THE NATURE AND CHARACTER OF MAN,
AND THE ORIGIN OF EVIL

By Rev. Abiel Silver, 1863

  The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. Gen. 3:13.

Having, in the preceding chapter, taken the first step toward preparing the mind for a proper examination and understanding of the Sacred Scriptures, by seeking a true view of the qualities of the Divine Author; and having thereby, from His own Word, and the use of the reason with which He has endowed us for this purpose, found a rational premise in the admission that all His principles and qualities, in their divine harmony, must be contained in the Infinite Love, Wisdom, and Power of one Almighty, Substantial, and Unchangeable Being, who declares Himself to be Goodness and Truth, Spirit and Life; and yet, as there are many things contained in the Bible which seem to be of a different character, making the Word appear inconsistent, mysterious, and contradictory, and therefore, as though these parts of it must have sprung from some other source; representing even God Himself as sometimes angry, wrathful, and revengeful, and as unstable or repentant; it therefore becomes necessary, in order to be well prepared to examine understandingly into the true character and teachings of this Divine Book, that we next obtain a rational view of what those opposite principles and characters are, and whence they originated. And this investigation will lead to a true understanding of what man is, and what part he plays in the drama of life; what his depravity is, and how he received it. For, until these questions are rationally settled, there must, after all that has been said of the Lord, either be a cloud of darkness still overshadowing the beauty and loveliness of the Divine Character, or else a spirit of skepticism will be excited against the Truth and Divine Authenticity of the Scriptures.

Now, in keeping the Great Divine Essentials or First Principles always before us, as the Starting Point and Grand Test, by which the character and quality of everything else are to be tried, and its origin known; and in looking up to those Principles for Light, and resting upon them as the Rock of Ages, God Himself becomes, in our mind, the Teacher and Judge: and thus, not by our own wisdom, but in the Lord's, we may, in our present investigation, obtain true ideas of the nature and origin of evil, and of the elements and powers of man; and thence of the reason why the Bible, in many places, appears so wonderfully strange and hard to be understood. And having once obtained this desirable knowledge, the way will be fairly opened for a successful investigation into the Spirit and Life of the Word, and for coming thereby to a true understanding of the Sacred Scriptures, and of the cause of their apparent Mysteries, Contradictions, and Discrepancies.

Beginning then with the view we have taken of our Heavenly Father, as the Great First Cause, the Creator of all things, Infinitely Merciful and True, the question which has so much perplexed the religious world comes up at once fully before us, asking boldly and peremptorily, What and Whence are Evils and Falsities, Discords and Contentions? And falling back upon the true qualities of God for answer, the decision is made at once and decisively that, whatever may have been their origin, such things cannot be the expressions of Goodness and Truth that God does not give forth evils and falsities. But here an interrogator meets us with the Words of God, saying, Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it? (Amos 3:6) I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. (Isa. 45:7) To this we might answer that A good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit. (Luke 6:43) But to all such questions or objections to what we are saying in this chapter, as may arise in the mind of the reader, coming from the letter of the Word, we here simply remark that we are not now explaining the Word, but are trying, by the True Light of God's own Qualities, which Light is the Word, in its Spirit, to prepare our minds to understand the nature and character of the Divine language, so as to see the true meaning of all such expressions of the Word, and of all its apparent contradictions. And we would further remark, that the letter of the Bible seems to give a great variety of characters to God, and some of them quite contradictory, though His true character beams out conspicuously through the whole, and that there is a good reason why the Word was so written, and that when we clearly understand the object of this chapter the origin of evil we shall be better prepared to enter upon the investigation of the Word in these peculiarities. Therefore, all inquiries after truth, in this chapter, will be answered by reasoning in the light of First Principles; and to such answers, properly made, no rational objection can be raised. Now, what we want clearly to understand is the difference between good and evil, truth and falsity, and their origin. Some have attributed all evil to a great diabolical power or being, standing up in opposition to the Lord. But whence has any creature power, but from God? He has all power in heaven and on earth. But is God then changeable; sometimes kind and sometimes unkind? He is Unchangeable Love, and His mercy endureth for ever. How, then, shall we solve the dark problem? Is there no such thing as evil or wrong? Some have falsely said so; but who can look around our world, and behold the murders, thefts, deceits, and crimes of every hue, and come to any such conclusions?

