supremacy of God.

The laws of God are changeless and eternal, but human morality is a
local and temporal development. As the character of an individual is the
product of disposition and experience, so his fate is humanly determined
by the particular forms of custom and law established in the community
in which his lot is cast. But these change from time to time, and in
periods of change the disparity between public and private interest is
most conspicuous: the progressive individual bears not only the burden
of proof but also the dead weight of public inertia. Only at infinity
can the parallel antithetical interests coincide. Nevertheless, the
world gradually effects self-correction by the evolution of new
syntheses from the thesis and antithesis ever and anon presented for
trial and judgment as between liberal and conservative forces.

Hebbel's drama, then, is the representation of a process, the process of
life, by which things come into being. It reveals the individual in the
making, and discusses the validity of the institutions that condition
his life or cause his death. There is no question of guilt and
atonement. Protagonist and antagonist are right, each in his way and
from his point of view; the conflict may arise from excess of goodness
as well as from excess of evil; but the representative of the whole
prevails of necessity over the champion of a single interest; and in the
knowledge of this truth, rather than in the futile attempt to modify the
relation, we must seek our freedom. Hebbel's plays are historical:
character in its setting of circumstances is the only character really
and fully comprehensible. They are sociological: exhibiting the
ceaseless collision of individualistic and collectivistic tendencies,
they teach forbearance, and patience, and the will to face the
facts--_tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_. And they are modern: