The Characteristics of Self-Deceit

It requires some amount of pious bravery to go on making a more and more intimate acquaintance with this offensive phenomenon of our fallen nature. But it is of incalculable consequence to us to do so. I feel that I have tried your patience, and that I have no right to expect you to listen to me with more than a half-angry forbearance. Yet I cannot help hoping that we are both of us getting very earnest in the matter: and, after all, do you not find that there is always a peculiar pleasantness in everything we do for God, no matter how we shrink from the thing in itself? We are very bad, full of littleness, full of inconsequence, and very foolish: and in nothing do we show our foolishness more than in the matters of the spiritual life. When we meet with an accident, we are not exactly angry with the surgeon who sets the broken limb and washes the o gravel out of the wound, and makes us tremble with pain while he does it. Yet there is perhaps a dash of anger towards him in our mind, and without any reason at all we think a greater degree of skill would have inflicted a lesser degree of pain. Yet this feeling con tinues only while the pain has risen for a moment above bearing-point. So, when we are.inclined to be angry with our directors, which we all of us very often are, and a reasonable director expects it at our hands, we must endeavour only to be angry with him as we are with o-ur surgeon. A hurt man is almost inevitably angry. It is foolish to be angry with him for being so. So if you begin to ask yourselves why I have chosen this repulsive subject, why I dwell upon it so long, and why I sometimes seem to speak banteringly on what must be so serious if it be only as much as half true, you will soon get more angry with me than is expedient for yourselves. I have tried to do a disagreeable thing in the least disagreeable way I could; but whatever must be disagreeable at best, always seems unnecessarily and wantonly disagreeable. Nevertheless, however unreasonable and petulant we may all of us be, we are really in earnest with G-od, and are content to force our way through the remainder of our investigation with the hope of something for His glory coming out of it at the last. This, you see, is nothing but a piece of self-defence, probably containing some amount of self-deceit. If you perceive it, I shall be more pleased than ashamed; for you will listen to me less fretfully when you see how I fall under my own lash. When a man makes a fool s cap for others, it always looks more at home on his own head than on theirs.

We have spoken of the varieties of self-deceit. Yet we cannot dispense ourselves from a scrutiny of the characteristics of all self-deceit, as such. In the last section we split it into subdivisions; now we must r ^gard it again in its unity as a coherent and consistent whole. The first characteristic of self-deceit which strikes us is its seemingly boundless power, as compared with other temptations, which by their own nature are more partial. Indeed it is something more than a temptation. It appears to be a law of our soul s infirmity, a law inevitable to our present condition, and which grace itself cannot altogether repeal. For, just as matter and body have their inseparable infirmities, so spirit and soul have theirs. Its genius is universal, and thus, like the air, gives no warning of its presence. Temptations follow in the train of certain circumstances, and those circum stances warn us of the temptation that is bearing down upon us, just as the sudden darkening of the sea-fog in one place warns the navigator that an iceberg is approaching. But self-deceit is everywhere. It is a sort of caricature of grace. It goes before and it follows after; it suggests, and it confers perseverance; it un derlies our actions like the earth, or overarches them like the sky; it walks by the side of them, or it fuses itself into them; it praises them in self-love; it re proaches them out of a false conscience; it gives us a light to see by, and the light blinds us; the two opposite states of activity and repose are equally suited for its operations; it hides itself and shows itself with alterna tions as indistinguishable as the vibrations of a hum ming-bird s wings. Intolerable companion! always in step, never fatigued, indifferent to hill or vale, to wood or swamp, to town or field, to land or sea, for ever invisibly mocking and mimicking the gait of our beloved Guardian Angel, and entrapping us into blind plots to baffle the intelligent kindness of that dear fra ternal Spirit! Life becomes irritating with this consciousness attached to it. No one can bear to be doggei. Moreover this self-deceit is always triumphant, always on the laugh, always making game of us. Change as wo will in natural things, we are equally its prey. Nay it almost grows with our grace. Grace gives it new opportunities, fresh theatres, and opens to its spiteful glee a delighted diversity of fresh experiments. I believe that there is often more self-deceit in a religious than in a secular; yet I suppose it is the grandest thing in the world to be a religious. Most aggravating self-deceit! It is so elastic; who can punish it? It is like whipping the air. It is such a confirmed optimist; who ever humbled it? It is almost embarrassed by its own success. But let us keep up our spirits, and be hopeful. We shall see by and bye, that this, like other dark sub jects, has a bright side also, bright enough, even if not very bright.

