SOURCE: "Carl Becker and the Jewel of Consistency," in The Antioch Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, Summer, 1966, pp. 235-46.

In the following essay, Penick examines ideological inconsistencies and conflicts in Becker's works.

Ours is a culture which once placed a high premium on the ideal of spiritual unity. Authority was centralized in institutions which measured social value against an objective standard. The offices of magistrate and priest alike were prescribed within a divinely ordered universe. Time has been unkind to this ideal. While unity dissolved into pluralism, certainty came under the hammer of relativity on the anvil of probability. Today magistrate and priest alike seek to build a foundation of value on the shifting quagmires of history. Doubtless value should emerge from the total civilization, transmitted over a continuum of time and adapted to changing circumstance, but the enhanced importance of history has raised the question whether what was...