The letters that come from such types written during their sane intervals, are entirely sane.  Some, who are probably unaware—­I think they should know—­of the offences or possibilities that justify their incarceration, write with a certain resentment at their position; others are entirely acquiescent, but one or two complain of the neglect of friends and relations.  But all are as manifestly capable of religion and of the religious life as any other intelligent persons during the lucid interludes that make up nine-tenths perhaps of their lives. . . .  Suppose now one of these cases, and suppose that the infirmity takes the form of some cruel, disgusting, or destructive disposition that may become at times overwhelming, and you have our universal trouble with sinful tendency, as it were magnified for examination.  It is clear that the mania which defines his position must be the primary if not the cardinal business in the life of a lunatic, but his problem with that is different not in kind but merely in degree from the problem of lusts, vanities, and weaknesses in what we call normal lives.  It is an unconquered tract, a great rebel province in his being, which refuses to serve God and tries to prevent him serving God, and succeeds at times in wresting his capital out of his control.  But his relationship to that is the same relationship as ours to the backward and insubordinate parishes, criminal slums, and disorderly houses in our own private texture.

It is clear that the believer who is a lunatic is, as it were, only the better part of himself.  He serves God with this unconquered disposition in him, like a man who, whatever else he is and does, is obliged to be the keeper of an untrustworthy and wicked animal.  His beast gets loose.  His only resort is to warn those about him when he feels that jangling or excitement of the nerves which precedes its escapes, to limit its range, to place weapons beyond its reach.  And there are plenty of human beings very much in his case, whose beasts have never got loose or have got caught back before their essential insanity was apparent.  And there are those uncertifiable lunatics we call men and women of “impulse” and “strong passions.”  If perhaps they have more self-control than the really mad, yet it happens oftener with them that the whole intelligent being falls under the dominion of evil.  The passion scarcely less than the obsession may darken the whole moral sky.  Repentance and atonement; nothing less will avail them after the storm has passed, and the sedulous preparation of defences and palliatives against the return of the storm.

This discussion of the lunatic’s case gives us indeed, usefully coarse and large, the lines for the treatment of every human weakness by the servants of God.  A “weakness,” just like the lunatic’s mania, becomes a particular charge under God, a special duty for the person it affects.  He has to minimise it, to isolate it, to keep it out of mischief.  If he can he must adopt preventive measures. . . .