A second characteristic of self-deceit is its deep-seated inveteracy. Repeated victories over it seem to give us no habit of victory over it. ~No amount of mortification saems to cow it. On the contrary all the measures taken against it appear to invigorate it. It finds its way everywhere, and flies under pressure, unharmed and whole as quicksilver. It cannot be gathered up, held fast, submitted to any operation, or detached from the various circumstances of life. One moment concentrated, and the next moment diffused, it baffles all pursuit. Vigilance does little to help us. To watch it makes us wise about it, as watching the stars helps us in theorizing about them, while it gives us no control over them in their paths. We never grow expert in our warfare with it, because it hardly ever attacks us twice quite in the same manner. Indeed attack is a wrong word to use. Even stratagem hardly expresses the peculiarly quiet initiative, which self-deceit takes in all things. It is passive, or rather active in the same way in which any corrosive matter is active. It does not affect war, but peace. It wants to live quietly in our lives, or rather to live our lives for us, and be a kind of soul to us. It is this peculiarity which enables it to be so inveterate. Many bad things are inveterate in us, but none are so inveterate as this.

Then, in the next place, we must note its ability to put on the appearance of good. -No wonder the devil s prime minister should possess so mucli of the devil s chief talent. Yet we hardly do justice to this characteristic of self-deceit, when we call it an ability to assume the disguise of virtue. For it always wears it. It is its normal state, its law of gravitation, some thing essential to its being. If it looked evil we should never be deceived by it. I hope there are few men in the world who deliberately, and without the disturbing force of passion or temptation, choose evil with the certainty that it is evil, and in spite of that certainty. I do not believe that any creature out of hell chooses evil because ifc is evil. But even if it were so, there is no self-deceiving here. It is the hardness and audacity of conscious malice. Self-deceit is that which makes us do the devil s work, believing, though not always with an entirely honest faith, that it is God s. The incomparable perfection with which self-deceit can put on endless disguises, and hardly ever be found out in any of them, is the grand characteristic of its inauspicious genius. How it can look persuasive in startling attitudes, and natural in novel positions alas! we all know too well. It is a thing we can never sufficiently admire. It were to be wished that our fear was always equal to our admiration. There would be a much lower average of shipwrecks among immortal souls.

But it has a weak point. There is comfort in the thought. This weak point is another of its character istics. This is its soreness when touched, though it is for the most part very hard to touch. It escapes unharmed from our touch, but it sensibly winces under the pain of it. There are some noxious creatures in creation which by sound, or odour, or the betrayal of some other animal, are mercifully compelled to disclose their dangerous proximity to us. This is one of the footprints of God s love in natural history. Xow this characteristic of self-deceit is a parallel case. There are a hundred dangers in self-deceit, it would have been truer to have said a thousand, but none of them is so great as its concealment. Hence the compassion of its being made to betray itself by its sensitiveness when touched. We have all of us certain ways, prac tices, habits, attitudes, tricks of conduct, which no one can blame us for without putting us out of temper. We ourselves hardly know why it should be so. Why should we be unmoved when an unfriendly tongue touches some mode or manifestation of our conceit, and explode like gunpowder when it touches some other, which is neither more guilty, nor, which is to be chiefly considered from this point of view, more disgraceful or more ridiculous? We cannot tell. Very often we cannot analyze it, when our attention is called to it. Generally speaking, it is a betrayal of self-deceit, a discovery of the utmost moment to us, and one to be fearlessly followed up without delay. This sensitiveness of self-deceit is a fortunate characteristic of the vice, or rather an ingenuity of providence. It is the rattle in the snake s tail, sounding when for the snake s purpose it should be silent. Let us take care to search the bush whenever we hear the rattle. Half our bites would have been saved, if we had always done so.

