rode,
Shattering all evil customs everywhere,
And past thro' Pagan realms, and made them mine,
And clash'd with Pagan hordes, and bore them down,
And broke thro' all, and in the strength of this
Come victor.

--_The Holy Grail._ Tennyson.

VI

_THE RE-AWAKENING_

As despondency and a feeling of failure comes to every soul with the
realization of its mistakes and sins, so there will some time come to
all a period of Re-awakening. This statement is the expression of a hope
which is cherished in the face of much opposing evidence. Nevertheless,
that this hope is cherished by so many persons of all classes is a
credit to humanity. It is difficult to believe that in the end an
infinitely wise and good God will fail of the achievement of His purpose
in regard to a single one of His creatures.

The saddest fact in the ascent of the soul is sin. However it may be
accounted for, it cannot be evaded, but must be honestly and resolutely
faced. Sin is the deliberate choice to return to animalism, for a
longer or shorter time, by a being who realizes that he is in a moral
order, that he is free, and who has heard the far-off call of a
spiritual destiny. It is the choice, by a spirit, of the condition from
which it ought to have forever escaped. Imperfection and ignorance are
not, in themselves, blameworthy and should never be classified as sins.
Weakness always palliates a wrong choice. An evil condition is a
misfortune; it does not justify condemnation. Sin always implies a
voluntary act. That all men have sinned is a contention not without
abundant justification. The better the man the more intensely he is
humiliated by the consciousness of moral failure.

After long-continued discipline, after much progress has been made, the
soul again and again chooses evil; and, after it ought to have moved far
on its upward career, it is found to be a bond-slave of tendencies
which should have been forever left behind. This is the solemn fact
which faces every student of human life. It is not a doctrine of an
effete theology but a continuous human experience. The consciousness of
moral failure is terrible and universal. This consciousness requires
neither definition nor illustration. Experience is a sufficient witness.
Who has been able exhaustively to delineate the soul's humiliation?
AEschylus and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe, Shelley, Tennyson, and
Browning have but skimmed the surface of the