Society, then, implies a common field or world in which its members meet. If there is an angelic society, as Christians have usually believed, then the angels also must have such a world or field; something which is to them as matter (in the modern, not the scholastic, sense) is to us.
But if matter is to serve as a neutral field it must have a fixed nature of its own. If a world or material system had only a single inhabitant it might conform at every moment to his wishestrees for his sake would crowd into a shade. But if you were introduced into a world which thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will. Nor is it clear that you could make your presence known to meall the matter by which you attempted to make signs to me being already in my control and therefore not capable of being manipulated by you.
Again, if matter has a fixed nature and obeys constant laws, not all states of matter will be equally agreeable to the wishes of a given soul, nor all equally beneficial for that particular aggregate of matter which he calls his body. If fire comforts that body at a certain distance, it will destroy it when the distance is reduced. Hence, even in a perfect world, the necessity for those danger signals which the pain-fibres in our nerves are apparently designed to transmit. Does this mean an inevitable element of evil (in the form of pain) in any possible world? I think not: for while it may be true that the least sin is an incalculable evil, the evil of pain depends on degree, and pains
of all possible universes, but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean only worlds that God could have made, but didnt. The idea of that which God could have done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of Gods freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes themthat His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower.
And that brings us to our next subjectthe Divine goodness. Nothing so far has been said of this, and no answer attempted to the objection that if the universe must, from the outset, admit the possibility of suffering, then absolute goodness would have left the universe uncreated. And I must warn the reader that I shall not attempt to prove that to create was better than not to create: I am aware of no human scales in which such a portentous question can be weighed. Some comparison between one state of being and another can be made, but the attempt to compare being and not being ends in mere words. It would be better for me not to existin what sense for me? How should I, if I did not exist, profit by not existing? Our design is a less formidable one: it is only to discover how, perceiving a suffering world, and being assured, on quite different grounds, that God is good, we are to conceive that goodness and that suffering without contradiction.
3 DIVINE GOODNESS
TRAHERNE,
Centuries of Meditation, II, 30
Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threatens us with the following dilemma.
On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.
On the other hand, if Gods moral judgement differs from ours so that our black may be His white, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say God is good, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say God is we know not what. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) good we shall obey, if at all, only through fearand should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravitywhen the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothingmay thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.
The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human relations, when the man of inferior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than he and gradually learns to accept their standardsa process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly accurately, since I have undergone it. When I came first to the University I was as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be. Some faint distaste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reachof chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music. By the mercy of God I fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. Thus their judgement of good and evil was very different from mine. Now what happens in such a case is not in the least like being asked to treat as white what was hitherto called black. The new moral judgements never enter the mind as mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but as lords that are certainly expected. You can have no doubt in which direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them. But the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered