RELIGIOUS FATALISM.*
Tiffs curious little book is one of the very few religious works which appear in any year that are wholly and in every fibre instinct with the unconventional personal faith of the author,— a faith that the reader feels to be of the essence of the writer's hourly and inmost thought, and scarcely even in part grown out of the mere assumptions of the society in which he lives. Indeed, only an infinitesimal part of our modern world, even of our modern Christian world, would agree in either the feeling or the thought it contains. Our testimony to this evident fact is the less biassed by sympathy that we differ absolutely from the central theory, and in great measure even from the central moral feeling of the essay. Yet, in spite of this radical difference, this seems to us the essay of a man whose inner life is infinitely more real and intense than his outer life, who, as far as we can judge from the language of a book (and if such a thing be true of any of our dis- tracted nineteenth-century lives of business), may be said to have approached St. Paul's ideal of a life "hidden with Christ in God." We may say of this strange little book, though in a very different sense, what Mr. Matthew Arnold said of the author of Ober- mane :—
"A fever in these pages burns Beneath the calm they feign, A wounded human spirit turns • Hero on its bed of pain."
But we could not add, as is there added, that this fever is the fever of a mind which has despaired of seeing its way clear through the "hopeless tangle of our age." On the contrary, the author of this little book has persuaded himself that he has found the key to the enigma, and hugs his faith with a passion of inward fervour which is the more pathetic, the less we can accept it as true. Mr. Field has returned to the old theory so dear to our Calvinist forefathers, but comparatively little held and less delighted in of late years, of a rigid and absolute but religious fatalism, which makes God in fact the only Being in the universe, though He may in His goodness give the external appearance of distinct personality to certain thinking particles of the divine medium. Mr. Field himself describes his book as "showing that mankind consists of angels and devils journeying to the homes of their delight in Heaven and Hell ; also showing how God's love is justified in the creation of both, and gives them, while both are but creatures, the feeling that they are creatures self-existent and independent." Mr. Field, however, makes thus much con- cession to the spirit not so much perhaps of modern thought, as of religious feeling and moral logic, that he holds Hell to be a very comfortable place for these involuntary devils. As they are entirely unable to be other than what they are, and are made in Mr. Field's belief only for the sake of the good, in order to give a semblance of conflict and the feeling of true heroism to those who are predestined to the love of God, he sees that it would be unjust to make their life eternally miserable, and so he dooms them to an eternal happiness in pure selfishness ;—though into the most absolute of conceivable impossibilities, how a number of purely selfish beings are to be thoroughly happy together, Mr. Field very wisely does not enter., But both worlds, accorling to him, the bad and the good, once finally separated, are to h.; very ' comfortable ones. The inhabitants of each have fulfille 1 their true destiny and attained their proper ends ; the one, completely selfish delights, the other, complete loss of themselves in God. It is difficult, almost impossible, to state Mr. Field's theory, without giving an irreligious instead of a religious impression. And yet it is, as it has often been before, a theory adopted not out of the austerity of a ruthless logic, but out of the passion of a religious love. The following passage, for instance, breathes the spirit of the book, though its intellectual creed is what we have described :— "I must find Him everywhere, or I can find no comfort. I must feel that He it is who bids the angry man beat me down with his insulting words ; or my grief to have to face them, for ends so vain as that of carrying on existence here, becomes unbearable ; but if every word and tone spring out of God's permission and appointment,—if it be, in fact, God's voice and tone,—what noed we fear? for then we are assured it is for good ends it comes; then do we ever gaze into the face of God, are upheld by His embrace, which, though it may destroy this body, yet, so destroying it, gives, in the heroism called forth, a gift attainable only through the torture of the flame and at the point of the sword."
