Formed part of preceding address.
PERHAPS the most weird picture in "Modern
Painters" is the description of Tintoretto's "Last Judgment."
Dante in poetry, Giotto, Orcagna, and Michael Angelo on canvas, have spent
their imaginations on the unimaginable theme; but Tintoretto alone, says
Mr. Ruskin, has grappled with this awful event in its verity: "Bat-like,
out of the holes and caverns and shadows of the earth, the bones gather,
and the clay-heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half-kneaded anatomies,
that crawl and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the
clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed with the
earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to Siloam
Pool; shaking off one by one the dreams of the prison-home, hardly hearing
the clangour of the trumpets of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as
they awake, by the white light of the new Heaven, until the great vortex
of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment seat: the firmament
is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and floats,
and falls in the interminable, inevitable light; the bright clouds are
darkened with them as with thick snow, currents of atom life in the arteries
of heaven, now soaring up slowly, farther, and higher, and higher still,
till the eye and the thought can follow no farther, borne up, wingless,
by their inward faith and by the angel powers invisible, now hurled in
countless drifts of horror before the breath of their condemnation."
Such is the picture, "not typically nor symbolically," Mr. Ruskin
tells us, "but as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed."
That artist and critic have drunk in the
spirit of their dreadful subject may be unquestioned. That pictures of
the Last Judgment, whether with pen or pigment, serve a certain function,
is also beyond dispute. To deny this would be to condemn the whole of sacred
art. And to have the mute appeal of the great religious masterpieces silenced
in the thronged galleries of Europe, where they have stood like beacons
to the passing stream of life for centuries, would be a blow to Christianity.
But it is no less true that to a class of minds the dramatic aspects of
the Last Judgment appeal in vain. The material imagery, we are assured,
the marshalling of the prisoners at the trumpet call, the Judge and the
great White Throne, are presentations to an age which has passed away.
The very tying-down of Judgment to a Day, the whole machinery of a human
court "which meets, goes through its docket and adjourns," are
out of harmony with the other ways of God; and whatever reality may underlie
it, the conception, as it stands at present, is too gross and artificial
to find acceptance with a scientific age.
Many will wonder what science means by this
fastidiousness. Some will quite fail even to enter into the state of mind
which feels it, or which presumes to question the congruity or incongruity
of what has been revealed. Nevertheless, this is a real difficulty. And,
whatever be its genesis, we are compelled to recognise an attitude of mind
which somehow disqualifies its possessor from being greatly influenced
by such spectacular representations as have been named. Our feelings are
a great mystery; the least definable are often those which sway us most.
But to meet this state of mind, rather than to defend its reasonableness
or ban its presumption, is the question before us. For the difficulty,
after giving up a truth in one form, of winning it back in another is very
great. And it is certainly true that for want of a connecting link between
the popular doctrines of eschatology, and the facts and ways of nature
and of the moral life, many who in this instance have repudiated the form
have come to abandon the substance. To restore the substance and meaning
of the idea of judgment by seeking to renovate the form is our object now.
We are far from claiming that the form to be presented is the best, still
less that it contains the whole of the substance. Truth has many forms,
and the whole substance of this truth is, perhaps, not given as yet to
man to know. But upon this, the most solemn thought that has ever been
presented to the conscience of mankind, it is impossible that reason should
be silent, or nature withhold its contribution from such a theme.
We have hinted that the scientific difficulty
in accepting the doctrine in its conventional form is one of standpoint.
But the particular point of the objection is worth defining, and for a
remarkable reason. What science really rebels at in the old doctrine is
its externalness. It is outside nature, a foreign and unanticipated
element, a breach of continuity. And what science would like to see is
a universal principle, a principle, if possible, operating from within,
bound up with nature itself, and involved in the general system of things.
Now, such a claim coming from science is in every way astonishing and unexpected.
For observe what it is. It is simply a demand upon religion for a further
spirituality. It is really materialism that science objects to in the old
doctrine--it objects to a material throne, and bar, and trumpet, to an
external law, to a judgment from without rather than from within. The protest,
in fact, is a rebuke to religion for the grossness of its conceptions,
for its tardy abandonment of the letter, for the permanence it has given
to provisional forms--in short, for its unspirituality.
Nor is this the first instance in which science
has called the attention of religion to this crude externaless in
its ideas. In several well-known instances it has already imposed upon
religion the useful task of remodelling its doctrines; and in each case
the gain has been in the direction of greater inwardness, greater naturalness,
greater spirituality. And the still more interesting fact remains to be
noted, that it is generally science itself which supplies the material
for the remodelled doctrine. As it destroys, it fulfils--the very discoveries
which begat its doubt become, when rearranged and incorporated by religion,
the materials for a firmer faith. For instance, the grossness and externalness
of the old theory of a Six Days' Creation was once a serious stumbling-block
to science. Students of nature were unaccustomed to find nature working
in ways so abrupt; facts proving the slow development of the world had
accumulated; the Divine-fiat hypothesis was challenged, and finally abandoned.
