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Title: The Varieties of Religious Experience
Author: William James
Release Date: October 17, 2014 [Ebook #621]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO 8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE***
The Varieties of Religious Experience
A Study in Human Nature
Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in
1901-1902
By
William James
Longmans, Green, And Co,
New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras
1917
CONTENTS
Preface.
Lecture I. Religion And Neurology.
Lecture II. Circumscription of the Topic.
Lecture III. The Reality Of The Unseen.
Lectures IV and V. The Religion Of Healthy-Mindedness.
Lectures VI And VII. The Sick Soul.
Lecture VIII. The Divided Self, And The Process Of Its Unification.
Lecture IX. Conversion.
Lecture X. Conversion--Concluded.
Lectures XI, XII, And XIII. Saintliness.
Lectures XIV And XV. The Value Of Saintliness.
Lectures XVI And XVII. Mysticism.
Lecture XVIII. Philosophy.
Lecture XIX. Other Characteristics.
Lecture XX. Conclusions.
Postscript.
Index.
Footnotes
[Title Page]
To
C. P. G.
IN FILIAL GRATITUDE AND LOVE
PREFACE.
This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an
appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of
Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten
lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me that
the first course might well be a descriptive one on "Man's Religious
Appetites," and the second a metaphysical one on "Their Satisfaction
through Philosophy." But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter
as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being
postponed entirely, and the description of man's religious constitution
now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than
stated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires
immediately to know them should turn to pages 511-519, and to the
"Postscript" of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express
them in more explicit form.
In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us
wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have
loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among
the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some readers I
may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to
offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will
say, are not sane. If, however, they will have the patience to read to the
end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I
there combine the religious impulses with other principles of common sense
which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow the individual
reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will.
My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D. Starbuck,
of Stanford University, who made over to me his large collection of
manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East Northfield, a friend
unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious information; to Theodore
Flournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller, of Oxford, and to my colleague
Benjamin Rand, for documents; to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to
my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late
of Cracow, for important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations
with the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at
Glenmore, above Keene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well
express.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
March, 1902.
LECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY.
It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this
desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of
receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of
European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not
a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from
Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or
literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to
cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were
visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the
Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans
listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure
it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.
Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American
imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of
this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood.
Professor Fraser's Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the
first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe-
struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton's
class-room therein contained. Hamilton's own lectures were the first
philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was
immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of
reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self
promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official
here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries
with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.
But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that
it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic
obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say
only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to
run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go
by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the
Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the
United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher
matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament,
as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English
speech may more and more pervade and influence the world.
-------------------------------------
As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this
lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the
history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch
of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the
religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other
of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem,
therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to
invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.
If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather
religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must
confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in
literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men, in works
of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of
a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full
significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and
perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most
concern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the
religious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their
ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern
writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The
_documents humains_ which we shall find most instructive need not then be
sought for in the haunts of special erudition--they lie along the beaten
highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the
character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer's lack of
special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and
paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some
time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no
detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more
adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth
from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable
and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he
will necessarily, by his control of so much more out-of-the-way material,
get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand.
The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What
is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of
question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize
this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point
a little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have
referred.
In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of
inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it
come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second,
What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once
here? The answer to the one question is given in an _existential judgment_
or proposition. The answer to the other is a _proposition of value_, what
the Germans call a _Werthurtheil_, or what we may, if we like, denominate
a _spiritual judgment_. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from
the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the
mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding
them together.
In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two
orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its
derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher
criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential
point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what
biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various
contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their
several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These are
manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the
answer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use
should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined,
be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other
question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as
to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for
purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called
a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might
indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if
our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess
it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of
the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and
express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill
at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a
book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and
deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner
experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their
fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the
existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the
value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never
confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same
conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of
the Bible's value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment
as to the foundation of values differs.
-------------------------------------
I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because
there are many religious persons--some of you now present, possibly, are
among them--who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who
may therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential
point of view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of
religious experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically
and psychologically as if they were mere curious facts of individual
history, some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject,
and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of
deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life.
Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since
such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of
much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the
point.
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life,
exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and
eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who
follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be
Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by
others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by
imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this
second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original
experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested
feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in
individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute
fever rather. But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line;
and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective
enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious
geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more
perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to
abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of
exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner
life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no
measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they
have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all
sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.
Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped
to give them their religious authority and influence.
If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is
furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he
founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of
shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a
return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever
known in England. So far as our Christian sects to-day are evolving into
liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox
and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment
that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox's mind was unsound.
Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to
county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior
power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a
psychopath or _détraqué_ of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in
entries of this sort:--
"As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head, and
saw three steeple-house spires, and they struck at my life. I
asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately
the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being
come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk
into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As
soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge
and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a
great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I
commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it
was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I
put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds; and the poor
shepherds trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about a
mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the
Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, 'Wo to the bloody city of
Lichfield!' So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud
voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I
went into the market-place, and to and fro in the several parts of
it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of
Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As I went thus crying
through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood
running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a
pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt
myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; and returning to
the shepherds gave them some money, and took my shoes of them
again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over
me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a
stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so
to do: then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again.
After this a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I
should be sent to cry against that city, and call it The bloody
city! For though the parliament had the minister one while, and
the king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during
the wars between them, yet there was no more than had befallen
many other places. But afterwards I came to understand, that in
the Emperor Diocletian's time a thousand Christians were martyr'd
in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the
channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the
market-place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of
those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before,
and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon
me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord."
Bent as we are on studying religion's existential conditions, we cannot
possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject. We must
describe and name them just as if they occurred in non-religious men. It
is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our
emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any
other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object
is to class it along with something else. But any object that is
infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if
it must be _sui generis_ and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with
a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or
apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it
would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone."
-------------------------------------
The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the
thing originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and appetites
of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids." And
elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their
properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural
things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature
with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that
its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine,
in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written:
"Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have
their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as
there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue
are products like vitriol and sugar." When we read such proclamations of
the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely
everything, we feel--quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the
somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors
are actually able to perform--menaced and negated in the springs of our
innermost life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to
undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed
in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their
significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than
the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value
is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which
unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental
acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his
temperament is so emotional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness is
merely a matter of over-instigated nerves. William's melancholy about the
universe is due to bad digestion--probably his liver is torpid. Eliza's
delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter
would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in
the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of
reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of
criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them
and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence.
The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only
instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the
hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary
substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like.(1)
We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of
discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it
to some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as
overstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-
flights by calling them "nothing but" expressions of our organic
disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our
organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value
as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical
materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-
minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism
finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a
discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It
snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an
hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age,
and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a
disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a
gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when
you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-
intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various
glands which physiology will yet discover.
And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all
such personages is successfully undermined.(2)
Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern
psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good,
assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states
upon bodily conditions must be thorough-going and complete. If we adopt
the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be
true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had
once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an
hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some
organ or other, no matter which,--and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can
such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way
or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general
postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our
states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic
process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned
just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts
intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the
dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the
Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one
way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another
way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our
drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are
equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious
content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in
refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite
illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance
some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with
determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts
and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our
_dis_-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for
every one of them without exception flows from the state of their
possessor's body at the time.
It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no
such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man
is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and
reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary
spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of
these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt
to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them
with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily
affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.
Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves
and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to
others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic
antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is
either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because
we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life. When we
speak disparagingly of "feverish fancies," surely the fever-process as
such is not the ground of our disesteem--for aught we know to the contrary,
103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for
truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97
or 98 degrees. It is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or
their inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour. When we
praise the thoughts which health brings, health's peculiar chemical
metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment. We know in
fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the character of inner
happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good, or else their
consistency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our
needs, which make them pass for true in our esteem.
Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always
hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree.
What immediately feels most "good" is not always most "true," when
measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between
Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If
merely "feeling good" could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely
valid human experience. But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at
the moment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them
out for any length of time. The consequence of this discrepancy of the two
criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our
spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical
experience--we shall hereafter hear much of them--that carry an enormous
sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But
they come seldom, and they do not come to every one; and the rest of life
makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more
than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in
these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the
sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a
discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these
lectures end.
-------------------------------------
It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely
medical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly to
the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of
genius promulgated by recent authors. "Genius," said Dr. Moreau, "is but
one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree." "Genius," says Dr.
Lombroso, "is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid
variety, and is allied to moral insanity." "Whenever a man's life," writes
Mr. Nisbet, "is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with
sufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study, he inevitably
falls into the morbid category.... And it is worthy of remark that, as a
rule, the greater the genius, the greater the unsoundness."(3)
Now do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing to their own
satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease, consistently
proceed thereupon to impugn the _value_ of the fruits? Do they deduce a
new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine of existential conditions?
Do they frankly forbid us to admire the productions of genius from now
onwards? and say outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new
truth?
No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here, and
hold their own against inferences which, in mere love of logical
consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw. One
disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the value of works
of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely, as
he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical
arguments.(4) But for the most part the masterpieces are left
unchallenged; and the medical line of attack either confines itself to
such secular productions as every one admits to be intrinsically
eccentric, or else addresses itself exclusively to religious
manifestations. And then it is because the religious manifestations have
been already condemned because the critic dislikes them on internal or
spiritual grounds.
In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any one to
try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution.
Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter
what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise
with religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual
judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate
feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their
experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold
as true.
_Immediate luminousness_, in short, _philosophical reasonableness_, and
_moral helpfulness_ are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might
have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now
save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests
should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can
stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or
nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us
here below.
-------------------------------------
You see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles by
which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided
in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for
truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct
mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and absolutely, now
and forever, against all mistake--such has been the darling dream of
philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the _origin_ of the truth would
be an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various origins could
be discriminated from one another from this point of view, and the history
of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been a favorite test.
Origin in immediate intuition; origin in pontifical authority; origin in
supernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccountable
impression; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing
itself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterance
generally,--these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one
opinion after another which we find represented in religious history. The
medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly
turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin
in a destructive instead of an accreditive way.
They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as
supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the
argument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin has
seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr. Maudsley
is perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion on
grounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced to write:--
"What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work
by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more
suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the work that is done,
and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is alone of
moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in
other qualities of character he was singularly defective--if indeed he were
hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic.... Home we come again, then,
to the old and last resort of certitude,--namely the common assent of
mankind, or of the competent by instruction and training among
mankind."(5)
In other words, not its origin, but _the way in which it works on the
whole_, is Dr. Maudsley's final test of a belief. This is our own
empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on
supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end. Among the
visions and messages some have always been too patently silly, among the
trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct
and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as
divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to
discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine
miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to
counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of
hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing all
the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the
end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall
know them, not by their roots, Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious
Affections is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The _roots_ of a
man's virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are
infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even
to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.
"In forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, "we
should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will
chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last
day.... There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the
existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian
practice is not the most decisive evidence.... The degree in which
our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which
our experience is spiritual and divine."
Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which a
vision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are
the only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of
the tempter. Says Saint Teresa:--
"Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to
the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere
operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead
of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust:
whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of
ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily
strength. I alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my
visions of being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of
my imagination.... I showed them the jewels which the divine hand
had left with me:--they were my actual dispositions. All those who
knew me saw that I was changed; my confessor bore witness to the
fact; this improvement, palpable in all respects, far from being
hidden, was brilliantly evident to all men. As for myself, it was
impossible to believe that if the demon were its author, he could
have used, in order to lose me and lead me to hell, an expedient
so contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my vices,
and filling me with masculine courage and other virtues instead,
for I saw clearly that a single one of these visions was enough to
enrich me with all that wealth."(6)
I fear I may have made a longer excursus than was necessary, and that
fewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may have arisen
among some of you as I announced my pathological programme. At any rate
you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its results
exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will
scandalize your piety no more.
Still, you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground of our final
spiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten us at all with
so much existential study of its conditions? Why not simply leave
pathological questions out?
To this I reply in two ways: First, I say, irrepressible curiosity
imperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly, that it always leads to a
better understanding of a thing's significance to consider its
exaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest
relatives elsewhere. Not that we may thereby swamp the thing in the
wholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior congeners, but rather
that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits
consist, by learning at the same time to what particular dangers of
corruption it may also be exposed.
Insane conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special factors
of the mental life, and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their more
usual surroundings. They play the part in mental anatomy which the scalpel
and the microscope play in the anatomy of the body. To understand a thing
rightly we need to see it both out of its environment and in it, and to
have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations. The study of
hallucinations has in this way been for psychologists the key to their
comprehension of normal sensation, that of illusions has been the key to
the right comprehension of perception. Morbid impulses and imperative
conceptions, "fixed ideas," so called, have thrown a flood of light on the
psychology of the normal will; and obsessions and delusions have performed
the same service for that of the normal faculty of belief.
Similarly, the nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts, of
which I already made mention, to class it with psychopathical phenomena.
Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental
balance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by
which it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities
which, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an
individual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect
his age, than if his temperament were less neurotic. There is of course no
special affinity between crankiness as such and superior intellect,(7) for
most psychopaths have feeble intellects, and superior intellects more
commonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic temperament,
whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings
with it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky person has
extraordinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixed ideas and
obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and
action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it,
or in some way "works it off." "What shall I think of it?" a common person
says to himself about a vexed question; but in a "cranky" mind "What must
I do about it?" is the form the question tends to take. In the
autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the
following passage: "Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very
few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk
anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but why should I?' is
the ever reëchoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. 'Some one ought to do
it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly
forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences
lie whole centuries of moral evolution." True enough! and between these
two sentences lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard
and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a superior intellect and a
psychopathic temperament coalesce--as in the endless permutations and
combinations of human faculty, they are bound to coalesce often enough--in
the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of
effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do
not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their
ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their
companions or their age. It is they who get counted when Messrs Lombroso,
Nisbet, and others invoke statistics to defend their paradox.
To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as we shall
see, constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious
evolution. Take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers.
Take the trance-like states of insight into truth which all religious
mystics report.(8) These are each and all of them special cases of kinds
of human experience of much wider scope. Religious melancholy, whatever
peculiarities it may have _quâ_ religious, is at any rate melancholy.
Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance. And the
moment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon
as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the moment we agree
to stand by experimental results and inner quality, in judging of
values,--who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive
significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious
trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with
other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to
consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if
they were outside of nature's order altogether?
I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this
supposition. As regards the psychopathic origin of so many religious
phenomena, that would not be in the least surprising or disconcerting,
even were such phenomena certified from on high to be the most precious of
human experiences. No one organism can possibly yield to its owner the
whole body of truth. Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even
diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the
psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the _sine quâ
non_ of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis
which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of
metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface
of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this
temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners
of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system,
forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking
Heaven that it hasn't a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be
sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?
If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might
well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of
the requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may
let the matter of religion and neuroticism drop.
-------------------------------------
The mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, with which the
various religious phenomena must be compared in order to understand them
better, forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed "the apperceiving
mass" by which we comprehend them. The only novelty that I can imagine
this course of lectures to possess lies in the breadth of the apperceiving
mass. I may succeed in discussing religious experiences in a wider context
than has been usual in university courses.
LECTURE II. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.
Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise
definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be
definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course,
and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now.
Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one
another is enough to prove that the word "religion" cannot stand for any
single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The
theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials.
This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which
both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall
immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit
freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many
characters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we
should inquire for the essence of "government," for example, one man might
tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an
army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it
would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these
things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at
another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles
himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying
an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would
naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a
thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a
conception equally complex?(9)
-------------------------------------
Consider also the "religious sentiment" which we see referred to in so
many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity.
In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the
authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to
the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others
connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling
of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of
themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific
thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term "religious
sentiment" as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious
objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains
nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious
fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But
religious love is only man's natural emotion of love directed to a
religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so
to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion
of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic
thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only
this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations;
and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play
in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of
a feeling _plus_ a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course
are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but
there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract "religious emotion" to
exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in
every religious experience without exception.
As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a
common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so
there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential
kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of
religious act.
-------------------------------------
The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible
that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a
fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set
up an abstract definition of religion's essence, and then proceed to
defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me
from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in _for the
purpose of these lectures_, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from
choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and
proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say "religion" I mean _that_. This, in
fact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the
field I choose.
One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we
leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which
divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on
the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of
religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and
sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity,
theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials
of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it,
we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning
the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on
the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre
of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his
incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained,
is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital
part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are
personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself
alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and
sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place.
The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between
man and his maker.
Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch
entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider
as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods
themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion
pure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly
considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general
name. "It is a part of religion," you will say, "but only its unorganized
rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man's
conscience or morality than his religion. The name 'religion' should be
reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and
institution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so
called, is but a fractional element."
But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the
question of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than
prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the
personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or
morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion--under either name it
will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove
to contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain,
and these elements I shall soon seek to point out; so I will myself
continue to apply the word "religion" to it; and in the last lecture of
all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say
something of its relation to them.
In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more
fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once
established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the _founders_ of
every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct
personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the
Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects
have been in this case;--so personal religion should still seem the
primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.
There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more
primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and
magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically--at least our records
of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be
regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the
inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds
are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But, quite apart from
the fact that many anthropologists--for instance, Jevons and
Frazer--expressly oppose "religion" and "magic" to each other, it is
certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism,
and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science
as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one
again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling
is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would
not be worth while.
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean
for us _the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their
solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to
whatever they may consider the divine_. Since the relation may be either
moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the
sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical
organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have
already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time,
and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.
We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our
field. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word "divine"
if we take it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems
of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not
positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course,
the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the
Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism,
Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract
Ideality. Not a deity _in concreto_, not a superhuman person, but the
immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the
universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to
the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson
famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was
what made the scandal of the performance.
"These laws," said the speaker, "execute themselves. They are out
of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in
the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant
and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who
does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts
off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just,
then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of
God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a
man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of
acquaintance with his own being. Character is always known. Thefts
never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of
stone walls. The least admixture of a lie--for example, the taint
of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable
appearance--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth,
and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of
the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your
witness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is
differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different
applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the
several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these
ends, a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being
shrinks ... he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until
absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law
awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious
sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its
power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the
embalmer of the world. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and
the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It
makes him illimitable. When he says 'I ought'; when love warns
him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great
deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme
wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for
he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions of this
sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity.
[They] affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences
of the olden time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and
fragrant. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose
name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this
world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion."(10)
Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of order,
which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. But
whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye's
brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious life
like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that never
unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the boundary of
these things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the
literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is
active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal
interests and keep the world's balance straight. The sentences in which
Emerson, to the very end, gave utterance to this faith are as fine as
anything in literature: "If you love and serve men, you cannot by any
hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are
always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is
impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and
monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar.
Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote,
and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil."(11)
Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie
such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to their utterance
are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal
that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on
the other, make to the individual and the sort of response which he makes
to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many
respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response. We must
therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or
quasi-godless creeds "religions"; and accordingly when in our definition
of religion we speak of the individual's relation to "what he considers
the divine," we must interpret the term "divine" very broadly, as denoting
any object that is god_like_, whether it be a concrete deity or not.
-------------------------------------
But the term "godlike," if thus treated as a floating general quality,
becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious
history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then is
that essentially godlike quality--be it embodied in a concrete deity or
not--our relation to which determines our character as religious men? It
will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we proceed
farther.
For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being
and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape.
What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth.
Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at
this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might thus be
identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, towards what he felt
to be the primal truth.
Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever
it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total
reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from
casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or
professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground
of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual
cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing,
lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of
the world's presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual
temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous,
gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and
inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all
our answers to the question, "What is the character of this universe in
which we dwell?" It expresses our individual sense of it in the most
definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter
what specific character they may have? Non-religious as some of these
reactions may be, in one sense of the word "religious," they yet belong to
_the general sphere of the religious life_, and so should generically be
classed as religious reactions. "He believes in No-God, and he worships
him," said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine
atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have
often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is
indistinguishable from religious zeal.
But so very broad a use of the word "religion" would be inconvenient,
however defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There are trifling,
sneering attitudes even towards the whole of life; and in some men these
attitudes are final and systematic. It would strain the ordinary use of
language too much to call such attitudes religious, even though, from the
point of view of an unbiased critical philosophy, they might conceivably
be perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon life. Voltaire, for example,
writes thus to a friend, at the age of seventy-three: "As for myself," he
says, "weak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment, I get a
hundred pike-thrusts, I return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my
door Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and,
thank God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as
tragic as it sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of the day, and
all comes out still more even when all the days are over."
Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a
valetudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is for
the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life. _Je m'en fiche_ is
the vulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation "Who cares?" And
the happy term _je m'en fichisme_ recently has been invented to designate
the systematic determination not to take anything in life too solemnly.
"All is vanity" is the relieving word in all difficult crises for this
mode of thought, which that exquisite literary genius Renan took pleasure,
in his later days of sweet decay, in putting into coquettishly
sacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent expressions of the "all
is vanity" state of mind. Take the following passage, for example,--we must
hold to duty, even against the evidence, Renan says,--but he then goes on:--
"There are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy
pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange
ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be completely
wrong. We must listen to the superior voices, but in such a way
that if the second hypothesis were true we should not have been
too completely duped. If in effect the world be not a serious
thing, it is the dogmatic people who will be the shallow ones, and
the worldly minded whom the theologians now call frivolous will be
those who are really wise.
"_In utrumque paratus_, then. Be ready for anything--that perhaps
is wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to
confidence, to skepticism, to optimism, to irony, and we may be
sure that at certain moments at least we shall be with the
truth.... Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to
say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes
us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a
smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous; but we have the
right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal
reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter jest for
jest; we play the trick that has been played on us. Saint
Augustine's phrase: _Lord, if we are deceived, it is by thee!_
remains a fine one, well suited to our modern feeling. Only we
wish the Eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept it
knowingly and willingly. We are resigned in advance to losing the
interest on our investments of virtue, but we wish not to appear
ridiculous by having counted on them too securely."(12)
Surely all the usual associations of the word "religion" would have to be
stripped away if such a systematic _parti pris_ of irony were also to be
denoted by the name. For common men "religion," whatever more special
meanings it may have, signifies always a _serious_ state of mind. If any
one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, "All
is _not_ vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest."
