the first man stood towards it. He had good forced upon him: we have forced ourselves upon it by a voluntary submission; and in this kind of submission true freedom consists; because, in making it, the initiative movement originates in our own wills, in an act of resistance put forth against the evil that encounters us in our natural selves, whichever way we turn; and thus, instead of this kind of causality exercising a strictly causal force upon us, we, properly speaking, are the cause by which it is induced to visit and operate upon us at all. "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force: " that is to say, it does not take them by force—it does not force itself causally upon us. On the contrary, we must force ourselves upon it by our own efforts, and, as it were, wring from an All-merciful God that grace which even He cannot and will not grant, except to our own most earnest importunities.
Would we now look back into the history of our kind, in order to gather instances of that real operation of consciousness which we have been speaking of? Then what was the whole of the enlightened jurisprudence, and all the high philosophy of antiquity, but so many indications of consciousness in its practical antagonism against human depravity? What is justice, that source and concentration of all law? Is it a natural growth or endowment of humanity? Has it, in its first origin, a positive character of its own? No; there is no such thing as natural or born justice among men. Justice is nothing but the consciousness of our own natural injustice, this consciousness being, in its very essence, an act of resistance against the same. Do the promptings of nature teach us to give every man his due? No; the promptings of nature teach us to keep to ourselves all that we can lay our hands upon; therefore it is only by acting against the promptings of nature that we can deal justly towards our fellow-men. But we cannot act against these promptings without being conscious of them, neither can we be conscious of them without acting against them to a greater or a less extent; and thus consciousness, or an act of antagonism put forth against our natural selfishness, lies at the root of the great principle upon which all justice depends—the principle suum cuique tribuendi. Therefore, in every nation of antiquity in which wise and righteous laws prevailed, they prevailed not in consequence of any natural sense or principle of justice among men, but solely in consequence of the act of consciousness, which exposed to them the injustice and selfish passions of their own hearts, and, in the very exposure, got the better of them.
If we look, too, to the highest sects of ancient philosophy, what do we behold but the development of consciousness in its antagonism against evil, and an earnest striving after something better than anything that is born within us? What was the whole theoretical and practical stoicism of antiquity? Was it apathy, in the modern sense of that word, that this high philosophy inculcated? Great philosophers have told us that it was so. But ah! doctrine lamentably inverted, traduced, and misunderstood! The "apathy" of ancient stoicism was no apathy in our sense of the word—it was no inertness—no sluggish insensibility—no avoidance of passion—and no folding of the hands to sleep. But it was the direct reverse of all this. It was, and it inculcated, an eternal war to be waged by the sleepless consciousness of every man against the indestructible demon-passions of his own heart. The ἀπαθεια of stoicism was an energetic acting against passion; and, if our word apathy means this, let us make use of it in characterising that philosophy. But we apprehend that our word apathy signifies an indifference, a passiveness, a listless torpidity of character, which either avoids the presence of the passions, or feels it not; in short, an unconsciousness of passion, a state diametrically opposed to the apathy of stoicism, which consists in the most vital consciousness of the passions, and their consequent subjugation thereby. It has been thought, too, that stoicism aimed at the annihilation of the passions; but it is much truer to say, that it took the strife between them and consciousness, as the focus of its philosophy; it found true manhood concentrated in this strife, and it merely placed true manhood where it found it—for it saw