Yet many at this day, for the want of a true knowledge of the origin and nature of evil, are coolly declaring that evil is only a state of imperfection; that, God alone being perfect, all other things are necessarily imperfect, because finite, and that from this imperfection is all evil; but that God is constantly improving the creation, and will eventually do away with all evil and misery. But what are the grounds of this conclusion? Is Infinite Wisdom becoming wiser by experience? Is the sun more bright, the rainbow more beautiful, the diamond more brilliant now than formerly? Does the bee make sweeter honey or more perfect cells; or do the birds sing more sweetly? Now, if the lower orders of things do not improve by age or generations, we cannot from thence conclude that man does. Let us then examine man himself, and see if he is constantly making progress in goodness. We know that we are progressing in certain kinds of science and knowledge. But are we naturally, from infancy to age, growing wiser, better, more honest, pure, and lovely? All experience teaches to the contrary. If we look into our hearts we know better. And if our natural propensities do not incline us upward, but downward, what becomes of the law of progress in moral excellence? Strange progress upward that, of the man who commences life an innocent, confiding infant, passes through a less artless but sportive childhood, becomes a licentious and deceitful youth, an adulterous and revengeful man, and ends his career on a murderer's gallows. But, say the advocates of moral progress, this is all the fault of society, not of the man. He was all well enough, and would have come out all right under other circumstances. But what compose society but individuals? And if they are all right, why is not society right also? This taking the blame off from individuals and putting it on to society is strange reasoning. Besides, if individual members of society may go downward, so may society.

There is no philosophy, however ingenious, that can rationally do away with the fall of man. The fact of man's degeneracy from the laws of order stands ever stamped upon the whole face and conduct of the race. Besides, Infinite Goodness and Truth cannot be chargeable with the evils, falsities, and miseries of mankind. For God would have all men to be saved; not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. He would have them saved now, saved always, saved everywhere, from all sin and suffering. And He and His laws are in effort to do this always, to everybody. Evil, therefore, springs not from God nor from His laws.

Whence, then, is evil? It is from man. What is evil? It is a disposition to violate the laws of life, and it is also the sufferings consequent upon such violation. There are two kinds, or rather two degrees of life natural and spiritual. The violation of the natural laws brings physical evils; and the violation of the spiritual laws, spiritual evils. Thus all evils spring from the violation of these laws.

But can man oppose the laws of Him who made him, and sustains him, and gives him all the powers he has to feel, think, and act? If man could not do this he could not steal, nor lie, nor murder; for such acts cannot be according to the laws of goodness, and Goodness or God forbids them. If man has no power to break the laws of God, he has no power to keep them. And what would be the use of laws, either of God or man, for the government of creatures who are ever impelled onward by a force which they can neither resist nor avert? Who, that has examined his own heart, does not know that he is not this blind machine?

But how could man originate evil? He could not originate evil. Evil is not an original thing. It is the perversion of good. But how could man pervert the laws of his being, when he has no power but from God? He did not pervert the laws of his being: he acted from those laws. Did the laws of his being, then, make him transgress? No: the laws of his being made him free: but it does not follow that because he was free he was obliged to transgress. Here is the grand point which men lose sight of. What would man be without freedom? Would he be anything? He certainly would not be a man; for men can make laws, and obey them or disobey them. He can reason, deliberate, and choose. Freedom is the grand characteristic of his nature. Without it man could not reason. Without freedom there could be no right, no wrong, no responsibility, no love, no happiness, no heaven. What a glorious boon is freedom! It gives us the privilege of becoming good and true, lovely and happy. It is true, it gives us the liberty of being disorderly and miserable; for true freedom could do no less than this.

But how could man, through the exercise of his freedom, violate the laws of life, unless there had been given him a disposition to violate them? On the contrary, how could God give to man a disposition contrary to His own laws? for His laws are an expression of His own will. All the propensities which God could give to man must be orderly, pure, and heavenly.

But here we are asked if we are not to understand, by the teachings of the Bible, that there is a being called the devil, who is the great leader of men into sin, the tempter to all transgression, the common Adversary of souls, who was once an angel of heaven, and was cast out for his wickedness? To answer this, let us fall back upon First Principles, and see what they will create. We read that in the creation of all things at the beginning, everything was good. There was no devil created, no hell. There was a serpent created which was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made; but still he was very good. And yet this is declared to be the identical serpent which tempted Eve. The doctrine of fallen angels has been drawn almost exclusively from the twelfth chapter of Revelation, the result of the war between Michael and the dragon. But this whole chapter is a beautiful allegory, containing useful instruction to be understood by the spiritual sense of the Word, explained in the following chapters of this book.

