The Fountains of Self-Deceit

We have seen what Christian simplicity requires. Our next enquiry must be into the fountains of self-deceit. They are four in number, the rarity of reliable self-knowledge, self s power to deceive self, self letting itself be deceived by others, and self deceived by Satan.

ISTo wonder that reliable self-knowledge is rare, when so few take pains to acquire it. There are few even who honestly desire it. There are but few men in the world who desire painful things, however salutary they may be; and self-knowledge is both painful in the acquisition and painful in the possession. It is incredible how little honesty there is among religious people in religious matters. Many are earnest in their desires to escape hell, but very few to grow in grace or to please God. Perhaps a man in the course of a life of fifty years may meet three people who make God their first object, and he will be lucky to meet three. Yet almost every one claims to be preferring God before all things. What a mass of unwholesome delusion then must the religious world be! It is. A supernatural formalism outside with natural principles of action inside, and a thoroughly natural system, or rather quackery, of spiritual direction to keep things comfortable and respectable, alas! it were devoutly to be wished that this definition embraced less than it does.

How very little do even good persons know themselves! Much, of what they think is the work of grace about them is simply the providential accident of their circumstances. A man has a very right horror of worldliness, for example, and he thinks, perhaps even thanks God, that he has no tendencies that way. Much evil he has, and is conscious of having, but not this. His circumstances of life change. He becomes rich, or gets into different society, or his health improves and he can do what awhile ago he could not do; and behold!

o w he finds himself worldly, not growing worldly by a process and under temptation, but worldly without any change at all, with a ready-made worldliness, which he has had in his heart all the while. A man cannot be angry in a fainting fit: so this man s worldliness could not develope itself in his old circumstances. It was there nevertheless. Hundreds of people are thoroughly worldly, worldly to the backbone, who flatter themselves they have no taste for the world at all. The fact is we know so little of ourselves, and of the almost inexhaustible possibilities of evil which we have got shut up within our souls. IB not life at every turn making unpleasant revelations of self? But they are revela tions, and that is noteworthy. Yet what sort of wisdom is it for?, man to shun these revelations, because they disquiet him, when it will so concern him in the day of judgment to have known them? A spiritual life, with out a very large allowance of disquietude in it, is no spiritual life at all. It is but a flattering superstition of self-love. But fancy a spiritual system which is to make everybody at ease and comfortable, and takes the banishment of the uncomfortable as its grand principle! It would be laughable, indeed intrinsically it is laughable; only we cannot laugh because it is such a terribly serious thing for a soul to go wrong in its doom.

Now it is of the last importance to observe, that with good persons the stronghold of worldliness is in this absence of reliable self-knowledge. They have right views about woiidliness, and their hearts also are in a great measure right about the matter. They do not wish to be worldly, if they could help it. They may not be prepared to go such lengths in the direction of self-sacrifice as might be well. Nevertheless they are prepared to go some lengths, and that is well. Yet they are worldly, or they become worldly, from the want of self-knowledge. As to the fact, that can hardly be a question. Is it not the standing scandal of the world, that strange medley of woiidliness and devotion which is so common among professedly pious people, that the world, which does not take a particularly accurate view of the matter, pronounces it to be universal? We have prayer and fine dress, alms and luxurious extravagance, sacraments and love of eating and drinking, humility and exclusiveness, spiritual confer ences and the worship of great people, balls and commu nions, benedictions and private theatricals, works of mercy and a scheming to push advantageous connec tions, interior life and fine furniture, all mingled up in such close union and inextricable confusion, that we might lecture on the matter the whole year round, as the nineteenth- century improvement of o-ldfashioned spirituality; and yet I fear the censorious world would be too stupid to be convinced, that all this was apostolical, evangelical, scriptural, after the mode of the saints, and such like. Whether we are in fault for giving this scandal, or the world for taking it, is of no consequence here. As a matter of fact scandal there is, given or taken. The reason of the fact is the want of reliable self-knowledge. Worldliness is an immense number of allowable details issuing in an unallowable end. This is partly from the accumulation, and partly from the hold the details have on our affections. Things, which are not wrong in themselves, become wrong when they stand between us and God, unspeakably wrong when they usurp God s place in aur hearts. We do not see the real malice of the separate component parts of worklliness, because we do not really know ourselves, and are thus unable to estimate the bad effects, or even the peculiar effects, which make this or that licit amusement become inexpedient in our case, or a certain amount of it downright poison. In the ana lysis of worldliness, we have to do with questions of kind and questions of degree. Anything like a safe judgment in either of these two classes of questions is impossible without self-knowledge. In a word, the secret power of worldliness is in our ignorance of ourselves, not an unsuspecting ignorance, but an ignorance with a bad conscience, which we will not force to learn its crabbed lesson of self. All supernatural principles and all religious manliness are based on genuine, reliable self-knowledge. Give that conclusion leave to do its work in your soul, and you will see what a change it will bring about t

