D. THE FREEDOM OF HUMAN SOULS THAT
IS THE LAW OF GOD

IN the present Part of this Study we are trying to gain some insight
into the relation between Law and Freedom in History; and, if we
now reapproach this question in the light of the evidence that we have
been gathering in the course of an empirical inquiry, we shall find that
the question has already received an answer. How is Freedom related to
Law ? Our evidence declares that Man does not live under one law only;
he lives under two laws, and one of these two is a Law of God which is
Freedom itself under another and more illuminating name.

This 'perfect law of liberty'1 is also a law of Love; for Man's freedom
could only have been given to Man by a God who is Love in person,3
and this divine gift can only be used by Man for freely choosing Good
and Life instead of Death and Evil3 if Man, on his side, loves God well
enough to be moved by this responsive love of his to commit himself to
God, by making God's will his own, as unreservedly as God has com-
mitted Himself to Man by giving Man the power of free choice.

Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.4

*La sua voluntade e nostra pace';3 and this self-surrender of Man's will
to God's, which the Prophet Muhammad has preached in the lapidary
word islam, is 'the glorious liberty of the children of God'.6 'History is,
. . . above everything else, a call, a vocation, a dispensation to be heard
and responded to by free human beings—in short, the interaction of
God and Man';7 and this truth has been partially divined by pre-
. Christian Hellenic philosophers and been faintly echoed in the utterances
of post-Christian Western heresiarchs. Plato has testified that the Gods
do not drive human beings, but steer them;8 and Hegel's description of
creation as a synthesis obtained through a settlement of accounts be-
tween a thesis and an antithesis is a recognizable academic abstract of
the living truth, even though it makes nonsense of it by perversely
depotentializing the creative act of God's and Man's mutual love into
the logical procedure of an intellect that 'by itself, moves nothing*.9

Law and Freedom in History prove to be identical, in the sense that
Man's freedom proves to be the law of a God who is identical with Love.
But this finding does not dispose of our problem; for in answering our

James i. 25. * i John iv._8. 3 Deut. xxx. 15.

Tennyson: In Memoriam, in. the invocation.

Dante: La Divina Conanedia: Taradiso*, Canto III, 1. 85. 6 Rom. -riii. 21.

Lampert, E.: The Apocalypse of History (London 1948, Faber), p. 45.

Plato: Critias, 109 B-C: They tended us as herdsmen tend their flocks, live-stock
and nurselings, except that they did not use physical force, as shepherds do when they
drive beasts by beating them. The Gods led Mankind by steering them. They guided
Mankind's course from astern, which is the way in which a living creature is most easily
manipulated, and they used as their rudder the instrument of Persuasion to influence the
Human Psyche in accordance with the Gods* own ideas/

9 Aristotle: Ethica Nicomachea, Zzt pp. 1139 A-B, quoted in III. in. 231, n. I,and on
pp. 327-8, above.