The Expositor's Bible: The General Epistles of St. James and St. JudePlummer, Alfred
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The General Epistles of St. James and St. Jude
Plummer, Alfred
Bible. James -- Commentaries; Bible. Jude -- Commentaries
Certainly the Positivist, who shuts God out from his consideration,
has a difficult problem to solve, when he is asked how he accounts for
a delusion so vast, so universal, and so horrible in its consequences;
and we do not wonder that he should exhaust all the powers of rhetoric
and invective in the attempt to exorcize it. But his difficulty is as
nothing compared with the difficulties of a thinker who endeavours to
combine Determinism with Theism, and even with Christianity. What sort
of a God can He be who has allowed, who has even ordained, that every
human heart should be wrung with this needless, senseless agony? Has
any savage, any inquisitor, ever devised torture so diabolical? And
what kind of a Saviour and Redeemer can He be who has come from
heaven, and returned thither again, without saying one word to free
men from their blind, self-inflicted agonies; who, on the contrary,
has said many things to confirm them in their delusions? Whence came
moral evil and the pangs of remorse, if there is no such thing as free
will? They must have been fore-ordained and created by God. The Theist
has no escape from that. If God made man free, and man by misusing his
freedom brought sin into the world, and remorse as a punishment for
sin, then we have _some_ explanation of the mystery of evil. God
neither willed it nor created it; it was the offspring of a free and
rebellious will. But if man was never free, and there is no such thing
as sin, then the madman gnawing his own limbs in his frenzy is a
reasonable being and a joyous sight, compared with the man who gnaws
his own heart in remorse for the deeds which the inexorable laws of
his own nature compelled him, and still compel him, to commit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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