DETERMINISM

The under-emphasis of sin, we said, is one of the special dangers which threaten the present age; and nothing is more remarkable or disquieting to observe than the number of attacks that are being made to-day from quarter after quarter, all of them converging upon the same point. Now the cry is raised that sin is a mere mistake, due to ignorance; or that it is merely the absence of something, as a shadow indicates the absence of light{1]; or we are assured that “what we call ‘evil’ is only incidental to the progress and development of the {universal] order” {2] a necessary step in evolution. Now again the burden of responsibility is shifted from the shoulders of the individual on to heredity and environment; or compromise with what is known to be moral evil is not only excused as a necessity, but commended as a duty; or the average person’s feelings are considerately soothed by {142] the pronouncement that “the mass of a Christian congregation are about as innocent as men and women can well be in a world where natural temptations are so rife, and so many social adjustments discountenance heroic saintliness” {3] the latter a truly admirable feat of circumlocution. And sometimes, as we have seen, sin and evil are themselves in essence negated generally in virtue of some pseudo-philosophic or pseudo-scientific “doctrine of a universe” as when we read that “in a universe . . . there cannot be any room for independent and creative wills, actually thwarting the Good Will.” {4] Doubtless, these various statements, whether made in the name of Monism or Determinism, or some form of neo-Christianity, represent a reaction against that over-emphasis which taught that man was by nature under God’s wrath and deserving of everlasting torments; but there can be no question that this reaction has gone very far in the direction of the opposite extreme, and that the time has come for reconsideration and a return to more balanced views.

So far as the virtual denial of human freedom, human sin, and indeed of human selfhood, {143] flows from a perversion of the doctrine of Divine immanence, we need not add anything to the observations made in earlier chapters upon this subject; we might, however, quote some pertinent words of Martineau’s, affirming and explaining that distinction between the Divine and human personality which can only be ignored to the hopeless confusion of thought:

“The whole external universe, then (external, I mean, to self-conscious beings), we unreservedly surrender to the Indwelling Will, of which it is the organised expression. From no point of its space, from no moment of its time, is His living energy withdrawn, or less intensely present than in any crisis fitly called creative. But the very same principle which establishes a Unity of all external causality makes it antithetic to the internal, and establishes a Duality between our own and that which is other than ours; so that, were not our personal power known to us as one, the cosmical power would not be guaranteed to us as the other. Here, therefore, at the boundary of the proper Ego, the absorbing claim of the Supreme will arrests itself, and recognises a ground on which it does not mean to step. Did it still press on and annex this field also, it would simply abolish the very base of its own recognisable existence, and, in making itself all in all, would vanish totally from view. . . Are we, then, to find Him in the sunshine and the rain, and to miss Him in our thought, our duty and our love? Far from it; He is with us in both: only in the former it is His immanent life, in the latter His transcendent, with which we are in communion.” {5]

Only where this fundamental principle of the non-identity of God and man is recognised, can the facts of human personality, {144] freedom and responsibility for willed acts be rationally based and defended.

At the same time this “otherness” of God, while it is the condition, is not necessarily the guarantee, of our freedom. Determinism is quite compatible, in theory, and has been so found in history, with belief in the Divine transcendence; but it is scarcely compatible with belief in the Divine goodness. There is no a priori reason making it inconceivable that the doctrine of absolute predestination might be true; but such a doctrine is not reconcilable with the belief that the Eternal Other is also the Eternal Father. The Divine Autocrat of Calvinism, who pre-ordained some of His creatures to eternal damnation not for any demerit of theirs, but “just choosing so” is not unthinkable; what is unthinkable is that we could love such a One a God who had predestined all human sin and woe, who had fore-ordered things in such a manner that unnumbered hapless souls were doomed evermore to stumble and to suffer. Such a God might inspire a shuddering, wondering, abject awe, but never affection. Only a good God, aiming at the evolution of goodness, the making of character, could have endowed us with freedom, for only through such an endowment can such an aim be realised.

