The Christ Ideal · 4 of 9

The Fall of Man

We have seen that the Kingdom of God is a universal Kingdom in the most minute sense of the word. The Father is not only present in spirit within the soul of man, but the life which ever comes from him is active in every event of our physical existence, so that there is no man so far removed from him in unrighteousness as to be separated from his sustaining love. Nothing could be more intimate, more personal than the relationship which Jesus’s sayings thus suggest.

Yet the mystery of man’s waywardness seems the more intensified the closer this relationship is found to be. That man should fall, if left to his own devices, seems possible. But if God not only created man good, but is always present to guide him, it seems incredible that he should sink so low. And why should man suffer, if God created him perfect? How could he sin, if God pronounced him “good”?

Let us approach this problem from the point of view of our knowledge of daily life.

All knowledge begins with experience. We really know only what our personal contact with the world enables us to comprehend. Our elders may counsel us with all the wisdom of the ages, hoping thereby to spare us the hardships and mistakes of life. But it is like talking Greek to an infant. The only way to know is to live. Always we are constrained to confess that, despite the admonitions of our elders, we had to try and prove and work things out for ourselves. And when we prove a thing we know it.

Further, no prediction is ever quite verified. No knowledge given in advance of experience is ever adequate. Our fathers do not know all that is latent in us. Each life is a new problem, each man is free to essay new experiments, within certain limits, and so each man must learn for himself, each man must know life by living it, by solving its problems in his own way.

We also know from experience that we must labor for every point gained, that every item of our vast modern knowledge is a hard-won product either of human intellectual toil, or of human suffering: the wisest men have suffered deeply as well as thought deeply.

It is inconceivable that man should be born with knowledge and really know it, that he should understand life before he has lived it. If he were thus gifted, there would obviously be nothing further for him to acquire, life would hold no novelty for him. On the other band, grant him the splendid opportunity of starting life in the darkness of ignorance, and he has before him the possibility of entering fully into the light by his own exertions.

Again, the human mind is limited. How would it be possible for man to acquire this great mass of knowledge except bit by bit through a vast period of time, through gradual evolution? To expect him to acquire it suddenly, or be born with it, would be like expecting a fully matured tree to spring suddenly into existence with ripe apples on it. That is not the law of growth.

It is also a fundamental law that the mind learns only by comparison,just as melody is distinguished from discord, or one colour from another. We detect the weaning of an experience when we are far enough removed from it to contrast it with other experiences, and so learn our mistakes. Youth becomes intelligible to the man of maturity, and maturity is understood from the point of view of old age.

Conscience tells us what is right and what is wrong by contrast, by the difference between lower and higher, the consciousness of shame, guilt or selfishness as contrasted with the assurance that we have been true to the noblest moral prompting.

Jesus makes his doctrine clear by contrasting it with the law of Moses. His teachings abound in comparisons calculated to distinguish the beauty of the law of love from the ugliness of the laws which were inculcated in his generation. And he very sharply distinguishes between the false prophets and the true, teaching men to know the one from the other by a comparison of their lives. If we have had experience with both the false and the true, we know as we could never know by being told. In a word, we must have experience with evil in order to know good, we must encounter darkness in order to value light.

If we were merely good we should have naught wherewith to contrast it, nothing to call out our sympathy, love, and compassion, nothing to overcome. We can no more spring into sudden virtue than we can leap into perfect knowledge.

Even Jesus, with all his wisdom and beauty of character, attained the fulness of his mission only through what was called out from him by his relationship with a sinful age. And even Jesus had obstacles to overcome, both within and without. We first learn of his great strength when he vanquishes the temptation to possess all the kingdoms of the world, instead of the kingdom of the Christ. And in the Gospel of St. Luke it is recorded that he prayed: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will but thine be done. And there appeared unto him an angel from heaven strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground.”

If Jesus was thus compelled to struggle and to pray ere he could fulfil the Christ ideal, how should we expect to fulfil our missions in life until we, too, have travailed and conquered?

But why need we suffer? Because suffering teaches what naught else can teach; because we do not really know until we have personally struggled and sorrowed and conquered.

Until a man has suffered, until he has met the severest tests of faith, we classify him as a theorist. And we hear people universally confessing that the harder experiences of life are those which unlock life’s mysteries and let them into the joys of truth, of love and service.

Still man might at least have been told that he was divine, the critic insists. That would have fatally maimed and weakened him. “Nothing venture nothing have.” We must plunge into the dark in order to enjoy the full benefit of experience. If we knew what we were plunging into, we would never make the plunge. If we knew our divine heritage, we should be deprived of the opportunities of experimentation whereby we learn what is wise, what is right, what is sound and good.

