Th^ Metaphysics of a Naturalist 
79 
ating because in the highest sphere. We could and did endure the 
pain we could not avoid, we expect to improve on the failure; 
but ^^who shall deliver us from the body of this death’’ in our 
inner heart chamber, with which we must live sleeping and wak- 
ing? 
I, the soul of honor, brave and true, my life-long hero uncon- 
fessed — I a poltroon — a cheat? No, a thousand times no; rather 
any pain, any failure than this. Even the outer simulacrum of 
this heroic ego, the man we hope others think us to be, is worth 
dying to preserve. 
No wonder that any charlatan can gain followers if he can but 
persuade them that he can deliver them from sin! 
Sin, the supreme failure, the extreme of pain, the crime of the 
traitorous self — can this also be a concomitant of good? Cer- 
tainly it must be so, for no single human being has been without 
it. 
So long as the disparity between the ideal self and the self of our 
present volition causes pain there is spiritual life. Happy sufferer, 
blessed torment, which stirs the blood of our soul to fresh endea- 
vor! Sin-sorrows are the growing pains of the soul. 
Evidently, then, no act can be a sin, though it may be a sin- 
ful act. Criminality may attach to an act the commission of 
which is not a sin. 
To the objection that we have defined evil by denying it, the 
reply is that evil is truly evil to the sufferer, sin is truly sin to the 
sinner; but in the higher view, both are seen necessarily to belong 
to a general scheme the ends of which are good. 
Perhaps the most fateful question remains to be asked. If we 
are all sinners, what are we to do about it? Must we continue to 
bear the burden of conscious sinfulness, or is there a way to be 
freed from it? We long with unspeakable desire to be free from 
three things: (1) our sins, (2) the sense of guilt, (3) the conse- 
quences. Almost all of religion is the outgrowth of this fervent 
desire. Who shall deliver us from the body of this death? 
But stay: (1) all men are sinners and all men will continue to 
be sinners; (2) all moral beings conscious of falling below their 
ideal of self-perfection will feel a sense of degradation (should 
they feel otherwise it would mean that moral growth had ceased) ; 
(3) the consequences of this failure, primarily, in so far as they 
are realized, are powerful motives toward a more strenuous 