And hence there are perhaps few attitudes so entirely irrational as that which affects to see in a determinist interpretation of man’s {145] nature a special reason for optimism. Occasionally one is invited to rejoice in the “great and glorious thought that every man is wholly a product of the Master Workman”; it is even urged that such a conception cannot change our appreciation of what is fine in human thought and action, just as “we do not admire a rose the less because we know that it could no more help being what it is than could a stinging nettle or a fungus.” We can only say that such a superficial optimism seems infinitely more open to objection than the temper which, in the face of so much suffering and sin, has to struggle hard sometimes to preserve its faith in the Father’s love, and half-wonders if some personal power of evil is not actively engaged in marring God’s workmanship. Anyone who can believe that every man, just as he is, represents the Divine intention in concrete form anyone who can believe this, and glory in the thought must inhabit a strange world, remote from reality. He can never have learned anything of the greed which condemns myriads of human beings to sunless and degraded lives; he can never have been inside a police-court; he can never have seen hapless womanhood flaunting its be-rouged and be-ribboned shame under the electric light of West End thoroughfares he can never even have reflected upon any of these things, and rejoiced in the thought that every human being was “wholly the {146] product of the Master Workman.” If such a thought does not produce something like despair, it ought to do so; if it does not, then it represents not a conviction but a pose.

As a matter of fact, the determinist creed, with all its professions of charitableness towards the transgressor, and while pretending to soothe us by absolving us from responsibility for wrong-doing, fatally paralyses our endeavours. It is a message, not of liberation from guilt, but of despair. Christianity, even while condemning sin, in its very condemnation speaks of hope; it says to the sinner: “You are guilty you ought to have done better, and you know it; you are guilty you ought still to do better, and you can.” That is a rousing, vitalising call: the very censure implies the possibility of better things. But Determinism says to the moral wreck: “Not only are you a wreck, but that is all you ever could have been; you not only cannot help being what you are, but in your wretchedness and degradation you are what you could not help being this was your pre-ordained destiny from the beginning of time. We are not angry with you, any more than we are angry with tigers for being fierce, or with thorns for not bearing grapes; only, being what you are, you never could have borne, and never will bear, grapes.” Truly a “great and glorious thought”! Determinism makes of the whole world of erring men a hospital, and pronounces {147] every patient an incurable it is ready to grant kindly, considerate treatment to each, but holds out hopes of recovery to none. Who would not rather submit to a sterner physician, whose ministrations promised to medicine him back to health again! A consistent Determinism, prepared to look stedfastly at things as they are, can, we repeat, lead nowhere but to despair; a conclusion from which determinists, fortunately for themselves, escape by means of the most patent inconsistency.

But we turn to the further contention which we already mentioned in passing, viz., that the acceptance of Determinism would by no means change our admiration of what was fine in human thought and action just as we did not admire a rose the less because it could not help being fragrant and beautiful. Here we have a very palpable, but all the more significant confusion between things totally different aesthetics and ethics. Our admiration for a rose is aesthetic; our admiration for goodness is ethical, and we give it with the implicit understanding that the quality we admire is the result of voluntary acts and decisions. All moral judgments imply this; and in practice we know that the experience of moral struggle and moral conquest is intensely real, not to be argued away any more than we can be argued out of any other primary fact of consciousness, which is its own sufficient evidence. Let anyone ask himself quite {148] candidly whether the feeling called forth by some rare work of art resembles remotely the emotion with which he reads of some deed of humble heroism or self-sacrifice; the psychology which discerns here no difference is singularly shallow.

But when the would-be optimistic determinist is shown the sheer fatuity of pretending to rejoice in that everything is just as it is a singular compliment to the “Master Workman” he executes a volte-face and falls back upon the plea that his doctrine is at any rate a pre-eminently practical one. Instead of vainly deploring imaginary “sins,” Determinism would simply have us recognise plain facts: it would arrange for healthy hereditary influences to cradle the coming generations; it would adopt the most enlightened educational, hygienic, reformatory methods; it would provide for all the citizens of the State such an environment as would steadily make for health and beauty and happiness. There are no “sinners,” it says, but only the unhappy products of conditions which foster anti-social proclivities as automatically as dirt fosters disease; instead of punishing the products, let us attack the producing conditions, and by sweeping them away bring in the millennium.