If it can stop anything, religion as commonly apprehended can stop just
such chaffing talk as Renan's. It favors gravity, not pertness; it says
"hush" to all vain chatter and smart wit.
But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy
grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some
religions, but the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of
deliverance is held to exist. We shall see enough of the religious
melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to our ordinary
use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious when, in Marcus
Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming
after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a
Nietzsche,--and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own
sad Carlyle,--though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only
peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of
the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings
of two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness
gives forth.
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude
which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if
sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being _solemn_
experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I
propose--arbitrarily again, if you please--to narrow our definition once
more by saying that the word "divine," as employed therein, shall mean for
us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if
taken without restriction might well prove too broad. The divine shall
mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to
respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.
But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of
various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at
last be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where
there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. The
pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously "scientific" or
"exact" in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of
our task. Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or less
religious, reactions are more or less total, but the boundaries are always
misty, and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree. Nevertheless,
at their extreme of development, there can never be any question as to
what experiences are religious. The divinity of the object and the
solemnity of the reaction are too well marked for doubt. Hesitation as to
whether a state of mind is "religious," or "irreligious," or "moral," or
"philosophical," is only likely to arise when the state of mind is weakly
characterized, but in that case it will be hardly worthy of our study at
all. With states that can only by courtesy be called religious we need
have nothing to do, our only profitable business being with what nobody
can possibly feel tempted to call anything else. I said in my former
lecture that we learn most about a thing when we view it under a
microscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form. This is as true
of religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact. The only cases likely
to be profitable enough to repay our attention will therefore be cases
where the religious spirit is unmistakable and extreme. Its fainter
manifestations we may tranquilly pass by. Here, for example, is the total
reaction upon life of Frederick Locker Lampson, whose autobiography,
entitled "Confidences," proves him to have been a most amiable man.
"I am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain at the
thought of having to part from what has been called the pleasant
habit of existence, the sweet fable of life. I would not care to
live my wasted life over again, and so to prolong my span. Strange
to say, I have but little wish to be younger. I submit with a
chill at my heart. I humbly submit because it is the Divine Will,
and my appointed destiny. I dread the increase of infirmities that
will make me a burden to those around me, those dear to me. No!
let me slip away as quietly and comfortably as I can. Let the end
come, if peace come with it.
"I do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this
world, or our sojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to
place us, and it must please me also. I ask you, what is human
life? Is not it a maimed happiness--care and weariness, weariness
and care, with the baseless expectation, the strange cozenage of a
brighter to-morrow? At best it is but a froward child, that must
be played with and humored, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep,
and then the care is over."(13)
This is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and a graceful state of mind.
For myself, I should have no objection to calling it on the whole a
religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of you it may
seem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name. But what
matters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind religious or
not? It is too insignificant for our instruction in any case; and its very
possessor wrote it down in terms which he would not have used unless he
had been thinking of more energetically religious moods in others, with
which he found himself unable to compete. It is with these more energetic
states that our sole business lies, and we can perfectly well afford to
let the minor notes and the uncertain border go.
It was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while ago when I
said that personal religion, even without theology or ritual, would prove
to embody some elements that morality pure and simple does not contain.
You may remember that I promised shortly to point out what those elements
were. In a general way I can now say what I had in mind.
-------------------------------------
"I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of
our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one
repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to
have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern of both
morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the
universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and
altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and
unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of
living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as
if stunned into submission,--as Carlyle would have us--"Gad! we'd
better!"--or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and
simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to
acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest
heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its
strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest
never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of
welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity
and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place.
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether
one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to
necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. The
difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as that
between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps by
which an individual may grow from one state into the other, many as are
the intermediate stages which different individuals represent, yet when
you place the typical extremes beside each other for comparison, you feel
that two discontinuous psychological universes confront you, and that in
passing from one to the other a "critical point" has been overcome.
If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a
difference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional mood that
parts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that has
ordered things, there is a frosty chill about his words which you rarely
find in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of religious writing. The
universe is "accepted" by all these writers; but how devoid of passion or
exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor is! Compare his fine sentence:
"If gods care not for me or my children, here is a reason for it," with
Job's cry: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!" and you
immediately see the difference I mean. The _anima mundi_, to whose
disposal of his own personal destiny the Stoic consents, is there to be
respected and submitted to, but the Christian God is there to be loved;
and the difference of emotional atmosphere is like that between an arctic
climate and the tropics, though the outcome in the way of accepting actual
conditions uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same.
"It is a man's duty," says Marcus Aurelius, "to comfort himself
and wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to
find refreshment solely in these thoughts--first that nothing will
happen to me which is not conformable to the nature of the
universe; and secondly that I need do nothing contrary to the God
and deity within me; for there is no man who can compel me to
transgress.(14) He is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and
separates himself from the reason of our common nature, through
being displeased with the things which happen. For the same nature
produces these, and has produced thee too. And so accept
everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it
leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity
and felicity of Zeus. For he would not have brought on any man
what he has brought, if it were not useful for the whole. The
integrity of the whole is mutilated if thou cuttest off anything.
And thou dost cut off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art
dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anything out of the
way."(15)
Compare now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the
Theologia Germanica:--
"Where men are enlightened with the true light, they renounce all
desire and choice, and commit and commend themselves and all
things to the eternal Goodness, so that every enlightened man
could say: 'I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own
hand is to a man.' Such men are in a state of freedom, because
they have lost the fear of pain or hell, and the hope of reward or
heaven, and are living in pure submission to the eternal Goodness,
in the perfect freedom of fervent love. When a man truly
perceiveth and considereth himself, who and what he is, and
findeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy, he falleth
into such a deep abasement that it seemeth to him reasonable that
all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him. And
therefore he will not and dare not desire any consolation and
release; but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he
doth not grieve over his sufferings, for they are right in his
eyes, and he hath nothing to say against them. This is what is
meant by true repentance for sin; and he who in this present time
entereth into this hell, none may console him. Now God hath not
forsaken a man in this hell, but He is laying his hand upon him,
that the man may not desire nor regard anything but the eternal
Good only. And then, when the man neither careth for nor desireth
anything but the eternal Good alone, and seeketh not himself nor
his own things, but the honour of God only, he is made a partaker
of all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and consolation, and so
the man is henceforth in the kingdom of heaven. This hell and this
heaven are two good safe ways for a man, and happy is he who truly
findeth them."(16)
How much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian writer to
accept his place in the universe is! Marcus Aurelius agrees _to_ the
scheme--the German theologian agrees _with_ it. He literally _abounds_ in
agreement, he runs out to embrace the divine decrees.
Occasionally, it is true, the Stoic rises to something like a Christian
warmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus Aurelius:--
"Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee, O
Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in
due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons
bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all things,
to thee all things return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops;
and wilt thou not say, Dear City of Zeus?"(17)
But compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine Christian
outpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the
Imitation of Christ:--
"Lord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that be according as
thou wilt. Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou
wilt. Do with me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to
thine honour. Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will
with me in all things.... When could it be evil when thou wert
near? I had rather be poor for thy sake than rich without thee. I
choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than
without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there is heaven;
and where thou art not, behold there death and hell."(18)
It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an
organ, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of
performance, and to seek its office in that one of its functions which no
other organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds good in our
present quest. The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we
finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we
can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of course most prominent
and easy to notice in those religious experiences which are most one-
sided, exaggerated, and intense.
Now when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiences of
tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them
philosophical rather than religious, we find a character that is perfectly
distinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded as the
practically important _differentia_ of religion for our purpose; and just
what it is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an
abstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly
conceived.
A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion
as it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and more by
objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring
personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far as it
calls for "volunteers." And for morality life is a war, and the service of
the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for
volunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carry on
the moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attention away from his own
future, whether in this world or the next. He can train himself to
indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever
objective interests still remain accessible. He can follow public news,
and sympathize with other people's affairs. He can cultivate cheerful
manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can contemplate whatever
ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to him, and
practice whatever duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his
ethical system requires. Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane.
He is a high-hearted freeman and no pining slave. And yet he lacks
something which the Christian _par excellence_, the mystic and ascetic
saint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which makes of him a
human being of an altogether different denomination.
The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and
the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased
conditions of body which probably no other human records show. But whereas
the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, the Christian
spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, in
the presence of which no exertion of volition is required. The moralist
must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this
athletic attitude is possible all goes well--morality suffices. But the
athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break
down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when
morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one
all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest
the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his
very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and
secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such
helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one
clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the
robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the
vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all
our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and
all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-_being_ that
our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.
And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands.
There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in
which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by
a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and
waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become
the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned
into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and
that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present,
with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not
held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and
washed away.
We shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later
lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing
religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope,
ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it
adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible
from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does
come,--a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of
God's grace, the theologians say,--is either there or not there for us, and
there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can
fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling
is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life. It gives him
a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer
world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which
otherwise would be an empty waste.
If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we
ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this
enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so
called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean
nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over,
the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting
possession spread before our eyes.(19)
This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find
nowhere but in religion. It is parted off from all mere animal happiness,
all mere enjoyment of the present, by that element of solemnity of which I
have already made so much account. Solemnity is a hard thing to define
abstractly, but certain of its marks are patent enough. A solemn state of
mind is never crude or simple--it seems to contain a certain measure of its
own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its
sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent. But
there are writers who, realizing that happiness of a supreme sort is the
prerogative of religion, forget this complication, and call all happiness,
as such, religious. Mr. Havelock Ellis, for example, identifies religion
with the entire field of the soul's liberation from oppressive moods.
"The simplest functions of physiological life," he writes, "may be
its ministers. Every one who is at all acquainted with the Persian
mystics knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of
religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all ages, some form of
physical enlargement--singing, dancing, drinking, sexual
excitement--has been intimately associated with worship. Even the
momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight
an extent, a religious exercise.... Whenever an impulse from the
world strikes against the organism, and the resultant is not
discomfort or pain, not even the muscular contraction of strenuous
manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the whole
soul--there is religion. It is the infinite for which we hunger,
and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us
towards it."(20)
But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of
happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The
more commonplace happinesses which we get are "reliefs," occasioned by our
momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its
most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of
escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as
a form of sacrifice--inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. If
you ask _how_ religion thus falls on the thorns and faces death, and in
the very act annuls annihilation, I cannot explain the matter, for it is
religion's secret, and to understand it you must yourself have been a
religious man of the extremer type. In our future examples, even of the
simplest and healthiest-minded type of religious consciousness, we shall
find this complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher happiness
holds a lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre there is a picture, by
Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of
the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The
richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there--that
is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, _so long as we
keep our foot upon his neck_. In the religious consciousness, that is just
the position in which the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is
found; and for that very reason the religious consciousness is so rich
from the emotional point of view.(21) We shall see how in certain men and
women it takes on a monstrously ascetic form. There are saints who have
literally fed on the negative principle, on humiliation and privation, and
the thought of suffering and death,--their souls growing in happiness just
in proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable. No other
emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass. And
it is for that reason that when we ask our question about the value of
religion for human life, I think we ought to look for the answer among
these violenter examples rather than among those of a more moderate hue.
Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to start
with, we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in these cases,
repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging, we find
ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion's value and treat it with
respect, it will have proved in some way its value for life at large. By
subtracting and toning down extravagances we may thereupon proceed to
trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway.
To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so much with
eccentricities and extremes. "How _can_ religion on the whole be the most
important of all human functions," you may ask, "if every several
manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and
pruned away?" Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain
reasonably,--yet I believe that something like it will have to be our final
contention. That personal attitude which the individual finds himself
impelled to take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine--and you
will remember that this was our definition--will prove to be both a
helpless and a sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to
at least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some
amount of renunciation, great or small, to save our souls alive. The
constitution of the world we live in requires it:--
"Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren!
Das ist der ewige Gesang
Der jedem an die Ohren klingt,
Den, unser ganzes Leben lang
Uns heiser jede Stunde singt."
For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on
the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort,
deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our
only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall
short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of
necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without
complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice
are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order
that the happiness may increase. _Religion thus makes easy and felicitous
what in any case is necessary_; and if it be the only agency that can
accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands
vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life,
performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so
successfully fulfill. From the merely biological point of view, so to call
it, this is a conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall
inevitably be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical
method of demonstration which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of
the farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say
nothing now.
But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one thing, and
to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning the
extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we
begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete
facts.
LECTURE III. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN.
Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and
most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief
that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in
harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment
are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call
your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an
attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our
attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due
to the "objects" of our consciousness, the things which we believe to
exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may
be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In
either case they elicit from us a _reaction_; and the reaction due to
things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to
sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may
make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently
more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of
making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is
based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a
weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.
The more concrete objects of most men's religion, the deities whom they
worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for
example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of
their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by
way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force
of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine
personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in
general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in
the individual's past experience directly serves as a model.
But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects,
religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power.
God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his
absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various
mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments,
etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian
believers.(22) We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible
images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all
religions as the _sine qua non_ of a successful orison, or contemplation
of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and
abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the
believer's subsequent attitude very powerfully for good.
Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God,
the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter.
These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our
conceptions always require a sense-content to work with, and as the words
"soul," "God," "immortality," cover no distinctive sense-content whatever,
it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any
significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning _for our
practice_. We can act _as if_ there were a God; feel _as if_ we were free;
consider Nature _as if_ she were full of special designs; lay plans _as
if_ we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a
genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith _that_ these
unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent
in _praktischer Hinsicht_, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of
our action, for a knowledge of _what_ they might be, in case we were
permitted positively to conceive them. So we have the strange phenomenon,
as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real
presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion
whatsoever.
My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to express
any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his
philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature
which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration.
The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our
object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so
to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet
that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be
present to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or
sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be
strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if,
through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going
in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different
attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an
outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so
strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life,
it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being.
It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have
this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent
articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them
the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson
which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects,
as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but
for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend
it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all
things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength,
significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant,
and just.
Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our
facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They
give its "nature," as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we
know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of these
abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless
and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their
means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with
helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects,
these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification
and conception.
This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the
cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as
they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate
them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings
they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing
things of sense are in the realm of space.
Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human
feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been
known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for
example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the
intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing
beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often
quoted passage in his "Banquet," "is to use the beauties of earth as steps
along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going
from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to
fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair
notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows
what the essence of Beauty is."(23) In our last lecture we had a glimpse
of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the
abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a
fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-
day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies,
we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed
in as an ultimate object. "Science" in many minds is genuinely taking the
place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the "Laws of
Nature" as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of
interpretation of Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the
Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications of those great
spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls
apart--the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like;
just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the
breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these
phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.(24)
As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an
opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion
something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a
_sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception_ of what
we may call "_something there_," more deep and more general than any of
the special and particular "senses" by which the current psychology
supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we
might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so
habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else,
any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that
same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally
possess. So far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality-
feeling, they would be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they
might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though
they might be such non-entities in point of _whatness_, as Kant makes the
objects of his moral theology to be.
The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense
of reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It often
happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed: the person
affected will feel a "presence" in the room, definitely localized, facing
in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often
coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard,
touched, nor cognized in any of the usual "sensible" ways. Let me give you
an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presence
religion is more peculiarly concerned.
An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had
several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response to my
inquiries:--
"I have several times within the past few years felt the so-called
'consciousness of a presence.' The experiences which I have in
mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience
which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons
would also call the 'consciousness of a presence.' But the
difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great
as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I
know not where, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with
all the ordinary senses alert.
"It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On
the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms
in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the
arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but
the sense of presence properly so called came on the next night.
After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake
awhile thinking on the previous night's experience, when suddenly
I _felt_ something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It
remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any
ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant
'sensation' connected with it. It stirred something more at the
roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had
something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain
spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism--and yet
the feeling was not _pain_ so much as _abhorrence_. At all events,
something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more
surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living
creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an
almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the
'horrible sensation' disappeared.
"On the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some
lectures which I was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these
when I became aware of the actual presence (though not of the
_coming_) of the thing that was there the night before, and of the
'horrible sensation.' I then mentally concentrated all my effort
to charge this 'thing,' if it was evil, to depart, if it was _not_
evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain
itself, to go, and that I would compel it to go. It went as on the
previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state.
"On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same
'horrible sensation.' Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In
all three instances the certainty that there in outward space
there stood _something_ was indescribably _stronger_ than the
ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close
presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to
me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although
I felt it to be like unto myself, so to speak, or finite, small,
and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize it as any
individual being or person."
Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the
religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same
correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had
the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only
then it was filled with a quality of joy.
"There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused
in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some
ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of
some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge
of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and after it
went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality.
Everything else might be a dream, but not that."
My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter
experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would
clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation of the
deity's existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have
much more to say upon this head.
Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture
to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show
that we are dealing with a well-marked natural kind of fact. In the first
case, which I take from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research,
the sense of presence developed in a few moments into a distinctly
visualized hallucination,--but I leave that part of the story out.
"I had read," the narrator says, "some twenty minutes or so, was
thoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was perfectly quiet, and
for the time being my friends were quite forgotten, when suddenly
without a moment's warning my whole being seemed roused to the
highest state of tension or aliveness, and I was aware, with an
intenseness not easily imagined by those who had never experienced
it, that another being or presence was not only in the room, but
quite close to me. I put my book down, and although my excitement
was great, I felt quite collected, and not conscious of any sense
of fear. Without changing my position, and looking straight at the
fire, I knew somehow that my friend A. H. was standing at my left
elbow, but so far behind me as to be hidden by the armchair in
which I was leaning back. Moving my eyes round slightly without
otherwise changing my position, the lower portion of one leg
became visible, and I instantly recognized the gray-blue material
of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semi-
transparent, reminding me of tobacco smoke in
consistency,"(25)--and hereupon the visual hallucination came.
Another informant writes:--
"Quite early in the night I was awakened.... I felt as if I had
been aroused intentionally, and at first thought some one was
breaking into the house.... I then turned on my side to go to
sleep again, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in
the room, and singular to state, it was not the consciousness of a
live person, but of a spiritual presence. This may provoke a
smile, but I can only tell you the facts as they occurred to me. I
do not know how to better describe my sensations than by simply
stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence.... I
felt also at the same time a strong feeling of superstitious
dread, as if something strange and fearful were about to
happen."(26)
Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend
of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:--
"Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it
is not due to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have of
a foreign presence, external to my body. It is sometimes so
definitely characterized that I could point to its exact position.
This impression of presence is impossible to describe. It varies
in intensity and clearness according to the personality from whom
the writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I
feel it immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems
to recognize it."
In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of
presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a
gray-bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself
under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room
towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an
exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual
imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive
that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false
perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the
feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it--in
other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized _idea_.
Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for
quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental
machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than
that which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing of
the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty problem--nothing
could be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, with the
feeling that our muscles were innervating themselves for action.
Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or "made our flesh creep,"--our
senses are what do so oftenest,--might then appear real and present, even
though it were but an abstract idea. But with such vague conjectures we
have no concern at present, for our interest lies with the faculty rather
than with its organic seat.
Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has
its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which
persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint:--
"When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by
accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of
the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I
see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible
as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I
experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me
as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a
dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dreaming.' "(27)
In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the
unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.
We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious
sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the
objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their
intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible
realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of these
objects fluctuates, so the believer alternates between warmth and coldness
in his faith. Other examples will bring this home to one better than
abstract description, so I proceed immediately to cite some. The first
example is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense in question. I
have extracted it from an account given me by a scientific man of my
acquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that
the feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an
intellectual operation properly so-called.
"Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more
agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that
'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so
well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality
was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer's philosophy, for although
I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never prayed to _It_
in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to have
been in a relation to _It_ which practically was the same thing as
prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especially when I had conflict
with other people, either domestically or in the way of business,
or when I was depressed in spirits or anxious about affairs, I now
recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious
relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical _It_.
It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to
term it, in the particular trouble, and it always strengthened me
and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and
supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing fountain of
living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively
turned at times of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know
now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of
late years the power of communicating with it has left me, and I
am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to
find it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when
sometimes I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to
make connection with it. I remember many occasions on which at
night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of
worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped
mentally for the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind
which had always seemed to be close at hand as it were, closing
the passage, and yielding support, but there was no electric
current. A blank was there instead of _It_: I couldn't find
anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting
into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to
confess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become
curiously dead and indifferent; and I can now see that my old
experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of
the orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have
spoken of as 'It' was practically not Spencer's Unknowable, but
just my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for
higher sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost."
Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in
which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as
alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of
particular crises in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct
perception, perhaps, of a living God's existence, swept in and overwhelmed
the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell's
correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of this kind:--
"I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary's, and
happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I
said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an
argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the
whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming from
the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me
and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air
seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something I knew
not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. I
cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied
it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear
it and acknowledge its grandeur."(28)
Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript
communication by a clergyman,--I take it from Starbuck's manuscript
collection:--
"I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop,
where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there
was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.
It was deep calling unto deep,--the deep that my own struggle had
opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without,
reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me,
and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even
temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my
spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For
the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained.
It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the
effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have
melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener
conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards,
and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of
the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held
a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I
could not any more have doubted that _He_ was there than that I
was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of
the two.
"My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in
me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the
Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the
same stirring of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face
to face with God, and was born anew of his spirit. There was, as I
recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except that
my early crude conception had, as it were, burst into flower.
There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful
unfolding. Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the
proofs of God's existence has been able to shake my faith. Having
once felt the presence of God's spirit, I have never lost it again
for long. My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply
rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme
experience, and in the conviction, gained from reading and
reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found
God. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I am not
enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any
other charge. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with
words rather than put it clearly to your thought. But, such as it
is, I have described it as carefully as I now am able to do."
Here is another document, even more definite in character, which, the
writer being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.(29)
"I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramping,
and in good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to
Trient by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my
state of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news
from home; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote, for
we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertainty
about the road we should follow. I can best describe the condition
in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at
once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt
the presence of God--I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of
it--as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me
altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could
barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat
down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes
overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life
he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took
pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I
was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to
the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should
do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him,
the Almighty God, to be judge of whether I should some time be
called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the
ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the
communion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but
very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by the interior
emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes,
my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me.
