Editorial April 15, 1905 Issue

God Does not Create Evil

Archibald McLellan

The following reference to a disaster in which more than fifty persons lost their lives occurs in a newspaper report of a sermon recently preached in Boston : —

"Whoever was directly to blame for the Brockton catastrophe, God has His indirect responsibility. Without consulting men in the slightest degree, He has set them in the midst of terrible and dangerous forces. With Him, therefore, there can be no accidents. Flames cannot leap forth without His consent and He never lifts His hand from the steam boilers. To this horror, in Brockton, there is attached some divine meaning.

"To my mind it is plain that it is a benevolent meaning. God intended to remind men of certain spiritual truths, without which life becomes insignificant. The first is the immortality of the soul. There has been a decided tendency of late, on the part of some of our ethical leaders, to obscure this truth. Prof. Goldwin Smith is uncertain about a future life. Mr. Allsop wrote in the Westminster Review for December, Immortality is gone. I have not the faintest desire for it.'

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