LAW AND SIN old humdrum task of removing hair from the face — defy the maker’s statement that razors are only meant for shaving — use your razor for chopping wood and you will have a piece of twisted metal, fit only for the scrap-heap. CJod’s law is not something altogether apart from us: the knowledge of it may have to come from outside, but the law itself is, in a special sense, inside us. For it is a statement of the way we are made. And any action against it is therefore an action ageunst our own nature and is consequently destructive. The act of running counter to God’s law is sometimes justified on the ground of “self-expression.” It certainly is not an expression of the self, for God, who made the self, has declared that such action is contrary to its nature. And a man who commits sin — any sin — ^is to that extent less of a man, just as a motor car, whose engine has been used in violation of its maker’s instructions, is less of a motor car. To return to the argument of an earlier chapter — freedom results only from doing what one ought. The connection between law and freedom is absolute. Yet we sin. Our will is so made that it can choose only what appears to us as good. But two different and contradictory things may both appear to us as good from different points of view: to abstain from meat on Friday is good because God’s Church demands it: to eat meat on Friday is good because 97