Yet even now, as I steal gloatingly through the dark chambers of that House of Shame which was once the fair temple of the living God, even now there still smoulders under the ashes of a fouled hearthstone some spark of the fire which was kindled of God, a fire which I strive in vain to trample out, since, because it is of God, it is inextinguishable and eternal.
If therefore when I seem most to have conquered, there never yet was God wholly defeated--of what use is it further to wage the unequal conflict? For God never entirely lets go His hold on a human soul; and that to which God holds fast, Satan shall never finally wrest from Him. Say the world, think the world, what it will, in the warfare for souls God wins, and has won all along the line.
It was, as I say, Wilde who was in my mind when I penned that passage commencing “Yonder man into whose great brain I entered, working strange madness within.” To me he seems to have been less hopelessly bad than partly mad.
We are told that it is possible, by locating and destroying certain cells or nerve-centres in the brain, so to affect the mind of the subject as to destroy his sense of colour, his sense of touch, or even, it is believed, to destroy his sense of right and wrong.
Wilde died of meningitis, which is a brain affection, and I think that the fact should be considered retrospectively. A post-mortem examination would possibly have revealed some disease or degeneration of certain brain-cells which may account for much that is painful in his career and character. This degeneration of brain-cells may have been inherited and congenital, in which case, condemnation on our part is silenced; or it may have been due to excesses of his own choosing and committing. Even if this be so, the price he paid was surely so terrible, and so tragic, as in a sense to be accounted an atonement, and even to entitle him to our pity. In the passage quoted from my dream-parable, I have hinted at some form of demoniacal possession which may or may not be a positive, as opposed to a negative form of madness. There is a brain derangement by which the power to reason aright and to co-ordinate ideas is lost; a brain derangement which results mainly in vacancy of mind. But there is yet another and more terrible form of derangement in which, so it seems to me, that unseen evil powers, outside himself, seize upon and possess the brain chambers, thus vacated, and direct and rule the unhappy victim, not according to his own will, which indeed has passed out of his control, but according to the wish or will of the power by which he is possessed.