To deal now with the first element in the attribute, namely, the relation of the entire world-order to human freedom; it will be universally admitted that the relation in question is to be found only in a corporate life. Only to the extent that such a corporate life is a unity complete in itself, and most perfectly therefore in human life considered as an integral whole, does this divine causality reveal itself in such a world-order that the hindrances to life that issue from sin cannot be averted or removed by any circumstances of the external world, however favourable. On the other hand, if we regard the individual as the proper object of the divine justice, we degrade that attribute to the status of a mere counterpart of civil justice, which we so often feel to be injustice. In fact, if we are determined to see the consummate justice of God only in the punishment of every particular offence—or, let us say, in the rewarding of every particular virtue or perfect act of virtue on the part of an individual—then as, e.g., intemperance and falsehood are clearly not always punished by contempt or disease, and as, moreover, the very same evil which, falling upon one person, is interpreted as the punishment of his sin, may also fall upon others to whom without grave injustice we could not attribute the same sin, we find ourselves in a difficulty from which we can hardly escape except by asserting that the divine justice cannot fully reveal itself here below but will attain to completeness only in the life to come. That is an idea which—though attempts have been made to clear it of the charge of involving God Himself in a temporal process—only puts the difficulty further away, for we have no evidence of such disparity of suffering there as would counterbalance the disparities between doing and suffering here. If, however, we posit the idea of a corporate penalty along with that of a corporate guilt, we reach a complete vindication of the principle that all sin is reflected in evil, and that all evil can be explained by sin; and this is precisely the connexion set forth above.

As regards the second element, namely, that in our consciousness this connexion between sin and evil is actually and even universally made—this is really the consciousness of penal desert, which in the human mind is as truly the creation of the divine justice as conscience is the creation of the divine holiness. The universality of that consciousness, however, manifests itself most unmistakably in the fact that domestic, civil, and social penalties everywhere flow from it, and indeed represent an affirmation of the connexion between sin and evil, just as the gradual mitigation of these penalties in consequence of the progressive disappearance of sin from corporate life represents the abrogation of it; both features thus appearing as conjoined in the divine justice.

3. The classification of penalties as natural and arbitrary—a classification which indeed could not be fully demonstrated or applied in the realm of finite and temporal causation—is one which we find here no reason whatever to adopt. In point of fact natural penalties, grounded as they are in the creative and regulative divine causality, are arbitrary in the only sense in which that word can be applied to God; while those which we might most properly call arbitrary, namely, the evils that do not correspond to the actions of those affected by them, are in reality natural; for this non-equivalence has its source in the world-order as a whole. With a different usage of the terms, again, we apply the adjective ‘natural’ to the penalties determined by the relation of the world-order to our freedom, while those that flow from human freedom itself we designate ‘arbitrary.’ But if we regard both kinds as divine, the distinction disappears; for penalties inflicted by man, no less than the other group, take place in accordance with the divinely ordained spiritual development of mankind. In fact, the two kinds, as being equally of divine appointment, are essentially correlative and complementary; for the ‘arbitrary’ without the ‘natural’ would lack reality, and the latter without the former would lack significance. Of penalties in the future life it is here impossible to say anything whatever; nor can we determine how far they are to be regarded as ‘arbitrary’ rather than ‘natural,’ or vice versa. The idea of these penalties is not taken directly from our self-consciousness; and only in another section of our work shall we be able to inquire how the distinctively Christian form of this pre-Christian and widely diffused idea is related to a universal ground or reason which we must certainly assume to exist, and, again, how far it is possible in this matter to go back to the conception of divine justice, whether interpreted as here or otherwise.

