[What Is and What Might Be by Edmond Holmes]@TWC D-Link book
What Is and What Might Be

CHAPTER I
32/50

The life of the votary of the Law is lived under strict and constant _surveillance_; and a man learns at last to value himself as his conduct is valued by a critical onlooker, and to make it the business of his life to produce "results" which can be weighed and measured by conventional standards, rather than to grow in grace,--with silent, subtle, unobtrusive growth.
Were I to try to prove that the _regime_ of the Law was necessarily fatal to the development of Man's higher faculties--conscience, freedom, reason, imagination, intuition, aspiration, and the rest--I should waste my time.

Legalism, as a scheme of life, is based on the assumption that development along the lines of Man's nature is a movement towards perdition; and to reproach the legalist for having arrested the growth of the human spirit by the pressure of the Law were to provoke the rejoinder that he had done what he intended to do.

The two schemes of Salvation--the mechanical and the evolutional--have so little in common that neither can pass judgment on the other without begging the question that is in dispute.

When I come to consider the effect of legalism--or rather of the philosophy that underlies legalism--on education, I may perhaps be able to find some court of law in which the case between the two schemes can be tried with the tacit consent of both.

Meanwhile I can but note that in the atmosphere of the Law growth is as a matter of fact arrested,--arrested so effectually that the counter process of degeneration begins to take its place.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books