The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes,
although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades
waited for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about
twenty-five or thirty minutes to join them, for as well as I can
remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half an
hour. The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly
the slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai
could have had a more intimate communication with God. I think it
well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form,
color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence
was accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather as
if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a
_spiritual spirit_. But the more I seek words to express this
intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of
describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the
expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was
present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet
my consciousness perceived him."
The adjective "mystical" is technically applied, most often, to states
that are of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last
two persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture
I shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another
mystical or semi-mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature
for ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck's collection. The lady who gives
the account is the daughter of a man well known in his time as a writer
against Christianity. The suddenness of her conversion shows well how
native the sense of God's presence must be to certain minds. She relates
that she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian doctrine, but,
when in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends, she read the
Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her like
a stream of light.
"To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with
religion and the commands of God. The very instant I heard my
Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I
ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am,
my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me,' answered
my God. 'I do, I do,' I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called
my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single
question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was
good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what
I thought of his church, or ... to wait until I should be
satisfied. Satisfied! I was satisfied. Had I not found my God and
my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not
a Church into which I might enter?... Since then I have had direct
answers to prayer--so significant as to be almost like talking with
God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never
left me for one moment."
Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty-seven, in
which the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less vividly
described:--
"I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period
of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked
and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary
obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and
cover my life.... Once it was when from the summit of a high
mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending
to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again
from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a
boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a
few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about
as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these
occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by
an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I
had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my
justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with
God. Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos.
I cannot conceive of life without its presence."
Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God's presence the
following sample from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection may serve
to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine,--probably thousands of
unpretending Christians would write an almost identical account.
"God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I
feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer
harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him
in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious
restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to
a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful.
He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken
that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but
generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of
Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and
care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school
matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is
mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without
it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste."
I subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes.
They are also from Professor Starbuck's collection, and their number might
be greatly multiplied. The first is from a man twenty-seven years old:--
"God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers.
Thoughts sudden and distinct from any I have been entertaining
come to my mind after asking God for his direction. Something over
a year ago I was for some weeks in the direst perplexity. When the
trouble first appeared before me I was dazed, but before long (two
or three hours) I could hear distinctly a passage of Scripture:
'My grace is sufficient for thee.' Every time my thoughts turned
to the trouble I could hear this quotation. I don't think I ever
doubted the existence of God, or had him drop out of my
consciousness. God has frequently stepped into my affairs very
perceptibly, and I feel that he directs many little details all
the time. But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me
very contrary to my ambitions and plans."
Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so
decidedly childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:--
"Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and
before I go out I feel as if God was with me, right side of me,
singing and reading the Psalms with me.... And then again I feel
as if I could sit beside him, and put my arms around him, kiss
him, etc. When I am taking Holy Communion at the altar, I try to
get with him and generally feel his presence."
I let a few other cases follow at random:--
"God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me
than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my
being."--
"There are times when I seem to stand, in his very presence, to
talk with him. Answers to prayer have come, sometimes direct and
overwhelming in their revelation of his presence and powers. There
are times when God seems far off, but this is always my own
fault."--
"I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time
soothing, which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me
with sustaining arms."
Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness
of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized
with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine our
vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined
by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the
world. A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his
idol, even when his attention is addressed to other matters and he no
longer represents her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly
affects him through and through.
I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must
dwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who
have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a
rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever
are. One may indeed be entirely without them; probably more than one of
you here present is without them in any marked degree; but if you do have
them, and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot
help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a
kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in
words, can expel from your belief. The opinion opposed to mysticism in
philosophy is sometimes spoken of as _rationalism_. Rationalism insists
that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate
grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1)
definitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation;
(3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences
logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place
in the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a
splendid intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies
fruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its
result.
Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the
life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and
that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part
of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.
It is the part that has the _prestige_ undoubtedly, for it has the
loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you
down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same,
if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have
intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the
loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life,
your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared
the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the
result; and something in you absolutely _knows_ that that result must be
truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may
contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding
belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it
argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn
from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly
convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the
simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God
it argued for. Whatever sort of a being God may be, we _know_ to-day that
he is nevermore that mere external inventor of "contrivances" intended to
make manifest his "glory" in which our great-grandfathers took such
satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear
by words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to
account for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic
and tragic personage than that Being.
The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate
reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality
have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed,
our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world-ruling
systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow
up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of
truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy
translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the
deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition.
Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the
presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your
critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves
to change his faith.
Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is _better_ that
the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the
religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so
hold it as a matter of fact.
So much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects. Let me now
say a brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken.
We have already agreed that they are _solemn_; and we have seen reason to
think that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may
result in extreme cases from absolute self-surrender. The sense of the
kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with
determining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is
more complex than any simple formula allows. In the literature of the
subject, sadness and gladness have each been emphasized in turn. The
ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives
voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the
less does religious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to
play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary, being the
gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of things, being
the more complex, is also the more complete; and as we proceed, I think we
shall have abundant reason for refusing to leave out either the sadness or
the gladness, if we look at religion with the breadth of view which it
demands. Stated in the completest possible terms, a man's religion
involves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of his being.
But the quantitative mixture and order of these moods vary so much from
one age of the world, from one system of thought, and from one individual
to another, that you may insist either on the dread and the submission, or
on the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still
remain materially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally
sombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize
opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes.
The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious
peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion
and contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and childish
after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper-
cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low,
rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of
Job, for example, the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God is the
exclusive burden of its author's mind. "It is as high as heaven; what
canst thou do?--deeper than hell; what canst thou know?" There is an
astringent relish about the truth of this conviction which some men can
feel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to the
feeling of religious joy.
"In Job," says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark
Rutherford, "God reminds us that man is not the measure of his
creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory
which the intellect of man can grasp. It is _transcendent_
everywhere. This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret,
if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is
nothing more.... God is great, we know not his ways. He takes from
us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in patience, we
_may_ pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight
again. We may or we may not!... What more have we to say now than
God said from the whirlwind over two thousand five hundred years
ago?"(30)
If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that
deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether overcome
and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions that seem to
the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to leave out all the
solemnity that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys.
In the opinion of some writers an attitude might be called religious,
though no touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission, no tendency to
flexion, no bowing of the head. Any "habitual and regulated admiration,"
says Professor J. R. Seeley,(31) "is worthy to be called a religion"; and
accordingly he thinks that our Music, our Science, and our so-called
"Civilization," as these things are now organized and admiringly believed
in, form the more genuine religions of our time. Certainly the
unhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feel that we must inflict our
civilization upon "lower" races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds
one of nothing so much as of the early spirit of Islam spreading its
religion by the sword.
In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical opinion of Mr.
Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious
exercise, for it bears witness to the soul's emancipation. I quoted this
opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores
more carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too
complex to be decided off-hand. I propose accordingly that we make of
religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures.
LECTURES IV AND V. THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS.
If we were to ask the question: "What is human life's chief concern?" one
of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness." How to gain,
how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all
times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to
endure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from
the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different kinds of
conduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the moral
life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the
interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom I
lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor
need we call mere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admit that
any persistent enjoyment may _produce_ the sort of religion which consists
in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; and we must
also acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing religion are
new manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner paths to a
supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift of natural existence
is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be.
With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not
surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief
affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he
almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it
is true--such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the "immediate inferences" of
the religious logic used by ordinary men.
"The near presence of God's spirit," says a German writer,(32)
"may be experienced in its reality--indeed _only_ experienced. And
the mark by which the spirit's existence and nearness are made
irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the
utterly incomparable _feeling of happiness_ which is connected
with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and
altogether proper feeling for us to have here below, but is the
best and most indispensable proof of God's reality. No other proof
is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from
which every efficacious new theology should start."
In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the
simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be
treated on a later day.
In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic
emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I
speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when
unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it,
as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age,
passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life,
in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the
sinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset their
religion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before the
reformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian
practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in
orgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century
in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been
idealized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret,
who claimed all natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine's maxim,
_Dilige et quod vis fac_,--if you but love [God], you may do as you
incline,--is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is
pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of
conventional morality. According to their characters they have been
refined or gross; but their belief has been at all times systematic enough
to constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of
freedom, and the sting of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his
immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of
which there are of course infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlier
years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders
of the eighteenth century anti-christian movement were of this optimistic
type. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their
feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is
absolutely good.
It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often
feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-
blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all
enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill
of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from
the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.
"God has two families of children on this earth," says Francis W.
Newman,(33) "_the once-born_ and _the twice-born_," and the once-
born he describes as follows: "They see God, not as a strict
Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of
a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as
well as Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical
tendencies: they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are
not distressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd
to call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves
_at all_. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening
of religion very happy to them: for they no more shrink from God,
than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in
fact, they have no vivid conception of _any_ of the qualities in
which the severer Majesty of God consists.(34) He is to them the
impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not
in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious
nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts
and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt
them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward
disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have
a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in
their simple worship."
In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in
than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of
a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been
abundant enough; and in its recent "liberal" developments of Unitarianism
and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still
are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an
admirable example. Theodore Parker is another,--here are a couple of
characteristic passages from Parker's correspondence.(35)
"Orthodox scholars say: 'In the heathen classics you find no
consciousness of sin.' It is very true--God be thanked for it. They
were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust,
sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got
rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of 'enmity
against God,' and didn't sit down and whine and groan against non-
existent evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do
them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again. But I am not
conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know
there is much 'health in me'; and in my body, even now, there
dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul."
In another letter Parker writes: "I have swum in clear sweet
waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and
the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too
strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest
boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass,... up to the
gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me
honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present
delight. When I recall the years ... I am filled with a sense of
sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so
exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of all my
delights is still the religious."
Another good expression of the "once-born" type of consciousness,
developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or
crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent
Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck's circulars. I quote
a part of it:--
"I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which
come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the
formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any
man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was,
into a family where the religion is simple and rational; who is
trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows,
for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I
always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the
world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was
always glad to receive his suggestions to me.... I can remember
perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half-
philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young
men and maidens who were facing the 'problem of life.' I had no
idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my
might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn
seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a
chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because
he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought
to enjoy it.... A child who is early taught that he is God's
child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and
that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the
conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and
probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is
born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good."(36)
One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a
temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally
forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the
darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become
quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a
momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital
anæsthesia.(37)
The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of
course Walt Whitman.
"His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke, "seemed
to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking
at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the
varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the
crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.
It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond
what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man,"
continues Dr. Bucke, "it had not occurred to me that any one could
derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He
was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all
sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as
roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things
and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to
have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him.
He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men,
women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he
liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or
her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or
dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified,
sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke
harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even
took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew
[him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not
allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy,
complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible
that these mental states could be absent in him. After long
observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or
unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of
any nationality or class of men, or time in the world's history,
or against any trades or occupations--not even against any animals,
insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor
any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and
death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather,
pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very
well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was
angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt
it."(38)
Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion
from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he
allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed
these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited
individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a
passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by
persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things
are divinely good.
Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the
restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his
own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist.
Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for
its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are
already beginning to be drawn;(39) hymns are written by others in his
peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of
the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.
Whitman is often spoken of as a "pagan." The word nowadays means sometimes
the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a
Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither
of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere
animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware
enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it,
a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which
your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.
"I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-
contained,
I stand and look at them long and long;
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."(40)
No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on the
other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness,
even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this
sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to
adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young
son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:--
"Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos
too is dead, who was better far than thou.... Over me too hang
death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday
when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear
he smite, or arrow from the string."(41)
Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword, heaves
him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river
to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy
each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the
Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and
entire. Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such
desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so
many of _us_ insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be "good
in the making," or something equally ingenious. Good was good, and bad
just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of
nature,--Walt Whitman's verse, "What is called good is perfect and what is
called bad is just as perfect," would have been mere silliness to
them,--nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent "another
and a better world" of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the
innocent goods of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the
instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain,
gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality
Whitman's outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and
defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,(42) and
this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed
towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in
important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.
-------------------------------------
If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which
looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must
distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic
way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy-
mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its
systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good.
Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as
their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects.
Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and
universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of
vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a
difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with
himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the
situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.
In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has
blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive
weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually
in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of
reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules.
To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then
and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may
then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.
But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and
honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or _parti pris_.
Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the
phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by
a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one
of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after
vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully,
that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts
that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape.
Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence;
turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are
concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil
character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own
thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be
your principal concern.
The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its
entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful
bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self-
protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals
have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only
painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the
pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have
been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a
way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble
which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all
costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout
it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is
impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without
zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of
the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution
not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within
ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality
under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its
needs.
In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the
total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion
plays an enormous part in the history of the religious consciousness, and
we must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far at
present. More ordinary non-mystical conditions of rapture suffice for my
immediate contention. All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms
make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease
to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the
winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in,
provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave
its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems
to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement
which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning
experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in
the heroic opportunity and adventure.
The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude
is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is
anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even
when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our
attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-
houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are
huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize
officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer
and cleaner and better than the world that really is.(43)
The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past
fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within
the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was
more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose
preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted
rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal
punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man.
They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian
with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible
rather than admirable; and a sanguine and "muscular" attitude, which to
our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes
an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not
they are right, I am only pointing out the change.
The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their
nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its
more pessimistic theological elements. But in that "theory of evolution"
which, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty-five
years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for
a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced
Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea
of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism
and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy-minded so well
that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use.
Accordingly we find "evolutionism" interpreted thus optimistically and
embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a
multitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained
scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had
already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the
harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme. As examples
are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer
to Professor Starbuck's circular of questions. The writer's state of mind
may by courtesy be called a religion, for it is his reaction on the whole
nature of things, it is systematic and reflective, and it loyally binds
him to certain inner ideals. I think you will recognize in him, coarse-
meated and incapable of wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar
contemporary type.
Q. _What does Religion mean to you?_
A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe,
useless to others. I am sixty-seven years of age and have resided
in X. fifty years, and have been in business forty-five,
consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and
some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious
people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and
morality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious
convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and
sermonizing are pernicious--they teach us to rely on some
supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I
_tee_totally disbelieve in a God. The God-idea was begotten in
ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If
I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both
mentally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die
with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational
pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die--there being no immortality
in either case.
Q. _What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God,
Heaven, Angels, etc.?_
A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion. These words
mean so much mythic bosh.
Q. _Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?_
A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintending kind. A
little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific
law will convince any one of this fact.
Q. _What things work most strongly on your emotions?_
A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like
Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc.,
etc. Of songs, the Star-spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise,
and all moral and soul-stirring songs, but wishy-washy hymns are
my detestation. I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather,
and until within a few years used to walk Sundays into the
country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle forty or
fifty. I have dropped the bicycle. I never go to church, but
attend lectures when there are any good ones. All of my thoughts
and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for
instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I
endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as the
deepest law. Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he
will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand
years hence.
Q. _What is your notion of sin?_
A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental
to man's development not being yet advanced enough. Morbidness
over it increases the disease. We should think that a million of
years hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order
will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of
evil or sin.
Q. _What is your temperament?_
A. Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically. Sorry
that Nature compels us to sleep at all.
If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not
look to this brother. His contentment with the finite incases him like a
lobster-shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance
from the Infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism
which may be encouraged by popular science.
To my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously than
that which sets in from natural science towards healthy-mindedness is that
which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force
every day,--I am ignorant what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great
Britain,--and to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will
give the title of the "Mind-cure movement." There are various sects of
this "New Thought," to use another of the names by which it calls itself;
but their agreements are so profound that their differences may be
neglected for my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without
apology, as if it were a simple thing.
It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative
and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter
of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory
elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power.
It has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature
is great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market,
to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers,--a phenomenon never
observed, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest
insecure beginnings.
One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is
Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan
idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and "progress"
and "development"; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of
which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a
strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is
an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an
intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as
such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a
correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously
precautionary states of mind.(44) Their belief has in a general way been
corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this
experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount.
The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; lifelong invalids have
had their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable.
The deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude has proved possible
to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character
has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to
countless homes. The indirect influence of this has been great. The mind-
cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their
spirit at second-hand. One hears of the "Gospel of Relaxation," of the
"Don't Worry Movement," of people who repeat to themselves, "Youth,
health, vigor!" when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day.
Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households;
and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of
disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences
and ailments of life. These general tonic effects on public opinion would
be good even if the more striking results were non-existent. But the
latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures
and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human
failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a
good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with
optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect
finds it almost impossible to read it at all.
The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to
practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the
American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this,
their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of
life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the
importance of mind-cure the medical and clerical professions in the United
States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and protesting, to
open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both
speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the
ablest of the group.(45) It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts
of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any
possibility be influenced by the mind-curers' ideas. For our immediate
purpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who
_can_ be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with
respect.(46)
To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental
pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all
religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is
connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder
sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The
shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts,
and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But
whereas Christian theology has always considered _frowardness_ to be the
essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind-curers say that the
mark of the beast in it is _fear_; and this is what gives such an entirely
new religious turn to their persuasion.
"Fear," to quote a writer of the school, "has had its uses in the
evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of
forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part of
the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I
find that the fear element of forethought is not stimulating to
those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the
natural motives, but is weakening and deterrent. As soon as it
becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent, and should
be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living tissue.
To assist in the analysis of fear, and in the denunciation of its
expressions, I have coined the word _fearthought_ to stand for the
unprofitable element of forethought, and have defined the word
'worry' as _fearthought in contradistinction to forethought_. I
have also defined fearthought as _the self-imposed or self-
permitted suggestion of inferiority_, in order to place it where
it really belongs, in the category of harmful, unnecessary, and
therefore not respectable things."(47)
The "misery-habit," the "martyr-habit," engendered by the prevalent
"fearthought," get pungent criticism from the mind-cure writers:--
"Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born.
There are certain social conventions or customs and alleged
requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the
world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early
training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life.
Following close upon this, there is a long series of
anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer certain children's
diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thought
that we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become
childlike; while crowning all is the fear of death. Then there is
a long line of particular fears and trouble-bearing expectations,
such, for example, as ideas associated with certain articles of
food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the
aches and pains associated with cold weather, the fear of catching
cold if one sits in a draught, the coming of hay-fever upon the
14th of August in the middle of the day, and so on through a long
list of fears, dreads, worriments, anxieties, anticipations,
expectations, pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly train
of fateful shapes which our fellow-men, and especially physicians,
are ready to help us conjure up, an array worthy to rank with
Bradley's 'unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.'
"Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumerable
volunteers from daily life,--the fear of accident, the possibility
of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of robbery, of fire,
or the outbreak of war. And it is not deemed sufficient to fear
for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we must forthwith fear
the worst and apprehend death. If one meets with sorrow ...
sympathy means to enter into and increase the suffering."(48)
"Man," to quote another writer, "often has fear stamped upon him
before his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear;
all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death,
and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and
depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and
specification.... Think of the millions of sensitive and
responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the
dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that
health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love,
exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though
unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean
of morbidity."(49)
Although the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian terminology,
one sees from such quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man
diverges from that of ordinary Christians.(50)
Their notion of man's higher nature is hardly less divergent, being
decidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in man appears in the mind-cure
philosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly subconscious; and through the
subconscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without any
miracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this view is
variously expressed by different writers, we find in it traces of
Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the
modern psychology of the subliminal self. A quotation or two will put us
at the central point of view:--
"The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite
life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and
through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back
of all is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it
Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul, Omnipotence, or whatever
term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to
the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone,
so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing that is
outside. He is the life of our life, our very life itself. We are
partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in
that we are individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite
Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence
the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and
so are one. They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in
degree.
"The great central fact in human life is the coming into a
conscious vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite
Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In
just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our
oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine
inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of
the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels through which the
Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In just the degree in
which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will
exchange dis-ease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and
pain for abounding health and strength. To recognize our own
divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is to attach
the belts of our machinery to the powerhouse of the Universe. One
need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can rise to
any heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all
the higher powers of the Universe combine to help us
heavenward."(51)
Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete
accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. I have many answers
from correspondents--the only difficulty is to choose. The first two whom I
shall quote are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as
follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power,
by which all mind-cure disciples are inspired.
"The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or
depression is the _human sense of separateness_ from that Divine
Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in
serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene: 'I and my
Father are one,' has no further need of healer, or of healing.
This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for
wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine
union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on
this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific
Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the
consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark?
"This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been
abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a
record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and
lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they
are to-day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was
dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I
have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a
vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a
moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly
with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For
how can a conscious part of Deity be sick?--since 'Greater is he
that is _with_ us than all that can strive against us.' "
My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement:--
"Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking
down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous
prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of
insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the
digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of
doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed
up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never
recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me.
"I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning
the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental
touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of
life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost
unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves _actually_, that
is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest
consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination
from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and
invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that
to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence
of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the
objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have
engrossed you without.
"I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily
health _as such_, because that comes of itself, as an incidental
result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to
have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to
above. That which we usually make the object of life, those outer
things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and
die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they
should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere
outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the
bosom of the spirit. This life is the real seeking of the kingdom
of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so that all
else comes as that which shall be 'added unto you'--as quite
incidental and as a surprise to us, perhaps; and yet it is the
proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre of
our being.
"When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that
which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which
the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in
business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown
in philanthropic undertakings. Such things should be results, not
objects. I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem
harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept
them--I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in
their various development, these being mostly approved by the
masses, although they may be unreal, and even unhealthy
superfluities."
Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read you
these cases without comment,--they express so many varieties of the state
of mind we are studying.
"I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year.
[Details of ill-health are given which I omit.] I had been in
Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but
steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of
October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it
were these words: 'You will be healed and do a work you never
dreamed of.' These words were impressed upon my mind with such
power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I
believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness,
which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within
two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer
(this was January 7, 1881). The healer said: 'There is nothing but
Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal
belief; as a man thinketh so is he.' I could not accept all she
said, but I translated all that was there for _me_ in this way:
'There is nothing but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely
dependent upon Him; mind is given me to use; and by just so much
of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I
shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past
experience.' That day I commenced accordingly to take a little of
every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself:
'The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I have
eaten.' By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to
bed and fell asleep, saying: 'I am soul, spirit, just one with
God's Thought of me,' and slept all night without waking, for the
first time in several years [the distress-turns had usually
recurred about two o'clock in the night]. I felt the next day like
an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that
would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able
to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began
to have my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to
me like stepping-stones. I will note a few of them; they came
about two weeks apart.
