THE ATONEMENT
By
REV. JOHN MORGAN,
D.D. A Moral
World. THIS is a moral world, under a
moral government, because mankind are conscious of moral
ideas and of moral law, and know themselves to be moral
agents, subjects of free-will, of the power to obey, or
disobey moral law. Outside of the sphere of moral agency
mankind are as much under the control of necessitative
forces as brute animals or insentient matter. But within
this sphere necessity can have no compulsive operation,
however mighty the influences that act on the soul, whether
those influences press from within through the working of
the living organism, or from without through the action of
other living beings or the action of material external
nature. As moral law commands, there must be the power to
obey, even if the heart of the moral agent is set in
disobedience. In general, sceptical necessitarians admit the
incompatibility of universal necessity with obligatory moral
law. But many Christian philosophers, strenuously
maintaining universal necessity, still hold to the validity,
of moral obligation. The sceptics appear here to have the
logical advantage; but the saintly character of many of the
advocates of universal necessity is beyond
question. It would seem not to be easy to
perceive how blameworthiness or praiseworthiness can attach
to qualities called moral, when the subjects of these
qualities no more freely produce them than the rose so
produces its fragrance, the rainbow its beauty, or the
serpent the poison of its fangs. We like a beautiful or
beneficent thing, and we dislike an ugly or baneful thing,
and we praise the one sort and dispraise the other; but this
is a totally different operation of our minds from moral
approbation or disapprobation. The moral law commands only one
thing--love, benevolence, good-will. This implies that the
moral agent knows something of the value of well-being or
good. Obedience to the moral law is holiness--the only
holiness conceivable or possible. Obedience is in its very
conception voluntary. It cannot be the product of creation,
in the literal sense of the word. Creation gives existence
to being and its natural attributes. But it may be conceived
that when man was ushered into being God at once so operated
on him in a moral way as to secure in him, as his first
character, obedience to the moral law, or holiness. Thus Man
would be made, or induced to be, upright. Refusal to love, or disobeying the
moral law, is sin or unholiness. This may appear in various
forms; but the essence of sin is found in not loving, or in
not exercising good-will. No moral agent can be made the
subject of holiness or sin without his consent. Neither
holiness nor sin can be propagated from father to son, as
scrofula may be. Disease, physical depravity in countless
forms, may be immediately inherited, and of course without
the consent of offspring. But these are not sin or sinful,
however harmful. These may be the occasions of sin, but not
without the consent of offspring. When sin or vice is said
to be inherited, the word ought to be considered as employed
in a secondary sense, unless the context forbids this
interpretation. A whole family, tribe, nation, or race may
thus inherit moral qualities; but the moral quality resides
only in each individual moral will, and originates there. In
no other possible way, can we conceive of moral
responsibility as properly attaching to each individual
moral agent. However powerful the principle of heredity, we
must not give it an interpretation which will sweep away the
moral world, or use it to explain the universal prevalence
of sin in mankind in such a way as to annihilate the sin
which it is sought to explain. If an inworking of the Holy Spirit is
an essential condition of the holiness of creatures, their
holiness is still their own personal holiness, consisting of
their own willing and doing. The occasion or condition makes
no part of the thing. And when man first sinned, his sin was
disobedience to the moral law. The sin was occasioned by
temptation applied to the susceptibilities of his nature.
These were not sinful nor evil in any sense. They were
necessary constituents of his form of being, necessary to
its activity. But moral creatures always know propensities
are not to be indulged in opposition to moral law, but
always governed in accordance with it. All the susceptibilities or
propensities, being essential to the nature which God has
given to man, were transmitted to their posterity by the
first parents of the act. I do not find that the Scriptures
explicitly tell us whether human nature was changed by the
fall of Adam and Eve. But observation has determined that
propensities may be made morbidly intense, or irregular, or
both, by wrong indulgence, and thus changed may be
transmitted to offspring. But this change does not
constitute the propensities themselves sinful in any sinner.
