AS now exhibited, the condition of the human race seems sufficiently calamitous. We come into the world accursed, with the wrath of God upon us, and under sentence of “eternal death,” that is, endless damnation. But this, bad as it is, is not the worst of our case.
We are here placed under a divine moral government, with a whole code of laws, which are holy, just, and good, and which we are required constantly and perfectly to obey, and for every act of disobedience we are threatened with a retribution of another eternal death equal to that to which we were born. And what makes our condition the harder and the more calamitous is the fact that we are, by the very constitution of our nature, “totally depraved,” and consequently wholly unfitted, not merely for perfect obedience, but any obedience whatever. It was one of the evils of our first parents’ sin, that by it “they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.”
And, “being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity; descending from them by ordinary generation.” Hence we not only come into the world under the wrath and curse of God and heirs of endless damnation, but to complete our misfortunes we are utterly incapable of doing anything to help ourselves, or even to avoid constant accumulations of sin and increasing damnation. To sin is as natural to us as to breathe, and as necessary; and we can no more live and avoid one than the other.
Yet God demands an obedience to all his laws that shall be at once ready and perfect! By a wise and benevolent ordinance we inherit Adam’s sin and depravity; and are still held bound to the performance of every moral and religious duty. God knows perfectly that we can no more perform the least of these duties than we can change the course of the earth in its orbit or reverse the procession of the seasons. For all the faculties of man’s soul are “wholly defiled;” he is by nature “utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good,” and as if that were not sufficient to unfit him for any proper moral action, he is by the same nature “wholly inclined to all evil.” How is it possible to conceive of a more unfortunate and helpless being—helpless, I mean, in regard to the obedience God requires—than we have here? We should think a parent very unreasonable and cruel who should insist that his child, born a cripple, should run and play with other children, or that one born blind should see, or one born deaf should hear, and should severely punish such a child because it did not implicitly obey. What is beyond our powers is impossible to us, whether in the realm of the physical or the moral, and it is unreasonable to require it.
“The Bible,” says Dr. Hodge, the latest expositor of systematic theology in this country and perhaps in the Christian world,—“the Bible uniformly represents men in their natural state, since the fall, as blind, deaf, and spiritually dead, from which state they can no more deliver themselves than one born blind can open his own eyes, or one corrupting in the grave can restore himself to life.” Yet it is a very patent fact that the Bible everywhere speaks of man as a moral being, addresses him as one who is able to see and hear and obey; calls him to duty, urges upon him motives to obedience, threatens him with punishment if he disobeys, and treats him precisely as if he possessed all his faculties and had the power of using them. And are we, indeed, to believe that God is so unreasonable a master as to demand of a blind man that he shall see, or of a dead man that he shall live? And especially are we to believe that for not doing what we acknowledge is simply impossible, God is so unjust as to threaten and inflict endless torments?
President Edwards is eloquent in describing the fearful condition in which, in our natural state, we are placed. “We may learn,” he says, “how dismal are the effects which the fall of man has brought upon the world. It has brought all mankind into this dreadful condition of which we have heard. . . . What a miserable world, therefore, is the world in which we live!
This world lies under a curse.” This he proves by showing in his way, that is, asserting, that human nature is suffering under a fatal poison, “which, has been infused into and spread over the man. He has been bitten by a fiery serpent, whose bite issues in a most tormenting death.”
He is a child of the Devil; he has no God, at least no friend in God: God is his constant enemy. He is in danger of destruction every moment. “Natural men hang over the pit of hell, as it were, by a thread that has a moth continually gnawing it. They know not when it will snap in twain and let them drop. . . . A natural man never goes to sleep but he is in danger of waking up in hell.”