"1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.
"2d. I am Soul, therefore I _am_ well.
"3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four-footed beast with
a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering,
with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I
resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and refused to even
look at my old self in this form.
"4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with
faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge.
"5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing
look; and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner
consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for
I was Soul, an expression of God's Perfect Thought. That was to me
the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I
appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my
real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees
(though it took me two years of hard work to get there) _I
expressed health continuously throughout my whole body_.
"In my subsequent nineteen years' experience I have never known
this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I
have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have
learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child."
But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you
back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records of
experience how impossible it is not to class mind-cure as primarily a
religious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God's
life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ's
message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of
your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.(52)
But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of
the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world,
the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness,
the mind-curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no
speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for
everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill
agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as
a "mystery" or "problem," or in "laying to heart" the lesson of its
experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don't reason about it,
as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya,
ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended
and forgotten. Christian Science so-called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the
most radical branch of mind-cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is
simply a _lie_, and any one who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic
ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit
attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad
speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical
merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a
mind-curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good?
After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed a living
system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous
literature of the _Diätetik der Seele_ into the shade. This system is
wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism: "Pessimism leads to
weakness. Optimism leads to power." "Thoughts are things," as one of the
most vigorous mind-cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each
of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and
success, before you know it these things will also be your outward
portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic
thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet
to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic
modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind-curers here bring
in a doctrine that thoughts are "forces," and that, by virtue of a law
that like attracts like, one man's thoughts draw to themselves as allies
all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one
gets, by one's thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization
of one's desires; and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the
heavenly forces on one's side by opening one's own mind to their influx.
On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the
mind-cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the
believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, "What shall I do
to be saved?" Luther and Wesley replied: "You are saved now, if you would
but believe it." And the mind-curers come with precisely similar words of
emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception
of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor
nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. _Things are wrong
with them_; and "What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?"
is the form of their question. And the answer is: "You _are_ well, sound,
and clear already, if you did but know it." "The whole matter may be
summed up in one sentence," says one of the authors whom I have already
quoted, "_God is well, and so are you_. You must awaken to the knowledge
of your real being."
The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of
mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same
adequacy holds in the case of the mind-cure message, foolish as it may
sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its
therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined
(probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its
manifestations(53)) to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the
popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their
day.
-------------------------------------
But I here fear that I may begin to "jar upon the nerves" of some of the
members of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may
think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures.
I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these
lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous
diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their
wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be
classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different
types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer
acquaintance with the healthy-minded type, we must take it where we find
it in most radical form. The psychology of individual types of character
has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet--our lectures may possibly
serve as a crumb-like contribution to the structure. The first thing to
bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-
scientific type, the officially and conventionally "correct" type, "the
deadly respectable" type, for which to ignore others is a besetting
temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena
from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in
anything like them ourselves.
Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic
conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems to prove the
existence of numerous persons in whom--at any rate at a certain stage in
their development--a change of character for the better, so far from being
facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place
all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed. Official
moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. "Be vigilant, day
and night," they adjure us; "hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink
from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent." But the persons I
speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure
and vexation in their hands, and only makes them two-fold more the
children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude
becomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses
to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.
Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by
innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralistic
method, by the "surrender" of which I spoke in my second lecture.
Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the
rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the
care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what
becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect
inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you
sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self-
despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage
into _nothing_ of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical
point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must
give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event
(as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic,
and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an
external power.
Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one
fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or
incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic
character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails
to cast doubt on its reality. They _know_; for they have actually _felt_
the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.
A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found
himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught
a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for
hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a
despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches.
If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared.
As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the
everlasting arms receive _us_ if we confide absolutely in them, and give
up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its
precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.
The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience.
They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting
go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by
faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of
persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran
theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and
finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or
great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative
phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of
human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-
idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal
explanation.(54)
When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shall learn
something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the
mind-curer's _methods_.
They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of
environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education. But the
word "suggestion," having acquired official status, is unfortunately
already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon
investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying
susceptibilities of individual cases. "Suggestion" is only another name
for the power of ideas, _so far as they prove efficacious over belief and
conduct_. Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over
others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are
not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churches are
not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to-day, whatever they may
have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why
the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving
of the word "suggestion" as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr.
Goddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to
nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that "Religion [and
by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is
in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our
religious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done." And this in
spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely
_nothing_, or did nothing until mind-cure came to the rescue.(55)
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a
revelation. The mind-cure with its gospel of healthy-mindedness has come
as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left
hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. In what can the
originality of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel,
until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some
group of human beings?
The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the
force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of
success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectable, and
intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its
acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The
church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the
acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many,
indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes
to the movings of the Spirit. "We may pray," says Jonathan Edwards,
"concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may
either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by
some at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural
men, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if
they were all dead."(56)
The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large numbers,
of minds who unite healthy-mindedness with readiness for regeneration by
letting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural
man, Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either the
one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character
formed of this peculiar mingling of elements. However few of us here
present may belong to such a type, it is now evident that it forms a
specific moral combination, well represented in the world.
Finally, mind-cure has made what in our protestant countries is an
unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasoned
advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise
in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even
invoked something like hypnotic practice. I quote some passages at
random:--
"The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on
which the New Thought most strongly insists,--the development
namely from within outward, from small to great.(57) Consequently
one's thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though
this trust be literally like a step in the dark.(58) To attain the
ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought
advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the
attainment of self-control. One is to learn to marshal the
tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a
unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times
for silent meditation, by one's self, preferably in a room where
the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New
Thought terms, this is called 'entering the silence.' "(59)
"The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street
you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of
your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and
everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace,
Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you.
This is the spirit of continual prayer.(60) One of the most
intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where
several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often
talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds
about him, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of
perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him
that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and
thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though he
were alone in some primeval wood. Taking his difficulty with him
into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to which
he expected a certain answer, he would remain utterly passive
until the reply came, and never once through many years'
experience did he find himself disappointed or misled."(61)
Wherein, I should like to know, does this _intrinsically_ differ from the
practice of "recollection" which plays so great a part in Catholic
discipline? Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so
known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus
defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on
Contemplation.
"It is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all
places and circumstances makes us see him present, lets us commune
respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and
affection for him.... Would you escape from every ill? Never lose
this recollection of God, neither in prosperity nor in adversity,
nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke not, to excuse
yourself from this duty, either the difficulty or the importance
of your business, for you can always remember that God sees you,
that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an hour you forget
him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection. If you cannot
practice this exercise continuously, at least make yourself as
familiar with it as possible; and, like unto those who in a
rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can, go as
often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your
soul."(62)
All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course
unlike anything in mind-cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the
exercise is identical in both communions, and in both communions those who
urge it write with authority, for they have evidently experienced in their
own persons that whereof they tell. Compare again some mind-cure
utterances:--
"High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and
strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it
forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the
mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty,
wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may
at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance
will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally
delightful.
"The soul's real world is that which it has built of its thoughts,
mental states, and imaginations. If we _will_, we can turn our
backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into
the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence.
The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will
attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as
air inclines to a vacuum.... Whenever the thought is not occupied
with one's daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into
the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day,
and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful
exercise may be engaged in to great advantage. If one who has
never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought-
forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here
suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and
nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and
superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons the outside world,
with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes
into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune
and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so
that the 'still, small voice' is audible, the tumultuous waves of
external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego
gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the
Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which
is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is soul-contact
with the Parent-Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health,
and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain."(63)
When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep an
immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all
over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with which
this little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed
away--doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract
talk and rhetoric set down _pour encourager les autres_. You will then be
convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of "union" form a
perfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul may
occasionally partake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper
sense than they live by anything else with which they have acquaintance.
This brings me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should
like to pass from the subject of healthy-mindedness, and close a topic
which I fear is already only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation
of all this systematized healthy-mindedness and mind-cure religion to
scientific method and the scientific life.
-------------------------------------
In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of
religion to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on the
other. There are plenty of persons to-day--"scientists" or "positivists,"
they are fond of calling themselves--who will tell you that religious
thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of
consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long
since left behind and outgrown. If you ask them to explain themselves more
fully, they will probably say that for primitive thought everything is
conceived of under the form of personality. The savage thinks that things
operate by personal forces, and for the sake of individual ends. For him,
even external nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these
were so many elementary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these
positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an
elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really
elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho-physical,
which are all impersonal and general in character. Nothing individual
accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and
exemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquire of them by what
means science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its
personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say it has been
by the strict use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out
science's conceptions practically, they will say, the conceptions that
ignore personality altogether, and you will always be corroborated. The
world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially
verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you
infer them impersonal and universal.
But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy,
setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says,
and every day will practically prove you right. That the controlling
energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are
forces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your
individual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and
mental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify
these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind-cure
movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but
by palpable experiential results. Here, in the very heyday of science's
authority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific
philosophy, and succeeds by using science's own peculiar methods and
weapons. Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain
ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw
ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not
impugned, but corroborated by its observation.
How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident enough
from the narratives which I have quoted. I will quote yet another couple
of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn. Here is
one:--
"One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two
months after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right
ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had to
use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully
guarding it ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I made the
positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being): 'There is
nothing but God, all life comes from him perfectly. I cannot be
sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.' Well, I never
had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day."
The next case not only illustrates experiment and verification, but also
the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made such
account.
"I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not
been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling
increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and
faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an
attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the
grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The mind-cure
teachings that I had been listening to all the winter thereupon
came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to
test myself. On my way home I met a friend, and I refrained with
some effort from telling her how I felt. That was the first step
gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send
for the doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until
morning and see how I felt. Then followed one of the most
beautiful experiences of my life.
"I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did 'lie
down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.' I gave up all
fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and
obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought.
My dominant idea was: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto
me even as thou wilt,' and a perfect confidence that all would be
well, that all _was_ well. The creative life was flowing into me
every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in
harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding. There
was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness
of time or space or persons; but only of love and happiness and
faith.
"I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep;
but when I woke up in the morning, _I was well_."
These are exceedingly trivial instances,(64) but in them, if we have
anything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification. For
the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider
the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they
seemed to _themselves_ to have been cured by the experiments tried was
enough to make them converts to the system. And although it is evident
that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not
every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than every
one can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom he calls in), yet
it would surely be pedantic and over-scrupulous for those who _can_ get
their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such
experimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for more
scientific therapeutics. What are we to think of all this? Has science
made too wide a claim?
I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the
least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this
hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them)
plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect,
even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our
verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated
systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why
in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of
ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the
world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled
by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of
profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some
other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all
of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in
preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape
of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and
prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better
in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the
religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure-
house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently
neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other's simultaneous use. And
why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many
interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in
alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different
attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial
facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or
by quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and
science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to
life, would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in
individualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever from
being driven by science from the field to-day. Numbers of educated people
still find it the directest experimental channel by which to carry on
their intercourse with reality.(65)
The case of mind-cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the
temptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention,
but I must content myself to-day with this very brief indication. In a
later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive
thought will have to receive much more explicit attention.
Appendix
(See note to p. 121.)
CASE I. "My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one
of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been
a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and
writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out
from exercise of any kind under penalty of immediate and great
exhaustion. I had been under the care of doctors of the highest
standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me
I had had great faith, with no or ill result. Then, at a time when
I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground, I heard some things
that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it;
I had no great hope of getting any good from it--it was a _chance_
I tried, partly because my thought was interested by the new
possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only
chance I then could see. I went to X. in Boston, from whom some
friends of mine had got, or thought that they had got, great help;
the treatment was a silent one; little was said, and that little
carried no conviction to my mind; whatever influence was exerted
was that of another person's thought or feeling silently projected
on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as
we sat still together. I believed from the start in the
_possibility_ of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to
shape, helping or hindering, the body's nerve-activities, and I
thought telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief
in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any
mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that
might have brought imagination strongly into play.
"I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first
with no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite
suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising
within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting-places, of
power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had
long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb. I
began to read and walk as I had not done for years, and the change
was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This tide seemed to mount
for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, I
came away, taking the treatment up again a few months later. The
lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining ground
instead of losing it, but with this lift the influence seemed in a
way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality
of the power had gained immensely from this first experience, and
should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength
if my belief in it had been the potent factor there, I never after
this got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as
this which came when I made trial of it first, with little faith
and doubtful expectation. It is difficult to put all the evidence
in such a matter into words, to gather up into a distinct
statement all that one bases one's conclusions on, but I have
always felt that I had abundant evidence to justify (to myself, at
least) the conclusion that I came to then, and since have held to,
that the physical change which came at that time was, first, the
result of a change wrought within me by a change of mental state;
and, secondly, that that change of mental state was not, save in a
very secondary way, brought about through the influence of an
excited imagination, or a _consciously_ received suggestion of an
hypnotic sort. Lastly, I believe that this change was the result
of my receiving telepathically, and upon a mental stratum quite
below the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and more
energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought
was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of
this attitude upon me. In my case the disease was distinctly what
would be classed as nervous, not organic; but from such
opportunities as I have had of observing, I have come to the
conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an
arbitrary one, the nerves controlling the internal activities and
the nutrition of the body throughout; and I believe that the
central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres,
can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, if it can
be brought to bear. In my judgment the question is simply how to
bring it to bear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable
differences in the results obtained through mental healing do but
show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the
means we should take to make them effective. That these results
are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and
others makes me sure; that the conscious mind, the imagination,
enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, but
in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary ones, it hardly
seems to enter in at all. On the whole I am inclined to think that
as the healing action, like the morbid one, springs from the plane
of the normally _un_conscious mind, so the strongest and most
effective impressions are those which _it_ receives, in some as
yet unknown, subtle way, _directly_ from a healthier mind whose
state, through a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces."
CASE II. "At the urgent request of friends, and with no faith and
hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful
experience with a Christian Scientist), our little daughter was
placed under the care of a healer, and cured of a trouble about
which the physician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis.
This interested me, and I began studying earnestly the method and
philosophy of this method of healing. Gradually an inner peace and
tranquillity came to me in so positive a way that my manner
changed greatly. My children and friends noticed the change and
commented upon it. All feelings of irritability disappeared. Even
the expression of my face changed noticeably.
"I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discussion,
both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive
toward the views of others. I had been nervous and irritable,
coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache
induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh. I grew
serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely disappeared.
I had been in the habit of approaching every business interview
with an almost morbid dread. I now meet every one with confidence
and inner calm.
"I may say that the growth has all been toward the elimination of
selfishness. I do not mean simply the grosser, more sensual forms,
but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such as
express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has
been in the direction of a practical, working realization of the
immanence of God and the Divinity of man's true, inner self."
LECTURES VI AND VII. THE SICK SOUL.
At our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded temperament, the
temperament which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering,
and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of
crystallization in which the individual's character is set. We saw how
this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a
religion in which good, even the good of this world's life, is regarded as
the essential thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion
directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the
universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of
them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on
occasion, by denying outright that they exist. Evil is a disease; and
worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only
adds to the original complaint. Even repentance and remorse, affections
which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and
relaxing impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness,
and forget that you ever had relations with sin.
Spinoza's philosophy has this sort of healthy-mindedness woven into the
heart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom
Reason leads, according to Spinoza, is led altogether by the influence
over his mind of good. Knowledge of evil is an "inadequate" knowledge, fit
only for slavish minds. So Spinoza categorically condemns repentance. When
men make mistakes, he says,--
"One might perhaps expect gnawings of conscience and repentance to
help to bring them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude
(as every one does conclude) that these affections are good
things. Yet when we look at the matter closely, we shall find that
not only are they not good, but on the contrary deleterious and
evil passions. For it is manifest that we can always get along
better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and
remorse. Harmful are these and evil, inasmuch as they form a
particular kind of sadness; and the disadvantages of sadness," he
continues, "I have already proved, and shown that we should strive
to keep it from our life. Just so we should endeavor, since
uneasiness of conscience and remorse are of this kind of
complexion, to flee and shun these states of mind."(66)
Within the Christian body, for which repentance of sins has from the
beginning been the critical religious act, healthy-mindedness has always
come forward with its milder interpretation. Repentance according to such
healthy-minded Christians means _getting away from_ the sin, not groaning
and writhing over its commission. The Catholic practice of confession and
absolution is in one of its aspects little more than a systematic method
of keeping healthy-mindedness on top. By it a man's accounts with evil are
periodically squared and audited, so that he may start the clean page with
no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will tell us how clean and fresh and
free he feels after the purging operation. Martin Luther by no means
belonged to the healthy-minded type in the radical sense in which we have
discussed it, and he repudiated priestly absolution for sin. Yet in this
matter of repentance he had some very healthy-minded ideas, due in the
main to the largeness of his conception of God.
"When I was a monk," he says, "I thought that I was utterly cast
away, if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say,
if I felt any evil motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or envy
against any brother. I assayed many ways to help to quiet my
conscience, but it would not be; for the concupiscence and lust of
my flesh did always return, so that I could not rest, but was
continually vexed with these thoughts: This or that sin thou hast
committed: thou art infected with envy, with impatiency, and such
other sins: therefore thou art entered into this holy order in
vain, and all thy good works are unprofitable. But if then I had
rightly understood these sentences of Paul: 'The flesh lusteth
contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit contrary to the flesh; and
these two are one against another, so that ye cannot do the things
that ye would do,' I should not have so miserably tormented
myself, but should have thought and said to myself, as now
commonly I do, 'Martin, thou shalt not utterly be without sin, for
thou hast flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the battle thereof.' I
remember that Staupitz was wont to say, 'I have vowed unto God
above a thousand times that I would become a better man: but I
never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter I will make no such
vow: for I have now learned by experience that I am not able to
perform it. Unless, therefore, God be favorable and merciful unto
me for Christ's sake, I shall not be able, with all my vows and
all my good deeds, to stand before him.' This (of Staupitz's) was
not only a true, but also a godly and a holy desperation; and this
must they all confess, both with mouth and heart, who will be
saved. For the godly trust not to their own righteousness. They
look unto Christ their reconciler, who gave his life for their
sins. Moreover, they know that the remnant of sin which is in
their flesh is not laid to their charge, but freely pardoned.
Notwithstanding, in the mean while they fight in spirit against
the flesh, lest they should _fulfill_ the lusts thereof; and
although they feel the flesh to rage and rebel, and themselves
also do fall sometimes into sin through infirmity, yet are they
not discouraged, nor think therefore that their state and kind of
life, and the works which are done according to their calling,
displease God; but they raise up themselves by faith."(67)
One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual genius,
Molinos, the founder of Quietism, so abominably condemned was his healthy-
minded opinion of repentance:--
"When thou fallest into a fault, in what matter soever it be, do
not trouble nor afflict thyself for it. For they are effects of
our frail Nature, stained by Original Sin. The common enemy will
make thee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that
thou walkest in error, and therefore art out of God and his favor,
and herewith would he make thee distrust of the divine Grace,
telling thee of thy misery, and making a giant of it; and putting
it into thy head that every day thy soul grows worse instead of
better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul,
open thine eyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical
suggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting in the mercy divine.
Would not he be a mere fool who, running at tournament with
others, and falling in the best of the career, should lie weeping
on the ground and afflicting himself with discourses upon his
fall? Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take the
course again, for he that rises again quickly and continues his
race is as if he had never fallen. If thou seest thyself fallen
once and a thousand times, thou oughtest to make use of the remedy
which I have given thee, that is, a loving confidence in the
divine mercy. These are the weapons with which thou must fight and
conquer cowardice and vain thoughts. This is the means thou
oughtest to use--not to lose time, not to disturb thyself, and reap
no good."(68)
Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat them
as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite
view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the
persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and
that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to
heart. We have now to address ourselves to this more morbid way of looking
at the situation. But as I closed our last hour with a general
philosophical reflection on the healthy-minded way of taking life, I
should like at this point to make another philosophical reflection upon it
before turning to that heavier task. You will excuse the brief delay.
If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the
interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that
has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever
it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has
shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All-in-All. In other
words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become
pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of
absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical
theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not
to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a
universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed
to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others
are subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible
for the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were not
finally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like
everything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to
see how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This
difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears
as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an _Individual_, and in it
the worst parts must be as essential as the best, must be as necessary to
make the individual what he is; since if any part whatever in an
individual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be _that_
individual at all. The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously
represented both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle with this
difficulty quite as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and
although it would be premature to say that there is no speculative issue
whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no
clear or easy issue, and that the only _obvious_ escape from paradox here
is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and to allow the
world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate
or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an
absolutely unitary fact. For then evil would not need to be essential; it
might be, and may always have been, an independent portion that had no
rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and which we might
conceivably hope to see got rid of at last.
Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have described it, casts its
vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the monistic
philosopher finds himself more or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that
everything actual is rational, and that evil, as an element dialectically
required, must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function
awarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to
say anything of the sort.(69) Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational,
and _not_ to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final
system of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality,
a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of
it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal, so far from being co-
extensive with the whole actual, is a mere _extract_ from the actual,
marked by its deliverance from all contact with this diseased, inferior,
and excrementitious stuff.
Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us,
of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole
in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view
of any system which those other elements make up, can only be considered
so much irrelevance and accident--so much "dirt," as it were, and matter
out of place. I ask you now not to forget this notion; for although most
philosophers seem either to forget it or to disdain it too much ever to
mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselves in the end
as containing an element of truth. The mind-cure gospel thus once more
appears to us as having dignity and importance. We have seen it to be a
genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal to imagination to cure disease;
we have seen its method of experimental verification to be not unlike the
method of all science; and now here we find mind-cure as the champion of a
perfectly definite conception of the metaphysical structure of the world.
I hope that, in view of all this, you will not regret my having pressed it
upon your attention at such length.
-------------------------------------
Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking, and turn
towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the
consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its
presence. Just as we saw that in healthy-mindedness there are shallower
and profounder levels, happiness like that of the mere animal, and more
regenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there different levels of the
morbid mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There are
people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with _things_, a wrong
correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such evil as this is
curable, in principle at least, upon the natural plane, for merely by
modifying either the self or the things, or both at once, the two terms
may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there
are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular
outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice
in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any
superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires
a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more
towards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins
in the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended
rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of
something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to
be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.(70) These comparisons
of races are always open to exception, but undoubtedly the northern tone
in religion has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion,
and this way of feeling, being the more extreme, we shall find by far the
more instructive for our study.