The second fountain of self-deceit is self directly deceiving self. There are many ways in which this unhappy end is compassed. Vanity is one of the most universal. We all put an absurdly high price upon ourselves. The mercury always stands too high in us, and indi cates wrongly, unless grace holds it down by main force. Even when we have too much sense to speak, we are always inwardly commenting upon our own actions in a most partial manner, and often with a very ingenious and farfetched partiality. We cherish our own plans, until ii, is hard to see how God can have any glory at all beyond the sphere of our own influence, except in other spheres very far away. But the spheres which confine on our own are mistakes, and ought never to have been there at all. Our vocation is to absorb them. This is our view. There is nothing too extravagant for the vanity of our self-love. It does not know an exaggeration when it sees it. Like some oriental lan guages, its commonest expressions are hyperboles. We should all make open fools of ourselves through vanity, if it were not for three things. First of all, many of us are saved by knowledge of the world, which always carries on famous warfare against self s absur dities. Secondly, many are rescued from exposing themselves, because they have a turn for humour and a keen sense of the ridiculous. Thirdly, grace saves some, by teaching lihem to put down within themselves those inordinate risings of self-importance, which would else expose them to the contempt of others, though it is not for that reason they are to put them down. An honest humorous sense of ridicule is a great help to holiness. Perhaps nature does not contribute a greater help to gi ciee than this.

Then, again, we deceive ourselves by dwelling on self; for self by a law of its own nature must needs see itself erroneously. The mother can see no imperfection in the babe she is fondling. In her eyes the most hideous little creature is charinincr. But self nursing &elf.

the fondest mothers are no match for it in this respect. Brooding on self is a sort of spiritual opium-eating. Nothing but phantasms can come of it. It is through this brooding on self that we arrive at another way of deceiving ourselves; and that is by confusing, almost without seeing it, feelings with facts, and desires with practices. In other words self-love knows how to blend most skilfully its ideal with its realization of its ideal, so that not only shall nobody else know what is theory and what is practice, but even self shall not be able, at least with anything like assurance, to discern between the two. Multitudes of souls live through life in a bright haze of this kind, and only get into the clear light as they land on the other side of the grave.

We deceive ourselves also by palliating what is acknowledgedly wrong. There is almost always a run ning commentary of secret self-excuse passing through our minds. We admit certain actions, or more frequently certain omissions, to be wrong. But we consider that there is something quite peculiar in our cir cumstances, which makes them less wrong in us than they would be in others. Sometimes it is our temperament, sometimes our health, sometimes our position, sometimes the provocation we have received. Some times we pardon ourselves with the very gentlest of reprimands, because we feel that the good points of our character are on the other side of us, as it were, and that this particular failing has the misfortune to light upon the barren or the weak side of us; and whose character is either complete and equable? So w T e must think of our opposite good points, by way of comfort and compensation. This method of self-deceit is akin to the practice of putting off the time for a closer acquaintance with our own motives. At present we have a great deal to do; and it is alsvays indiscreet in the spiritual life to take upon ourselves more than we can accomplish. "We have manifest faults enough to fight against, so we will adjourn the day for a more thorough search into self, It is as if we said, that we have so much writing to do we have really no time to go out to buy paper or ink. The result of all these various forms of self-deceit is spiritual blindness, a blindness which always has the additional misfortune of thinking that it sees.

