Ground Of Christian Responsibility
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
At the close of the previous chapter we pointed out that there is a very close connection between the sense of human depravity and the sense of moral responsibility.
But it must be observed that in this statement the word "sense" forms a very important factor..
It is just by leaving out this little word that some creeds and confessions have fallen into a contradiction in terms.
The sense of depravity is not identical with the state of depravity; the former begins when the latter is passing away.
Yet at certain epochs of the Christian Church it has been no uncommon occurrence for these two things to be confounded.
It has been no uncommon occurrence for the preacher in one breath to proclaim at once the moral deadness and the moral responsibility of the soul.
We have been told again and again that all the imaginations of every man's heart are only evil continually ; that he is incapable in his own strength of thinking one good thought, or of doing one good thing; that, without the aid of a supernatural life transforming him into a new creature, it would be impossible for him even to desire a
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
participation in the pureand holy.
And yet at the close of all these statements—nay, as a corollary from ali these statements—there has come the assurance that we are under the wrath and curse of God, and only waiting to receive the just reward of our sins.
Now it is quite competent for any divine to hold either of these, but not both.
He may say, if he choose, that man's nature is depraved to the extent of being incapable even of conceiving goodness, or, he may say that man's nature is so bad as to be every moment in danger of the Divine judgement, but he cannot hold these two propositions at the same time without intellectual suicide.
The one is the contradictory of the other; if the one be true, the other must be false.
'The one is the doctrine of human impotence, and therefore of human unaccountableness; the other is the doctrine of human responsibility, and therefore of human power.
No man is responsible for that which is naturally and originally beyond his power.
We lay this down as a first principle of ethics, and we use the qualifying phrase advisedly.
We can conceive circumstances in which a man's impotence may be itself culpable.
He may have allowed the passion for strong drink by repeated acts of indulgence to gain such an ascendancy over him that resistance to it has become impossible.
In this case the impotence is not natural nor original; it is acquired, and exists within the man as a monu-
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
ment of blame.
But the position of man in the theological systems under consideration is very different from this.
It is not the position of one who has squandered his fortune and become poor ; it is the case of a being who never had a fortune to squander, who has been born and bred in poverty. and has no conception of the pleasure which money brings.
As if to leave no mistake on this subject, the sin of man is declared to be original—born with him.
Of course no one would say that the fact of original sin is incompatible with responsibility.
A man may be born with a hereditary bias towards drunkenness, but if in addition to that bias he is born with a hereditary strength of will, it becomes his duty to root it out.
Let us suppose, however, that this bias towards drunkenness were the only evidence the man gave of life, that he gave no sign of any other sensation, nor of any other manifestation of will, you would then represent the case of the theologians in question.
A sin which is at once original and universal, born with the man and diffused through the whole nature of the man, cannot possibly involve the imputation of guilt.
Guilt demands power.
If I am responsible for living in ignorance of God, it is because I have faculties which bring me into some relation to God.
Why am I not responsible for my ignorance of what will happen ten years hence?
Simply and solely because [ have no faculty which relates to the future.
If there be not an original righteous-
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY,
SI ness as well as an original sin, theologians must abandon the belief that religion has anything to do with morality.
The key-note of Christianity is, man has power to be saved!
The proof is that it offers salvation.
Tt holds out a gift which may be taken by. the putting forth of the hand, and thereby it assumes that man has a hand.
It declares in the most explicit terms that the motive which it brings to bear on the human soul ought to be irresistible.
"Tf I had not come and spoken to them, they had not had sin, but now they have no cloak for their sin" (John xv. 22).
These words are very striking.
Taken in their purely ethical aspect they imply that the principle of virtue, as Christianity has revealed it, ought to exert an invingible influence over all men, that its empire should admit of no competitor, and that its dominion over the human heart should brook no bounds.
And this is not, less remarkable from the fact that it is spoken not of saints, but of sinners, of men who have chosen. to live contrary to the law of virtue.
One asks, On what ground can such a statement be made?
If these men have been born in a state of absolute depravity, in a depravity which has rendered immoral not only every deed and word but even every thought, why should it be said that one manifestation of virtue ought to be more compelling than another?