Recent psychology has found great use for the word "threshold" as a
symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into
another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness in
general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer
stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high
threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low
threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to
small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low
"difference-threshold"--his mind easily steps over it into the
consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak
of a "pain-threshold," a "fear-threshold," a "misery-threshold," and find
it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying
too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The
sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their
misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and
apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle
or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have
been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants
fatally send them over.
Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the
pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who
habitually lived on the other? This question, of the relativity of
different types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally
at this point, and will become a serious problem ere we have done. But
before we confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the
unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in
contrast to the healthy-minded, have to say of the secrets of their
prison-house, their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then
resolutely turn our backs on the once-born and their sky-blue optimistic
gospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, "Hurrah
for the Universe!--God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world." Let us
see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human
helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more
complicated key to the meaning of the situation.
-------------------------------------
To begin with, how _can_ things so insecure as the successful experiences
of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its
weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most
prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are
always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of
pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of
nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that
sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming
from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz
of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the
damper falls upon it.
Of course the music can commence again;--and again and again,--at intervals.
But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an
irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws
its breath on sufferance and by an accident.
Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy-mindedness as never to
have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals, still,
if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his own lot with
that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just a lucky
chance and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born
to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security!
What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is,
"Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!" Is not its blessedness a
fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike
the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success,
even on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied
by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one
of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched
far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals
of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows
himself to be found wanting.
When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this
wise, how must it be with less successful men?
"I will say nothing," writes Goethe in 1824, "against the course
of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and
burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I
have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the
perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever."
What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther? yet
when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an
absolute failure.
"I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith
and carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last
Judgment: I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst
forth, and I shall be at rest."--And having a necklace of white
agates in his hand at the time he added: "O God, grant that it may
come without delay. I would readily eat up this necklace to-day,
for the Judgment to come to-morrow."--The Electress Dowager, one
day when Luther was dining with her, said to him: "Doctor, I wish
you may live forty years to come." "Madam," replied he, "rather
than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of
Paradise."
Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it
with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the
memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning
emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal
expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh
exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering
known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to
these results.
And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and
everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. "There is indeed one
element in human destiny," Robert Louis Stevenson writes, "that not
blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we
are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted."(71) And our
nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians
should have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the
personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of
life's significance is reached?(72)
But this is only the first stage of the world-sickness. Make the human
being's sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over
the misery-threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments
themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods
perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and
health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust and
disappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of
everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing
blackness:--
"What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under
the Sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and
behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which
befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so
dieth the other; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust
again.... The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a
reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love and
their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any
more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the Sun....
Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes
to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in
them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they
shall be many."
In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But
if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are
equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems
infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the
joy-destroying chill which such a contemplation engenders, the only relief
that healthy-mindedness can give is by saying: "Stuff and nonsense, get
out into the open air!" or "Cheer up, old fellow, you'll be all right
erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!" But in all seriousness,
can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To
ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's
brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness
and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for _that_ cure. The
fact that we _can_ die, that we _can_ be ill at all, is what perplexes us;
the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that
perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable
to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies
beyond the Goods of nature.
It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. "The
trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and
goodness," said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort,
"and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and
disconcerted at its being possible." And so with most of us: a little
cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal
toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold,
will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into
full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life
and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing
quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely
naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure
to end in sadness.
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or
naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its
best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and
forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of,
and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the
individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact
depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its
significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be
known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy,
its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal
disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he
knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge
knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of
death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.
The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of
possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an
eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let
Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and
hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;--and his days pass by with
zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place
round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all
permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science
evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the
thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a
position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake,
surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that
little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near
when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously
will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer
and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night,
the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of
the total situation.
The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as models
of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of nature may
engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks--Homer's flow
of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines upon is steady. But even
in Homer the reflective passages are cheerless,(73) and the moment the
Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they became
unmitigated pessimists.(74) The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that
follows too much happiness, the all-encompassing death, fate's dark
opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed
background of their imagination. The beautiful joyousness of their
polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable
in quality of preciousness to those which we shall erelong see that
Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice-born people whose
religion is non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism
and renunciation.
Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance
which the Greek mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: "Seek not
to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always
linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the
deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiming
low; and above all do not fret." The Stoic said: "The only genuine good
that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all
other goods are lies." Each of these philosophies is in its degree a
philosophy of despair in nature's boons. Trustful self-abandonment to the
joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and
Stoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust-
and-ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy
of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and
gives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms of
resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which
man's primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo. In
the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite
cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they
were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to
all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished
in the evolution of the world-sick soul.(75) They mark the conclusion of
what we call the once-born period, and represent the highest flights of
what twice-born religion would call the purely natural man--Epicureanism,
which can only by great courtesy be called a religion, showing his
refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world
in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity.
Compared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated
Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts
for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity.
Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to _judge_
any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety.
The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice-
born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a more
radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered. We have seen
how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off from the goods of nature.
But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may
be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from
the mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something
more is needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The
individual must in his own person become the prey of a pathological
melancholy. As the healthy-minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil's
very existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself
to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the
least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a
rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one
seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the
most atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic
constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its
active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that
follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance
absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal
documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost
an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle
of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all
seriously, we must be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below
the smooth and lying official conversational surface.
One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it is
mere passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack
of taste and zest and spring. Professor Ribot has proposed the name
_anhedonia_ to designate this condition.
"The state of _anhedonia_, if I may coin a new word to pair off
with _analgesia_," he writes, "has been very little studied, but
it exists. A young girl was smitten with a liver disease which for
some time altered her constitution. She felt no longer any
affection for her father and mother. She would have played with
her doll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure in the
act. The same things which formerly convulsed her with laughter
entirely failed to interest her now. Esquirol observed the case of
a very intelligent magistrate who was also a prey to hepatic
disease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested
neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of emotional
reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he
could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his
home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little,
he said, as a theorem of Euclid."(76)
Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary condition
of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is imagined only to be
turned from with disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connected
with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character, both
intellectual and moral, is well described by the Catholic philosopher,
Father Gratry, in his autobiographical recollections. In consequence of
mental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young
Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms which he thus
describes:--
"I had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start,
thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic school,
or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring
into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And
when these impressions were past, all day long without respite I
suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation, verging on
despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned!
I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had
never even thought of hell. My mind had never turned in that
direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had impressed me in
that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and all at once, I
suffered in a measure what is suffered there.
"But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of
heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of
anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It
was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows
less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in
inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love--all these
words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have
talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling
anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping
anything from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my
great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived
any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An abstract
heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for
eternity."(77)
So much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling. A
much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical
neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of
various characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing;
sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self-mistrust
and self-despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient
may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he
may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should
so have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our
classifications with too much respect. Moreover, it is only a relatively
small proportion of cases that connect themselves with the religious
sphere of experience at all. Exasperated cases, for instance, as a rule do
not. I quote now literally from the first case of melancholy on which I
lay my hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French asylum.
"I suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and morally.
Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep
since I am shut up here, and the little rest I get is broken by
bad dreams, and I am waked with a jump by nightmares, dreadful
visions, lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear, atrocious fear,
presses me down, holds me without respite, never lets me go. Where
is the justice in it all! What have I done to deserve this excess
of severity? Under what form will this fear crush me? What would I
not owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Eat, drink, lie
awake all night, suffer without interruption--such is the fine
legacy I have received from my mother! What I fail to understand
is this abuse of power. There are limits to everything, there is a
middle way. But God knows neither middle way nor limits. I say
God, but why? All I have known so far has been the devil. After
all, I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I drift along,
thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage nor
means here to execute the act. As you read this, it will easily
prove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas are incoherent
enough--I can see that myself. But I cannot keep myself from being
either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are, from whom should I
ask pity? I am defenseless against the invisible enemy who is
tightening his coils around me. I should be no better armed
against him even if I saw him, or had seen him. Oh, if he would
but kill me, devil take him! Death, death, once for all! But I
stop. I have raved to you long enough. I say raved, for I can
write no otherwise, having neither brain nor thoughts left. O God!
what a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless
between an evening and a morning; and how true and right I was
when in our philosophy-year in college I chewed the cud of
bitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more pain in
life than gladness--it is one long agony until the grave. Think how
gay it makes me to remember that this horrible misery of mine,
coupled with this unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred,
who knows how many more years!"(78)
This letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire consciousness
of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of
there being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His
attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And
secondly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind
from taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact
rather towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part
whatever in the construction of religious systems.
-------------------------------------
Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has left
us, in his book called My Confession, a wonderful account of the attack of
melancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions. The latter in
some respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents two characters
which make it a typical document for our present purpose. First it is a
well-marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite for all life's
values; and second, it shows how the altered and estranged aspect which
the world assumed in consequence of this stimulated Tolstoy's intellect to
a gnawing, carking questioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean
to quote Tolstoy at some length; but before doing so, I will make a
general remark on each of these two points.
First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general.
It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional
comments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings in
different persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is
no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the
sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in another
sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the
subject's being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all
the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it
_as it exists_, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable,
hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to
realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the
universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole
collection of its things and series of its events would be without
significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value,
interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus
pure gifts of the spectator's mind. The passion of love is the most
familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it
does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the
value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont
Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole
world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So
with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are
there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost
always upon non-logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited
interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world,
just so are the passions themselves _gifts_,--gifts to us, from sources
sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always non-logical and beyond
our control. How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the
romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old
earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts,
either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it
listeth; and the world's materials lend their surface passively to all the
gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever
alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus
in the gallery.
Meanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the effective
world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and
emotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert
either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we
call pathological ensues.
In Tolstoy's case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a
time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole
expression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion
or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence
of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of
nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In
melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse
direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its
color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it
glares with. "It is as if I lived in another century," says one asylum
patient.--"I see everything through a cloud," says another, "things are not
as they were, and I am changed."--"I see," says a third, "I touch, but the
things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of
everything."--"Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come from a
distant world."--"There is no longer any past for me; people appear so
strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a
theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can no
longer find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but
leaves no impression."--"I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the
things I see are not real things."--Such are expressions that naturally
rise to the lips of melancholy subjects describing their changed
state.(79)
Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest
astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery
is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world
is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An
urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity,
and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter,
the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious
solution.
At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments
of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not "how to live,"
or what to do. It is obvious that these were moments in which the
excitement and interest which our functions naturally bring had ceased.
Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead.
Things were meaningless whose meaning had always been self-evident. The
questions "Why?" and "What next?" began to beset him more and more
frequently. At first it seemed as if such questions must be answerable,
and as if he could easily find the answers if he would take the time; but
as they ever became more urgent, he perceived that it was like those first
discomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little attention till they
run into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took
for a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for
him, means his death.
These questions "Why?" "Wherefore?" "What for?" found no response.
"I felt," says Tolstoy, "that something had broken within me on
which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold
on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force
impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It
cannot be said exactly that I _wished_ to kill myself, for the
force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more
general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old
aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction.
It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.
"Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope
in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every
night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting,
lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end
to myself with my gun.
"I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven
to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it.
"All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer
circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a
good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large
property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I
was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever
been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without
exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I
was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a
physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of
my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my
brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.
"And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my
life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the
very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid
jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live only so
long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows
sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What
is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in
it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.
"The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a
wild beast is very old.
"Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler
jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this
well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And
the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey
of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be
devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush
which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands
weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate;
but still he clings, and sees two mice, one white, the other
black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing
off its roots.
"The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish;
but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves
of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue
and licks them off with rapture.
"Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable
dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot
comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey
which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer,
and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the
branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable
dragon and the mice--I cannot turn my gaze away from them.
"This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every
one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to-day?
Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my
life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in
life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does
not undo and destroy?
"These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid
child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human
being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I
experienced, for life to go on.
" 'But perhaps,' I often said to myself, 'there may be something I
have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that
this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.' And I
sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge
acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with
no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously
and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a man
who is lost and seeks to save himself,--and I found nothing. I
became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had
sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And
not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing
which was leading me to despair--the meaningless absurdity of
life--is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man."
To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer.
And he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are
accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking
the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice,--"and from such a way," he
says, "I can learn nothing, after what I now know;" or reflective
epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts,--which is only a
more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly suicide; or
seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the
bush of life.
Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical
intellect.
"Yet," says Tolstoy, "whilst my intellect was working, something
else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed--a
consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force
that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw
me out of my situation of despair.... During the whole course of
this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end
the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all
that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and
observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining
emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst
for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement
of my ideas,--in fact, it was the direct contrary of that
movement,--but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of
dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst
of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of
dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some
one."(80)
Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which, starting from
this idea of God, led to Tolstoy's recovery, I will say nothing in this
lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest
us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary
life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man
as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a
mockery.
When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a
_restitutio ad integrum_. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the
happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any
does come,--and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though
its form is sometimes very acute,--is not the simple ignorance of ill, but
something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its
elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block and terror
because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is
one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the
sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a
deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.
-------------------------------------
We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrined in
literature in John Bunyan's autobiography. Tolstoy's preoccupations were
largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what
so troubled him; but poor Bunyan's troubles were over the condition of his
own personal self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament,
sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and
insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and
sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory
and sometimes favorable, would come in a half-hallucinatory form as if
they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a
shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self-contempt and
despair.
"Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse; now I am farther from
conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burned at
the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas,
I could neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any
of his things. Sometimes I would tell my condition to the people
of God, which, when they heard, they would pity me, and would tell
of the Promises. But they had as good have told me that I must
reach the Sun with my finger as have bidden me receive or rely
upon the Promise. [Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, I
never was more tender than now; I durst not take a pin or stick,
though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and
would smart at every touch; I could not tell how to speak my
words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I
then go, in all I did or said! I found myself as on a miry bog
that shook if I did but stir; and was as there left both by God
and Christ, and the spirit, and all good things.
"But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my
affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes
than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God's eyes too. Sin and
corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as
water would bubble out of a fountain. I could have changed heart
with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me
for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am
forsaken of God; and thus I continued a long while, even for some
years together.
"And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts,
birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a
sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they
were not to go to hell-fire after death. I could therefore have
rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed
the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been
in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul
to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was
like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken
to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I
could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My
heart was at times exceedingly hard. If I would have given a
thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one; no, nor
sometimes scarce desire to shed one.
"I was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so
know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid
to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself! Anything
but a man! and in any condition but my own."(81)
Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we must also
postpone that part of his story to another hour. In a later lecture I will
also give the end of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist
who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly
describes the high-water mark of the religious melancholy which formed its
beginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan's.
"Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed
accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales
seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of
the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my
ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that every
one I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to
acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea sometimes
it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as the most
guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of the vanity
and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole
world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system
of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought would
be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And
when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before
morning. I would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing
with all my heart I was in their place, that I might have no soul
to lose; and when I have seen birds flying over my head, have
often thought within myself, Oh, that I could fly away from my
danger and distress! Oh, how happy should I be, if I were in their
place!"(82)
Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this
type of sadness.
-------------------------------------
The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear.
Here is an excellent example, for permission to print which I have to
thank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the subject was
evidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes, his
case has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.
"Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general
depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into
a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was
there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just
as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own
existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an
epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired
youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all
day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall,
with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray
undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing
his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian
cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and
looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into
a species of combination with each other. _That shape am I_, I
felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against
that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck
for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of
my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if
something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I
became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was
changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a
horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the
insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never
felt since.(83) It was like a revelation; and although the
immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me
sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It
gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the
dark alone.
"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how
other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so
unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life.
My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a
perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may
well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of
my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience
of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing."
On asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant by these
last words, the answer he wrote was this:--
"I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had
not clung to scripture-texts like 'The eternal God is my refuge,'
etc., 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,' etc.,
'I am the resurrection and the life,' etc., I think I should have
grown really insane."(84)
There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at are enough.
One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense of
sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe;--and in one
or other of these three ways it always is that man's original optimism and
self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust.
In none of these cases was there any intellectual insanity or delusion
about matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the chapter of really
insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a
worse story still--desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe
coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror,
surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual
perception of evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation
of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live
for a moment in its presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual
refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a
need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem:
Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says
things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as
these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint,
if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser
religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and
supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some
constitutions need them too much.
-------------------------------------
Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally
arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that
takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter
way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure
and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way,
on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased.
With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with
their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind
of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath
and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and
burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt
that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would at
present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two.
In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are
we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are bound to say that
morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its
survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention
from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as
it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more
generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of
its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a
religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy
comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there
is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical
doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account
for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best
key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to
the deepest levels of truth.
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which
insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its
innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all
drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the
shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of
helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there
yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard
for our imagination--they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet
there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily
through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in
despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to
their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-
day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays
with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws.
Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life
as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every
day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts
clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac
feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.(85)
It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute
totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to
higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so
extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect
of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical
resource. This question must confront us on a later day. But
provisionally, and as a mere matter of program and method, since the evil
facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic
presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that
systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow,
pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally
less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in
their scope.
The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the
pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and
Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially
religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can
be born into the real life. In my next lecture, I will try to discuss some
of the psychological conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now
onward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which
we have recently been dwelling on.
LECTURE VIII. THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION.
The last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil as a
pervasive element of the world we live in. At the close of it we were
brought into full view of the contrast between the two ways of looking at
life which are characteristic respectively of what we called the healthy-
minded, who need to be born only once, and of the sick souls, who must be
twice-born in order to be happy. The result is two different conceptions
of the universe of our experience. In the religion of the once-born the
world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose accounts are
kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally
they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and
minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist
in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-
born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace
cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of
minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and
transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is
by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can
never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our
real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step
in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the
spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the
other.
In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two
types are violently contrasted; though here as in most other current
classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and
the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties
and mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize the difference: you
understand, for example, the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere
sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion
of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the
Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the
inversion of natural appearances the essence of God's truth.(86)
-------------------------------------
The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be a certain
discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an
incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.
"Homo duplex, homo duplex!" writes Alphonse Daudet. "The first
time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my
brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, 'He is
dead, he is dead!' While my first self wept, my second self
thought, 'How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at
the theatre.' I was then fourteen years old.
"This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection.
Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on
foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me
that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or
put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!"(87)
Recent works on the psychology of character have had much to say upon this
point.(88) Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is
harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are
consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the
guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their
lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted;
and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result
in a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the
consequences may be inconvenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent
kinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant's
autobiography.
"I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength,
and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to
suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would
feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unlucky string;
as a girl I would shrink away from strangers and think myself
unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude to any
one who noticed me kindly; as the young mistress of a house I was
afraid of my servants, and would let careless work pass rather
than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer; when I have been
lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the platform, I
have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel rather
than to ring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the
platform in defense of any cause I cared for, I shrink from
quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am a coward at heart in
private while a good fighter in public. How often have I passed
unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up my courage to find fault
with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and
how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty
platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass
for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to
make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on
the platform, opposition makes me speak my best."(89)
This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but a
stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject's life.
There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags,
as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars
with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt
their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of
repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.
Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of
inheritance--the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic
ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.(90) This
explanation may pass for what it is worth--it certainly needs
corroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be,
we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament, of
which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament make
the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently,
indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to
a man at all. A "dégénéré supérieur" is simply a man of sensibility in
many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in keeping his
spiritual house in order and running his furrow straight, because his
feelings and impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the
haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid
scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperament
when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of
heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, "Sell
Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!" which would run
through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath
with retorting, "I will not, I will not," he impulsively said, "Let him go
if he will," and this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a
year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions,
ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connects
itself with the life of the subconscious self, so-called, of which we must
ere-long speak more directly.
Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in
proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified
temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly
psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in
the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the
lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a
comparative chaos within us--they must end by forming a stable system of
functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the
period of order-making and struggle. If the individual be of tender
conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form
of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and
of standing in false relations to the author of one's being and appointer
of one's spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and "conviction
of sin" that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant
Christianity. The man's interior is a battle-ground for what he feels to
be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor Hugo
makes his Mahomet say:--
"Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats:
Tantôt l'homme d'en haut, et tantôt l'homme d'en bas;
Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne,
Comme dans le désert le sable et la citerne."
Wrong living, impotent aspirations; "What I would, that do I not; but what
I hate, that do I," as Saint Paul says; self-loathing, self-despair; an
unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the
heir.
Let me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with
melancholy in the form of self-condemnation and sense of sin. Saint
Augustine's case is a classic example. You all remember his half-pagan,
half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan,
his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his restless
search for truth and purity of life; and finally how, distracted by the
struggle between the two souls in his breast, and ashamed of his own
weakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown
off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and
the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, "_Sume, lege_" (take
and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, "not in
chambering and wantonness," etc., which seemed directly sent to his
address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever.(91) Augustine's
psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a
divided self which has never been surpassed.
"The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough to
overcome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So
these two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other
spiritual, contended with each other and disturbed my soul. I
understood by my own experience what I had read, 'flesh lusteth
against spirit, and spirit against flesh.' It was myself indeed in
both the wills, yet more myself in that which I approved in myself
than in that which I disapproved in myself. Yet it was through
myself that habit had attained so fierce a mastery over me,
because I had willingly come whither I willed not. Still bound to
earth, I refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as much afraid to
be freed from all bonds, as I ought to have feared being trammeled
by them.
"Thus the thoughts by which I meditated upon thee were like the
efforts of one who would awake, but being overpowered with
sleepiness is soon asleep again. Often does a man when heavy
sleepiness is on his limbs defer to shake it off, and though not
approving it, encourage it; even so I was sure it was better to
surrender to thy love than to yield to my own lusts, yet, though
the former course convinced me, the latter pleased and held me
bound. There was naught in me to answer thy call, 'Awake, thou
sleeper,' but only drawling, drowsy words, 'Presently; yes,
presently; wait a little while.' But the 'presently' had no
'present,' and the 'little while' grew long.... For I was afraid
thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once of my disease
of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than to see
extinguished. With what lashes of words did I not scourge my own
soul. Yet it shrank back; it refused, though it had no excuse to
offer.... I said within myself: 'Come, let it be done now,' and as
I said it, I was on the point of the resolve. I all but did it,
yet I did not do it. And I made another effort, and almost
succeeded, yet I did not reach it, and did not grasp it,
hesitating to die to death, and live to life; and the evil to
which I was so wonted held me more than the better life I had not
tried."(92)
There could be no more perfect description of the divided will, when the
higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive
intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists),
that enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously
into life and quell the lower tendencies forever. In a later lecture we
shall have much to say about this higher excitability.
