Part III: The Problem of Evil: Some Little-Considered Physical Aspects

Introduction

THE TITLE of this paper is a little misleading unless we understand our use of the term physical. We wanted to concentrate on those aspects of experience which are related more specifically to man's position in nature, rather than his relationship with God.

We therefore decided to use the word physical in contradistinction to the word spiritual as applied to evil, and then to take some liberties with this term by an extension of its usual meaning.

This paper therefore gives some attention to the total environment in which we live, including our relationships with our fellowmen and with nature.

Consideration is given to the place of disease and death in the scheme of things, of multiplied conception, of "thorns and thistles" and deserts, of storms and earthquakes and other seismic phenomena, of wars and wicked governments, and so forth. All these are part of the problem of evil and at times in a very critical way.

Certain rather satisfying principles appear which have wide application in providing an answer in part to many such situations and justify the observation made by Cabell that this may well be, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the "best of all possible worlds."

Even in the midst of judgment, the goodness and mercy of God are brought to light again and again.

Chapter 1

The Problem of Evil

ONE IS always a little suspicious of an answer that is too complete. Things don't work out that way. In fact, the unanswered questions make life worth living. There is a stimulation in being faced with problems which appear almost, but not quite, insoluble.

Frequently one hears the remark that the problem of suffering is beyond us. The world is so full of misfortune. Everywhere men and women and children, the innocent and the guilty alike, suffer unbelievable hardships, physical and emotional. The whole creation groans indeed. Disease, poverty, bereavement, disaster, war, accident, and the sheer wickedness of man to man--all hourly add their awful total to history until one wonders whether God is still in His heaven, or at least, whether He cares. Then we are warned that we must not question the goodness of God: we must simply trust that in spite of all appearances to the contrary, God is still loving and merciful. But we do question. It is part of the process of living to ask questions.

And there are some answers. Sometimes they are amazingly satisfying, sometimes they scarcely help at all. A lot depends on our mood and our experience. One day a pupil asked a learned rabbi, "Why, if God abhors the idols men worship, does He not destroy them all?"

The old man replied, "Because some of these idols are a necessary part of the economy of nature, like the sun and the moon."

"Then in that case," answered the pupil, "why does He not destroy at least those which are not a part of nature?"

"Because," replied the rabbi, "if He destroyed some and not others, it would appear that He was agreeing to the worship of those which He did not destroy."

Such was the kind of answer given in an age when wisdom was greater and knowledge was less. Today we have more knowledge, but scarcely more wisdom. Our knowledge is always fragmentary--so answers to this great problem must suffer accordingly. Yet we do have some light, and we should surely acquaint ourselves with all we can.

Now, if God foresaw the evils which were to result from man's disobedience, He must surely have taken account of them in His plans. Even the sinfulness of man is sometimes turned to man's own good by the overruling providence of God. How great have been the sufferings of some folk as a result of disease--yet God has sometimes wrought amazing things by those whose lives could only be made useful by such means. The Lord's redeemed are made perfect by suffering--there does not seem to be any other way; it thus becomes a blessing in disguise for the child of God. But the children of God number only a small percentage of those who greatly suffer--and what of all the rest? (can suffering really serve any good purpose for the majority of mankind? It may. As the children of God are to be made wholly perfect by suffering, it is possible that the world is preserved from becoming wholly corrupt by the same means. This much seems certain: a world in which there was no suffering to shake us out of our complacency and to stir our sympathies would be a hard, dispassionate world indeed. And a world in which no poverty existed would breed a uniform level of frightful human selfishness.

A few years ago, a namesake of mine wrote a remarkable book entitled Wisdom, Madness and Folly in which he reflected upon some time spent in a mental asylum in England while suffering a nervous breakdown. The book is remarkable for its lucidity--even in dealing with those times in which he was seriously ill. This is what he wrote regarding the suffering of pain: (1)

Or take the question of pain, which I as an individual fear and loathe. Yet I know that it is a biological necessity without which I could not possibly survive. Certainly I can legitimately strive to avoid or mitigate it in reason, but I cannot even wish it to be abolished.

The old religious idea of the value of suffering is out of fashion today. We live in a sentimental age to which the infliction of pain seems inherently wicked and even the caning of a naughty child is looked at askance. Perhaps this paradoxical result is designed expressly by Providence to teach us the lesson that apparent evils are necessary and that to accept them, adapt them, and turn them into good is the true way of salvation.

Looking back on my own life, which has not been without periods of suffering, I can sincerely say that were I now given the chance of living my life over again without these periods, with all the happiness and none of the misery, all the ups and none of the downs, I would refuse. Theoretically at any rate, though I dare say not in practice, I would choose rather to live my life with all the suffering, the misery and the downs and none of the happiness and the ups. For, wonderful though the experience of the mountain-tops has been, I know that I have learnt far more in the valleys, and I believe that what I have learnt is of permanent value.

May it not be that the typical modern attitude toward suffering, toward the apparent evils of pain, disease, and so on, is due to decay in belief in eternal life beyond the grave? If there is a Resurrection, as the Christian and most other religions teach us to believe, then the question so often asked of why God allows such and such evils, such and such pains, misery and suffering, especially of innocent people and children, is quite easy to answer. Suffering is a necessary part of the education of souls, more particularly since it is a precondition of sacrifice.... If there really is an eternity to look forward to, there is no reason to suppose that anything in this life is wasted or lost or without value in its true relationship, not even sin.

Often the only way God can reach a fallen creature is by using the consequences of the Fall and magnifying them till they become unbearable. Then in his desperation, like the prodigal who came to the end of himself, a man turns again to his God. "Yet," we are assured, "God does not willingly afflict nor grieve the children of men..." (Lam. 3:33).

Not all evils are the consequences of someone's sinfulness, as Jesus pointed out to the disciples (John 9). Yet many of the evils which continue after those responsible for them are dead serve as a challenge by creating problems that stimulate effort to correct them: thus, to some extent evil has its own compensations, for by nature we usually need this stimulation to give our best. And the result of such giving brings its own reward--and we are glad.

It is amazing what has been inspired by such evils, and what has been achieved by some organizations of mercy. One has only to contemplate the work of institutes for the blind and deaf and dumb, for example. Consider Helen Keller or Laura Bridgeman. Why these two people should have been born blind and deaf, and dumb as a consequence, no one can say. It is well not to assume that all such misfortunes result from some specific sin. But it is certain that both were liberated from the unthinkable darkness of that silent tomb by the energies of men and women who were not motivated specifically by any Christian convictions. Some evils seem to arise apart from sin altogether. Prehistoric animals, living in far distant geological ages before man was created, suffered certain diseases including dental caries, as their bones clearly show. (2) And correspondingly, there are evils which have stimulated men and women to great things apart from any divine "inspiration" in the accepted Christian sense. Many evils, as we shall see, are not really evils at all, for in their absence, far far greater evils would result. They thus serve for the restraint of worse things and might be viewed as blessings in spite of appearances to the contrary.

Let us examine for a moment the evils which can be considered a direct result of the fall of man, on the basis of the statements made in Genesis 3:1-19. The list is simple enough; the simplicity is deceiving; the implications are tremendous.

In the order of Scripture we have: for the woman, greatly multiplied sorrow and multiple conception (twins, triplets, etc.), pain in childbirth, and a position of dependence upon the husband; and for Adam (and in Adam, for mankind), a cursed ground, with its fruits continually disappointing him, thorns and thistles, labor and sweat, and physical death.

Take these in reverse order and consider physical death first. It is true that death is an "enemy" for man, as numerous passages assert; it is an enemy when considered as an intrusive element, for it did not originally apply to Adam and Eve: it resulted from their first act of disobedience. As Romans 5:12 points out, for man death "entered." But that such an evil is now really a blessing in our present sinful condition is a fact which the Scriptures themselves plainly show. Adam and Eve had access to the Tree of Life which would have served for their healing (Rev. 22:2) and would evidently have restored their original state of deathlessness (Gen. 3:22). But after they had sinned and the poison of death had been introduced into their bodies through the eating of a forbidden fruit, it was God's merciful provision to drive them from the Garden of Eden, lest they should succeed in reaching the Tree of Life again. He set an angel to keep the way to the Tree of Life, an angel whose sword could never be escaped, since it turned every way (Gen. 3:24). God made sure that such deathlessness could never be recovered so long as man remained a sinner.

The angel guarded specifically the way to the Tree of Life! The wording of Genesis 3:22 is striking: "And the Lord said, Behold the man is become as one of Us, to know good and evil; now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the Tree of Life and eat and live forever..." Thus ends the sentence. It is unfinished. The consequences of reaching the Tree of Life would have been a life of sin prolonged unendingly into an eternity too terrible to contemplate. So God drove out the man and the woman and appointed thenceforth that every man must die. The penalty of death becomes a liberation which is a blessing.

An editorial comment appeared in a popular magazine which suggested that death is not altogether a curse after all for man. It read as follows:

Our eye was caught last month by two adjacent news items that seemed to dovetail neatly. One quoted an eminent scientist who said that the time might easily come when medical advances would make it possible for human beings to live forever. The other reported the information recently of the Toronto Memorial Society, aimed at ending "morbid, barbaric" funeral rites and at reducing "the high cost of dying." With all respect to the eminent scientist, we hope his prophecy proves wrong. The advantages of living forever, we suspect, are almost wholly illusory. We personally are committed to nature's ancient and wise system of cycles in which the new continues to replace the old at regular intervals; we have no wish, really, to run on century after century like a stuck record or a play without a final act, repeating past follies and renewing stale triumphs to the boredom of ourselves and others. No, there are many worse fates than death.

Clearly, there is something within us that makes it easier for us to do wrong than to do right. This is "the law of sin" (Rom. 7:23). This is what a fallen nature means. So life becomes increasingly a failure to achieve past ideals, a series of defeats which discourage us and render us critical of any idealism remaining in others. Life is a downhill process, and the longer we live the further down we tend to go, until we are tired--and ready to die. Long life holds promise in youth but seldom in old age, even for the child of God. It was not that Paul was an unusually sinful man that made him long to go "home," but rather the persistence of sin as it expressed itself in a million daily saddening ways in little things--in his own life, and in the world about him. The very best of men may grow most wearied because of their very desire to be something other than they are.

It is only in the goodness of God that we hate this thing which defeats our aspiration for righteousness. When a man is born again, he is a new creation in that the law of sin is broken and there is a new tendency, a tendency to goodness rather than to its opposite. It becomes more truly "natural" to do the right thing than to do the wrong. But few would be rash enough to argue that a man is ever free from the struggle against sin. The conflict remains, the old nature against the new, and in the conflict the final victory comes only when we pass on. Even for the saints, death comes as a release.

What if death never came! How terrible to be condemned to such a struggle for all eternity. How merciful a provision physical death becomes when viewed in this light. Dr. E. O. James mentions this concept of death being a blessing among some African people--and considers it a remarkable insight. (3) Yes, death was imposed as a judgment, but what a merciful one!

But there were other far-reaching consequences which resulted from this one act of disobedience. Genesis 3:17 tells that the ground was to be cursed because of man's fall, it would be hard to cultivate, it would render its fruits disappointingly, and it would bring forth thorns and thistles. In what way can these results possibly be traced back to man's fall?

In the Garden of Eden, lacking mechanical aids, Adam and Eve would have to do most of the work on their knees. They were told to dress it and keep it (Gen. 2:15). This implies that there was a certain danger of an "undressed" earth and an "unkept" domain. We still speak of "keeping" a garden. It seems that, having placed man here God intended that this should be his proper habitat. In multiplying and filling the earth, he was not merely to spill out over the boundaries of the Garden, but to expand the Garden as he himself expanded. The whole world was to become an Eden.