And then out of these very facts grew the new and beautiful theory that
Creation was not a stupendous and catastrophic operation performed from
without, but a silent process acting from within. So, having destroyed
the old conception, science itself contributed the new--a conception which
it could not only intelligently accept, but which for religion also left
everything more worthy of worship than before.
Again, consider a case where the difficulty
of believing an accepted theory is not physical but moral. Take the second
commandment. The impression this law would leave on the early mind would
certainly be that, in visiting the iniquities of fathers upon children,
God weighed each case separately and administered special judgment upon
cases of exceptional enormity. God administered punishment, that is to
say, from without, by judicial enactments, augmenting or remitting sentence
according to discretion. But instead of referring the enforcement of this
commandment to an external court, we now see that execution of its sentences
are transferred to the laws of nature. Instead of working from without,
from above nature, it works, in ordinary circumstances at least, within
it. It is, in fact, the ordinary law of heredity--the law of transmission
from sire to son of the dispositions, tendencies, temptations, and diseases
of the parent. Now, while losing nothing here, much is gained. The idea
of judgment for sin is as much in the law as ever, the personality of the
Judge is as before; but the seat of judgment has changed, and the mechanism
of justice is replaced by the working of inherent laws. The very laws of
nature have become "the hands of the living God."
Now with these two examples before us of
the change of emphasis from the external to the internal, may we not ask
whether any parallel change is warranted in the case of the larger doctrine
now in view? Should it not also have an inward ground, a discoverable law?
Is it an operation from without, or a process from within? Is there no
anticipation, in short, in nature of a final judgment? As it is not intended
to deal here directly with the Scripture references, I will leave them
with two remarks.
1. The Scriptures are not explicit--are,
in fact, very far from explicit. Let any one collate the various references
to this subject--and they are very numerous--sift them with whatever care
he likes, arrange them upon whatever principle he likes, or upon all known
principles of interpretation up to the present time, and he will find them
perplexing, and even contradictory. Here, if anywhere then, there is room
for the New Testament to come in and seek out a basis of law. And I select
the field as an illustration, simply because it is a remote one, and at
the first blush most unpromising.
2. That while Christ lays down, and especially
in the parables of Judgment, the great ethical principles of eschatology,
nearly all beyond that, in His teaching and in Paul's, has a purely Jewish
or Rabbinic basis. No theme is more prominent in Jewish literature. The
older portions of the book of Enoch, for example, contain constant allusions
to a "Great Judgment," "the Day of the Great Judgment,"
"the Great Day of Judgment," "the Great Day," "the
Day of Judgment," "the Righteous Judgment," and "the
Last Judgment for all Eternity." The Sibylline books and the Apocalypses
generally teem with detailed descriptions of such an event variously conceived
of, variously dated, and for the most part having a political origin and
significance. "Even the idea of `a day` (according to Stanton) does
not seem to have been originally taken from a judge holding court, but
from a terrible triumphal conqueror executing vengeance in a day of battle
and slaughter."
But to proceed. The position to be now taken
up is not only the one which will be obvious on a little thought--that
Judgment is not an act to be accomplished, an act sudden, spectacular,
explosive, but a quiet process now and ever going on-- but that that process
is simply the operation of one of the widest and most familiar of the Laws
of Nature.
This law let me first bring forward in its
simplicity as mere natural law; later on, we shall reach its ethical relations;
and I must be pardoned for speaking here my own native tongue of Science
rather than attempting a translation into ethics. The name of this law
is the Survival of the Fittest. Eternal life under the last analysis is
a question of the survival of the fittest. And Judgment is a question of
natural selection. In spite of the constantly reiterated protest of popular
theology that science and religion part company for ever over this law,
in spite of the apparent objection that while in nature the prize is to
the strong, and the weak go to the wall, in the kingdom of grace the bruised
reed is not broken and the weary and heavy laden win; it is the most certain
of truths that in nature and grace alike the law of the survival of the
fittest holds. A moment's reflection will show that in thus contrasting
the genius of nature and the genius of Christianity by way of objection,
the word fitness is used in two totally different senses. In the one case
it is employed in a biological, in the other in an ethical sense. When
it is said that a fish survives in water because it is "fit"
for it, all that is meant is that the organization of the fish is, in certain
respects, adapted for this element. And when it is said that eternal life
is a question of the survival of the fittest, what is implied is that it
is a question of the survival of the adapted--of those who, by some means,
have become specially fitted or equipped for living in this element. In
this--the only possible scientific sense--it is literally and eternally
true that the future state is a question of the survival of the fittest.
