Life's Dark Problems; Or, Is This a Good World? (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT GOD has made to us no supernatural revelation as to His method of governing the world. He has left us, as indeed He has in every other direction, to find out for ourselves. We discover it by study and by experience, and it is better that it is so; for by the processes of study and experience we not only discover truth, but we grow, we develop, so that we can understand, comprehend, and feel that which we have attained. Such being the case, it is perfectly natural that men in different stages of human development should have transferred to the heavens their best ideals of earthly conditions. What else could they do ? We are men: we have to think as men, imagine as men. We have to think from our human point of view; and it may be accurate as far as it goes. The only difficulty is that the world has in so many cases imagined that the crude and ignorant conceptions of the early world were definitely inspired, and so infallible and not to be improved upon. So these old ideas persist even after we are wise enough to have learned something better. It was natural, then, that the first men, the early men of the world, should have thought of the world as governed as their particular tribe or kingdom was governed. So they imagined a king seated on a throne, and arbitrarily directing the affairs of the world. An emperor, if he be an absolute monarch, issues a command, an edict, an ukase. He orders that certain things be done, that certain other things be not done; and he attaches to these orders an entirely arbitrary sequence in the way of reward or punishment. It is " You do thus, and I will do so." There is no natural, no necessary causal link between the thing done and the reward or the punishment. It is, as I have said, purely arbitrary ...