Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle. If the individual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of one’s being and appointer of one’s spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and “conviction of sin” that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant Christianity. The man’s interior is a battleground for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor Hugo makes his Muhammad say:—
“Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats: Tantôt l’homme d’en haut, et tantôt l’homme d’en bas; Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne, Comme dans le désert le sable et la citerne.”
Wrong living, impotent aspirations; “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I,” as Saint Paul says; self-loathing, self-despair; an unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the heir.
Let me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with melancholy in the form of self-condemnation and sense of sin. Saint Augustine’s case is a classic example. You all remember his half-pagan, half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his