Moreover, this task, though not being physically burdensome to unfallen Adam, presumably would be a sufficient challenge to require self-discipline and would therefore prove perhaps the prime agency in the building of character, the conversion of innocence into virtue. By experience, by the things he learned, he was to mature, to discover the difference between good and evil, learning to abhor the evil and growing in stature and wisdom, as the Last Adam (Jesus) showed that man could do. He might have passed through this period of training and growth as the Last Adam did. That a person is not yet mature and has yet to learn many things is not an evidence of sinfulness. The Lord Jesus was holy as a child (Luke 1:35), but could still grow to be a sinless boy, and then a sinless man. His experience made Him mature, not more holy. In Hebrews 2:10 "perfect" means "mature." Once made "perfect" in this sense by the things he had experienced, Adam would have been ready, not for death, but for transformation into a higher plane of life, a new kind of existence. Even yet, we shall not all die, but we shall all be transformed (I Cor. 15:51).

On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus Christ had reached this divinely appointed state. He might easily have gone on into glory, transformed, never seeing death. Had he not sinned, Adam likewise would have passed into glory, never seeing death. And as with Adam, so might it have been with Eve--and each succeeding generation. Death intruded, because of sin.

So now, outside the Garden, a weary Adam turned his hands to till the earth. Very soon, he found there were short cuts. It was easier to burn off the trees and cultivate a small patch till it was exhausted--then desert it. And in time he began to create deserts. Undressed and unguarded, the earth became naked and unfruitful. Deserts grew where none had been before. Their chief restraint came to be that God now "clothes" the nakedness of the earth (Matt. 6:30) sufficiently to prevent the complete breakdown of the economy of nature: once such wounds have reached a certain size, it seems they grow by leaps and bounds, and nature unaided has not the power to halt their progress. Sooner or later, such areas would have covered the habitable parts of the earth.

The extent to which man is responsible for such widespread desiccation is very great and seems to have arisen quite directly from his lack of energy. Adopting the easiest course to extract the maximum wealth from the soil with the least effort and in the shortest time, he has quite literally "plundered the earth."

Can it really be that man created deserts? Andrew Ivy wrote: (4)

Soil erosion and depletion caused the transformation of garden spots into deserts in Greece, Syria, northern Italy, Africa, Mesopotamia and the Uplands of China; we hear of dust storms in the Volga Valley, in South Africa, Australia and the United States, the bread-baskets of the world.

Walter Taylor has observed: (5)

Buttrick has shown that the lack of adequate regulation of grazing has resulted in "the treeless countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, the Moorlands of Scotland and England and the poverty and desolation of Spain...."

Recently a series of dust clouds swept over half the United States. According to Forest Science these originated largely on over-grazed semi-arid lands and former cattle ranges plowed for wheat near the east side of the Rockies...

It is not a question, as some stockmen mistakenly think, of the country getting drier and the vegetation disappearing. Over-grazing does more than remove valuable forage; indeed it tends to alter many important environmental conditions.

There are deserts in some parts of the world which cannot be attributed to man in this sense, as far as we know. This seems to be true, for example, of the Australian desert and perhaps the deserts of Central America. Yet we do not really know to what extent the upset of one local environment sets up a chain reaction over extended areas, bringing climatic and other changes in places where man has not yet laid his heavy hand.

It has been said sometimes that all deserts are "since man" and that geology supplies us with no desert plants in fossil form, as though they did not exist in prehistoric times. But this apparently is not true.

It may be that in the economy of nature God sees fit to leave some uncovered ground for reasons which are not clear to us. The fact remains, however, that those areas where man penetrated in early times and which proved to be most fertile have largely been turned into desert as a consequence of his abuse of the soil. Some climatic changes have taken place as the polar ice has retreated, but it does not seem that this is sufficient to account for the major deserts. Thus E. W. Bovill, writing on the Sahara, while admitting the possibility of a climatic change being in part responsible, remarks nevertheless: (6)

As the greater part of the Sahara has reached the extreme limit of aridity it is rather to its outer fringes, where desert conditions give way to steppe, that we naturally look for signs of progressive desiccation. In Barbary the problem has been closely studied by Gsell, the greatest authority on the history of North Africa. Exhaustive research has convinced him that [climatic] conditions have changed little since the Roman period. Purely local changes caused by earth movements and other factors are admitted but do not alter the main argument. Throughout Barbary, stories of failing wells and shrunken springs are common enough. In nearly every case it is due to neglect by the natives...

The world has few more impressive monuments to offer than the vast amphitheater of El Djem, built to seat 60,000 spectators but today a ruin set amid utter desolation excepting a few Arab hovels clustering at its foot which serve to emphasize its degradation. Or Timgad, lying like a bleached skeleton stretched on an arid plain, its deserted streets bordered by channels which we know once flowed continually with water. These and countless other ruins lie scattered over an inhospitable land which once was called the Granary of Rome...

The desiccation of the Western Sudan is not itself wholly natural. The incalculable harm which is being wrought throughout tropical Africa by the shifting cultivator is now widely recognized. The African farmer has little knowledge of crop rotation or manuring. He cultivates his land to exhaustion and then with fire and steel makes a fresh clearing in the surrounding bush or forest. In 1924 the Governor of Nigeria declared that "the necessity for protecting the people from their own improvidence, which if left unchecked will inflict untold calamity upon posterity, is as urgent as ever...literally thousands of square miles of forest have disappeared since the War broke out." Agreement has never been reached regarding the extent to which forest affects climate. It is however the common experience of man that trees conserve moisture and that the destruction of forest impoverishes the soil and causes increased aridity...

Man, who is but a secondary cause of desiccation in the Sudan, must be held primarily responsible for the continued activity of the same process in the Sahara.

We know now that the Sahara is still growing, reaching further and further south, advancing some years at a frightening pace. Whole tribes are displaced and crowded down toward the south into borderline areas already showing signs of being overexploited. And the added burden of hungry mouths to feed by native farming techniques which ruin the land is literally causing millions to starve and only accelerating the growth of the already tremendous wound across the face of a once-fertile land.

In the New World, the rate of desiccation has been just as serious. In 1940 it was reported from Washington by H. H. Bennett, chief of the Soil Conservation Service, that soil erosion was then costing U.S. farmers at least $400,000,000 a year. At the then average value of $50 an acre, that means that 8,000,000 acres were being washed and blown away each year.

Dr. W. C. Lowdermilk wrote in an article: (7)

The History of Civilizations is a record of struggles against the progressive desiccation of civilized lands. The more ancient the civilization, the drier and more wasted, usually, is the supporting country. In fact, so devastating seems the occupation of man that, with a few striking exceptions, a desert or near desert condition is often associated with his long habitation of a region.

Two major factors are believed to account for the growth of man-made deserts. In the first place, semi-arid to semi-humid regions proved the most favourable sites for the early development of human culture. Such areas, however, stand in a condition of delicate ecological balance between humid and true desert climates. Comparatively slight disturbances of the cover of vegetation and soils, such as are brought about by human occupation for grazing and cultivation, are sufficient to extend the borders of the desert far beyond the natural true desert into more humid climates.

Recently the archaeologists have turned back the pages of history, not merely centuries, but thousands of years, and their postmortems on buried civilizations suggest that it has been the hand of man, more than climatic change, which has reduced once rich and populous regions to desolation and poverty. After a long struggle, a civilization either died or its people migrated to more productive regions. Many ancient civilizations, once reveling in a golden age of prosperity, are crumbling in ruins or lie buried in sands and debris largely caused by the destructive treatment of the lands on which they were dependent for sustenance.

According to archaeologists the Sahara, the Central Asian deserts, the arid parts of Palestine, Mesopotamia, and the Gobi and North China were once teeming with human life, and the traditions of peoples descended from ancient cultures tell of immigration to their present habitation from what are now the desert regions of Central Asia. The origin of the European peoples was in the East. The Hindus came from the North, and the Chinese from the West. Yet this land from which they came is today an immense desert where only very limited regions are still able to nourish the scanty population. Sir Aural Stein's discoveries of sand-buried Chinese Turkestan reveal numerous towns a square mile or more in size, in a region now depopulated. There were ruins of cities, castles, aqueducts, reservoirs, and all the other evidences of lost cultures of vanished populations. Gibbon declared that 500 cities once flourished in what are now the dry depopulated plains of Asia Minor...

The peninsula of Arabia contained an enormous population called Sea-Land, which at times annoyed Babylon from B.C. 2500 to 616. Now, a few fierce nomadic Bedouins, the remnants of former cultures, fight for existence over every drop of water and every sign of vegetation. The great Sahara Desert has recently revealed monuments, ruins of cities, temples, implements and unearthed cut trees. Champollion, the famous Egyptologist, said of it, "...And so the astonishing fact dawns upon us that this desert once was a region of groves and foundations and the abode of happy millions." The very gradual climatic changes due to the present age of retreating ice do not appear sufficient to account for the excessively rapid desiccation of the vast areas known to have sustained at one time enormous populations. Man has written the record of encroaching deserts.

When Zenobia was overthrown by the Romans under Aurelian, its capital, Palmyra or Tadmor, was the metropolis of a mighty empire. Now the sands of the Syrian desert almost hide the ruins of that stupendous city of marble and gold. As late as the rise of Mohamed, Tripoli on the northern coast of Africa had a population of six million. It was then clothed with vineyards, orchards and forests. It is now bare of vegetation. The streams are dried up, and the population reduced to about forty-five thousand.

And archaeologists claim now to have discovered, under shifting sands, the capital of the rich kingdom of the Queen of Sheba.

To the United States, doubtless, goes the speed record in time and extent for man-made deserts. The dust storms of the old world, long occupied by man, have appeared in the new world and for the same reasons...

It seems clear that man and his animals may extend the desert conditions by processes of man-induced desiccation into regions formerly capable of supporting large populations. Climate does change, but not at the comparatively rapid rate of the decadence of vast areas of habitable regions.

As Duncan Stuart has pointed out, farm crops divide themselves into soil-depleting on the one hand (e.g., wheat, oats and barley) and soil-preserving on the other hand (e.g., peas, beans, alfalfa, clover and vetches). (8) The former are more readily adopted for cultivation because the immediate returns are far greater relative to the labor involved. The tendency is to strip the earth of its covering and create deserts. The latter involve more labor, but completing the circle of thought, their cultivation tends to clothe the earth and dress it and thereby to extend the Garden that God originally planned.

Now desert conditions produce a plant life that has a character of its own. Everyone is familiar enough with the various forms of cactus. These strange plants are in one way or another "thorny." Thorns are a symbol in Genesis 3:18 of an earth cursed because of man, cursed because improperly dressed and tended, cursed by open wounds and nakedness, cursed by erosion and desert. This is reflected in Isaiah 34:13, 14: "And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof...The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet there with hyenas..."

J. H. Balfour is quoted by Pember as having remarked: (9)

There is in all plants a tendency to a spiral arrangement of leaves and branches, etc., but we rarely see this carried out fully, in consequence of numerous interruptions to growth and abnormalities in development. When branches are arrested in growth they often appear in the form of thorns or spines, and thus thorns may be taken as an indication of an imperfection in the branch....That thorns are abortive branches is well seen in cases where, by cultivation, they may disappear. In such cases they are transformed into branches. The wild apple is a thorny plant, but on cultivation it is not so.

Thistles, too, appear in the judgment. So Balfour observes: (10)

Thistles are troublesome and injurious in consequence of the pappus and hairs appended to their fruit, which waft it about in all directions and injure the work of man, so far as agricultural operations are concerned. Now it is interesting to remark that this pappus is shown to be an abortive state of the calyx, which is not developed as in ordinary instances, but becomes changed into hairs. Here, then, we see an alteration in the calyx which makes the thistle a source of labour and trouble to man.