The third fountain of self-deceit is self letting itself be deceived by other things or persons, by things or persons external to itself. It is not always easy to distinguish this process from self deceiving self; but there is a difference. When we lay ourselves out for praise, or even very obviously acquiesce in it, we are letting ourselves be deceived by others, often without any fault of theirs. We do not plead guilty to half the amount of love of praise which we have in us. It is quite preposterous even in the humblest of us. We live lives of prayer and sacraments, and yet are all the while itching for praise. Who ever saw any one that was not? The gravest, sleekest, most pompous of men, smooth themselves down and unbend themselves in glossy patronizing benevolence under the siren breath of praise, like the swell of a summer sea when the gentle south-wind blows. Cold men thaw with an amusing reluctant eagerness under the same operation, and dignity descends even to playfulness under the resistless attractions of praise. Silent men however are the grand lovers of praise. They are ruminating creatures; self is the cud they chew, and, strange to say, they do not find it bitter. Like thirsty camels in the desert who suck up the muddiest water with relish, so we with praise are almost regardless of its quality. No matter how absurd, how unmerited, how exaggerated, or from what feminine or childish incapacity of just appreciation it may spring, wise and grave men among us drink it down. We set a value upon it and attach an import-n ce to it and feed on its scraps, in a manner which ought to make us thoroughly ashamed of ourselves. All we require is that certain rules of good taste should be observed by those who administer this sweet spoon-meat to us grown-up babies. But these rules vary with national character. An Irishman must be praised differently from an Englishman, and an American and a Frenchman differently from both, and from each other. But praised we must all be, or we shall sulk. Monkeys can look grave when they scratch each other. But then they are monkeys. We are men, gifted with reason: how is it we do not smile at an operation which is really so absurd? Because we do not know ourselves. Who ever knew an eminent lover -of praise, who did not imagine he was peculiarly above public opinion? Or whoever knew a man that boasted of his independence of the judgments of others, who was not servile, and base, and touchy, and fawning, and deceitful, and vain? After all, we are monkeys, and we only grow into men by knowing that we are not men yet.

We compel others to deceive us by the way in which we talk to them about ourselves. This especially applies to religious conversation, and to all talk about our own characters and peculiarities. Kow here we have an alternative. Either we ought to keep our inward life much more secret than we do, or we ought to let it be much more unreservedly known. The middle course is practically to tell lies. The right thing is not to talk about self at all. All self-talk is wretched and mean. Yet it would be difficult to name a practice of Christian perfection harder than the avoid ing of it. If we have ever made a real effort to hold our tongues about ourselves for any considerable length of time, we have found out that there may be some things which look easy, and yet are next door to im possibilities. Nevertheless, if we will talk of self, we ought to say much more than we do. If we tell people how our hearts warm with love of God, we ouoht also to tell them how those same hearts are cheered by having nice things to eat and drink. If we make known our practices of prayer, we ought also to make known our attachment to handsome furniture and becoming o dress. If we say how much time and money go to visiting and relieving the poor, we ought also to say how selfish and inconsiderate we are towards our ser vants, in the matter of their health, comfort, temper, sensibilities, and the like. If we publish our good side, we ought also to publish our bad side; else we are practically telling an untruth, making people believe that we are far more noble-minded than we really are, and so causing them by praise, respect, and admiration, to react upon ourselves in the shape of self-deceit.

