The White People | Page 2

late. The man who had brought Cotgrave had
probably heard all this before, since he assisted with a bland and
judicious smile, but Cotgrave began to think that his "lunatic" was
turning into a sage.
"Do you know," he said, "you interest me immensely? You think, then,
that we do not understand the real nature of evil?"
"No, I don't think we do. We over-estimate it and we under-estimate it.
We take the very numerous infractions of our social 'bye-laws'--the
very necessary and very proper regulations which keep the human
company together--and we get frightened at the prevalence of 'sin' and
'evil.' But this is really nonsense. Take theft, for example. Have you any
horror at the thought of Robin Hood, of the Highland caterans of the
seventeenth century, of the moss-troopers, of the company promoters of
our day?
"Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an
enormous importance to the 'sin' of meddling with our pockets (and our
wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin."
"And what is sin?" said Cotgrave.

"I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your
feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and
to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed
with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a
weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road
began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you
noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?
"Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is."
"Look here," said the third man, hitherto placid, "you two seem pretty
well wound up. But I'm going home. I've missed my tram, and I shall
have to walk."
Ambrose and Cotgrave seemed to settle down more profoundly when
the other had gone out into the early misty morning and the pale light
of the lamps.
"You astonish me," said Cotgrave. "I had never thought of that. If that
is really so, one must turn everything upside down. Then the essence of
sin really is----"
"In the taking of heaven by storm, it seems to me," said Ambrose. "It
appears to me that it is simply an attempt to penetrate into another and
higher sphere in a forbidden manner. You can understand why it is so
rare. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres,
higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are
amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints,
and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still, and men of genius, who
partake sometimes of each character, are rare also. Yes; on the whole, it
is, perhaps, harder to be a great sinner than a great saint."
"There is something profoundly unnatural about Sin? Is that what you
mean?"
"Exactly. Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but
holiness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover
the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the

ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels and in making
this effort man becomes a demon. I told you that the mere murderer is
not therefore a sinner; that is true, but the sinner is sometimes a
murderer. Gilles de Raiz is an instance. So you see that while the good
and the evil are unnatural to man as he now is--to man the social,
civilized being--evil is unnatural in a much deeper sense than good.
The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries
to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall."
"But are you a Catholic?" said Cotgrave.
"Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church."
"Then, how about those texts which seem to reckon as sin that which
you would set down as a mere trivial dereliction?"
"Yes; but in one place the word 'sorcerers' comes in the same sentence,
doesn't it? That seems to me to give the key-note. Consider: can you
imagine for a moment that a false statement which saves an innocent
man's life is a sin? No; very good, then, it is not the mere liar who is
excluded by those words; it is, above all, the 'sorcerers' who use the
material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as
instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you
this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with
materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness
if we encountered