r no hope of finding the way, although one knows that if the
way could be found it would bring one into touch with a new type of
human companionship. We all know how the sense of guilt may take the
form of a feeling of overwhelming loneliness. Now the sense of guilt,
if deep and pervasive and passionate, involves at least a dim
recognition that there is some central aim of life and that one has
come hopelessly short of that aim. I may regret a blunder, and yet
have no hint that there is any unified and supreme ideal of life. For
a blunder is a special affair involving the missing of some particular
aim. I may even bitterly repent a fault, and still think of that fault
as a refusal to pursue some one separate moral purpose--a violation of
this or of that maxim of conduct. But the true sense of guilt in its
greater manifestation involves a confession that the {67} whole self
is somehow tainted, the whole life, for the time being, wrecked. But
the bankruptcy of the self implies that there is one highest purpose
which gives the self its value; the sense of total failure is itself a
revelation of the value of what was lost. Hence the highly idealising
tendency of the great experiences of moral suffering. They lead us to
think not of this or of that special good, but of salvation and
perdition in their general bearing upon life. The depth of the despair
shows the grandeur of what has been missed; and it is therefore not
surprising that experiences of this sort have been, for so many, the
beginnings of religious insight. To believe that one is cut off from
salvation may be the very crisis that in the end saves.

Now some of those who feel this overmastering might of their guilt lay
most stress upon their assurance that God has condemned them. And
religious tradition has of course emphasised this way of stating the
case. But it is perfectly natural, and is surely a humane experience,
to feel the sense of guilt primarily in the form of a belief that one
is an outcast from human sympathy and is hopelessly alone. The more
abnormal types of the sense of guilt, in nervous patients, frequently
exemplify this terror of the lonely soul, this inner grief over the
homelessness of the remorseful outcast. But actual guilt may be
present with or without the more abnormal nervous conditions just
mentioned, and, when present, may bring home to the rueful mind {68}
the despair of the awakened but forsaken sinner, and may bring it in
the form o