with a certain poignancy of distress at that hour--a distress
which I always knew would vanish the moment I felt my feet on the
carpet. I used to take advantage of this to use my Manual at that hour,
because by that I secured a deeper intensity of repentance, and I have
often succeeded in inducing a kind of tearful condition by those means,
which I knew perfectly well to be artificial, but which yet seemed to
comply with the rules of the process.

The kind of repentance indicated in the book as appropriate was a deep
abasement, a horror and hatred of one's sinful propensities; and the
language used seems to me now not only hollow and meaningless, but to
insult the dignity of the soul, and to be indeed a profound confession
of a want of confidence in the methods and purposes of God. Surely the
right attitude is rather a manly, frank, and hopeful co-operation with
God, than a degraded kind of humiliation. One was invited to
contemplate God's detestation of sin, His awful and stainless holiness.
How unreal, how utterly false! It is no more reasonable than to
inculcate in human beings a sense of His hatred of weakness, of
imperfection, of disease, of suffering. One might as well say that
God's courage and beauty were so perfect that He had an impatient
loathing for anything timid or ugly. If one said that being perfect He
had an infinite pity for imperfection, that would be nearer the
truth--but, even so, how far away! To believe in His perfect love and
benevolence, one must also believe that all shortcomings, all
temptations, all sufferings, somehow emanate from Him; that they are
educative, and have an intense and beautiful significance--that is what
one struggles, how hardly, to believe! Those childish sins, they were
but the expression of the nature one received from His hand, that
wilful, pleasure-loving, timid, fitful nature, which yet always desired
the better part, if only it could compass it, choose it, love it. To
hate one's nature and temperament and disposition, how impossible,
unless one also hated the God who had bestowed them! And then, too, how
inextricably intertwined! The very part of one's soul that made one
peace-loving, affectionate, trustful was the very thing that led one
into temptation. The very humility and diffidence that made one hate to
seem or to be superior to others was the occasion of falling. The
religion recommended was a religion of scrupulous saints and
self-torturing ascetics; and the r