Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1662/Principal Tulloch on Spiritual Evolution
From The Spectator.
PRINCIPAL TULLOCH ON SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION.
Principal Tulloch delivered last Sunday, in Edinburgh, the first of a series of lectures on the Christian doctrine of sin, and dwelt in his openings address chiefly on the bearing which the recognition of the fact of sin should have on the modern theory of evolution. He pointed out that there is nothing in Christian teaching in the least inconsistent with the theory of development of which Mr. Darwin, for instance, is the chief exponent What is inconsistent with it is the notion, he said, that everything can be accounted for as a mere growth out of antecedent states, and that all divine agency is excluded; that nature is not merely a sphere of action, but the acting power itself, beyond which there is nothing. That the doctrine of evolution, by natural selection or in any other way, may describe the true method in which life rises from the lower to the higher levels, Principal Tulloch not only did not deny, but held it to be in every sense consistent with the evolution of conscious life, as we know it ourselves on those higher levels. It is no longer supposed, as he very justly remarked, that theology is merely the classified arrangement of Scriptural teachings properly interpreted, it is held by all the better thinkers to be the vital growth of the moral and spiritual experience of man as enlightened by Scripture, and its business is to trace the various links in the organized structure of Christian history and thought. Now, if this be true, so far is a doctrine of gradual evolution of the forms of life from being inconsistent with Christian teaching, it is but the anticipation in lower stages of creation of the highest application of that teaching. Only, just as in interpreting the gradual development of Christian doctrine and Christian thought, we never think of assuming that the later stage is nothing but the earlier stage in transformation, but rather assume that the later stage is a fuller unfolding of that divine mind which was less perfectly seen in the earlier stage, so with regard to physical evolution, the assumption of the Christian faith is that it is the divine power which is seen in evolution throughout all the stages of the gradual growth of life, only more fully manifested in the more complex organisms of the higher creation than in the simpler organisms of the lower. Christian faith has not only nothing to say against evolution, but recognizes evolution as one of the most important phases in the method of revelation itself. But such faith is wholly inconsistent with the radical idea dominating materialistic conceptions of evolution,—namely, that the process of growth really explains the cause as well as the history of life on the earth,—and also with the radical idea dominating the view of Matthew Arnold and the modern Dutch school of divines,—that there is nothing but an abstract ideal which is higher than man, that religion is only "morality touched with emotion," and God an expression for "a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," in other words, not the foundation of our life, but its visionary goal. Now with both these conceptions as Dr. Tulloch showed, the Christian teaching as to sin,—a teaching, which, like all other similar lessons of the Church, had its history of gradual growth, and was no more fully developed at first than the doctrine of divine grace,—is entirely inconsistent. If sin represent a fact at all in human experience, it is a fact which cannot be explained on the principle of finding in every new phase of existence nothing but the transformed shape of some antecedent state of existence. If sin were to the previous condition of circumstances and character what the blossom is to the bud, or the fruit to the blossom, then though it might be a morbid growth, a parasitic growth, a growth tending to disfigure and ruin the character out of which it grows, it would no more call for remorse, or penitence, or judgment, than the gall-apple on the oak, or water on the brain. Yet the attempt to eliminate the sense of sin from human consciousness is just as ineffectual as the attempt to eliminate the sense of cause and effect, or the sense of hope and fear. The "historical method," as it is called, which recognizes everything as having some real right to an appropriate commemoration in the life of man which is found alike in all ages, and developed as the life of the race is developed, demands that the sense of sin should be recognized as a constituent part of human history, no less than the feeling for art, or the thirst for knowledge, or the life of imagination. Indeed, it is far more pervading than any of these. While they are developed by only a portion of the community, the moral feeling of deep self-reproach and remorse for voluntary evil is shared by all, not least by the most ignorant who do not participate at all in the life of culture or of abstract thought.
