Here, also, in this free act of the will, is attained that sense of liberty which in both the Old and New Testaments is described as “righteousness.” It is a sense of initiative and power, as though one were not wholly the subject of arbitrary grace, but had a certain positive companionship with God. It is what the Old Testament calls a “covenant,” involving mutual rights and obligations. No man, however, who accepts this relation is inclined to urge overmuch his own rights, knowing as he well does that his part in the covenant falls ever short and is even then made possible only through his steady confidence in God. Grace, unearned and undeserved, he still knows that he needs; yet behind this grace lies ever the initiative of personal “turning,” and the free assertion of the will as the first step toward complete redemption. To say with Paul that a man is “justified by faith,” or to emphasize as Luther does, even more strongly, the province of grace, is to run some risk of forgetting the constant demand for an initial step of one’s own. This step once taken, both the world in which one lives and one’s own personal life get a clear and intelligible meaning. On the one hand stands the free will of God, creating and directing the world, not restricted by the so-called laws of nature, yet a God of order, whose desires are not arbitrary or lawless. On the other hand is the free will of man, with the free choice before it of obedience or refusal;--a will, therefore, which may choose the wrong though it may not thereby thwart the Divine purpose. The evil-doer, if impenitent, must suffer, but his evil is converted into good. In such a philosophy what is a wisely adjusted human life? It is a life of free obedience to the eternal and unchangeable laws of God; a life, therefore, which attains through self-discipline successive steps of spiritual power. Life on other terms brings on a progressive decline of spiritual power and with this a sense of self-condemnation. What is the happy life? It is a life of conscious harmony with this Divine order of the world, a sense, that is to say, of God’s companionship. And wherein is the profoundest unhappiness? It is in the sense of remoteness from God, issuing into incurable restlessness of heart, and finally into incapacity to make one’s life fruitful or effective.