The Varieties of Self-Deceit

If the varieties of grace are numberless, the varieties of self-deceit are well nigh able to match them. We shall get a step further into our disagreeable subject by glancing at some of these varieties, selecting those which we meet with most commonly in daily life. There are in fact seven species, which w r e may name the fundamental self-deceits, as one or other of them seems to lie at the bottom of every possible modification of delusion.

There is, first of all, the self-deceit which takes no advice. Everyone knows that the delusions of the spiritual life are so amazing as to be incredible. A man neglects the duties which God has given him to do, and spends all his day in church, and yet imagines himself a special favourite of G-od. Even monks and nuns can mistake singularity for perfection. There is a false modesty, and a false humility, a deluded penance and a deluded prayer. Delusion is everywhere, and yet to us looking on, it is unaccountable how the victim does not at once see through the delusion. Now, in a great number of cases, all these worlds of delusion are created by the self-deceit which takes no advice. Taciturnity has its good points. Who can doubt it? Silence is more often expedient than speech in a world so extremely foolish as ours is. Then there are some dispositions, which are not at all tempted to talk, but tempted for it is a veritable temptation to hold their tongues. These are men who, unlike Solomon, have never happened on a right time to speak. So they make plans, either with no counsellors but themselves, or with only such as they know to be at best but selves at second hand. Their plans grow into them, and length of time is mistaken for maturity of deliberation. These plans twinkle and oscillate through their prayers, and so at least seem to have the light of a quasi-divine sanction upon them; and with all conceivable respectability, and without one external admonitory symptom of self-seeking, these men have at last come to mistake self-opinionatedness for judicious reserve, through the self-deceit which takes no advice. This form of self-deceit tends very rapidly to become incurable; and when it has once taken hold of a man, he can only be roused up by a rare miracle of grace, and most often is not roused up at all.

Then there is a self-deceit, which is always taking advice, and, what is perhaps worse, always taking it of everybody. This vice belongs to men who have as many directors as a king has privy counsellors, men whose weakness of character is such that they publish their plans in confidence to every one they meet, and have to end, as it were, of sheer necessity, by taking no advice at all, because the persuasions on the right hand are so completely neutralized by the dissuasions on the left hand, that the man s mind becomes almost a blank. These are the men, we see them daily, who are always undertaking things, and who never succeed in anything they undertake. Yet this universal confidence reposed in all mankind is not only consistent with the most mulish obstinacy, but is not unfrequently an actual develop ement of it. Among English people obstinacy and weakness almost always go together. "Who ever saw a weak man who was not obstinate, a weak man who was reallv docile, and did not find out at last that he was not an Englishman? This perpetual and indiscriminate voracity of advice is also a form of self-importance; and who ever knew a weak man of any nation who was not self-important? But when we regard this endless seeking of counsel as a delusion, as one of the varieties of self-deceit, we soon discover that no little dishonesty mingles with its weakness. A man, who is always asking advice, suspects himself of being in the wrong, even if he does not go further than suspicion. A real uneasiness of conscience lies at the bottom of it all; and consequently, if he is not trying to make him self comfortable in a state of things which he half knows ouojht to make him uncomfortable, there is something more or less hopeful in his case, even in spite of the dishonesty. For, a grain or two less of dishonesty, and the suspicion might become a salutary self-distrust. Yet in order that this process may take place, it is necessary that he should hold his tongue. But here is the difficulty. For the more he talks and asks and communicates, the more the dishonesty grows. He is throwing dust in his own eyes at every word. The more obstinate he grows, the more eloquently is he persuading himself of his own docility. Every additional counsellor makes him less able to discern the truth. Every step he takes brings him nearer to the doing of his own will. Some men are snares to others; this man is a snare to himself. At last complete confusion ensues, and the total eclipse of self-ignorance, and the chaos of entangled vacillation. The man s life may now be pronounced a decided failure, as a life; but his salvation of course remains possible, and if a man saves his soul, we may be content to let him fail in all else. Besides, of what good to the world would any success have been which such a man could have by any possibility have achieved?

