Can Human Nature Be Changed?

1910

Curiously enough, in every generation since Christ was born there have been large numbers of men, often followers of this very Christ, who have held as a sort of fundamental postulate their philosophy that you cannot change human nature. One who reads the literature of the ages carefully will see that often the great stumbling block in the way of human progress and emancipation has been this obsession of good people. So deep-rooted has it been that it has passed into proverbs: "Whatever has been must always be," "Whatever is, is right," "As is a boy so is the man," and, quoting an older cynic, "Can a leopard change his spots," "Temperament is a fixed quantity," "Human nature is the same in every age." These proverbs are generally coined by good people. It has been in the church that this philosophy has been prevalent, as well as among the scoffers.

And yet the fact of transformation of human nature is the very center and core of Christ's Gospel, and how his disciples could ever doubt it, and remain his disciples, is one of the mysteries and paradoxes of history. It is simply another of those strange misunderstandings of the Gospels that one witnessed among those Christians who could not see that slavery and Christianity had no part together. But this is not the strangest thing. Far stranger is the fact that fully half of the Christians of today are still under the spell of this delusion. Not long ago a great writer called the attention of the world to the fact that if reformers would only take human nature as it is, they would stop reforming. To his mind reforms originate in an idealizing of human nature it cannot stand. Many Christians share that view. On our way home from church one Sunday a good Christian mother, worried by some tendencies of her young boy, remarked that she supposed there was no hope of changing him because he was born so. You cannot change human nature, half of our Christians believe.

Now, the Christians of the early ages, and even of the middle ages, had only the promise of the Gospel to convict them of error — and, to be sure, that ought to have been enough — but the Christians of today have that and this fact, too, that history and most literature is nothing but the record of a gradual transformation of human nature. And not only in individuals, but in whole nations and communities. For civilization is nothing but the collective expression of the human nature of the time.

The passing of civilization from barbarism to the semi-Christian civilization of the middle ages is the history of the transformation of human nature. The passage from the cruelty and feudalism and vice of the middle ages to our more Christian civilization of today is further story of the alchemistic change in the human heart by the deeper and larger application and understanding of the Gospel. The promise of Christianity is the transformation of human nature into divine nature, the subduing of the animal in man by the rising, conquering, spiritual. This needs no proof. It is the whole asservation of the Gospel. If it fail, then Christianity is a failure. But perhaps it might be helpful to us, and deepen our faith in the power of Christianity to accomplish what it purposes to do. If we find that history, as we said, is the record of the fulfillment of this promise we think we can show it is by looking at two or three great spheres of human conduct where the change has been manifested.

There is a passage in Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis," where a wretch named Chilo, who has been plotting against the Christians — it is the time of the first Christians in Rome — falls into the hands of the Christians, and one of them, the giant slave Ursus, is ready to crush him to death, when the Apostle Peter rises from the table and speaks these words: "The Saviour said this to us: 'If thy brother has sinned against thee, chastise him; but if he is repentant, forgive him.' " Then Glaucus, against whose life Chilo had been especially plotting, turns to Chilo and says: "May God forgive thy offenses, as I forgive them in the name of Christ." The point is that Chilo cannot believe his own ears and eyes. When at last he finds himself free and tells the Romans they will not believe it.

In every century, even within the church, men keep on saying that forgiveness of the enemy is impossible; revenge is the natural law of life, of man as well as of the animal; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is all humanity is capable of. Even today one meets Christians who cannot believe in this possibility of forgiveness as a law of life. And yet we find that every age in history has been full of exquisite instances of it. We find many a soul, like St. Francis, practicing it. Today there are millions of Christians practicing it, and thousands, from Tolstoy to the humblest apostle, preaching it. The church enjoins it upon every new member. We have seen thousands of unforgiving natures since Christ's day so transformed by the divine alchemy of Christ's Gospel that they have begun to practice it with ease. It has become the universal law of thousands, yet good men have said, and still say, you cannot change human nature.

As you go up and down Europe you find everywhere dungeons where slaves were kept. When Christ was born slavery was as common an institution and as much accepted as in the order of society as marriage. As the divine leaven of Christianity began to beget in men the worth and dignity of the human soul and the doctrine of brotherhood and human rights, the prophets began to see the evil of slavery and its inherent contradiction to the spirit of the new religion. But as they spoke they heard the same old story: Slavery has always been. It seems to have been a sort of divine institution. One cannot make over the human race. We did make over the human race and no one is now left, since 1860, to lift his voice for its existence. The owning of man by man is gone, and soon other indirect forms of industrial slavery will go with it.

Some time ago we were in Nuremberg. We climbed the hill to the old castle, and there we were shown through the great tower where all the torture machines are preserved. We saw the roasting pans, the racks for stretching and crushing bones, the other instruments too horrible to mention, along with the iron virgin, who once embraced hundreds of miserable creatures in her spiked arms. And the awful thing was not that men practiced this torture, but that they enjoyed it and flocked to see it. But one day a prophet arose in Nuremberg and said: "This torture is horrible, utterly inhuman, against all the sweet mercy and pity of Jesus Christ, unworthy of our civilization. It must stop." When he had spoken it was the good people who discouraged him. They said: "Yes, it is inhuman and un-Christian, but you cannot stop it. People have always tortured, therefore they always will. It is part of the order of civilization, because it has always been. You cannot change." Needless to say, it was stopped in all civilized countries in 100 years, and where once the whole city loved it, not one but who would shudder at it now. You can change human nature completely.

One of the last great barbarities, most inhuman of all, a pagan institution to linger on in our Christian civilization, is war. The prophetic souls know that it is doomed and must go, because it is an anachronism in Christianity, and because the forces are now at work before which it needs must fall. But the one thing that prevents its going in a generation is this obsession of good people, that you cannot change human nature. The church alone could stop wars tomorrow did it believe its own Gospel had power to do what it claims to do, and did it dare believe that human nature could be so changed as to see the reasonableness of Christian settlement of national disputes as already it settles individual differences. It has been changed to do that. Once all men settled personal disputes with fists. That passed, and the duel came. That has gone, and we have the courts. More and more private quarrels are now adjudicated before they even reach the courts, by diplomacy. This evolution has gone on side by side with all this absurd talk of not being able to change human nature. And the change from wars as the method of adjudication between groups of people to international courts is in this inevitable evolution; but it limps and halts because good people cling to this outgrown obsession: You cannot change human nature. Wars have always been, therefore they must always be.

We are writing this editorial to call the attention of these good people to the effect that this obsession will prove false here as it has everywhere. You can do away with war soon because you can change human nature. The earth is full of the signs that human nature is changing very fast in this regard. The calendar of 1909 printed in our last two issues is only a slight indication of what is going on in the mind of the world. Read it carefully, and remember that 50 years ago one could not have written one. World unity, international peace, world federation, Hague courts, arbitration treaties, brotherhood of man — these are the growing words everywhere. They betoken a change coming over human nature. Link yourself up to it and hasten the transformation with your Christian faith. The change of human nature is easy to a Christianity really believed. — The Christian Work and Evangelist.

--Reprinted in The Daily Press, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Feb. 21, 1910, p. 7.

Note: OK, here, this has to be the classic article, if there ever was one, on the progress of humanity, the changing of human nature, because of religion. We've probably all heard it, that there was this sense before World War I, then great disillusionment for such a point of view, made much worse by the next war. And add to that the various things of psychiatry, Freud, Jung, and things were never so optimistic again, although of course their aim was reconciliation and adjustment for at least good coping.