Now the turning round of the modern mind from a conception of the universe as something derived deductively from the past to a conception of it as something gathering itself adventurously towards the future, involves a release from the supposed necessity to tell a story and explain why.  Instead comes the inquiry, “To what end?” We can say without mental discomfort, these disharmonies are here, this damnation is here—­inexplicably.  We can, without any distressful inquiry into ultimate origins, bring our minds to the conception of a spontaneous and developing God arising out of those stresses in our hearts and in the universe, and arising to overcome them.  Salvation for the individual 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.

Something of that idea of damnation as a lack of the will for salvation has crept at a number of points into contemporary religious thought.  It was the fine fancy of Swedenborg that the damned go to their own hells of their own accord.  It underlies a queer poem, “Simpson,” by that interesting essayist upon modern Christianity, Mr. Clutton Brock, which I have recently read.  Simpson dies and goes to hell—­it is rather like the Cromwell Road—­and approves of it very highly, and then and then only is he completely damned.  Not to realise that one can be damned is certainly to be damned; such is Mr. Brock’s idea.  It is his definition of damnation.  Satisfaction with existing things is damnation.  It is surrender to limitation; it is acquiescence in “disharmony”; it is making peace with that enemy against whom God fights for ever.

(But whether there are indeed Simpsons who acquiesce always and for ever remains for me, as I have already confessed in the previous chapter, a quite open question.  My Arminian temperament turns me from the Calvinistic conclusion of Mr. Brock’s satire.)

3.  Sin is not damnation

Now the question of sin will hardly concern those damned and lost by nature, if such there be.  Sin is not the same thing as damnation, as we have just defined damnation.  Damnation is a state, but sin is an incident.  One is an essential and the other an incidental separation from God.  It is possible to sin without being damned; and to be damned is to be in a state when sin scarcely matters, like ink upon a blackamoor.  You cannot have questions of more or less among absolute things.

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.  At first it seems incredible that one should ever have any motive again that is not also God’s motive.  Then one finds oneself caught unawares by a base impulse.  We discover that discontinuousness of our apparently homogeneous selves,