Such a dire result comes from a one-sided view of things, a knowledge of certain truths without the knowledge of their counterbalancing truths; and the counterbalancing truth which will preserve us from so great a calamity is contained in the Bible teaching regarding the forgiveness of sin.
Once grant that there is such a thing as the forgiveness of sin, and the root of all possible spiritual inversion is logically cut away, for there must be One who is able and willing to forgive and who is therefore the object of worship and is capable of entering into a specific, conscious, personal relation to us. It is therefore important to realise what the Bible teaching on this subject is.
The logic of it is sufficiently simple if we grant the premise on which it starts. It is that man, by his essential and true innermost nature, is a being fitted and intended to live in uninterrupted intercourse with the All-creating spirit, thus continually receiving a ceaseless inflow of life from this infinite source. At the same time, it is impossible for a being capable of thus partaking of the infinite life of the Originating Spirit to be a mere piece of mechanism, mechanically incapable of moving in more than one direction; for if he is to reproduce in his individuality that power of origination and initiative which must be the very essence of the Creative Spirit's recognition of itself, he must possess a corresponding liberty of choice as to the way in which he will use his powers; and if he chooses wrongly, the inevitable law of cause and effect must produce the natural consequences of his choice.
The nature of this wrong choice is told us in the allegorical story of "the Fall". It is mistaking the sequence of laws which necessarily proceeds from any creative act for the creative power itself — the error of looking upon secondary causes as the originating cause and not seeing that they are themselves effects of something antecedent which works through them to the production of the ultimate effect. This is the fundamental error, and the opposite truth consists in connecting the ultimate effect directly with the intention of the originating intelligence and (from this point of view) excluding all consideration of the chain of intermediary causes which link these two extremes together.
In the latter case we do not have to consider the mechanism through which the vital energy brings forth its ultimate fruition, for by the very fact of its being inherent energy working for manifestation in a certain direction, it must necessarily produce all those relations, visible or invisible, which go to make the completed whole.
The fundamental error consists in ignoring this distinction between direct creation and external construction — in entirely losing sight of the former and consequently attempting to accomplish by knowledge of particular laws, which are applicable only to construction from without, what can only be accomplished by a direct creation which produces laws instead of being restricted by them.
The temptation then is to substitute our intellectual knowledge of the relations between various existing laws with which we are acquainted for that Creative Power which is not subject to any antecedent conditions and can produce what it will, while conforming always to its own recognition of itself as perfectly harmonious Being. [See my Creative Process in the Individual] This temptation is a very subtle one. It appeals to all that we can gather from secondary causes, whether in the seen or the unseen, and to all the deductions we can make from these observations. To all appearances it is entirely reasonable, only its reasoning is restricted to the circle of secondary causation and contemplates the great First Cause as a mere force whose action is limited by certain particular laws.
Looked at superficially, it does appear as if this course of reasoning was correct. But in truth it does not take into account the originating power of the Creative Spirit and is in reality a course of reasoning which is only applicable to construction from without and not to growth from within.
Now so long as we do not recognise a Power which can transcend all our past experiences, we naturally look to a more extended knowledge of particular laws as a means by which we can attain to a power of control which will at last place us beyond subjection to any control, the general principle involved being that by our knowledge we can balance the positive and negative aspects of law against each other in any proportion we like and become masters of the situation by this method.
Is this not a correct description of much of the teaching we meet with at the present day? And does it not exactly agree with the words of the old allegory, "ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil (Gen 3:5)?
Those grosser forms of sin which we all recognise as such are only the one original transgression — of seeking from without what can only come by growth from within — when assuming its crudest aspect, but the underlying principle is the same; and so the allegory of the Fall is typical of all sin, of that inverted conception of life which, because it is inverted, must necessarily lead us away from the Spiritual Source of Life instead of towards it. The story is, so to say, a sort of algebraic generalisation of the factors concerned.
When this becomes clear to us, we begin to see the necessity for the removal of sin. We see that hitherto we have been trying to live by an inverted conception of the principle of Life, whether this wrong conception has shown itself in crude and gross forms or more subtly in the purely intellectual region.
Then we perceive that what we require for the perpetuation and continual increase of our individual life is a mental attitude which renders us perpetually and increasingly receptive of the Creative Love — the consciousness of a personal and individual relation to it beyond and in addition to our merely generic relation as items in the cosmic whole.
Then something must be done to assure us of this specific relation, to assure us that neither our erroneous thoughts in the past, nor yet the erroneous action to which they have given rise, can separate us from this Love, either by making it turn away from us or by a law of cause and effect proceeding from our wrong thoughts and acts themselves. And to give us such a confidence we require to be assured that the initiative movement proceeds from the side of the Divine Spirit; for if we suppose that the initiative starts from our side, then we can have no assurance that it has been accepted, or that the law of "Karma" is not dogging our steps.
It is this misconception of pacifying the Almighty by an initiative originating on our side that shows itself in penances, sacrifices, and various rites and ceremonies at the end of which we do not know whether our operations have been successful, or whether through deficiency in quantity or quality they have failed of the desired result.
