actise the impartiality with which Montaigne's singular devotee lighted
one candle {152} to St. George and another to the dragon. If we would
realise the type of perfect in the mind, we must not gratify "the
penchant for revolt," but exert ourselves to lay--

The ghost of the brute that is walking and haunting us yet and be free;

we must

Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.

Granted that the lower impulses, the inheritance from our animal
ancestry, are left in us by Divine decree, they are there, not to be
indulged on the plea that to repent would be tantamount to "insulting God
who made us," but to be conquered by the exercise of that freedom which
is the earnest of our call to claim our birthright as children of God.

But when we are further told that, as well as repent of our actions, we
might repent of the tiger and the snake, we are immediately conscious of
a double confusion of thought behind that statement; for in the first
place, we are not even called upon to repent of _each other's_ failings
but only of our own, and in the second there is no analogy between
ourselves and the tiger and snake, creatures which act according to their
animal natures, and are incapable of desiring to be other than they are.
Our capacity of, and desire for, better things attest our possession of a
measure of liberty, and {153} indicate at once our responsibility for the
course we take, and the essential distinction between the animal creation
and ourselves--a distinction wittily expressed in the remark that
"everybody would admit that very few men are really manly; but nobody
would contend that very few whales were really whaley."

But those who seek to spare us the discomfort of repentance by teaching
us to declare with a new inflection, "It is He that hath made us, and not
we ourselves," forget that there is another side to this argument. It
is, of course, very alluring to be told that we are not really
blameworthy for acts which hitherto we have blamed ourselves for--that
our impulses are God-given--that "the sinner is merely a learner in a
lower grade in the school," [8] and so forth; one can understand how
grateful is such a morphia injection for deadening the pangs of an
accusing conscience. The art of making excuses, as old as the Garden of
Eden, will never lack ardent professors or eager disciples. Says Cassius
to