396 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

original question we have raised a new one. In rinding that Freedom is
identical with one of two codes of Law, we have raised the question of the
relation in which these two laws stand to one another; and at first sight
the answer to this new question would seem to be that the Law of Love
and the Law of Subconscious Human Nature, which both manifestly
have jurisdiction over human affairs, are not only different but are con-
tradictory, and are not only contradictory but are incompatible; for the
law of the Subconscious Psyche, which our Western psychologists have
located in the psychic abyss from which the Babylonian astrologers once
projected it on to the stars in their courses, holds in spiritual bondage
human souls whom God has called to work with Him in freedom. When
one of two dispensations spells liberty, while the other spells servitude,
are we not wantonly obscuring the truth and confusing the issue by
using the same word 'law' to describe them both ?

The more searchingly we compare these two 'laws', the wider the moral
gulf between them seems to be. If we appraise the Law of Nature by the
standard of the Law of Love, and see through Love's eyes everything that
Nature has made, behold, it is very bad.1

Ay, look: high Heaven and Earth ail from the prime foundation;
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain.'2

And, in the bitterness of his riven heart, Man explores divers possible
explanations of a moral anomaly and enormity that he cannot explain
away and cannot take for granted.

One of the conclusions that have been drawn by human spectators of
the moral evil in the Universe is that this chamber of horrors cannot be
any god's handiwork.

Quod si iam rerurn ignorem primordia quae sint,
hoc tarnen ex ipsis caeli rationibus ausim
confirmare aliisque ex rebus reddere multis,
nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratarn
naturam rerurn: tanta stat praedita culpa.3

To explain this evil universe as the undesigned outcome of a fortuitous
concourse of indestructable atoms of matter is indeed the line of least
resistance for an Epicurean in whose belief the gods are rois faineants \
but this Epicurean solution of the problem of Evil will not satisfy either
a logician who sees through the word 'Chance' to an undesignated posi-
tive order lurking incognito under this negative label, or a Christian in
whose belief God is the Love that has bestowed on Man a law that is
Freedom. The Christian finds himself compelled to choose between two
other alternatives, both of which are grievously disconcerting: Either the
God who is Love must be also the creator of a manifestly ailing Uni-
verse, and therefore be either an incompetent demiurge or a malignant
mater saeva cupidinum'S or, if the God of Love is not one aspect of
a Janus-headed Godhead that, in another aspect, is Our Lady of the

1 Gen. i. 31.

* Housman, A. E.: The Shropshire Lad, xlviii, quoted in V. vi. 139.
5 Lucretius: De Rerum Naturd, Book V, 11. 195-9. The grounds of this verdict are
indicated in 1L 300-27. 4 Horace: Odes, Book I, Ode xix, 1. i.