When the sharp pangs of pain, really a beneficent guide, have taught us how to obey the divine laws of our being, we know for all time: there is no theory about it. And best of all, when we learn the meaning of suffering we learn how to avoid it, and how to help our suffering fellow-men. Thus we understand the divinely beneficent plan by which we are instructed. Thus is the Father’s love revealed.

Again, we have seen that moral freedom of the will is implied in Jesus’s doctrine. If man’s will be free, a certain amount of suffering is inevitable; for unless man were always compelled to do the wisest thing, he would be sure to make many grievous mistakes ere he should learn the futility of his schemes and devices.

The great glory of the moral cosmos is the opportunity it affords to man, although free to choose his own will, to say in all humility: “Not my will, but thine be done.” Were man deprived of this choice of choices the universe would lose its greatest beauty, its noblest significance. And surely man could not be free to rise unless he were also free to fall.

But man ought at least to be guided, to possess a divine instinct, instead of being left to blunder about in darkness and misery, cries the critic in desperation.

He is divinely guided. There is not a creature in all God’s universe without the instinct for perfection. No one is left without guidance. No one can sink into a pit of darkness so deep that the divine spark cannot be kindled.

This is precisely the truth which Jesus came to declare, bidding men leave all else and seek God’s Kingdom that they might know that guidance, and thus escape from the bondage of ignorance. This is the message of the Christ. This is the lesson of all sorrow, of all suffering, of all persecution for the sake of truth. Immanent in our very hardships is the perfecting power of God. All our trials and tribulations are blessings in disguise. All pain is an indication that the remedial power of God is restoring harmony and health. All remorse is prompted by the moral activity of God.

We are left in ignorance of all this that we may first try our own way. We are granted sufficient freedom to experiment, fully to express ourselves; yet we are checked by the divine guidance at all points where we would otherwise be unable to help ourselves. And when the divine succour comes, if we will not receive it in any other way it comes as pain, even as a hard knock calculated to bring us to our senses.

Every moment of our daily life is replete with promptings from the divine, but we are largely unconscious of them. Every day and hour the possibility is open before us to turn away from the selfishness and the strife to that Kingdom of peace and love which is not far from any one of us, but which we so often neglect. Thus we cause ourselves a great amount of unnecessary suffering by resisting the very Power which makes for health, happiness and virtue, all the time complaining that we have been left utterly alone. But when at last we begin to discriminate, to awaken to spiritual consciousness, we know with a knowledge which no doubt can shake. Thus is justified our long denial of the Father.

When we take into account the great height to which man is to ascend, all that he must know and be, we see that the end justifies the means; that without this long and sometimes weary travail the greatest heights of virtue and wisdom could never be attained.

Man was not then born perfect? No, that is a mistaken assumption; hence much false reasoning. The law of growth, the divine method of creation, as everywhere exemplified, is from simple to complex, from lower to higher.

If man were perfect, there would be no wars, no selfishness, no sin. All men would live in harmony, as brothers, as fellow-workers for God.

Man is being perfected. There is still a vast amount to do. Out from the Kingdom of God, day by day, the divine life proceeds, carrying this great work forward. And there, in that creative realm, everything has been provided, so that in due time even the least of men shall be a finished product.

This is an important part of the significance of the Kingdom of God. We should not think of the divine life as quiescent, but as ever active. We should not approach it as a thing of history, but as an animate kingdom where even now history is in the making.

But man may be perfect in being, yet not in knowledge and experience, the critic suggests.

That is impossible. Perfection is perfection. It is organic; one part cannot be complete until all are complete. We cannot be perfect in being until we are perfect in knowledge, since to know is to live. We cannot have complete knowledge until we have had complete experience. We can only have complete experience when the last activity in the universe has ceased.

God forbid that we should ever be perfect if perfection means quiescence; for the glory of life is not found in completed attainment, but in constant progression.

Since society is an organism of interdependent beings, the life of one soul could only be complete with the completion of all social life. Even the life of Jesus, although perfect as the prophet of the Christ, will in a sense remain incomplete until be has literally drawn all men up to him.

Meanwhile there is beauty in imperfection. Blessings be upon it so far as it enables us to do our special work and no other; for we are organs or functions in a perpetually moving social life, adapted to fulfil a certain divine ideal, ever progressive, with boundless possibilities of life and change before us.

At birth, if we were ever born, absolutely speaking, we were potential functions only. We began, we know not how low; we are ascending, we know not how high. We do not even know that what the Father has caused us to be in this life shall be our final goal; for there are countless worlds besides this, and there may be innumerable forms of existence differing widely from the one we partly know. It is too soon to talk about perfection.

Then there was no fall of man? Not as commonly believed; for if man had in truth been born perfect he could not have fallen. A fall implies ignorance, but a perfect man is wise.

