Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1890-06-01
THE GOOD IN PAIN.
Views of the Pessimist and Their
Effect Upon Religion.
ANALYSIS OF AN OLD DILEMMA.
The Creator Could Abolish Sin, but Then
We Would Not be Men.
FREE-wILL A FACTOR IN THE PROBLEM
WRITTEN FOR THE DISPATCH. /,

God is, and God can be sufficiently known,
Materialism cannot Danish GOD, neither can
| agnosticism obscure Him. But is God
| good? This is the question which pessimism
| puts in the way Of the argument for God.
| The question turns upon the problem oil
| pain.
There is NO escaping the fact of pain.
There is story in the Light of Asia" of q
poor mother with her dead baby in her arms,
who came and fell down at the Masters feet
and begged that He would give her baby
life again. And the Master answered that
He would-if she could get Him handful
| of black mustard seed fiom home without
a sorrow. And away went the poor mother
from house to house, and street to street, and
along the roads and byways of the country
handful of black mustard seed, and trying
to find a home without sorrow. But there
was no home without its sorrow anywhere.
The First Cause, as we have seen, has pro-
duced two great effects in this world-one is
nature and the other is man. That is to
say, God has manifested Himself in nature
and in man so that we may know Him.
But nature and man are the sources of pain.
Nature is so ordered that for great proper
tion of living creatures life can be sustained
only at the cost of lite. The world has a
pleasant look on a summer day, but it is q
field of battle, nevertheless. Whoever looks
beneath the surface, whoever reflects upon
the meaning which the law of the survival
of the fttest shows in the life of nature,
understands what these lines, out OF the
Light of Asia, mean:
Then marked he, too,
How lizard fed on ant and snake on him,
And kite on both; and how the fish hawk
robbed
The nsh tiger of that which it had seized.
The shrike chasing the bulbul, which did chase
The jeweled butterflies, till everywhere
Each slew a slayer, and in turn was slain,
Life living upon death. So the fair show
Yelled one vast, savage, grim conspiracy
Of mutual murder.
GREAT CATASTROPHES.
Nature, moreover. is so ordered that out
OF the universal and necessary elements of
the world can come at any unexpected
moment whole legion Of devils to devour
men alive. The confagration, the cyclone,
the flood, the earthquake, slay every year
their tens of thousands. We live in world
in which disease is simply inevitable. Our
bodies are so made that any smallest part
may become pain-center which shall make
a man regret the day of his birth. And,
after disease, is death. That fendish out
rage upon justice which they call in Russia
Exile by administrative powers, by which,
at an hour when no one is aware, men and
women may be taken from their friends,
sent away nobody knows where, and never
brought back again-this is done by nature,
with death for policeman, every day.
And worst of all is this terrible fact that
nature is supremely and absolutely indiffer-
ent. The good and the bad perish together
without distinction of persons. The train
breaks through the bridge, and the man
whose lie is OF value to his generation
browns, while the man with handouts on
his wrists, bound for the penitentiary, whose
lite is a curse to himself and to everybody
who knows him, lives.
From nature we turn to man. There is
pain enough which nature makes in this
world, but man is more than nature. Man
is so made that it is possible for him to sin.
He can degrade his body, his mind, and his
soul. He can make beast of himself. He
can bring upon himself the agonies of con-
science and the terrors of remorse. He can
make his life utterly miserable, Worse
than that, he can make the lives of others
utterly miserable. There is no torture in
man. Think what war means, and exile.
and solitary imprisonment, and slaveryl
Think what is going on to-day in the heart
of Africa! Think of the long procession of
men and women, bound with chains, tramp
ing through mud and dust and ice across
Siberia! There are no adequate words in
any language to describe mans inhumanity
to man.
HOW THE WICKED PROSPER.
And here again God seems so strangely
Indifferent. Rascality prospers. The vicious
and the cruel sit in places of power The
man who lifts his hand to strike an unjust
blow, no lightning out of the sky hits him.
he good have often died at stakes, and are |
all the time suffering some kind of martyr |
dom. And there is no interference. The |
Supreme must hear the cry of the oppressed, |
but it seems as if He hears it as the lotus |
eaters heard it, only as far-off murmur
having little meaning.
1t is said that a few years before the Civil |
War there arose a strange religion some
where among the negroes OF the South hay
ing for its central doctrine the belief that
God is dead. Sometimes we look about us,
and that creed seems true.
There is a great religion in the East The
religion of the Buddhists, which is based
d
In the opinion of the disciples of this re-
ligion the only happiness lies in getting out
of this miserable life into Nirvana. And
Nirvana means simply an everlasting con-
dition of Inconsistencies.
There is a philosophy in Germany, the
philosophy of the pessimists, which is based
upon the assumption that whatever is, is
bad. One of its leading teachers maintained
that this is the worst of all possible worlds.
Another held that it would have been far
better never to have been born, at all.
John Stuart Mill declared that nature is
the great criminal; that there is no crime
which puts men into prison or conducts
them to the gallows, but nature is guilty OF
it every day. Mr.. Ingersol has devoted
two-tnirds of his writings in opposition to
he Christian religion to comments upon the
act of pain. There may be q God, he
lays, ''or not I do not know; but when
ook out upon the pain and sin which curse
he life of man, 1 am inclined to think not"
This is the centre OF Mr.. Ingersoll's posi-
ION.
THE OLD DILEMMA.
Finally. here is this ancient dilemma,
which is older than the Christian religion,
md is not worn out yet. IfGo6 is omnipo-
ent, He can stop pain; if He is GOOD. He
lesires to stop pain; but he does not stop
pain; therefore He is either not omnipo-
ent, or not good.
Now here is the problem Of pain. Is
here any solution to it? Here is the fact OF
,ain. What can we do with 1t? Is it possi-
lie that we can still maintain that God is
.ood?
Adolphe Monod. a sanity Huguenot, has
remarkable passage at the beginning of {
ne of his sermons, in which he imagines, in
world which is altogether ignorant of God
he discovery of an inscribed tablet on which
S written an authentic revelation. Who