n
process could entirely transfer a man from the old into the new
relation. To break altogether, and at every point, with the old
environment, is a simple impossibility. So long as the regenerate man is
kept in this world, he must find the old environment at many points a
severe temptation. Power over very many of the commonest temptations is
only to be won by degrees, and however anxious one might be to apply the
summary method to every case, he soon finds it impossible in practice.
The difficulty in these cases arises from a peculiar feature of the
temptation. The difference between a sin of drunkenness, and, let us
say, a sin of temper, is that in the former case the victim who would
reform has mainly to deal with the environment, but in the latter with
the correspondence. The drunkard's temptation is a known and definite
quantity. His safety lies in avoiding some external and material
substance. Of course, at bottom, he is really dealing with the
correspondence every time he resists; he is distinctly controlling
appetite. Nevertheless it is less the appetite that absorbs his mind
than the environment. And so long as he can keep himself clear of the
"external relation," to use Mr. Herbert Spencer's phraseology, he has
much less difficulty with the "internal relation." The ill-tempered
person, on the other hand, can make very little of his environment.
However he may attempt to circumscribe it in certain directions, there
will always remain a wide and ever-changing area to stimulate his
irascibility. His environment, in short, is an inconstant quantity, and
his most elaborate calculations and precautions must often and suddenly
fail him.

What he has to deal with, then, mainly is the correspondence, the
temper itself. And that, he well knows, involves a long and humiliating
discipline. The case now is not at all a surgical but a medical one, and
the knife is here of no more use than in a fever. A specific irritant
has poisoned his veins. And the acrid humors that are breaking out all
over the surface of his life are only to be subdued by a gradual
sweetening of the inward spirit. It is now known that the human body
acts toward certain fever-germs as a sort of soil. The man whose blood
is pure has nothing to fear. So he whose spirit is purified and
sweetened becomes proof against these germs of sin. "Anger, wrath,
malice and railing" in such a soil can find no root.

The difference between this and the former method