Hugh McMillan observes regarding nettles: (11)

It is a remarkable circumstance that whenever man cultivates nature, and then abandons her to her own unaided energies, the result is far worse than if he had never attempted to improve her at all. There are no such thorns found in a state of nature as those produced by the ground which man once has tilled, but has now deserted. In the waste clearings amidst the fern brakes of New Zealand, and in the primeval forests of Canada, thorns may now be seen which were unknown before. The nettle and the thistle follow man wherever he goes, and remain as perpetual witnesses of his presence, even though he departs; around the cold hearthstone of the ruined Shieling on the Highland moor and on the threshold of the crumbling log-hut in the Australian bush, those social plants may be seen growing, forming a singular contrast to the vegetation around them.

Yet there is the promise that the desert shall yet blossom as a rose (Isa. 35:1). That a desert could become once more a garden seems hard to believe. But there have been occasions when the promise has been fulfilled momentarily as though to give us an earnest of the future reality. In November 1948, a Toronto newspaper reported:

Thousands of cattle and sheep have grazed this year on a desert--the great Kalahari Desert which covers thousands of square miles in Southwest Africa and Bechuanaland, Windhoek reports. Following unusually heavy rains, the boulder-strewn waste of sand suddenly sprouted many kinds of grass and plants. Geologists say this desert once was a vast inland sea and its miraculous fertility this year has revived an old plan to pump water from the Orange River into the salt pans of the desert, enabling farmers to plant lucerne, wheat, oats and millet.

The consequences of these desert areas are serious, not merely to man in the light of his future survival, but even to animals. There are examples of some animals having become carnivorous and most cruel, which were previously herbivorous and comparatively gentle, and others becoming locally extinct, contributing to the disruption by forcing animals to prey upon each other "unnaturally." Eugene Marais has pointed out how some animals are becoming ferocious and cruel as a result of desert conditions. Thus until about 1860 the wild baboons in Africa fed upon insects and roots. But with the rapid drying up of the Continent, due to man's bad management, they were forced to look for liquid to drink and started attacking goats, killing them cruelly just to suck the milk from their udders. Then they started attacking all kinds of domestic animals and eating them for food--and the unnatural habit has spread widely over the Continent. (12) As S. Zuckerman pointed out, however, apes and monkeys are by nature predominantly, if not entirely, vegetarian and do not normally attack other animals to eat their flesh. (13)

Other similar primates are now proving to be occasionally carnivorous. The chimpanzee, which was once considered to be essentially vegetarian, though with some insects to round off its diet and perhaps supply its protein, is now found to be occasionally killing its own kind for food and is thus becoming cannibalistic. (14)

Whether this has always been the case or has been the case at least as long as man has observed their behavior or is a recent change in dietary habit is not known. But in view of the fact that the primates as a whole seem to be vegetarian by nature, it is quite possible that the disturbance of their natural habitat by man has been the decisive factor here also.

Indeed the dominion which man was to have over the beasts and cattle and creeping things and the fowls of the air--over the whole animal kingdom, in fact (Gen. 1:28)--was not properly exercised and nature having no proper governor became wild, and the struggle for food has resulted in much of the apparent cruelty among animals. But it was not the original arrangement, nor will it be the final one.

This incidentally throws some light on the reason why certain animals were "brought" to Noah to preserve seed, while other animals were left to be destroyed along with man at the time of the Flood. The sudden unnatural reduction in animal population in one area would bring an imbalance over a much wider area. This, when at the same moment the human population was reduced to a mere handful of people, might have put the entire natural system in grave danger. It must surely be supposed therefore that God brought to Noah just such creatures to be preserved which, in multiplying would restore the balance and control it until the initial family had multiplied sufficiently to be out of danger. The same principle forms the basis of God's delayed action on behalf of Israel as revealed in Exodus 23:29 where the enemy forces occupying the land were not immediately reduced lest predatory animals should multiply and endanger the scattered settlements of the Israelites. Man is required in sufficient numbers to keep in check those aspects of nature which can be dangerous to him. Dr. Laura Thompson says wisely, "Man is not only a major factor in the web of life; he is the only agent whereby a conservation program for a local area may be actively implemented." (15)

It is a matter of common observation that animal nature may be modified by diet. Cats fed on meat are often more savage than cats fed on milk. On the other hand, domestic animals are tame because suitably fed and properly governed, so that we may see in the barnyard flesh-eating and herb-eating creatures living harmoniously together. Adam was to dress and to keep the Garden and all in it. That is to say, he was to attend to a regulation of the soil and all that this involves, but he was also to govern the animal world and guard its sensitive balance.

In 1956, Georges H. Westbeau published his record of the life of Little Tyke, (16) a lioness who was saved from death as a tiny cub and taken into the Westbeau household to be treated as a pet. The story is a fascinating one. What is particularly surprising is the demonstration of the fact that the young cub showed no desire whatever for meat when she reached an age at which in the wild she would have accepted it as her normal diet. For days the Westbeaus tried to train her to accept meat, since they had every intention of fitting her for a return to nature in due time. Little Tyke resolutely refused.

Subsequent conversations with authorities revealed the fact that, in the wild, young lion cubs have to be taught to eat meat by virtually starving them. It is evidently not something they adopt by instinct. The Westbeaus had tried all kinds of ruses and even offered $1,000 to anyone who could show them how to succeed. By the time Little Tyke was four years old she had become a permanent vegetarian and--more important to the Westbeaus--the gentlest creature they had ever known. Little Tyke befriended kittens, chickens, lambs, dogs, donkeys, indeed every kind and species of waif or stray animal, healthy or sick, that she came across. On one occasion, when the Westbeaus managed to introduce a mouthful of solid food by guile, Little Tyke at once regurgitated it. They never attempted it again.

The experts assured them that carnivorous animals, such as lions, cannot live without meat. Little Tyke could not live with it. Her extraordinary gentleness, even to the extent of keeping her claws retracted, and her tidiness and cleanliness made her a perfect companion and playmate for all kinds of animals and all kinds of people, including infants barely able to climb on her back. The front cover of Westbeau's book shows a lamb lying between her paws, the former obviously almost asleep. Isaiah 11:6 foresees just such a world when the Lord returns to establish His rule over a creation that man has failed to govern as he was commissioned to do:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

The animals were to live on herbs (Gen. 1:30), not on flesh. So they will again in the Millennium, for as Isaiah 65:25 points out, "The lion [the king of beasts] shall eat straw like the bull [the king of cattle]." There is a remarkable and perhaps unsuspected evidence today that man also changed his diet. Claude A. Villee remarked: (17)

The human appendix is the remnant of the blind pouch, the cecum, which is a large functional structure in the digestive tract of herbivorous animals such as the rabbit. Foods rich in cellulose require a long time for digestion, and the cecum provides a place where the food may be stored while the gradual process of digestion, mostly by intestinal bacteria, takes place. A long time ago...our ancestors changed to a diet containing more meat and less cellulose, and the cecum has gradually diminished to the present useless vestige, the appendix.

John E. Pfeiffer reinforces this conclusion by saying: (18)

Man bears the marks of vegetarian origins in teeth not specialized for ripping and tearing like those of true carnivores, and in the sort of long gut generally associated with a diet of plant food. Furthermore, man still seems to digest vegetable fats better than animal fats. Medical research indicates that an important factor in hardening of the arteries may be the formation of deposits of poorly digested fatty products on inner blood vessel walls.

Reverting once more to Isaiah 65:25, we see that the passage continues by saying "at that time, they shall not harm nor destroy in all My holy mountain, saith the Lord." So the true government then to be established will obviate all the present "evils" of the world which spring from disharmony in the natural order.

It is a challenge to us, even as it stands, to do our part in governing the animal world by wise use of the means which have been developed for the maintenance of the requisite food supplies. In some way the whole animal creation suffered, as the words "above the rest" (Gen. 3:14) imply. Human government is not always bad.

Where we have, as it were, "vital statistics" for animals which are known both in a wild and in a tame state, it is revealed that they may live longer when tame. Thus, as Raymond Pearl points out, "All the available evidence agrees that elephants under domestication, about which India furnishes long and extensive experience, live on the average longer than in the wild state." (19) And this in spite of the fact that they are made to work hard!

Yet, in itself domestication may not be an unmixed blessing for animals. It is sometimes pointed out that predatory creatures are given instincts of "limitation" which operate so long as other animals respond according to their true nature. When the preyed-upon do not act according to nature, the predatory instincts of the attacker are upset entirely. Thus wolves in the presence of the "stupidity" of sheep, and foxes in the presence of the "stupidity" of fowl, will kill indiscriminately. William J. Long, a naturalist, made this observation: "I must give the wolves this credit, too, that though they crossed the well-worn paths of a deer yard, they made no attempt to harry the game. They rarely do so unless they are hungry, or unless (near settlements) they run into a herd of foolish domestic animals that do not know enough to scatter or be quiet when wolves appear." (20) If man had completed his duty of domestication, this would not have come about, because wolves and foxes would also have been tamed.

There appears on the other hand to be sufficient evidence to show that the cruelty of nature is apparent rather than real in many cases. The majority of animals do not actually hurt their victims in spite of appearances to the contrary. J. Crowther Hirst tells us that he wrote to big game hunters and missionary doctors, securing the record of some sixty men who had been pounced upon by bears, lions, tigers, leopards, and panthers. Fifty-eight of them felt no pain or terror. (21) If this be true of man with his intense sensitivity, it should be more true of animals.

There are numberless examples of creatures which do not lose their appetite even after the most extraordinary mutilations. Alexander Skutch relates how he watched a mica serpent mortally wounded by bullets continue to gorge upon the contents of some nests in a colony of Lawrence's caciques. He concludes that a hungry snake is insensitive to pain and almost insensible to danger. (22) On the other hand, human beings lose their appetite almost immediately under very slight provocation--though this is not quite universally true. Some primitive people do not seem to feel pain as we do and occasionally, for them, loss of appetite occurs only as a sign of approaching death. (23)

But the assumption may be reasonably made that loss of appetite is some measure of sensitivity to pain--and that therefore many animals do not have this sensitivity, since they do not lose their appetite. Some domestic animals appear to be more sensitive. But on the whole, the apparent "wildness" and ruthlessness of animals in the wild is partially due to the fact that we project ourselves into it and attribute to animals "human" reactions, interpreting their reactive behavior accordingly.

Animals do not anticipate pain as we do, though they may anticipate danger. We often confuse these two animal responses. There is a case of a codfish which was apparently hooked in the eye, but succeeded in tearing itself loose, leaving its eye on the hook. Subsequently it was attracted to the hook once again by its own eye, which it took for food! When it was taken out of the water, its own eye was still on the hook in its own mouth.

A moth cut in half continued to eat ravenously to assuage an endless appetite, unaware that the food passed right out of its open stomach onto a table, where it was removed by the experimenter. Finally it died of starvation! Yet, if such creatures are caught, the restriction of their movement starts up a keen reflex that makes them struggle to be free--and this struggle gives us the impression that they are in intense pain. It is not at all certain that the animal world suffers pain in the ordinarily appointed experiences of their existence, except insofar as it serves to teach them where danger lies. It may only be evidence of a powerful instinct to resist all unnatural restriction of free movement.

As Munro Fox has put it: (24)

One might think that pain could be deduced from an animal's actions. If it struggles when wounded, or if it attempts to get rid of the object which wounds it, then one might conclude that the animal is in pain. But is this so? If an earth-worm is cut in two, the back part wriggles most. Does it therefore suffer most? The worm's "brain" is scattered: there is a portion in each of the numerous segments of the body. But the more complex part of the nervous system is at the front end of the worm. Here, if anywhere, one would expect pain to be felt, yet the hind end wriggles most. Rather than a sign of pain, this struggling seems to be due to a release from a normal inhibition to excessive movement. In the intact worm the front "brain" imposes a restraint or inhibition on excessive movements of the body. Released from inhibition by the cut, the worm's hind end wriggles freely.