The coexistence of self-deceit with so much good is another of its characteristics. It has a genius for alliances. All are natural to it, and fall in with its purposes, and extend its influence. Its power of combination is incredible, until observation and experience bring it home to us. It can amalgamate with things which have apparently repugnant, or even antagonistic, qualities. But it tends especially to ally itself with good. It selects the best of everything, and fastens by predilection on that which is most excellent. In many instances good drowns evil, when by the help of grace it comes to be in excess. But the quantity of good only freshens self-deceit, while on the other hand the smallest quantity of its poison disturbs the greatest quantity of good, and a moderate quantity of the evil is able even to neutralize an enormously disproportionate amount of good. Hypocrisy is generally short lived, unless it has some amount of piety along with it. So self-deceit purposely abides in the neigh bourhood of good, in order to be fostered and kept warm. Thus we have always to regard the amount of our grace as some index to the amount of our self-deceit, and this is in itself a disheartening consideration. Akin to this characteristic, perhaps simply a manifestation of it, we must notice also that quiet partnership with the sacraments into which this deceit intrudes itself. There is even a peculiar form of it belonging to frequent confession; and our corruption can make frequent communion an actual hotbed of self-deceit. I dare not go further into these questions, unless I went into them completely, and, if it were possible, exhaustively; and therefore I content myself with this dismal indication of them.

Self-deceit increases with our age. This is another of its characteristics. Some weeds grow in our souls by what appears a chance. Others die, if peculiar circumstances do not nurture them. Some are planted there by a single act of sin, an act which had neither parents or children, neither antecedents or consequences, so far as we can see; and they remain hardly green, barely not dead, and never grow at all. But self-deceit is an inevitable growth. The broadening of life is the widening of our faculties for deceiving ourselves. Simplicity is the only thing which is fatal to self-deceit. If we could be perfectly simple, we could inflict a mortal wound upon the monster. But life multiplies tilings. It entangles our motives. It distracts our attention. It complicates our daily conduct. It bewilders us by its rapidity, its versatility, its contradictoriness, its impcriousness, its fertility. All these things are prolific of new possibilities for self-deceit; and self-deceit fills them as air fills a vacuum, silently if allowed its own way and time, with a report if compelled to act suddenly and under distress. Only of this we may be sure, that the fountain flows more copiously each succeeding year, and that unless grace is evaporating the waters as they spring, life is but a match between grace and self-deceit, in which the latter will be victorious; and all that grace can do is to delay the hour of its own defeat. It is one of those operations of grace which must be a complete one in order to be decisively triumphant. In almost; all its other operations grace has a fair triumph even in comparative failure. But I doubt if it is so here.

But what is true in the life of nature is true also in the life of grace. For it is another characteristic of self-deceit, that its energies are quickened as people rise higher in the spiritual life. It has always been a melancholy truth, which no experienced ascetic has ever thought of gainsaying, that the higher operations of grace are more subject to delusion than the lower, except the very highest, which have to do with the

20-i SELF-DECEIT.

soul s uttermost union with God. Tins arises from their being more out of proportion with our infirmity and vileness; while those highest operations of all are nearly exempt from delusion, because, although they are still more disproportioned to our littleness, they bring with them more sovereign succours and more overwhelming transformations of grace. We are more easily able to manage common grace; and the highest graces easily manage us, because they liken us to themselves. But the higher graces, which stand midway, are replete with delusions precisely because they are not high enough to counterbalance of themselves the disproportioned weight they lay upon us. Very few, even of those aiming at perfection, rise above these middle graces. Hence it is practically the common rule, that, the higher men rise in the spiritual life, the more subject they become to the insidious operations of self-deceit. Interior mortifications are higher than bodily mortifications, and they are especially liable to this deceit. The broad fact of bodily pain is something palpable to feel our way by, and the pain itself dis abuses us of,as much self-deceit as the infliction of it can bring into us. But it is not so with the hio-her mortifications. So with prayer. The more nearly it comes to the confines of what is passive, the more liable it is to delusions. So with peculiar or definite prayers, such as to be thought ill of; they furnish us with end less opportunities of going wrong, even while they open almost interminable avenues of grace. However there is a sort of collateral consolation in this. The growth of self-deceit may be an index of growth in holiness; and in a land of such Egyptian darkness even what looks like light cheers the eye; and a chance almost has the value of a reality when all chance seemed gone.

