at times in
wresting his capital out of his control. But his relationship to that
is the same relationship as ours to the backward and insubordinate
parishes, criminal slums, and disorderly houses in our own private
texture.

It is clear that the believer who is a lunatic is, as it were, only the
better part of himself. He serves God with this unconquered disposition
in him, like a man who, whatever else he is and does, is obliged to be
the keeper of an untrustworthy and wicked animal. His beast gets loose.
His only resort is to warn those about him when he feels that jangling
or excitement of the nerves which precedes its escapes, to limit its
range, to place weapons beyond its reach. And there are plenty of human
beings very much in his case, whose beasts have never got loose or have
got caught back before their essential insanity was apparent. And there
are those uncertifiable lunatics we call men and women of "impulse"
and "strong passions." If perhaps they have more self-control than the
really mad, yet it happens oftener with them that the whole intelligent
being falls under the dominion of evil. The passion scarcely less than
the obsession may darken the whole moral sky. Repentance and atonement;
nothing less will avail them after the storm has passed, and the
sedulous preparation of defences and palliatives against the return of
the storm.

This discussion of the lunatic's case gives us indeed, usefully coarse
and large, the lines for the treatment of every human weakness by the
servants of God. A "weakness," just like the lunatic's mania, becomes a
particular charge under God, a special duty for the person it affects.
He has to minimise it, to isolate it, to keep it out of mischief. If he
can he must adopt preventive measures. . . .

These passions and weaknesses that get control of us hamper our
usefulness to God, they are an incessant anxiety and distress to us,
they wound our self-respect and make us incomprehensible to many who
would trust us, they discredit the faith we profess. If they break
through and break through again it is natural and proper that men and
women should cease to believe in our faith, cease to work with us or to
meet us frankly. . . . Our sins do everything evil to us and through us
except separate us from God.

Yet let there be no mistake about one thing. Here prayer is a power.
Here God can indeed work miracles. A man with the light of God in his
heart can defeat vicious habits,