A frog can be anaesthetized and its brain then destroyed. It soon recovers from the anesthetic and lives on without the brain. If, now, a tiny piece of blotting paper dipped in acid is put on the frog's back, the animal raises its hind foot and wipes off the paper. Everything looks as if the frog had been stung or hurt by the acid, as if it had felt a painful sensation and had sought to free itself from pain. But surely we cannot suppose that without a brain the frog could feel pain. Rather we have here an automatic reflex action to the acid stimulus, a reflex through the spinal cord, which can involve no pain. Thus appearances of pain are deceptive.

In light of such observations, Ronald Good points out the need for a change of attitude toward nature on the part of the naturalists. He says: (25)

The deepest reason for dissatisfaction is our failure to abandon outmoded biological conceptions, and this has two main aspects. More important because of its profound significance to the world in general, is what may be called the "Nature red in tooth and claw" fallacy. One would imagine that the influence which such a belief has had on human affairs in the past half-century would at least raise doubts about its validity; but even more odd is the apparent continuing failure to admit that the very existence of a science of "natural communities" belies it, for if Nature was indeed as the poet described it, its condition would be chaotic and in a perpetual state of disequilibrium. If there were nothing else to thank Dr. Dice for, there is the support his book gives to the view that Nature is essentially a state of beautiful and delicate balance to which each and every member makes its due, but only due, contribution.

If this is true, then we are presented with an interesting fact. The apparent suffering of these creatures in their normal living conditions attracts our sympathetic attention, in spite of ourselves, to the fact that nature is a system which can be thrown out of adjustment and needs our oversight. Yet this lesson is not taught us at the expense of the innocent creatures who appear to need our care. Thus has God wisely appointed an effective method whereby a constant challenge should be presented to us without making the animals pay the cost of our education. We are challenged to keep harmony, or to restore where necessary what has been lost. We ideally support our societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and the skeptics say it is a waste of money because the animals do not really suffer anyway. They may be quite right. But so is our idealism.

Animal lovers will still maintain--probably with justification--that animals do feel pain, especially domesticated ones. But this does not affect the argument too seriously. Manifestly, pain is essential for the protection of the organism. There are children born now and then who feel no pain whatever. This is usually only discovered when the child takes delight in cutting itself just to see the blood bubbling out! This may sound absurd, but it is a fact. Such children feel no pain whatever and will without hesitation plunge their hands into water that will scald them, or drink things far too hot for their throat and stomach to stand. They have to be protected continually against themselves and their own curiosity.

This is well illustrated from a news item appearing in The Fundamentals: (26)

A little girl, Beverly Smith, born in Akron, Ohio, about six years ago, almost never cried. She never cried when she fell down, she never cried when she bumped her head. She didn't even cry when she burned her hand on a hot stove. She cried only when angry or hungry.

The doctors who examined her soon discovered that she had a rare condition, probably due to a defect in the central nervous system, and for which no cure is known. She cannot feel pain. The mother took the baby home with a great deal of accompanying advice.... She must watch Beverly constantly; the baby might break a bone and continue using it until it could not be set properly; she might develop appendicitis without nature's warning of pain. Spanking her to make her more careful about hot stoves and knives would do no good. A life without pain will be a perpetually dangerous life for Beverly.

A similar instance was reported in the Montreal Gazette: (27)

Richard Mains, age 8, goes to the hospital regularly to have his hair pulled. Each time doctors watch for some indication that the boy feels the pulling. But so far it has failed to give him any sense of pain.

Richard is the only little boy in the country who never cries, because he has no sense of feeling or touch. Officially, Richard's condition is diagnosed as a gangli-neuropathy, a rare disorder that has baffled medical scientists for years. A leading nerve specialist described Richard's case as "among the most baffling in the world."...The boy takes knocks, cuts and bruises without knowing they have happened.

His condition can be dangerous, like the time when he rubbed his eye so hard he scratched the retina. It took a leading surgeon to save the eye.

Recently, the door of a hot oven was opened against Richard's knee. His leg was badly burned. He knew nothing about it until someone noticed his reddening leg. Now he wears special protective clothing. Each night and morning he is carefully examined to see if he has been injured.

For any creature which has a highly organized nervous system--that is to say, which is a highly developed animal--a sense of pain is absolutely essential. It is a protective device. Presumably some domesticated animals have become more sensitive to pain because they are not so hardy as the wild variety of the species.

Now sweat also, in the case of man, appears to be as much a consequence as a punishment, though it is often assumed that, being part of the curse, it is a penalty. In a sense it is a penalty, but it is a merciful one. Although from an engineering point of view the figure seems quite high, by actual measurement under a wide range of work load and environmental temperature conditions, we established in our own laboratories (using fit young men as subjects) that the efficiency of the body as a thermodynamic machine is anywhere from 15 percent to 35 percent. Some young men were much less efficient, some were highly so: in part it depends upon the type of work being done. On a bicycle we found the highest levels of efficiency for all forms of exercise.

Now, the potential energy of the oxidation of the food eaten in excess of these figures, the mean of which is 25 percent, must be eliminated in the form of heat if the temperature of the body is to be held at a safe level. Whenever the temperature of the environment will not allow this excess heat energy to be dissipated quickly by radiation, sweating breaks out to provide a means of evaporative cooling, and it is highly effective in man. (28) If for some reason sweating is suppressed--as by the administration of drugs, for example--deep body temperature begins to rise at once in quite precise proportion to drug dosage. (29) Sweating is now therefore essential for man's survival under the normal working conditions of his existence as a creature whose disobedience in Eden ruined his body as it ruined his spirit.

It is a curious thing that as machines have taken more and more labor off our hands, holidays have steadily decreased. Centuries ago, a few days labor per week was all that a man ever did. And this involved in many instances only a few hours each day...except on special occasions and during certain seasons. Most non-Western peoples, especially primitive people, have much more free time; even in Europe, holidays and feast days were so numerous that the idea of holidays would have seemed absurd.

Unfortunately, someone has to make and run the machines which are to reduce our hours of labor. Certainly we can do more in less time. But these machines of ours merely enlarge our appetite for gadgets and comforts for which we must work longer and harder! Alfred Pearce Dennis remarked: (30)

It is doubtful whether all the labour saving machinery ever invented has lightened the toil of a single human being. Modern inventions increase the capacity for production and enable more people to live, but just as many people as before live laboriously and painfully. The women who work in the clothing sweat shops of New York or London, with their improved sewing machines, have a production capacity tenfold that of the old needle workers, yet I doubt if they labour one whit less than the nameless needle woman in Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt"!

Strangely enough, despite our dreams, hard work is not only better for us at times, but is even more desirable! There are areas of the world where hard work simply is not necessary: nature is so bountiful. But the result is curiously far from what we might suppose.

The Daily Commercial News of Toronto carried the following editorial: (31)

People are funny. Mention of a tropical South Sea island brings visions of an idyllic life of happiness and ease, with complete freedom from everyday cares and worries. But it doesn't work out that way.

Take the case in New Zealand for instance. The Socialist government administers numerous islands and island groups in tropical waters, and it has been found that the more pleasant the surroundings appear to be, the unhappier are the residents. There are lots of volunteers for service in these Edens, but it has been noted that even with cooks and a surplus of native servants to wait upon them, the men quarrel, develop nervous troubles and are only too glad to leave when the opportunity arises. Most of them never volunteer again.

This is not an exceptional situation by any means. The Prairie Overcomer had this little item on Sweden: (32)

With her "well-stocked cellar" Sweden is described as the "Welfares State" according to Time (Dec. 31, 1952). "Sweden has not been in a war since 1814, has spent most of her effort since then on staying out." She has managed to escape war and feather her nest to such an extent that she enjoys a heavenly Utopia in the midst of chaotic Europe. After a few days in Stockholm Time's editor found himself asking people "Isn't there anything wrong with Sweden? There must be." Then the government official replied: "In a country that has established an orderly society, there comes a time when one begins to ask oneself 'What next?'"

Here is a summary of that editor's findings in the country which has had no war tragedies for about 140 years: "In Stockholm gangs of prostitutes, homosexuals and assorted hoodlums make a practice of mixing it every Saturday night, to the delight of onlookers. The divorce rate has almost doubled in ten years. Sweden has one of the world's highest illegitimacy rates and one of the highest alcohol rates. High juvenile delinquency is blamed on easy jobs and easy money. The State Church admits defeat: 'We do not seem to be able to interest the young, but nobody else seems to be able to interest them either.' A deep undercurrent of emotional unrest exists in Sweden in spite of their paradise of plenty. 'Nothing will get the Swedes out of their well-stocked cellar except a war on Sweden.'"

A. L. Kroeber pointed out how the Yurok and Karok of California lived (33)

... In a climate of no rigors, on a river that gave them abundance of salmon, in a land full of acorns that were their staple food, and for centuries no foreign foes nor even pestilences invaded them. Yet all the members of the society, whatever their congenital individual dispositions, had fear and pessimism pounded into them from childhood on. They were taught by all their elders that the world simply reeked with evils and dangers, against which one sought to protect oneself by an endless series of preventive taboos and magical practices.

Here then is an environment that seems almost paradisaical and yet, as Kroeber observed, "the culture had gone hypochondriac."

Another such district is Kashmir in India. Here too, as Said K. Hak reported in The Rotarian (April 1951), the inhabitants are unbelievably wretched, poverty-stricken, and filthy.

Roland Dixon rightly concluded: (34)

The great cultures of the world's history, in the majority of cases, attained their commanding station largely because a gifted people had the chance to become numerous in a location favorably placed to receive the benefits of diffusion. But something more was needed, as a rule--a habitat where nature was not too kind. For where environment supplies the ordinary human wants with little labour, the urge of need does not seem enough to lead to great achievement. A "Happy Valley" has rarely bred an outstanding culture: in the Gardens of the Hesperides, man drowsed away the centuries. Most of the great cultures of the past had their rise in regions where, on the borders of a harsh environment, keen and persistent effort insured a rich reward.

So it seems that "sweat" both physiologically and psychologically may in reality be a great blessing. This is remarkably borne out in a book by George P. Murdock in which a description will be found of a number of primitive cultures. Those who live, like the Samoans, in an environment which is bountiful indeed (35)

...live in a chronic state of war. Rarely is there a time when neighboring villages somewhere in the islands are not in arms, and great wars involving two or more districts are not infrequent.

By extreme contrast there are the Aranda--an Australian aboriginal people who live in desert conditions where the possessions of any individual can easily be carried in one hand, and where there are no houses and no fixed or settled abode of any kind since the people must be constantly on the move, either to keep warm or to obtain food to live by. They are completely peaceful. As Murdock said: (36)

Relations between groups, even of different tribes, are almost equally amicable. No such thing as a chronic state of hostility exists. Couriers with messages or invitations travel with impunity from group to group. Visiting between groups, even aside from special ceremonial occasions, is common. Men may go alone, in parties, or with their families. The presence of women and children gives evidence of friendly intentions.

And among the Semang of the Malay Peninsula, living in a dense, hot, humid tropical climate, surrounded everywhere by thick forest, driven back by the advancing waves of more highly civilized people on all sides, (37)

...war, or any other form of hostility, is absolutely unknown, not only between different bands and tribes of the Semang themselves, but also with the Sakai, and even with the Malays, by whom they were not infrequently harassed. They never react to ill-treatment with treachery, much less with open violence. They merely withdraw and avoid their oppressors.

Here we find the strange fact that utopias are not good for us at all, and that the sweetest temperaments may be nurtured in the midst of hardship What a contrast this is to the accepted philosophy of our own culture!

