Books of the Day
The End of History
IT is never easy to believe in God. It is doubly difficult in the
world today. It is not merely that the war has come despite the prayers of so many faithful Christians, but that it has come in such a form. That the evil will seem to be unrestrained, that justice and truth go down before naked power, that a righteous cause seems to avail so little—there is the real challenge to the faith that the world belongs to a God of Love and Righteousness. " Where is now thy God? " that is the question, and it cannot be met by any ad hoc answer, for, in fact, it is raised by the whole course of history. We tell ourselves that a righteous cause " must " triumph. The warning of history is that there is no must.
Christianity is utterly committed to the faith that is at the heart of the whole Bible, in the sovereignty of a just and living God whose judgements are in all the earth." It believes that God is the Lord of history, which is the arena of a moral conflict— not a stream of meaningless events, but a drama moving to a consummation. The events of time serve a moral purpose and are under the governance of the Divine will. Yet this faith is but seldom verified. Historical evidence does not bear it out. The hopes of the Hebrew prophets did not conic true. The Church for the last nineteen hundred years has prayed, Thy kingdom come on earth, as it prays at this very hour—but does it come? It would be almost impossible to argue in this present year of our Lord that the human race, taken as a whole, does grow better as it grows older, or that the Kingdom of God on earth is nearer than it was when the Lord's Prayer was first repeated. Where, then, is the promise of His coming? What Dr. Bevan calls the stock answer—a thousand years are with the Lord as one day—is not an answer at all. It might just as well (as he says) be a hundred thousand or ten million years; and for practical purposes that amounts to saying that the Kingdom never will be realised. No merely futurist interpretation of the meaning of history, therefore, will satisfy. "A Saviour with a time-machine " will not do.
But the Biblical faith, as Dr. Bevan says, was not an induction from the facts of history, which indeed seem rather to contradict it, but a moral and religious intuition imposing its own claim upon the facts. Because it is sure that the meaning of this world is not to be found in itself but in another—in an unseen order of spiritual reality—it demands that well-doing and well-being shall stand in some logical relation, in the lives of men and in the course of history. The facts, as we know them, do not seem to yield to it. The iron years grind on their way, the innocent perish, the righteous cry in vain. Yet the Church does not cease its prayer. It is still sure that in Jesus Christ the triumph of God's Kingdom is secure. But it is a kingdom " not of this world." The end of history is the annihilation of all conscious life on this planet ; there can be no moral consummation at some remote future in the time-series. The end (in the sense of the goal or meaning) of history is in a world on the other side of death, in the perfect fellowship of souls redeemed, in com- munion with God and with one another.
" The direction in which to look for the future of mankind is not along the course of history on this planet. It is obliquely across the historical process, not along it, that the millions of human spirits are always streaming. . The groups which seem so permanent in con- trast with the perishing individuals—the family, the society, the nation—are merely frames within which during their time on earth human spirits are brought together to be exercised.. . . There is only one society partially manifested on earth which is an eternal frame which continues, as a society, in the world beyond death; and that is the Mystical Body of Christ " (pp. 95, 96).
That is the classical Christian position, and events are driving us back again upon it. It was the faith that served St. 'Augustine
in his day of anarchy and bloodshed, it is what we can summon to our aid today. It is not, of course, incompatible with trying to make this world as good as we can ; nor does it exclude (Dr. Bevan argues) something that might be described as a return of
Christ to reign in the affairs of men. But the hope to which faith in God is committed and of which the Resurrection is the earnest cannot be fulfilled in this world of sin and death. A secularised this-worldly Christianity is more than sub-Christian, it is non- sense: it is a self-contradictory belief. " Left-wing Christianity,"
says the author, has completely ignored the real point. " To prof to believe in an eternal life beyond and to say that it is I. important than the brief life on earth is manifestly absurd." Ii this that gives its value and worth to this life. We must labour to serve our day and generation ; at this moment we must pr and toil for victory. But whatever suffering we may have to fa whatever the dark ages of misery which may conceivably before Europe, our hope lies eternal in the heavens, incorruptible and undefiled. Here is power to endure and faith to overcome.
Here at last is a book about the war which does come to grips with the real question. This short notice gives but a poor idea of Dr. Bevan's admirable study—its masculine thinking and its clear insight or the large range of subjects discussed. Some of the best things are in the footnotes. It does not attempt any easy answer to the particular challenge of the hour. It sets forth the Christian world-view as an interpretation of all history. It is a cordial for drooping spirits which is to be very warmly recom-
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