So the second problem of the preacher is clear.  Man asserts his potential independence of the natural law.  But to realize that, he must bridge the gulf between himself and the supernatural lawgiver to whose dictates he confesses he is subject.  He is not free from the bondage of the lower, except through the bondage to the higher.  Nor can he live by that higher law unaided and alone.  Here we strike at the root of humanism.  Its kindly tolerance of the church is built up on the proud conviction that we, with our distinctive doctrine of salvation, are superfluous, hence sometimes disingenuous and always negligible.  The humanist believes that understanding takes the place of faith.  What men need is not to be redeemed from their sins, but to be educated out of their follies.

But does right knowing in itself suffice to insure right doing?  Socrates and Plato, with their indentification of knowledge and virtue, would appear to think so; the church has gone a long way, under humanistic pressure, in tacit acquiescence with their doctrine.  Yet most of us, judging alike from internal and personal evidence and from external and social observation, would say that there was no sadder or more universal experience than that of the failure of right knowledge to secure right performance.  Right knowledge is not in itself right living.  We have striking testimony on that point from one of the greatest of all humanists, no less a person than Confucius.  “At seventy,” he says, “I could follow what my heart desired without transgressing the law of measure."[33] The implication of such testimony makes no very good humanistic apologetic!  Most of us, when desire has failed, can manage to attain, unaided, the identification of understanding and conduct, can climb to the poor heights of a worn-out and withered continence.  But one wonders a little whether, then, the climbing seems to be worth while.

[Footnote 33:  Analects, II, civ.]

But the doctrine usually begins by minimizing the free agency of the individual, playing up the factors of compulsion, either of circumstance or inheritance or of ignorance, as being in themselves chiefly responsible for blameful acts.  These are therefore considered involuntary and certain to be reformed when man knows better and has the corresponding strength of his knowledge.  But Aristotle, who deals with this Socratic doctrine in the third book of the Ethics, very sensibly remarks, “It is ridiculous to lay the blame of our wrong actions upon external causes rather than upon the facility with which we ourselves are caught by such causes, and, while we take credit for our noble actions to ourselves, lay the blame of our shameful actions upon pleasure."[34] “The facility with which we are caught”—­there is the religious understanding there is that perversion of will which conspires with the perils and chances of the world so that together they may undo the soul.

[Footnote 34:  Ethics, Book III, ch. ii, p. 61.]