No matter how we may strive to eliminate "sweat," God will work to prevent our purposes; for He knows better. This taxing of our strength, this challenge to the will and the mind, is a necessary good if we are to maintain any kind of energetic dominion over this world of ours. And even from a purely physiological point of view, sweat is a blessing in our fallen state. There are people born now and then who cannot sweat. They have to be protected continually against being burnt up due to the excess heat energy created by the food they eat to satisfy their hunger. All kinds of precautions are necessary for such folk who are constantly in danger of their lives.

One might suppose that by eating less, the excess of available energy from the food eaten would be reduced sufficiently to make sweating no longer important. But this solution has the serious defect of leaving one everlastingly hungry! The fact is, therefore, that somehow appetite for, and the effective use of, the foods available have gotten out of register. If our bodies had not been involved in the disastrous consequences of man's first disobedience, it is to be supposed that our appetite would be satisfied the moment we had eaten sufficient to provide just enough fuel for energy to carry on. As soon as exercise used up this energy, hunger would automatically induce its replacement--and no more. We ought therefore to have about four times as much energy as we actually do have, if appetite for food is any guide. Perhaps Adam did have.

Undoubtedly the far greater efficiency of animal bodies (apart from man) is due to the perfect arrangement whereby all the food eaten to satisfy the appetite is turned into energy ...or at least a very high percentage of it. The feats of animals, from the point of view of muscular energy, is truly amazing. One only has to realize what it means for a bird to fly several thousand miles without food to appreciate its body efficiency. Studies made of other animals, particularly fish, show that they achieve prodigious energy out of the small quantities of food they consume. The potential of this food is made much more evident now that we can extract some of the energy from a few ounces of matter in the creation of an atom bomb.

It has been shown that fish may have efficiencies as high as 80 percent. (38) In fact, some of the "wasted" heat that is not obviously turned into useful work may not actually be wasted at all, since heat is required simply to provide the energy for normal metabolic activities. The fish's efficiency may well be in excess of 80 percent! Comparatively speaking, the best man-made machines seldom achieve an efficiency as high as 50 percent. A good diesel engine may achieve 35 percent under normal working conditions, a steam engine with a condenser 19 percent and without a condenser a lowly 7 percent. (39) So even in his fallen estate, the athlete who achieves 35 percent is not doing too badly perhaps--though far from what the human body might have achieved but for the Fall. It is apparent from some recent experiments that animals have appetites adjusted quite precisely to their specific energy requirements. (40)

So one wonders whether it is really good for us that we strive for shorter and shorter working periods, particularly if we have not found how to spend the free time thus provided. Sometimes we are reminded that we ought to do no work whatever on the Sabbath, but those who insist on the letter here often overlook the fact that the same commandment tells us we ought to work six days--not five!

Although most of us feel that the long weekend is a great boon, there is some evidence that it does not contribute to the amount of work accomplished during the other five days. DuPont de Nemours published a report showing how production started very low on Monday and rose over Tuesday till it reached capacity on Wednesday; Thursday maintained this high level, but by Friday there was a slight falling off again, as workers became both tired from a week's work and restless as plans were made for the weekend. The slump on Monday is attributed directly to the fact that two-days' holiday is too long, and workers, instead of resting, tire themselves out with activity, coming in on Monday not refreshed, but exhausted.

And apparently even sweat itself once had a value of its own! Thus H. E. Jacob observed: (41)

According to the Bible, the sweat of the brow is not only an unavoidable consequence of all human labour, but even a blessing. For ages, the sweat of the baker mixed with the dough in the bakeries of men, and apparently it did not harm the taste of the bread. Could it have been that sodium chloride and uric acid, as well as lactic, formic, entyric and caprylic acids, of which sweat is chemically composed, have even helped the baking process?

Jacob points out that the best bread in Roman times, the tastiest loaves, were those in which sweat had intentionally been added to the dough!

Now, this discourse is no facile justification for permitting the continuance of poverty where we have it in our power to alleviate the burden it brings. But it is some help perhaps toward establishing the principle that every evil will ultimately be justified in the light of the good which an overruling God of love will bring out of it. For most of us, as a matter of fact, wealth is as dangerous as can be. We feel that we could do "so much more" with wealth. But undoubtedly, if God gives us always what is best for us, He would give us wealth if that were best. He can, and does, trust a few of His saints with wealth--but very few. It too easily becomes a means of "security," and He desires Himself to be our only security. Besides, poverty is not always identical with misery. Emil Durkheim, the great French social scientist, in his classic volume on the subject of suicide, found that suicides occurred least among poor people and most frequently among the upper classes. Many of the poorest people are the happiest.

There was a time when the church gave more honor to lack of wealth than to the possession of it--particularly for the Christian who was forthrightly so. The change came about, strangely enough, when Protestantism began to lay more emphasis on the value of time and thrift, so that possession of some wealth became the hallmark of a proper sense of stewardship.

Missionaries and colonial administrators brought up in this Christian tradition often make the mistake of supposing that this aspect of our culture--its emphasis upon thrift and the value of time--is essentially Christian also. Our accepted ideas of what is desirable for most people is under severe criticism in some quarters today, and there are many who feel that it is a mistake, even in our own culture, to educate a man to the "enjoyment" of things which his natural level of intelligence would never allow him to be able to afford. Archbishop Temple went even further and considered it morally wrong to educate a man too far when it was evident that that man was not going to be a law-abiding citizen. "If a man is a fool, by all means let us refrain from making him a clever one," he suggested. Whether this is justifiable discrimination or not is a matter of dispute, but we have a tendency to suppose that certain values are unquestionable (acquisitiveness, wealth, energetic use of every minute of the day, saving for security, competition, higher education, and so forth). It may be that part of the "problem" of evil is that we have assumed such things ought to be the right of everyone... and correspondingly desirable. Since not everyone can have them, this appears as one of the "evils" contributing to the "problem." But in reality it is an appearance only. People are by no means automatically happy with them nor automatically unhappy without them. We are realizing that toil can be a blessing and leisure a terrible curse when we do not know how to use it. Dr. R. E. D. Clark remarked: (42)

On this question Haldane has some interesting points to make. Down's syndrome victims and other persons with very low intelligence are ideally suited for many necessary jobs--e.g., looking after cows, sheep, etc. They prove reliable and their lives are exceedingly happy. Often they dislike holidays. On the other hand, intelligent persons employed in work of drudgery are unhappy, accident prone, and do not work efficiently for any length of time. It is nearly impossible to imagine a society in which all work of drudgery has been eliminated.

Moreover, many many physical things which we have longed for and which are procurable with one kind of wealth or another give us practically no satisfaction when we do finally obtain them. This alone proves that the maldistribution of wealth which limits our acquisitions may not be as serious as it seems. It may even be far better that God made most of us poor rather than rich. Certainly neither a man's poverty nor his wealth ever made it impossible for God to accomplish His purposes through men for the good of the world. But undoubtedly wealth makes it more difficult for God to move in a man's heart to do His will, and to this extent it may be a handicap.

It has been estimated by Adam Smith, I believe, that if all the wealth of the rich were distributed evenly among all the rest of mankind, the total wealth of the average individual would be raised by only 2 percent. (43) And the "cost" would be just that kind of complete leveling off which has already robbed certain countries of their means to promote the highest arts in the most effective atmosphere.

Quite possibly, the society that encourages personal initiative--even though it means that some men labor harder and sweat more than others--is probably the best society for promoting general psychological well-being. Hard work is good for man, and God will perhaps in His own way always bring to naught every attempt to eliminate it. "By the sweat of thy brow" was both a curse and a blessing: and both literally and allegorically, "thorns and thistles" arose to bear united testimony against every effort to take the easy way.

So much for the price man had to pay. What about woman?

For woman, multiplied conception and the pain of childbirth are appointed as immediate consequences of disobedience. God's original purpose was to fill the earth so that it might be governed and "dressed." This means a certain steady increase in population until enough hands exist to complete the task. It was not His intention merely to crowd the earth with people; and childbearing for its own sake does not appear to fulfill the purpose set forth in Genesis 1:28 if the children thus raised are not capable of doing their part in achieving "dominion."

Nevertheless, God foresaw that the life span of the individual would be reduced drastically with the passing of the centuries. The consequence was that the number of children possible in any one family was correspondingly reduced. Indeed, only about nine more people per one thousand are born each year than die in the same period. The "edge" which life thus has over death is small, and so it has come about that if it were not for multiplied conception, it is doubtful if the population of the world would grow at all. As Dr. George A. Dorsey has pointed out, one in every one hundred births is a twin birth. (44) This is equal to ten in one thousand. Thus, for every one thousand births, ten extra children are likely to be born because of multiplied conception. This is just enough to maintain the edge of life over death and to guarantee that the earth will be filled. (45)

Multiplied conception is apparently essential to keep the race alive. When, at the beginning, man's expected life span began to drop steadily, conception was multiplied more and more. At one time twins were the exception, then triplets, and now we are finding that even quadruplets are not too exceptional. Since children are the gift of the Lord, His provision must be as He has seen the world's need. It is not merely a punishment; it is a necessary consequence of the reduction of a life span from 900 or more years to an average somewhere in the neighborhood of 37 years! Moreover, it has sometimes been observed that more male children are born in wartime than in peacetime. If this is ever shown to be true, it would be as though God were balancing the loss of life in war, which presumably has tended to take a greater toll of males than females.

And what of the pain of childbirth? It was once widely thought that here was one experience that should be circumvented at all costs by medical science. There are still many people well qualified to speak who are persuaded that this should be done. Nevertheless, there is some evidence to the contrary. An article appeared once in a magazine, entitled "The Benefit of Birth Pains," and it had this to say (46)

At a recent congress of gynecologists in Kansas City, the subject under discussion was, "Is it necessary to have recourse to anaesthebcs during childbirth?" Certain gynecologists were violently opposed to its use in obstetrics. Thus Dr. Gertrude Nielson, a physician from Oklahoma, maintained in an interesting report that childbirth is the normal function in the life of every woman and that any intervention can only be harmful. Moreover, certain psychic disturbances manifest themselves in the woman who is thus deprived of the sensation of giving birth to her child.

Dr. Grantly Dick Read, speaking of a certain woman who during labor for her first child received anesthetic with chloroform and recovered consciousness about three hours later, remarked that she did not know how her baby had arrived. When she visited him before the birth of her second child, her final request to Dr. Read was, "I want a baby that I know to be my own. My child is very sweet, but I have never felt that he is mine. Can you make this baby part of me after it is born?" (47)

Moreover, there is not always great pain without any compensation. What suffering there is may sometimes be enervating. Dr. H. M. Denholm-Young has pointed out that although we know that delivery often means the utmost agony and an anesthetic must surely be kept at hand, yet young mothers had more than once told him that at the moment of delivery they felt no pain or discomfort, but "a physical sensation of ecstatic pleasure." (48)

Thus, while no one has the right to inflict upon anyone severe suffering merely to justify a principle, there is some evidence that where the alleviation of pain is too quickly demanded or too readily proffered, there may be an adverse effect upon the subsequent development of mother love. Part of the problem here is of our own making, because our culture weakens us constitutionally and introduces psychological factors which often do not arise in other cultures.

And what are we to say of the second part of this judgment: "And thy desire shall be toward thy husband, and he shall rule over thee"? There is but little light to be obtained from the rest of Scripture on the phrase "thy desire." The root Hebrew word has the meaning of "running after." It is as though the woman, having herself been pursued and won, should in turn thereafter find it necessary to pursue in order to hold the affection of her husband. Is it altogether fanciful to see in this a certain poetic justice? In a sense Eve had forced Adam to make a choice, to forsake his first loyalty which was to God, and by disobedience to God to remain true to herself. Henceforth he would continue to be drawn away by other loyalties (in business, in research, in sport) and she would have to pursue him to keep the ties secure. And in the meantime, this very sense of dependence would make him to some extent her ruler. But we cannot be sure, and there is room for a wide measure of disagreement.

