This chapter is specially recommended to clergymen, "high livers," and other erring ones addicted to chicken dinner on Sunday.

   There's nothing inherently vicious about the chicken--Nature made it. But there is in the trimmings--a French chef made them.

   Paris vice is the post-prandium to Paris viands.

   London vice to London viands, Berlin vice to Berlin viands, New York vice to New York viands. Since it is no more unrighteous to be a volatile Frenchman than to be a beefy Englishman, a dense German, or a neurotic American.

   I ask not if a man be holy--I ask if he be whole. And these one-sided racialists are none of them whole.

   Wholeness presupposes and ensures holiness. Since vice is a matter, not of moral depravity, but of physical and mental excess or deficiency. The Conquest Fast reduces this excess and reveals this deficiency. Herein is it advisable for those also who pride themselves on being "exemplary"--they lack good red blood and riot in bad blue thought. Incidentally I may observe you can't "set" a good example--it isn't stationary.

   Speaking of good red blood. It has been a time-honored fallacy of both Physiology and Theology that white corpuscles made pure blood. Redundant perhaps to say "time-honored fallacy"--since fallacies are about the only things time honors anyway. In matters of morals especially has the anaemic been mistaken for the virtuous, and the ruddy for the vicious. We now know--at least a few of us do--that the more red corpuscles the better the blood; and the redder they are the purer it is. Quality counts--not color. For white corpuscles are but disease-clots.

   The whitest part of the lily is not the mother-part. Wholly encircled by white, as passion always should be, it enters on a deeper hue when once it finds its heart. Prudery wears lilies--to appear pure; Love, being pure, may wear the roses that symbolize power. I like them best together though--roses and lilies in the same vase. My Sweetheart does too. Even to mention one's sweetheart to others is almost sacrilege. Certainly to describe her is to defame her. You may be glad you are reading instead of listening. Because then--unless you are one of the few rare souls that understand--I should hardly feel like speaking of Love at all.

   Only Love prizes equally roses and lilies.

   Only lovers therefore will sense my meaning in this chapter.

   It is worse to be so good you can't be bad, than so bad you won't be good.

   If saints are as valuable as sinners, why should saints spend their lives saving sinners?

   A sinner is a man who can't live without loving; a reformer is a man who can't love at all.

   Now I've done it. Henceforth am I ostracized by the respectable and excommunicated by the pious. A terrible fate--but shared by all the great souls that have ever lived.

   There are compensations though. For instance, I shan't get any more fishy handshakes.

   Understand, I am neither arraigning virtue nor defending vice.

   Both defense and arraignment imply counter-charge. And I never argue. We argue solely to convince ourselves. Since assured of myself, I have outgrown disputation.

   My neighbor's virtue or vice is none of my business--until he asks me to make it so. But when my own virtue is condemned as vice and vice extolled as virtue, it's in order for me to say a word. This has often happened. Hence several words.

   First let us define "sin."

   Sin is the temporary thwarting of the soul by forces outside itself. ''Saving souls" is therefore an absurdity.

   Salvation is the soul's assumption of its right to rule--no more, no less. He therefore is a savior who can help the soul best, quickest and fullest to express itself.

   I recognize that what the church calls sin does thwart the soul. But only temporarily. And it is less of an evil to be thwarted than to be throttled. Any expression is better than all repression. Indeed the greatest mistake proves to be the greatest lesson in disguise. If the soul knew itself it would not sin; if it trusted itself it could not sin.

   Theology actually causes much of the sin it would remedy--by teaching the soul to fear itself instead of to know and trust. Ignorant of realities and terrified by symptoms, both Medicine and Theology have dosed the sufferer with germicides and antipyretics. Result to body and soul; congestion, stagnation, death. This because we take the temperature and look at the tongue, rather than learn wherein Nature has been violated. If souls were as apprehensive of enteric fever as they are of eczema, the death-rate of souls would be cut in two.

   It is almost never justifiable to remain a "sinner;" it is almost always justifiable to become a sinner. Better love the wrong thing than not to love at all--but next time, love the right thing. You see there's hardly anybody to tell us what the right thing is. So we seldom know until, alone and forsaken, we have somehow stumbled on it for ourselves.

