382 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

a la meme fin, et c'est faute d'entendre le tout que nous trouvons du

hasard ou de Tirregularite dans les rencontres particulieres.'1

The orator's language is as brilliant as it is masterful, but the theo-
logian's ideas of what God is and how God acts are as unconvincing as
they are repellant to any drinker at the fountain-head of Christianity. As
God is revealed in the Gospels, He is Love as well as Omnipotence; He
is the Soul's father, redeemer, and illuminator, as well as its creator and
its master;2 and this Christian faith assures us that, when a soul en-
counters the God of whom this is the authentic Christian picture, Love
suspends the fiat of Omnipotence in order to transmute a command into
a challenge which confronts the human recipient of it with a free choice
between Good and Evil and between Life and Death.3 Such challenges
from God may evoke in human souls creative responses that are
genuinely free human acts; and this spiritual drama of Challenge-
and-Response4 is perhaps the key to an explanation of those human
affairs in which human action wears the appearance of being at any rate
partially exempt from the dorninion of laws of Nature.

If we now recall some of our instances of an apparent recalcitrance
of human affairs to laws of Nature, we shall find that these are also
instances of a creative response to a challenge.

When, for example, a creative individual or minority distinguishes
itself by breaking contact with the rank-and-file, forging ahead of them,
and then re-entering into contact again, these distinctive moves, which
are so many evidences of the minority's freedom of action, are at the
same time so many stages in a response that the creative individual or
minority has been stimulated to make in answer to some challenge that
has been presented to all the members of the society, including the un-
responsive rank-and-file, and also perhaps including other individuals or
minorities who have made a choice of Evil instead of Good that brings
Death instead of Life.5

If we now also look again at the history of the art of ship-building in
the Modern and post-Modern ages of Western history, in which we have
watched the sequence of an acceleration followed by a retardation occur-
ring, not once only, as in the movement of Withdrawal-and-Return, but
twice over, we shall find this duplication of the same sequence accounted
For here by the presentation of two different challenges in succession.

The challenge that evoked the creation of the Modern Western 'ship*
tvithin the half-century A.D. 1440-90 was a political one. Towards the
:lose of the Medieval Age of Western history, Western Christendom
bund itself not only conclusively foiled in its attempt to break out of
ts West European homeland south-eastward into Dar-al-Islam and
Drthodox Christendom, but seriously threatened by a north-westward-
leading counter-attack in which the military resources of Orthodox
Christendom and Islam were brigaded under Ottoman auspices.6 The
langerousness of Western Christendom's plight in the fifteenth century