There is very little danger of rebellion going too far.  The barriers confronting it are too solid, and the Idol of the Herd is too carefully enshrined.  A perpetual rebellion of every one against everything would give us an insecure, though exciting, existence, and we are protected by man’s disposition to obedience and his solid love of custom.  Against the first vedettes of rebellion the army of routine will always muster, and it gathers to itself the indifferent, the startled cowards, the thinkers whose thought is finished, the lawyers whose laws are fixed—­an innumerable host.  They proceed to treat the rebels as we have seen.  In all ages, rebellion has been met by the standing armies of permanence.  If captured, it is put to the ordeal of fire and water, so as to try what stuff it is made of.  Faith is rebellion’s only inspiration and support, and a deal of faith is needed to resist the battle and the test.  It was in thinking of the faith of rebels that an early Christian writer told of those who, having walked by faith, have in all ages been tortured, not accepting deliverance; and others have had trial of mockings and scourgings, and of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented (of whom the world was not worthy); they wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.[5] That is the test and the reward of faith.  So strong is the grip of the Leviathan, so determined is mankind to allow no change in thought or life to survive if he can possibly choke it.

One of the most learned and inspiring of writers on political philosophy has said in a book published in 1910: 

  “It is advantageous to the organism [of the Slate] that
  the rights of suggestion, protest, veto, and revolt should be
  accorded to its members."[6]

That sounds very simple.  We should all like to agree with it.  But under that apparently innocent sentence one of the most perplexing of human problems lies hidden:  what are the rights of liberty, what are the limits of revolt?  Only in a State of ideal anarchy can liberty be complete and revolt universal, because there would be nothing to revolt against.  And anarchy, though it is the goal of every man’s desire, seems still far away, being, indeed, the Kingdom of Heaven, which that God rules whose service is perfect freedom and which only angels are qualified to inhabit.  For though the law of the indwelling spirit is the only law that ought to count, not many of us are so little lower than the angels as to be a law unto ourselves.