Nation: LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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faith of the West and of the U.S. It owes much to ancient Greece, a civilization of first-rate men and second-rate gods, which prized human excellence, beauty and strength above all things. But it owes most to the revolutionary Biblical idea of a direct encounter between man and a single, personal God. Abraham had the temerity to bargain with Jehovah over the fate of Sodom, and Job is noted for having goaded Him into talking back.

Christianity dismissed the state and temporal power as transitory, turning all existence around the salvation of the individual soul. Christ asserted the infinite worth of every human being: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." And St. Paul added the equally radical injunction: "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." The central paradox of Christian free will is that the individual must surrender wholly, yet forever remain free, to say yes or no to God.

As the scattered early Christian churches turned into The Church, the direct relationship between the individual human being and the Creator had to be broadened to include society. Ever since, the intellectual and spiritual history of Western man has been a great, ever-varying triangle of God, the individual and the community.

In the Middle Ages, the triangle was firmly fixed, and each person, no matter how lowly, had his place and his worth. Unity, not individuality, was the ideal. The soul was cupped in the great single hand of the Church—until, in the Renaissance, the soul bloomed into flesh bursting with beauty, strength and pride.

Some of the greatest individuals the world has known dedicated their works ad majorem Dei gloriam. But it was really for the greater glory of man that they recreated the heavens and the earth in their paintings, molded the fiercest and the softest forms as if marble had become wax, and folded the world into their ledgers. For, as Will Durant said of the Renaissance, "first of all it took money, smelly bourgeois money."

The Novel Expression. The human side of the triangle very nearly overwhelmed both the divine and the social. But the great parallel movement of the Renaissance and the Reformation powerfully reasserted the direct relation between man and God, conferring on the individual the freedom, but also the burden, of "the priesthood of all believers." And in the 17th century, society reached a new balance with man and God in the thought of John Locke, who believed in God as the ultimate guarantor of human rights, in natural law as the foundation of liberty and property, and in government as an arrangement for the convenience and protection of the citizens.

Voltaire, Diderot and others extracted from Locke what they chose, and the rational individual was enthroned as monarch of the universe. Never was the triumph of individualism more swiftly followed by disaster. In the French Revolution the Goddess of Reason danced in the streets—until she found herself at the foot of the guillotine. It remained for Napoleon to create from the Revolution the modern state (including the draft and the secret police) in which individual men are submerged in the abstract glory of the nation.

But in the hands of