r over a
year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions,
ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon
connects itself with the life of the subconscious self, so-called, of
which we must erelong speak more directly.

[90] Smith Baker, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September,
1893.

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 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