Such a plea, it must be admitted, harmonises well with our modern tolerance, our modern zeal for reform; and yet it rests upon a fundamental fallacy. No one, of course, denies the {149] moulding power of heredity and environment; no one denies such an obvious truism as that we cannot expect to grow fine specimens of humanity in the reeking slum or the sweater’s workshop. But as environment is a greater power than heredity, so there is only one power greater than environment and that is our power to alter environment. “But that,” protests the determinist, “is just what we hold ought to be done.” Certainly; only it is just what, on his presupposition, cannot be done. For if the slum-dweller cannot help being what he is, owing to his environment, neither can the slum-owner, or the legislator, or the community, help being what they are, owing to the self-same cause. In fact, we cannot get the word “ought” from Determinism; it is as much out of place in that connection as a free worker in a slave-compound. But every reform springs from a sense of “oughtness”; and the sense of moral obligation is itself the spontaneous expression of the consciousness of moral freedom. So far as we believe in the duty of reform or in “duty” itself, sans phrase we have already renounced Determinism, and proclaimed our belief in liberty. Let it be said once more, before we pass from this particular aspect of our subject, that too much may be set down to, or expected from, even environment; everybody knows that from gentle homes, surrounded by what seemed the most favouring influences, {150] there have sprung vicious and depraved characters. We ask ourselves, in encountering such cases, “Wanting is what?” And the answer must be given in Kant’s famous dictum: that which is “the only good thing in the world a good will.”

In one sense, paradoxical as it may sound, much of the strenuous modern advocacy of Determinism or semi-Determinism is a kind of inverted acknowledgment of man’s consciousness of freedom, viz., where that consciousness appears as the sense of sin. Of course, when a writer like Mr. Dole assures us that “there is no objection to a moral and spiritual Determinism that binds all things over into the unity of good,” {6] we merely reply that on the contrary there is the very serious objection that “all things” are not good. But most advocates of the determinist position are, to do them justice, well aware of the existence of wrong and discord in human life; and their object is, by emphasising the influence of heredity and environment, to remove or at least materially to lighten, the crushing burden of the sense of sin. The same intention underlies the effort, occasionally made, to persuade men that, seeing they are such as God created them, it is not for them to repine at being what they are, nor to “take too serious a view” of any “penchant for {151] revolt” another delightful phrase they may discover within themselves; as a recent writer has it, “The responsibility of its presence and action does not rest with us, nor are we justified in insulting God who made us, by repenting of what He has done. We might as well repent of the tiger and the snake, the earthquake and the tempest in nature.” {7] What are we to say of this attempt to make God answerable, not merely for the presence, but for the action, of whatever impulse to “revolt” of which we may be conscious?

To be quite frank, we cannot think the utterance we have just quoted other than extraordinarily ill-considered. The simple fact that we cannot follow all the impulses which arise in us, but have to choose between higher and lower the fact that we are well aware of this conflict of unharmonisable elements within ourselves, some of which can only triumph at the expense of others seems sufficiently to dispose of this writer’s main contention. We may not be responsible for the presence of these warring instincts, but we are undoubtedly responsible for translating one kind into action while holding the other kind in check. The earthward and the heavenward are in each of us, striving for mastery; but no imagination is vainer than that we can indulge both, or practise the impartiality with which Montaigne’s singular devotee lighted one candle {152] to St. George and another to the dragon. If we would realise the type of perfect in the mind, we must not gratify “the penchant for revolt,” but exert ourselves to lay

The ghost of the brute that is walking and haunting us yet and be free;

we must

Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.

Granted that the lower impulses, the inheritance from our animal ancestry, are left in us by Divine decree, they are there, not to be indulged on the plea that to repent would be tantamount to “insulting God who made us,” but to be conquered by the exercise of that freedom which is the earnest of our call to claim our birthright as children of God.

But when we are further told that, as well as repent of our actions, we might repent of the tiger and the snake, we are immediately conscious of a double confusion of thought behind that statement; for in the first place, we are not even called upon to repent of each other’s failings but only of our own, and in the second there is no analogy between ourselves and the tiger and snake, creatures which act according to their animal natures, and are incapable of desiring to be other than they are. Our capacity of, and desire for, better things attest our possession of a measure of liberty, and {153] indicate at once our responsibility for the course we take, and the essential distinction between the animal creation and ourselves a distinction wittily expressed in the remark that “everybody would admit that very few men are really manly; but nobody would contend that very few whales were really whaley.”

But those who seek to spare us the discomfort of repentance by teaching us to declare with a new inflection, “It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves,” forget that there is another side to this argument. It is, of course, very alluring to be told that we are not really blameworthy for acts which hitherto we have blamed ourselves for that our impulses are God-given that “the sinner is merely a learner in a lower grade in the school,” {8] and so forth; one can understand how grateful is such a morphia injection for deadening the pangs of an accusing conscience. The art of making excuses, as old as the Garden of Eden, will never lack ardent professors or eager disciples. Says Cassius to Brutus:

Have you not love enough to bear with me
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?

