ich makes life a hell.

To be led to believe that one is naturally depraved!--to be condemned as
the worst of sinners before one has committed even a single sin! Is that
not the height and depth of cruelty? Do you wonder if here and there one
of the stronger spirits among these condemned ones reacts in a fierce,
unconscious egotism and proclaims himself the true type of humanity, the
truly "civilized" man? How shall they see clearly whom we have clothed in
darkness, or judge truly who are so terribly alone?

To have a temperament is not in itself a sin! To find in your nature a
disharmony which you must transcend, a dislocation you have to restore
to order, is not a sin! Whose nature is all harmony? Whose temperament
guarantees him from temptation? Is there one here who is not conscious of
some dislocation in his life that he must combat? Not one!

It is a disharmony to have an active spirit in a sickly body. It is a
disharmony to have, like one of the very greatest of Christ's disciples, "a
thorn in the flesh to buffet him." Who shall deliver us from this body of
death? When you hear of a Beethoven deaf or of a Robert Louis Stevenson
spitting blood, are you not conscious of disharmony? Where there is perfect
harmony--_perfect_, I say--such a dislocation could not be. Epilepsy has
been called "la maladie des grands," because some great ones have suffered
from it. Perhaps St. Paul did. It is not possible to imagine Christ doing
so. In Him there existed so perfect a harmony of being that one can no more
associate Him with ill-health than with any other disorder or defect.
Yet we do not speak (or think) with horrified contempt of the disharmony
present in St. Paul or in Beethoven. Rather we reverence the glorious
conquest of the spirit over the weakness and limitations of the flesh. Some
of us have even rushed to the opposite extreme and preached ill-health as a
kind of sanctity, in our just admiration for those who have battled against
it and shown us the spirit dominant over the flesh.

But, it will be urged, ill-health is quite another kind of disharmony than
vice. We are not responsible for it, and cannot be blamed.

I am not prepared to admit that this is altogether true, but I will not
discuss it now. The point I want to make clear, if I make nothing else
clear, is that to be born with a certain temperament is not in itself a
sin nor does it compel you to be a sinner. "Your temperament decides your
trials; it does