The active will can also receive healing
All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will.
The demand for personal rejection of sin has a close theological parallel in Thomas Aquinas: justification requires the rational adult's free will both to turn toward God and to turn away from sin (Summa theologiae, I–II, question 113, articles 3 and 5). But Aquinas makes that willing movement itself an effect of God's grace. Receiving and acting are therefore compatible; the sinner's activity need not mean self-salvation. The inspected English text is the Fathers of the English Dominican Province translation, online at New Advent; the Summa was composed in the thirteenth century. Question 113.
Nor does this tradition reject medical imagery. Aquinas describes ignorance, malice, weakness and disordered desire as wounds of human nature (I–II, question 85, article 3). Question 85. Chesterton's patient/sinner contrast is thus most useful as a protest against eliminating repentance from reform, rather than as a complete account of Christian moral healing. His deliberately comic grammar makes dependence and action appear mutually exclusive where Aquinas's account joins them.
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