Westminster Sermons / with a Preface

by Charles Kingsley

them in all ages. It tormented the old Greeks and Romans; it torments some Eastern peoples still—that terrible thought—I am I myself, and cannot be any one else. I am answerable for all that I ever did, or shall do; and no one can be answerable for me. All the bad deeds I ever did, the bad thoughts I ever thought, are mine, parts of me, and will be for ever. I can no more escape from them than I can spring off my own shadow. But men have been always trying to escape; to escape from the burden of their own self, and the dread of an evil conscience; and have invented religion after religion, often fantastic enough, often pathetic enough likewise, in hopes of hiding from themselves the secret thought—I am I, and must be myself for ever. But I am not what I ought to be, and therefore I may be wrong, and miserable for ever. And how many people, in this Christian land, are saying at this very moment to themselves, “Oh that I could get rid of this I myself in me, which is so discontented and unhappy! Oh that I had no conscience! Oh that I could forget myself!” And they try to forget themselves by dissipation, by gaming, by drinking, by taking narcotic drugs, even sometimes by suicide, as a last desperate attempt to escape from themselves, they know not and care not whither. It is all in vain. There is no escape from self. As the pious poet whose bust stands beneath yonder tower has said:

Each in his separate sphere of joy and woe
Our hermit spirits dwell, and range apart.

I must be I, thou must be thou, he must be he, she must be she, and no one else, throughout our mortal lives, and,

for aught we can tell, for ever; alone, each of us, with our own souls, our own thoughts, our own actions, our own hopes, our own fears, our own deservings. Stay alone:—with all these? Yes, and alone with one more. Each of us is alone with God. Face to face with God, seen by Him through and through, and directly answerable to Him at every moment of our lives, for every deed, and word, and thought. And is that not a more terrible thought than any? Ah! my friends, it may be. But it may be also the most comforting of all thoughts, the only really comforting thought, if we will but look at the question as the Psalmist looks at it, and cry with him to God, “I am Thine, oh save the me whom Thou hast made.”

There are those, and those who deserve a respectful hearing, who will differ from all that I have been saying, and indeed from the beliefs of 999 out of 1000 of the human race in every age. They will say—This fancy that you are an I, a self, individual and indivisible, is but a fancy; one of the many idols which man creates for himself, by bestowing reality and personality on mere abstractions like this I and self. Each man is not one indivisible, much less indestructible, thing or being. He is really many things. He is the net result of all the organic cells of his body, and of all the forces which act through them within, and of all the circumstances which influence them from without, ay, and of all the forces and circumstances which have influenced his ancestors ever since man appeared on the earth. But because he remembers many states of consciousness, many moments in which he was aware of sensations within him, and of

circumstances without him, therefore he strings all these together, and talks of them as one thing which he calls I; and speaks of them as his remembrances of himself, when really the many things are but links of a chain which is perpetually growing at one end and dropping off at the other. To say, therefore, that he is the same person as he was when a child, or as he would be when an old man,—is, when we know that every atom of his physical frame has changed again and again during the course of years, a popular delusion, or at least a misnomer used for convenience’ sake; as when we say that the sun rises and sets, when we know that the earth moves, and not the sun. A man, therefore, according to this school, is really no more a person, one and indivisible, than is the coral with its million polypes, the tree with its million buds, or even the thunderstorm with its million vesicles of attracting and repelling vapour.

Now that a truth underlies such a theory as this, I am the last to deny. How much of the character of each man is inherited, how much of it depends on his actual bodily organization; how much of it, alas! on the circumstances of his youth; how much of it changes with the mere physical change from youth to old age—who does not know all this, who has ever needed to fight for himself the battle of life? Only, I say, this is but half the truth; and these philosophers cannot state their half-truth, without employing the very words which they repudiate; without using the very personal pronouns, the I and me, the thou and thee, the he and him, to which they deny any real existence. Beside, I ask—Is the

experience and the conclusion of the vast majority of all mankind to go for nothing? For if there be one point on which human beings have been, and are still, agreed, it is this—that each of them is, to his joy or his sorrow, an I; a separate person. And, I should have said, this conviction becomes stronger and stronger in each of them, the more human they become, civilized, and worthy of the respect and affection of their fellow-men.

For what rises in them, or seems to rise, more and more painfully and fiercely? What but that protest, that battle, between the everlasting I within them, and their own passions, and motives, and circumstances; which St Paul of old called the battle between the spirit on one side, and the flesh and the world on the other. The nobler, surely, and healthier, even for a moment, the manhood of any man is, the more intense is that inward struggle, which man alone of all the animals endures. Is it in moments of brave endeavour, whether to improve our own character, or to benefit our fellow-men: or is it in moments of depression, disappointment, bodily sickness, that we are tempted to say?—I will fight no more. I cannot mend myself, or the world. I am what nature has made me; and what I am, I must remain. I, and all I know, and all I love, are things, not persons; parts of nature, even as the birds upon the bough, only more miserable, because tormented by a hope which never will be fulfilled; an empty pageant of mere phenomena, blown onward toward decay, like dying autumn leaves, before the “everlasting storm which no one guides.” Is this the inward voice of health and strength? or

rather, for evil or for good, that voice which bids the man, the woman, in the mysterious might of the free I within, trample on their own passions, defy their own circumstances, even to the death; fall back, in utter need, on the absolute instinct of self; and even though all seem lost, say with Medea in the tragedy—