destroyed, has always suggested to me that sin can be eliminated. But when one remembers the price that Christ paid to gain his victory over sin, it was obviously not going to be easy.
However the vision of indwelling, wedded to mutual understanding and mutual trust, is so dazzling in its freedom and universal virtue, and the vision of sin and mutual mistrust is so sordid in its parochialism, that I did not need much persuasion to make the attempt. The difficulty, as always, was to see.
Some people might suggest that it would be helpful if I sketched out the thought processes leading up to my decision to begin. It would not be helpful. Outside the narrow discipline of the law, even if a decision is correct, different people will give different reasons to justify it; even more so, if it is wrong, will different reasons be given to condemn it. The reasons for making a decision are entirely personal, and do not concern others at all. The correctness of the decision is another matter.
So the reader will have to take it on trust that the amount of thought beforehand was immense, and any preparation that could be made was made, that I was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime, I was ready so far as I was able, and that I seized it with both hands. It was pretty obvious from the start that I was going to fail, but nothing in my experience has taught me the attempt was ill-conceived, or a wild-goose chase. On the contrary, however inept my actual efforts may have been, I was right to make the attempt.
If no one were ever to make the attempt, what would the result be? So long as society remains a conglomerate of individuals each pursuing their own individual and usually selfish aims, so long is society condemned to remain a fallen world. Unless one subscribes to the pathetic fallacy of the perfectibility of man, which Rousseau made fashionable at the end of the eighteenth century, in Imperial Prussia of all places, the prospect is depressing. Selfishness leads…