Were I to try to prove that the _regime_ of the Law was necessarily fatal to the development of Man's higher faculties--conscience, freedom, reason, imagination, intuition, aspiration, and the rest--I should waste my time. Legalism, as a scheme of life, is based on the assumption that development along the lines of Man's nature is a movement towards perdition; and to reproach the legalist for having arrested the growth of the human spirit by the pressure of the Law were to provoke the rejoinder that he had done what he intended to do. The two schemes of Salvation--the mechanical and the evolutional--have so little in common that neither can pass judgment on the other without begging the question that is in dispute. When I come to consider the effect of legalism--or rather of the philosophy that underlies legalism--on education, I may perhaps be able to find some court of law in which the case between the two schemes can be tried with the tacit consent of both. Meanwhile I can but note that in the atmosphere of the Law growth is as a matter of fact arrested,--arrested so effectually that the counter process of degeneration begins to take its place. The proof of this statement, if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master principle has been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form of Pharisaism, and that it is possible for the Pharisee to "count himself to have apprehended," to congratulate himself on his spiritual achievement, to believe, in all seriousness, that he has closed his account with God.