The case is different with certain other classifications sometimes applied to the subject, e.g. those based upon the various purposes of punishment. (1) To begin with, it seems clear that penalties cannot be ordained by God as reformative. Thus, suppose that an excess of sensuousness is counteracted only by means of sensuous feeling itself, then, e.g., an appeal to fear as against pleasure cannot possibly issue in a higher energy of the God-consciousness and a greater freedom of the spirit; indeed, all that could be effected in this way would be such a fresh distribution of sensuous motives as would, in accordance with the individual’s nature, be felt as less disagreeable. It is also obvious that if the God-consciousness could be strengthened by punishment, a system of divine penalties as perfect as possible could have been made to serve instead of redemption. (2) We have, secondly, just as little right to suppose that the purpose of divine punishment is merely vengeful or retributive. Fundamentally, badness (or wrong) and evil are incommensurable; it is only when a bad action brings evil upon another person that it is commensurable with a retributive evil. But this retributive evil is inflicted only in so far as the injured person regards his pleasure in the suffering of the injurer as removing or assuaging his own pain. Hence under the conditions of antiquity it is the custom everywhere that a penal evil can be bought off by conferring some other pleasure on the injured person. It was partly in this practice that the criminal jurisdiction of the State took its rise, replacing the vendetta by milder measures. Divine penalties of such a type, however, could be believed in only at a very primitive stage of development—a stage at which the Deity is still thought of as susceptible to irritation, and as not above feeling an injury or having other passive states; and what has all along been preached, sometimes with apparent profundity, regarding the mysterious nature of the divine wrath and the fundamental necessity of divine retribution, cannot be made clear to the mind. And we can leave the matter there all the more confidently because (3) the consciousness of deserving punishment, as superinduced in us by divine justice, is fully explained by the remaining purpose of punishment, namely, to prevent or to deter. Punishment is, in fact, that which must of necessity be interposed wherever and in so far as the power of the God-consciousness is as yet inactive in the sinner, its object being to prevent his dominant sensuous tendencies from meanwhile attaining complete mastery through mere unchecked habit. Further, what is said, with reference to the Mosaic legislation, as to the people’s being kept solidly together under the law applies generally to all criminal jurisdiction among all peoples, and equally to the natural penalties set forth also in the Mosaic legislation. Hence it is only relatively to the dispensation of redemption, and in so far as redemption has still to become operative, that the divine justice can be fully understood.

4. From what has just been said we see, on the one hand, how clearly the divine holiness and the divine justice are connected, and, on the other, how necessary it is to keep them separate. They are connected in the most intimate way as expressions of the divine causality as bearing upon sin in its relation to redemption. On the very same principle, according to which we say of sin that in the sense in which it cannot have its cause in God it cannot exist at all, we say of evil that if it cannot be grounded in God, i.e. if it be a real negation of the original perfection of the world for man, it likewise cannot exist at all. Similarly, just as with regard to sin, so too with regard to evil, we assert that so far as it is real, it must have its source in the divine causality. And, again, just as the consciousness of sin as necessarily entailing penalty—a consciousness due to the divine justice—is possible only on the assumption that conscience is due to the divine holiness, so, without that consciousness of penal liability, conscience would have no means of gaining a secure hold in any human soul still under the dominion of the flesh, and thus no means of generating there a consciousness of the need of redemption. But for the same reason it is also necessary that the distinction of the two concepts should be maintained here where, though we are dealing with elements of the religious consciousness which are provisionally abstracted from redemption, we must nevertheless premise the fact of redemption as that on which everything turns. For suppose matters brought to the point that both the natural imperfections and the sins of the world were no longer evils to us, but merely incentives; that we therefore felt nothing at all to be evil in relation to ourselves, and that accordingly the justice of God was not immediately present even in our own purely personal religious experience; yet we should still require conscience, and should therefore constantly revive within us the consciousness of God’s holiness. Similarly, even while we still need both, we keep them rigorously apart. For our displeasure with what is bad, i.e. the reflection in us of God’s holiness, is absolutely pure and satisfying only when not affected by anticipations of punishment; and the consciousness of penal desert is so firmly rooted in our corporate sense that we always acquiesce in punishment, even although our personal moral feeling regarding any particular occasion of it has been entirely corrected and purified, and our will has completely escaped from the bondage it implies. Precisely on this account, therefore, that form of the God-consciousness (i.e. the concept of divine justice) is no more transient in us than the form represented by the conception of the divine holiness, for it permanently conserves the same truth for our corporate sense, to which, in fact, it is in its origin specially related. Were it, however, to be said that the two conceptions, having to do merely with the natural imperfection of man, would apart from that sphere be nothing at all in God, and even within that sphere would cease to be of valid application as soon as the said imperfection was finally done away, and that accordingly they are not divine attributes in the same sense as those dealt with in the first part of our system—we should reply as follows. First of all, the same would hold good of the divine attributes which are subsequently to be developed from the second aspect of the antithesis, for to these also it is essential that they refer back to the first aspect; and, in fact, the same objection might be made to all the so-called moral attributes of God so far as they have any reference to the antithesis at all. But we have never attached great importance to these mere general phrases; so I shall only call attention to these special considerations bearing on the conceptions of the two attributes before us. First, as regards God’s holiness: apart from its implication of that in virtue of which sin does not exist for God, and from the fact that it forms so far a general characteristic of God’s consciousness of His works, and so of His omnipresence and omniscience, holiness is an essential element in our consciousness of God, for we can be cognizant of the absolute power of the God-consciousness only as we are cognizant of the state of sin as removed by redemption. The same is true also of the divine justice, since the Redeemer’s merit is only the other side of sin’s desert of punishment, and just as the former has always been present in the latter as a premonition of it, so the latter will always be present in the former as recollection. And no less is the relation of God’s government of the world to our freedom one with its relation to redemption, while this whole interrelated system of the spiritual and the sensuous is the domain of what is accordingly the equally omnipresent and eternal justice of God.