But this is not all. While he continues in a natural state he is constantly increasing his guilt, and adding to the horrors of his damnation. “It would be dreadful,” says President Edwards, “to be in a natural condition, if a person could continue as he is, and his condition grow no worse; if he could live in a natural condition, and never have it any more dreadful than when he first begins to sin. But it is yet much more dreadful when we consider that it every day becomes worse and worse. The condition of natural men is worse to-day than it was yesterday, and that on several accounts. The heart [which was utterly averse to all good, and inclined to all evil at one’s birth] grows more and more polluted and hardened. The longer sin continues unmortified, the more it is strengthened and rooted.
“Their guilt also grows greater, and hell every day grows hotter; for they are every day adding sin to sin, and so their iniquity is increasing over their heads more and more. Every new sin adds to their guilt. Every sin deserves eternal death for its punishment. And therefore in every sin that a man commits there is so much added to the punishment to which he is exposed. There is, as it were, another eternal death added to augment his damnation. . . . If a man has lived twenty years in a natural condition, the fire has been increasing every day since he lived. It has been, as it were, blown up to a greater degree of fierceness. Yea, how dreadfully does one day’s continuance in sin add to the heat of hell-fire.”
And all this, I beg the reader to remember, while he is born totally depraved, and, according to the theory, is as unable to obey God, to repent, to do a good act, or think a good thought, as a man born blind is to open his own eyes, or a dead man to raise himself to life!
Is it possible to conceive of a moral government more unreasonable or more unjust? Without conversion all men must certainly be damned, and “they have nothing on which to depend,” says President Edwards, “for conversion. They have nothing in the world by which to persuade themselves that they will ever be converted. Left to themselves, they never will repent and turn to God. If they are ever converted, therefore, it is God who must do it. But they have no promise of God that they ever shall be converted.” In other words, they cannot help themselves; God alone can help them, and he does not; and, as President Edwards says, “it is but a peradventure whether he will ever give them repentance.”
It was this thought that so tormented the late Rev. Albert Barnes. “I confess,” said he, “when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers,—upon death-beds and grave-yards,—upon the world of woe filled with hosts to suffer forever; when I see my friends, my parents, my family, my people, my fellow citizens,—when I look upon a whole race all involved in this sin and danger,—and when I see the great mass of them wholly unconcerned, and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet He does not do so, I am struck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I cannot disguise it.”
It is obvious that, as Catherine Beecher once said, “there must be a terrible mistake somewhere,” when an intelligent and pious Christian—for such Mr. Barnes is acknowledged by all to have been—is forced to make a confession like this. Either the moral government of God is a very unfortunate one, or men take a very false view of it. It was the boast of the beloved disciple that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all;” and in another place he says: “The darkness is past, and the true light now shineth.” Yet to Mr. Barnes and many others it is not only dark, but all dark. On some of the gravest problems of our being there is no light. Dr. Pond, though less distressed than Mr. Barnes, finds difficulties in his path, which he is obliged to confess, but is unable to remove. “Theological writers,” he says, “have found much difficulty in reconciling the earnestness of God for the salvation of sinners with the fact that so many of them are not saved.
“It results from the moral perfection of God that he must earnestly desire the salvation of sinners. To suppose the contrary would be to divest him of even common benevolence. . . . But how are we to reconcile the earnestness of God for the salvation of sinners with the fact that so many are not saved? If he desires their salvation, why does he not save them? If he has no pleasure in the final destruction of the wicked, why does he not rescue them from so dreadful an end? Shall we reply to these questions by saying that God cannot save more of the human family than he does without destroying their free agency, which is equivalent to saying that he cannot save them at all? For to convert, sanctify, and save sinners, or rather creatures, beings, which are not free agents, is a contradiction in terms.
Shall we, then, meet the difficulty in question by affirming that God cannot save more of the human family than he does? He desires to save more, but he cannot accomplish it. He saves as many as he possibly can. But are such assertions consistent with reason or with truth? Is not God omnipotent? Has he not the hearts of men in his hand, as the rivers of water, to turn them whithersoever he will? Could not the Being who converted Paul have converted Judas?