The survival of the fittest means, then, only the survival of the adapted.
It is not asserted, meantime, that the survival of the adapted means also
the survival of the worthiest. Whether worthiness be, after all, the same
thing as fitness will be referred to presently. But that no moral quality
whatever is involved in the operation of this law is a point to be marked,
for the basis of judgment for which we contend is one involved in the very
constitution of the world.
The essential thing in any organism in relation
to its surroundings, the characteristic quality on which life depends,
is adaptation to environment. If an organism is to survive in water,
it must be adapted to the aquatic condition by the development of a water
breathing faculty, a gill. If it is to change its surroundings so as to
live in air--as actually happens during the life-history of the common
frog--it must become adapted to correspond with the atmosphere by the development
of an air-breathing apparatus, or lung. So if the highest organism is to
be in correspondence with the Divine Environment, he must be adapted to
it. He, the Christian, must have undergone some process of adaptation to
environment--theologically called sanctification--in virtue of which he
is able to correspond, to commune, with God. Only those so adapted can
possibly exist in this element, even as those only equipped with gill can
breathe in water, or those with lung in air. But this is simply to repeat
once more that the adapted survive; that the fit survive; that they are
"selected" to live by the possession of the required faculty.
Suppose, now, to point the application, these
varying degrees of adaptation to environment to be tested by actual experiment.
A pool teeming with living organisms suddenly dries up. The vast majority
of these organisms are adapted for an aquatic environment and for no other,
and with the removal of this they perish. In terms of adaptation to environment
they are judged. One or two, however, such as the water-newt, in addition
to the special adaptation required for the liquid element possess the further
power of corresponding with the earth and air in virtue of the possession
of a lung. So long, therefore, as it can remain in correspondence with
the earth and air, it lives. Suppose next some climatic change to occur,
or some physical catastrophe such as the sudden eruption of a volcano,
and that those who escaped from the water are no longer able to adapt themselves
to this further change. In terms of environment they are judged. Suppose,
however, that another organism, man, within the affected area was able
to escape. His survival is due solely to the superior complexity of his
organization. By his intelligence he foretold the calamity, and prepared
for it, or with the aid of his inventions he swiftly withdrew to a safe
distance. But suppose next, by a mightier catastrophe, the earth itself
should collide with another star, and make his new environment again untenable.
What is to become of him? It will depend on what correspondences remain,
and on what environment still exists. But the old law holds He will go
where he is fit for, and be in what is fit for him. If he has any correspondence
with eternity, he will go on living in terms of these correspondences.
He will go on living in terms of his correspondences--this
is the point of it all. And this is natural selection; it is another way
of saying that the fit to survive survive. And is there not here a principle
of Judgment? The organisms in the drying pool, the water-newt upon the
quaking land, the man at the world's collapse--each is allocated to his
place according to his correspondences. No external act of choice takes
place; there is an inherent claim to live, or an inherent necessity to
die, in the organism itself This claim is founded on the fulfilment or
non-fulfilment of an essential and imperative condition; it is a necessary
consequence of the law of the survival of the fittest; it is not an arbitrary
appointment or reward, it is the natural evolution of an organism in terms
of its correspondences.
Nature sits upon no far-off throne, like
a capricious goddess, signalling which shall live and which shall die.
But in the very inmost being of each she discloses a law of life or death.
If an animal dies, its death is the natural culmination of its own past,
of tendencies, proclivities, and processes already at work within; if it
lives, its survival is the direct result of what it at the moment is. If
death is, in such cases, in any sense a judgment, it is a judgment solely
on unfitness. And if in dissolution the sentence of a judge is being carried
out, it is not by an external operation, but by an inward process. And
so with man. It is not necessary that he should be judged from without;
he will be judged from within. He is his own judge.
No witnesses need be called to give their
evidence; the witnesses are himself. No gaolers need be told off
to watch him; he cannot run away from himself. No external court need formulate
the case against him; his own past has done it, his own past is it. No
Judge need pronounce sentence at a Last Day; as he stands there to-day,
he has sentenced himself,--as he stands there, he is prisoner, gaoler,
court, witnesses, all in one, all the past collected and focussed in his
present, all the present defining and determining the unknown, but not
unanticipated, future. As in the past evolution of the earth the nebulous
gases combined in the order of their affinities and arranged themselves
in the order of their densities, so in the future evolution will each go
to his own, living on in terms of his correspondences, in the order determined
by his spiritual affinities.
