nly say
what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the
Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a
serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace)
"to be continued in our next." Also, with a noble vulgarity,
life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment.
For death is distinctly an exciting moment.

But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it
so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will.
You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story
how you like. When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus
there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover.
But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to
Juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined. And Christendom has
excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted
on the theological free-will. It is a large matter and too much
to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this
is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating
crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment
like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods.
The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active
choice whereas disease is not. If you say that you are going to cure
a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is,
"Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want
to be profligates." A man may lie still and be cured of a malady.
But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin;
on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently.
The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word
which we use for a man in hospital; "patient" is in the passive mood;
"sinner" is in the active. If a man is to be saved from influenza,
he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from forging,
he must be not a patient but an IMPATIENT. He must be personally
impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the active
not the passive will.

Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion. In so far
as we desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions
which have distinguished European civilization, we shall not discourage
the thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it.
If we want, like the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right
things are, of c