vows and promises but by an essential kindred and cleaving of body
and spirit; and it concerns only the two who can dare to say they
have it, and God. And the divine thing in marriage, the thing that
is most like the love of God, is, even then, not the relationship of
the man and woman as man and woman but the comradeship and trust and
mutual help and pity that joins them. No doubt that from the mutual
necessities of bodily love and the common adventure, the necessary
honesties and helps of a joint life, there springs the stoutest,
nearest, most enduring and best of human companionship; perhaps only
upon that root can the best of mortal comradeship be got; but it
does not follow that the mere ordinary coming together and pairing
off of men and women is in itself divine or sacramental or anything
of the sort. Being in love is a condition that may have its moments
of sublime exaltation, but it is for the most part an experience far
down the scale below divine experience; it is often love only in so
far as it shares the name with better things; it is greed, it is
admiration, it is desire, it is the itch for excitement, it is the
instinct for competition, it is lust, it is curiosity, it is
adventure, it is jealousy, it is hate. On a hundred scores ‘lovers’
meet and part. Thereby some few find true love and the spirit of
God in themselves or others.
Lovers may love God in one another; I do not deny it. That is no
reason why the imitation and outward form of this great happiness
should be made an obligation upon all men and women who are
attracted by one another, nor why it should be woven into the
essentials of religion. For women much more than for men is this
confusion dangerous, lest a personal love should shape and dominate
their lives instead of God. “He for God only; she for God in him,”
phrases the idea of Milton and of ancient Islam; it is the formula
of sexual infatuation, a formula quite easily inverted, as the end
of Goethe’s Faust (“The woman soul leadeth us upward and on”) may
witness. The whole drift of modern religious feeling is against
this exaggeration of sexual feeling, these moods of sexual
slavishness, in spiritual things. Between the healthy love of
ordinary mortal lovers in love and the love of God, there is an
essential contrast and opposition in this, that preference,
exclusiveness, and jealousy seem to be in the very nature of the
former and are absolutely incompatible with the latter. The former
is the intensest realisation of which our individualities are
capable; the latter is the way of escape from the limitations of
individuality. It may be true that a few men and more women do
achieve the completest unselfishness and self-abandonment in earthly
love. So the poets and romancers tell us. If so, it is that by an
imaginative perversion they have given to some attractive person a
worship that should be reserved for God and a devotion that is
normally evoked only by little children in their mother’s heart. It
is not the way between most of the men and women one meets in this
world.
But between God and the believer there is no other way, there is
nothing else, but self-surrender and the ending of self.
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION
1. THE BIOLOGICAL EQUIVALENT OF SIN
If the reader who is unfamiliar with scientific things will obtain
and read Metchnikoff’s “Nature of Man,” he will find there an
interesting summary of the biological facts that bear upon and
destroy the delusion that there is such a thing as individual
perfection, that there is even ideal perfection for humanity. With
an abundance of convincing instances Professor Metchnikoff
demonstrates that life is a system of “disharmonies,” capable of no
perfect way, that there is no “perfect” dieting, no “perfect” sexual
life, no “perfect” happiness, no “perfect” conduct. He releases one
from the arbitrary but all too easy assumption that there is even an
ideal “perfection” in organic life. He sweeps out of the mind with
all the confidence and conviction of a physiological specialist, any
idea that there is a perfect man or a conceivable perfect man. It
is in the nature of every man to fall short at every point from
perfection. From the biological point of view we are as individuals
a series of involuntary “tries” on the part of an imperfect species
towards an unknown end.
Our spiritual nature follows our bodily as a glove follows a hand.
We are disharmonious beings and salvation no more makes an end to
the defects of our souls than it makes an end to the decay of our
teeth or to those vestigial structures of our body that endanger our
physical welfare. Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds
not an inch to our spiritual and moral stature.
2. WHAT IS DAMNATION?
Let us now take up the question of what is Sin? and what we mean by
the term “damnation,” in the light of this view of human reality.
Most of the great world religions are as clear as Professor
Metchnikoff that life in the world is a tangle of disharmonies, and
in most cases they supply a more or less myth-like explanation, they
declare that evil is one side of the conflict between Ahriman and
Ormazd, or that it is the punishment of an act of disobedience, of
the fall of man and world alike from a state of harmony. Their
case, like his, is that THIS world is damned.
We do not find the belief that superposed upon the miseries of this
world there are the still bitterer miseries of punishments after
death, so nearly universal. The endless punishments of hell appear
to be an exploit of theory; they have a superadded appearance even
in the Christian system; the same common tendency to superlatives
and absolutes that makes men ashamed to admit that God is finite,
makes them seek to enhance the merits of their Saviour by the device
of everlasting fire. Conquest over the sorrow of life and the fear
of death do not seem to them sufficient for Christ’s glory.
Now the turning round of the modern mind from a conception of the
universe as something derived deductively from the past to a
conception of it as something gathering itself adventurously towards
the future, involves a release from the supposed necessity to tell a
story and explain why. Instead comes the inquiry, “To what end?”
We can say without mental discomfort, these disharmonies are here,
this damnation is here—inexplicably. We can, without any
distressful inquiry into ultimate origins, bring our minds to the
conception of a spontaneous and developing God arising out of those
stresses in our hearts and in the universe, and arising to overcome
them. Salvation for the individual is escape from the individual
distress at disharmony and the individual defeat by death, into the
Kingdom of God. And damnation can be nothing more and nothing less
than the failure or inability or disinclination to make that escape.
Something of that idea of damnation as a lack of the will for
salvation has crept at a number of points into contemporary
religious thought. It was the fine fancy of Swedenborg that the
damned go to their own hells of their own accord. It underlies a
queer poem, “Simpson,” by that interesting essayist upon modern
Christianity, Mr. Clutton Brock, which I have recently read.
Simpson dies and goes to hell—it is rather like the Cromwell Road—
and approves of it very highly, and then and then only is he
completely damned. Not to realise that one can be damned is
certainly to be damned; such is Mr. Brock’s idea. It is his
definition of damnation. Satisfaction with existing things is
damnation. It is surrender to limitation; it is acquiescence in
“disharmony”; it is making peace with that enemy against whom God
fights for ever.
(But whether there are indeed Simpsons who acquiesce always and for
ever remains for me, as I have already confessed in the previous
chapter, a quite open question. My Arminian temperament turns me
from the Calvinistic conclusion of Mr. Brock’s satire.)
3. SIN IS NOT DAMNATION
Now the question of sin will hardly concern those damned and lost by
nature, if such there be. Sin is not the same thing as damnation,
as we have just defined damnation. Damnation is a state, but sin is
an incident. One is an essential and the other an incidental
separation from God. It is possible to sin without being damned;
and to be damned is to be in a state when sin scarcely matters, like
ink upon a blackamoor. You cannot have questions of more or less
among absolute things.
It is the amazing and distressful discovery of every believer so