This principle of judgment pervades with
its invisible presence the whole of nature. Every plant, insect, animal,
man--man physical, mental, moral, spiritual--is daily and hourly on trial.
This court is never opened and never closed. It is a vast, mysterious,
self-acting organization, ramifying through the whole of nature, and without
resistance or appeal, each living thing obeys its verdict.
But, in the case of an organism, what is
it that betrays the insufficiency of its correspondences? It is the presentation
to it of the new environment. So long as the fish lives in the stream,
it will neither feel nor exhibit any want of adaptation to other surroundings.
But when the stream runs dry? So long as the swallow lives in the English
climate, its joyful existence is complete. But when the English summer
wanes and the chills of winter come? So long as man lives on in the environment
of this present world, his correspondences, or some of them, are satisfied.
But when this present world is done? Then is the great trial. Then is the
sifting time. Then is the Judgment Day. Then his sufficiency or insufficiency
is finally betrayed. In presence of the new environment--not by any book
opened, word spoken, past recalled--in the mere presence of it, he is made
manifest. This reflex influence of environment has been a commonplace with
theology from the beginning. It is remarkable how full revelation is of
this still future truth--remarkable also that, being a thing to come, nature
should so anticipate and confirm it. No thought is more frequent or more
solemn in the Biblical accounts of the last things than that at the appearing
of Christ a mighty change will sweep over the moral world--a sudden revolution
in men's opinions--a swift reversal of all human judgments. And this is
not an unlooked-for crisis. It is the natural effect of the new environment--or
of the sudden prominence of the new environment--upon organisms well or
ill prepared to live in it. Hence it is not only that in this Presence
the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, nor that human lives projected
against His will henceforth and evermore appear in colours black as hell.
But it will be that vital relations will manifest themselves in the case
of every man; his correspondences will continue, or come short. All that
he is, the little that he is, all that he is fit for, all that he is not
fit for, will be revealed. In terms of these, in himself, and at a glance,
he will know whether he is to live or die. With his own eyes he will see
the great gulf fixed; with his own reason he will see why it cannot be
crossed
"The appearing of Christ," says
Van Oosterzee, "brings about separation (krisi)
between the one who has the Son and the one who has Him not; or rather,
the difference, already present, unseen, is in consequence of His coming
and His work, brought to light. Thus the Christ becomes necessarily Judge,
even where He desires to be Saviour." And to the same effect Paul,
"For we must all be made manifest before the Judgment-seat of Christ."
This is that being "weighed in the balance" in which some shall
be "found wanting." This is what Paul foresaw when he said, "We
must all be made manifest before the Judgment-seat of Christ."
This, again, is not peculiar to Christianity
or to science, but universal law. The moment I go to a high-class concert,
in the matter of musical taste I am judged. My musical soul, or soul-lessness,
is instantly made manifest. The moment I enter a picture gallery I am judged.
My correspondences are or are not. I am weighed in the balances. That day
declares it.
What man is what God is--these are the materials
for the anticipation of judgment. They are in each man's hands, and in
terms of them he can here and now decide. To no man, surely, is it ever
given to draw aside the veil and forecast the future for another. Personal
to the individual, the possession of the appropriate correspondences,--the
adaptation to the Divine is truly known to oneself alone. And we are therefore
warned by the New Testament: "Judge nothing before the time, `until
the Lord come,' who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness,
and will make manifest the counsels of the heart." But so far from
precluding a judgment of our own upon ourselves, the very inability of
our neighbour, the impotence to help of those who know and love us best,
the isolation and solitude in which we must settle this question of life
and death, create a warrant for self-examination such as no serious man
will allow himself to evade. "Examine yourselves," says Paul,
"whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves." And again,
"Make your calling and election sure."
* * * *
Mr. Darwin tells us that the object of natural
selection--the object of the fittest surviving--is "the improvement
of organisms." It is the means by which nature shows her appreciation,
not of fitness alone, but of fitness in the direction of advancement. It
is her splendid effort to ennoble life, to exalt and purify creation, to
bring all organisms to an ever-increasing perfectness and complexity, to
carry on the evolution of the world to higher and higher beauty, usefulness,
and efficacy. How keen her desire to compass this great end, how enormous
the value she sets on the result, may be feebly inferred from the terrible
price she is prepared to pay for it. If nature is in earnest about one
thing, it is quality. To this end all her labour tends; she works, and
waits; she destroys, and re-creates. And surely nothing is more significant
for religion, nothing could more eloquently express its own deepest aim
for the world, than this mighty gravitation of all in nature towards fitness,
wholeness, perfectness. Even Lamarck finds himself so impressed by the
silent witnesses around him to the great ascent of life as to believe in
"an innate and inevitable tendency towards perfection in all organic
beings."