The way in which Mr. Field reconciles his theory that there is no
• Heroism; or, God Oar Father, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent. By Homes FMK, B.A. London; Lotigumne. such thing in reality as either voluntary sin or actual retribution for the sinner, with the Bible is curious and ingenious. He maintains that the Bible,—like all the deepest things of life, on his theory, —is only a book describing appearances, and as regards sin and its consequences, describing the mode in which they appear to the heavenly mind. Thus the gnashing of teeth, the torture reserved for the wicked, is not real gnashing of teeth, not real torture to the wicked, but consists in such a condition as produces on the mind of the truly good and unselfish the impression of real torture of the highest kind. As the bird would feel it torture to be buried in the ground, while the mole would feel it torture to be tossed in the air, so Mr. Field holds that the wicked would feel the delights of the good to be tor- ture, and the good equally feel the delights of the wicked torture. According to him, if we may be allowed to apply his doctrine to the interpretation of one of the most remarkable of our Lord's parables, the rich man was not really in torment on the other side of the great gulf. His tongue, so far from being con- sumed with tormenting flame, was enjoying with delicate palate the most delicious morsels of diabolic epicurism, but Lazarus in Abraham's bosom saw all those delicacies as mere pangs of agony, and the voice which came across the gulf to Father Abraham was not the real voice of the sufferer, but a dramatic reverie of Abraham himself, looking upon what seemed to him the worst of agonies, and soliloquizing on what he should have felt if he had been lapped in those horrible delights. Thus Mr. Field says :- "If all the world's a stage, and men and women merely players, history is but an account of the drama acted; and the Old Testament and the New contain this drama as enacted in the part of Jewish history related. They are books written for the edification of the heavenly man, and regard all things with his eyes. We thus have hell described as a place where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched ;' a ' furnace of fire ; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth ;' a place of 'everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels ;' a place of everlasting punishment,'—all accounts of hell as it appears to the heavenly man. Even of Judas Iscariot our Lord says, 'It had been good for that man if he had not been born ;' not that he—a mere puppet in God's hands, doing a deed, villanous, it is true, but one by which all men are blessed—will not go to his happiness, like the rest of his race ; but that to the heavenly man his offence is such, that the worst of all imaginable things—annihilation—were preferable. I call Jewish history an account of a drama, containing a set of appearances which are to their deeper meaning surface appearances. I must give it this name, because God really moves, while man seems to move the actors. I feel myself specially entitled to call this history, with its central event of the Crucifixion, a drama : for I find the one crucified, Himself telling His disciples, that whatever be done to Him, it is not men that do it but Himself only, as the human embodiment of God. Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again ; no man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself.' He thus warns His disciples, Be not deceived by appearances ; look beneath the,surf ace of things ; never mind that men seem to do all you will see done, of themselves: they are but puppets in my hands and my Father's, and play the parts we appoint. Their acting, it is trite, calls forth real blood, genuine tears, heartfelt joy. We will it so ; and, behold, I, even I, do not shrink from all We have appointed. I, the Director, have become a seeming actor, among you for a time, and see, according to our laws, I suffer and die even as you suffer and die, and joy and live even as you joy and live.' And in His own words, 'Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. '"
Grotesquely untrue as all this seems to us, it is impossible to read the little essay in which it is set forth without profound respect, and a certain amount even of religious sympathy. For the theory, as we said, does not come out of the intellectual doctrine of cause and effect, but from the intense desire to find God everywhere, — the almost passionate feeling that if God is not everywhere and in every pang, however bitter, life would be insupportable.
And, therefore, the true criticism on Mr. Field's essay is not to show by analysis of the doctrine of necessity and free-will that the former is false and the latter true, for clearly it was not by any discussion of this kind that he came at his faith. The true criti- cism upon this doctrine is that it overbalances itself, defeats its own end, and by ascribing everything to God robs us of Him altogether.
