King of England; but why do you care?
Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look
down on all the kings of the earth." Or it might be the third case,
of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt,
we should say, "So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world:
but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit,
with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God;
and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love
more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful
pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be,
how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God
could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles,
and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well
as down!"

And it must be remembered that the most purely practical science
does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it
like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell. Neither modern
science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought.
Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous.
Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid. For example,
some religious societies discouraged men more or less from thinking
about sex. The new scientific society definitely discourages men from
thinking about death; it is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact.
And in dealing with those whose morbidity has a touch of mania,
modern science cares far less for pure logic than a dancing Dervish.
In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth;
he must desire health. Nothing can save him but a blind hunger
for normality, like that of a beast. A man cannot think himself
out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has
become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can
only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves,
it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his
logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner
Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs
the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.
Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever.
Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure.
Curing a madman is