destroy the Christian soul;
and regarded them with justice as an opportunity of testing our
spiritual strength. It is true that every man has within him such a
tempting spirit; but its characters can better be studied in the
Zoological Gardens than in the convolutions of a theological hell.
"External Reason," says Boehme, "supposes that hell is far from us. But
it is near us. Every one carries it in himself."[66] Many of our vices,
in fact, are simply savage qualities--and some are even savage
virtues--in their old age. Thus in an organized society the
acquisitiveness and self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive
dependent on his own powers survive as the sins of envy and
covetousness, and are seen operating in the dishonesty of the burglar,
the greed and egotism of the profiteer: and, on the highest levels, the
great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to a perverted
expression of that self-regarding instinct without which the individual
could hardly survive.

When therefore qualities which were once useful on their own level are
outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life's
spiritualization, then--whatever they may be--they belong to the body of
death, not to the body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump--none
other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing."[67]
Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as
religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich
declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul.
Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse
satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us. The
violent-tempered man becomes once more a primitive, when he yields to
wrath. A starved and repressed side of his nature--the old Adam, in
fact--leaps up into consciousness and glories in its strength. He
obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with
the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality
keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural
instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures
came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena.[68] St.
Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a
spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up.[69] Games and sport
of a combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a
certain amount of this unused f