soon as the first exaltation of belief is past, that one does not
remain always in touch with God. At first it seems incredible that
one should ever have any motive again that is not also God’s motive.
Then one finds oneself caught unawares by a base impulse. We
discover that discontinuousness of our apparently homogeneous
selves, the unincorporated and warring elements that seemed at first
altogether absent from the synthesis of conversion. We are tripped
up by forgetfulness, by distraction, by old habits, by tricks of
appearance. There come dull patches of existence; those mysterious
obliterations of one’s finer sense that are due at times to the
little minor poisons one eats or drinks, to phases of fatigue, ill-health and bodily disorder, or one is betrayed by some unanticipated
storm of emotion, brewed deep in the animal being and released by
any trifling accident, such as personal jealousy or lust, or one is
relaxed by contentment into vanity. All these rebel forces of our
ill-coordinated selves, all these “disharmonies,” of the inner
being, snatch us away from our devotion to God’s service, carry us
off to follies, offences, unkindness, waste, and leave us
compromised, involved, and regretful, perplexed by a hundred
difficulties we have put in our own way back to God.
This is the personal problem of Sin. Here prayer avails; here God
can help us. From God comes the strength to repent and make such
reparation as we can, to begin the battle again further back and
lower down. From God comes the power to anticipate the struggle
with one’s rebel self, and to resist and prevail over it.
4. THE SINS OF THE INSANE
An extreme case is very serviceable in such a discussion as this.
It happens that the author carries on a correspondence with several
lunatics in asylums. There is a considerable freedom of notepaper
in these institutions; the outgoing letters are no doubt censored or
selected in some way, but a proportion at any rate are allowed to go
out to their addresses. As a journalist who signs his articles and
as the author of various books of fiction, as a frequent NAME, that
is, to any one much forced back upon reading, the writer is
particularly accessible to this type of correspondent. The letters
come, some manifesting a hopeless disorder that permits of no reply,
but some being the expression of minds overlaid not at all
offensively by a web of fantasy, and some (and these are the more
touching ones and the ones that most concern us now) as sanely
conceived and expressed as any letters could be. They are written
by people living lives very like the lives of us who are called
“sane,” except that they lift to a higher excitement and fall to a
lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or
melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take
abnormal forms. They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the
safer ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of
drugs, or in dreams and rare moments of controllable extravagance.
Then the insane become “glorious,” or they become murderous, or they
become suicidal. All these letter-writers in confinement have
convinced their fellow-creatures by some extravagance that they are
a danger to themselves or others.
The letters that come from such types written during their sane
intervals, are entirely sane. Some, who are probably unaware—I
think they should know—of the offences or possibilities that
justify their incarceration, write with a certain resentment at
their position; others are entirely acquiescent, but one or two
complain of the neglect of friends and relations. But all are as
manifestly capable of religion and of the religious life as any
other intelligent persons during the lucid interludes that make up
nine-tenths perhaps of their lives… . Suppose now one of these
cases, and suppose that the infirmity takes the form of some cruel,
disgusting, or destructive disposition that may become at times
overwhelming, and you have our universal trouble with sinful
tendency, as it were magnified for examination. It is clear that
the mania which defines his position must be the primary if not the
cardinal business in the life of a lunatic, but his problem with
that is different not in kind but merely in degree from the problem
of lusts, vanities, and weaknesses in what we call normal lives. It
is an unconquered tract, a great rebel province in his being, which
refuses to serve God and tries to prevent him serving God, and
succeeds at times in wresting his capital out of his control. But
his relationship to that is the same relationship as ours to the
backward and insubordinate parishes, criminal slums, and disorderly
houses in our own private texture.
It is clear that the believer who is a lunatic is, as it were, only
the better part of himself. He serves God with this unconquered
disposition in him, like a man who, whatever else he is and does, is
obliged to be the keeper of an untrustworthy and wicked animal. His
beast gets loose. His only resort is to warn those about him when
he feels that jangling or excitement of the nerves which precedes
its escapes, to limit its range, to place weapons beyond its reach.
And there are plenty of human beings very much in his case, whose
beasts have never got loose or have got caught back before their
essential insanity was apparent. And there are those uncertifiable
lunatics we call men and women of “impulse” and “strong passions.”
If perhaps they have more self-control than the really mad, yet it
happens oftener with them that the whole intelligent being falls
under the dominion of evil. The passion scarcely less than the
obsession may darken the whole moral sky. Repentance and atonement;
nothing less will avail them after the storm has passed, and the
sedulous preparation of defences and palliatives against the return
of the storm.
This discussion of the lunatic’s case gives us indeed, usefully
coarse and large, the lines for the treatment of every human
weakness by the servants of God. A “weakness,” just like the
lunatic’s mania, becomes a particular charge under God, a special
duty for the person it affects. He has to minimise it, to isolate
it, to keep it out of mischief. If he can he must adopt preventive
measures… .
These passions and weaknesses that get control of us hamper our
usefulness to God, they are an incessant anxiety and distress to us,
they wound our self-respect and make us incomprehensible to many who
would trust us, they discredit the faith we profess. If they break
through and break through again it is natural and proper that men
and women should cease to believe in our faith, cease to work with
us or to meet us frankly… . Our sins do everything evil to us
and through us except separate us from God.
Yet let there be no mistake about one thing. Here prayer is a
power. Here God can indeed work miracles. A man with the light of
God in his heart can defeat vicious habits, rise again combative and
undaunted after a hundred falls, escape from the grip of lusts and
revenges, make head against despair, thrust back the very onset of
madness. He is still the same man he was before he came to God,
still with his libidinous, vindictive, boastful, or indolent vein;
but now his will to prevail over those qualities can refer to an
exterior standard and an external interest, he can draw upon a
strength, almost boundless, beyond his own.
5. BELIEVE, AND YOU ARE SAVED
But be a sin great or small, it cannot damn a man once he has found
God. You may kill and hang for it, you may rob or rape; the moment
you truly repent and set yourself to such atonement and reparation
as is possible there remains no barrier between you and God.
Directly you cease to hide or deny or escape, and turn manfully
towards the consequences and the setting of things right, you take
hold again of the hand of God. Though you sin seventy times seven
times, God will still forgive the poor rest of you. Nothing but
utter blindness of the spirit can shut a man off from God.
There is nothing one can suffer, no situation so unfortunate, that
it can shut off one who has the thought of God, from God. If you
but lift up your head for a moment out of a stormy chaos of madness
and cry to him, God is there, God will not fail you. A convicted
criminal, frankly penitent, and neither obdurate nor abject,
whatever the evil of his yesterdays, may still die well and bravely
on the gallows to the glory of God. He may step straight from that
death into the immortal being of God.
This persuasion is the very essence of the religion of the true God.