Sunday, Dec. 11, 1904.

Painful and revolting associations are called up by the phrase—"leading the double life." To the aversion provoked by the evil itself, is added in such cases the disgust excited by the hypocrisy with which it is cloaked. He who leads a double life offends not only by the wrong he does, but by borrowing the plumes of virtue. He lives a perpetual lie; he is "a whited sepulchre, clean on the outside, full of filth and corruption within." The Beecher trial at the time so profoundly agitated the whole country, because the accusations brought forward associated the name of one of the most prominent characters of the nation, a man of brilliant talent and meritorious service, with secret impurity. The more meritorious such a man's services, the more damning the charges if they be established. Nor do we admit in such cases the sophistical argument, that the interests of public morality require the facts to be hushed up in order to avoid a scandal. Nothing is so imperative where guilt really exists as that it be confessed and expiated. The public conscience requires the truth. Let the sinner make a clean breast of it; let the atmosphere be cleared by an act of public humiliation. No injury to the cause of public morality is so great as the lurking suspicion that men who stand forth as exponents of morality are themselves corrupt. Lurking suspicion, distrust of all the moral values, is worse than recognition of human weakness, however deplorable.

There are other examples of the double life, with which all who have knowledge of the world's ways are familiar. That of the merchant, for instance, who, though he has long been virtually a bankrupt, conceals his position behind a screen of opulence, emulating the sumptuous expenditure of the rich, living a life of glittering show; tortured inwardly by the fear of exposure, yet not courageous enough to be honest; sinking deeper himself and, what is worse, dragging others down with him. A young man at college sometimes leads a double life, his letters home being filled with accounts of his legitimate employments, while at the same time he is leading the life of the prodigal, the spendthrift, the dissipated sot.

The dual life has been depicted in powerful colors by poets and writers of fiction; as, for instance, by Hawthorne in his "Scarlet Letter," by Robert Louis Stevenson in his "Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." I suppose if there be such a thing as hell on earth, the double life is another name for it. Yet I know of no writer of fiction whose plummet has sounded the depths of this hell. In Stevenson's story one gets the impression of a too mechanical separation between the two sides. The man is at one moment the benevolent doctor, and at another the malignant fiend. The device of the drug is introduced to explain the transition; but the transformation is too sudden, too abrupt. Jekyll and Hyde dwell side by side in the same body, and the relations between them have not been wrought out with sufficient subtlety. It is rather a broad moral parable than a subtle study of man's dual nature.

The initial point I desire to make is, that in certain cases the inner torture and anguish of the dual life can only be ended by publishing the secret, so long and jealously hidden. Just as the criminal must stand judgment in a court of law, so must the double-minded man stand judgment in the court of public opinion. It is not possible to determine by a hard and fast line, when such exposure is obligatory; but in general it may be said that it is required in those cases where publicity is necessary to set things right and to repair the wrong that has been done to others.

There are, however, cases in which others are not affected, or only indirectly so; in which the evil relates to the personal life and its consequences are private to the man himself. The situation is such as is described by Goethe, when he speaks of the two souls dwelling within the human breast; the soul itself in its own sphere being divided against itself. The man is conscious of rectitude in one part of his conduct, of magnanimous impulses, of high and noble aspirations. He feels himself allied on one side to what is best and purest, and at the same time is aware of another side which in his saner moments fills him with loathing, and poisons for him life's cup of satisfaction. It is of this class of cases that I propose to speak. And here the terrible fact stares us in the face, that if the dual life be interpreted in this sense, there is hardly a man who is not leading it. Even the best of men have been aware of an abhorrent side of their nature. What else can St. Paul mean when he speaks of the continual warfare between the two laws—"the law of the flesh that is in his members, and the law of God that is in his spirit"? What else do the confessions of St. Augustine reveal but the continual oscillations of a finely poised nature between the two extremes? What else can we gather from certain passages in Tennyson's writings, but hints of a miserable and grievous struggle of the same sort? And what an intolerable burden to any person of integrity, to any one who would at least be honest, to think that he passes for better than he is, to think that if men only could see his heart as he sees it, they would pass him by with scorn instead of admiration! Yet as a rule, in such cases self-revelation is not only not demanded, but not even allowable. The opening of the secret chambers of one's life to the public, confessions like those of Rousseau, are, if anything, indecent and nauseating. The case of a man in such situations is bad enough, but the remedy for it is perforce committed to his own hands. Let him put his hand to the plough and not turn back, let him grapple with the evil in his nature and subdue and transform it, let him accomplish his inner redemption, let him make himself what he ought to be—what others perhaps think he is. What aid can the spiritual view of life extend to him in this stupendous business?