I have recently heard views similar to mine controverted by an able theologian, who contended that, although they professed to be illogical, they went beyond the bounds even of the illogicality permissible in this subject. But the controverter’s solution of the problem was this: “_Evil is a part of God’s intention._ We have to fight, with God, against something _which we recognise to be His work_.” Is not this a “hard saying”? Is it not harder than the saying of Christ, “An enemy hath done this”? I say nothing about its being illogical and absurd: but does it not raise up a new stumbling-block in the path of those who are striving to follow Christ?
It may be urged that the belief in Satan has been tested by the experience of centuries and has been found to be productive of superstition, insanity, and immorality; but these evils appear to me to have sprung, not from the belief in Satan, but from a superstitious, disorderly and materialistic form of Christianity, which has perverted Christ’s doctrine about the Adversary into a recognition of a licensed Trafficker in Souls. The same materialistic and immoral tendency has perverted Christ’s sacrifice into a bribe. But, just as we should not reject the spiritual doctrine of Christ’s Atonement, so neither should we reject the spiritual doctrine of an Evil in the world resisting the Good, although both doctrines alike have been grossly and harmfully misinterpreted.
Of course it is possible that in our notions of spiritual personality, and therefore in our personification of Satan, we may be under some partial illusion. The subject teems with difficulties; and I have not concealed from you my opinion that some passages in the Old Testament appear to support a view at variance with the tenour of the New. The real truth, while justifying our Lord’s language, may not accord with all our inferences as to its meaning; and I should myself admit that it would be most disastrous to attempt to personify the Adversary with the same vividness with which we personify the Father in heaven. Still,—in answer to the taunt of the agnostic or sceptic, “Is this, or that, the work of the God whom you describe as Love?”—I think we avail ourselves of our truest and most effective answer, when we resolve to separate certain aspects of Nature from the intention of God, and to say, with Christ, “An enemy hath done these things.”