But this is not all. Self-deceit seems actually to thrive on prayer, and to grow fat on contemplation. Prayer leads us into a new world, a world where a different language is spoken, where the forms of the scenery are different, and seen in a differently tinted atmosphere. AVe are not used to this, and easily make mistakes. There are no deceptions in nature to compare with those of light. We misjudge distances and sizes; we see things inverted, and even discern things which have nothing but a fantastical existence. It is a principle no less true in theology than in natural science, that light only gets colour by shining through darkness. In the world of prayer there are colours which we cannot easily assign rightly to the object or the atmosphere; there are splendours which dazzle, and which by dazzling mislead. Habit is the only safety with supernatural things; and by the time we become habituated to one set of supernatural objects the ascensions of grace have raised us into another. In the spiritual life we are always changing our sphere. It would not be life, but stagnation, were it otherwise. This is not the place to enter upon so large a subject; but it would not be difficult to show that all the phenomena of prayer, its dangers, its peculiarities, its reactions on the soul, its associations, and even its blessings, are singularly capable of affording nutriment to self-deceit. As a matter of fact, no man who has watched himself well, has failed to observe the way in which prayer, regarded as a habit, is beset by self-deceit.

In connection with this, we must notice another of its characteristics, which is the opportune and instantaneous manner in which it seizes on fresh graces, and diverts them to its own ends. The power of a temptation is mostly in its timeliness. With a nature so weak as ours, so peculiarly unable to withstand sur prises, that which is welltimed, either for good or evil, is almost irresistible. The empire of self-deceit rests in no slight degree upon the way in which it times every move. It is cautious and calculating, clear of eye and patient of temper. It never precipitates anything. It is never before its time, as the passions so often are. For the passions are continually overreaching their own ends, and baffling themselves by the animal vehemence of their impulses. They succeed rather by their obstinacy than by their skill. But self-deceit is delicate, diplomatic, noiseless, wary even in its swiftness, and does everything to a nicety. It works like a chemist, cleanly, finely, measuredly, and for the most part minutely. Its very gracefulness is the grace of a man who is conscious that he is intruding, and must make a title out of his manner. Then, when this timeliness of self-deceit is applied to the increments of grace which we are continually receiving, the danger and misery of our position become obvious. We seem to be in receipt of a good income, for our dividends are both regular and large. But in truth it is not all our own. Self-deceit levies a large income tax, and it is paid insensibly as our new graces come, so that we never know how much less rich we are than we seem to be. Only we know that we are considerably poorer. The discreet management of our grace is one of the most difficult subjects in the spiritual life. We must have Conferences on it some Lent or other.¹ Here it is enough to record it as a grievous and distasteful fact, that self-deceit does in fact take the bloom off our fresh graces as they come, so that our pining souls hardly ever taste a grace in all its own unhandled freshness. The fruit has been fingered, and the sugar in it has begun to ferment.

Thus self-deceit infests nature, and it infests grace. At one moment it is busy in one of these worlds, at the next moment in the other. Thus it is another of its characteristics that it is, in some persons habitually, and in others at particular times, almost indistinguishable from natural character. I have said before, that it is an inevitable growth: but a growth of what? Truly, of natural character, in a subject weakened, unhinged, and overbalanced by sin. Thus there is a necessary connection between our natural character and our own mode of self-deceit, although it would be as intolerable as untrue to confound the two things together. Yet this connection enables it, not only to time itself to our weak moments and to fasten on our weak points, but also to assume the look of our disposition so completely, that we may be unable to recognize ourselves. Then here is the danger. Almost every man considers his natural character, or some part of it, to be practically a necessity to him. He concedes to his disposition at least a limited right to lay down the law to him. He cannot resist this; he cannot overcome that. He assumes these as acknowledged facts in his government of himself, or rather management of himself. For unluckily self-government is little else but management. Here we arrive at that fountain of self-dispensation upon which so many souls make shipwreck, who cannot discern between want of trust in nature and want of trust in grace, between confidence in self and confidence in God. Then self-deceit intervenes, and with an adroitness^ which we should admire if it were less pernicious in its. effects, insinuates itself into the privileged parts of our character, into the dispositions we hare made up our minds to humour, and so becomes our law of life. We lie to ourselves, and make that lie our law. We had better say no more on that head.

