There is something tragic to me in this Siamese-twins arrangement of two so uncongenial. I am at one and the same time pupil and teacher, offender and judge, performer and critic, chaperone and protégée, a prim, precise, old maid and a rollicking schoolgirl, a tomboy and a prude, a saint and sinner. What can result from such a combination? That we get on tolerably is a wonder. Some days, however, we get on admirably together, part of me paying compliments to the other part of me--whole days being given to this--until each of us has such a good opinion of herself and the other that we feel on equal terms and are at our happiest.
But how dreadful are the days when we turn against each other! There are not words enough to express the contempt which we feel for ourselves. We seem to set each other in the corner and the combination as a whole is utterly miserable.
I can but wonder and enjoy and wait to see what Myself and I will make of Me.
5. The Divided Self and Moral Consciousness[73]
Two ways of looking at life are characteristic respectively of what we call the healthy-minded, who need to be born only once, and of the sick souls, who must be twice-born in order to be happy. The result is two different conceptions of the universe of our experience. In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilineal or one-storied affair, whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient; there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death, if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.