306 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

ism, evoked a whole-hearted reassertion of Monotheism in the shape of
Islam and a less thoroughgoing reassertion of it in the shape of Pro-
testantism; yet Protestantism confessed its nostalgia for the comfortable
practices of an abandoned Roman Church by eventually rankling into
Anglo-Catholicism, while a would-be meticulously monotheistic Islam
was no more successful than Judaism or Protestantism or Catholicism
in living up to its superhumanly etherial principles. Islam, in its turn,
made the now familiar concessions to the Soul's irrepressible appetite
for a plurality of gods. Even the Sunnah found its equivalent for a per-
sonified Word of God in an uncreated Qur'an and acquiesced in a cult
of saints which owed at least as much to the corresponding Christian
practice as this owed to the cult of pagan Hellenic heroes and demigods,
while a doubly heretical 'AH Ilahi sect had the courage of the Shi'ah's
muffled convictions when it openly conferred upon cAli the apotheosis
that Jesus had received from the Christian Church. The Christians'
apotheosis of Jesus had been rejected as a relapse into Polytheism by
'All's own cousin and father-in-law the Prophet Muhammad. The yearn-
ing, manifest in the Shi'ah, to find a legitimate Islamic substitute for a
proscribed Christian God Incarnate gives reason to Horace's dictum
Naturam expelles fared, tamen usque recunet.1

These variations on the theme of a trial of strength between conflicting
tendencies, in which the eventually defeated tendency kicks repeatedly
against the pricks without succeeding in the long run in defying its 'fate',
are all embraced in the drama of Man's 'fate' of having daily and hourly
to purchase and re-purchase his right to Life and Freedom by perpetually
responding to repeated challenges.

Nur der verdient sich Freiheit, wie das Leben,
Der taglich sie erobern muss.2

In our search for a criterion of the process of growth,3 we have found it
in a cumulative success in responding to challenges which is rewarded,
not by an exemption from Challenge which would be tantamount to a
discharge from the active service of Life, but by a transfer of the field of
challenge from, a Macrocosm where God challenges Man through the
agency of Non-Human Nature or of Man's fellow human beings to a
Microcosm where God challenges Man through the agency of Man's own
soul by an ineffable epiphany of God the Challenger Himself.

(II) POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS OF THE CURRENCY
OF 'LAWS OF NATURE' IN HISTORY

The Emancipation of Man's Work from the Day-and-Night Cycle and

from the Annual Cycle of the Seasons by Civilisation

The evidence for the amenability of human affairs to 'laws of Nature'

that has presented itself in the foregoing survey of historical facts seems

sufficient to warrant, and indeed to demand, an inquiry into possible

explanations of the appearance of regularities and recurrences too well

* Horace: Epistvlae, Book I, Ep. x, 1. 24.

2 Goethe: Faust, II. 11575-6, quoted in II. i. 277. 3 In HI. iii. 192-217.