Then we have for our third variety the complacent self-deceit. Where this exists, it seems born with a man. Nevertheless we need not despair of straightening even the twists we bring with us into the world, though it is a more difficult matter than straightening what out ward circumstances, and even habitual sins, have bent. Some men have a strong faith in themselves, which no number of mistakes or misfortunes can shake. Experience is unpersuasive to them. Practically speaking, their own infallibility is the fixed point of their compass. Whatever else moves, that cannot move. Whatever else is called in question, that must not be. There is always a quiet optimism about them. It is quiet, because it cannot conceive the possibility of doubting itself. There is an external reason for every failure, which no foresight could have calculated, and against which no prudence could have guarded. If what they have done was not simply and absolutely the best thing, it was the best for the time and place and circumstances. Indeed they consider themselves entitled to additional credit, precisely because they consented to waive the best thing, and humble themselves to circumstances with the wise condescension of discretion. These are men with whom all tokens are providential, and all interpositions miraculous. They fail without knowing that they fail, because all things look so providential in their particular case. They see the government of the whole world before them as in a panorama, of which they are the centre. Their affairs are God s final causes. Their piety takes the shape of inspirations, and what is natural about them has a ruinous tendency to extravasate into the supernatural. Their devotion can never run long in a common groove, nor indeed in any one groove at all. Their dreams even sometimes become motives of action. Hence they are wayward and changeable. They are not only receiving inspirations every moment, but even cross inspirations. But they take this very easily, almost as if it were a feature of divine guidance. They see no difficulty in the matter. What is change in others is no change to them. In truth they are so unchangeably changeable, that it is quite easy for them to believe themselves consistent, systematic, and lovers of principle, when everybody else thinks them not to be depended on in the commonest matter. Such men listen to advice with all the composure of self- righteousness, with almost a pathetic appearance of patience, as if they were carrying a cross, and sharing in the mortifications of the saints. For how improper to advise them! Their position, their name, their ante cedents, all should have guaranteed them from the impertinent simplicity of advice; and the quarter from which the advice has come is just the quarter from which it ought not to have come. But they bear it with admirable meekness, remembering how hidden and unsuspected all goodness for the most part is in this naughty world. Perhaps we may say of these men, without offending charity, that they are not very likely candidates for the honours of canonization. Yet perhaps a great number of them expect their lives will be written.

But we have another form of self-deceit, which is censorious. There are men who are always so sure they are in the right, that they set themselves up as a standard by which to judge others. So undoubting is their self-confidence, that they are not conscious they are making any uncommon claim to the confidence of others, when they thus put themselves forward as a standard. To abstain to do so would in their estimation be an act of false humility. As a man lives a man s life all the day long without particularly adverting to the fact that he is not an angel or a beast, but simply a man, so these persons are judging others all the day long, without adverting to it, as if they came into the world for the sole and express purpose of judging others, and the wonder would be if they did anything else. They would rather advert to the exception of not judg ing, than to the continuity of censoriousness which makes up their life. But, while the complacent self-deceivers habitually reflect with pleasure on their own being in the right, the less amiable, though really more practical, censorious self- deceivers prefer to contemplate with satisfaction the fact that others are in the wrong. The latter therefore are less to be loved, while at the same time there is much more real work to be got out of them. It is astonishing how accurate their unfa vourable judgments of others are. It is as if practice conferred a skill upon uncharitableness, which gave it almost the unerringness of a science. Thus they make fewer mistakes than the complacent self-deceivers. For the world is really a very bad world, and most people are in the wrong; and there is a kind of reputation to be got by always prophecying dismal things, and a kind of influence to be obtained by frightening others with our sarcasm and detraction, and even a kind of success, which to an unamiable man is better than none, in getting out of the way of a scrape into which others fall. Few men, even among good men, aim at anything high in life, and a few crumbs of success are nourishment enough to souls that can swallow a sea of flattery. These censorious men are generally calm and tranquil, because of the unshaken placidity of their self-confidence. Hence they have for the most part a great dislike of enthusiasm. It is contrary to the genius of the critical spirit to be enthusiastic. A man s heart gets cold if he does not keep it warm by living in it; and a censorious man is one who ordinarily lives out of his own heart. In matters of religious detail these men have an instinctive aversion to liberty of spirit, and while they indulge themselves to a dangerous amount in liberty of practice, they are severe upon liberty of spirit in others. They are men who cannot easily understand what another man can inwardly be like who acts from love; and hence they think liberty of spirit to be only an unblushing proclamation of that infrequency of prayer, perfunctoriness of examination of conscience, and tepidity of sorrow for sin, which they themselves keep secret as the realities of their own interior life. A rigorous theology is one of the cheapest modes of respectability; and he, who represents the road to heaven as hard to others, is most probably leading an easy life himself. A censorious man is either under the voluptuous dominion of self-indulgence, or the unworthy subjection of human respect. Yet this is one of the commonest forms of self-deceit. It is more-o ver hard to cure, because its heart is inaccessible. It seems almost to require the shock of a great sin, which, by shattering the lordly edifice of self-respect, may let in upon the soul the light of salutary shame.