Still man was declared “good.” Yes, but a thing is good if adapted to fill an end; it is not self-sufficient then and there. Since all things in God’s universe fulfil their purpose progressively, that is, through gradual evolution, we are justified in saying that man was good to realise the highest divine ideal through the conditions of just this toilsome life of ours. Now that which is highest in product is longest in gestation. And “it doth not yet appear what we shall be.”

Man was good, that is, adapted to start in ignorance and work up to the highest pinnacle which a product of the divine life can reach. Therefore we must view his life as a whole, not as a fragment created “out of hand” in a single day.

The creation of a perfect man is the work of all eternity. The fragment of human history which we chance to know is only a phase of the divine creative process. To judge correctly we must know all, and we cannot know all until we can be all.

Viewed from the standpoint of the whole, we can only say there is an ascent of man. As for his fall, we must say, as it is now customary to speak of “the prince of darkness,” not that there is one devil, but that there are many.

To understand these falls of man we must take his origin into account, remembering that he began very far down, in ignorance, a mere animal, burdened with a long inheritance.

For the animal, there is nothing higher than to be an animal. Consequently, that which we condemn as brutal in man is good in the animal, because it enables him to be an animal. But when the human is added, and there are two natures in conflict and contrast, then, if man cultivates the animal at the expense of the human he becomes worse than the brute.

Here we see the origin of evil, also why it was not evil at the outset; also that God did not create evil and mingle it with the good. For evil begins when man, in presence of a higher, chooses a lower, when instead of becoming more of a man and serving his fellows, he becomes more of a brute and wrongs his fellows.

Sin is misdirected energy, misdirected power, which in itself is good. Man sins; he falls every time he consciously chooses a lower instead of a higher, every time he subordinates the soul to the body. Sin entered into the world with knowledge, because, until man began to know himself as an upright being, he was only an animal, ignorant, and therefore blameless.

But why is man wilfully perverse; why does he want to misdirect his energy? Through ignorance: enlighten him and he will not wish to sin. Many a man commits a crime because he thinks he can elude the officers of the law, but if he knew that there is a law of the universe, a law of action and reaction which no man can evade, his knowledge would give him pause. Jesus is most emphatic in his statements concerning this law.

Again, many a reprobate would be a better man, but he does not know how; many a person is struggling upwards, but is repulsed on every hand.

Then God is at fault, you say. No, an old dogma is at fault. Man has been condemned and pushed aside as a sinner. He has been told that he was vile and perverse, and has been put away with many other so-called worthless mortals.

Reach out a helping hand to him, call him “brother,” love him, explain to him that all his forces are inherently good, that he can overcome them by gradually building a different habit of life, and you will find him a human being, like yourself. And who would like to be condemned as the criminal is condemned? Who can make headway if he looks upon himself as “fallen,” as a miserable sinner with no help in him?

If you would really redeem a man, seek first the Kingdom of God, the home of peace and love. Put yourself in a kindly, forgiving mood. Remember the far-off goal set before all humanity, and the conditions necessary to attain it. Recollect that we are one and all emerging from ignorance and animalism, that we have not yet travelled far. Approach the man as a brother, giving him the benefit of every doubt, believing that he longs to conquer himself but does not know how. And so help him, even as you would be helped, by turning his thought in a new direction, by calling out the best that is in him, by teaching him how to resist temptation. Thus shall you meet response. Thus shall you help him to rise, instead of making him the more miserably conscious of his fall.

Right knowledge of the fall of man thus suggests boundless possibilities of helpfulness. Man falls because he is not wise enough to see the misery he is causing himself and humanity, or because he is not yet strong enough to turn from the lower impulse and cleave to the higher. Therefore explain to him the law of action and reaction, whereby every deed brings its corresponding result. Show him that by cultivating a different habit of life, by manifesting love, by seeking the environments of peace, he is developing a centre of resistance which shall in time withstand all the assaults of the lower self.

Point out the possibility of pausing for a moment to gather strength when the animal impulse arises, as one would pause before an angry man to seek thoughts of peace and express words of love, instead of returning blow for blow. Thus you will aid him to outflank his temptations, to conquer himself by the indirect and far more successful method of cultivating the good and letting the evil die out.

We all know from experience that when we acted wrongly we acted impulsively. And when we conquered, it was because we paused to think, “to count ten before striking the blow.”

We also know why we paused to think, namely, because we had some measure of repose.

Therefore to strike at the root of all our misdeeds, to avoid our mistakes, we must cultivate repose, moderation, equanimity. We must seek the inner Kingdom, where we can say unto the troubled waves of our lower nature, as the Master said to the waves of the sea, Peace, be still!

If we find this calm, inner centre, all else will follow. For in finding it, as we shall see more fully in the following chapter, we take the Christ attitude, we find the true way of escape from sin, the true atonement for the fall of man.