suffers by your being unpunctual.  If it comes to that, isn’t it quite as good a discipline for punctual people to learn to wait without impatience for the unpunctual?  Supposing an unpunctual person were to say, ‘I do it on principle, to teach precise people not to mind waiting,’ where is the flaw in that?  Take what you call laziness.  Some people work better by fits and starts, some do better work by regularity.  The point is to know how you work best.  You must not make the convenience of average people into a moral law.  The thing to aim at is that a man should not go on doing a thing which he honestly believes to be wrong and hurtful, out of a mere habit.  Take the small excesses of which you speak—­food, drink, sleep, tobacco.  Some people want more of these things than others; you can’t lay down exact laws.  A man ought to find out precisely what suits him best; but I’m not prepared to say that regularity in these matters is absolutely good for everyone.  The thing is not to be interfered with by your habits; and the end of all discipline is, I believe, efficiency, vitality, and freedom; but it is no good substituting one tyranny for another.  I was reading the life of a man the other day who simply could not believe that anyone could think a thing wrong and yet do it.  His biographer said, very shrewdly, that his sense of sin was as dead as his ear for music—­that he did not possess even the common liberty of right and wrong.  That’s a bad case of atrophy!  You must not, of course, be at the mercy of your moods, but you must not be at the mercy of your ethical habits either.  Of the two, I am not sure that the habit isn’t the most dangerous.”

“You seem to be holding a brief all round, Father,” said Vincent.

“No, I am not doing that,” said Father Payne, “but my theory is this.  You must know, first of all, what you are aiming at, and you must apply your discipline sensibly to that.  There are certain things in us which we know to be sloppy—­we lie in bed, we dawdle, we eat too much, we moon over our work.  All that is obviously no good, and all sensible people try to pull themselves up.  When you have found out what suits you, do it boldly; but the man who admires discipline for its own sake is a sort of hypochondriac—­a medicine-drinker.  I have a friend who says that if he stays in a house, and sees a bottle of medicine in a cupboard, he is always tempted to take a dose.  ‘Is it that you feel ill?’ I once said to him.  ‘No,’ he said; ‘but I have an idea that it might do me good.’  The disciplinarian is like that:  he is always putting a little strain upon himself, cutting off this and that, trying new rules, heading himself off.  He has an uneasy feeling that if he likes anything, it is a sort of sign that he should abstain from it:  he mistrusts his impulses and instincts.  He thinks he is getting to talk too much, and so he practises holding his tongue.  The truth is that he is suspicious of life.  He is like the schoolmaster who says,