It seems very strange that men should ever have supposed that the dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, who was cast out of heaven more than four thousand years after the fall took place, should be the serpent which tempted Eve, when the whole Apocalypse is a prophecy of things which were to take place after the work was written. John expressly declares the matter stated to be things that must shortly come to pass.

The first passage of Scripture that looks toward the idea of a fallen angel was written more than three thousand years after the account of the fall, and says, How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground. . . . For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven; I will be like the Most High: yet thou shalt be brought down to hell. (Isa. 14:12,13,14,15.) But we here see that he had never been in heaven, and that he fell because he aspired to be equal to God. He fell only from his anticipated or imaginary heaven. Indeed, he fell as Adam fell, in asking to be as God, and as all men fall who become wise in their own eyes.

The next passage that may be thought to favor the doctrine of fallen angels is in Luke, where the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name. And He said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven (10:17, 18). But the Lord then explains by saying, Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: thus teaching them that the power of Satan, or of false light, falls from the imaginary heaven of men's minds as they tread upon, or keep down, the serpents and scorpions of the wicked heart.

The next and last passage touching the subject is that of Paul to the Corinthians: Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. (2 Cor. 11: 14.) This is the only passage in the Bible where the devil is called an angel of light and this is from transformation, and is not his real character.

We have now mentioned all that the Bible says, in the literal sense, upon the subject of fallen angels, or of the origin of evil; and it fails to produce the least evidence that an angel of the heavenly abode ever fell and became a devil on the earth.

Milton's Paradise Lost, and not the Word of God, is what has impressed men with the idea of the devil as a fallen angel. The lively imagination of Milton has painted the picture in glowing colors; and it leaves a deep impression on the minds of religious people who love to read it. But had Milton had the spiritual sense of the Scriptures, he would have painted a very different picture. And in the subsequent part of this book we shall give the true spiritual view of the fall. We can here only treat of it in the light of natural deductions drawn from First Principles.

What, then, are we to understand by the phrase, the devil? The most correct brief definition that can be given to that phrase is, the love of evil. The fall of man gradually engendered the love of self; and as this love increased, the love of God diminished, till man loved himself supremely. This self-love led him to covetousness, deceit, theft, murder, and all crimes, for the sake of self, which filled him with the love of evil, or with the devil. This love of evil, therefore, did not exist before the fall; consequently there was no devil. How could there be a love of evil, when there was no evil to love and no desire to love it? Evil and the love of evil are, therefore, in their essence, inseparable, and came into existence together. They are perverted states and principles of the human heart.

Now it is certain this devil is not of God's creating. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit. And surely there cannot be a self-existent, uncreated Devil, for such a being would be Infinite, and we should then have two Infinites, a good one and a bad one (which is most absurd and impossible), neither of whom could conquer the other; whereas the Saviour did conquer death, hell, and the devil; and offers men the power, in His Holy Spirit, to do the same.

The devil, then, is the love of evil in the complex. Every person whose ruling love is the love of evil is a devil. Thus the Lord called Judas a devil. Now the head of that old serpent the devil is, the love of self. This love of self is the serpent's head which the Lord came to bruise, as will hereafter be seen from the spiritual sense.

Evil, then, is not an original thing: it is a perversion of good, a depraved love and its consequences, brought about by habit and cultivation, through the abuse of the good principles given us. God implanted no desire for evil, no taste or relish for it, in the human heart. Indeed, He could not, for it is contrary to His nature. He could not give what He did not possess Himself.

