should not be there. There is, for example, the whole sphere of the accidental. If we cooperate with others in dangerous employments, or, say, go out seeking pleasure with a shooting party, we may be killed by an unskillful act of a fellow workman or by the random shot of a careless marksman. God is helpless in the matter, and there will be no use in appealing to him with regard to it. For, says Dr. Forrest,” ‘God could only prevent the bad workman or marksman from causing death to others by depriving him of his freedom to shape his own course.” There is in a word no providential control whatever of the acts of free agents. Accordingly, Dr. Forrest tells us,” a wise man will not be surprised that tragic cruelties should occur in the world, which seem almost un- alleviatedly wrong: “he will recognize the possibilities of man’s freedom in defying God’s will, both by the infliction of suffering and by the refusal to be taught by suffering.” Nor can God’s grace intervene to cure the defects of his providence. Human free will interposes an effectual barrier to the working of his grace; and God has no power to overcome the opposi- tion of the human heart. “There is no barrier to the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the heart,” remarks Dr. Forrest with the air of making a great concession,” “except that created by the refusal of the heart to welcome him:" obviously only another way of saying that the heart’s refusal is an insuperable barrier to the entrance of the Holy Spirit into it.” Accordingly, the progress of his kingdom in the world could not be [51]
THE PLAN OF SALVATION
forecast in its details by our Lord, but lay in his mind only as outlined in its general features. “Не saw,” says Dr. Forrest, “that ‘conversion’ had its human factor as well as its divine; and that the mighty works of God might be rendered impossible by man’s per- versities of unbelief. Hence the detailed course of the kingdom in the world was an inscrutable thing. . . .”* Even in the Church itself the divine purpose may fail, despite the presence in the Church of the Spirit of God promised to it: for, though the Spirit will not fail to guide the Church, the Church may fail to “fulfill the conditions under which it could avail itself of the Spirit’s guidance.” *” So zealous, in a word, is Dr. Forrest to emancipate man from the dominion of God that he goes near to placing God under the dominion of man. The world God has created has escaped beyond its tether; there is nothing for God to do but to accept it as he finds it and adjust himself as best he may to it. It was told to Thomas Carlyle once that Margaret Fuller had announced in her solemn way, “I accept the universe." “Gad, she'd better," was the simple comment of the sage. Is the Lord God Almighty in the same case?
If this be in any degree the case with God, why, of course there can be no talk of God's saving man. If man is to be saved at all, though it is questionable whether “saving” is the right word to use here, it is clear that he must “save” himself. If we can still speak of a plan of salvation on God's part, that plan must be reduced just to keeping the way of salvation
[ 52 ]
AUTOSOTERISM
open, that man, who is the master of his own destiny," may meet with no hindrance when he chooses to walk in it. In very truth, this is the conception of “salvation” which in the widest circles is now con- fidently proclaimed. This is the hinge, indeed, on which turns the entire thought of that New Prot- estantism which has arisen in our day, repudiating the Reformation and all its works as mere medievalism, and attaching itself rather to the Enlightenment, as the birth of a new world, a new world in which rules just Man, the Lord of all. “Rationalism” we have been accustomed to call the whole movement, and as phase of it follows phase of it, in the Rationalismus Vulgaris of Wegscheider, we will say; in Kant and his followers; in the Post-Kantian Schools; and now in our “New Protestantism” we must at least accord it the praise of breeding marvelously true to type. Profound thinkers like Kant and perhaps we may say, even more, spiritually minded thinkers like Rudolf Eucken, may be incapable of the shallow estimate of human nature which sees in it nothing but good. But even the perception of the radical evil of human nature cannot deliver them out of the fixed circle of thought which asserts human ability for the whole sphere of human obligation, however that ability be construed. “How it is possible for a naturally bad man to make himself a good man,” exclaims Kant,” “entirely baffles our thought, for how can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit?” But he is, despite the perceived impossibility of it, able to rest in the solu- [ 53 |
THE PLAN OF SALVATION