In the early history of every people, it is indeed remarkable how uniformly the nation feels that all its guilt or goodness is shared by all, that the penalty of impiety will light upon all alike, even when it seems to be due only to the acts of a few. As the Jews recognized that Egypt suffered for the tyranny of its king, and themselves expected that, in the long wanderings of the wilderness, all would incur the penalty of acts committed only by a few,—as the Athenians regarded their whole city as liable to a curse for the acts of desecration committed by a few thoughtless youths,—so the early literature of all nations is full of the Nemesis which descends on one member of a family for the sins of his ancestors, a conception of which the earliest dogmatic trace is probably found in the story of the fall and the wide extermination which followed it in the flood. It will be said that this fact only proves that, originally at least, sin is no more distinguished from the antecedent conditions from which it is "evolved," than other human characteristics or qualities; that the peculiar remorse attending it, whatever it may be due to, is not due to any keen sense of personal responsibility. But it might be as well said that because in a dim light we cannot distinguish from each other the shadows of contiguous objects, we have no impression of the true meaning of a shadow. The line of discrimination between the range of the suffering, and the exact range of personal or tribal responsibility for the suffering, is necessarily a delicate line to draw. Society is so constituted, especially in its earlier stages, that it sins and suffers collectively,—that it is often impossible to distinguish who is and who is not responsible for a calamity which overshadows all alike. Early tribes were units, rather than collections of units. What they did was done perhaps by the chief, but then the chief carried the whole tribe with him, and what he did, they consented to. In such cases, the sense of sin was necessarily almost as collective as the suffering which came of it. No one was in the same way separately responsible as in more individualized societies, but no one was in the same way distinctly innocent of the guilt. It is only in later stages of society that it is possible to distinguish effectually between the range of the guilt and the range of the suffering caused by that guilt, which last necessarily spreads far beyond the limits of the guilt itself. When a whole city trembles because one or two of that city have done something impious, as Athens trembled at the mutilation of the Hermes, it is probable that all feel, though not perhaps responsible for the impiety, yet accountable for the moral recklessness and selfish audacity which caused the impiety. Athenian awelessness seemed almost the contradiction of Athenian superstition, but the Athenian mob felt in some dim way, we presume, that the cruel awelessness of the young scapegraces, and the cruel superstition which cried out for vengeance on them, were somehow a growth of the same stock. And to us, looking back at the history of Judaea and Athens, the real identity between the impiety of individual offenders, and the cruel vindictiveness which asked for vengeance on them as a mode of absolving the people from the consequences of such offences, seems plain enough. But as the history of a race develops, the time inevitably comes when finer distinctions are rendered necessary between sin and suffering, and when the notion of expiation is connected rather with the voluntary disinterestedness of more than human love, than with the compulsory suffering of arbitrarily chosen victims. The notion of sin is individualized, the range of the collective suffering which comes from it is better defined, and the conception of the intense and yet willing suffering which is its only adequate cure, comes out in its full grandeur in the doctrine of atoning love.
Thus, as Principal Tulloch truly urges, the history of the sense of sin is the truest example of the sort of "evolution" which should be our standard in interpreting the sense to be attached to lower kinds of evolution. In the first instance, the ideas of guilt, responsibility, punishment, expiation are all more or less confused in a vague notion of common evil, common penalty, and common hope of some sort of penance and purification. Then gradually the guilt is discriminated from the penalty, and the penalty from the expiation. It is seen that the doers of evil cannot suffer alone, but that they suffer differently, and in a much more permanent way, than those who only share the evil consequences and not the evil of the cause; and again, it is felt that those who only share involuntarily the evil consequences are in no way helping to remove the evil cause, while the divine love which accepts voluntarily, and for the sake of the guilty, that pain, of the origin of which it was. quite innocent, is restoring the moral order which the guilty broke. Now, can "evolution" of this sort be in any sense the mere growth of more organized out of less organized structures? Does not the whole story imply the conception of a divine horror of sin, and a more and more complete discrimination of its origin, its consequences, and its remedy, every step in which renders the divine ground-work of creation more evident? Surely Principal Tulloch is right in saying that the theistic and Christian conception of evolution excludes the idea of the growth of the higher forms of life out of the lower, and requires that of the gradual revelation of divine purposes which in the earlier stages of human life are only roughly and dimly discerned.