REV. W. R. INGE, D.D., ON FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE. 249 



their capacities, even their freedom, much more fully under a 

 system of authority and discipline than if they were left to 

 themselves. Three quotations from French writers will serve 

 to support me here. " Weak minds," says Janet, " have an 

 enormous need of an external affirmation. The answer does 

 not matter much to them ; provided it be clear and decisive, 

 they are immediately comforted." Eenan says: "The existence 

 of a stable society guaranteeing the existence of a stable psychical 

 state, the average individual finds himself personally interested 

 in the conservation of traditional beliefs and customs in his 

 surroundings, and innovators become his personal enemies." 

 Blondel, speaking of the educative force of tradition, says : 

 " Tradition brings into distinct consciousness elements which 

 before were retained in the depths of faith and practice, rather 

 than expressed, placed in their true relations, and reflected on. 

 Therefore, this conservative and preservative power is at the 

 same time an instructive and initiating power. Even that which 

 it discovers, it has the humble feeling of faithfully recovering. 

 It has nothing to innovate, because it possesses its God and its 

 all ; but it can always teach us something new, because it 

 makes something pass from the implicit that is lived {Vimflicite 

 vecu) to the explicit that is known." This last sentence contains 

 too bold a claim ; for, as I shall show presently, the tendency of 

 tradition is to check experience and gag knowledge. But it 

 is perfectly true that Discipline may be a safeguard of freedom. 

 Freedom is not an original endowment of human nature. A 

 fool cannot be free ; and a man who cannot control himself 

 cannot be free. " Qui sihi servit servo servit ; qui se regit regem 

 regit.'' The independence of the ignorant merely liberates him 

 from the experience of the past. Examples may be found in 

 the downright silliness of many religious sects which have 

 sprung up since the Reformation, and in the recrudescence of 

 superstition which marks the emancipation of the half-educated 

 in a free country. The experience of the United States shows 

 how little democracy has to do with real liberty. In many 

 ways the dweller in a small censorious New England town is 

 more interfered with, if his tastes are at all unusual, than if he 

 lived at Petrograd before Lenin. In matters of thought, the 

 American is "free" to be a Christian Scientist, or to believe 

 that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. In a Catholic country 

 these and many other aberrations hardly exist ; thought in 

 the Latin countries acknowledges some authority, though not 



