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 battle-ground for what he
feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other
ideal. As Victor Hugo makes his Mahomet say:--
"Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats:
Tantot l'homme d'en haut, et tantot l'homme d'en bas;
Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne,
Comme dans le desert 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 restless search for truth and
purity of life; and finally how, distracted by the struggle
between the two souls in his breast and ashamed of his own
weakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of
had thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated
themselves to chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice in
the garden say, "Sume, lege" (take and read), and opening the
Bible at random, saw the text, "not in chambering and
wantonness," etc.
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