-------------------------------------
I find another good description of the divided will in the autobiography
of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist, of whose melancholy I read a
brief account in my last lecture. The poor youth's sins were, as you will
see, of the most harmless order, yet they interfered with what proved to
be his truest vocation, so they gave him great distress.
"I was now very moral in my life, but found no rest of conscience.
I now began to be esteemed in young company, who knew nothing of
my mind all this while, and their esteem began to be a snare to my
soul, for I soon began to be fond of carnal mirth, though I still
flattered myself that if I did not get drunk, nor curse, nor
swear, there would be no sin in frolicking and carnal mirth, and I
thought God would indulge young people with some (what I called
simple or civil) recreation. I still kept a round of duties, and
would not suffer myself to run into any open vices, and so got
along very well in time of health and prosperity, but when I was
distressed or threatened by sickness, death, or heavy storms of
thunder, my religion would not do, and I found there was something
wanting, and would begin to repent my going so much to frolics,
but when the distress was over, the devil and my own wicked heart,
with the solicitations of my associates, and my fondness for young
company, were such strong allurements, I would again give way, and
thus I got to be very wild and rude, at the same time kept up my
rounds of secret prayer and reading; but God, not willing I should
destroy myself, still followed me with his calls, and moved with
such power upon my conscience, that I could not satisfy myself
with my diversions, and in the midst of my mirth sometimes would
have such a sense of my lost and undone condition, that I would
wish myself from the company, and after it was over, when I went
home, would make many promises that I would attend no more on
these frolics, and would beg forgiveness for hours and hours; but
when I came to have the temptation again, I would give way: no
sooner would I hear the music and drink a glass of wine, but I
would find my mind elevated and soon proceed to any sort of
merriment or diversion, that I thought was not debauched or openly
vicious; but when I returned from my carnal mirth I felt as guilty
as ever, and could sometimes not close my eyes for some hours
after I had gone to my bed. I was one of the most unhappy
creatures on earth.
"Sometimes I would leave the company (often speaking to the
fiddler to cease from playing, as if I was tired), and go out and
walk about crying and praying, as if my very heart would break,
and beseeching God that he would not cut me off, nor give me up to
hardness of heart. Oh, what unhappy hours and nights I thus wore
away! When I met sometimes with merry companions, and my heart was
ready to sink, I would labor to put on as cheerful a countenance
as possible, that they might not distrust anything, and sometimes
would begin some discourse with young men or young women on
purpose, or propose a merry song, lest the distress of my soul
would be discovered, or mistrusted, when at the same time I would
then rather have been in a wilderness in exile, than with them or
any of their pleasures or enjoyments. Thus for many months when I
was in company, I would act the hypocrite and feign a merry heart,
but at the same time would endeavor as much as I could to shun
their company, oh wretched and unhappy mortal that I was!
Everything I did, and wherever I went, I was still in a storm, and
yet I continued to be the chief contriver and ringleader of the
frolics for many months after; though it was a toil and torment to
attend them; but the devil and my own wicked heart drove me about
like a slave, telling me that I must do this and do that, and bear
this and bear that, and turn here and turn there, to keep my
credit up, and retain the esteem of my associates: and all this
while I continued as strict as possible in my duties, and left no
stone unturned to pacify my conscience, watching even against my
thoughts, and praying continually wherever I went: for I did not
think there was any sin in my conduct, when I was among carnal
company, because I did not take any satisfaction there, but only
followed it, I thought, for sufficient reasons.
"But still, all that I did or could do, conscience would roar
night and day."
Saint Augustine and Alline both emerged into the smooth waters of inner
unity and peace, and I shall next ask you to consider more closely some of
the peculiarities of the process of unification, when it occurs. It may
come gradually, or it may occur abruptly; it may come through altered
feelings, or through altered powers of action; or it may come through new
intellectual insights, or through experiences which we shall later have to
designate as "mystical." However it come, it brings a characteristic sort
of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the
religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in
which men gain that gift. Easily, permanently, and successfully, it often
transforms the most intolerable misery into the profoundest and most
enduring happiness.
But to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and
the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord
is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of
mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form. In
judging of the religious types of regeneration which we are about to
study, it is important to recognize that they are only one species of a
genus that contains other types as well. For example, the new birth may be
away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity
into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the
individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition,
cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion. In all these instances we have
precisely the same psychological form of event,--a firmness, stability, and
equilibrium succeeding a period of storm and stress and inconsistency. In
these non-religious cases the new man may also be born either gradually or
suddenly.
The French philosopher Jouffroy has left an eloquent memorial of his own
"counter-conversion," as the transition from orthodoxy to infidelity has
been well styled by Mr. Starbuck. Jouffroy's doubts had long harassed him;
but he dates his final crisis from a certain night when his disbelief grew
fixed and stable, and where the immediate result was sadness at the
illusions he had lost.
"I shall never forget that night of December," writes Jouffroy,
"in which the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was
torn. I hear again my steps in that narrow naked chamber where
long after the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking
up and down. I see again that moon, half-veiled by clouds, which
now and again illuminated the frigid window-panes. The hours of
the night flowed on and I did not note their passage. Anxiously I
followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer they descended
towards the foundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one by
one all the illusions which until then had screened its windings
from my view, made them every moment more clearly visible.
"Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor
clings to the fragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at the
unknown void in which I was about to float, I turned with them
towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and
sacred to me: the inflexible current of my thought was too
strong,--parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me to let go
of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more
severe as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end
was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was
left that stood erect.
"This moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning I threw
myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so
smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another
life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live
alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiled me thither,
and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this
discovery were the saddest of my life."(93)
In John Foster's Essay on Decision of Character, there is an account of a
case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to
quote:--
A young man, it appears, "wasted, in two or three years, a large
patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless
associates who called themselves his friends, and who, when his
last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or
contempt. Reduced to absolute want, he one day went out of the
house with an intention to put an end to his life; but wandering
awhile almost unconsciously, he came to the brow of an eminence
which overlooked what were lately his estates. Here he sat down,
and remained fixed in thought a number of hours, at the end of
which he sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion.
He had formed his resolution, which was, that all these estates
should be his again; he had formed his plan, too, which he
instantly began to execute. He walked hastily forward, determined
to seize the first opportunity, of however humble a kind, to gain
any money, though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and
resolved absolutely not to spend, if he could help it, a farthing
of whatever he might obtain. The first thing that drew his
attention was a heap of coals shot out of carts on the pavement
before a house. He offered himself to shovel or wheel them into
the place where they were to be laid, and was employed. He
received a few pence for the labor; and then, in pursuance of the
saving part of his plan, requested some small gratuity of meat and
drink, which was given him. He then looked out for the next thing
that might chance; and went, with indefatigable industry, through
a succession of servile employments in different places, of longer
and shorter duration, still scrupulous in avoiding, as far as
possible, the expense of a penny. He promptly seized every
opportunity which could advance his design, without regarding the
meanness of occupation or appearance. By this method he had
gained, after a considerable time, money enough to purchase in
order to sell again a few cattle, of which he had taken pains to
understand the value. He speedily but cautiously turned his first
gains into second advantages; retained without a single deviation
his extreme parsimony; and thus advanced by degrees into larger
transactions and incipient wealth. I did not hear, or have
forgotten, the continued course of his life, but the final result
was, that he more than recovered his lost possessions, and died an
inveterate miser, worth £60,000."(94)
Let me turn now to the kind of case, the religious case, namely, that
immediately concerns us. Here is one of the simplest possible type, an
account of the conversion to the systematic religion of healthy-mindedness
of a man who must already have been naturally of the healthy-minded type.
It shows how, when the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall.
Mr. Horace Fletcher, in his little book called Menticulture, relates that
a friend with whom he was talking of the self-control attained by the
Japanese through their practice of the Buddhist discipline said:--
" 'You must first get rid of anger and worry.' 'But,' said I, 'is
that possible?' 'Yes,' replied he; 'it is possible to the
Japanese, and ought to be possible to us.'
"On my way back I could think of nothing else but the words 'get
rid, get rid'; and the idea must have continued to possess me
during my sleeping hours, for the first consciousness in the
morning brought back the same thought, with the revelation of a
discovery, which framed itself into the reasoning, 'If it is
possible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it necessary to
have them at all?' I felt the strength of the argument, and at
once accepted the reasoning. The baby had discovered that it could
walk. It would scorn to creep any longer.
"From the instant I realized that these cancer spots of worry and
anger were removable, they left me. With the discovery of their
weakness they were exorcised. From that time life has had an
entirely different aspect.
"Although from that moment the possibility and desirability of
freedom from the depressing passions has been a reality to me, it
took me some months to feel absolute security in my new position;
but, as the usual occasions for worry and anger have presented
themselves over and over again, and I have been unable to feel
them in the slightest degree, I no longer dread or guard against
them, and I am amazed at my increased energy and vigor of mind; at
my strength to meet situations of all kinds, and at my disposition
to love and appreciate everything.
"I have had occasion to travel more than ten thousand miles by
rail since that morning. The same Pullman porter, conductor,
hotel-waiter, peddler, book-agent, cabman, and others who were
formerly a source of annoyance and irritation have been met, but I
am not conscious of a single incivility. All at once the whole
world has turned good to me. I have become, as it were, sensitive
only to the rays of good.
"I could recount many experiences which prove a brand-new
condition of mind, but one will be sufficient. Without the
slightest feeling of annoyance or impatience, I have seen a train
that I had planned to take with a good deal of interested and
pleasurable anticipation move out of the station without me,
because my baggage did not arrive. The porter from the hotel came
running and panting into the station just as the train pulled out
of sight. When he saw me, he looked as if he feared a scolding,
and began to tell of being blocked in a crowded street and unable
to get out. When he had finished, I said to him: 'It doesn't
matter at all, you couldn't help it, so we will try again to-
morrow. Here is your fee, I am sorry you had all this trouble in
earning it.' The look of surprise that came over his face was so
filled with pleasure that I was repaid on the spot for the delay
in my departure. Next day he would not accept a cent for the
service, and he and I are friends for life.
"During the first weeks of my experience I was on guard only
against worry and anger; but, in the mean time, having noticed the
absence of the other depressing and dwarfing passions, I began to
trace a relationship, until I was convinced that they are all
growths from the two roots I have specified. I have felt the
freedom now for so long a time that I am sure of my relation
toward it; and I could no more harbor any of the thieving and
depressing influences that once I nursed as a heritage of humanity
than a fop would voluntarily wallow in a filthy gutter.
"There is no doubt in my mind that pure Christianity and pure
Buddhism, and the Mental Sciences and all Religions, fundamentally
teach what has been a discovery to me; but none of them have
presented it in the light of a simple and easy process of
elimination. At one time I wondered if the elimination would not
yield to indifference and sloth. In my experience, the contrary is
the result. I feel such an increased desire to do something useful
that it seems as if I were a boy again and the energy for play had
returned. I could fight as readily as (and better than) ever, if
there were occasion for it. It does not make one a coward. It
can't, since fear is one of the things eliminated. I notice the
absence of timidity in the presence of any audience. When a boy, I
was standing under a tree which was struck by lightning, and
received a shock from the effects of which I never knew exemption
until I had dissolved partnership with worry. Since then,
lightning and thunder have been encountered under conditions which
would formerly have caused great depression and discomfort,
without [my] experiencing a trace of either. Surprise is also
greatly modified, and one is less liable to become startled by
unexpected sights or noises.
"As far as I am individually concerned, I am not bothering myself
at present as to what the results of this emancipated condition
may be. I have no doubt that the perfect health aimed at by
Christian Science may be one of the possibilities, for I note a
marked improvement in the way my stomach does its duty in
assimilating the food I give it to handle, and I am sure it works
better to the sound of a song than under the friction of a frown.
Neither am I wasting any of this precious time formulating an idea
of a future existence or a future Heaven. The Heaven that I have
within myself is as attractive as any that has been promised or
that I can imagine; and I am willing to let the growth lead where
it will, as long as the anger and their brood have no part in
misguiding it."(95)
The older medicine used to speak of two ways, _lysis_ and _crisis_, one
gradual, the other abrupt, in which one might recover from a bodily
disease. In the spiritual realm there are also two ways, one gradual, the
other sudden, in which inner unification may occur. Tolstoy and Bunyan may
again serve us as examples, examples, as it happens, of the gradual way,
though it must be confessed at the outset that it is hard to follow these
windings of the hearts of others, and one feels that their words do not
reveal their total secret.
Howe'er this be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending questioning, seemed to
come to one insight after another. First he perceived that his conviction
that life was meaningless took only this finite life into account. He was
looking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole
result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics
which end with 0=0. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by
itself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the
infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and life grows
possible again.
"Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has
been the faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the
sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy
himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we
live. If Man did not believe that he must live for something, he
would not live at all. The idea of an infinite God, of the
divinity of the soul, of the union of men's actions with God--these
are ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human
thought. They are ideas without which there would be no life,
without which I myself," said Tolstoy, "would not exist. I began
to see that I had no right to rely on my individual reasoning and
neglect these answers given by faith, for they are the only
answers to the question."
Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in
grossest superstition? It is impossible,--but yet their life! their life!
It is normal. It is happy! It is an answer to the question!
Little by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction--he says it took
him two years to arrive there--that his trouble had not been with life in
general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the
upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personally
always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality,
and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work
for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to
be simple, to believe in God, therein lay happiness again.
"I remember," he says, "one day in early spring, I was alone in
the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened,
and my thought went back to what for these three years it always
was busy with--the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how
did I ever come by the idea?
"And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations
towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning....
Why do I look farther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he,
without whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and to live are
one and the same thing. God is what life is. Well, then! live,
seek God, and there will be no life without him....
"After this, things cleared up within me and about me better than
ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from
suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But
as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled
within me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually
and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was
strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It
was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole
purpose of my life was to be _better_. I gave up the life of the
conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on
life, which its superfluities simply keep us from
comprehending,"--and Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the
peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so,
ever since.(96)
As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental
vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was
logically called for by the clash between his inner character and his
outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of
those primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities,
the cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization
are profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities lie with
more natural and animal things. His crisis was the getting of his soul in
order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from
falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of
heterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level.
And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps,
of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel
as if it might be better for us if we could.
Bunyan's recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together he
was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but
at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of
Christ.
"My peace would be in and out twenty times a day; comfort now and
trouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as
full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold." When a good text
comes home to him, "This," he writes, "gave me good encouragement
for the space of two or three hours"; or "This was a good day to
me, I hope I shall not forget it"; or "The glory of these words
was then so weighty on me that I was ready to swoon as I sat; yet
not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace"; or
"This made a strange seizure on my spirit; it brought light with
it, and commanded a silence in my heart of all those tumultuous
thoughts that before did use, like masterless hell-hounds, to roar
and bellow and make a hideous noise within me. It showed me that
Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken and cast off my Soul."
Such periods accumulate until he can write: "And now remained only
the hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond
me, only some drops would still remain, that now and then would
fall upon me";--and at last: "Now did my chains fall off my legs
indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations
also fled away; so that from that time, those dreadful Scriptures
of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing, for
the grace and love of God.... Now could I see myself in Heaven and
Earth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my
Righteousness and Life, though on Earth by my body or person....
Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night; I could scarce
lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ."
Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic
constitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his non-
conformity, his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker and
doer of good, and the immortal Allegory which he wrote has brought the
very spirit of religious patience home to English hearts.
But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy-
minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget
its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep. Each
of them realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness; yet
the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith
by which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that as a matter
of fact they could and did find _something_ welling up in the inner
reaches of their consciousness, by which such extreme sadness could be
overcome. Tolstoy does well to talk of it as _that by which men live_; for
that is exactly what it is, a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force
that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of
the evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable. For
Tolstoy's perceptions of evil appear within their sphere to have remained
unmodified. His later works show him implacable to the whole system of
official values: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of
empire; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the
professions; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and
every other pompous crime and lying institution of this world. To all
patience with such things his experience has been for him a permanent
ministry of death.
Bunyan also leaves this world to the enemy.
"I must first pass a sentence of death," he says, "upon everything
that can properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon
myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyments, and all,
as dead to me, and myself as dead to them; to trust in God through
Christ, as touching the world to come; and as touching this world,
to count the grave my house, to make my bed in darkness, and to
say to corruption, Thou art my father, and to the worm, Thou art
my mother and sister.... The parting with my wife and my poor
children hath often been to me as the pulling of my flesh from my
bones, especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart than
all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou
like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten,
must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand
calamities, though I cannot now endure that the wind should blow
upon thee. But yet I must venture you all with God, though it
goeth to the quick to leave you."(97)
The "hue of resolution" is there, but the full flood of ecstatic
liberation seems never to have poured over poor John Bunyan's soul.
These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general way with the
phenomenon technically called "Conversion." In the next lecture I shall
invite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some detail.
LECTURE IX. CONVERSION.
To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience
religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the
process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and
consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously
right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious
realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms,
whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to
bring such a moral change about.
Before entering upon a minuter study of the process, let me enliven our
understanding of the definition by a concrete example. I choose the quaint
case of an unlettered man, Stephen H. Bradley, whose experience is related
in a scarce American pamphlet.(98)
I select this case because it shows how in these inner alterations one may
find one unsuspected depth below another, as if the possibilities of
character lay disposed in a series of layers or shells, of whose existence
we have no premonitory knowledge.
Bradley thought that he had been already fully converted at the age of
fourteen.
"I thought I saw the Saviour, by faith, in human shape, for about
one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to
me, Come. The next day I rejoiced with trembling; soon after, my
happiness was so great that I said that I wanted to die; this
world had no place in my affections, as I knew of, and every day
appeared as solemn to me as the Sabbath. I had an ardent desire
that all mankind might feel as I did; I wanted to have them all
love God supremely. Previous to this time I was very selfish and
self-righteous; but now I desired the welfare of all mankind, and
could with a feeling heart forgive my worst enemies, and I felt as
if I should be willing to bear the scoffs and sneers of any
person, and suffer anything for His sake, if I could be the means
in the hands of God, of the conversion of one soul."
Nine years later, in 1829, Mr. Bradley heard of a revival of
religion that had begun in his neighborhood. "Many of the young
converts," he says, "would come to me when in meeting and ask me
if I had religion, and my reply generally was, I hope I have. This
did not appear to satisfy them; they said they _knew they_ had it.
I requested them to pray for me, thinking with myself, that if I
had not got religion now, after so long a time professing to be a
Christian, that it was time I had, and hoped their prayers would
be answered in my behalf.
"One Sabbath, I went to hear the Methodist at the Academy. He
spoke of the ushering in of the day of general judgment; and he
set it forth in such a solemn and terrible manner as I never heard
before. The scene of that day appeared to be taking place, and so
awakened were all the powers of my mind that, like Felix, I
trembled involuntarily on the bench where I was sitting, though I
felt nothing at heart. The next day evening I went to hear him
again. He took his text from Revelation: 'And I saw the dead,
small and great, stand before God.' And he represented the terrors
of that day in such a manner that it appeared as if it would melt
the heart of stone. When he finished his discourse, an old
gentleman turned to me and said, 'This is what I call preaching.'
I thought the same; but my feelings were still unmoved by what he
said, and I did not enjoy religion, but I believe he did.
"I will now relate my experience of the power of the Holy Spirit
which took place on the same night. Had any person told me
previous to this that I could have experienced the power of the
Holy Spirit in the manner which I did, I could not have believed
it, and should have thought the person deluded that told me so. I
went directly home after the meeting, and when I got home I
wondered what made me feel so stupid. I retired to rest soon after
I got home, and felt indifferent to the things of religion until I
began to be exercised by the Holy Spirit, which began in about
five minutes after, in the following manner:--
"At first, I began to feel my heart beat very quick all on a
sudden, which made me at first think that perhaps something is
going to ail me, though I was not alarmed, for I felt no pain. My
heart increased in its beating, which soon convinced me that it
was the Holy Spirit from the effect it had on me. I began to feel
exceedingly happy and humble, and such a sense of unworthiness as
I never felt before. I could not very well help speaking out,
which I did, and said, Lord, I do not deserve this happiness, or
words to that effect, while there was a stream (resembling air in
feeling) came into my mouth and heart in a more sensible manner
than that of drinking anything, which continued, as near as I
could judge, five minutes or more, which appeared to be the cause
of such a palpitation of my heart. It took complete possession of
my soul, and I am certain that I desired the Lord, while in the
midst of it, not to give me any more happiness, for it seemed as
if I could not contain what I had got. My heart seemed as if it
would burst, but it did not stop until I felt as if I was
unutterably full of the love and grace of God. In the mean time
while thus exercised, a thought arose in my mind, what can it
mean? and all at once, as if to answer it, my memory became
exceedingly clear, and it appeared to me just as if the New
Testament was placed open before me, eighth chapter of Romans, and
as light as if some candle lighted was held for me to read the
26th and 27th verses of that chapter, and I read these words: 'The
Spirit helpeth our infirmities with groanings which cannot be
uttered.' And all the time that my heart was a-beating, it made me
groan like a person in distress, which was not very easy to stop,
though I was in no pain at all, and my brother being in bed in
another room came and opened the door, and asked me if I had got
the toothache. I told him no, and that he might get to sleep. I
tried to stop. I felt unwilling to go to sleep myself, I was so
happy, fearing I should lose it--thinking within myself
'My willing soul would stay
In such a frame as this.'
And while I lay reflecting, after my heart stopped beating,
feeling as if my soul was full of the Holy Spirit, I thought that
perhaps there might be angels hovering round my bed. I felt just
as if I wanted to converse with them, and finally I spoke, saying,
'O ye affectionate angels! how is it that ye can take so much
interest in our welfare, and we take so little interest in our
own.' After this, with difficulty I got to sleep; and when I awoke
in the morning my first thoughts were: What has become of my
happiness? and, feeling a degree of it in my heart, I asked for
more, which was given to me as quick as thought. I then got up to
dress myself, and found to my surprise that I could but just
stand. It appeared to me as if it was a little heaven upon earth.
