ose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose
parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of
which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total
worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus
side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other
hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached
by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life.
Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there
lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death if
not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can never be the
thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our real good,
rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the
direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the
spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the
other.

In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the
two types are violently contrasted; though here as in most other
current classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal
abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are
intermediate varieties and mixtures. Practically, however, you all
recognize the difference: you understand, for example, the disdain of
the methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist;
and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to
him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he
calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural
appearances the essence of God's truth.[86]

[86] E.g., "Our young people are diseased with the theological problems
of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These
never presented a practical difficulty to any man--never darkened
across any man's road, who did not go out of his way to seek them.
These are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs, etc.
Emerson: Spiritual Laws.

The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be a
certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the
subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.

"Homo duplex, homo duplex!" writes Alphonse Daudet. "The first time
that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri,
when my father cried out so dramatically, 'He is de