l, of what theology calls free-will. You cannot finish
a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like. When
somebody discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one
Differential Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare killed
Romeo he might have married him to Juliet's old nurse if he had felt
inclined. And Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly
because it has insisted on the theological free-will. It is a large
matter and too much to one side of the road to be discussed adequately
here; but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk
about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic
environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods.
The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active
choice, whereas disease is not. If you say that you are going to cure a
profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is,
"Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want to be
Profligates." A man may lie still and be cured of a malady. But he must
not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the contrary, he must
get up and jump about violently. The whole point indeed is perfectly
expressed in the very word which we use for a man in hospital; "patient"
is in the passive mood; "sinner" is in the active. If a man is to be
saved from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from
forging, he must be not a patient but an _impatient_. He must be
personally impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the
active not the passive will.

Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion. In so far as we
desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions which
have distinguished European civilisation, we shall not discourage the
thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it. If we want, like
the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right things are, of
course we shall only say that they must go right. But if we particularly
want to _make_ them go right, we must insist that they may go wrong.

Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common modern
attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ. The
thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end. But if
the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good
man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already;