When therefore qualities which were once useful on their own level are outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life’s spiritualization, then—­whatever they may be—­they belong to the body of death, not to the body of life, and are “sin.”  “Call sin a lump—­none other thing than thyself,” says “The Cloud of Unknowing."[67] Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul.  Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us.  The violent-tempered man becomes once more a primitive, when he yields to wrath.  A starved and repressed side of his nature—­the old Adam, in fact—­leaps up into consciousness and glories in its strength.  He obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality keeps in check.  Even the saints have known these revenges of natural instincts too violently denied.  Thoughts of obscene words and gestures came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena.[68] St. Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up.[69] Games and sport of a combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a certain amount of this unused ferocity; and indeed the chief function of games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin.  The sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved:  failure to correspond with the light we possess.  The inequality of the moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this fact:  for many a deed which is innocent in New Guinea, would in London provoke the immediate attention of the police.

Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fall-back to past levels of conduct and experience, a defeat of the spirit of the future in its conflict with the undying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which to look at the idea of Salvation?  We know that all religions of the spirit have based their claim upon man on such an offer of salvation:  on the conviction that there is something from which he needs to be rescued, if he is to achieve a satisfactory life.  What is it, then, from which he must be saved?

I think that the answer must be, from conflict:  the conflict between the pull-back of his racial origin and the pull-forward of his spiritual destiny, the antagonism between the buried Titan and the emerging soul, each tending towards adaptation to a different order of reality.  We may as well acknowledge that man as he stands is mostly full of conflicts and resistances:  that the trite verse about “fightings and fears within, without” does really describe the unregenerate yet sensitive mind with its ineffective