What meaning would there be in saying of a blind man, "Tf TI had not brought the light of the sun to him,
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
if I had only given him candle-light, I would not have blamed him for not seeing" ? wherein would consist the absurdity of such a statement?
Simply here, that to such a man there can exist no difference between candle-light and sun-light; there can be no degrees in negation.
Yet it is not a whit less absurd to say that a totally depraved - man is rendered in any degree more guilty by the fact that he has rejected the highest manifestation of spiritual light and love.
Moral blindness, lke physical blindness, must be just as impervious to the rays of a Sun of Righteousness as to the glimmer of a merely earthly heroism, and it is alike as blameless in its failure to perceive the one, as it is in its inability to discern the other.
There is then a presupposition involved in the Christian revelation.
It assumes that man is endowed with a moral nature, with a power to choose what is good.
But the question now arises, Where is the evidence of such a power?
The problem is comparatively easy so long as it lies between the revelation of Christian morality and the systems of Christian theology, but it assumes a more serious aspect when it embraces the wider battle-ground between the revelation of Christian morality and our experience of the facts of life.
For the question simply is, Have we a free choice?
Is there within the human soul a power of goodness?
That is the great problem of one of the greatest theological works of modern times—
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
Julius Miiller's Doctrine of Sin.
An ardent advocate for the liberty of the will, he feels that unless man has been allowed to choose virtue for himself he cannot be said to love virtue.
To make a man worthy of the name of good, there must have been some golden moment of his life in which his choice between good and evil was free and unbiassed, a moment in which he stood on the mountain's brow and saw on the one side the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and on the other the kingdom of righteousness and its power.
But Miiller cannot find any such moment in the life of man.
At no stage of individual existence can he discover an unbiassed will.
We are what we are by reason of what we have been; the present is the child of the past.
We have never had a chance of choosing virtue, for the choice of vice has been bequeathed to us as an inheritance.
We have come into the world with corrupt natures, and the corruption has weakened the will's power.
Virtue no longer stands before us as she is; she is seen through a mist, through a glass darkly.
Her beauty is veiled to the human eye.
Man would choose her if he could only see her.
But the mist of his own corruption prevents him from seeing her; his eyes are blinded, therefore his choice is not free.
Whence then, asks Miiller, is this sense of responsibility which beyond all doubt exists within us?
If in point of fact we have never since the day
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY,
of our birth enjoyed one hour of freedom, if there | has not been one solitary moment in which our will has been suffered to fix an unbiassed gaze on the alternatives of good and evil, how is it that every moment of my life I feel as if I were free, feel when
I do good that I ought to have done better, when I do wrong that I mle to have refrained?
Miiller answers, It is hsamares we have come from another world where the will was free!
There was a life before this life in which we had our choice of right and wrong.
We stood upon a pre-existent mountain, and saw the alternative of the two kinedoms, and said with open eyes:
"Evil, be thou my good!"
And the result has ieee this present world of material corruption, this world in which the eye is under mist and the will is under chains and the heart is under ice.
The slavery has come to us with birth, because before birth we elected to be slaves, and the sense of responsibility alone remains to tell us we once were free.* The barren speculation here indulged in is one that can neither be verified nor contradicted.
The point which concerns us is that we are quite independent of either its verification or its contradiction.
The hypothesis is purely superfluous, and for this reason that the facts of nature explain themselves.
There is no need to go out of the present world to find a solution of the difficulty; the solution lies
* Cf, Clement of Alexandria, Strom. vii. 6,
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY,
within the moral world itself.
We agree with Miller that freedom is necessary to responsibility, we agree with him that the sense of responsibility demands the existence somewhere of a power of choice.
But we say that this power of choice is here.
We go further.
We say that every developed man, whether he is classed in the category of good or bad, has in point of fact chosen the good in preference to the evil.
We say that the difference between a virtuous man and a vicious man does not lie in the difference of their intellectual choice.
We believe the aphorism of Socrates to be capable of verification in all experience: No man is wicked from choice.
We all know what led Socrates to give utterance to that remarkable statement.
'lhe Sophists were denying moral responsibility.