And Brutus answers with a smile:

Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth,
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,
He’ll think your mother chides, and leave you so!

{154] But, after all, we none of us do exclusively things for which we wish to escape being blamed; there is hardly anyone who could not name some occasion on which he has made some sacrifice, foregone an unfair advantage, declined to listen to selfish promptings, or held some baser impulse in check. None of these things were done for the sake of receiving praise; nevertheless, and quite inevitably, the doer felt praise_worthy_, conscious of an inner accord whose self-attesting power stamped it a reality, and not an illusion. But Determinism leaves no room for this emotion, any more than for that of remorse or blame-worthiness; we cannot get rid of the sense of sin, yet retain the sense of righteousness. The determinist sponge passes over the whole moral vocabulary, not only over the inconvenient parts; it obliterates the terms self-indulgence, dishonesty, cowardice, but the same fate overtakes self-conquest, integrity, bravery. To vary the phrase slightly, we must not, on the determinist hypothesis, insult God by taking credit to ourselves for what He has done. Are we prepared to surrender the approval of our conscience, the new-won self-respect which rewards the successful resistance offered to temptation, as having no basis in fact? And if we are not, what is this but to affirm our freedom and our responsibility alike in doing and forbearing?

{155]

And this inner sense of peace or discord, according as we have acted thus or thus this immediate consciousness that it lay with us to choose aright or amiss is both anterior and superior to all argument; it asserts itself victoriously against all merely intellectual perplexities, such as are apt to arise when we ask ourselves how man could be free to commit or not to commit an act, in view of the Divine omniscience. The contradiction seems a stubborn one, yet in practice we never feel our freedom circumscribed by it. Probably our difficulty arises largely from the mistake of applying time-relations to God at all, and thinking of eternity as an enormously long period instead of timeless Present, excluding both “unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday.” We, of course, have to think under the category of time, remembering and looking forward; but the Divine modus cognoscendi excludes either of these processes, being the timeless act of One who “knoweth altogether” in whose sight a thousand years are as a day, and a day as a thousand years. To the Eternal Intelligence, living in an unbeginning and unending Present, “past” and “future” must be equally unmeaning; to such a One we cannot but think that all events must be equally and simultaneously present, “for all live unto Him.” If we could behold the drama of existence sub specie aeternitatis, we might be able to understand how {156] Divine omniscience can co-exist with human freedom; as it is, we can only say, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for us it is high, and we cannot attain unto it.” We know that we cannot know. In any case, even while the Divine omniscience may present itself to us as a necessity of thought, human freedom remains a reality of experience and a postulate of morals.{9]

There are, however, those to whom human freedom presents itself, not as a contradiction to Divine omniscience, but as a contradiction in terms. Man’s choice of a course of conduct, they argue, cannot be thought of as other than {157] determined by an efficient cause; but if it is so determined, in what sense can it be free? An uncaused act is strictly speaking unthinkable; but do we not affirm that acts are uncaused when we speak of them as free in other words, is not the only alternative to Determinism what might be called indeterminism? The answer is (a) that every choice is certainly the result of an efficient cause; but (b) the fact of this being so interferes in no wise with the reality of liberty, nor does it contradict the universality of the law of causation. For the efficient cause is the man himself, and the fact that he can choose is attested in the very act of choice which would not be “choice” if there were not at least two real alternatives. We do not quarrel with the obvious truth, stated by Mill, that the will is determined by motives; we contest the assumption that a “free” act is an “uncaused” act. The act is caused or determined by the free choice of a causal self; in strict parlance, indeed, we should have to say that neither acts nor wills, but only human selves, are free. The will is not self-determined, but determined by a self; and this self is able not only to choose between different motives, but to attend to one set of motives to the neglect of others, and even to create motives in order to become able to make a difficult decision.

