obligation-sense

Updated: May 14, 2025

"Ah, but law is something beyond laws or those who administer them," he said in a lower tone; "and the law the obligation-sense of our own race and time, however imperfect it may be, is sacred, not because it has been imposed upon us from without, but because it has grown up to what it is, out of our own best life ours, yet not ours the best proof we have, when we look back at it in the large, when we feel its work in ourselves of some diviner power than our own will our best clue to what that power may be!"

Mrs. Humphry Ward - Marcella