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.