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life, no “perfect” happiness, no “perfect” conduct. He releases one
from the arbitrary but all too easy assumption that there is even an
ideal “perfection” in organic life. He sweeps out of the mind with
all the confidence and conviction of a physiological specialist, any
idea that there is a perfect man or a conceivable perfect man. It
is in the nature of every man to fall short at every point from
perfection. From the biological point of view we are as individuals
a series of involuntary “tries” on the part of an imperfect species
towards an unknown end.
Our spiritual nature follows our bodily as a glove follows a hand.
We are disharmonious beings and salvation no more makes an end to
the defects of our souls than it makes an end to the decay of our
teeth or to those vestigial structures of our body that endanger our
physical welfare. Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds
not an inch to our spiritual and moral stature.
2. WHAT IS DAMNATION?
Let us now take up the question of what is Sin? and what we mean by
the term “damnation,” in the light of this view of human reality.
Most of the great world religions are as clear as Professor
Metchnikoff that life in the world is a tangle of disharmonies, and
in most cases they supply a more or less myth-like explanation, they
declare that evil is one side of the conflict between Ahriman and
Ormazd, or that it is the punishment of an act of disobedience, of
the fall of man and world alike from a state of harmony. Their
case, like his, is that THIS world is damned.
We do not find the belief that superposed upon the miseries of this
world there are the still bitterer miseries of punishments after
death, so nearly universal. The endless punishments of hell appear
to be an exploit of theory; they have a superadded appearance even
in the Christian system; the same common tendency to superlatives
and absolutes that makes men ashamed to admit that God is finite,
makes them seek to enhance the merits of their Saviour by the device
of everlasting fire. Conquest over the sorrow of life and the fear
of death do not seem to them sufficient for Christ’s glory.
Now the turning round of the modern mind from a conception of the
universe as something derived deductively from the past to a
conception of it as something gathering itself adventurously towards
the future, involves a release from the supposed necessity to tell a
story and explain why. Instead comes the inquiry, “To what end?”
We can say without mental discomfort, these disharmonies are here,
this damnation is here—inexplicably. We can, without any
distressful inquiry into ultimate origins, bring our minds to the
conception of a spontaneous and developing God arising out of those
stresses in our hearts and in the universe, and arising to overcome
them. Salvation for the individual is escape from the individual
distress at disharmony and the individual defeat by death, into the
Kingdom of God. And damnation can be nothing more and nothing less
than the failure or inability or disinclination to make that escape.
Something of that idea of damnation as a lack of the will for
salvation has crept at a number of points into contemporary
religious thought. It was the fine fancy of Swedenborg that the
damned go to their own hells of their own accord. It underlies a
queer poem, “Simpson,” by that interesting essayist upon modern
Christianity, Mr. Clutton Brock, which I have recently read.
Simpson dies and goes to hell—it is rather like the Cromwell Road—
and approves of it very highly, and then and then only is he
completely damned. Not to realise that one can be damned is
certainly to be damned; such is Mr. Brock’s idea. It is his
definition of damnation. Satisfaction with existing things is
damnation. It is surrender to limitation; it is acquiescence in
“disharmony”; it is making peace with that enemy against whom God
fights for ever.
(But whether there are indeed Simpsons who acquiesce always and for
ever remains for me, as I have already confessed in the previous
chapter, a quite open question. My Arminian temperament turns me
from the Calvinistic conclusion of Mr. Brock’s satire.)
3. SIN IS NOT DAMNATION
Now the question of sin will hardly concern those damned and lost by
nature, if such there be. Sin is not the same thing as damnation,
as we have just defined damnation. Damnation is a state, but sin is
an incident. One is an essential and the other an incidental
separation from God. It is possible to sin without being damned;
and to be damned is to be in a state when sin scarcely matters, like
ink upon a blackamoor. You cannot have questions of more or less
among absolute things.
It is the amazing and distressful discovery of every believer so
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
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