My soul felt as completely raised above the fears of death as of
going to sleep; and like a bird in a cage, I had a desire, if it
was the will of God, to get released from my body and to dwell
with Christ, though willing to live to do good to others, and to
warn sinners to repent. I went downstairs feeling as solemn as if
I had lost all my friends, and thinking with myself, that I would
not let my parents know it until I had first looked into the
Testament. I went directly to the shelf and looked into it, at the
eighth chapter of Romans, and every verse seemed to almost speak
and to confirm it to be truly the Word of God, and as if my
feelings corresponded with the meaning of the word. I then told my
parents of it, and told them that I thought that they must see
that when I spoke, that it was not my own voice, for it appeared
so to me. My speech seemed entirely under the control of the
Spirit within me; I do not mean that the words which I spoke were
not my own, for they were. I thought that I was influenced similar
to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost (with the exception of
having power to give it to others, and doing what they did). After
breakfast I went round to converse with my neighbors on religion,
which I could not have been hired to have done before this, and at
their request I prayed with them, though I had never prayed in
public before.
"I now feel as if I had discharged my duty by telling the truth,
and hope by the blessing of God, it may do some good to all who
shall read it. He has fulfilled his promise in sending the Holy
Spirit down into our hearts, or mine at least, and I now defy all
the Deists and Atheists in the world to shake my faith in Christ."
So much for Mr. Bradley and his conversion, of the effect of which upon
his later life we gain no information. Now for a minuter survey of the
constituent elements of the conversion process.
-------------------------------------
If you open the chapter on Association, of any treatise on Psychology, you
will read that a man's ideas, aims, and objects form diverse internal
groups and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each "aim"
which he follows awakens a certain specific kind of interested excitement,
and gathers a certain group of ideas together in subordination to it as
its associates; and if the aims and excitements are distinct in kind,
their groups of ideas may have little in common. When one group is present
and engrosses the interest, all the ideas connected with other groups may
be excluded from the mental field. The President of the United States
when, with paddle, gun, and fishing-rod, he goes camping in the wilderness
for a vacation, changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The
presidential anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the
official habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those
who knew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not "know him for
the same person" if they saw him as the camper.
If now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests
to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes
a permanently transformed being. Our ordinary alterations of character, as
we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called
transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another
in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel
definitively its previous rivals from the individual's life, we tend to
speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a
"transformation."
These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be
divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two or
more different groups of aims, of which one practically holds the right of
way and instigates activity, whilst the others are only pious wishes, and
never practically come to anything. Saint Augustine's aspirations to a
purer life, in our last lecture, were for a while an example. Another
would be the President in his full pride of office, wondering whether it
were not all vanity, and whether the life of a wood-chopper were not the
wholesomer destiny. Such fleeting aspirations are mere _velleitates_,
whimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind, and the real
self of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely
different system. As life goes on, there is a constant change of our
interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from
more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central
parts of consciousness. I remember, for instance, that one evening when I
was a youth, my father read aloud from a Boston newspaper that part of
Lord Gifford's will which founded these four lectureships. At that time I
did not think of being a teacher of philosophy: and what I listened to was
as remote from my own life as if it related to the planet Mars. Yet here I
am, with the Gifford system part and parcel of my very self, and all my
energies, for the time being, devoted to successfully identifying myself
with it. My soul stands now planted in what once was for it a practically
unreal object, and speaks from it as from its proper habitat and centre.
When I say "Soul," you need not take me in the ontological sense unless
you prefer to; for although ontological language is instinctive in such
matters, yet Buddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe the facts in
the phenomenal terms which are their favorites. For them the soul is only
a succession of fields of consciousness: yet there is found in each field
a part, or sub-field, which figures as focal and contains the excitement,
and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken. Talking of
this part, we involuntarily apply words of perspective to distinguish it
from the rest, words like "here," "this," "now," "mine," or "me"; and we
ascribe to the other parts the positions "there," "then," "that," "his" or
"thine," "it," "not me." But a "here" can change to a "there," and a
"there" become a "here," and what was "mine" and what was "not mine"
change their places.
What brings such changes about is the way in which emotional excitement
alters. Things hot and vital to us to-day are cold to-morrow. It is as if
seen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear to us,
and from these hot parts personal desire and volition make their sallies.
They are in short the centres of our dynamic energy, whereas the cold
parts leave us indifferent and passive in proportion to their coldness.
Whether such language be rigorously exact is for the present of no
importance. It is exact enough, if you recognize from your own experience
the facts which I seek to designate by it.
Now there may be great oscillation in the emotional interest, and the hot
places may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run
through burnt-up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self we
heard so much of in the previous lecture. Or the focus of excitement and
heat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie
permanently within a certain system; and then, if the change be a
religious one, we call it a _conversion_, especially if it be by crisis,
or sudden.
Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in a man's consciousness,
the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works,
call it _the habitual centre of his personal energy_. It makes a great
difference to a man whether one set of his ideas, or another, be the
centre of his energy; and it makes a great difference, as regards any set
of ideas which he may possess, whether they become central or remain
peripheral in him. To say that a man is "converted" means, in these terms,
that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take
a central place, and that religious aims form the habitual centre of his
energy.
Now if you ask of psychology just _how_ the excitement shifts in a man's
mental system, and _why_ aims that were peripheral become at a certain
moment central, psychology has to reply that although she can give a
general description of what happens, she is unable in a given case to
account accurately for all the single forces at work. Neither an outside
observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully how
particular experiences are able to change one's centre of energy so
decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We have
a thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real
meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has
suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are
dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live
ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-
crystallize about it. We may say that the heat and liveliness mean only
the "motor efficacy," long deferred but now operative, of the idea; but
such talk itself is only circumlocution, for whence the sudden motor
efficacy? And our explanations then get so vague and general that one
realizes all the more the intense individuality of the whole phenomenon.
In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical
equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it
arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually
check or reinforce one another. The collection of ideas alters by
subtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies
alter as the organism gets more aged. A mental system may be undermined or
weakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet
for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden
emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration,
will make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity
sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the
centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new
structure remains permanent.
Formed associations of ideas and habits are usually factors of retardation
in such changes of equilibrium. New information, however acquired, plays
an accelerating part in the changes; and the slow mutation of our
instincts and propensities, under the "unimaginable touch of time" has an
enormous influence. Moreover, all these influences may work subconsciously
or half unconsciously.(99) And when you get a Subject in whom the
subconscious life--of which I must speak more fully soon--is largely
developed, and in whom motives habitually ripen in silence, you get a case
of which you can never give a full account, and in which, both to the
Subject and the onlookers, there may appear an element of marvel.
Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in
precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in
which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one
are known to everybody.(100) Hope, happiness, security, resolve, emotions
characteristic of conversion, can be equally explosive. And emotions that
come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Starbuck of
California has shown by a statistical inquiry how closely parallel in its
manifestations the ordinary "conversion" which occurs in young people
brought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a larger
spiritual life which is a normal phase of adolescence in every class of
human beings. The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and
seventeen. The symptoms are the same,--sense of incompleteness and
imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense of
sin; anxiety about the hereafter; distress over doubts, and the like. And
the result is the same,--a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence
in self gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider
outlook. In spontaneous religious awakening, apart from revivalistic
examples, and in the ordinary storm and stress and moulting-time of
adolescence, we also may meet with mystical experiences, astonishing the
subjects by their suddenness, just as in revivalistic conversion. The
analogy, in fact, is complete; and Starbuck's conclusion as to these
ordinary youthful conversions would seem to be the only sound one:
Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to
the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and
spiritual life of maturity.
"Theology," says Dr. Starbuck, "takes the adolescent tendencies and builds
upon them; it sees that the essential thing in adolescent growth is
bringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity and
personal insight. It accordingly brings those means to bear which will
intensify the normal tendencies. It shortens up the period of duration of
storm and stress." The conversion phenomena of "conviction of sin" last,
by this investigator's statistics, about one fifth as long as the periods
of adolescent storm and stress phenomena of which he also got statistics,
but they are very much more intense. Bodily accompaniments, loss of sleep
and appetite, for example, are much more frequent in them. "The essential
distinction appears to be that conversion intensifies but shortens the
period by bringing the person to a definite crisis."(101)
The conversions which Dr. Starbuck here has in mind are of course mainly
those of very commonplace persons, kept true to a pre-appointed type by
instruction, appeal, and example. The particular form which they affect is
the result of suggestion and imitation.(102) If they went through their
growth-crisis in other faiths and other countries, although the essence of
the change would be the same (since it is one in the main so inevitable),
its accidents would be different. In Catholic lands, for example, and in
our own Episcopalian sects, no such anxiety and conviction of sin is usual
as in sects that encourage revivals. The sacraments being more relied on
in these more strictly ecclesiastical bodies, the individual's personal
acceptance of salvation needs less to be accentuated and led up to.
But every imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I
propose that for the future we keep as close as may be to the more first-
hand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to be found
in sporadic adult cases.
Professor Leuba, in a valuable article on the psychology of
conversion,(103) subordinates the theological aspect of the religious life
almost entirely to its moral aspect. The religious sense he defines as
"the feeling of un-wholeness, of moral imperfection, of sin, to use the
technical word, accompanied by the yearning after the peace of unity."
"The word 'religion,' " he says, "is getting more and more to signify the
conglomerate of desires and emotions springing from the sense of sin and
its release"; and he gives a large number of examples, in which the sin
ranges from drunkenness to spiritual pride, to show that the sense of it
may beset one and crave relief as urgently as does the anguish of the
sickened flesh or any form of physical misery.
Undoubtedly this conception covers an immense number of cases. A good one
to use as an example is that of Mr. S. H. Hadley, who after his conversion
became an active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New York. His
experience runs as follows:--
"One Tuesday evening I sat in a saloon in Harlem, a homeless,
friendless, dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold everything that
would bring a drink. I could not sleep unless I was dead drunk. I
had not eaten for days, and for four nights preceding I had
suffered with delirium tremens, or the horrors, from midnight till
morning. I had often said, 'I will never be a tramp. I will never
be cornered, for when that time comes, if ever it comes, I will
find a home in the bottom of the river.' But the Lord so ordered
it that when that time did come I was not able to walk one quarter
of the way to the river. As I sat there thinking, I seemed to feel
some great and mighty presence. I did not know then what it was. I
did learn afterwards that it was Jesus, the sinner's friend. I
walked up to the bar and pounded it with my fist till I made the
glasses rattle. Those who stood by drinking looked on with
scornful curiosity. I said I would never take another drink, if I
died on the street, and really I felt as though that would happen
before morning. Something said, 'If you want to keep this promise,
go and have yourself locked up.' I went to the nearest station-
house and had myself locked up.
"I was placed in a narrow cell, and it seemed as though all the
demons that could find room came in that place with me. This was
not all the company I had, either. No, praise the Lord; that dear
Spirit that came to me in the saloon was present, and said, Pray.
I did pray, and though I did not feel any great help, I kept on
praying. As soon as I was able to leave my cell I was taken to the
police court and remanded back to the cell. I was finally
released, and found my way to my brother's house, where every care
was given me. While lying in bed the admonishing Spirit never left
me, and when I arose the following Sabbath morning I felt that day
would decide my fate, and toward evening it came into my head to
go to Jerry M'Auley's Mission. I went. The house was packed, and
with great difficulty I made my way to the space near the
platform. There I saw the apostle to the drunkard and the
outcast--that man of God, Jerry M'Auley. He rose, and amid deep
silence told his experience. There was a sincerity about this man
that carried conviction with it, and I found myself saying, 'I
wonder if God can save _me_?' I listened to the testimony of
twenty-five or thirty persons, every one of whom had been saved
from rum, and I made up my mind that I would be saved or die right
there. When the invitation was given, I knelt down with a crowd of
drunkards. Jerry made the first prayer. Then Mrs. M'Auley prayed
fervently for us. Oh, what a conflict was going on for my poor
soul! A blessed whisper said, 'Come'; the devil said, 'Be
careful.' I halted but a moment, and then, with a breaking heart,
I said, 'Dear Jesus, can you help me?' Never with mortal tongue
can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had
been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious
brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a
free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of
resting on Jesus! I felt that Christ with all his brightness and
power had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had passed
away and all things had become new.
"From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey,
and I have never seen money enough to make me take one. I promised
God that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong
drink, I would work for him all my life. He has done his part, and
I have been trying to do mine."(104)
Dr. Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinal theology in such
an experience, which starts with the absolute need of a higher helper, and
ends with the sense that he has helped us. He gives other cases of
drunkards' conversions which are purely ethical, containing, as recorded,
no theological beliefs whatever. John B. Gough's case, for instance, is
practically, says Dr. Leuba, the conversion of an atheist--neither God nor
Jesus being mentioned.(105) But in spite of the importance of this type of
regeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment, this writer
surely makes it too exclusive. It corresponds to the subjectively centred
form of morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But
we saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of melancholy
also, in which the lack of rational meaning of the universe, and of life
anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon one--you remember Tolstoy's
case.(106) So there are distinct elements in conversion, and their
relations to individual lives deserve to be discriminated.(107)
Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any
circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the
centre of their spiritual energy. They may be excellent persons, servants
of God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They
are either incapable of imagining the invisible; or else, in the language
of devotion, they are life-long subjects of "barrenness" and "dryness."
Such inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intellectual in
its origin. Their religious faculties may be checked in their natural
tendency to expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the
pessimistic and materialistic beliefs, for example, within which so many
good souls, who in former times would have freely indulged their religious
propensities, find themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or the
agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, under which so
many of us to-day lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In many
persons such inhibitions are never overcome. To the end of their days they
refuse to believe, their personal energy never gets to its religious
centre, and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity.
In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men anæsthetic on
the religious side, deficient in that category of sensibility. Just as a
bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain to the
reckless "animal spirits" enjoyed by those of sanguine temperament; so the
nature which is spiritually barren may admire and envy faith in others,
but can never compass the enthusiasm and peace which those who are
temperamentally qualified for faith enjoy. All this may, however, turn out
eventually to have been a matter of temporary inhibition. Even late in
life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the
barrenest breast, and the man's hard heart may soften and break into
religious feeling. Such cases more than any others suggest the idea that
sudden conversion is by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not
imagine ourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes.
-------------------------------------
Now there are two forms of mental occurrence in human beings, which lead
to a striking difference in the conversion process, a difference to which
Professor Starbuck has called attention. You know how it is when you try
to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working for
it, by mentally running over the places, persons, and things with which
the word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as
if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name
were _jammed_, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more
from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the
effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an
hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says, as
carelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden process was
started in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, and
made the result come as if it came spontaneously. A certain music teacher,
says Dr. Starbuck, says to her pupils after the thing to be done has been
clearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted: "Stop trying and it
will do itself!"(108)
There is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntary and
unconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished; and we find
both ways exemplified in the history of conversion, giving us two types,
which Starbuck calls the _volitional type_ and the _type by self-
surrender_ respectively.
In the volitional type the regenerative change is usually gradual, and
consists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral and
spiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at which the
movement forward seems much more rapid. This psychological fact is
abundantly illustrated by Dr. Starbuck. Our education in any practical
accomplishment proceeds apparently by jerks and starts, just as the growth
of our physical bodies does.
"An athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of
the fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as
the convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on
engaging in the sport, there may come a day when all at once the
game plays itself through him--when he loses himself in some great
contest. In the same way, a musician may suddenly reach a point at
which pleasure in the technique of the art entirely falls away,
and in some moment of inspiration he becomes the instrument
through which music flows. The writer has chanced to hear two
different married persons, both of whose wedded lives had been
beautiful from the beginning, relate that not until a year or more
after marriage did they awake to the full blessedness of married
life. So it is with the religious experience of these persons we
are studying."(109)
We shall erelong hear still more remarkable illustrations of
subconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which we
suddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton and Professor Laycock of
Edinburgh were among the first to call attention to this class of effects;
but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the term
"unconscious cerebration," which has since then been a popular phrase of
explanation. The facts are now known to us far more extensively than he
could know them, and the adjective "unconscious," being for many of them
almost certainly a misnomer, is better replaced by the vaguer term
"subconscious" or "subliminal."
Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give
examples,(110) but they are as a rule less interesting than those of the
self-surrender type, in which the subconscious effects are more abundant
and often startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter, the more so
because the difference between the two types is after all not radical.
Even in the most voluntarily built-up sort of regeneration there are
passages of partial self-surrender interposed; and in the great majority
of all cases, when the will has done its uttermost towards bringing one
close to the complete unification aspired after, it seems that the very
last step must be left to other forces and performed without the help of
its activity. In other words, self-surrender becomes then indispensable.
"The personal will," says Dr. Starbuck, "must be given up. In many cases
relief persistently refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or
to make an effort in the direction he desires to go."
"I had said I would not give up; but when my will was broken, it
was all over," writes one of Starbuck's correspondents.--Another
says: "I simply said: 'Lord, I have done all I can; I leave the
whole matter with Thee;' and immediately there came to me a great
peace."--Another: "All at once it occurred to me that I might be
saved, too, if I would stop trying to do it all myself, and follow
Jesus: somehow I lost my load."--Another: "I finally ceased to
resist, and gave myself up, though it was a hard struggle.
Gradually the feeling came over me that I had done my part, and
God was willing to do his."(111)--"Lord, Thy will be done; damn or
save!" cries John Nelson,(112) exhausted with the anxious struggle
to escape damnation; and at that moment his soul was filled with
peace.
Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account--so
far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all--of the reasons why
self-surrender at the last moment should be so indispensable. To begin
with, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion:
first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the "sin" which he is
eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to
compass. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far
more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any
positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the "sin"
almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is "_a
process of struggling away from sin rather than of striving towards
righteousness_."(113) A man's conscious wit and will, so far as they
strain towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and
inaccurately imagined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic
ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and
his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the
scenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement; and the
rearrangement towards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely
definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and
determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with (_jammed_, as
it were, like the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it),
by his voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction.
Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he says
that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where
the imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary,
the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self
_in posse_ which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and
vaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing centre.
What then must the person do? "He must relax," says Dr. Starbuck,--"that
is, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness,
which has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own
way the work it has begun.... The act of yielding, in this point of view,
is giving one's self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new
personality, and living, from within, the truth of it which had before
been viewed objectively."(114)
"Man's extremity is God's opportunity" is the theological way of putting
this fact of the need of self-surrender; whilst the physiological way of
stating it would be, "Let one do all in one's power, and one's nervous
system will do the rest." Both statements acknowledge the same fact.(115)
To state it in terms of our own symbolism: When the new centre of personal
energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to
open into flower, "hands off" is the only word for us, it must burst forth
unaided!
We have used the vague and abstract language of psychology. But since, in
any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves
upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than
we are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why self-surrender
has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning-point of the
religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of
outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole
development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more
than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-
surrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism; from
that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical Christianity
altogether, to pure "liberalism" or transcendental idealism, whether or
not of the mind-cure type, taking in the mediæval mystics, the quietists,
the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress
towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the
individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of
doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery.
Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point,
since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious
individual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology,
defining these forces as "subconscious," and speaking of their effects as
due to "incubation," or "cerebration," implies that they do not transcend
the individual's personality; and herein she diverges from Christian
theology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of
the Deity. I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence
final, but leave the question for a while in abeyance--continued inquiry
may enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord.
-------------------------------------
Revert, then, for a moment more to the psychology of self-surrender.
When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent
in to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable,
and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that he must stop his
worry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety, you seem to him
to come with pure absurdities. The only positive consciousness he has
tells him that all is _not_ well, and the better way you offer sounds
simply as if you proposed to him to assert cold-blooded falsehoods. "The
will to believe" cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves
more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot
create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us
of its opposite. The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the
form of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively
will a pure negation.
There are only two ways in which it is possible to get rid of anger,
worry, fear, despair, or other undesirable affections. One is that an
opposite affection should overpoweringly break over us, and the other is
by getting so exhausted with the struggle that we have to stop,--so we drop
down, give up, and _don't care_ any longer. Our emotional brain-centres
strike work, and we lapse into a temporary apathy. Now there is
documentary proof that this state of temporary exhaustion not infrequently
forms part of the conversion crisis. So long as the egoistic worry of the
sick soul guards the door, the expansive confidence of the soul of faith
gains no presence. But let the former faint away, even but for a moment,
and the latter can profit by the opportunity, and, having once acquired
possession, may retain it. Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh passes from the
everlasting No to the everlasting Yes through a "Centre of Indifference."
Let me give you a good illustration of this feature in the conversion
process. That genuine saint, David Brainerd, describes his own crisis in
the following words:--
"One morning, while I was walking in a solitary place as usual, I
at once saw that all my contrivances and projects to effect or
procure deliverance and salvation for myself were utterly in vain;
I was brought quite to a stand, as finding myself totally lost. I
saw that it was forever impossible for me to do anything towards
helping or delivering myself, that I had made all the pleas I ever
could have made to all eternity; and that all my pleas were vain,
for I saw that self-interest had led me to pray, and that I had
never once prayed from any respect to the glory of God. I saw that
there was no necessary connection between my prayers and the
bestowment of divine mercy; that they laid not the least
obligation upon God to bestow his grace upon me; and that there
was no more virtue or goodness in them than there would be in my
paddling with my hand in the water. I saw that I had been heaping
up my devotions before God, fasting, praying, etc., pretending,
and indeed really thinking sometimes that I was aiming at the
glory of God; whereas I never once truly intended it, but only my
own happiness. I saw that as I had never done anything for God, I
had no claim on anything from him but perdition, on account of my
hypocrisy and mockery. When I saw evidently that I had regard to
nothing but self-interest, then my duties appeared a vile mockery
and a continual course of lies, for the whole was nothing but
self-worship, and an horrid abuse of God.
