Well, don't get it wrong. A gospel gone wrong in a mind is
dangerous, and worse than no gospel at all. If you get this gospel wrong
you may become conceited, and fancy yourself possessed of a power which
you haven't a notion of. To use will in any really affective way, you
must train your body, and take care of it, not ruin it, and let it run
to seed, or grow disfigured, or a ghastly tell-tale, a truth-teller, a
town-crier with a big bell going about and calling aloud all the silly
or criminal things you do. Now you have forgotten this, or perhaps you
never knew it, and so will could not work in you; not even, I believe,
a malign will to do mischief. You have thrown your body to the wolves,
and whoever looks upon you must see the marks of their teeth."
It was evident that he gloated on this idea that the body of the lady of
the feathers was forever useless for good, and even powerless to do much
effective evil. He seemed to revel in the notion that she was simply a
thing powerless, negative, and totally vain.
"I was mad ever to imagine the contrary," he said. Then, glancing away
from personality, he exclaimed with more energy:
"But sometimes a will is so great, so trained, so watchful of
opportunities, so acute and ready, that, instead of passing away
practically on the passing away of the body in which it has been born
and has lived, and merely living and working through the emanations
of itself that have clung to men and women in many different places,
instead--in fact--of being diffused--you understand me?" he broke
out, with an obvious delight in the grossness of her ignorance and the
denseness of her bewilderment and misunderstanding of him--"which is a
sort of death, it seizes, whole, as a body, with all the members sound,
upon another home.
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