He abused the teetotal sect with ferocity, as he handed the
seltzer, and pouring out a glass of water for himself, was about to
resume his monologue, when Cotgrave broke in--

'I can't stand it, you know,' he said, 'your paradoxes are too
monstrous. A man may be a great sinner and yet never do anything sinful! Come!' 'You're quite wrong,' said Ambrose. 'I never make paradoxes; I wish I
could. I merely said that a man may have an exquisite taste in Romanée
Conti, and yet never have even smelt four ale. That's all, and it's more
like a truism than a paradox, isn't it? Your surprise at my remark is
due to the fact that you haven't realized what sin is. Oh, yes, there is
a sort of connexion between Sin with the capital letter, and actions
which are commonly called sinful: with murder, theft, adultery, and so
forth. Much the same connexion that there is between the A, B, C and
fine literature. But I believe that the misconception--it is all but
universal--arises in great measure from our looking at the matter
through social spectacles. We think that a man who does evil to _us_ and
to his neighbours must be very evil. So he is, from a social standpoint;
but can't you realize that Evil in its essence is a lonely thing, a
passion of the solitary, individual soul? Really, the average murderer,
_quâ_ murderer, is not by any means a sinner in the true sense of the
word. He is simply a wild beast that we have to get rid of to save our
own necks from his knife. I should class him rather with tigers than
with sinners.' 'It seems a little strange.' 'I think not. The murderer murders not from positive qualities, but from
negative ones; he lacks something which non-murderers possess. Evil, of
course, is wholly positive--only it is on the wrong side. You may
believe me that sin in its proper sense is very rare; it is probable
that there have been far fewer sinners than saints. Yes, your standpoint
is all very well for practical, social purposes; we are naturally
inclined to think that a person who is very disagreeable to us must be a
very great sinner! It is very disagreeable to have one's pocket picked,
and we pronounce the thief to be a very great sinner. In truth, he is
merely an undeveloped man. He cannot be a saint, of course; but he may
be, and often is, an infinitely better creature than thousands who have
never broken a single commandment. He is a great nuisance to _us_, I
admit, and we very properly lock him up if we catch him; but between his
troublesome and unsocial action and evil--Oh, the connexion is of the
weakest.' It was getting very late. The man who had brought Cotgrave had probably
heard all this before, since he assisted with a bland and judicious
smile, but Cotgrave began to think that his 'lunatic' was turning into a
sage. 'Do you know,' he said, 'you interest me immensely? You think, then,
that we do not understand the real nature of evil?' 'No, I don't think we do. We over-estimate it and we under-estimate it. We take the very numerous infractions of our social "bye-laws"--the very
necessary and very proper regulations which keep the human company
together--and we get frightened at the prevalence of "sin" and "evil." But this is really nonsense. Take theft, for example. Have you any
_horror_ at the thought of Robin Hood, of the Highland caterans of the
seventeenth century, of the moss-troopers, of the company promoters of
our day? 'Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an enormous
importance to the "sin" of meddling with our pockets (and our wives)
that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.' 'And what is sin?' said Cotgrave. 'I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your
feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you,
and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with
horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird
song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to
swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at
night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning? 'Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.' 'Look here,' said the third man, hitherto placid, 'you two seem pretty
well wound up. But I'm going home. I've missed my tram, and I shall have
to walk.' Ambrose and Cotgrave seemed to settle down more profoundly when the
other had gone out into the early misty morning and the pale light of
the lamps. 'You astonish me,' said Cotgrave. 'I had never thought of that. If that
is really so, one must turn everything upside down. Then the essence of
sin really is----'

'In the taking of heaven by storm, it seems to me,' said Ambrose. 'It
appears to me that it is simply an attempt to penetrate into another and
higher sphere in a forbidden manner. You can understand why it is so
rare. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres,
higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are
amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints,
and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still, and men of genius,
who partake sometimes of each character, are rare also. Yes; on the
whole, it is, perhaps, harder to be a great sinner than a great saint.' 'There is something profoundly unnatural about sin? Is that what you
mean?' 'Exactly. Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but
holiness works on lines that _were_ natural once; it is an effort to
recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to
gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in
making this effort man becomes a demon. I told you that the mere
murderer is not _therefore_ a sinner; that is true, but the sinner is
sometimes a murderer. Gilles de Raiz is an instance. So you see that
while the good and the evil are unnatural to man as he now is--to man
the social, civilized being--evil is unnatural in a much deeper sense
than good. The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the
sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he
repeats the Fall.' 'But are you a Catholic?' said Cotgrave. 'Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church.' 'Then, how about those texts which seem to reckon as sin that which you
would set down as a mere trivial dereliction?' 'Yes; but in one place the word "sorcerers" comes in the same sentence,
doesn't it? That seems to me to give the key-note. Consider: can you
imagine for a moment that a false statement which saves an innocent
man's life is a sin? No; very good, then, it is not the mere liar who is
excluded by those words; it is, above all, the "sorcerers" who use the
material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as
instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you
this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with
materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness
if we encountered it.'