the things which by nature we can not do. His is
that Divine impulse which initiates, continues, matures, and satisfies
the life of God in us. It is the indwelling, all-pervading Holy Spirit,
which interprets that great word, "I in them and Thou in Me, that they
may be one as We are."
[Sidenote: The Doctrine of Energy.]
And if the most advanced philosophy should yet be confirmed as true that
there is nothing really but energy, none the less would the doctrine of
the Holy Spirit abide. Back of all the individual energies of humanity;
back of all the forces of nature is the supreme energy of God. If
creation be our theory, it is the Spirit of God which broods on the face
of the waters. If evolution be our creed, it is "in Him we live and move
and have our being." All science is but the knowing of His way of
working, and all theology is but the discovery of His mind. To know Him
is to know all things. The latest Christian will be saying, "I believe
in the Holy Ghost."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Forgiveness of Sin.]
[Sidenote: Huxley on Depravity.]
[Sidenote: Not All Born Good.]
[Sidenote: Experience of Hell.]
And what becomes of the doctrine of the "forgiveness of sins" in this
outlook for "the things which remain?" Accepting Huxley as the
incarnation of the skeptical spirit of our time, I quote from him his
thought of sin, depravity, and punishment, as a hint of where the
scientific spirit may yet aid us. "The doctrine of predestination, of
original sin, of the innate depravity of man, the evil fate of the
greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the
essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgos subordinate to a
benevolent Almighty who has only lately revealed Himself, faulty as they
are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the liberal,
popular illusions that babies are all born good, and that the example of
corrupt society is responsible for their failure to remain so.... That
it is given to everybody to reach the ethical ideal if they will only
try; that all partial evil is universal good; and other optimistic
figments." "I suppose that all men with a clear sense of right and wrong
have descended into hell and stopped there quite long enough to know
what infinite punishment means."
[Sidenote: Transmission of Evil.]
Surely, the established truths of heredity confirm the doctrine that
man, if not born depraved, is born _deprived_ of tendencies toward good
essential to his own welfare and that of the race. "Where sin has once
taken hold of the race, the natural reproduction of life become
reproduction of life morally injured and faulty. With evil once begun,
the race is a succession of tainted individuals; an organism that works
toward continuance of evil. Not but that good is transmitted at the same
time, for it goes along with evil. Any virtue or value which is strong
enough to live will pass from generation to generation even while evil
is making the same journey."[6]
[Footnote 6: Outline of Christian Theology. Clarke, p. 242.]
[Sidenote: Depravation and Deprivation.]
[Sidenote: Natural Standards.]
[Sidenote: The Decalogue.]
While we hold that this tendency, this natural sluggishness in laying
hold of the things of the higher nature is not in itself guilt, it
becomes so by the voluntary adoption of the lower forces as the guide of
life. Nature has her own decalogue. There is a law written upon our
hearts. The wasting of power by anger, jealousy, envy, covetousness and
the like, and the degradation following their expression in acts of
revenge, concupiscence, and mere rapacity, are known without revelation
by all races which have not suffered the downward evolution. The
literatures prove this back even to the days of Hamurabi. Thus natural
standards of temper and conduct are seen to exist, below which men may
not live without loss, and hence there are natural laws to disobey which
is sin. The table given on Sinai, though given to Moses, was in the
world long before Moses. But higher sanction was given it by the
lawgiver, and the highest by the re-enactment of the Decalogue by Jesus
Christ.
[Sidenote: The Heart Law.]
[Sidenote: Effects of Sin.]
[Sidenote: Characteristics of Sin.]
[Sidenote: Results of Sin.]
Sin is blameworthy because it is born of the human preference and the
human will. The nation which, knowing most of the Divine will, disobeys,
is the most guilty because the most knowing. The proportion of guilt
depends on the measure of knowledge and the measure of opportunity.
Hence there is some guilt among those who know only a part of the truth,
and if a man perceives, without the aid of revelation, a law in nature
and a penalty, and breaks that law, then is he a sinner. Some of the
physical consequences may apparently be avoided by future obedience. But
the inner and spiritual consequences of sin are the worst--these things;
namely: In the weakening of the will; in the hardening of the
conscience; and, later, in the recklessness as to consequences,
indicated by that terrible indictment by Paul, "Who, being past
feeling, have given themselves over." The consciousness of sin is
practically universal. It is no invention of Christianity, though
brought to its greatest force by Christianity. Religions, governments,
literatures,--all and everywhere,--treat of sin as a fact. It is more
than dominion of body over spirit; more than an incident of growth; more
than a result of undeveloped judgment, tinged with emotion, and applied
to questions of motive and conduct. Sin is the abnormal; sin is a
variant from standard; sin is self-will and selfishness throttling duty.
Where men accept a God, it is opposition to His law and government.[7]
If no personal God be believed in, then sin is willful opposition to the
course of nature and to law, as proved by experience. So, in every case,
it is unworthy, injurious, and guilty, and must be repented of and
atoned for. The doctrine of sin will never be essentially disturbed.
