D LIBRARY MARVARD UNIVERS The Origin of Evil. "The Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."-GENESIS ii. 16, 17.. MY purpose in the present sermon is to show that God is not to be held responsible for the existence of evil. Assuming that evil is a reality, that it is hateful to God, and that He is more powerful than any other being in the universe, let us ask, How it is that evil exists? This is a subject upon which much nonsense and unintentional blasphemy have been uttered. There are certain opinions regarding it very commonly held, which inevitably cast a shadow upon the character of God. Most theologians tell us that evil must have been permitted by Him for some wise purpose; but that it is impossible to A imagine what that purpose can have been, and that therefore the existence of evil calls for the exercise of an unlimited amount of faith. In other words, they talk as if reason, apart from faith, would suggest that God ought to have prevented evil, and that, had He done so, we should have found ourselves much more fortunately situated than we are. Now reason, I take it, teaches no such thing. She shows us, on the contrary, that the prevention of evil would have made our world not better than it is, but infinitely worse. I must ask you, first, to notice that God works, and cannot but work, under certain restrictions, conditions, or limitations. The most sober theologians have always maintained that He could not make wrong right, or right wrong. There have been some celebrated writers-as, for example, Paley and Occam-who asserted that sins are only sins because God has forbidden them. Occam even went so far as to say that God might conceivably command us to hate Him, and it would then be our duty to do so. The more reasonable view, however—in fact the only reasonable view seems to be, that the distinction between right and wrong is a distinction not made, but accepted, by God. This distinction |