m if when we were told that we had a smooch on
our left cheek, we were to insist vehemently upon the cleanliness of
our right cheek, or our forehead, or our hands, instead of being
grateful that our attention should be called to the smooch and taking
soap and water and at once washing it off. Or how equally absurd it
would be if we went into long explanations as to how the smooch would
not have been there if it had not been for so and so, and so and so, or
so and so,--and then with all our excuses and explanations and
protestations, we let the smooch stay--and never really wash it off.

And yet this is not an exaggeration of what most of us do when our
attention is called to defects of character. When we excuse and explain
and tell how clean the other side of our face is, we are putting
ourselves positively on the side of the smooch. So we are putting
ourselves entirely on the side of the illness or the pain or the
oppression of difficult circumstances when we give excuses or resist or
pretend not to see fault in ourselves, or when we confess faults and
are contented about them, or when we give all our attention to what is
disagreeable and no attention to the normal way of gaining our health
or our freedom.

Then all these expressions of self or of illness are to us positive,
and our efforts against them only negative. In such cases, of course,
the self possesses us as surely as the grip possesses us when we
succumb entirely to all its horrors and make no positive effort to
yield out of it. And the possession of the self is much worse, much
deeper, much more subtle. When possessed with selfishness, we are
laying up in our subconsciousness any number of self-seeking motives
which come to the surface disguised and compel us to make impulsive and
often foolish efforts to gain our own ends. The self is every day
proving to be the enemy of the man or woman whom it possesses.

God leaves us free to obey Him or to choose our own selfish way, and in
His infinite Providence He is constantly showing us that our own
selfish way leads to death and obedience to Him leads to life. That is,
that only in obedience to Him do we find our real freedom. He is
constantly showering us with a tender generosity and kindness that
seems inconceivable, and sometimes it seems as if more often than not
we were refusing to see. Indeed we blind ourselves by making all pains
of body and faults of soul positive and our efforts against them
negative.