LECTURE II.*

THE GOODNESS OF GOD.

ISAIAH, XXviii. 21.

"The Lord will rise up, that he may do his work, his strange work, and bring to pass his act, his strange act."

HE latter clause of the text just read may perhaps be

TH

more correctly rendered, "to serve his service, his unwonted service." The meaning plainly is, that those acts of severity which may be ascribed to God, whether as special interpositions or as taking place under the ordinary government of His providence, are foreign to His prevailing character, not resorted to for their own sake, but needful to serve some urgent occasion, which a good God would gladly forego, if some greater and more important end were not to be secured thereby, and so some unwonted service to be served. In dwelling on the goodness of God, it is with the natural indications of this I am now concerned. To a devout believer in Christ, the grand display of God's goodness in redemption might seem to render this inquiry needless. And it is an intelligible position that we should take our stand on that,

* Delivered on Sunday, December 2, 1877.

ignoring all prior difficulties, and working by means of the mighty influences of the Gospel and its attendant grace on the religious emotions of mankind. And I suppose that for the ordinary purposes of the Christian ministry this is the proper course. But then it is to be

remembered that scepticism has a tendency to deaden the capacity of religious emotion, and that it is desirable, as far as possible, to lay a foundation in reason for our religious sentiments; that scepticism is around us on every side, and that it concerns us, not only to endeavour as far as possible to remove the difficulties of the doubting, but also to provide against their intrusion into minds as yet unassailed by doubt, and to furnish ourselves with the means of repelling the arguments of unbelief. It is not, therefore, from any undervaluing of the blessed Gospel of the grace of God that I dwell now on questions that lie at the basis of all religion, instead of what would be far more consonant to my own feelings, enforcing the saving truths of Christianity, through the atonement of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

In my first Lecture I said that one of the means resorted to, through a long period and by a very extensive body of men in former times, to explain the mystery of evil, was the supposition of a duality of godhead, the belief in a good and a malignant Deity, a God such as we believe in, existing apart from material creation, or creation altogether, and an evil God, the author of matter and creator of this world. The conceptions of this evil being varied indeed from impersonal matter up to a deified and selfexisting devil, but few resting satisfied, however, with the view of self-existing impersonal matter. It seems unnecessary now to enter on a refutation of a doctrine long aban

doned, at least by all with whom we are likely to come into collision. While our present difficulty is to persuade some men to believe that there is any God at all, it would seem to be a useless waste of time to prove to them that there are not two. But though this notion of a malignant Deity, coexistent with the good God, has no advocates amongst us, there are many thinkers of the present times who are sufficiently alive to the reasons for such a belief, to dispose them, so far as they recognize a God at all, or supposing that there is a God, to regard Him as having very much of the character of the malignant Deity of the older dualism. There are many who view the existing world of life and thought with disgust and despair, and who are ready to think that if there be a God at all—a personal Author of Nature-He must be one deficient in power or in goodness, perhaps in both. This was the outcome of all the thought of a deceased philosopher of the highest eminence-one whose influence was largely felt in extending the scepticism of more recent times. Out of many passages of Mr. Mill's Essays on religion I select one, for the sake of its concluding words: "These are the net results of Natural Theology on the question of the Divine attributes. A Being of great but limited power-how or by what limited we cannot even conjecture of great, and perhaps unlimited intelligence; but perhaps, also, more narrowly limited than his power; who desires, and pays some regard to, the happiness of his creatures, but who seems to have other motives of action which he cares more for, and who hardly can be supposed to have created the universe for that purpose alone."* Now, it is in this last sentence that there seems

* Essays on Religion, p. 194.

to me to be an answer to all the disparaging estimates which this writer forms of the Divine Being. God had other objects in view than the mere happiness of His creatures, their temporal and earthly happiness, which seems only to enter into Mr. Mill's contemplation. And it is strange that in the whole of this Essay on Theism, or indeed in the entire volume of the Essays on Religion, I find no distinct statement of the moral ends of creation. Whatever God had in view with regard to other parts of the universe in ordering this world of ours, the moral ends of creation in regard to us are so apparent, that it seems strange so acute a writer should have wholly overlooked them. I have already presented some considerations in reference to a supposed deficiency of ability and of wisdom in God, and endeavoured to show that the indications of such inability are fairly to be judged in reference to the end proposed; and that if it was a purpose worthy of God to develop in his creatures righteousness of the highest order, that purpose involved the necessity of allowing to freedom of will and choice in men full and unfettered play; and that the consequences of this, such as we are too well acquainted with, may reasonably be viewed as practically unavoidable. God's omnipotence might not have hindered them without destroying the very design which God must have had in view. I proceed now to consider what grounds may be supposed to exist for ascribing to the Author of Nature the alleged malignity of character, which, if it really existed, would render a belief in God practically useless for all the real purposes of religion-indeed I might say practically injurious. It would, except as a mere question of philosophy, be better to believe in no God at all than in one whose cha

racter was such as to degrade and debase the moral nature we might be supposed to have or to acquire, apart from all belief in God-only I may here just observe, that a Being who should be all benevolence and nothing else would seem to most men to be a very weak and insignificant character. Most men will perhaps agree that righteousness is something greater than mere benevolence, and that the claims of both must, in dealing with creatures possessed of freedom, come at times into seeming collision. It is necessary, of course, to assume an Author of Nature for the present discussion. There would be no room for the question before us except on this assumption. But the discussion, so far as it may be successful, will tend to remove one of the prevailing difficulties attending the belief in God, while, if it should issue in a reasonable ascription of malignity to God, that would amount to a practical reduction of the supposition to an absurdity.

If now, as the subject under consideration requires, we may reasonably judge the character of the Creator from His works of creation, I think that, on any fair and candid estimate of things as they exist in the world, we have abundant indications that the prevailing design in creation was benevolent, that its prevailing operation is beneficent, and that what seems opposed to this may, after all, turn out to be the truest benevolence, as that must be the truest benevolence which secures the highest and best character in the creation as the ultimate and permanent issue. If it shall seem that apart from counter indications the prevailing character is that of goodness, and any reasonable grounds may be assigned for explaining the counter indications, making due allowance for our ignorance of the entire scheme, which must needs hinder a full explanation of