All such performances are vitiated by the inherent defect of making the first move towards reconciliation come from our side. It is nothing else than carrying into our highest spiritual yearnings the old error of trying to produce by working from without what can only be produced by growth from within. We are still substituting the constructive process for the creative.
Accordingly, the Bible tells us that the fundamental proposition that there is such a thing as forgiveness of sin is enunciated by God Himself; and so we find that the story of the Fall includes the promise of the One by whom man shall be redeemed and released from sin and brought into conscious realisation of that reciprocal intercourse with the Source of Life which is the essence of his innermost being. Man is told to look to the Divine promise of forgiveness, and from this point onwards belief in this promise is set forth as the way by which sin and its consequences are effectually removed.
I sometimes meet with those who object to the teaching that there is forgiveness. To such I would say, Why do you object to this teaching? Of course, if you are entirely without sin, you have no need of it for yourself; but then you are a very rare exception and at the same time beastly selfish not to consider all the rest of us who are of the more ordinary sort. Or if you put it that everybody is without sin, then the newspapers of all countries flatly contradict you with their daily details of thefts, murders, swindles, and the like.
Again, the conception of a God who will not forgive sin when repented of is the conception of a monstrosity. It is the conception of the Spirit of Life determining to deal death, when by its very nature it must be seeking to express Life to the fullest extent that the expressing vehicle will admit of; and repentance is turning away from something that had previously hindered this fuller expression. Therefore such a conception is illogical, for it implies the Spirit of Life acting in opposition to itself. Also such a God ceases to be the object of worship, for there is nothing to be gained by worshipping Him. He can only be the object of fear and hatred.
On the other hand, the conception of a God who cannot forgive sin is the conception of no God at all. It is the conception of a mere Force, and you cannot enter into a personal relation with unintelligent forces — you can only study them scientifically and utilise them so far as your knowledge of their law admits; and this logically brings you back to your own knowledge and power as your only source of life, so that in this case also there is nothing to worship.
If, then, there is such a mental attitude as that of worship, the looking to an Infinite Source of life and joy and strength, it can only be based upon the recognition that this All-creating Spirit is able to forgive sin and desires to do so.
Then, since the Divine Self-conception is bound to work out into realisation, a supreme manifestation of this eternal principle is the legitimate outcome of all that we can conceive of the creative working of the Spirit when viewed from the particular standpoint of the existence of sin in the world, and so the appearing of One who should give complete expression in space and time to the Spirit's recognition of human needs by a supreme act of self-sacrificing Love reasonably forms the grand centre of the whole teaching of the Bible.
The Great Sacrifice is the Self-offering of Love to meet the requirements of the soul of man. Our psychological constitution requires it, and it is adequately adapted to fit in with every aspect of our mental nature, whether in the least or the most advanced members of the race. It is the supreme manifestation of that Love which is the Original Creative Power, and the Bible presents it to us as such.
Hear Christ's own description of it: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" [John 15:13 — Ed.]; "God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son into the world, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life" [John 3:16 — Ed.]. All is attributed to Love on the one hand and Belief on the other — the Creating Spirit and the simple recognition of it — thus meeting exactly those conditions which we found to constitute the conditions for vital growth from within as distinguished from mechanical construction from without, and therefore not depending on our knowledge but on our faith.
Nor is this conception of the forgiveness of the All-originating Love to be found in the New Testament only. If we turn to the Old Testament we find such statements as the following: "And the Lord descended in a cloud and stood with him [Moses] there, and proclaimed the Name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin" (Ex. 34:5-7); "I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for my own sake, and will not remember thy sins" (Isaiah 43:25); "I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a cloud thy sins; return unto me, for I have redeemed thee" (Isaiah 44:22); "If the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him; in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live" (Ezek. 18:21-2).
No doubt on the other hand there are threatenings against sin; but the whole tenor of the Bible is clear, that these threatenings apply only so long as we continue to do evil. Both the promises and the threatenings are nothing else than the statement of that Law of Correspondence with which my readers are no doubt sufficiently familiar — the great creative law by which spiritual causes produce their analogues in the outer world, and which is identically the same law whether it works positively or negatively.
The phrase "for my own sake" in Isaiah 43:25 should be noted, as it exactly bears out what I have said about the inherent quality of forgiveness as forming a necessary part of the Creating Spirit's conception of Itself in Its relation to the human race. This is the fundamental basis of the whole matter, and this truth has been dimly perceived by all the great religions of the world; in fact, it is just the perception of this truth that distinguishes a religion from a mere philosophy on the one hand and from magical rites on the other; and I think I cannot end this chapter more suitably than by a quotation which shows how, ages before Christianity was known to them, our rude Norse ancestors had at least some adumbration that the supreme offering must be that of the Divine Love to itself. The passage occurs in the Elder Edda, where O-din, the Supreme God, addresses himself while hanging in self-sacrifice in Ygdrasil, the Cosmic Tree:
I knew that I hung
In the wind-rocked tree
Nine whole nights,
Wounded with a spear,
And to O-din offered
Myself to myself,
On that tree
Of which no one knows
From what root it springs.
(From Strange Survivals, by Sabine Baring-Gould)