   No--not alone, and not forsaken. God was with us through the sin that men condemned. Indeed, that is why they condemned--because God had left their hearts to comfort ours.

   Anything is sin that sounds louder than the voice of your own soul. It may be sinful for you to hear a sermon, or join in prayer;--if the sermon and the prayer represent some childish notion of Deity that you have outgrown.

   Now the soul has four principal mediums of communication; instinct, intuition, inspiration, and revelation. To violate any one of these is to sin. Instinct is what makes us good animals--or would if we would let it. But the instinct in most of us is dead--it isn't "nice" to be like animals. I often wish the beasts of the field and the birds of the air could laugh--how they would ridicule men! No they wouldn't either; it takes a man to be uncharitable--animals don't know how.

   No wonder men aren't in possession of themselves. They attribute to the animals all their bad qualities and to the gods all their good ones. I think both animals and gods would be improved by a judicious interchange. Indeed the old heathen gods, with their half-human grotesqueness, were often nearer Truth than our modern Deities of glossy raiment and wooden hearts.

   I have treated somewhat on this matter of instinct in another chapter. Let me merely say in passing that the violation of instinct is the beginning of all vice. It is just as truly a crime to wear a tight shoe or to eat when not hungry as to murder a fellow-man. Not so much of a crime, of course. Many a temperance reformer is a worse drunkard than the rum victim he condemns. He is a food-inebriate. He habitually stuffs himself on viands that vitiate every atom of his being. Equally with the drunkard is he a slave to the senses--and on top of that a hypocrite. Any minister who must have his cigar knows less real religion than the weed he smokes.

   Before proceeding further, let me give you my idea of virtue.

   Virtue consists in the utmost expression of the divine through the natural.

   Not through the human--since the human is seldom the natural. Seldom therefore the divine, there being no distinction. I am not moral. Neither am I immoral. I am unmoral--like both animals and angels. I do not defend or condone wanton wickedness. The man who entices a virgin to corruption should pay the severest penalty. But the man who loves a virgin and is loved of her--no law need they to authorize what God has implanted.

   In short, the abandon of unmorality is as desirable as the wantonness of immorality is deplorable.

   Here again I am quite willing to stand alone. It's rather exhilarating when you get used to it--nothing human to shut off the hills, the sun, and the stars.

   To be famous, one must do what others cannot.

   To be infamous, one must do what others dare not. Count me with the few great souls that must do both.

   We're a long time getting to the Conquest Fast.

   But we couldn't come cross-lots, because there were some things of interest I wanted to point out along the path we took.

   Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey, to whom I have already referred, has written another book, a sequel to his first. In this he shows how Fasting may be made an almost infallible cure for Chronic Alcoholism. If you care to study further the relation of food to virtue and to vice, you should by all means get this book.

   The point is simply this.

   During the Conquest Fast, one's taste for everything unnatural wholly disappears. Liquors, tobacco, spiced foods, tight clothing, perfervid literature, church worship, loveless passion, civilized habits;--these all go glimmering. Even so piquant a thing as a problem play ceases to appeal.

   A problem play is an interrogation-point lost in the mud. And the problem is why the author forgot the soap. Which is irrelevant, but interesting.

   The clue to race regeneration lies right here.

   For ages, our moralists, theologians and reformers have mistaken human encrustment for human integument.

   "Spirit is willing, but flesh is weak"? No. Flesh is not weak. Soul is impeded not by very flesh, but by the externals that cumber flesh. Clear your blood of wrong food, your lungs of wrong air, your brain of wrong thought, your nerves of wrong tremors, your heart of wrong fear, and your soul of wrong residue from all these other wrong things;--then see how absolutely right the whole world becomes.

   The Conquest Fast won't transform a sinner into a god through the space of twenty, thirty or forty days. It takes eons of evolution to do that. And on this planet the process is hut begun.

   But it will hasten the end desired--perhaps help you skip an incarnation or two. There's no hurry though, time being purely imaginary. So if you'd rather "eat, drink and be merry "all the while, I haven't the least objection. Once in a while I like a sumptuous dinner too--and like it mighty well. We wouldn't be natural if we didn't. "Be a good animal"--that's Nature's first commandment, with promise.