Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/431

370 might have done right instead of wrong. The question of our effectual freedom in the world of experience is simply the question whether we have not a living source of right within us, our own eternal choice, of fuller flood than the countercurrent tending to arrest it. But, on the other hand, the presence in us of this essential counter-stream brings the constant risk that the movement in response to the absolute Ideal may in the time-world actually suffer arrest. Nevertheless, this arrest cannot annihilate the potential for goodness that lies in our eternal vision of the Supreme Ideal. That lives on; and our sin is, that we fail in our time-world to avail ourselves of it, because we temporarily lose experimental realisation of it, and consequently become absorbed in that side of our life which arises directly from our principle of difference — our difference from God.

Our sense of alternative is the sense that the transcending view which connects us with our Divine Ideal, and which moves us evermore toward harmony with that, is really ever-living, and so affords resources to reduce our defective difference and carry us beyond all temporal actualities. So that when we halt in any stage of these, and act as if our aim and object ended there, and we were there fulfilled, we know that this is false. We know that we have belied our real being, that in our true