There is a fifth variety of self-deceit, which is ambitious. Ambition aims at a distant object, which can only be obtained slowly. Yet it is by no means a patient quality. VThile it feeds patience perhaps more than any other vice does, it has by no means a fair share of it. It is a quick, impetuous, impatient passion, perpetually overreaching itself in its calculations, and peculiarly liable to mistake the means for the end. This ambitious self-deceit confounds single actions with formed habits:

C> 7 and if by a more than common impulse of grace a man lias been able in one instance to do something generous for God, this self-deceit leads him to suppose that he lias already acquired a saintly habit, towards which this action has been the first step only. Contrary experience irritates rather than undeceives him. He grows petulant with God. He has adopted practices of devotion which are above the level of his attainments. He has ventured upon a familiarity in prayer, which he conceived suited to his perfection, but which has been in his case, however holy in itself, simply prejudicial to his reverence. He dares to speak complainingly to God. He would fain contemplate, without the previous pains of assiduous meditation. He would love suffering, but he has spared himself in the matter of bodily mortification. He would serve God with a purely disinterested love, but he has never been half sorry enough for his sins. He passed through the earlier stages of the spiritual life at a bound, and leaped into high things, and has starved his soul upon mysticism when he would have grown fat upon common piety. Here is altogether a very incurable case, and not a very uncommon one! But what is the man s end? He began by imitating the saints in what was inimitable, and he ends by giving up religion under discouragement. He commenced by being voracious of the supernatural, and he finishes by finding the common exercise of faith a difficult attainment.

Then there is the self-deceit, which is scrupulous.

It is odious to have to speak of it. The older we get, the less good can we see in scruples. Experience and age both convince us that the look of respectability, which we once thought there was about scrupulous men, was a mere delusion. They all turn out badly. Huge continents of puerile conceit are being discovered in their souls every year. They are eaten up with that unassuming assumption, which is the most wicked of all the varieties of censoriousness. Their selfish pusillanimity is intolerable. They are a pest which religious society might almost blamelessly combine to get rid of by summary extinction. Their good is all on the sur face, and wears no better than the bloom on a plum. This is a form of self-deceit which Satan very much affects. It does his work as he would have it done. It perversely fixes its attention on wrong things, that is y on things which it need not particularly attend to, and it does this exclusively. Meanwhile it is perfectly unscrupulous in things which are a scandal, or a ruling passion, or an occasion of sin, or a besetting temptation. On the whole, it pays very little attention to its behaviour to others, or to their feelings. It is snappish, and sour, and uncongenial, and intractable; and all this foolish people sometimes put down to sanctity. It has in its nature a deep well of tranquil self-exaltation, and on the surface it has the fidgets in religion. It has never done any good in its lifetime, and never will do any; but it has made such a noise about the good it was one day going to do, that it has got more credit for its intention than a man often gets who quietly does the real work. These are tiresome men, good to try our tempers, but otherwise such as we like to know of at a distance, as possible, probable, or actual, like the wild 13 beasts in Africa. A man, who has duties to such people, is unfortunately placed in life.

Lastly, there is the self-deceit which is falsely humble. It has a great affinity to the scrupulous self-deceit, but perhaps conies more near to be incurable. It is true that self-deceit is a mark both of intellectual and moral weakness. But then there are few charac ters in the world which have not at least one point, at which they are both intellectually and morally weak. With some the intellectual weakness comes from the moral; with most the moral comes from the intellectual. We must not therefore be surprised at finding apparently strong and clear characters, which are nevertheless the victims of this extremely foolish self-deceit which arises from false humility. Every one feels that humility is preeminently the saintly virtue, and therefore every one aims at mastering it. But it is uncommonly difficult to master, while it seems almost impossible to nature to go on believing itself so little good as it must believe itself, so long as it believes itself not to be humble. Hence something must be done in order to shorten the process of its acquisition. Unfortunately some of the saints have occasionally spoken ill of themselves. Whereupon we also will speak ill of ourselves, not in the least believing what we say, and still less conceding any right to others to believe us. Every man in the world has his little circle of flatterers, just as an insect has its parasites. These are either foolish enough or insincere enough to be pleased with our self-abuse; and we, finding it a cheap heroism, are by no means economical in the matter. But this self-abuse has a remarkable tendency to produce spiritual blindness. It does not seem to be so much a disease superinduced upon the soul s eye, as a positive wearing away of that by which alone the soul can see at all, a destruction of its very power of seeing. Its blindness is complete when it has come to believe, as it does at last, what it says against itself, and what it began to say only from conceit and affectation. A man in this state is ignorant of that, which of all things in the spiritual life it is most necessary for him to know, his own want of courage. This is because his false humility never allows him to try himself. He thinks, in his artificial self- abjection, which has now become real without becoming true, that he ought only to attempt low things for God; and therefore he does what is below his strength, without trying what is level with it or above it. Yet, mean-spirited as it grows, this self-deceit is not without a kind of pride in its safety and discretion, while it does not see at all its peculiarly odious form of ungenerosity. All deluded souls will be much surprised at the day of judgment, but we should imagine the greatest and most painful surprise of all is that which awaits the soul self-deceived by false humility.

These are the seven varieties of self-deceit, with which direction has to deal, with such patience as it can command, fighting manfully with irritability and despair. There are however manifold interminglings of these varieties, which are the greatest puzzle in spiritual direction, and also the greatest tortures which self can inflict on self. There is in fact no entanglement in creation like the entanglement of self-deceit; and there is this peculiarity about all its varieties, that they are all of them swift diseases, tending to become so very soon, and at such early stages, very difficult to cure.