To sum up, we may say that the judgments pronounced upon Adam and upon Eve were prophetic. They were not the literary inventions of some myth-maker. They were not such as are likely to have occurred to a creative mind at work seeking to reconstruct out of the imagination the kinds of things an indignant deity of like passions with ourselves would pronounce on two erring creatures.

These judgments have all the earmarks of the mind of God as we have come to know it in Jesus Christ. They were judgments indeed--but merciful ones whose very quality was to warn or to protect rather than to humiliate or to destroy the accused. Adam was to labor for the preservation of his own generation, Eve for the preservation of the generation to come. With beautiful concordance, Scripture says of the Lord that He would see the labor of His soul, but it would apply not only for His own generation, nor for those who are to come, but for all generations (Isa. 53:8 and 11).

Meanwhile, it often seems that nature is now at war with man, as though he were an alien suffered with some indifference by a natural order whose forces of destruction are every once in a while turned loose with complete abandon to warn this puny creature of his powerlessness. Such evils seem somehow quite unrelated to man's disobedience and consequent fall from divine favor.

Unseasonable and devastating floods, catastrophic earthquakes, volcanic eruptions of fearful consequences, withering drought and bitter cold--all these strike indiscriminately, bringing hurt to the just and the unjust alike. Are these part of God's original plan?

Psalm 148:7-8 calls upon fire and hail, snow and vapors, and stormy winds to fulfill God's word and to praise His name. We are devastated by such phenomena at times and hardly think of these things as fulfilling His word or as evidencing His goodness. But many phenomena which appear at times as evils are an essential part of the economy of nature--i.e., the kingdom of God, part and parcel of His benevolent dictatorship--as we learn once we see their place in the wider sphere.

For example, volcanoes are pretty frightening and at times terribly destructive, yet they may be essential to our well-being. Howel Williams of the University of California observed: (49)

During the past 400 years, some 500 volcanoes have erupted from the depths of our planet. They have killed 190,000 people; the most destructive eruption, the one of Tamboro in the East Indies in 1815, wiped out 56,000 people in one gigantic explosion. Volcanoes understandably have always terrified mankind. Yet it should not be forgotten that they also play a constructive role for our benefit. It is not merely that volcanic eruptions have provided some of the world's richest soils--and some of our most magnificent scenery. Throughout geological time, volcanoes and their attendant springs and gas vents have been supplying the oceans with water and the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. But for these emanations there would be no plant life on earth, and therefore no animal life. In very truth, but for them we would not be here!

This reminds us rather forcibly of the words of Nahum, the prophet, (Nah. 1:3): "The Lord doeth His will in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet."

Even what we call periods of consistently inclement weather are found to have beneficial effects! W. M. Krogman of the Department of Anthropology in the University of Chicago remarked: (50)

Climate in its entirety is a very potent factor. Huntington speaks of the "coldward and stormward" march of civilization. Specifically, he points out that in the last several thousand years the centre of civilization has shifted from warmer to cooler areas, and from quieter to stormy areas where atmospheric ozone and electricity are at a maximum. In the presence of a storm there are changes in air pressure, air movement, water content, temperature, amount of ultraviolet, ionization, and atmospheric ozone and electricity. These changes record themselves upon human behaviour, and Huntington cites as an example the period A.D. 1250-1450 when the amount of storminess increased, and extremes in weather occurred. As a result, he says, "this was a time of special alertness, initiative, and originality in most of Europe."

So in man's present condition, certain types of weather which at the time might be considered as simply unpleasant are by and large better for him. It is a familiar fact to students that it is easier to study when the room is too cool than when the room is too warm, and certainly the body functions more energetically when heat generated by physical exercise is quickly removed from the surface of the skin. The "call of the warm sunny south" may well be an illusion to the man who wants to make a contribution to his own age and generation!

Just as there is some geological evidence that deserts are "since man," so there is some geological evidence that the inclemency of violent seasonal changes is also a feature of our present economy and that prior to the appearance of man climate was more uniform. The absence of well-marked rings on wood found in coal measures is evidence that these seasonal changes from summer to winter were at least very slight in those pre-Adamic times. Ellsworth Huntington assembled convincing evidence that the distribution of civilization, over the earth corresponds with that of climate, and that the climate best suited for intellectual activities is one having frequent changes of weather and well-marked seasons. He concluded that there must be enough warmth and rainfall to permit extensive agriculture and that frequent drops below are distinctly stimulating. (51)

But this is not all. A paper presented before the Victoria Institute in London on "Climate in Relation to Organic Nature" has a chart showing that the commonly recurring diseases which plague the human race follow a seasonal recurrence, distributed over the whole year. (52) If any particular temperature and humidity and length of day persisted indefinitely, one or two diseases associated with that season would also persist and would ultimately greatly weaken if not entirely wipe out the whole human race!

The changing seasons guarantee man's continuance. But even the alternation of night and day play their part in his continuance. Laurence Henderson of Harvard remarked on the properties of carbon dioxide and said that "since the unique stability of carbon dioxide depends upon alternating light and darkness, the revolution of the earth is involved in the process."

Kenneth Walker goes one step further: (53)

As the behaviour of water when freezing and melting is also among the characteristics which make it a suitable medium for life, the larger phenomenon of alternating seasons and of the earth's revolutions around the sun must be also related to the appearance of living organisms on this planet. Wood Jones argues that the advent of life would inevitably seem to indicate the existence of some vast plan in which not only the properties of the various elements had their place, but also the greater phenomena of night and day and of changing seasons. It is a plan therefore which extends beyond the earth and involves in its compass at least the whole of the solar system. The fact that some of the observations on which these conclusions have been made are by scientists who are avowedly materialistic and mechanistic in their outlook renders these all the more interesting.

We have, then, the presence of volcanoes to provide carbon dioxide and water to make plant life possible, and we find even the alternation of light and darkness (symbols of joy and pain, good and evil, life and death) equally essential to guarantee the effective use of these prerequisites for plant life and therefore all life--since all flesh is grass.

Indeed, so closely are the threads of God's handiwork interwoven that in his presidential address to a chemical society in 1948, Sir C. H. Hinshelwood remarked, "It may not be wholly unreasonable to fancy that to almost every element there falls some unique and perhaps indispensable role in the economy of nature." Could we see deeply enough, we might well discover that those features in nature which appear most indifferent to man's well-being are in reality most essential for his continuance.

But nature's apparent cruelty to man is nothing compared with what Shakespeare terms "man's inhumanity to man." World War II is not very far away. One is still reminded now and then of the unbelievable atrocities of the Nazi regime. Little by little the truth of Belsen and Dachau and all the other places of death have been made a matter of public record. Often these records are so terrible that they are scarcely believable. The suffering of millions upon millions of human beings was a fearful reality, even more frightful, it seems now, than the sufferings of the early Christians under the Roman emperors.

In that day Paul laid it down clearly as a principle of Christian conduct that we ought to be obedient to the powers that be, because they are ordained of God (Rom. 13:1-7) . Can this really apply in the case of Nazi Germany?

At first, everything within us screams a negative. And so we search for some other way of evading the force of Paul's--or better, of the Holy Spirit's--injunction. Maybe it did apply to the days of the Roman emperors--Caligula, Nero, and the rest of them--but not to a Hitler regime. Yet we are always rightly suspicious of any effort to give plain words special meanings unless there is clear warrant for it elsewhere in Scripture.

In any society some order is necessary for the continuance of the church's witness. There have been times in human history when society was so chaotic that this witness was almost eclipsed. It happened, for example, during the Dark Ages when invading hordes of barbarians made organized life impossible. In this instance it was not that the government was corrupt, but rather that there was no government whatever.

Now, it follows that no matter how corrupt a government may be, if it continues to operate at all, it will preserve some measure of order. Within this framework the church may be able to maintain its witness. If the society is utterly corrupt, only a corrupt government can survive to keep order within it. It takes an evil man to govern evil men because only such a man can be equal to their tricks. A saintly king, for example, could hardly hope to govern a society comprised entirely of criminals, because he must often authorize others to act for himself. If these others are as corrupt as their society (which is likely) they will hardly carry out his orders as he intends, and his effectiveness is soon reduced and his authority ultimately undermined. When no central authority remains, the result is revolution and anarchy. But a man equal to his corrupt ministers, by reason of his own wickedness, might hope to command their respect and thus maintain his authority--and in so doing, preserve some measure of order. Perhaps, then, God sees to it that a very corrupt society has an appropriate governor appointed over it who is capable of dealing with the situation realistically and maintaining enough order to permit the church to survive.

Disobedience to such an authority may serve only to undermine the very agency by which a sufficient measure of order is maintained to allow the church to continue. In this light, disobedience is virtually suicide. And this is true even when the government is bent upon destroying the church--for history reveals that the church has never failed because of opposition from without. In a time of grave persecution, it has often shone its brightest, as though the contrary winds fanned the flame. But in a time of total anarchy, its light is not so much eclipsed: it is rather that the light has nowhere to shine. It is reduced to the witness of scattered individuals to scattered individuals. The possibility of local bodies of believers having any impact on their society is reduced to nil, because there is no society upon which that impact can be brought to bear. Believers tend by the force of circumstance to become isolated, and the concerted strength of numbers is lost. Two people have more than twice the strength of one if they are truly united, and a group of believers has a strength beyond the mere sum of its individuals. Thus any order at all, whatever the cost to the individual insofar as suffering is concerned, is still best for the church if it provides a structured society upon which its light may shine, though it may be unpleasant for those individuals who suffer for their testimony.

While I was reading Scott's Quentin Durward recently, a passage of significance caught my attention. It is worth quoting in this connection. Speaking of the terrible condition of society in France at the period under consideration in the story, Scott wrote: (54)

In the midst of the horrors and miseries arising from so distracted a state of public affairs, reckless and profuse expense distinguished the courts of the lesser nobles, as well as of the superior princes: and their dependents, in imitation, expended in rude but magnificent display the wealth which they extorted from the people. A tone of romantic and chivalrous gallantry (which however, was often disgraced by unbounded license) characterized the intercourse between the sexes; and the language of knight-errantry was yet used and its observances followed, though the pure spirit of honorable love, and benevolent enterprise which it inculcates, had ceased to qualify and atone for its extravagances. The jousts and tournaments, the entertainments and revels which each petty court displayed, invited to France every wandering adventurer. And it was seldom that, when arrived there, he failed to employ his rash courage and headlong spirit of enterprise in actions for which his happier native country afforded no free stage.

At this period and as if to save their fair realm from the various woes with which it was menaced, the tottering throne was ascended by Louis XI, whose character, evil as it was in itself, combated and in a great degree neutralized the mischiefs of the time as poisons of opposing qualities are said, in ancient books of medicine, to have the power of counteracting each other.

And so Scott, contemplating the evils of that society and the character of the king raised up to govern it, sees a certain divine propriety, as though no other governor could either have survived or served any useful purpose in correcting the evils of the day. W. H. Hudson in his Green Mansions rightly said that "every nation has the government it deserves." (55)

The League of Nations failed because this principle was not observed. Kenneth Walker wrote: (56)

The League of Nations was originally planned by a small group of idealists in the hope that it would be able to settle international disagreements in accordance with ethical principles. Within a comparatively few years of its establishment Geneva became an international market-place in which the shrewd opportunists who controlled the foreign offices of Europe drove hard and shady bargains. Hardy's account of the Congress of Vienna is equally descriptive of the meetings of the League at Geneva.

The Congress of Vienna sits,
And war becomes a war of wits
Where every Power perpends with all
Its dues as large, its friends as small
Till Priests of Peace prepare once more
To fight as they have fought before.

