or my immediate contention. All invasive moral states
and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some
direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual
prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is
extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the
ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these
states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up
in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the
evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience of
his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic
opportunity and adventure.

The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious
attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human
nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact. we all do cultivate it
more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency
forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as
we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which
our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so
that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is
a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world
that really is.[43]

[43] "As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a
bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to
heredity, to sight, to hearing, the commonest things are a burthen. The
prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy and
orgiastic--or maenadic--foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit
reconciles me. R. L. Stevenson: Letters, ii. 355.

The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past
fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness
within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire
theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole
congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of
sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even
deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the
depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the
old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something
sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and
"muscular" attitude. which to our f