If I condemn mechanical obedience, I do so because it is unworthy of the name of obedience, because the higher faculties of Man's being, the faculties which are distinctively human--reason, imagination, aspiration, spiritual intuition, and the like--take no part in it, because it is the obedience of an automaton, not of a living soul.

What I wish to oppose to it is _vital obedience_, obedience to the master laws of Man's being, obedience to the laws which assert themselves as central and supreme, obedience more particularly to those larger and obscurer laws which obedience itself helps us to discover, obedience in fine to that hierarchy of laws--( the superior law always claiming the fuller measure and the higher kind of obedience)--which, if we are to use the Divine Name, we must needs identify with the will of God.
Obedience, in this sense of the word, is a sustained and soul-deep effort in which all the higher faculties of Man's being take part, an effort which is in some sort a voyage of discovery, the doing of the more obvious duty being always rewarded by the deepening of the doer's insight and the widening of his outlook, and by the consequent unveiling to him of the way in which he is to walk and the goal at which he is to aim.

That the path of soul-growth is the path of vital obedience can scarcely be doubted.

The effort to grow is always successful just so far as it implies knowledge of the laws of the nature that is unfolding itself, and readiness to obey those laws; and so far as it is successful, it carries with it the outgrowth of the very faculties by which knowledge--the higher knowledge which makes further growth possible--is to be gained.

Here, as elsewhere, there is an unceasing interaction between perception and expression, between knowledge of law and obedience to law, what is given as obedience being received back as enlightenment, and what is received as enlightenment being given back as larger, fuller, and more significant obedience.
And, be it carefully observed, it is obedience to the laws of human nature, not obedience to the idiosyncrasies of the individual nature, which the process of soul-growth at once implies and makes possible.
Growth is, in its essence, a movement towards that perfect type which is the real self of each individual in turn, and the approach to which involves the gradual surrender of individuality, and the gradual escape from the ordinary self.