If it is objected that this is a doctrine of contingent anarchy, that it admits the right of men to rebellion, my answer is that the accusation is true. But is its truth important? Order, surely, is not the supreme wrong. Power is not conferred upon men for the sake of power, but to enable them to achieve ends which win happiness for each of us. If what they do is a denial of the purpose they serve; if, as we meet their acts, there appears in them an absence of goodwill, a blindness to experience alien from their own, an incapacity imaginatively to meet the wants of others, what alternatives have we save a challenge to power or a sacrifice of the end of our life? We do not condemn Washington because there came a moment in his career when he was compelled to recognize that the time for compromise with England had passed. We do not, even more notably, condemn those early Christians who refused to offer incense to the Gods. We have to act by the dictates of our conscience knowing, as Washington knew, as the early Christians recognized, that the penalties of failure are terrible. But we can so act, also, knowing that there is a sense in which no man who serves his conscience ever fails. For by that service he becomes a free man, and his freedom is a condition of other men’s freedom. There is immense significance in the fact that those who fought for religious liberty were the unconscious progenitors of civil liberty also. When they demanded the right to worship the God they knew, in their own mind they were insisting that in one sphere, at least, of human experience, their own perception must count as ultimate. They consecrated freedom to the service of God. But that, after all, is only one aspect of freedom. Its consecration to the service of man is, for some of us, not less vital and pervasive. To fight for the assurance that a man may do his duty as he conceives it is not only to fight for freedom, but for all the ends which the emancipation of mankind seeks to attain. I do not know whether liberty is the highest objective we can serve. I do assert that no other great purpose is possible of achievement save in the terms of fellowship with freedom. CHAPTER II FREEDOM OF THE MIND I I have sought, so far, to show that, however important be the political mechanisms on which liberty depends, they will not work of themselves. They depend for their creativeness upon the presence in any given society of a determination to make them work. The knowledge that an invasion of liberty will always meet with resistance from men determined upon its repulsion, this, in the last analysis, is the only true safeguard that we have. It means, I have admitted, that a certain penumbra of contingent anarchy always confronts the state; but I have argued that this is entirely desirable since the secret of liberty is always, in the end, the courage to resist.