<SPAN name="chap19"></SPAN>
<h3> XIX </h3>
<h3> SIN </h3>
<p>It is every one's duty to take himself seriously—that is the right
mean between taking oneself either solemnly or apologetically. There is
no merit in being apologetic about oneself. One has a right to be
there, wherever one is, a right to an opinion, a right to take some
kind of a hand in whatever is going on; natural tact is the only thing
which can tell us exactly how far those rights extend; but it is
inconvenient to be apologetic, because if one insists on explaining how
one comes to be there, or how one comes to have an opinion, other
people begin to think that one needs explanation and excuse; but it is
even worse to be solemn about oneself, because English people are very
critical in private, though they are tolerant in public, because they
dislike a scene, and have not got the art of administering the delicate
snub which indicates to a man that his self-confidence is exuberant
without humiliating him; when English people inflict a snub, they do it
violently and emphatically, like Dr. Johnson, and it generally means
that they are relieving themselves of accumulated disapproval. An
Englishman is apt to be deferential, and one of the worst temptations
of official life is the temptation to be solemn. There is an old story
about Scott and Wordsworth, when the latter stayed at Abbotsford;
Scott, during the whole visit, was full of little pleasant and
courteous allusions to Wordsworth's poems; and one of the guests
present records how at the end of the visit not a single word had ever
passed Wordsworth's lips which could have indicated that he knew his
host to have ever written a line of poetry or prose.</p>
<p>I was sitting the other day at a function next a man of some eminence,
and I was really amazed at the way in which he discoursed of himself
and his habits, his diet, his hours of work, and the blank indifference
with which he received similar confidences. He merely waited till the
speaker had finished, and then resumed his own story.</p>
<p>It is this sort of solemn egotism which makes us overvalue our
anxieties quite out of all proportion to their importance, because they
all appear to us as integral elements of a dignified drama in which we
enact the hero's part. We press far too heavily on the sense of
responsibility; and if we begin by telling boys, as is too often done
in sermons, that whatever they do or say is of far-reaching
consequence, that every lightest word may produce an effect, that any
carelessness of speech or example may have disastrous effects upon the
character of another, we are doing our best to encourage the
self-emphasis which is the very essence of priggishness.</p>
<p>There is a curious conflict going on at the present time in English
life between light-mindedness and solemnity; there is a great appetite
for living, a love of amusement, a tendency to subordinate the
interests of the future to the pleasure of the moment, and to think
that the one serious evil is boredom; that is a healthy manifestation
enough in its way, because it stands for interest and delight in life;
but there is another strain in our nature, that of a rather heavy
pietism, inherited from our Puritan ancestors. It must not be forgotten
that the Puritan got a good deal of interest out of his sense of sin;
as the old combative elements of feudal ages disappeared, the soldierly
blood retained the fighting instinct, and turned it into moral regions.
The sense of adventure is impelled to satiate itself, and the Pilgrim's
Progress is a clear enough proof that the old combativeness was all
there, revelling in danger, and exulting in the thought that the human
being was in the midst of foes. Sin represented itself to the Puritan
as a thing out of which he could get a good deal of fun; not the fun of
yielding to it, but the fun of whipping out his sword and getting in
some shrewd blows. When preachers nowadays lament that we have lost the
sense of sin, what they really mean is that we have lost our
combativeness: we no longer believe that we must treat our foes with
open and brutal violence, and we perceive that such conduct is only
pitting one sin against another. There is no warrant in the Gospel for
the combative idea of the Christian life; all such metaphors and
suggestions come from St. Paul and the Apocalypse. The fact is that the
world was not ready for the utter peaceableness of the Gospel, and it
had to be accommodated to the violence of the world.</p>
<p>Now again the Christian idea is coloured by scientific and medical
knowledge, and sin, instead of an enemy which we must fight, has become
a disease which we must try to cure.</p>
<p>Sins, the ordinary sins of ordinary life, are not as a rule instincts
which are evil in themselves, so much as instincts which are selfishly
pursued to the detriment of others; sin is in its essence the
selfishness which will not cooperate, and which secures advantages
unjustly, without any heed to the disadvantage of others. SYMPATHETIC
IMAGINATION is the real foe of sin, the power of putting oneself in the
place of another; and much of the sentiment which is so prevalent
nowadays is the evidence of the growth of sympathy.</p>
<p>The old theory of sin lands one in a horrible dilemma, because it
implies a treacherous enmity on the part of God, to create man weak and
unstable, and to pit his weakness against tyrannous desires; to allow
his will to do evil to be stronger than his power to do right, is a
satanical device. One must not sacrifice the truth to the desire for
simplicity and effective statement. The truth is intricate and obscure,
and to pretend that it is plain and obvious is mere hypocrisy. The
strength of Calvinism is its horrible resemblance to a natural
inference from the facts of life; but if any sort of Calvinism is true,
then it is a mere insult to the intelligence to say that God is loving
or just. The real basis for all deep-seated fear about life is the fear
that one will not be dealt with either lovingly or justly. But we have
to make a simple choice as to what we will believe, and the only hope
is to believe that immediate harshness and injustice is not ultimately
inconsistent with Love. No one who knows anything of the world and of
life can pretend to think or say that suffering always results from, or
is at all proportioned to, moral faults; and if we are tempted to
regard all our disasters as penal consequences, then we are tempted to
endure them with gloomy and morbid immobility.</p>
<p>It is far more wholesome and encouraging to look upon many disasters
that befall us as opportunities to show a little spirit, to evoke the
courage which does not come by indolent prosperity, to increase our
sympathy, to enlarge our experience, to make things clearer to us, to
develop our mind and heart, to free us from material temptations. Past
suffering is not always an evil, it is often an exciting reminiscence.
