equally important fact of the difference, the
distinction between the two. But sound knowledge and normal feeling
rest upon observing and reckoning with both aspects of this law of
kinship and contrast. All human experience becomes known to us through
the interplay of what appear to be contradictory needs and opposing
truths within our being. Thus, man is a social animal and can only
find himself in a series of relationships as producer, lover, husband,
father and friend. He is a part of and like unto his kind, his spirit
immanent in his race. But man is also a solitary creature, and in that
very solitariness, which he knows as he contrasts it with his social
interests, he finds identity of self, the something which makes us
"us," which separates us from all others in the world. A Crusoe,
marooned on a South Sea island, without even a black man Friday for
companionship, would soon cease to be a man; personality would forsake
him. But the same Crusoe is equally in need of solitude. The hell of
the barracks, no matter how well conducted, is their hideous lack of
privacy; men condemned by shipwreck or imprisonment to an unbroken and
intimate companionship kill their comrade or themselves. We are all
alike and hence gregarious; we are all different and hence flee as a
bird to the mountain. The reality of human personality lies in neither
one aspect of the truth nor the other, but in both. The truth is found
as we hold the balance between identity and difference. Hence we are
not able to think of personality in the Godhead unless we conceive of
God as being, within Himself, a social no less than a solitary Being.

Again, this law that the truth is found in the balance of the
antinomies appears in man's equal passion for continuity and
permanency and for variety and change. The book of Revelation tells
us that the redeemed, before the great white throne, standing upon the
sea of glass, sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. What has the one
to do with the other? Here is the savage, triumphant chant of the far
dawn of Israel's history, joined with the furthest and latest possible
events and words. Well, it at least suggests the continuity of the
ageless struggle of mankind, showing that the past has its place
in the present, relieving man's horror of the impermanence, the
disjointed character of existence. He wants something orderly and
static. But, like the jet of water in the fountain, his life is
forever collapsing and collap