"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 mentalconsistencyaltogether 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 destructivedisposition 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 incessantanxiety 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, franklypenitent, 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.

There is no sin, no state that, being regretted and repented of, can
stand between God and man.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
THE IDEA OF A CHURCH

1. THE WORLD DAWN
As yet those who may be counted as belonging definitely to the new

religion are few and scattered and unconfessed, their realisations
are still uncertain and incomplete. But that is no augury for the

continuance of this state of affairs even for the next few decades.
There are many signs that the revival is coming very swiftly, it may

be coming as swiftly as the morning comes after a tropical night.
It may seem at present as though nothing very much were happening,

except for the fact that the old familiar constellations of theology
have become a little pallid and lost something of their multitude of

points. But nothing fades of itself. The deep stillness of the
late night is broken by a stirring, and the morning star of

creedless faith, the last and brightest of the stars, the star that
owes its light to the coming sun is in the sky.

There is a stirring and a movement. There is a stir, like the stir
before a breeze. Men are beginning to speak of religion without the

bluster of the Christian formulae; they have begun to speak of God
without any reference to Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence.

The Deists and Theists of an older generation, be it noted, never
did that. Their "Supreme Being" repudiated nothing. He was merely

the whittled stump of the Trinity. It is in the last few decades
that the western mind has slipped loose from this absolutist

conception of God that has dominated the intelligence of Christendom
at least, for many centuries. Almost unconsciously the new thought

is taking a course that will lead it far away from the moorings of
Omnipotence. It is like a ship that has slipped its anchors and

drifts, still sleeping, under the pale and vanishing stars, out to
the open sea. . . .

2. CONVERGENT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS
In quite a little while the whole world may be alive with this

renascent faith.
For emancipation from the Trinitarian formularies and from a belief

in an infinite God means not merely a great revivification of minds
trained under the decadence of orthodox Christianity, minds which

have hitherto been hopelessly embarrassed by the choice between
pseudo-Christian religion or denial, but also it opens the way

towards the completest understanding and sympathy and participation
with the kindredmovements for release and for an intensification of

the religious life, that are going on outside the sphere of the
Christian tradition and influence altogether. Allusion has already

been made to the sympathetic devotional poetry of Rabindranath
Tagore; he stands for a movement in Brahminism parallel with and

assimilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.
It is too often supposed that the religious tendency of the East is

entirely towards other-worldness, to a treatment of this life as an
evil entanglement and of death as a release and a blessing. It is