Page:Society the Redeemed Form of Man.djvu/90

74 it ever had been to the Jew, namely, to serve as a ministry of plain moral life or actual righteousness among men, so constructing an everlasting heaven out of men s warring and divided personalities : and not at all, as the apostles taught, a ministry of death, to convince those who stood approved by it of SIN, thereby shutting up all men, good and evil alike, but especially the good, to unlimited dependence upon the sheer and mere mercy of God.

It was impossible for me, after what I have told you, to hold this audacious faith in selfhood any longer. When I sat down to dinner on that memorable chilly afternoon in Windsor, I held it serene and unweakened by the faintest breath of doubt. Before I rose from table it had inwardly shrivelled to a cinder. One moment I devoutly thanked God for the inappreciable boon of selfhood; the next that inappreciable boon seemed to me the one thing damnable on earth, seemed a literal nest of hell within my own entrails. Whatever difficulties then stood in the way of a better faith, they were infinitely milder and more placable than those inherent in the old one. In fact the old faith was itself the only obstacle in the path of the new. Take the one away, and the other becomes inevitable. If you admit the intrinsic or essential phenomenality of selfhood—its utter unreality or non-existence out of consciousness—you are logi-