By obedience to rational law man is raised to a level far transcending the transient and shadowy dignities of the world. His rational and divine part is reunited to the Divine Spirit which “makes for righteousness”; he places himself in the sweep and freedom of a movement which finds its image and counterpart in the majestic and ordered movements of the heavenly spheres. If we ask, how can poor humanity, so abject, so brutalised, so deadened by the downward pressure of the flesh and the world, ever release itself and rise to those empyrean heights, the answer is, through the original strength of the rational, which is the divine element in the human soul. It may be, and actually is, in the mass of men, drugged and silenced by the seductions of sense and the deceptions of the world. But if, in some moment of detachment and elation, when its captors and jailors relax their guard, it can escape their clutches, it will at once seek the region of its birth, and its true home. It is in the kindred of the human reason with the Divine, the Reason of the world, that we must seek the reconciliation of two apparently opposite points of view. At one time the Stoic doctor tells us that we must trust to our own strength in the moral struggle. And again Seneca, in almost Christian phrase, comforts his disciple with the vision of God holding out a succouring hand to struggling virtue, just as he warns the backslider of an eye “that seeth in secret.” Woe to him who despises that Witness.(1678) With such a conception of the relation of the human reason to the Divine, Seneca was bound to believe that human nature, as it is, had fallen away from original and spontaneous innocence. In the equal enjoyment of the unforced gifts of nature, in the absence of the avarice and luxury which the development of the arts, the exploitation of the earth’s hidden wealth, and the competitive struggle, born of a social life growing more and more complicated, have generated, the primeval man was unsolicited by the passions which have made life a hell.(1679) Yet this blissful state was one of innocence rather than of virtue; it was the result of ignorance of evil rather than determined choice of good.(1680) And the man who, in the midst of a corrupt society, fights his way to virtue, will take far higher moral rank than our simple ancestors, who wandered in the unravaged garden of the Golden Age. For the man born in a time when the nobler instincts have been deadened by the lust of gold and power and sensual excess, the virtuous will can only be won by a hard struggle.