[Footnote 7: Cf. Clarke. Outline of Theology.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A Supernatural Event.]
[Sidenote: Lacks Scientific Proof.]
[Sidenote: An Old Fallacy.]
[Sidenote: A Jewish Argument.]
[Sidenote: Kant's Reasoning.]
[Sidenote: Can Not Be Demonstrated.]
The next clause in the creed, "The resurrection of the body," if it
remains as a permanent article of faith, must rest on the declaration of
Christ and on His resurrection. It is confessedly dependent, not on a
natural, but a supernatural order. On this point it is again worth our
while to note a concession by Huxley, as showing the consistency of one
Christian truth with another. "If a genuine, and not merely subjective,
immortality awaits us, I conceive that without some such change as that
depicted in I Corinthians xv, immortality must be eternal misery."[8]
Surely, this is a great testimony to that famous chapter on the
resurrection. No scientific proof or probability can be adduced for the
resurrection of the body. The older theologians used to point out that
the caterpillar entombed itself that it might emerge to the higher life
of the butterfly. But we must not take from such a fact what suits our
purpose, and leave a fatal weakness in our argument. The butterfly does,
indeed, emerge from the coffin of the cocoon and the seemingly dead
pupa. But it is only for a brief day of life. Then it lays its eggs and
dies forever. It is born to no immortality, but to the most ephemeral
life. The early Church; yea, the Jewish Church, found rational warrant
for belief in immortality and the resurrection of the body, first in the
thought that it was unjust for those who fought for and brought in the
kingdom of God, to enjoy nothing of what they secured. So the doctrine
of the first resurrection appears as a contribution of justice to holy
life. Later on, similar reasoning demanded the resurrection of all. A
judgment is necessary, not to acquaint God with the merits of men, but
to acquaint men with the righteousness of God. This would be impossible
without the resurrection of all. Very close to this is the reasoning of
Kant, summarized as follows: "Every moral act must have as an end the
highest good. This good consists of two elements, virtue and felicity,
or happiness. The two are inseparable. But these can not be realized
under the limitations of this existence. Immortality follows as a
deduction. The moral law demands perfect virtue or holiness; but a moral
being can not realize absolute moral perfection or a holy completeness
of nature in this present life." It is wholly of faith that men are
immortal. It of necessity can not be demonstrated. The mass of mankind
have believed it, and do believe it, and it is one of the most
difficult of beliefs to escape from, returning to some skeptical
scientists almost as an intuition, conquering the logic of death and
decay.
[Footnote 8: Biography, Vol. II. p. 322.]
[Sidenote: How Faith Grows.]
It is also true that faith in immortality grows with the fullness and
intelligence of the spiritual life. It becomes a complete persuasion to
the pure in heart. Yet some scientific facts, as related to man, make
the idea of his extinction improbable, and separate him from the "beast
which perisheth."
[Sidenote: Men and Brutes.]
[Sidenote: What Brutes Have.]
It is true that much is common to men and brutes. They walk the same
earth; breathe the same air; are nourished by the same food, which is
digested by the same processes. Their life is transmitted by the same
methods, and their embryonic life is strangely similar. It is also true
that there are strong mental resemblances. Both love and hate; are
jealous and indifferent; are courageous and cowardly; they perceive by
similar organs; record by similar mnemonic ganglia; and are within
certain limits impelled by the same motives. Nor can a measure of reason
be denied to animals. While much of what appears to be mental life is
automatic and unconscious response to an external stimulus reaching a
nerve-center, yet within limits they deliberate; they exercise choice;
and determine routes and methods.
[Sidenote: Man Above Brutes.]
[Sidenote: Habits of Animals.]
[Sidenote: Limits of Brute Intelligence.]
[Sidenote: Limits Continued.]
But when all this is said, man rises almost infinitely beyond the
highest brute. Man can stand outside of himself; contemplate the
movements of his own mind; watch the play of motive upon energy and
will, and know himself as no brute can ever be trained to do. Nor have
brutes the ganglia, lobes, or convolutions which house and direct such
powers; and no tribe of mankind has been found without them, however
undeveloped. Very limited, indeed, is the use of natural forces or of
supplied materials in the life of a brute. The birds pick up feathers,
hair, twigs; but no bird provides such things by deliberate prevision
and co-operation with nature. What animal sows that he may reap? The
so-called agricultural ants gather what they have not sown, and reap
what they have not planted. Man sows that he may gather; breeds that he
may use; and accomplishes civilization by an ever-increasing mastery and
adaptation of natural forces. An insect may float with the current on a
chip; but what one ever put a chip into the water? A beaver may build a
dam; but what beaver ever turned the heightened water on a wheel? The
dog may lie in a sunny spot; but what dog ever created artificial heat
or condensed by a lens the sun's heat on a particular point? The hen may
lay and incubate an egg; but what hen ever invented an incubator to
save her long sitting in one pose or place, or studied the development
of life in and from the egg she produced? The ox may select the richest
pasture; but never dreamed of creating a rich pasture by the culture and
fertilization of which he is the chief source. The tiger chooses and
slays his prey; but does not know how to propagate, develop, and safely
mature the animals on which he feeds. All animal life below man must
locate where its food abounds, or follow that food in its migrations or
seasonal changes. Man alone stores and transports his food, creating
commerce by his mastery of climate.