Sin consists in the surrender of the will to their control,
in the consent of the man to obey them against the moral
law. When offspring inherit them in this disordered state,
it is an inheritance of increased temptation. But however
strong the temptation may be, the propensities cannot govern
without the consent of the tempted party, even if the
temptation is aggravated by the wily influence of Satan. We
do not yield to absurdity, when we believe that our first
father has transmitted to us an inheritance of increased
temptation, certain to lead us into sin. But to say, that a
necessitative force infuses sin into us in connection with
our descent, is to contradict the very nature of sin, which
can be nothing else than disobedience to moral law, and so
the free action of moral beings. The principle of heredity
is one of tremendous influence, and recognized in the
Scriptures; and it is seen to mould families; nations, and
races in a marvelous manner. But it is never in the
Scriptures spoken of as necessitative, or as fating any
creature of God to be wicked. The Bible would be a very
different book if it represented mankind as inheriting sin
as they, inherit scrofula, consumption, or
leprosy. Nor has the Bible any responsibility
for the doctrine that when a moral creature has once sinned
he is bound to sin by chains of necessity. For the moment
necessity comes in morality and all moral action cease, and
all moral responsibility, except for the past. It may be
that a sinner, or every sinner in the world, has so set his
heart to do evil that there is no hope of his turning from
evil-doing unless a Divine Redeemer undertakes his
deliverance; but all his obstinate sin is as free as if he
were just beginning his evil course. The distinction between
moral certainty and physical necessity must be held fast, or
there comes a total collapse of all moral ideas. The first man, by becoming a sinner,
became the natural representative of the race in sin, as
from him descends the nature or propensities which, with
Satan's influence, successfully tempt mankind to sin. It is
not Adam and Eve alone who, in the third chapter of Genesis
and in the fifth of Romans, are set forth as sinning, but
the whole human race of moral agents. But nowhere in the
Bible is the offspring of the first pair said to inherit in
a purely passive way, their sinful moral character. The
first sin of every human being is as free as the first sin
of Eve and Adam. The disobedient attitude toward God and his
law is as freely assumed. And no necessity of continuing in
sin is caused by any sin of any sinner. All sin is always
freely committed, and is the abusive product of free-agency.
Guilt is proportioned to the degree of light enjoyed. If
sinners have now more light than Adam had, they are, in
committing sin or in continuing in it, greater sinners than
he could be. The cigar-smoker, who knows better that it is
wrong to smoke cigars than Adam knew that it was wrong to
eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is a worse
sinner than Adam was in his sin, This, of course, could not
be, if man existed under the operation of a necessitating
force of evil, inserted in his nature by his mere descent
from the first sinner of the race, or it he did not remain,
as to his faculty of moral will, as free as Adam was before
he sinned. But this freedom does not interfere
with the certainty of the occurrence of sin. The first sin
of Adam was beforehand as certain as any sin ever was or
ever will be. God infallibly knew that it would occur, and
occur freely, not even occasioned by any antecedent moral
bias, but opposed by a bias to good; for an evil bias would
itself be sinful, and obviously the first sin could not in
any sense arise from what was itself sin. The only account
the Bible gives of Adam's first sin is, that Eve tempted
him, and he ate the forbidden fruit; his innocent
propensities, including his affections, being presupposed as
conditions of his temptibility. This is the only explanation
that can be given. Some so called philosophers imagine that
it is an explanation to say that God created the sin; and
they propose the same explanation for all sin and holiness,
and, indeed, all thought and choice. The trouble is, that
the explanation annihilates the sin sought to be explained.
It is self-evident that any attempted explanation of sin or
holiness that makes them or it a product of necessity, like
an effect of a natural cause or natural causes, is
inadmissible, as not germane to the subject. I have said that all moral events, as
well as events in the world of matter and necessity, are
antecedently certain to God. This certainty is regarded by
Christian necessitarians as proving the necessity of the
events. On no other principle, they argue, could they be
certainly foreknown. To me the argument appears plausible;
and I confess I know not where the fallacy lies. It is like
the famous puzzles about motion in space and about the
reality of time. Augustine said: "If you do not ask me about
time, I know about it; but if you do ask me, I don't know."
I think it is self-evident that necessity and morality are
incompatible, and that the universality of necessity would
sweep away responsibility and moral government or reduce
them to an illusion. This is generally held with respect to
the pantheistic philosophy and most pantheists maintain that
the notions of moral merit and ill-desert are illusory. But
I see no difference between the logical outcome of the
necessitarianism of some Christians and that of Spinoza.
Christian philosophers do not accept this logical outcome;
but Spinoza boldly faced the music, or "horrible discord."
Holding that there cannot be virtue or sin without
free-will, I hold that free-will is a reality, and that we
know its reality by immediate consciousness. Kant and
Hamilton seem to maintain that we do not know our freedom
immediately, but infer it from our consciousness of the
moral law. This removes the idea of freedom from the domain
of knowledge to that of faith. As that freedom which is the
condition of moral responsibility exists in all moral
agents, and is not destroyed by sin, we are not to regard
ourselves as a race of unfortunates who by the fall of their
first father have been made sinful. We are really guilty
ourselves, as he was of his own sin, of all the sin charged
to us; and continuing in sin under the light of the gospel,
we must be more guilty than Adam ever could be. In this way
the Bible speaks of the wickedness of mankind, never
representing the sin of any generation as any the less their
own personal sin for any influence descending to them from
Adam.