APPENDIX: THE MERCY OF GOD

§ 85. To attribute mercy to God is more appropriate to the language of preaching and poetry than to that of dogmatic theology. 1. For one thing, preaching and poetry can afford to be less precise in their use of anthropopathic terms. And mercy is certainly such a term in a pre-eminent degree, since in the human sphere we apply it exclusively to a state of feeling specially evoked by the sufferings of others and finding outlet in acts of relief. Such helpful ministration is, no doubt, an ethical activity, but here it is conditioned by a sensuous sympathy, namely, the pain produced in us by hampered conditions in the lives of others; and, in fact, if the help tendered does not spring from such a feeling we do not call it mercy. In this sense mercy is the counterpart of ‘kindness,’ i.e. the helpfulness in which the correlative sensuous sympathy, namely, pleasure in some furtherance of life in the case of others, plays a part; and here, too, help given without such feeling behind it would not be called kindness. Thus neither of these qualities, as so understood, can be applied to God without our bringing Him under the antithesis of the agreeable and the disagreeable. And even if we were to overlook this and use the two terms solely of the respective acts of helpfulness, yet it would be out of keeping with the character of teleological (ethical) religions were we to admit, in a rigorously formulated system of doctrine, a divine causality bent upon a sensuous furtherance of life simply as such. Nor can the difficulty of finding a place for the conception of mercy in God be due to our looking for it at this particular stage of our inquiry. For, as mercy obviously presupposes evil and the consciousness of evil, the discussion of it could not well come before that of evil; while, again, as mercy always implies some degree of separateness between the two parties involved—for within a closer group, as between father and children, we do not speak of mercy— the objects of God’s mercy cannot be those who are already enjoying, and in so far as they are enjoying, their part in redemption.

2. Again, from a somewhat different point of view, the merciful God is for the most part contrasted with the jealous God. Now, as wrath and jealousy have obviously to do with offence and sin, mercy would in such case be the repression of jealousy by compassion. If, accordingly, we once more set aside the fact that this involves an emotional state, and think only of the withholding of punishment, we must nevertheless here too set aside the idea that the punishment which is related to redemption is revoked merely on the ground of pain or defect experienced by some other. Thus, these eliminations having been made, all that remains is God’s readiness to remit the punishment altogether. Yet, even so, we cannot allow mercy to rank as a distinct attribute, since we have ascribed that remission as well as the enactment of the penalty to the divine justice. Should this procedure be regarded as wrong, however, and mercy in the sense indicated be taken after all as a distinct attribute, then mercy and justice would each delimit the other. Where justice ceased, mercy would begin, and vice versa—a relation that cannot subsist between divine attributes. It is true that the classical passage for the use of the word in the New Testament⁷ best agrees with that interpretation, for kindness to the unthankful is the suppression of jealousy by compassion. But the point of Christ’s saying is the demand made upon the hearers, and in speaking of self-discipline it was natural that the analogous element in God to which He directed their minds should there be referred to by the same term.

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Footnotes

1. Something of this kind seems to have been in the minds of the theologians who apply the term ‘internal’ justice to the divine holiness, while to justice itself they give the name ‘external’ justice. On that view, it is holiness itself that is the legislative activity of God; or else, if external justice is in turn divided into legislative and retributive, the former refers to holiness as the supreme perfection that constitutes the ground of law, the latter to holiness as displeasure at what is bad. ↩

2. Rom. 4⁴·¹⁶; cf. Matt. 20¹⁴·¹⁶. While in 2 Tim. 4⁸ the conferring of the reward is ascribed to God as judge, yet He is there represented rather as an umpire—a symbol that is not relevant here. ↩

3. Phil. 2⁹⁻¹⁰, Heb. 2⁹⁻¹⁰. ↩

4. Matt. 25²¹. ↩

5. Hence in 1 John 1⁹ forgiveness too is attributed to God’s justice. ↩

6. Rom. 8²⁸. ↩

7. Lk. 6³⁵f. ↩