Let us, however, guard against a possible misconstruction by saying that there is all the difference between this conception of freedom {158] and the mere spontaneity which is recognised by the followers both of Spinoza and Hegel, a difference which was luminously brought out by Martineau.{10] The Spinozist doctrine of spontaneity, as Mr. Picton points out, means that the individual follows an impulse which “has its antecedents . . . in the chain of invariable sequences.” {11] Man, in this view, is “free” to do what he wants, because he wants it; he is not free in the sense that he could have wanted something different.{12] Nothing could be more frank than Mr. Picton’s statements on this point as when he speaks of the “free man’s” sense that “all things are of God, and could not have been otherwise:”

Of course the obvious retort occurs, (he continues,) that if indeed everything . . . occurs by invariable sequence, all this intellectual gospel of freedom is vain, and exhortations to its acceptance thrown away. And to those who are not satisfied with the freedom of conscious spontaneity, a condition in which we do just as we want to do, though our will is a link in an endless series of untraceable sequences, I suppose this objection must still be final.{13]

The objection is undoubtedly final, because it is absolutely valid; for by freedom we mean the ability to do or leave undone, to act thus or thus, and apart from such an ability moral judgments are quite unthinkable. Where we pronounce praise or blame, the tacit {159] presupposition is always that the object of the pronouncement could have acted differently; and this Spinozism denies.

The same remark applies to the teaching of that modern Absolute Idealism which declares, with Green, that man is his motives, and that he is “free” inasmuch as it is by his own motives that he is governed. It would be as accurate to call an automatic machine “free” on the ground that it is by its own works that it is moved. This is only, as Professor William James aptly calls it, “soft Determinism.” If the automaton could decide to slacken or increase its rate of speed, to go or to stop as it liked and where it liked above all, if it could aim at and devise improvements in its own mechanism so as to make itself a better automaton it would then be appropriate to speak of it as free; only it would no longer be appropriate to call it an automaton. And similarly it is only if man is able to determine his course of action if he can “choose” in any real sense, i.e., in the sense that he might choose differently, if he wished to do so that it can be anything but an abuse of language to speak of him as free; for only in that case can he be an object of approbation or condemnation. If he is merely the sum-total of his motives, he is as little free to act other than he does as a number of chemical elements combined in certain proportions are free to form anything but a definite chemical substance. As {160] Mr. Balfour has well expressed it,{14] “It may seem at first sight plausible to describe a man as free whose behaviour is due to ‘himself’ alone. But without quarrelling over words, it is, I think, plain that whether it be proper to call him free or not, he at least lacks freedom in the sense in which freedom is necessary in order to constitute responsibility. It is impossible to say of him that he ‘ought,’ and therefore he ‘can,’ for at any given moment of his life his next action is by hypothesis strictly determined.” But the freedom of which we are conscious e.g., in every experience of conflict between inclination and duty is something altogether different; we know that we can yield or resist, choose between, reinforce, and if necessary make, our motives.{15]

{161]

But is not sin, it is sometimes asked, inevitable per se, and in that sense natural to man, and if so, how can we be blamed for what we could not avoid? And again, is there not some truth in the statement that much that we call evil has been incidental to the progress of the race, just as the discords produced by the learner on a musical instrument are necessary incidents in the process which will teach him by and by to charm the ear with the perfect harmony? Such questions are frequently put forward; let us see if we are able to clear away the misunderstandings to which they bear witness.

(1) Admitting that a free moral being must be able in theory to choose the wrong as well as the right, it should in the first place be observed that the possibility of that or any course does not render it inevitable for him to take it, and it is only the possibility that is given. But it may be justly argued that since as a matter of fact all men sin, we cannot pretend that we are merely dealing with a theoretical possibility, but must pronounce sin to be de facto natural to man as well as inevitable for who has ever avoided it? Let us observe what follows: this, and no more, that sin is “natural” only in the sense in which disease is “natural” viz., as a disorder to which the human frame may become subject, but nevertheless a disorder. As physical disease entails a diminution of physical life, so sin entails a diminution of {162] our moral and spiritual life, an alienation of the soul from God; and while anyone may thus choose to describe sin the wilful misuse of faculties lent us for other ends as natural, it is significant that the result of sin is quite unnatural, viz., a state of disunion between the soul and God. So much is this the case that the aim of all religion is to bring about a cessation of this unhappy state, and to effect the healing of the discord created by man’s transgression. True religion treats sin, not as an error to be explained away, but as a wall of partition to be broken down; the essential aim of religion is atonement, man’s reconciliation to God.

