s and as the
author of various books of fiction, as a frequent NAME, that is, to any
one much forced back upon reading, the writer is particularly accessible
to this type of correspondent. The letters come, some manifesting
a hopeless disorder that permits of no reply, but some being the
expression of minds overlaid not at all offensively by a web of fantasy,
and some (and these are the more touching ones and the ones that most
concern us now) as sanely conceived and expressed as any letters could
be. They are written by people living lives very like the lives of us
who are called "sane," except that they lift to a higher excitement and
fall to a lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or
melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take
abnormal forms. They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the safer
ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of drugs, or in
dreams and rare moments of controllable extravagance. Then the insane
become "glorious," or they become murderous, or they become suicidal.
All these letter-writers in confinement have convinced their
fellow-creatures by some extravagance that they are a danger to
themselves or others.

The letters that come from such types written during their sane
intervals, are entirely sane. Some, who are probably unaware--I think
they should know--of the offences or possibilities that justify their
incarceration, write with a certain resentment at their position; others
are entirely acquiescent, but one or two complain of the neglect of
friends and relations. But all are as manifestly capable of religion and
of the religious life as any other intelligent persons during the
lucid interludes that make up nine-tenths perhaps of their lives. . . .
Suppose now one of these cases, and suppose that the infirmity takes
the form of some cruel, disgusting, or destructive disposition that may
become at times overwhelming, and you have our universal trouble with
sinful tendency, as it were magnified for examination. It is clear that
the mania which defines his position must be the primary if not the
cardinal business in the life of a lunatic, but his problem with that
is different not in kind but merely in degree from the problem of
lusts, vanities, and weaknesses in what we call normal lives. It is an
unconquered tract, a great rebel province in his being, which refuses to
serve God and tries to prevent him serving God, and succeeds