God gave to man two things to be kept inviolate as his own. These two things are what distinguish him from the brutes, unite him with his God, and thereby give him perpetual existence, and make him capable of becoming either an angel or an evil spirit. These two things constitute what may be called man's selfhood; for they give him individuality and elevate him above machinery. These two important endowments are Freedom, Rationality, with Desire for knowledge reason to determine, freedom to act, and curiosity to know. Without these endowments, man could never be elevated above the beasts that perish. With them, he is a free, rational, and progressive being. These three endowments, as given by God, are all right. And though, from the very nature of these endowments, man may abuse them and become depraved, yet they are positive necessities of his being. And the possibility of abusing them and falling into evil exists in the possibility of using them and rising into heavenly knowledge and happiness. In the freedom and ability to do right are necessarily involved the freedom and ability to do wrong. But no man, in the exercise of the freedom which God has given him, is obliged to do what he knows to be wrong. In the truth, by which he sees the wrong, God gives him the power to resist the temptation and do right, if he will look to the Lord and make the effort which he is free to do. Thus everything necessary for man's salvation is carefully provided by the Lord.

Man was not obliged to fall. God did not desire him to fall, for He commanded him not to eat of the knowledge of evil; or, in other words, not to know evil and make it his good, by practicing it, and thus appropriating it to his affections. God told him that if he did eat of it he would surely die. The forbidden fruit was the same that is now forbidden in the Decalogue.

Nor did man intend to fall. He could not have had any such desire at first, for it would have been evil. Therefore, the fall must have been imperceptibly slow at first. Man, in the exercise of his curiosity to know new things, gradually overreached the true line of virtue and justice, in such slight degrees as not to be aware that he was really diverging from the course of truth and righteousness. He was young and ambitious, with everything to learn, and a desire to know everything: with no historic paths or beaten tracks of life before him; no symbols of vice to warn him of his danger, nor examples of depravity to show him his faults. Thus he went on, gradually falling from the love of good to the love of evil.

This fall may be illustrated in many ways. A man, ignorant of the quality of the poppy, while examining, tasting, and testing its medicinal properties, and its influence upon the human system, may gradually obtain, by habit, an artificial relish for it which God did not give him, and, following up the growing demands of a disordered appetite, he eventually destroys his physical existence by it: and so of antimony and alcohol. Thus, without any relish implanted in his nature for these poisons, he by habit obtains a love for what is destructive of physical order and happiness. Precisely so could the people of the primeval age, without any inherent tendencies to evil, obtain a love for that which is destructive of spiritual order and happiness. For illustration: the inebriate is out of alcohol: the voracious appetite loudly demands it. The love of self and self-gratification the very head of the serpent is determined to have it at any cost. But the circumstances are such that it cannot be obtained without stealing it. The better judgment sees the injustice of the theft; but the serpent's demands are imperious, and the judgment finally yields; and the Divine command is broken the soul has eaten of the forbidden fruit. And the next time it will be broken more easily. Thus he yields to the bite of the serpent, whose tooth he had poisoned by his own indulgence, in permitting it to run wild when he might have controlled it.

Thus the love of evil, brought on by gradually vitiating the orderly demands of mind and body, is that old serpent the Devil, who as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. And is not this the great enemy of mankind? What evil or crime was ever committed that this devil did not do? Look at the wretch in human form, with this devil in the midst of his depraved and morbid appetites of soul and body! What else have we so much to fear? His hand is pollution to everything he touches.

These serpents of the human heart are the evils to which the Saviour alludes when He says He will give His disciples power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy. They had no more power over the snakes of the earth than other people. But over the serpent of the mind they had power from the Lord. Paul to the Corinthians says, I fear, lest, . . . as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. Here Paul is afraid that the minds of his disciples will be corrupted as the serpent beguiled Eve, or in the same way that she was beguiled. This is proof positive that Paul did not suppose that any natural serpent tempted Eve. For it cannot be believed that Paul was afraid that the snakes of this earth would lead his disciples into sin. No: it was their sinful desires to gratify the wayward demands of the heart, that Paul was afraid of.

Thus, immediately after the fall, the Saviour was promised to bruise the serpent's head, or the love of self. This work was the great object of His mission. It is nowhere recorded that He killed a snake. When He came in the flesh the kingdom of Satan, or of the serpent, ruled on earth. Christ came to destroy the works of the devil in the human heart, and establish His own kingdom there. When the serpent rules, the whole mind is in disorder. When Christ rules, all is happiness and peace.

Thus the Lion of the tribe of Judah, according to prophecy, has prevailed to open the Book, and loose the seven seals of God's Holy Word; and has mercifully given to the world the divine science of correspondences; the grand key which opens the door to that fountain of wisdom which is to bring the world into order.