No Refuge but in Truth | Page 3

remains of whole races of primeval animals
produced apparently only to become extinct. Of the earth itself, man's
destined habitation, large portions are utterly uninhabitable. The
legendary war between the powers of good and evil, God and Satan,
Ormuzd and Ahriman, was a fable naturally devised, though the birth
of the two powers and the division of existence between them is
inconceivable. Can anything like a clear line be drawn between good
and evil?
Effort and resistance to temptation may seem necessary ingredients in

the formation of a virtuous character. So far we may think we have the
clue. But what is to be said of the myriads of cases in which virtuous
effort seems to be morally impossible; in the case, for instance, of
barbarous or corrupt and depraved tribes or nations in which general
example is evil? What is to be said of deaths in infancy, when there has
been no time for character to be formed? To suppose that the Creator
could not have helped it, that this was his only way to the production of
virtuous beings, is to deny his omnipotence. A Satan with horns and
hoofs, struggling against the power of good, used to be the solution of
the problem, but belongs to the simple religion of the past.
A plan of which we are ignorant, but of which the end will be good, is
apparently our only explanation of the mystery. The earth is beautiful;
we have human society with all its interests; we have friendship, love,
and marriage; we have art and music. We must trust that the power
which will determine the future reveals itself in these.
The belief that man has an immortal soul inserted into a mortal body
from which, being, as Bishop Butler phrases it, "indiscerptible," it is
parted at death, has become untenable. We know that man is one; that
all grows and develops together. Imagination cannot picture a
disembodied soul. The spiritualist apparitions are always corporeal.
Free will surely we unquestionably have. Necessarianism seems to
assume that in action there is only one element, motive. But reflection
seems to show that there are two elements, motive and will; and of this
duality we seem to be sensible when we waver in action or feel
compunction for what we have done. Is it possible to explain moral
repentance or morality at all without assuming the freedom of the will?
Habit may enslave; but to be enslaved is once to have been free.
What is conscience? When we repent morally are we looking only to
the immediate consequences of the act, or are we also looking to the
injury done to our moral nature? If the latter, does it not appear that
there is something in us not material and pointing to a higher life?
Much of us, no doubt, is material. Memory and imagination often act
unbidden by the will; imagination often when we are asleep. We may
find a material element even in the character as moulded by physical or

social circumstance or need. But is there not also a conscious effort of
self-improvement not dependent on these? That all is material, nothing
spiritual, does not seem yet to have been proved.
It is by close examination of our own nature and its workings, perhaps,
that we are most likely to solve the enigma of our being. The word
spiritual surely has a meaning; it suggests self-culture not only for the
present but for a higher state.
Evolution is a great discovery. But evolution cannot have evolved itself,
nor does there seem to have been an observed case of it. Points of
similarity between the ape and man are not proofs of transition. Has
any animal given, like man, the slightest sign of self-improvement or
conscious tendency to progress?
The putting on by the mortal of immortality, it must however be owned,
baffles conception. In the apologue of Dives and Lazarus the dead
appear still in their human forms and talk to each other across the gulf,
apparently narrow, which divides the abode of the damned from that of
the blessed. This clearly is the work of imagination. Nor, seeing the
infinite gradations of character and the frequent mixture of good and
evil in the same man, can we understand how a clear line can be drawn
between those who are admitted to heaven and those who are
condemned to hell.
Mere difficulties of sense or intellect on mundane questions might be
met by appeal to the mysteries of a universe which may conceivably be
other in reality than to us it appears. But it is to be supposed that divine
beneficence would give its creatures all powers of intelligence
necessary to their moral welfare, above all those entailing reward or
punishment in a future life.
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