They said, How can there be a standard of right and wrong when so many deliberately prefer wrong to right?
Socrates said, It is not so; no man that has come into consciousness of his moral nature can for a moment hesitate, or does for a moment hesitate, between the alternatives; the absolute standard of virtue is proved by this, that it is always chosen.
'That is what Socrates meant, and perhaps profounder words were never uttered in the whole sphere of morals.
For, we ask, What do we mean by such terms as right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice?
We do not ask how we came by the ideas; we leave that question to the metaphysicians.
We may hold with Butler
GROUND
OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
that conscience is a natural tribunal within the soul,* or we may hold with Bain that it is only the last result of a process of utilitarian education; t for our purpose it is all the same.
We take up the man just where the evolutionist lays him down, and our anatomy begins-where his comes to an end.
It is denied by no school of physics or faith or morals that the ideas of right and wrong belong to normal humanity; on this rock we build our structure.
In whatever manner we came by these ideas, it is admitted on all hands that we have them now; the simple question is, How much does this admission imply ?
It implies nothing less than this, that man has freedom to choose rectitude.
The very fact that he calls right by the name of right and wrong by the name of wrong is a proof, not only that there is no barrier to his choice of virtue, but that his choice of virtue is already made.
If the form of virtue were hid from him it would be quite impossible that, even in language, he should use such an antithesis as that implied in the ideas of right and wrong.
'The moment a man says, I have done wrong, he chooses the other course, declares that the cther course is better, preferable, more worthy of being followed.
And he does not choose it a whit the less should he continue to follow the lower path ; the very condemnation in that case is that * See Sermons 1 and 2, t+ See Emotions and Will, pp. 283-286.
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
he is acting in opposition to the choice of his higher nature. very sting of a remorseful conscience is a choice of that nature.
Every sense of sin is a preference of the human will for holiness.
Every effort even to shut the moral eyes, every attempt to drown the voice of conscience in a vortex of other
Voices, is an indirect testimony to the fact that man in some mode of his being has declared goodness to be the strongest motive.
It may be said, indeed, if man thus habitually chooses the good, why does he so generally follow the evil?
It was man's following of evil that led Julius Miiller to say that the form of virtue must be dimly seen by him.
What if the cause of the anomaly should be exactly the reverse?
What if it should be found that of the two alternatives, the one which is the dimmer is not the virtue but the vice?
What if the reason of man's degeneracy be, not so much the inability to see virtue clothed in her own garments, as the inability to divest vice of garments not her own?
For our part we have no doubt about the matter; we hold the faith of Socrates.
We believe that in the present system of things no being has ever been heard to say, Evil, be thou my good!
It is true, there are certain states of primitive culture in which commendation is extended to many acts that are now called criminal.
And the argument would be indeed very strong if they were commended as criminal acts.
But the truth is, the thing which is not seen by
GROUND
OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
the savage is just the criminality or moral turpitude.
He considers theft as an act of adroitness, robbery as a proof of strength, duplicity as an evidence of wisdom.
Adroitness and strength and wisdom are all good things, and in themselves all objects of desire.
Accordingly, when these qualities are displayed, as they may be, in a course of selfish agoression, the savage loses sight of the selfishness in the admiration of the traits by which it is accompanied.
Nor let it be thought that the savage is peculiar in this respect.
We believe he only exhibits in a coarse form the principle on which all vice makes its progress in the world.
To the civilised man as to the savage the secret of the power of vice is a false heroism.
** Vice is a creature of such hideous mien, That to be hated needs but to be seen. "
So doubtless it is, but then the word "but" is very deceptive.
It implies that to see evil as evil isa very simple thing.
The truth is, it is not only the most difficult part of the process of moral regeneration, it is, strictly speaking, the moral regeneration itself.
If a man saw evil to be evil and evil only, he never would follow it.
This he does not readily see, and in the mere state of nature never can see.
Hivil always comes to him as something more than evil, and it is always chosen by him for the sake of the something more.
Sometimes it takes the form of interest.
Sometimes it takes the shape of man-
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
liness.
Sometimes it offers itself as an ocean of forgetfulness in which to drown a load of care.