Our original representative to the League, Viscount Cecil, was soon in difficulties. One does not send a clergyman to deal with horse thieves, nor was it wise to have dispatched a gentlemanly idealist to represent us at Geneva. He was replaced in time by more suitable national emissaries. Individual idealists had created a machine for settling international disputes, but those who took control of it were more representative of national morality.

No...one does not send a clergyman to deal with horse traders making shady deals. Set a thief to catch a thief: that is an axiom based on experience. It may not be Christian, but it is realistic. Idealism is essential, but nothing is ideal if it simply does not work.

So then, a society of thieves cannot be governed successfully by a man to whom stealing is completely unintelligible. As one great judge once said, "Choose you out good men for your judges, but not so good that they forget the frailty of human nature." It is clear therefore that a bad government is better than no government...indeed may be the only government that can succeed! It has its appointed place; and it has its limitations too.

A bad government can hardly do good, yet by restraining a greater evil it may serve as an agent for good, as Paul says of the Roman government: "For he is the minister of God to thee for good" (Rom. 13:4). The fact is that government is chiefly concerned not with doing good in a positive sense, but with restraint of evil, as verse 3 makes clear, "for rulers are not a terror to good works but to the evil." They may be a burden to doers of good works, but if the righteous man is truly righteous, the government will not be a terror to him.

In the Patten Foundation Lectures for 1938-39, the visiting professor was Raymond Pearl and his subject was "Man the Animal." In the published record of these lectures, Pearl quotes with wholehearted approval the words of Jeremy Bentham: (57)

It is with government as with medicine; its only business is the choice of evils. Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty. Government, I repeat it, has but the choice of evils. In making that choice, what ought to be the object of the legislator? He ought to be certain of two things. First, that in every case the acts which he undertakes to prevent are really evils, and second, that these evils are greater than those which he employs to prevent them.

It is for this reason that a majority is considered to have a superior right over a minority, in that while the majority is likely to be just as often wrong as a minority, they are never likely to be as terribly wrong because numbers tend to limit extremists. And since government is concerned with a choice of evils, the majority will probably make the safest over-all choices.

This clearly suggests that what we have in the restrictions of a government are lesser evils made necessary by greater ones. It seems then that we should always obey authorities over us.

However, the Book of Acts provides several instances of what appear at first sight to be contradictions of the principles set forth in Romans 13. The apostles quite clearly did not obey the authorities in Acts 5:40-42, for example. Nor did Jesus, at times. How are we to account for this?

A review of such occasions seems to indicate that it was the religious authorities and not the civil authorities who were thus disregarded. Jesus clearly stood opposed to the high priest, but equally clearly stood in submission before Pilate--because the real issue here had to do with the fate of His body and not His soul--despite the fact that the latter was consenting to an act of wickedness without parallel in human history.

It would seem from these facts that Paul's injunction applies to all divinely appointed authority, including religious authority, but each in its respective sphere. It appears therefore that the civil authority is responsible by divine decree for the welfare of the bodies of men rather than for their souls, the religious authority responsible for the souls of men rather than for their bodies. So as soon as a civil authority takes upon itself the responsibility for men's spiritual lives, it is stepping beyond the sphere of action appointed for it. By the same token, when religious authorities secure their power by making use of the sanctions which are properly the administrative tools of a civil authority, they cease at once to be spiritual leaders and are rightly challenged.

To state it a little differently, whenever a religious authority attempts to secure dominion over the spiritual lives of men by the use of means which belong to civil authorities, the religious authority ceases to be religious. And because it was never appointed as a civil authority either, it has no authority whatever. So as soon as the Jewish officials took steps against the persons of the apostles, to restrain their freedom, they ceased to be a divinely appointed religious authority and were simply ignored. The use of prisons, tortures, restrictions upon the liberty of movement or labor--all these belong to the civil authority, not to the religious.

Essentially the church is concerned with men's souls, and the state with their bodies. It is never possible to separate a man's soul from his body completely and therefore there is interaction between church and state; but the ultimate assertion of authority is limited to each in its proper sphere. So the church has authority over men's Souls (Matt. 16:19; John 20:23), and the government has authority over men's bodies and goods (Matt. 22:21; Matt. 17:27 in which Jesus includes Himself; Rom. 13:7; Titus 3:1; I Peter 2:17,18).

Each has its proper place and, in that place, must be obeyed because ordained of God. This divine ordination, even of an ungodly man, was personally acknowledged by Paul when he withdrew his rebuke against the high priest (Acts 23:2-5).

The division of responsibility for men's souls and men's bodies results from the fact that society comprises sinful men. Under perfect conditions the two authorities would be merged--and indeed will be, in Jesus Christ. In the meantime, just as an ungodly man may act by divine appointment in a civil capacity, so an ungodly man may be divinely appointed to speak in a religious capacity. In the latter case he may not know it, but his words may still be inspired. The proclamation of the Word of God is not limited to God's own people, as is clearly implied by Paul in Philippians 1:15-18. In II Chronicles 35:22, Necho, king of Egypt, declared the word of God to Josiah who, perhaps not unlike ourselves, did not expect to hear any word of God from an unbeliever.

When Caiaphas was high priest, he spoke not of his own volition but simply because he held a divine appointment. As John put it, "This spake he not of his own self, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation" (John 11:51).

It is apparent that the high priests had been to all intents and purposes without vision at all, during the intervening period since the time when Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of the Babylonians. It is apparent therefore that a careful distinction must be made here where we find that while God did not speak to such men (hence the lack of "vision"), He could and did speak through them sometimes. A not altogether dissimilar instance, of course, is that of Eli with Samuel. Here is a case where God could not speak directly to Eli, because he was out of fellowship; nor could He speak at once directly to Samuel, because he was too unprepared. But He could and did speak through Eli to Samuel to give him further instructions.

Naturally, from the mere fact that such a man may be able to speak for God at times, it does not at all follow that he is always speaking for God. And only the Holy Spirit can safeguard us in this respect. Certainly it would be a great mistake to suppose that only the child of God can speak "the truth."

It is also to be remembered that heresy has its part to play, not because God ever delights in untruth, but because the presence of it may be used in His providence as a challenge calling forth truth that might not otherwise appear. Scripture assures us that this is so (I Cor. 11:19). The Rev. Francis Sharr wrote in this connection: (58)

The conflict between the truth and infidelity has resulted in immense gains to the Church. The Bible has been read as it never was before [this was written in 1891]. Champions have been raised up, created by the warfare. Thousands of books have been written in defense of the faith that would never have been thought of, if the faith had not been assailed. No sooner were the famous "Essays and Reviews" published than three hundred answers were at once forthcoming. Strauss published his "Life of Jesus" in 1836. Since that date there have been more lives of the Perfect Man published than during all the centuries preceding. A little healthy opposition is good. A storm now and then purifies the atmosphere.

In his Historical Theology, William Cunningham speaks of the conflict that arose between Calvinists and Arminians over personal election and the sovereignty of grace: (59)

Calvinists and anti-Calvinists have both appealed to the early church in support of their respective opinions, although we believe it cannot be made out that the fathers of the first three centuries give any very distinct deliverance concerning them. These important topics did not become subjects of controversial discussion during that period; until a doctrine has been fully discussed in a controversial way by men of talent and learning taking opposite sides, men's opinions regarding it are generally obscure and indefinite, and their language vague and confused, if not contradictory [my emphasis].

In his work Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, (60) John Calvin comments to the same effect when speaking of Augustine's conflict with the Pelagians:

The Pelagians at one time vexed this holy man with the reproach that he had against him all other writers of the church. He replies that, before the rise of Pelagius' heresy, the fathers did not teach so precisely and exactly about predestination; and this is a fact. What need is there therefore, Augustine says, to scrutinize the works of those writers who, before the heresy arose thought it unnecessary to devote themselves to this difficult question? But this I do not doubt, they would have done, if enemies of predestination had compelled them to do so. This reply is both wise and ingenious. For unless the enemies of the grace of God had not worried him, he also would never have so devoted himself to discussion of God's election, as he himself says. For in the work which he titles Concerning the Gift of Perseverance he says: "This predestination of the saints is certain and manifest, but necessity later compelled me to defend it more diligently and laboriously, when discussing it against a new sect. For we have learned that each heresy introduces into the Church its own particular question; and Holy Scripture has to be defended more diligently against these, than if no such need compelled it."

In a sense, this controversy generated Reformed theology.

It is to be feared that we as Christians adopt a rather superior attitude when we suppose that men of the world who do not share our faith are of no use to God and little concern to Him. God sometimes needs bad men to do a job that a good man could not do, and an unbeliever to perform a necessary task which a believer could not undertake.

A bad government may, as we have seen, be considered a lesser evil than no government at all. As such it may readily be credited directly to God's providence and submitted to in His Name, even at great personal sacrifice. For to do anything else is to weaken the lesser evil which serves to restrain the greater evil, thus paving the way for the latter to have free course. As Andre Schlemmer remarks with characteristic insight, "The State is not meant to produce on earth perfection, nor happiness, nor even the Kingdom of God. Its real value is to maintain enough order to allow the Church to preach the Gospel and to transmit God's call to His children." (61) It thus serves to guarantee the completion of the body of Christ with which its Head will bring in the new order in His own good time. The task of a government is essentially negative: the restraint of evil that good may come.

When the ebb of public life is very, very low, it is probable that no other kind of government than an evil one could survive. Resistance on our part is therefore probably nonproductive. We do not mean that no expression of disagreement should be voiced, but rather that no steps should be taken to force a change in government by the use of violence. Protest may surely be in order, but not active resistance.

This does not mean that we should adopt the attitude that there is nothing we can do in a time of evil and therefore we should not or need not try. The answer to this is that we are so constituted that we cannot help trying. In fact, the more hopeless the situation appears to be, the more likely is it that men will rise up to attempt reform. As long as one accepts life and is willing to continue with it, one must strive; "trying" is merely the name we give to the efforts exerted in the very process of living. All of which means that an evil government is not necessarily outside the will of God, and thus it must have some redeeming features, could we see the situation in its entirety, if for no other reason than the challenge it brings to our faith.

It becomes reasonably clear, therefore, that God in His infinite wisdom appoints only those governments which can survive in states which happen to be completely corrupt. And in a similar way, God may appoint an "unbelieving" ecclesiastical dignitary in a time of spiritual decay. No one but an unbelieving high priest would have agreed to the crucifixion of the nation's true King! But it was necessary that this true King be unrecognized and rejected. And Caiaphas spoke as for God on that one day.

This is in no sense an answer to the age-old problem of the relationship between the church and state. It does indicate, however, some of the principles which Scripture clearly supports, and it may yet, by opening out fresh views, contribute light to minds of greater precision who may thus be enabled to hit upon the exact truth.

In this general connection, we should perhaps give a moment's attention to one further point which has been of concern to political philosophers. It is often held that freedom is a basic good and that restraint of freedom is an evil of the worst kind. It is reflected in the Atlantic Charter and the expression there of a hope of achieving certain basic freedoms on an international scale. But while we readily admit that men ought to be free, there are necessary qualifications. If the freedom of one man (a criminal, for instance) endangers the freedom of many men, we feel rightly that the restraint of his freedom by imprisonment is just.

The existence of prisons, of restraints legally established, of many forms of punishment for the protection of the innocent--all these, though evils in one sense, are goods in another. Granted that there are miscarriages of justice now and then, by and large the sanctions of the law, its powers to punish, are ultimate goods. In fact, punishment may itself be a blessing, or at least the threat of it may be.

