Translated into the terms of concrete human life and work, man’s answerableness in the divine image means free obedience to normative law. Such is the character of human obedience and the proximate definition of man's responsibility. All four of its terms are equally essential. Thus an unfree obedience, whether of ignorance or of force, is to that extent irresponsible, and a freedom which is not essentially qualified as obedience altogether lacks the condition of responsibility, for it is answerable to nothing. Again, an obedience, however free, which has nothing to do with law lacks an essential mark of human responsibility, namely order in and towards the common good. And although we may obey other laws, the character of the law that binds us precisely as responsible beings is to be normative. For a norm is the truth of things understood as a nature to be served and thus binds our will not arbitrarily but through our understanding.

We should recall, as Eric Gill was wont to recall ad nauseam, that man’s nature is twofold, bodily and spiritual (‘spirit and matter, both real and both good’) : that human life is the unity of these two elements which are resolved only by death and by false philosophy. But our death looks forward to the resurrection of our bodies. Thus our dependance upon the divine Image is also twofold. It shares the dependance of all created things upon their Exemplar as bodily creatures share it, being fashioned in a determinate scope of growth, of development and decay; and it obeys the laws of heaven as the grass of the field obeys them. But our dependance is also spiritual, of knowledge and of love.