^ It is related that in certain parts in South America it used to be the practice to drug with opium the coolies brought to work there, in order to make them oblivious to their wretched surround- ings, and their arduous tasks. It is possible with the opiates of sin, of small sins as we call them if you will, gradually to dose our souls into a state of callous indifference to great moral and spiritual issues, so that it becomes possible to stand upon the very brink of ruin and not to realize it. What once would have appalled and shocked with a great horror is looked upon with indifference, or perhaps practised with complacency.^
^ Meissonier, the great artist, had a very delicate hand, and he used to take great care of it, so much so that he had it shampooed every morning, and in driving always wore thick gloves. He was always watchful that he should not impair this marvellous suppleness and dexterity. Well, if a man thinks it necessary to take all that care of his hand that it may retain its sensitiveness and masterliness, how careful you ought to be of that diviner faculty inside by which you discriminate in the great questions of character and conduct. In short, no man commits a sin but the conscience that records it is injured, it has lost some of its discriminateness, some of its sensibility, some of its force. A man never sins but he has injured his will.^
3. To turn our back on wisdom is to love death. Sin is not only foolishness : it is suicide, self-inflicted wrong, killing the man in us, pouring out the very blood of our life. To have lived and with all our getting to have missed wisdom, to have missed the blessedness of accord with God's holy law, is failure. And in all the world's sore tragedy there is no failure so tragic as this. As the years pass by us, and the shadows gather round us, we look back, and the keenest sting is the thought of what we have missed by the way, what we might have been and done and received, and 1 R. Mackintosh. a W. L. Watkinson.
2^4 WRONGING THE SOUL
failed to be or do or get. Wheu we have given way to passion or evil desire, when we have sinned against conscience or heart, when we have slid down to lower levels of thought and life, how we have wronged ourselves ! No enemy hath done this, but we ourselves. Fools ! we have been our own worst enemy. " So foolish was I, I was as a beast before thee." Folly ! It is madness. " He that misseth me " (wisdom, the eternal law of all living) "wrongeth his own soul. All that hate me love death."
^ Charlotte Bronte writes thus to her literary friend and adviser Mr. W. S. Williams, a few days after the death of her brother Branwell, who passed away at the gloomy Haworth Parsonage, in September, 1848, a dissolute wreck — the victim, at the age of 31, of opium, strong drink, and debauchery : " ' We have buried our dead out of our sight.' A lull begins to succeed the gloomy tumult of last week. It is not permitted us to grieve for him who is gone as others grieve for those they lose. The removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather in the light of a mercy than a chastisement. Branwell was his father's and his sisters' pride and hope in boyhood, but since manhood the case has been otherwise. It has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent ; to hope, expect, wait his return to the right path ; to know the sickness of hope deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled ; to experience despair at last and now to behold the sudden early obscure close of what might have been a noble career. I do not weep from a sense of bereavement — there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost — but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior. I had aspirations and ambitions for him once, long ago — they have perished mournfully. Nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings. There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death, such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe." ^
^ Professor Turner tells us in his most interesting book on astronomy that the astronomer uses mechanism of unspeakable delicacy. One day they allowed a visitor to come into the room ; and the visitor gently touched one of the instruments with his finger. That was enough. It took months of painstaking and expensive work to correct that machine and make it once more
' C. K. Shorter, The BroiUia ■ Life and Letters, i. 4£ia
PROVERBS viiL 36 565
register the signs of the sky. And I tell you that as one touch would destroy that astronomical mechanism, so an act, a thought, a word, a fancy may destroy the delicacy of the human soul, and put us out of fellowship with the sky above our head. He that sinneth against Me does injustice to his own personality, maims his own splendid faculties. That is the thing to look at — suicide, self-destruction, suicide of the soul.^