re of mechanical, obedience is the only path
of safety; and the more punctiliously the letter is obeyed, the more
perfect will be the machinery of salvation, and the nearer will
legalism get to the appointed goal of its labours,--the extinction
of spiritual life.

As is the life that legalism expects us to lead, so is the scheme of
rewards and punishments by which (as we have already seen) it
constrains us to lead it. The materialisation of life that takes
place under the sway of the Law is accurately matched and measured by
the materialisation of the doctrine of moral retribution. The general
idea that virtue is rewarded and vice punished is profoundly true.
But the idea is easily misinterpreted; and it necessarily shares in
the degradation of one's general conception of life. Virtue rewards
the virtuous by making them more virtuous. Vice punishes the vicious
by making them more vicious. So long as the rewards for which we hope
and the punishments which we dread are conceived of as inward and
spiritual, we are on safe ground. But such a scheme of rewards and
punishments is wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism. It
is not by becoming more virtuous that we are saved. It is not by
becoming more vicious that we are lost. We are saved by obedience,
we are lost by disobedience, to the formulated rules of a
divinely-delivered law. To appeal to Man's higher self, when there is
no higher self to appeal to,--to set before him as the supreme reward
of virtue the development of his better nature, when his nature is
intrinsically evil,--would be an obvious waste of labour. And as,
apart from the presumed repugnance of the "natural man" to the
presumed delights of the Law, the intrinsic attractiveness of the
life that legalism prescribes must needs diminish in exact proportion
as the authority of the Law becomes oppressive and vexatious, and the
letter of it tends to establish itself at the expense of the
spirit,--it is clear that a scheme of rewards and punishments will
become, in effect as well as in theory, the only weapon in the
armoury of the legalist. It is also clear that there will be much
work for that one weapon to do. The central tendencies of Man's
nature, besides being _ex hypothesi_ evil, are antagonistic _de
facto_ to the galling despotism and the irrational requirements of
the Law; and the lawgiver, far from being able to enlist those
tendencies under his banner by appealing to the highest of them--the
na