330 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



throughout; he can have no "righteousness of 

 God," — righteousness, that is, such as God has, — 

 but must remain in bondage to the false and ex- 

 ternal "righteousness of the law." 



Before it can be said, then, that human freedom 

 and the absolute definiteness of God as Supreme 

 Reason are really reconciled, we must have found 

 some way of harmonising the eternity of the hu- 

 man spirit with the creative and regenerative of- 

 fices of God. The sense of their antagonism is 

 nothing new. Confronted with the race-wide fact 

 of human sin, the elder theology proclaimed this 

 antagonism, and solved it by denying to man any 

 but a temporal being ; quite as the common-sense 

 of the everyday Philistine, absorbed in the limita- 

 tions of the sensory life, proclaims the mere fini- 

 tude of man, and is stolid to the ideal considerations 

 that suggest immortality and moral freedom, rating 

 them as day-dreams beneath sober notice, because 

 the price of their being real is the attributing to 

 man nothing short of infinity. "We are finite! 

 merely finite ! " is the steadfast cry of the old 

 theology and of the plodding common realist alike ; 

 and, sad to say, of most of historic philosophy too. 

 And the old theology, with more penetrating con- 

 sistency than the realistic ordinary man or the 

 ordinary philosophy, went on to complete its vindi- 

 cation of the Divine Sovereignty from all human 



