“But,” asks Dr. Martineau, “if the animal instincts and appetites are to be directed by conscience and ruled by the will in accordance with the dictates of conscience, what becomes of the unconsciousness which is necessary for their right action?  Its place is gradually supplied by habit, which is the unconsciousness of a self-conscious being.”  The habit of plain living and spare food, so necessary to high thinking, at first acquired possibly by real effort of will, by real fasting and prayer, becomes a second nature, that sets the will free for higher conquests.  The habit of purity, which at first may have resulted only from a sleepless watch of the will in directing the thoughts and imagination into safe channels, becomes an instinctive recoil from the least touch of defilement.  The habit of unworldly simplicity, which may have had to be induced by deliberate self-denial, becomes a natural disposition which rejects superfluities from unconscious choice.

This is what takes place where direct conflict is necessitated by the constant readjustment of the individual, with his instincts and appetites, to his social environment which so complex a state of society as that of modern civilization involves.  But under ordinary circumstances, where the teaching of Christ is observed and all the conscious energies of the man are absorbed in seeking first the kingdom of God, there the need of conflict on the lower plane is at least partially done away with.  The whole current of thought and will, flowing into higher channels, is drained away from the lower instincts and appetites, which are thus restored to their natural unconsciousness, with only an occasional interference on the part of the will to subordinate them to human ends and aims, or to those demands of a high and complex civilization in the benefits of which we all share, but for whose fuller and richer life we have in some directions to pay, and perhaps at times to pay heavily.  The scientific man who in his passionate devotion to the search after truth—­the kingdom of God as revealed in the order of the universe—­exclaimed testily that he had no time to waste in making money, had no conflict with the instinct of self-subsistence maddened into greed.  It worked out a sufficient quotient of bread and cheese to insure the healthy exercise of his brain, and that was enough.  The Alpine climber, intent on mastering a printless snow-peak, has not to control an appetite sharpened by mountain air from sinking into the gluttony which would be fatal to the cool head and steady foot necessary for his enterprise.  The man who has a noble passion for the weak and defenceless, who from the first has cultivated a chivalrous loyalty to women, putting far from him the lowering talk, the cynical expression, the moral lassitude of society, and guarding his high enthusiasm from the blight of worldly commonplace, has no need to fight against the lower instinct that would degrade them or wrong the weak and defenceless.  The conflict