It is a curious thing that today psychologists are beginning to admit the value of punishment, not as a deterrent, but as an incentive to achievement. Leonard Carmichael remarked: (62)

Many students find it helpful to set mild punishments for themselves if their allotted tasks are not performed. Most scholarly workers indeed find that they must solve the problem of not allowing apparently unfavorable environmental conditions to interfere with work that they must do. It is helpful to remember that psychological experiments on distractions show that interpolated noise or other unpleasant interruption instead of cutting down work actually may, at times, have a so-called dynamogenic effect and make the individual do more and better work when the distraction is present than when absent. Thus the scholar who complains of the radio in the next room, the glare of the library light, or the whispering of his companions, is beginning to show dangerous signs of blaming his surroundings for his own shortcoming.

Most students complain bitterly of the threat of examinations. If only one could be free to study as one wished without the burden of necessity of learning things just for the sake of getting good marks later on! But in courses which do not involve the writing of examinations, it is found consistently that the learning rate and the measure of attention and consequently of interest is apt to be very, very low. But the approach of examinations does positively stimulate us markedly, and in the end we are benefited and glad.

Erich Fromm makes a careful analysis of the question of political freedom. (63) He points out that men have a powerful and almost innate desire to be free and unrestrained, but in actual fact, when they find themselves to be quite free, become restless and afraid. There is a price to pay. The penalty is the necessity of making decisions for oneself which are otherwise made by someone else for us. While we may well complain about the things we are then expected to do in obedience to the authority over us, we are at least relieved of all burden of responsibility for the success or failure which ensues upon strict obedience. Many people cannot decide for themselves even in the simplest matters, yet they are often the very people who make the loudest protests against being told what to do! Freedom of choice has its drawbacks. Part of the delightful, carefree spirit of childhood lies in the fact that life is ordered for us by others, however much we rebel at times. The same observations apply with equal validity to the life of a man in the armed forces, which explains the attraction it has for many.

Such limitations are often blessings. Job complained of the hedge which God had put around him, limiting (as he supposed) his freedom of action (Job 1:10). But Satan also complained of the hedge which God had thus put about His servant Job (Job 3:23)! It often depends upon the point of view. African natives can jump much higher than Europeans simply because they carry stones in each hand when they jump. This might be thought to be a handicap which would load them down and restrict their leap. Actually, as they approach the crossbar which they hope to clear, they stoop down and then quickly swing up both arms above their heads. At the same time they leap from the ground. The momentum gathered by the stone in each hand, as it is swung upwards, lifts them as they spring from the ground, so that they clear the bar at far higher levels than Europeans can. For this very "unfair" method, they are disqualified from jumping in the Olympics in their own style! By the same token, a kite will not fly unless its flight is restrained. The moment you let go of the string the kite comes down. And a contrary wind is essential.

The principle in all these situations is the same. Restraint is essential to forward movement. It is fundamentally true that for man, perfect freedom lies ultimately in perfect obedience to perfect law. But in the absence of these perfections some restraint (however undesirable it may seem) or some government (however evil it may appear to be) is absolutely essential to our well-being.

The world grows "smaller" and more compact each day. The extension of communication has brought an end to the distances which once made it possible for nations to act in isolation. The world itself is becoming a single society, and within that society the behavior of a single member may endanger the peace of the whole world. Concerted action may become necessary to restrain it.

No one wants the horrors of war. But it would not be true to say that no one wants war. Nations, like gangsters, sometimes thrive on it--it is by tradition in their blood. This is particularly true in those areas of the world where natural resources are too limited to support the population, but it is also true of other nations who have suffered no such handicaps. It seems difficult to find any justification for war, except that there are rights to be maintained between nations as there are between families or even individuals. Yet it is difficult in most cases to establish who is really maintaining the right. The causes of most wars (barring those which spring from the desire of some individual for personal aggrandizement) are deeply rooted in the historical precedents.

We do know that in most cases, if not in all, no matter how evil war may be, it could still be a lesser evil than the absence of war when this means the surrender of some ideal of absolute value. A peace based upon unjustified compromise with wrong may not be better than a conflict, even a lost conflict.

There are, however, other effects resulting from war which may be beneficial in ways not usually recognized. The Word of God clearly indicates that "war must needs be." This statement is specific and is repeated clearly on several occasions: Matt. 24:6 Mark 13:7; Luke 21:9.

God appoints boundaries for the nations (Acts 17:26). There is a good reason for this. In the early days of human history, when man undertook to thwart the purposes of God by building a rallying point to make sure that the population would not be scattered too widely over the plain (Gen. 11:1-5) or lose contact with the "central government," seeking thereby to remain a unified culture of one mind and one speech, God undertook to bring their plans to naught. By a confusion of language supernaturally imposed, men found themselves no longer able to cooperate and soon scattered in every direction over the face of the earth, thereafter developing independently.

This desire to re-establish unity is strongly with us today. It is based on the "ideal" of One World. There would be a serious penalty to pay for such unity, however. It would inevitably result in mediocrity and in a suspicion of all expression of individuality and therefore of true greatness. Such men as Nicholas Berdyaev and Leslie Paul (64) have warned against the tendency of all such movements to enforce conformity in every sphere of human endeavor. All that would remain would be the herd instinct to survive. This would in fact, be the annihilation of man as an individual.

Now, the confusion of language brought about by divine intervention led to a widespread dispersion in which isolated segments, preserved intact by language, thenceforth tended to develop along their own lines a kind of "national character" that is quite distinct though often very hard to define in so many words. The existence of such national characters has been of great benefit to mankind, as we shall see. It is admitted that diversity of language may limit communication at times and lead to grave misunderstandings, and even upon occasion to war. But by and large the diversity seems a providentially wise arrangement, because man's nature is such that when he does agree to concerted action, that action is too often sinful. Thus, when the appointed boundaries tend to break down, it appears that God once more restores them by permitting wars to arise. Let us illustrate this a little more clearly by reference to some observations made by others along these lines.

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, shortly after the end of World War II observed (65)

Every new boon man first degrades into a curse; everything that should make for wider and richer fellowship, he makes into a cause of fresh and bitter division. The things which should have been for our health became to us an occasion for falling. This is the state of fallen man.

The supreme usurpation is spoken of (in Gen. 11) as frustrated by the confusion of men's speech. The ambition of Babel led to that name becoming a symbol of confusion. For man could achieve even that semblance of success in his titanic self-assertion only if he could prevent the outbreak of divisions and rivalries. The multiplication of tongues, each representing a special tradition and a peculiar hope, has effectually prevented man from achieving a godless contentment. Thus from the selfish ambition which essays the blasphemous task of establishing an independence of God and usurpation of His throne springs also the fresh rivalry which makes the effort ineffectual. Evil has at least this much of good about it, that its own nature renders it self-destructive.

Raymond Pearl, speaking as a confirmed evolutionist, points out that there is always a tendency for men to desire to band together and that such coordination of goals and aspirations would have a disastrous effect upon the individual. (66)

In the far offend, all mankind will presumably be a rather uniform lot; all looking, thinking and acting pretty much the same way, like sheep. Just in proportion as biological differences between people diminish, so will the frequency of wars diminish. But the diminution seems likely to be at a very slow rate. And a low cynic might suggest that even wars, stupid and horrid as they are, would perhaps be preferable to that deadly uniformity among men towards which we are slowly but surely breeding our way.

As a matter of fact, competition between peoples has been beneficial at times. Thus John Swanton observed: (67)

The highest spots in intellectual productivity until very recent times have been reached in countries divided into small competing states.

Different nations have developed what the psychologists term "basal" or "modal" personalities. It is exceedingly difficult to specify the characteristics of any national group, either in personality structure or in bodily form. It is not too difficult to spot nationals away from home, but to define them exactly is much more difficult. One thinks it easy enough to distinguish between a Chinaman and an Englishman, but to state that the former has straight black hair, almond-shaped and brown eyes, a double fold in the eye lid, olive complexion, comparative hairlessness of the face and body, and slightly reduced stature is not sufficient. It might be thought to be but actually many Englishmen have brown eyes, with the oriental slant, straight black hair, olive skin, and so forth. Yet the impression of a stereotype Chinaman remains and is useful as a term of reference.

The same is true of personality types. The Chinaman is normally as lacking in outward expression of emotion as the Italian is forward in it. The Frenchman speaking in his animated, hand waving, and dramatic fashion is clearly a different kind of person from the unemotional Englishman talking casually with his hands in his pockets. Irish wit and German thoroughness, and Russian patience and stolidness...these are readily recognized. The wedding of these characteristics in individuals of mixed parentage often leads to exceptional personalities. Examples of this blending are numerous. It is sometimes argued that so-called half-breeds are a bad lot, combining the worst of both sides in one individual. This depends upon the status of half-breeds in the eyes of the community; there is no evidence that such mixtures are in themselves detrimental to intelligence or personality. In fact, the purest races have been found consistently to produce the smallest number of truly great men. Such races have few cultural peaks in their history. Then the preservation of distinct nationalities leaves the way open for the appearance of mixtures now and then which result in gains for all concerned. That all men should be of "one blood" (Acts 17:26) means that all men can freely interbreed; but that God also sets boundaries to nations means that distinctions will still be preserved. When these boundaries show signs of breaking down, conflicts arise; and by a natural process, providentially appointed, they tend to be re-established once more. A lesser evil prevents a greater one.

Moreover, different languages give us different world views. We may assume, in our ethno-centricity, that our concepts about the nature of reality are valid and absolute and the only ones of consequence. Recent studies made by linguists have suggested that this may well be a fallacy. Thus Dr. Alexander Gode, deriving his inspiration from the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, wrote: (68)

I believe that those who envision a future world speaking only one tongue, whether English, German, Russian or any other, hold a misguided ideal and would do the evolution of the human mind the greatest disservice.

Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The correctives lie in all those other tongues which by eons of independent evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical provisional analysis.

Even in ecclesiastical history, some of the "wars" which have led to the formation of denominations have undoubtedly served a valuable purpose, despite the plea made by our Lord that we might be "one." The oneness is to be a unity of harmony, not a unity of identity.

Andrew Murray had this to say on the subject of denominationalism: (69)

Our place on this earth is such that we can only see one half of the starry heavens at a time. And so in the great sphere of Divine Truth, no mind is large enough to grasp the whole. Every truth in man's hands becomes one-sided. God's way of remedying this defect and its danger is to entrust one aspect of truth to one portion of His Church, while another holds the abuse of it in check by testifying to some different aspect. In this way, the dependence of all on each other is to be maintained, and the triumph of love in the midst of difference to be made manifest.

The Church of England might be thought of as the guardian of order and reverence, the Presbyterians of church order and divine sovereignty, the Baptists of obedience, the Plymouth Brethren of separation from the world, the Pentecostalists of the freedom of the Spirit, the United Church of Christ of the need for Christian concern with the affairs of men, the Salvation Army with the poor and needy in a special way, and so forth. These divisions may be artificial and may even anger some who read them. The point is not that we insist upon coupling these characteristics together, but rather that there is a real sense in which each denomination exists for the emphasis of one or more aspects of Christian faith and conduct, which, were it not for their emphasis, might be lost to the church of God altogether. It is as though in all these things--in national life, in language, in denominationalism--God has created a paint box in which the characteristics are the palettes of color. To mix them all together would be to bring an end to the possibility of any kind of picture. Some may be mixed to create new colors, but the originals must remain intact, if the end-result is to be anything more than black and white only. Some colors, moreover, will inevitably clash. But this is the price paid for the greater possibilities. As the Christian Union of Professional Men of Greece remarked, "There is always a saving inconsistency, an inconsistency which checks the wrong in our civilization and does not let it come to completion. Without this inconsistency the results would be too terrible to contemplate." (70)

There remains yet the problem of disease. The subject is exceedingly complex, since animals which existed long before man (and therefore before the entrance of sin) are known to have been afflicted with diseases of various kinds, such as dental caries. (71)

In some instances a sickness occasionally proves to be a benefit both to the sufferer and to those influe