Alas! the idolatry of domestic affections is another way in which we let ourselves be deceived by others. Everybody is thought so good in his own family. Men must be notably bad to have the honours of this house hold canonization withheld from them. It is like living in air drugged with luscious incense. Conscience is half stifled in it. This is a chief delight of home to our poor conceited nature. It is one of the first principles of the spiritual life that each man should be in his own sight what he is in the sight of God, and nothing more. Yet there are few women, and fewer men, who are not in their own sight what they are in the sight of their family. It is moreover to be feared that God s point of view and the family point of view are very far from identical in most cases. We fall into a sort of happy optimism in our families, which is marvellously unsuspicious of its own absurdity. We laugh at tombstones, and there is reason for it. They tell queer tales sometimes. Yet, after all, it is only the simpleheartedness of sorrow which thus promulges to a critical world what is really the judgment of all families upon their members. But, when we leave the home circle, which praise, exaggeration, blindness, and caress keep so warm and nest-like for us, what can the presence of God feel like, but a cold cutting east-wind against which no furs and wrappers are adequate protection? Oh how many saints are spoiled, how many souls unmanned, how many high things brought low, by the sweet effeminacies and ingenious adulations of domestic admiration and family worship! Eeality has no worse enemy than this sweetest and most enticing of deceits. No wonder the saints have always treated as unpardonable what looks to us the most pardonable of all delusions, because it is the most amiable, the graceful blandishments and soothing flatteries of home.

Spiritual books are outward things, and they also can make us unreal. No soul spins a grosser web of self-deceit around itself, than the one that habitually reads spiritual books above its spiritual condition, or in any other way unfitted for its existing circumstances. Common states of prayer look uncommon to the man who is always reading books of mystical theology. Converts particularly are always mistaking common graces for uncommon ones. Indeed mystical theology can be made into a sham more easily than most things that are real. If we are for ever reading of pure and disinterested love of God, we soon come to think that our love for Him is such as we read of. Heroic thoughts are infectious, and we soon swell with them. ta

33 ut they will not do duty for heroic deeds. They only give an air of sentimentality to our religion,. when we are not making any real effort to act upon them. When a spiritual book does not mortify us and keep us down, it is sure to puff us up and make us untruthful. Its doctrine gets into our head, and we commit follies. A man, who finds the popular commonplace spiritual books dull and unimpressive, has great reason to suspect his religious state altogether;*and of one thing he may be quite confident, that his feeling of dulnessin the common books shows he is not up to the level of high books.

Another way, in which, we let ourselves be deceived by others, is by seeking guidance where we expect least contradiction. How honest hearts can be so dishonest as they are, is a mystery which meets us at every turn in the spiritual life; and here is one of the most glaring examples of it. The Church does not oblige us to have spiritual directors. It imposes nothing more upon us than sacramental confession. If we put ourselves under a director, it is our own act. We do it, in order to gain some spiritual advantage by it. Who could believe that any one would go and entangle himself in a whole system of insincerity, and allow himself to be almost irrevocably lost in the bogs and fens of self-deceit, knowing all the while, as he must know, that his inten tions are not godly, and his motives not of the right sort? Yet so it is. Men seek spiritual direction, partly that they may be deceived, and partly lest they should be awakened from their self-deceit. They look around. They fix upon the least independent judgment, or the least vigorous judgment, they can discern; and to that judgment they assign their spiritual direction. What they want is a ghostly father who will let them alone, who will hardly ever take the initiative, whose directiori will confine itself to words, whose direction will be simply passive, whose yoke will be of outward observances rather than of inward strictness, who will caution rather than rouse, and hold them back rather than spur them forward. Yet is there any man, who-has had anything whatever to do with souls, who was ever lucky enough to find one soul in a thousand which needed holding back? Now if the Church compelled us to have a spiritual director, it is quite intelligible that our clever corruption should seek for some venerable King Log, and set him over itself; but, as the whole thing is voluntary, is it not amazing we should take so-much trouble for such very unsatisfactory results?

