Another strong indication of allowing our weaknesses and faults to be positive and our effort against them negative is the destructive habit of giving excuses.  If fault is found with us and there is justice in it, it does not make the slightest difference how many things we have done that are good, or how much better we do than some one else does—­the positive way is to say “thank you” in spirit and in words, and to aim directly toward freeing ourselves from the fault.  How ridiculous it would seem if when we were told that we had a smooch on our left cheek, we were to insist vehemently upon the cleanliness of our right cheek, or our forehead, or our hands, instead of being grateful that our attention should be called to the smooch and taking soap and water and at once washing it off.  Or how equally absurd it would be if we went into long explanations as to how the smooch would not have been there if it had not been for so and so, and so and so, or so and so,—­and then with all our excuses and explanations and protestations, we let the smooch stay—­and never really wash it off.

And yet this is not an exaggeration of what most of us do when our attention is called to defects of character.  When we excuse and explain and tell how clean the other side of our face is, we are putting ourselves positively on the side of the smooch.  So we are putting ourselves entirely on the side of the illness or the pain or the oppression of difficult circumstances when we give excuses or resist or pretend not to see fault in ourselves, or when we confess faults and are contented about them, or when we give all our attention to what is disagreeable and no attention to the normal way of gaining our health or our freedom.

Then all these expressions of self or of illness are to us positive, and our efforts against them only negative.  In such cases, of course, the self possesses us as surely as the grip possesses us when we succumb entirely to all its horrors and make no positive effort to yield out of it.  And the possession of the self is much worse, much deeper, much more subtle.  When possessed with selfishness, we are laying up in our subconsciousness any number of self-seeking motives which come to the surface disguised and compel us to make impulsive and often foolish efforts to gain our own ends.  The self is every day proving to be the enemy of the man or woman whom it possesses.

God leaves us free to obey Him or to choose our own selfish way, and in His infinite Providence He is constantly showing us that our own selfish way leads to death and obedience to Him leads to life.  That is, that only in obedience to Him do we find our real freedom.  He is constantly showering us with a tender generosity and kindness that seems inconceivable, and sometimes it seems as if more often than not we were refusing to see.  Indeed we blind ourselves by making all pains of body and faults of soul positive and our efforts against them negative.