Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/130

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COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON
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freedom, are the whole foundation on which our enlightened civilisation stands; and the voice of aspiring and successful man, as he lives and acts in Europe and in America, speaks ever more and more plainly the two magic words of enthusiasm and of stability — Duty and Rights. But these are really the signals of his citizenship in the ideal City of God. By them he proclaims: We are many, though indeed one; there is one nature, in manifold persons; personality alone is the measure, the sufficing establishment, of reality; unconditional reality alone is sufficient to the being of persons; for that alone is sufficient to a Moral Order, since a moral order is possible for none but beings who are mutually responsible, and no beings can be responsible but those who originate their own acts. The entire political history of the West is accordingly a perpetual progress of struggle toward a system of law establishing liberty, and of liberty habilitated and filled with stable contents by law. The emergence, too, of western religion from oriental is similarly marked by the rise of this consciousness of individual and unconditional reality; we hear its presaging voice in that Hebrew prophet who declares: “Ye have said, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge; but I say unto you, The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” And the whole history of western theology, broken and incomplete and apparently tragic as it looks in the stage whither it has now at length come, is but the sincere and devout response of the human spirit to that inward voice of this ideal, which announces the supremacy of reason and declares the