But, let us suppose our spiritual director chosen r how do we behave to him? Do we give him anything like fair play? I ought rather to say, Do we give our own poor souls anything like fair play with him? Can we ever remember having put one single question to him with perfect honesty and thorough straightforwardness? Have we not always shaped it, and worded it, and emphasized it, for some ulterior end? Have we not half made up our own minds on most subjects, before we have consulted our guide, and has not our aim rather been to elicit such a verdict as we wish, than to know his calm and dispassionate and uninfluenced judgment? All this is wild work: God being considered, and the soul, and eternal possibilities! In these days of railway frauds, we are always hearing of accounts being " cooked" ]S"ow I have no very clear idea of how to " cook" accounts, and should hardly know how to set about it, from want of experience in accounts-altogether: but I greatly suspect that what we do with our statements to our spiritual directors is to "cook" them. Am I bitter and sarcastic? If so, I assure you it is with much love, and the most earnest of intentions. I feel as if I wanted to do you some good, and could not get at you, as if there were a waving veil of cob webs between your souls and my hand, and when I strike it, it yields, and waves about, and gets into my own eyes, and there is no tearing it. This is vexatious; and I do not know how far to be serious, lest, beino 1 serious, I should become angry also. So bear with my foolishness. See if I do not say some sensible things in the course of it, which, if I had said gravely, would have been less sensible. I would give anything to do with you what I want. It would bring you a little nearer G-od. Do not be annoyed with my frivolous way of doing it. Yet perhaps you had better be a little angry. I am sure to be able to make you think, if I can put you moderately out of temper. You are out of temper now, because of what I have said of your intercourse with your directors. It is a sore subject. It is the soreness which has made you angry. But you know very well, that your spiritual direction is little better than a farce, and that it is so, because of your own ungenuineness with your directors. Most of you had better have no directors, than direct your directors so adroitly as you do.

From spiritual directors I pass to the devil. Perhaps an abrupt transition: but not so, when you come to think of it. For when self-deceit comes to feed upon spiritual dainties, the evil one can never be very far off. This brings me to my next division, self deceived by Satan. It would require a separate dissertation to divide the blame, according to justice and equity, between self and Satan: so that part of the question shall go untouched. Satan deceives us in many ways, too many ways for us to enumerate now. He deceives us by instigating good men to over-praise us. These good men do it out of the abundance of their natural

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kindness, or on the compulsion of their charity, or from the self- vilification of their own humility. How little they suspect what they are doing! Praise people as little as you can consistently with kindness; for you never run a greater risk of doing the devil s work for him, than when you praise people. Nevertheless you must praise others sometimes. We cannot go on with out it. Vanity is as universal a law of the mental and moral worlds, as gravitation is of the material. We shall all of us expire of inanition, if we are not praised. It is one of the gases necessary to action: some of it we must have, the less the better.

Satan has also another power, of a much more serious kind. He can raise strange mists within our souls, disturbing and discolouring self. How he does it, I do not know; but of the fact there is no doubt. I greatly suspect he could not do it, if We did not play into his hands in some way, and furnish him with the mate rials. The consequences, however, of this mist are terrific. Distances are confused, shapes swollen, light darkened, darkness lightened, what ought to be hidden shown, what ought to be shown hidden; a complete fata morgana! Disagreeable subject! you all know it well enough. I must either say a great deal about it, or very little. So, as I have not the heart to say much, I shall now say no more.

Another of his wiles is to fill us with indiscreet and unseasonable aspirations: indiscreet, because they are out of all proportion to our grace, and unseasonable, because they are especially unbefitting our present condition. Strange to say! there is something congenial between grace and nature. Hence it is that certain forms of holiness come almost natural to a man, suit his disposition, elicit the excellences of his individual character, and transform his nature rather than supplant it. Then again there are other forms of holiness, which in particular souls seem to have occult affinities with evil. With them they are akin to temptations. They leave the weak places in the soul unguarded, and develope what rather requires subduing. They are not meant for those souls, but for others. ISTow all God s work everywhere is a work of order; and therefore the devil finds his account in disturbing this order; and in the spiritual life, he cannot more effectually accomplish this than by filling devout people with indiscreet and unseasonable aspirations.