For how does Mr. Field make sure that if evil and good are equally created by God, and are therefore equally entitled to happiness of their own sort, God is on the side of the good, and not of the evil? The true inference from his theory would be that God is equally favourable to both, in other words, that good is as much created to give zest to the taste for evil, as evil is, in Mr. Field's view, in order to give zest to the taste for good. Mr. Field will say that the good know by their own conscience, that is, by inspiration, that God loves disinterested love, which our author regards as the essence of all goodness, and hates selfishness, which he regards as the essence of all evil. Well, but the evil man, whose whole nature and every act and thought are as much from God, according to Mr. Field, as the good man's whole nature and every act and thought, will equally and equally truly
in Mr. Field's view, declare that his inspiration and his instincts are all selfish, and will claim the right to argue thence that God approves selfishness, and not disinterestedness. If we are to rely on either's separate experience, why not on the one as much as the other ? If we are to rely on both.-as is more philosophical,— then God is neutral in the fight between good and evil, and pro- motes the fight by prompting each combatant in turn, finding in the two sorts of conscious happiness,—conscious happiness in evil and conscious happiness in good,—a greater variety and wealth of creation, than either without the contrast with the other could alone furnish. But if this be true,—and it is the natural, irre- sistible conclusion from this theory,—then we lose God, the God of Christ, altogether, and get in His place the God of Hume, whose qualities are as mixed as the works of His hands. Indeed, once admit that God creates evil for the sake of good, and He can never be again the Spirit of pure Good, but only at best a great artist, who puts in darkness as a background to light, or light as a background to darkness, as the case may be, from a keen percep- tion that the one sets off the other to great advantage.
In short, Mr. Field's theory really comes to this curious result, that appearances,—phenomena,—are, after all, truer, better, deeper, than the realities which underlie them. He contends that " heroism " is a mere appearance, that no man can do other than he does, the evil evil, the good good, and yet he makes all this elaborate machinery of appearance a mechanism for the elaboration of heroism, because he feels that the qualities evolved by (seeming) conflict are so much greater than the qualities which require no conflict to evolve. God, too, as He seems to us, as the Bible paints Him with a view to encourage that seeming,—utterly devoted to good, hating evilwith a perfect hatred,—isso muchgreater than God as He really is, in Mr. Field's view, creating good and evil alike with perfect impartiality, the one to set off the other, that Mr. Field sinks the latter and true view as much as He can in the former or seeming view. For all practical purposes Mr. Field's curious little essay reverses the position in which mere am- biances usually appear to us, and makes the semblance the true purpose of the reality,—that which seems, the final cause of that which is,—as if an astronomer were to maintain that the earth is in fact made to go round the sun in order that the sun may appear to go round the earth.
As it seems to us, all the moral and religious advantage which Mr. Field sacrifices so much to obtain, may be got without any of these destructive admissions. Even if we are so hard pressed by the inconsistency of God's omniscience with true human freedom that we must give up either the one or the other, it does not seem to us that we need give up anything of real value to the religious heart. If God Himself sees, as we sometimes seem to see, that His own absolute foresight of our actions is intellectually and morally inconsistent with the true freedom of those actions, He would choose the greater of the two goods, and not the lees, and create free children whose use of their freedom even He cannot absoluiely foresee (though He can provide against all the various alternatives involved), rather than create intel- lectual and moral machines, all whose actions he can fore- know. We put this with an "if," because the absolute incon- sistency of God's omniscience with human freedom is beyond our power to assert. Still, even if it were so, no loss of divine care, of divine love, of divine providence is involved. Does it not give even a grander and diviner conception of that care and providence to think that He provides against all the alternatives of human choice, instead of for the single series of inevitable consequences which is all the theory of necessity leaves us,—the chain of cause and effect. Human freedom at its best is a limited sort of thing,—a choice between this and that, not between an infinite number of possibili- ties,—and though the whole world may be different in consequence of a different exercise of this choice, faith in God's providence im- plies that He provides beforehand for the best result out of every action, whether good or bad, of which that action is intrinsically capable, though abetter result must have come out of a good action, i.e., one in which the human will concurs with the divine, than out of a bad, in which they are at variance. In this sense Provi- dence is greater than the mere prescience of perfect knowledge of cause and effect. It is perfect love, guaranteeing human free-, dom, calculating all the possible aberrations of human frailty, and providing the best restraints and remedies for all.
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