Our ancestors called these uprushes the solicitations of the devil, seeking to destroy the Christian soul; and regarded them with justice as an opportunity of testing our spiritual strength.

It is true that every man has within him such a tempting spirit; but its characters can better be studied in the Zoological Gardens than in the convolutions of a theological hell.
"External Reason," says Boehme, "supposes that hell is far from us.

But it is near us.

Every one carries it in himself."[66] Many of our vices, in fact, are simply savage qualities--and some are even savage virtues--in their old age.

Thus in an organized society the acquisitiveness and self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive dependent on his own powers survive as the sins of envy and covetousness, and are seen operating in the dishonesty of the burglar, the greed and egotism of the profiteer: and, on the highest levels, the great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to a perverted expression of that self-regarding instinct without which the individual could hardly survive.
When therefore qualities which were once useful on their own level are outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life's spiritualization, then--whatever they may be--they belong to the body of death, not to the body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump--none other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing."[67] Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul.
Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us.