Was not he who converted three thousand on the day of Pentecost able, had he put in requisition all his power, to have converted a great many more? And besides, if God is not able to do all the good which he, on the whole, desires,—if the promptings of his benevolence must be forever restrained through a want of power,—how can he be happy? Confident I am that this mode of relieving the difficulty above suggested cannot be, with propriety, adopted.
We are constrained, therefore, to seek for some other mode, and in this search we are essentially aided by the views which have been exhibited on the general subject of probation.
Is God able to do more for the salvation of sinners than he is actually doing—I speak now of sinners under the gospel—consistently with their being in a state of probation, and with their having a fair and sufficient trial? That he has power to do more than he does, were not his omnipotence held in check by moral considerations, I have no doubt. But his omnipotence is held in check by moral considerations; and among these may not this be chief,—the necessity of furnishing to our race in this world a season of trial?”
But does this consideration materially relieve the difficulty? The trouble is that a world of human beings, made in the image of God and for his glory, instead of reaching the end of their being, should, the great majority of them at least, sink into final and remediless destruction, and, so far from glorifying their Creator, are to exist through eternity a perpetual reproach to his goodness, his wisdom, or his power. The doctrine of probation can be only a statement of the method by which God proposed to accomplish his purpose; and, as Dr. Pond is obliged to confess, it proves a sublime failure. “The moral perfection of God” makes it necessary that he should propose, as the end of man’s creation, his final holiness and happiness. “To suppose the contrary would be to divest him of even common benevolence.”
Then as to the divine power there can be no dispute. If failure occurs, therefore, it must arise from the badness of his plan, or the use of injudicious means, that is, from a want of wisdom.
In other words, to state it plainly, God is good enough to desire, and consequently to propose, the best and noblest ends for the human race. He has power sufficient to carry out and accomplish any plan he could devise for the attainment of these ends; yet the issue is such as shocks the reason and the moral nature of his best friends, and strikes them dumb. The divine wisdom has failed! He does not know enough to do what he desires, to reach the ends he proposes, and thus accomplish his will. How, then, is he to be happy?
But is this difficulty really in the plan of God, or only in the narrow and imperfect views men are pleased to take of it? We have all heard the story of the astronomer who, looking through his telescope, saw a monster in the heavens; it was only an insect on one of the lenses of his instrument. In like manner our theologians find frightful defects in the government of God, while the only trouble is in their own minds by which this government is contemplated. They insist on limiting the Holy One of Israel, and, therefore, without warrant of Scripture or reason, confine the whole economy of his grace to this speck of earth and this moment of time. The divine plan is too broad and too beneficent to be cooped up within such narrow bounds. Is it reasonable to suppose that God, who occupies a thousand years in the growth of a tree, which yet is destined to fall and perish utterly, should, as by law, confine himself to a human lifetime of ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years here on earth, in making and training, expanding and beautifying, a human soul, which is to endure and shine like a star in the firmament forever?
Then, let it be remembered, this soul is not a thing subject to merely physical laws, but is a conscious being, endowed with personality, having an individual will, and the power of self-determination, and hence naturally demands scope for its energies and various activities. And being a free agent, as Dr. Pond properly calls it, it is able, not only to act in harmony with the divine will, but against it; able not only to obey God, but to disobey him. It enters the world ignorant, and it has everything to learn. It is placed upon probation, if you please, but not that kind of commercial probation which Dr. Pond describes. It is not here for the purpose of teaching God whether it is such as he wishes, and if not, to be thrown away, but to be itself taught, to be educated, trained, disciplined; and the process does not end till his purpose is attained, it matters not through what length of time or change of worlds it may extend. God made that soul to mirror his own perfections, and reflect his glory; and do you think he will finally be disappointed? He has in his possession all the resources of the universe, and before him all time, and all eternity, if need be, for doing his work and accomplishing his pleasure. That he has shut himself up to a few days, as the doctrine of Probation teaches, is at once so unreasonable and so contrary to the whole spirit of the gospel that no Christian has a right to believe it but upon better grounds than have as yet ever been offered. But this leads to a fuller discussion of the subject.