In no case does it present itself as what it really is; if it did, Pope's aphorism would be fulfilled, and it would be hated; it is not hated because it is not clearly seen.
Now it is in strict and rather striking accordance with this that in the teaching of the New Testament the degree of a man's spiritual illumination is said to be proportionate to the deeree of clearness in his vision of sin.
At the top of the spiritual ladder we find the saintly Paul calling himself the chief of sinners; at the foot of the ladder we hear the ideal types of paganism spoken of as unconscious of their own depravity (2 Thess. 1. 7). The passage just referred to 1s indeed in this connection worthy of some consideration.
Paul says that ''the mystery of iniquity doth already work," in other words, that sin is operating in hearts that are quite unconscious of its presence.
Itis most hid from those in whom it has become a nature, an atmosphere.
It is too near to them to be perceived by them; the revelation which they need most is a revelation of their own actions.
Now, according to St. Paul, there is something which prevents such a revelation:
" He that hindereth will hinder until he be taken out of the way, and then shall that wicked one be revealed."
Who is "he that hindereth?"
Is he the Devil or the Roman Emperor?
We should say he stands for both, and a great many other poten-
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
tates beside.
Whatever Paul meant historically, there can be no question what he meant ethically, and this alone here concerns our purpose.
The power which in his view prevented sin from being seen as sin was the worldly or carnal principle.
The power which blinded pagan Rome was a false ideal of greatness.
Men had come to think that the secret of man's glory lay in the abundance of the things he could call his own.
The pursuit of self had thus become heroic, and all the forms of selfishness had been masked under heroic names.
It has been more or less the same in every age.
The true character of vice has a hundred times been hid by a false glare and a false name.
Duelling has been called a debt of honour.
Opposition to the spirit of religion has been styled freethought.
The life of impure morals has received the name of libertinism—sugegestive of freedom from a chain.
The effect in each case is the same.
Sin is not seen to be what it is, and is made to seem something which it is not.
We are forced to experience what Paul experienced—that there is something in the human heart which prevents the revelation of man to himself, a curtain which hides from him his own actions and shuts him out from the possibility of self-scrutiny.
'The region where man is strongest is precisely that region where he is most a slave; he has a very dim perception of the nature of his own evil.
This, then, is the conclusion at which Christianity
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
QI and human nature have both arrived.
Man is partly a slave, and partly free.
His slavery consists in the fact, that in the world of actual practice he finds it hard to detect sin as sin; his freedom lies in this, that in the world of thought and theory he never hesitates in his preference for the good:
"The evil which I would not, that I do; and the good which I would, that I do not."* It will be observed that in the view of St. Paul embodied in this passage the one free thing about man is just the will itself: 'I would," "I would not."
It is in practical action he shows himself a slave: 'I do," "I do not."
Maw's strong point is with St.
Paul his power of choice, or rather, his want of all power to choose anything but the good.
Paul's notion of moral freedom is different from some modern notions.
He looks upon it not as a capacity, to weigh impartially the claims of virtue and of vice, but as a necessity to be swayed by the claims of virtue alone.
Man's freedom of choice is the unrestrainedness of his choice, the absence of all hesitation in his choice.
In so far as he hesitates, deliberates, weighs alternatives, he is not free.
Perfect moral freedom is the perfect captivity of the life to goodness, or to what Paul calls, "the law written in the heart."
True freedom is not liberation from law, but liberation from the sense of restraint.
The sense of restraint will never be perfectly absent until our subjection to law is * Cf. Kant, Metaph. of Ethics, pp. 70-73.
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
complete.
A man only masters an art when the art has mastered him; he is then, as we say in common language at home in it.
And this is his freedom.
To be morally free is to have the moral nature dominated by a spirit of holiness;
'' Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
Now we have admitted, St. Paul has admitted, that we see not yet all things subject to this spirit ; there is an element of slavery in the nature of man.
But what Paul says is, that the slavery does not extend to the will.
There is one part of our nature which is free to choose good, which never hesitates for amoment in its preference for virtue ; it is that power, call it by what name you will, which distinguishes between the right and the wrong.