[Sidenote: Man Parts Company.]
[Sidenote: Man and Brute Compared.]
[Sidenote: How Man Can Live.]
[Sidenote: How Man Can Decay.]
[Sidenote: Incidental as to Body.]
The brute obeys law unwittingly in the sustenance and transmission of
life. Man alone perceives and deduces law from a thousand facts, and
concludes a lawgiver from the law, and one Lord and Giver of Life "from
the unity and universality of force." The brute turns its eye skyward to
detect danger; but never measures or counts the stars, discerns the
movements of the planets, nor extends vision and hearing by telescope,
microscope, and megaphone, nor proves by the spectroscope the sameness
of stellar elements with those of our own world. The brute neither makes
history nor records it. He remembers, but does not recollect. His
affections are evanescent as to his kind, and only approach permanence
as they are fastened upon us. The brute cognizes external things, but
does not perceive their being. Thus man can live in an intellectual or
spiritual world as to his aims, motives, and occupations. He need touch
matter only so far as it is necessary to support the bodily strength on
which his spiritual and intellectual movement must depend for basis and
manifestation. On the other hand he may reduce the intellectual and
spiritual life to the lowest limit by giving the mastery to his physical
appetites. We feel instinctively that to do this last is unworthy of
manhood and destructive of the higher nature and intent. But who expects
a brute to do anything else but minister to his appetites? If he delays
a single second in doing it, it is only through fear of man or of some
stronger animal. His intellectual movements have this as an end in
complete reversal of the case with man. With the brute the intellect
seems incidental to the body. With man the body is incidental to the
intellect. One feels for this reason that man might live a purely
spiritual and disembodied life. No one from this standpoint thinks so of
a brute.
[Sidenote: Immortality of Force.]
[Sidenote: Christ's Light.]
[Sidenote: The Christian's Eye.]
Once more let Huxley speak as to the scientific possibility "with regard
to the other great Christian dogmas, the immortality of the soul, and a
future state of rewards and punishments, what possible objection can I,
who am compelled, perforce, to believe in the immortality of what we
call matter and force, and in a very unmistakable present state of
rewards and punishments for all our deeds, have to these doctrines? Give
me a scintilla of evidence, and I am ready to jump at them."[9] But when
all conditions are considered, and just weight given to all the
probabilities, the full persuasion of immortality comes through Him who
has "brought life and immortality to light." These seem part of His
communication to the souls in whom He dwells. To them He says, "Because
I live, ye shall live also." Into their being He injects the power of an
endless life. Their hopes, faith, affections center less and less on
time. The truer, fuller, richer life is felt to be coming. It is to
surpass the earthly life in quantity and in quality only because the
soul, as it flutters Godward, must here feel the attrition of its
fleshly tabernacle. This dissolved, the fullness and the freedom come.
The house not made with hands henceforth enshrines the spirit. Christ's
great Word is finally interpreted: "I am come, that they might have
life, and have it more abundantly."
[Footnote 9: Biography. Vol. I, p. 260.]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Life Everlasting.]
[Sidenote: Literalism.]
"The life everlasting!" This is the grand finale of the Creed as it is
the end which all devout souls seek. It is made probable by what man is,
which is the same as saying that there are, from considerations above
mentioned, probabilities in its favor. It has been the habit of pious
souls to attempt to understand and describe this life, and many are the
volumes which proceed upon the literalness of the Bible descriptions. I
suppose there are phases of faith which can not reach beyond
literalness, and hence do not rightly interpret the splendid imagery of
St. John. Such we must leave to the blessed surprise and ecstatic
awakening of Paradise.
[Sidenote: Great Figures.]
[Sidenote: Locating Heaven.]
[Sidenote: Eternal Punishment.]
To other minds the life everlasting is unbelievable except as the great
pictures of John are spiritualized. To such the place becomes a state or
condition. It is of no interest to us to inquire, as did the Christian
philosopher, Dick, into the locality of heaven and hell. Such ideas as
those recently put forth by a preacher, not of our Church, thank God!
that hell is in one of the spots on the sun, and heaven in the
chromosphere are distasteful to the last degree to those who believe
that "God is a Spirit," and that "flesh and blood can not inherit the
kingdom of God." Such feel that heaven may be anywhere and everywhere;
that the gulf which separates the rich man and Lazarus may be only a
moral gulf, seeing that they talked across it. They see eternal
punishment in the perception of the sinner that he has forever stunted
his soul by his sinfullness and the grossness of his affections. Though
he should begin a progressive life from his present status, he could
never catch up with a soul which has a purer point of departure.