, from quite a number of things. You are
saved "from the purposelessness of life" (p. 18). God's immortality
has "taken the sting from death" (p. 22). You have escaped "from the
painful accidents and chagrins of individuation" (p. 73). "Salvation
is to lose oneself" (p. 73); it is "a complete turning away from self"
(p. 84). "Damnation is really over-individuation, and salvation is
escape from self into the larger being of life" (p. 76). In another
place we are told that salvation is "escape from the individual
distress at disharmony and the individual defeat by death, into the
Kingdom of God, and damnation can be nothing more and nothing less
than the failure or inability or disinclination to make that escape"
(p. 148). On the next page we have another definition of damnation
(borrowed, it would seem, from Mr. Clutton Brock), with which I hasten
to express my cordial and enthusiastic agreement: "_Satisfaction with
existing things is damnation._" I have always thought that hell was
the headquarters of conservatism, and am delighted to find such
influential backing for that pious opinion.

As for sin, it seems to be a falling away from the state of grace
attained through conversion. You can and do sin while you are still
unconverted; for we are told that "repentance is the beginning and
essential of the religious life" (p. 165). Probably (though this is
not clear) your unregenerate condition is in itself sinful,
"individuation" being not very different from the Original Sin of the
theologians. But it is sin after regeneration that really matters.
"Salvation leaves us still disharmonious, and adds not one inch to our
spiritual and moral nature" (p. 146). "It is the amazing and
distressful discovery of every believer so soon as the first
exaltation of belief is past, that one does not remain always in touch
with God" (p. 149). One backslides. One reverts to one's unregenerate
type. The old Adam makes disquieting resurgences in the swept and
garnished mansion from which he seemed to have been for ever cast out.
"This is the personal problem of Sin. _Here prayer avails; here God
can help us_" (p. 150). And what is still more consoling, "though you
sin seventy times seven times, God will still forgive the poor rest of
you.... There is no sin, no state that, being regretted and repented
of, can stand between God and man" (p. 156).

We shall have to consider later what useful purpose (if any) is served
by this free-and-easy u