It is good to take life adventurously, like Odysseus of old. What would
one feel about Odysseus if, instead of contriving a way out of the
Cyclops' cave, he had set himself to consider of what forgotten sin his
danger was the consequence? Suffering and disaster come to us to
develop our inventiveness and our courage, not to daunt and dismay us;
and we ought therefore to approach experience with a sense of humour,
if possible, and with a lively curiosity. I recollect hearing a man the
other day describing an operation to which he had been subjected. "My
word," he said, his eyes sparkling with delight at the recollection,
"that was awful, when I came into the operating-room, and saw the
surgeons in their togs, and the pails and basins all about, and was
invited to step up to the table!" There is nothing so agreeable as the
remembrance of fears through which we have passed; and we can only
learn to despise them by finding out how unbalanced they were.</p>
<p>I do not mean that fears can ever be pleasant at the time, but we do
them too much honour if we court them and defer to them. However much
we may be tortured by them, there is always something at the back of
our mind which despises our own susceptibility to them; and it is that
deeper instinct which we ought to trust.</p>
<p>But we cannot even begin to trust it, as long as we allow ourselves to
believe pietistically that the Mind of God is set on punishment. That
is the ghastly error which humanity tends to make. It has been dinned
into us, alas, from our early years, and religious phraseology is
constantly polluted by it. Our Saviour lent no countenance to this at
all; He spoke perfectly plainly against the theory of "judgments." Of
course suffering is sometimes a consequence of sin, but it is not a
vindictive punishment; it is that we may learn our mistake. But we must
give up the revengeful idea of God: that is imported into our scale of
values by the grossest anthropomorphism. Only the weak man, who fears
that his safety will be menaced if he does not make an example, deals
in revenge. He is indignant at anything which mortifies his vanity,
which implies any doubt of his power or any disregard of his wishes.
Revenge is born of terror, and to think of God as vindictive is to
think of Him as subject to fear. Serene and unquestioned strength can
have nothing to do with fear. Milton is largely responsible for
perpetuating this belief. He makes the Almighty say to the Son—</p>
<p class="poem">
"Let us advise, and to this hazard draw<br/>
With speed what force is left, and all employ<br/>
In our defence, lest unawares we lose<br/>
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill."<br/></p>
<br/>
<p>Milton's idea of the Almighty was frankly that of a Power who had
undertaken more than he could manage, and who had allowed things to go
too far. But it is a puerile conception of God; and to allow ourselves
to think or speak of God as a Power that has to take precautions, or
that has anything to fear from the exercise of human volition, is to
cloud the whole horizon at once.</p>
<p>But we ought rather to think of God as a Power which for some reason
works through imperfection. The battle of the world is that of force
against inertness: and our fears are the shadow of that combat.</p>
<p>Fear should then rather show us that we are being confronted with
experience; and that our duty is to disregard it, to march forward
through it, to come out on the other side of it. It is all an
adventure, in fact! The disaster in which we are involved is not sent
to show us that the Eternal Power which created us is vexed at our
failures, or bent on crushing us. It is exactly the opposite; it is to
show us that we are worth testing, worth developing, and that we are to
have the glory of going on; the very fear of death is the last test of
our belief in Love. We are assuredly meant to believe that the coward
is to learn the beauty of courage, that the laggard is to perceive the
worth of energy, that the selfish man is to be taught sympathy. If we
must take a metaphor, let us rather think of God as the graver of the
gem than as the child that beats her doll for collapsing instead of
sitting upright.</p>
<p>It is our dishonouring thought of God as jealous, suspicious, fond of
exhibiting power, revengeful, cruel, that does us harm. We must rather
think of His Heart as full of courage, energy, and hope; as teeming
with joy, lightness, zest, mirth; and then we can begin to think of
failures, fears, delays as things small and unimportant, not as
malicious ambushes, but as rough bits of road, as obstacles to reveal
and to develop our strength and gaiety. There is no joy in the world so
great as the joy of finding ourselves stronger than we know; and that
is what God is bent upon showing us, and not upon proving to us that we
are vile and base, in the spirit of the old Calvinist who said to his
own daughter when she was dying of a painful disease, that she must
remember that all short of Hell was mercy. It is so; but Hell is rather
what we start from, and out of which we have to find our way, than the
waste-paper basket of life, the last receptacle for our shattered
purposes.</p>
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