(2) But it is further urged that in historical retrospect, and in the light of evolution, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the course of man’s development from a savage and barbaric condition all manner of ills bloodshed, slavery, etc. have been necessary stages; may not, then, sin be claimed as constituting part of the Divine plan? And if such was the case once, may it not be the case still? Here we are dealing with a very obvious confusion; for while man is in a low and undeveloped state, a good many acts which would be sins if committed by people on a higher level, have not that character at all. It is quite impossible, e.g., to read the Homeric poems and find in them any trace or indication that deceit, war and massacres are {163] regarded with so much as moral distaste; the men of the Homeric age had simply not risen to that moral height, and it would be futile to judge them by the standards of a more advanced civilisation. Undoubtedly, in its slow evolution from sub-human origins, the race passes through long sub-moral stages during which the animal instincts “moods of tiger or of ape” are still in the ascendant; it is only gradually that man becomes aware of certain practices with shame, disgust or remorse, and it is only then that we can begin to speak of the indulgence of the passions which prompt those practices as “sin.” When Paul calls the law the strength of sin, or says that the law came in that the trespass might abound, he states a truth, but sees it, if one may say so, out of focus; for the law was not arbitrarily imposed in order to brand a multitude of harmless acts as offences, but in proportion as the moral law is discerned by man’s mind, acts which formerly were merely non-moral begin to range themselves on this side or that, as right and wrong. True, even when our moral perceptions have thus been quickened, we shall not always “rule our province of the brute” with a strong hand true also that, owing to our earthly nature, “in many things we all stumble;” but so far from viewing these failures complacently, they ought to spur us to more earnest endeavours to leave our lower inheritance behind. The truth {164] concerning the “inevitableness” of sin was stated by our Lord when He said, “It must needs be that occasions” viz., of stumbling “come; but woe to that man through whom the occasion cometh.” Sin as such, as an “occasion,” is inevitable; but for any particular sin, for acting contrarily to the known best, the individual is responsible and greatest of all is the responsibility of one who knowingly and of design becomes an “occasion of stumbling” to another, making sin more difficult to avoid, or positively inciting another to wrong-doing. We do not forget the inequalities of moral endowment, nor do we leave out of sight that a temptation which for one man scarcely so much as exists may prove well-nigh irresistible to another; but the judgment upon each is in the wise and Fatherly hands of Him who knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are dust.

We have seen that Determinism, in spite of its humanitarian and even optimistic pretensions, when it is consistently applied falsifies every one of its promises; it is worth while to ask ourselves yet once more what is likely to be the effect of this doctrine upon the characters of those who seriously entertain it. Mill, in his frigid and precise, yet scrupulously just manner, expressed the opinion that

The free-will doctrine, by keeping in view precisely that portion of the truth which the word necessity puts {165] out of sight, namely the power of the mind to co-operate in the formation of its own character, has given to its adherents a practical feeling much nearer to the truth than has generally (I believe) existed in the minds of necessarians. The latter may have had a stronger sense of the importance of what human beings can do as to shape the characters of one another; but the free-will doctrine has, I believe, fostered in its supporters a much stronger spirit of self-culture.{16]

If for “self-culture” we substituted self-reliance, buoyancy, a sense of responsibility, we should scarcely go too far; for, indeed, it would be difficult to say from what sources the consistent determinist is to derive these qualities. He regards himself as the inevitable product of forces which have moulded him into that particular shape and no other; he cannot help himself or change his character by one hair’s-breadth; he views his own life, as has been well said, not in the light of a story which he can carry on as he may choose, but as a sum which must finish in a given way; and his one dismal consolation is that he is not responsible for his shortcomings. He can but say with his favourite sage:

The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that toss’d you down into the Field,
He knows about it all He knows HE knows!

But to believe that no effort can avail will certainly not inspire anyone to make such an effort; on the contrary, the likelihood is only {166] too great that such a belief will upon occasion serve as a welcome excuse for not making it. It has been said that Determinism, if not a very heroic creed, will at any rate make for tolerance and charity towards human failings; but nothing is more certain than that this kind of charity will, in practice, begin while its tendency will be also to end at home.

