If we could once be strongly started in obedience to
the law from love of the law itself, we should find in that
impersonal love a clear light and power for effective action both in
the larger and in the smaller questions of life.
There is a popular cry against introspection and an insistence that
it is necessarily morbid, which works in direct opposition to true
self-control. Introspection for its own sake is self-centred and
morbid, but we might as well assert that it is right to have dirty
hands so long as we wear gloves, and that it is morbid to want to be
sure that our hands are clean under our gloves, as to assert that
introspection for the sake of our true spiritual freedom is morbid.
If I cannot look at my selfish motives, how am I going to get free
from them? It is my selfish motives that prevent true self-control.
It is my selfish motives that prompt me to the false control of
repression, which is counterfeit and for the sake of appearances
alone. We must see these motives, recognize and turn away from them,
in order to control ourselves interiorly into line with law. We
cannot possibly see them unless we look for them. If we look into
ourselves for the sake of freedom, for the sake of our greater power
for use, for the sake of our true self-control, what can be more
wholesome or what can lead us to a more healthy habit of looking out
from ourselves into the lives and interests of others? The farther
we get established in motives that are truly unselfish, the sooner
we shall get out of our own light, and the wider our horizon will
be; and the wider our horizon, the greater our power for use.
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