Page:OptimismBlood.djvu/59

reverence. All men have at some time confessed it, and none can assure us how it might be otherwise. At the same time every man feels a sufficient independence of God that he may attempt to insult and defy him, and disobey his laws. We feel that we may be justly commanded of God, and are at liberty to obey. We feel that if we stood on the threshold of heaven, invited to enter, and should declare with tears in our eyes that we could not enter until God should give us a disposition so to do, the devil himself, with all his reputed sophistry, could not outmatch our effrontery. We feel that God may require our good will, however we obtain it.

But few minds are so shallow as to attempt, in these days, to reconcile with human notions of justice the assertion that God requires of man the will which He alone can give. Men deny the validity of that instinct which feels independent of God. If one man controls the consciousness of another, either with drugs or any force whatsoever, common justice forbids that the second should be responsible to the first for word or deed. His consciousness of individual liberty is a delusion. Men see that God has at least such control over them, and they repudiate their alleged responsibility.

Much argument has been put forth to show that God could make a being independent of himself, and therefore responsible to him. But sad were our fate if any but €k)d held independent power; and reason scouts the proposition for its own absurdity. For every being, independent or otherwise, created or uncreated, finds itself, in the mere fact of being,