This estimate, it is true, is often warmly challenged; in actual life, we are told, many of those who profess determinist principles are notorious for their strenuous moral calibre, and certainly not open to the charge of laxity. Let that statement be ungrudgingly accepted; what it proves is no more than that prussic acid is entirely harmless provided it is not taken. We are quite willing to admit that Determinism, provided it is not put into practice, is nothing more than a mistaken theory. So long as men are content to be determinists in their studies and libertarians everywhere else, no particular mischief is likely to ensue; and it is matter of common experience, and for much congratulation, that our theoretical determinists should so far obey the instinct of moral self-preservation as to be for the most part practical libertarians, freely pronouncing praise and blame on human conduct, and feeling praise-and blameworthy themselves. But if they were logical and consistent determinists, they would do and feel no such thing; for the praise we give to a {167] well-poised spring-cart is one thing, and the praise we give to a well-poised character is another. And again, given a man who really believed, or whom it suited to believe, that he was quite irresponsible for his actions, and that no morally valid censure could attach to him for gratifying some appetite or passion, one cannot help suspecting that the result would be something much worse than mere laxity. That most persons who argue in favour of Determinism do not act up to its principles, is surely nothing in the doctrine’s recommendation; on the other hand there is always the unpleasant possibility that some day they may begin to take their philosophy seriously. And just as one would not like prussic acid to lie about promiscuously where all and sundry could have access to it, lest there should be a great deal of accidental poisoning, so we are justified in viewing the broadcast dissemination of determinist theory not merely with the antipathy one may feel towards intellectual error, but with the apprehension excited by a moral danger. Every system or movement which involves the denial of evil or of freedom the denial or under-emphasis of sin menaces not only religion in the narrower sense, but the structure of civilisation itself.

The rock upon which all these theories make shipwreck is the fact that we cannot abolish the reality of sin and leave the reality of {168] goodness intact. Saint and sinner, hero and coward, martyr and traitor, all, as we have seen, are reduced by Determinism to a common level where there is neither admiration nor censure, but at most a vague wonder at all the unnecessary suffering for that at any rate remains real involved in this profoundly futile procession of phenomena; and that is a conclusion to which humanity has always refused, and will always refuse, to reconcile itself. If we wish to see how utterly a deterministic conception empties morality of meaning, we need only turn to the earthly career of our Lord, and ask ourselves what it is that gives to that life and death their poignant significance but the voluntariness with which the Saviour took each successive step on the road from His native Nazareth to the place called Calvary. Think of Him simply as the product of a compelling Force, unable to act otherwise than He did, and at one stroke all that moved us to gratitude, to admiration, all that appealed to us most deeply, is gone. There can be no such thing as compulsory heroism or non-voluntary self-sacrifice; moral judgments upon “inevitable” conduct are merely absurd we do not bestow moral approval upon this kind of higher automatism.

Sometimes, indeed, in a connection like this, an attempt is made at some sort of compromise: granted, it is said, that each separate action of Christ’s was voluntary, yet His life-purpose {169] as a whole was surely pre-determined, and not left to Him to adopt or refuse. Yet how impossible, upon closer reflection, is this species of semi-Determinism! Every single act of Jesus was voluntary; but His whole life and character and purpose which is just the sum-total of these single, voluntary acts these, we are to believe, were strictly necessitated. He could choose every step of a way which was yet absolutely chosen for Him, so that He could tread no other! A tremendous decision like His going to Jerusalem lay within His power; but the aim and meaning of His life, viewed as a whole, He had no power of voluntarily determining. That, to our mind, is a wholly irrational position; one might as reasonably say, “Every link of this chain is golden; but the chain itself is iron.” Simple consistency requires the admission that if the chain is iron, so must the links be, and if the links are golden, so must be the chain.

We say again all that enshrines Jesus in our hearts, all that gives its redemptive power to His love-prompted death, and its significance to Calvary, rests upon the fact of His moral freedom. He had power to lay down His life; therein lay the glory of His self-surrender. He was, indeed, God’s instrument in effecting the reconciliation of sinners to the Divine Love, but it rested with Him to decide whether He would be that instrument or no, and the course He chose was not that of {170] mechanical necessity, nor was the decision to which He came a following in the line of least resistance. In accepting the pain and shame of the Cross, Jesus worked His Father’s will; but that will was not imposed upon Him from without, but freely responded to from within. As the author of the Theologia Germanica has it, a man should strive “to be to the Eternal Goodness what his hand is to a man”: but all the ultimate splendour of the achievement is bound up with the initial possibility of the striving. Not only the yearning love of God, but the conquering freedom of Man is finally attested by that blood-red seal which bears the impressure of a Cross.