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I told him. Now, I ask you, is it not deplorable that so important and accurate an addition to his 
thesis should not have been accepted with pious glee? 
Things went from bad to worse as I grew in moral power. Part of the time I was well enough to go to 
a day school in Streatham, where I learnt at long last the terrible secret which I had racked my 
brains to discover for nearly three years. Here was certainly a sin worth sinning and I applied myself 
with characteristic vigour to its practice. 
As my father had been accustomed to drink wine, I could not see how drinking could be a sin. There 
was, therefore, no object in doing it. I never touched wine until I got to Trinity and I have never felt 
the smallest temptation to excess. My father had, however, not been a smoker, saying that if God 
had intended men to smoke He would have supplied a chimney at the top of the head2. I had no 
hesitation, therefore in making a great point of smoking. I had no thought of connecting the service 
of the "third King" with the reproduction of the species, and therefore no reason to suppose that my 
father had ever so far forgotten himself. I spent my whole time trying to enrol myself under the 
royal banner; but this could only be done by cooperation and it was sometime before I found the 
means. 
To return to my tutors. Relations were invariably strained. On one occasion the Rev. Fothergill had 
taken me for the summer to a fishing centre near Lairg called Forsinard. We went fishing one day to 
a loch over the moors and in the course of some argument I threw his rod far into the water. 
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He attacked me with fury, but I got a good hold and threw him after it. I then went of in the boat, 
but he caught me as I was pushing off, overturned the boat on top of me and tried to drown me. 
That night the gods still further favoured me. For a village girl named Belle McKay found herself 
with nothing better to do than to roam with me amid the heather. We returned together quite 
openly and Fothergill threw up the sponge. He took me back to London the next morning. Breaking 
the journey at Carlisle, I repeated my victory with a buxom chambermaid. 
But murder is not the only amusement open to pious tutors. The brother of the Dean of Westminster 
(he subsequently became a missionary and died at Lokoja) had been taught that if he couldn't be 
good he should be careful. While he was actually in charge of me his conduct was irreproachable, 
but after giving me up he invited me over to his mother's house at Maze Hill to spend the night, and 
did his best to live up to the reputation of his cloth. I did not allow him to succeed, not because I 
could see no sin in it, but because I thought it was a trap to betray me to my family. Just before he 
left for Africa he invited me again, prayed with me, confessed to his offence, excusing himself on 
the ground that his elder brother Jack, also a missionary, had led him astray, and asked my pardon. 
Once again I adopted the attitude of the man of the world, "Tut, tut, my dear fellow, don't mention 
it," which annoyed him very much, because he wanted to be taken seriously as the chief of sinners. 
One of the principal points about the sin stupidity is that it flatters the sinner. All insanity depends 
upon the exacerbation of the ego. The melancholic hugs the delusion that he has committed the 
unpardonable sin. Sins grow by repression and by brooding upon their enormity. Few people would 
go to excess if they were not unwholsomely over-excited about their trivial apishness. 
Most people, especially Freud, misunderstand the Freudian position. "The libido of the unconscious" 
is really "the true, will of the inmost self". The sexual characteristics of the individual are, it is true, 
symbolic indications of its nature, and when those are "abnormal", we may suspect that the self is 
divided against itself in some way. Experience teaches the adepts who initiate mankind that when 
any complex (duality) in the self is resolved (unity) the initiate becomes whole. The morbid sexual 
symptoms (which are merely the complaints of the sick animal) disappear, while the moral and 
mental consciousness is relieved from its civil war of doubt and self-obsession. The complete man, 
harmonized, flows freely towards his natural goal. 
It will be seen that I had developed enormously in these years. Unfortunately, my misery was so 
great during this long battle with my tyrants that while the incidents themselves stand out