We have to add to the characteristics of self-deceit, already enumerated, the manifoldness of its forms. We might almost say that its forms are as countless as the insects of the earth, and that each form is a species by itself. So versatile and so individual, is each man s self-deceit. It is as it were the essence of the subtlety of evil in each man s mind, combining with everything; and no two of its combinations are alike. Who can ever learn thoroughly a spirit so protean as this?

The invisible and distracting speed of its changes is another of its characteristics, intimately connected with the former. Who could pursue the electrical stream as it runs round the earth twenty-two times in a second? Yet self-deceit could outstrip it far in speed. There are no measures to the speed of thought. There are few thoughts gifted with such speed of self-origi nating logic as those by which we daily deceive ourselves.

To this we must also add the humiliatingness of self-deceit. There is a shame quite peculiar to the tight thraldom in which it holds us, whenever we come to perceive it. There are no men who shrink more instinctively from self-knowledge, than those who have once detected themselves in self-deceit. They cannot bear that shame over again. The detection has changed them in some respects. They are better men for it. Yet in some other respects, unless they have great grace, they are worse men also for the self-conviction. As men say at insurance offices, they are better lives, but their health is no better. This is especially the case with beginners in the spiritual life. When they are first turned loose into the grand prairies of asceticism and the vast forests of meditation, they fall into spiritual gluttony, and mistake unwieldiness for growth in robustness. They ought to have been sent out, as we used to hear in old years of farmers turning their cows into clover fields, with tight girths of rope round their stomachs lest they should eat till they burst. Then by this gluttony men find themselves out. All habits of lying are humiliating: what must selflying be? So they give up the whole matter in disgust, and turn moderate, and take to comfort, and lead unsatisfactory lives, and go to purgatory for years to expiate their discretion. The end of some is farther and more fatal than that. A man always thinks he must change himself when he changes his circumstances, or change his whole self when he is called upon to change any part of himself. This is why men are always puzzling us by contradicting their antecedents. This is why lawyers are so inaccurate when they turn authors, and mathematicians talk so badly. So with these poor fellows, whom the shame of self-deceit drives into a life where there is no possibility of hypocrisy, because there is no show of piety.

There is one characteristic more, which results from a contemplation of all the others. It is the peculiar antagonism to God which distinguishes self-deceit. He is absolute truth: it is the meanest falsehood. He is simplicity: it is confusion. He is light; it is darkness. He is merciful; it is unsparing. It belongs to us as creatures, not yet transformed into His image. 14

It is the grand complicated result of sin. It works against God, under ground and above ground^ in every soul and at every turn. It enables nature to taint grace. It teaches sin how to avoid repentance, apostolate is to dissuade from perfection. It shifts the rudders of lives, and sets them on rocks or on the sands. It is the source of almost all the bad steering in life, and it is no slight proportion of wrecks which are attributable to bad steering. It takes the bloom off God s glory which it cannot steal. It spoils deathbeds, and then dies happy.

Moreover this is a domestic enemy, who can never be put to death while we live ourselves, but, amid all other trials, and in addition to them, is to be held down in an uncomfortable, struggling captivity. Everything is food to it. Poisons nourish it. Mortifications strengthen it. Prayer fattens it. Sacraments make it bright and happy. There is but one way to deal with it, which is to starve it; and the danger is, lest, while we starve it, we starve our own souls also. Well may we pine for childlike simplicity and royal truth. God is true, and every man a liar. Yet consolation is in sight. There is one another characteristic of self-deceit; we have enumerated fifteen; this will make the sixteenth. It is, that there is oue thing, and one only, with which self-deceit appears to be nearly incompatible, or with which at least it can only be combined by being immensely weakened; and that is abiding sorrow for sin, the beautiful grace of contrition.

Footnotes

1. These Conferences on the Management of Grace havs now been de livered. Lent of 1858. ↩