But it is to the various eschatological theories
of theology that its voice most distinctly speaks. Has Antinomianism no
tacit following in the modern Church? Let those who have to meet this subtle
and monstrous and unaccountable perversion explain the meaning and press
home the necessity of adaptation to environment. Let it be shown that fitness
to survive is tested, not by profession, but by experiment. How easily
in the theological forms may faith be a correspondence, a communion, a
living bond with a living Christ, or (it may be) a mere belief, a barren
formula, a name to live. There is an ecclesiastical Christ and a living
Christ; there is a historical Christ and a risen Christ; there is a theological
Christ and a personal Christ. Is it not clear alike from reason from nature,
and from revelation that only by contact--immediate, personal, living--with
a living, present Christ the eternal life can be a root in the heart of
man? We turn to yet another tendency of the time. More and more the doctrines
of Universalism seem to spread.
Where then, it may be asked, is mercy? The
answer is--(1) It will be seen presently that the whole scheme is established
only in mercy; but (2) even mercy has its laws. The object of mercy can
never be to "save" the unfit, i.e. to save the unadapted,
which is inconceivable and impossible. Mercy can make the unfit fit; it
has a vast machinery for this one purpose. That is its work, its line,
the only line it can take. To "fit" the unfit is a possibility,
to "save" them being unfit, to sentence them unfit in either
relation to a heaven or a hell is impossible. The only conceivable ways
to save a fish tossed on the rocks by a billow are to suddenly supply it
with a lung, which is impossible, or to turn it back into its own element.
On similar principles the unfit in relation to God cannot be saved, the
fit can by no possibility be lost.
As the evangelist said of Emerson, "Emerson
was one of the most beautiful souls I ever knew. There is something wrong
with his machinery somewhere, but I do not know what it is, for I never
heard it jar. He cannot be lost, for if he went to hell, the devil would
not know what to do with him."
* * * * *
But we must shape this many-sided inquiry
to a close.
One other aspect of this Truth demands a
passing notice before we close. Till now we have discussed the survival
of the fittest only as it affects the individual. This is a small part
of the truth. No law is of private interpretation. How calmly we, as individuals,
appropriate the laws of God focussing all in our own little world--as if
they were only for ourselves; as if they were not the parallel of latitude
of a larger universe, the revelation of the method of God's whole purposes
and government. What is each man but one little thread in the loom of God?
The great wheels revolve, the shuttle flies, not for the thread but for
the web; not for the web alone, but for the pattern on the web; not for
the pattern on the web, but for One, the Designer, who makes loom and web
and pattern for Himself. To know why the loom is there, and why the shuttle
moves, and why the threads are in this place or in that, or why they are
there at all, we must look beyond ourselves, discover if we may the hidden
Workman's purpose, and see in the half-finished design the prophecy of
some final harmony.
Revelation is too prophetic of the End, and
creation is too full of God and of His plans to leave man without a clue
to the larger meanings of the natural laws. In the natural world the function
of the law of the survival of the fittest is to produce fitness--to make
a select world (a cosmos, beautiful, harmonious) perfect. So is it in the
spiritual world. There its function will surely be to secure and guarantee
the quality of the Kingdom of God.
If it is necessary that there should be a
heaven, it is necessary that it should be kept heavenly. This is that law
which now and evermore keeps heaven pure. It has more than a personal application;
it is a chief factor in the great evolution, one of the main instruments
by which nature passes on to these nobler and nobler developments in which
all changes, forces, and movements in nature appear to be culminating.
So far as science can read the secret will and purpose of creation, it
is this, that Nature is gravitating with infinite patience and sureness
towards perfection.
The object of the Law of the Survival of
the fittest is to produce fitness. And this is the object of Judgment--to
produce fitness here by the terror of its law hereafter, to separate the
chaff from the wheat, yet not for the sake of punishing the chaff, only
for the sake of preserving the wheat. This is the great law whose secret
operations tend to make a select world. It is the guarantee of the quality
of the Kingdom of God.
Even now, in some poor way, we seem to see
how God proceeds to secure His end. Our little world has had its own life-history.
In the life-history of this one world we can dimly make out, not only the
direction, but the method of progress, for every feature in its marvellous
evolution is a further vision of things to come. Look into this past for
a moment, observe God's way of producing earth from chaos, and say whether
no clue lies here to that further evolution of heaven from earth.