of virtue, it reaches the border of his being
and destroys the last possibility of penitence. It is the horror of Evil in
the four stages of its growth: Temptation, Delusion, Audacity, and
Habit ending in Death.
To us sin has not become any less of a mystery or a pain. Temptation is
as sudden and demonic. Into every soul, however purged and fenced,
evil appears to have as much freedom of entrance as God Himself. It
begins as early. In the heart of every little child God works, but they
who next to God have most right there, the father and the mother, know
that something else has had, with God, precedence of themselves. As
the years go on, and the knowledge of good and evil grows, becoming
ever more jealous and expert a sentinel, it still finds its watch and fence
of the outside world mocked by the mysterious upburst of sin within.
The whole mystery of temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to
be swept after them by a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as
strong as the Spirit of God ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue.
'There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us, and we
seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in them an inspiration of
crime, that in an instant does the work of long premeditation.'[2] 'An
inspiration of crime,' that is the oracle of sin. From that come the panic
and the despair of temptation. The heart, which has still left in it some
loyalty to God, is horrified by the ease and the surprise of evil. Yet the
greater horror is that this horror may be lost: that men and women do
continually exchange it for a complacent and careless temper toward
the besetting sin which they have once felt to be worse than death.
From being panic-stricken at the rise and surge of temptation, they will
(and there is no more marvellous change in all fickle man's experience)
grow easy and scornful about it, time after time permitting it to
overcome them, in the delusion that they may reassert themselves when
they will, and put it beneath their feet. The rest is certain. Falsehood
becomes natural to him who was born loyal, audacity to him who grew
up timid and scrupulous. The impulsive lover of good, who has fallen
through the very warmth of his nature, develops into the deliberate
sensualist. Natures sensitive and enthusiastic grow absolutely empty of
power to revolt against what is unjust or foul. A great writer once said
of himself in middle life: 'I am proud and intellectual, but forced by the
habits of years to like the base and dishonourable from which I
formerly revolted.' Little children have the seeds of all this within them;
men and women are born with the inspiration which starts these
mysterious and direful changes; the fatal decadence takes place in
countless lives.
[Footnote 2: George Eliot.]
Before facts so horrifying--they are within as well as everywhere
around us--our real need is not an intellectual explanation of why they
are permitted or whence this taint in the race arose. For, supposing that
we were capable of understanding this, the probability is that we might
become tolerant of the facts themselves, and, perceiving that cruelty
and sin had a necessary place in the universe, lose the mind to fight
them. Constituted as are the most of mankind, for them to discover a
reason for a fact is, if not to conceive a respect for it, at least to feel a
plausible excuse for their sluggishness and timidity in dealing with it.
Nay, the very study of sin for the purpose of acquainting ourselves with
its nature, too often either intoxicates the will, or paralyses it with
despair; and it is in recoil from the whole subject that we most surely
recover health to fight evil in ourselves and nerve to work for the
deliverance from it of others. The practical solution of our problem is
to remember how much else there is in the Universe, how much else
that is utterly away from and opposed to sin. We must engross
ourselves in that, we must exult in that. We must remember goodness,
not only in the countless scattered instances about us, but in its infinite
resource in the Power and Character of God Himself. We must feel that
the Universe is pervaded by this: that it is the atmosphere of life, and
that the whole visible framework of the world offers signals and
sacraments of its real presence. We may not, we shall not, be able to
reconcile this goodness with the cruel facts about us; but at least we
shall have reduced these to a new proportion and perspective; we shall
have
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