February Month of Light in Darkness

It is still very calm—but the frost is over. The hardness is gone from the air, and the cold, and that chill sense of binding. Instead, there is a feeling of moisture, which is also a feeling of growth—of the first growth. Already that growth has become apparent in the delicate catkins that hang from the hedges, in the frail budding of the trees. As yet there is no green, only a brown stickiness—no unfurling, only a close-packed promise. But life and growth are there, in the hedges, in the woods, and in the moist, rain-drenched earth, whose scents are carried up the lane by the breeze which has the first spring warmth in it. A slow light spreads over the fields at evening—yellow, rainy, reflected in the ponds and in the watery ruts. It is a faint light, a watery light, but it shines where a month ago was darkness.

Once, long ages ago, there was only twilight in the world—not a twilight of the sun, though those were days of ice and snow and a strange desolation, but a twilight in the soul and mind of man, dimness and faintness and pale struggle in the spirit and mind and intellect—a world in which the earliest man saw men only as trees walking.

The last great ice age was approaching, and where once the forest had grown thickly, the trees were becoming scant. The forest-belt receded before the advancing world of ice, which came out of those parts which are now Scandinavia, and its place was taken gradually by barren tundras or steppes. In the forest had dwelt a strange race, common stock of ourselves and the apes. These beings had lived in the trees, an arboreal life, far above the ground, more or less secure from the terrible beasts that stalked those parts of the world. When in a slow process of many hundreds of years the tree-belt receded, a large proportion of the tree-dwelling race went with it into the south, maintaining by migration the ease and safety of their old conditions. These migrants were the ancestors of the African monkey, born in the freedom and comparative security of the jungle, faithful to the old conditions and the old environment, to which they became more and more perfectly adapted in succeeding generations.

But what of those who remained behind? From tree-dwellers they had become earth-dwellers. They must painfully adapt themselves to an entirely new environment, and learn new ways of feeding, moving, living, at bitter cost to the individual and to the race. They were no longer safe from marauding beasts, the giant mammoths and buffaloes and elks that preyed over the steppes. It would seem as if they had made an evil choice, and would have been wiser had they done as others of their race and clung to their old conditions, following the tree-belt southward. Nothing but destruction could come of this defiance of their environment, this painful adoption of new ways. Those who remained after the trees were gone must surely perish.

But this first race of men (that yet were not quite men) had not acted entirely without light. Descending from the trees to the ground, their hands and arms, used hitherto for climbing, were now set free for enterprise. At last man stood upright. The ages went by, and his hands, no longer needed for mere balance and locomotion, learned skill. He picked up objects, used them, shaped them, and with using the power and scope of using grew. At the same time, the dangers with which he was beset sharpened his brain into resource and constructive planning. His reason came to have a definite survival value in the scheme of things. At first it had been by strength alone that living things survived. Those were the days when the ichthyosaurus and the giant iguanodon roamed the earth. Then the survival factor changed, and the battle was to the swift—instead of the ichthyosaurus and the iguanodon flourished the reindeer and the hare. But now at last mind became dominant, and mankind triumphed by virtue of his better brain development, both over the swift and over the strong. His brain taught him stratagem to atone for his lack of swiftness, it gave him skill to make weapons so that his weakness was a match for the strength of his enemies.

But it taught him more than this. The light was growing, and one day a man drew a rough picture of a buffalo on the roof of the cave where he lived. He did not draw it in the spirit of imitation but in the spirit of power. By placing the image of the creature there in his cave he felt himself to have won power over it. Mere magic-making, no doubt ... nevertheless by such an act man definitely asserted the power of mind over matter, of the unseen over the seen. The first upward step was taken. The Præparatio Evangelica had begun.

The long process had started which was to end in the “ethical monotheism” of Judea. From mere magic-making man passes on to the idea of propitiation. He adopts a personal relation towards the Unseen. Propitiation leads him to the idea of beneficence—his gifts are accepted, calamities and dangers are averted, therefore the Unseen, though cruel, powerful, and capricious must also know moments of loving-kindness. In time his gods are half good and half bad, but it is remarkable that continual contact with the Unseen through the ages both before and after history, slowly deepens man’s sense of its fundamental goodness. At last even his idea of goodness itself changes and acquires an ethical significance. Isaiah and Jeremiah lift up their voices—Wisdom and the Son of Sirach speak—and the spiritual environment is ready for the coming of the New Life, of the Virgin Mary, as in the ages of the ages ago the physical environment was ready for the birth of life in the virgin sea.

It was the suffering and struggle of man which made him first look upwards, and in the whole history of the world it would seem as if no step, either material or spiritual, was ever taken without pain. “Without shedding of blood is no remission of sin.” Perfect adaptation to environment—or, quite plainly, happiness—means the end of progress. If man is to go forward, he must be in a state of warfare and dissatisfaction with his environment—in other words, he must suffer. It would seem as if suffering were an indispensable condition of advance. The corn of wheat that falls into the ground cannot bear fruit except it die, and when that process takes place in consciousness, then it is suffering, no matter what its fruit.

You may speculate whether suffering would or would not have been a condition of progress if there had been no Fall. The first impulse is to answer unhesitatingly that it would not—suffering has a place only in a world whose processes are warped by evil, it can have no place in the scheme of an all-loving and all-powerful God. But, after a little reflection, you realise that, though suffering as we know it could certainly have had no place in a sinless world, nevertheless some process of which our suffering is a perverted image may have been a condition of advance. The free creature gladly doing battle with its environment in order to fulfil with a pure and loving will the intelligible purposes of God is of a different order from the creature bound by sin, who endures ignorantly and unwillingly its conditions of progress, which indeed has the power to abuse them into conditions of failure, so that pain no longer brings its certain redemption. Directly suffering becomes voluntary and intelligent it is no longer suffering at all. The misery lies in the clouded mind and will, and it is for this clouding that sin is responsible. No one of us has ever suffered entirely of clear purpose or free will, so it is impossible for us to know the place of suffering in the Purpose of God.

But to the stumbling pain of our first ancestors we owe the fact that we stand upright upon our feet, to the first glimmerings of logos-light that bade them stay and fight a new environment rather than follow their old one into happiness we owe, humanly speaking, the fact that we are men. The light shined in darkness, and the darkness overpowered it not. The pale February dusk is a-flower with the promise of Spring.