The very capacity to distinguish is itself a choice.
The moment I have said—There is a right, and there is a wrong, I have declared virtue to be the stronger motive, I have decided in favour of goodness.
'l'hat moment too I have become a responsible being.
I can no longer plead that the motives of sin are too strong for my weak nature; by the very use of the word right, I have decided that goodness is, and ought to be, the most powerful influence.
It is-true I have only made this decision in the will, but, as Kant says, a man's will is his proper self.* The will is the man; the moral decision of the will is the moral decision of the man.
That decision has made us responsible beings, for, wher- * Metaph. of Ethics, p. 71.
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY,
ever the distinction of right from wrong is known, it is always on the side of good.
The very fact of making such a distinction is itself a choice ; it is a proof that the will has already been dominated by the influence of a mighty motive which has impelled the innermost life of man to call the moral law by the loftier name.
What, then, is the nature of this responsibility ?
Its ground lies in our choice, but what is the extent of its requirement?
The answer must be clear.
My will, that is to say, my innermost nature, has chosen the moral law, has declared the moral law to be the more excellent way, by giving it the name of right.
J am responsible for the carrying out of that choice.
I am bound to make that moral law, to which my will has already submitted, the governing force of my whole nature.
There is no longer any excuse for disharmony when my highest life has decided that the right lies with moral law.
Henceforth it must be my task to make my nature consistent with itself.
As yet there is no such consistency.
We have seen how in the conception of St. Paul the elements of our being are at war.
There is arupture in the life of man, a schism in the human soul.
I always choose right; I tend to follow wrong.
The question is, Why?
Is it that when I come from the inner into the outer world a stronger motive assails me and compels me to reverse my choice.
In point of fact I never do reverse my choice; even where I follow the wrong,
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
I still "see and approve better things."
It is impossible, therefore, that the superior strength of a new motive can be my excuse.
What is conscience itself but a protest against such a conclusion?
What is it but the declaration that the first choice of the will remains unreversed, that the first motive of the will remains undimmed, and that the failure to execute the will remains unaccounted for and therefore unexcused.
It is this unanswered "' Why" that constitutes man's sense of moral guilt.
He feels that he ought to do more than he has done, that he has power to do more than he has done.
His sense of duty is itself a sense of power—'" I ought, therefore I can!"
He has chosen the right, therefore the right cannot be beyond him.
It is within the orbit of his aspirations, and so it must be within the range of his capacities.
The mind's recognition of its slavery is itself its hope of redemption.
What, as unfolded by Christianity, is the plan of its redemption ?
What are the steps of that process by which, in the view of the Christian system, the spirit of man is to rise from slavery into freedom?
All doctrines of a purely dogmatic theology we here pass by on the other side, for the simple reason that in relation to our subject they are on the other side.
In their own departments of study they have their legitimate place, but the department with which we have to do lies within the limits of human nature and normal experience.
The question which
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
we have to determine is, To what extent do the doctrines of Christian theology admit of being translated into the principles of universal morality ?
Amid the many things which they profess to reveal, do they throw any light on the ethical life of man ?
Do they furnish any hint or suggestion or principle which may serve to light up the steps of that steep ascent by which the human soul must mount the heights of duty?
'The answer to that question is the problem that now lies before us,
THESMORAT. PEACE OF HAILE.
We have now come to the great practical question, In what way is a human soul to justify itself, to set itself in harmony with the law of conscience ?
The question assumed originally a theological form, but its interests really lay in the appeal which it made to the moral struggles of the heart.
We have seen that a part altogether from theology, nay, apart altogether from any definite form of religion, there is within the human soul the sense of a violated law.
We have seen that in the heart of every man there is a dualism—a strife between two.
Christianity neither created nor revealed that dualism; it only made the perception of it more vivid.
The sense of a violated law belongs to no creed; it belongs to man as man.
It takes its rise originally, not from the promulgation of a priestly mystery, but from the discovery of an actual discord.
To man in every age there thunders a voice from the mount of his highest nature—Thow shalt! Thou shalt not !—a voice which ought to be supreme, and which claims to be omnipotent.
But to man in every age there has come also one uniform experi-