ad no
'present,' and the 'little while' grew long.... For I was afraid thou
wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once of my disease of lust,
which I wished to satiate rather than to see extinguished. With what
lashes of words did I not scourge my own soul. Yet it shrank back; it
refused, though it had no excuse to offer.... I said within myself:
'Come, let it be done now,' and as I said it, I was on the point of the
resolve. I all but did it, yet I did not do it. And I made another
effort, and almost succeeded, yet I did not reach it, and did not grasp
it, hesitating to die to death, and live to life, and the evil to which
I was so wonted held me more than the better life I had not tried."[92]

[92] Confessions, Book VIII., Chaps. v., vii., xi., abridged.

There could be no more perfect description of the divided will, when
the higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of
explosive intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the
psychologists), that enables them to burst their shell, and make
irruption efficaciously into life and quell the lower tendencies
forever. In a later lecture we shall have much to say about this
higher excitability.

I find another good description of the divided will in the
autobiography of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist, of whose
melancholy I read a brief account in my last lecture. The poor youth's
sins were, as you will see, of the most harmless order, yet they
interfered with what proved to be his truest vocation, so they gave him
great distress.

"I was now very moral in my life, but found no rest of conscience. I
now began to be esteemed in young company, who knew nothing of my mind
all this while, and their esteem began to be a snare to my soul, for I
soon began to be fond of carnal mirth, though I still flattered myself
that if I did not get drunk, nor curse, nor swear, there would be no
sin in frolicking and carnal mirth, and I thought God would indulge
young people with some (what I called simple or civil) recreation. I
still kept a round of duties, and would not suffer myself to run into
any open vices, and so got along very well in time of health and
prosperity, but when I was distressed or threatened by sickness, death,
or heavy storms of thunder, my religion would not do, and I found there
was something wanting, and would begin to repent my going so much to
frolics, but when the distress was over, the devil and my own wicked