pered the thought and the will of man, and sent its enfeebling darts through all his feelings, impulses, strivings, experiences. Yes, religion, too, has its determinism, and there its results may be seen down to the deepest working of the will. But it must be overcome by that higher nature in man which, working under the law of conscience, draws him towards God and goodness. This is that ideal self towards which the actual self is-rightly directed-ever tending. When the power to make our wills one with the Divine Will shall come in as with a flood, we shall still freely and consciously will the good.

Such free willing of the good, with the supreme Entschluss or resolution it involves, remains for us the highest here possible. Such freedom will yet, at best, be but a forecast or foreshadowing of the glorious liberty that awaits the children of God. But it will still be freedom that is unimpaired, amid the strange, unlimited ways in which the grace of the Almighty Sovereign and Father of men invests the hidden realm of freedom. Yea, so true abide the lines of the German poet

"Man kann in wahrer Freiheit leben,

Und doch nicht ungebunden sein."

CHAPTER XIV.

RECENT SURVEYS OF THE REIGN OF LAW IN MAN.

We do not suppose it will be questioned that, in recent thinking, Law has not been regarded as the narrow thing it would be so far as the bounds of our experience go, but has been believed in as a vast principle reaching in its reign to every region of the universe whither thought can penetrate. Of course, this is the case, as we have just said, rather as a mental conviction than an induction from facts, which it can be said to be only on a basis so small as to be merely fractional in extent. This great conviction of the universality of law has been attended with no small confusion of thought, not only among scientific but also theistic writers. In some ways too, let us add, with a weakening of ethical law or idea itself such as was neither needful nor warranted, even though we grant that the study of cosmical laws may proceed without ethical preoccupation. Still, there is the fact of this vastly increased

recognition of cosmic law, with its principles of uniformity, conservation, and evolution. Certainly we reject that as an absurd obscuration of the subject which tacitly assumes physical law as the norm of law, and shuts the eye of reason to the laws of persons and of ideas, real as the laws of things. We are not concerned to deny the prevalence of law over inner as well as outer experience, for it has become less surprising, since Kant expounded for us the philosophy of law, to find that "the Moral Laws are undemonstrable, and yet apodictic, like the Mathematical Postulates." If we maintain the unity of law, we do so only as a unity amid diversity. We are thus at one with the poet,

"God is law, say the wise, O soul! and let us rejoice;

For if He thunder by law, the thunder is still His voice."

Zeller, speaking historically in an academic contribution, utters the needful reminder that it was the conception of the divine law which first led over (hinüber-leitete) to that of natural law, the representatives of which latter, we may add, do not always realise what it owes to religious ideas and representations. Law, as we take it, has been more carefully distinguished as a relation, not an entity -as thought rather than thing. As Professor A. Riehl has said, "there are not first laws, then things and processes subject to them. Laws are the relations of things." This is like the

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443

conception of Law laid down by J. G. Fichte, in his Science of Rights,' namely, as a "relation between personal beings." So that law, in our conception of it, must always be joined to being, of which, in fact, it is just the expression. Theistic philosophy has rightly resisted the hypostatising of abstraction under the phrase natural law, for it has not suffered itself to forget that all such natural laws are results or consequents of reality, and not its basis. These laws have their rise in the nature of things, but men mistakenly fancy that reality, whensoever it appears, must come under the form of previously existent law. The truth is, these natural laws spring simply from what things are, and tell only of what things are, not of what they must be.

Theistic thought may claim to have found itself in happy agreement with the most eminent of modern jurists when, in expounding the principles of jurisprudence as a science, they yet have taken law, in the true sense of moral law, as something which can only be addressed to persons who are capable, in virtue of intelligence and will, of obeying or disobeying it at their pleasure. This fact may help it to retain a clear vision of how divergent is such spiritual law from physical laws, since spiritual law runs up into that higher sphere in which a real - however responsive in result - dualism subsists between two wills.

The reign of law in the spiritual world is really

6

The laws of con

one whose kingdom is to come. science or the moral faculty may not be allowed to bear the stamp of axiomatic or mathematical certainty, yet they do exhibit a constancy accountable only by the remarkable persistence of the moral ideal. The reign of law in the physical world, Dr Carpenter, the author of Mental Physiology,' thinks, would be better spoken of as government according to, than by, laws. For in Law-the form in which Ultimate Reality is manifested to our consciousness by external phenomena-we have, as one has well said, but "another name for the union of Reason and Will, wherein consists Personality." Recent theistic philosophy of religion has advanced in making good its contentions for a theory of ethics that shall lead us from law up to an Agent or personal Lawgiver-from what Chalmers styled "the judge within the breast" up to the "notion of a Supreme Judge and Sovereign Who placed it there" -not only as against modern materialistic and agnostic systems of ethics, but also in the face of the plausible ethics of Pantheism. As against this last, it has more forcefully expounded the law of right as for it an ethical law-a moral law in the real sense of the term, and not a natural lawethical because its ought lays moral obligation on us with the hand of a Higher Will. It has found, with Dorner, that man possesses conscience less than conscience possesses him; it has found, in fact, Passavant, Auberlen, Schöberlein, and others, de