A mischief, which is confined to ourselves, is a very great mischief. But it is not half so bad as a mischief which compromises us with others. This last tends to the irremediable. Nothing is positively irremediable out of hell. The worst evil never gets beyond the tendency to be so. But this tendency is bad enough. Now see how the devil draws us on beyond mere aspirations. He entangles us in unsuitable good works. Why, one might almost prefer a sin to this. Observe the almost, if you please. There is nothing like an un suitable good work for keeping us back from God. It enlists against Him all that is best and least selfish in our nature. Set an active soul to contemplate, and one of two results will follow, hypochondria or woiidliness. Immerse a contemplative soul in business, and you will have either melancholy or delusion. Bend a person to much mental prayer, when they ought to be spinning at home, or bustling about in the garrets of the poor, and you will produce a self-righteous, inflated, stupefied simulation of interior holiness, which would ruffle the good humour of an angel. Keep a soul in hospi tals or on ladies committees, which ought to be alone with God, and although the evil you do by it will be less than in the former case, you will frustrate the soul s vocation, risk its salvation, and indirectly spoil a good many plans of charitable beneficence.

Last of all, our spiritual enemy is always enticing us to speed. This is the fatallest of fatal things. Are there any of you, who once were different from what you are now? Are there any who mourn over a delicacy of conscience which has grown callous and hard, over the cold ash-strewn hearth where the flames of divine love once burned but are now extinct, over a nearness of God which has gone back like an ebb tide down the sands, over a hundred great graces once within reach, but now mere words never to have realities? If it is so, has it not for the most part been speed which has done all the mischief? There are few saints more remarkable in the history of spiritual theology than St. Francis of Sales. He is a kind of French Revolution in spirituality. It is hard to see where he got all his traditions from. Many, we know, Avere from St. Philip. But the connection between modern society and his modest innovations is very striking. We seem to see exactly for what ends he was raised up, and of what he was the apostle. There is an originality about him, as an ascetical writer, which ought to be well weighed. But could we select any one thing he was sent to teach us, which is more remarkable, than the duty and the wisdom of slowness? He teaches as one from God, seldom giving reasons for what he teaches, and when he does give them, somehow the reasons have nothing like the divine cogency of his axioms. Fenelon s letters are St. Francis of Sales reasoned out, the bishop of Geneva with the metaphysics put into him, and perhaps something of the saint left out. To be slow, this is what St. Francis and Fenelon teach, and what you must learn. There are endless reasons for it. I will only mention the one which connects the duty with the avoidance of self-deceit. It is this: speed, in spiritual matters, is always followed by darkness.

The power of the kingdom of sin rests simply in self-deceit. The picture, you think, is gloomy. I grant it. Yet not disheartening. It is the old story. You will not serve God out of love, and then you abuse preachers for unsettling you. You want unsettling. I wish I could unsettle you. I wish you had the grace to be unsettled. Digging does good. It loosens roots, and lets in sun and rain. What can be more vexatious than an obstinate shrub which will not grow? It always reminds me of souls, so stiff, and concentrated, and dull, and pert, and self-satisfied in its yellow primness. A simple childlike love of Jesus always goes safely throuo-h these dangers of self-deceit, almost without o o * being aware of their existence. There is something in tensely sickly about the spiritual life. It is nothing but unbandaging, examining sores, bandaging them up again, smelling-salts, rooms with blinds down, and I know not what dishonourable invalidisms and tottering convalescences. It seems to me no slight temptation to love God with a headlong love, in order that one s soul may not be sickened with these degrading symptoms or valetudinarian sensations of the spiritual life, but live a robust, out-of-doors kind of religious existence. Yet many people like to be ill, specially to be ill in mind. It shows how little the thought of God is in them; for that thought, grave, kindly, sober, earnest, is an inexorable exorcism of all sickliness.