Despair

"Are we to aim at cowardice - or at courage, with consequent pride - or at hatred of the Germans?"  "But as we cannot supply these qualities ourselves, we can only use them as supplied by the Enemy - and this means leaving [God] a kind of foothold in those men whom, otherwise, we have made most securely our own."  "Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion...Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people's enemies."  "...hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful...Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often //compensation// by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame...Now this is a ticklish business. We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice."

"And in fact, in the last war, thousands of humans, by discovering their own cowardice, discovered the whole moral world for the first time. In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them. There is here a cruel dilemma before us. If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy's hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupoer."  "He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply //one// of the virtues, but the form of  every virtue at the testing point..."  "Despair. This would be a great triumph...[but] he knows that Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it."  "For remember, the //act// of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion of fear is, in itself, no sin and, though we enjoy it, does us no good."