"I continued, as I remember, in this state of mind, from Friday
morning till the Sabbath evening following (July 12, 1739), when I
was walking again in the same solitary place. Here, in a mournful
melancholy state _I was attempting to pray; but found no heart to
engage in that or any other duty; my former concern, exercise, and
religious affections were now gone. I thought that the Spirit of
God had quite left me; but still was not distressed; yet
disconsolate, as if there was nothing in heaven or earth could
make me happy. Having been thus endeavoring to pray--though, as I
thought, very stupid and senseless_--for near half an hour; then,
as I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to
open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external
brightness, nor any imagination of a body of light, but it was a
new inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never
had before, nor anything which had the least resemblance to it. I
had no particular apprehension of any one person in the Trinity,
either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost; but it appeared to
be Divine glory. My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable, to see
such a God, such a glorious Divine Being; and I was inwardly
pleased and satisfied that he should be God over all for ever and
ever. My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency
of God that I was even swallowed up in him; at least to that
degree that I had no thought about my own salvation, and scarce
reflected that there was such a creature as myself. I continued in
this state of inward joy, peace, and astonishing, till near dark
without any sensible abatement; and then began to think and
examine what I had seen; and felt sweetly composed in my mind all
the evening following. I felt myself in a new world, and
everything about me appeared with a different aspect from what it
was wont to do. At this time, the way of salvation opened to me
with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that I
wondered I should ever think of any other way of salvation; was
amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances, and complied
with this lovely, blessed, and excellent way before. If I could
have been saved by my own duties or any other way that I had
formerly contrived, my whole soul would now have refused it. I
wondered that all the world did not see and comply with this way
of salvation, entirely by the righteousness of Christ."(116)
I have italicized the passage which records the exhaustion of the anxious
emotion hitherto habitual. In a large proportion, perhaps the majority, of
reports, the writers speak as if the exhaustion of the lower and the
entrance of the higher emotion were simultaneous,(117) yet often again
they speak as if the higher actively drove the lower out. This is
undoubtedly true in a great many instances, as we shall presently see. But
often there seems little doubt that both conditions--subconscious ripening
of the one affection and exhaustion of the other--must simultaneously have
conspired, in order to produce the result.
T. W. B., a convert of Nettleton's, being brought to an acute
paroxysm of conviction of sin, ate nothing all day, locked himself
in his room in the evening in complete despair, crying aloud, "How
long, O Lord, how long?" "After repeating this and similar
language," he says, "several times, _I seemed to sink away into a
state of insensibility_. When I came to myself again I was on my
knees, praying not for myself but for others. I felt submission to
the will of God, willing that he should do with me as should seem
good in his sight. My concern seemed all lost in concern for
others."(118)
Our great American revivalist Finney writes: "I said to myself:
'What is this? I must have grieved the Holy Ghost entirely away. I
have lost all my conviction. I have not a particle of concern
about my soul; and it must be that the Spirit has left me.' 'Why!'
thought I, 'I never was so far from being concerned about my own
salvation in my life.'... I tried to recall my convictions, to get
back again the load of sin under which I had been laboring. I
tried in vain to make myself anxious. I was so quiet and peaceful
that I tried to feel concerned about that, lest it should be the
result of my having grieved the Spirit away."(119)
But beyond all question there are persons in whom, quite independently of
any exhaustion in the Subject's capacity for feeling, or even in the
absence of any acute previous feeling, the higher condition, having
reached the due degree of energy, bursts through all barriers and sweeps
in like a sudden flood. These are the most striking and memorable cases,
the cases of instantaneous conversion to which the conception of divine
grace has been most peculiarly attached. I have given one of them at
length--the case of Mr. Bradley. But I had better reserve the other cases
and my comments on the rest of the subject for the following lecture.
LECTURE X. CONVERSION--CONCLUDED.
In this lecture we have to finish the subject of Conversion, considering
at first those striking instantaneous instances of which Saint Paul's is
the most eminent, and in which, often amid tremendous emotional excitement
or perturbation of the senses, a complete division is established in the
twinkling of an eye between the old life and the new. Conversion of this
type is an important phase of religious experience, owing to the part
which it has played in Protestant theology, and it behooves us to study it
conscientiously on that account.
I think I had better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to
a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for,
as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a
generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with
particulars enables one to take it in. I will go back, then, to the case
of our friend Henry Alline, and quote his report of the 26th of March,
1775, on which his poor divided mind became unified for good.
"As I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamenting my
miserable lost and undone condition, and almost ready to sink
under my burden, I thought I was in such a miserable case as never
any man was before. I returned to the house, and when I got to the
door, just as I was stepping off the threshold, the following
impressions came into my mind like a powerful but small still
voice. You have been seeking, praying, reforming, laboring,
reading, hearing, and meditating, and what have you done by it
towards your salvation? Are you any nearer to conversion now than
when you first began? Are you any more prepared for heaven, or
fitter to appear before the impartial bar of God, than when you
first began to seek?
"It brought such conviction on me that I was obliged to say that I
did not think I was one step nearer than at first, but as much
condemned, as much exposed, and as miserable as before. I cried
out within myself, O Lord God, I am lost, and if thou, O Lord,
dost not find out some new way, I know nothing of, I shall never
be saved, for the ways and methods I have prescribed to myself
have all failed me, and I am willing they should fail. O Lord,
have mercy! O Lord, have mercy!
"These discoveries continued until I went into the house and sat
down. After I sat down, being all in confusion, like a drowning
man that was just giving up to sink, and almost in an agony, I
turned very suddenly round in my chair, and seeing part of an old
Bible lying in one of the chairs, I caught hold of it in great
haste; and opening it without any premeditation, cast my eyes on
the 38th Psalm, which was the first time I ever saw the word of
God: it took hold of me with such power that it seemed to go
through my whole soul, so that it seemed as if God was praying in,
with, and for me. About this time my father called the family to
attend prayers; I attended, but paid no regard to what he said in
his prayer, but continued praying in those words of the Psalm. Oh,
help me, help me! cried I, thou Redeemer of souls, and save me, or
I am gone forever; thou canst this night, if thou pleasest, with
one drop of thy blood atone for my sins, and appease the wrath of
an angry God. At that instant of time when I gave all up to him to
do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule
over me at his pleasure, redeeming love broke into my soul with
repeated scriptures, with such power that my whole soul seemed to
be melted down with love; the burden of guilt and condemnation was
gone, darkness was expelled, my heart humbled and filled with
gratitude, and my whole soul, that was a few minutes ago groaning
under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown God for help,
was now filled with immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith,
freed from the chains of death and darkness, and crying out, My
Lord and my God; thou art my rock and my fortress, my shield and
my high tower, my life, my joy, my present and my everlasting
portion. Looking up, I thought I saw that same light [he had on
more than one previous occasion seen subjectively a bright blaze
of light], though it appeared different; and as soon as I saw it,
the design was opened to me, according to his promise, and I was
obliged to cry out: Enough, enough, O blessed God! The work of
conversion, the change, and the manifestations of it are no more
disputable than that light which I see, or anything that ever I
saw.
"In the midst of all my joys, in less than half an hour after my
soul was set at liberty, the Lord discovered to me my labor in the
ministry and call to preach the gospel. I cried out, Amen, Lord,
I'll go; send me, send me. I spent the greatest part of the night
in ecstasies of joy, praising and adoring the Ancient of Days for
his free and unbounded grace. After I had been so long in this
transport and heavenly frame that my nature seemed to require
sleep, I thought to close my eyes for a few moments; then the
devil stepped in, and told me that if I went to sleep, I should
lose it all, and when I should awake in the morning I would find
it to be nothing but a fancy and delusion. I immediately cried
out, O Lord God, if I am deceived, undeceive me.
"I then closed my eyes for a few minutes, and seemed to be
refreshed with sleep; and when I awoke, the first inquiry was,
Where is my God? And in an instant of time, my soul seemed awake
in and with God, and surrounded by the arms of everlasting love.
About sunrise I arose with joy to relate to my parents what God
had done for my soul, and declared to them the miracle of God's
unbounded grace. I took a Bible to show them the words that were
impressed by God on my soul the evening before; but when I came to
open the Bible, it appeared all new to me.
"I so longed to be useful in the cause of Christ, in preaching the
gospel, that it seemed as if I could not rest any longer, but go I
must and tell the wonders of redeeming love. I lost all taste for
carnal pleasures, and carnal company, and was enabled to forsake
them."(120)
Young Mr. Alline, after the briefest of delays, and with no book-learning
but his Bible, and no teaching save that of his own experience, became a
Christian minister, and thenceforward his life was fit to rank, for its
austerity and single-mindedness, with that of the most devoted saints. But
happy as he became in his strenuous way, he never got his taste for even
the most innocent carnal pleasures back. We must class him, like Bunyan
and Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron of melancholy left a
permanent imprint. His redemption was into another universe than this mere
natural world, and life remained for him a sad and patient trial. Years
later we can find him making such an entry as this in his diary: "On
Wednesday the 12th I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby
to be the means of excluding carnal mirth."
The next case I will give is that of a correspondent of Professor Leuba,
printed in the latter's article, already cited, in vol. vi. of the
American Journal of Psychology. This subject was an Oxford graduate, the
son of a clergyman, and the story resembles in many points the classic
case of Colonel Gardiner, which everybody may be supposed to know. Here it
is, somewhat abridged:--
"Between the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I never
darkened the door of my father's church, although I lived with him
for eight years, making what money I wanted by journalism, and
spending it in high carousal with any one who would sit with me
and drink it away. So I lived, sometimes drunk for a week
together, and then a terrible repentance, and would not touch a
drop for a whole month.
"In all this period, that is, up to thirty-three years of age, I
never had a desire to reform on religious grounds. But all my
pangs were due to some terrible remorse I used to feel after a
heavy carousal, the remorse taking the shape of regret after my
folly in wasting my life in such a way--a man of superior talents
and education. This terrible remorse turned me gray in one night,
and whenever it came upon me I was perceptibly grayer the next
morning. What I suffered in this way is beyond the expression of
words. It was hell-fire in all its most dreadful tortures. Often
did I vow that if I got over 'this time' I would reform. Alas, in
about three days I fully recovered, and was as happy as ever. So
it went on for years, but, with a physique like a rhinoceros, I
always recovered, and as long as I let drink alone, no man was as
capable of enjoying life as I was.
"I was converted in my own bedroom in my father's rectory house at
precisely three o'clock in the afternoon of a hot July day (July
13, 1886). I was in perfect health, having been off from the drink
for nearly a month. I was in no way troubled about my soul. In
fact, God was not in my thoughts that day. A young lady friend
sent me a copy of Professor Drummond's Natural Law in the
Spiritual World, asking me my opinion of it as a literary work
only. Being proud of my critical talents and wishing to enhance
myself in my new friend's esteem, I took the book to my bedroom
for quiet, intending to give it a thorough study, and then write
her what I thought of it. It was here that God met me face to
face, and I shall never forget the meeting. 'He that hath the Son
hath life eternal, he that hath not the Son hath not life.' I had
read this scores of times before, but this made all the
difference. I was now in God's presence and my attention was
absolutely 'soldered' on to this verse, and I was not allowed to
proceed with the book till I had fairly considered what these
words really involved. Only then was I allowed to proceed, feeling
all the while that there was another being in my bedroom, though
not seen by me. The stillness was very marvelous, and I felt
supremely happy. It was most unquestionably shown me, in one
second of time, that I had never touched the Eternal: and that if
I died then, I must inevitably be lost. I was undone. I knew it as
well as I now know I am saved. The Spirit of God showed it me in
ineffable love; there was no terror in it; I felt God's love so
powerfully upon me that only a mighty sorrow crept over me that I
had lost all through my own folly; and what was I to do? What
could I do? I did not repent even; God never asked me to repent.
All I felt was 'I am undone,' and God cannot help it, although he
loves me. No fault on the part of the Almighty. All the time I was
supremely happy: I felt like a little child before his father. I
had done wrong, but my Father did not scold me, but loved me most
wondrously. Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to a certainty,
and being naturally of a brave disposition I did not quail under
it, but deep sorrow for the past, mixed with regret for what I had
lost, took hold upon me, and my soul thrilled within me to think
it was all over. Then there crept in upon me so gently, so
lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it after
all? The old, old story over again, told in the simplest way:
'There is no name under heaven whereby ye can be saved except that
of the Lord Jesus Christ.' No words were spoken to me; my soul
seemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from that hour to
this, nearly nine years now, there has never been in my life one
doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father both worked
upon me that afternoon in July, both differently, and both in the
most perfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced there and then in a
conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in
less than twenty-four hours.
"But a time of trouble was yet to come. The day after my
conversion I went into the hay-field to lend a hand with the
harvest, and not having made any promise to God to abstain or
drink in moderation only, I took too much and came home drunk. My
poor sister was heart-broken; and I felt ashamed of myself and got
to my bedroom at once, where she followed me, weeping copiously.
She said I had been converted and fallen away instantly. But
although I was quite full of drink (not muddled, however), I knew
that God's work begun in me was not going to be wasted. About
midday I made on my knees the first prayer before God for twenty
years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for
I would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I committed
myself to him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was
going to be destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was
willing. In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From
that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never
want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe: after being a
regular smoker from my twelfth year the desire for it went at
once, and has never returned. So with every known sin, the
deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had
no temptation since conversion, God seemingly having shut out
Satan from that course with me. He gets a free hand in other ways,
but never on sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all
ownership in my own life, he has guided me in a thousand ways, and
has opened my path in a way almost incredible to those who do not
enjoy the blessing of a truly surrendered life."
So much for our graduate of Oxford, in whom you notice the complete
abolition of an ancient appetite as one of the conversion's fruits.
The most curious record of sudden conversion with which I am acquainted is
that of M. Alphonse Ratisbonne, a freethinking French Jew, to Catholicism,
at Rome in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend, written a few months
later, the convert gives a palpitating account of the circumstances.(121)
The predisposing conditions appear to have been slight. He had an elder
brother who had been converted and was a Catholic priest. He was himself
irreligious, and nourished an antipathy to the apostate brother and
generally to his "cloth." Finding himself at Rome in his twenty-ninth
year, he fell in with a French gentleman who tried to make a proselyte of
him, but who succeeded no farther after two or three conversations than to
get him to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal round his neck, and to
accept and read a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin. M. Ratisbonne
represents his own part in the conversations as having been of a light and
chaffing order; but he notes the fact that for some days he was unable to
banish the words of the prayer from his mind, and that the night before
the crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in the imagery of which a black
cross with no Christ upon it figured. Nevertheless, until noon of the next
day he was free in mind and spent the time in trivial conversations. I now
give his own words.
"If at this time any one had accosted me, saying: 'Alphonse, in a
quarter of an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God
and Saviour; you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the
ground in a humble church; you shall be smiting your breast at the
foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of
Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your
life for the Catholic faith; you shall renounce the world and its
pomps and pleasures; renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if
need be, your betrothed; the affections of your family, the esteem
of your friends, and your attachment to the Jewish people; you
shall have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his
cross till death;'--if, I say, a prophet had come to me with such a
prediction, I should have judged that only one person could be
more mad than he,--whosoever, namely, might believe in the
possibility of such senseless folly becoming true. And yet that
folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.
"Coming out of the café I met the carriage of Monsieur B. [the
proselyting friend]. He stopped and invited me in for a drive, but
first asked me to wait for a few minutes whilst he attended to
some duty at the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of
waiting in the carriage, I entered the church myself to look at
it. The church of San Andrea was poor, small, and empty; I believe
that I found myself there almost alone. No work of art attracted
my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its interior
without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only
remember an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning
before me as I mused. In an instant the dog had disappeared, the
whole church had vanished, I no longer saw anything, ... or more
truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone.
"Heavens, how can I speak of it? Oh no! human words cannot attain
to expressing the inexpressible. Any description, however sublime
it might be, could be but a profanation of the unspeakable truth.
"I was there prostrate on the ground, bathed in my tears, with my
heart beside itself, when M. B. called me back to life. I could
not reply to the questions which followed from him one upon the
other. But finally I took the medal which I had on my breast, and
with all the effusion of my soul I kissed the image of the Virgin,
radiant with grace, which it bore. Oh, indeed, it was She! It was
indeed She! [What he had seen had been a vision of the Virgin.]
"I did not know where I was: I did not know whether I was Alphonse
or another. I only felt myself changed and believed myself another
me; I looked for myself in myself and did not find myself. In the
bottom of my soul I felt an explosion of the most ardent joy; I
could not speak; I had no wish to reveal what had happened. But I
felt something solemn and sacred within me which made me ask for a
priest. I was led to one; and there, alone, after he had given me
the positive order, I spoke as best I could, kneeling, and with my
heart still trembling. I could give no account to myself of the
truth of which I had acquired a knowledge and a faith. All that I
can say is that in an instant the bandage had fallen from my eyes;
and not one bandage only, but the whole manifold of bandages in
which I had been brought up. One after another they rapidly
disappeared, even as the mud and ice disappear under the rays of
the burning sun.
"I came out as from a sepulchre, from an abyss of darkness; and I
was living, perfectly living. But I wept, for at the bottom of
that gulf I saw the extreme of misery from which I had been saved
by an infinite mercy; and I shuddered at the sight of my
iniquities, stupefied, melted, overwhelmed with wonder and with
gratitude. You may ask me how I came to this new insight, for
truly I had never opened a book of religion nor even read a single
page of the Bible, and the dogma of original sin is either
entirely denied or forgotten by the Hebrews of to-day, so that I
had thought so little about it that I doubt whether I ever knew
its name. But how came I, then, to this perception of it? I can
answer nothing save this, that on entering that church I was in
darkness altogether, and on coming out of it I saw the fullness of
the light. I can explain the change no better than by the simile
of a profound sleep or the analogy of one born blind who should
suddenly open his eyes to the day. He sees, but cannot define the
light which bathes him and by means of which he sees the objects
which excite his wonder. If we cannot explain physical light, how
can we explain the light which is the truth itself? And I think I
remain within the limits of veracity when I say that without
having any knowledge of the letter of religious doctrine, I now
intuitively perceived its sense and spirit. Better than if I saw
them, I _felt_ those hidden things; I felt them by the
inexplicable effects they produced in me. It all happened in my
interior mind; and those impressions, more rapid than thought,
shook my soul, revolved and turned it, as it were, in another
direction, towards other aims, by other paths. I express myself
badly. But do you wish, Lord, that I should inclose in poor and
barren words sentiments which the heart alone can understand?"
I might multiply cases almost indefinitely, but these will suffice to show
you how real, definite, and memorable an event a sudden conversion may be
to him who has the experience. Throughout the height of it he undoubtedly
seems to himself a passive spectator or undergoer of an astounding process
performed upon him from above. There is too much evidence of this for any
doubt of it to be possible. Theology, combining this fact with the
doctrines of election and grace, has concluded that the spirit of God is
with us at these dramatic moments in a peculiarly miraculous way, unlike
what happens at any other juncture of our lives. At that moment, it
believes, an absolutely new nature is breathed into us, and we become
partakers of the very substance of the Deity.
That the conversion should be instantaneous seems called for on this view,
and the Moravian Protestants appear to have been the first to see this
logical consequence. The Methodists soon followed suit, practically if not
dogmatically, and a short time ere his death, John Wesley wrote:--
"In London alone I found 652 members of our Society who were
exceeding clear in their experience, and whose testimony I could
see no reason to doubt. And every one of these (without a single
exception) has declared that his deliverance from sin was
instantaneous; that the change was wrought in a moment. Had half
of these, or one third, or one in twenty, declared it was
_gradually_ wrought in _them_, I should have believed this, with
regard to _them_, and thought that _some_ were gradually
sanctified and some instantaneously. But as I have not found, in
so long a space of time, a single person speaking thus, I cannot
but believe that sanctification is commonly, if not always, an
instantaneous work." Tyerman's Life of Wesley, i. 463.
All this while the more usual sects of Protestantism have set no such
store by instantaneous conversion. For them as for the Catholic Church,
Christ's blood, the sacraments, and the individual's ordinary religious
duties are practically supposed to suffice to his salvation, even though
no acute crisis of self-despair and surrender followed by relief should be
experienced. For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there have been a
crisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, not effectively received,
and Christ's sacrifice in so far forth is incomplete. Methodism surely
here follows, if not the healthier-minded, yet on the whole the profounder
spiritual instinct. The individual models which it has set up as typical
and worthy of imitation are not only the more interesting dramatically,
but psychologically they have been the more complete.
In the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain and America we have, so
to speak, the codified and stereotyped procedure to which this way of
thinking has led. In spite of the unquestionable fact that saints of the
once-born type exist, that there may be a gradual growth in holiness
without a cataclysm; in spite of the obvious leakage (as one may say) of
much mere natural goodness into the scheme of salvation; revivalism has
always assumed that only its own type of religious experience can be
perfect; you must first be nailed on the cross of natural despair and
agony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be miraculously released.
It is natural that those who personally have traversed such an experience
should carry away a feeling of its being a miracle rather than a natural
process. Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visions witnessed;
automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems, after the surrender
of the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and
taken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness,
rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant as well to warrant one's
belief in a radically new substantial nature.
"Conversion," writes the New England Puritan, Joseph Alleine, "is
not the putting in a patch of holiness; but with the true convert
holiness is woven into all his powers, principles, and practice.
The sincere Christian is quite a new fabric, from the foundation
to the top-stone. He is a new man, a new creature."
And Jonathan Edwards says in the same strain: "Those gracious
influences which are the effects of the Spirit of God are
altogether supernatural--are quite different from anything that
unregenerate men experience. They are what no improvement, or
composition of natural qualifications or principles will ever
produce; because they not only differ from what is natural, and
from everything that natural men experience in degree and
circumstances, but also in kind, and are of a nature far more
excellent. From hence it follows that in gracious affections there
are [also] new perceptions and sensations entirely different in
their nature and kind from anything experienced by the [same]
saints before they were sanctified.... The conceptions which the
saints have of the loveliness of God, and that kind of delight
which they experience in it, are quite peculiar, and entirely
different from anything which a natural man can possess, or of
which he can form any proper notion."
And that such a glorious transformation as this ought of necessity to be
preceded by despair is shown by Edwards in another passage.
"Surely it cannot be unreasonable," he says, "that before God
delivers us from a state of sin and liability to everlasting woe,
he should give us some considerable sense of the evil from which
he delivers us, in order that we may know and feel the importance
of salvation, and be enabled to appreciate the value of what God
is pleased to do for us. As those who are saved are successively
in two extremely different states--first in a state of condemnation
and then in a state of justification and blessedness--and as God,
in the salvation of men, deals with them as rational and
intelligent creatures, it appears agreeable to this wisdom, that
those who are saved should be made sensible of their Being, in
those two different states. In the first place, that they should
be made sensible of their state of condemnation; and afterwards,
of their state of deliverance and happiness."
Such quotations express sufficiently well for our purpose the doctrinal
interpretation of these changes. Whatever part suggestion and imitation
may have played in producing them in men and women in excited assemblies,
they have at any rate been in countless individual instances an original
and unborrowed experience. Were we writing the story of the mind from the
purely natural-history point of view, with no religious interest whatever,
we should still have to write down man's liability to sudden and complete
conversion as one of his most curious peculiarities.
-------------------------------------
What, now, must we ourselves think of this question? Is an instantaneous
conversion a miracle in which God is present as he is present in no change
of heart less strikingly abrupt? Are there two classes of human beings,
even among the apparently regenerate, of which the one class really
partakes of Christ's nature while the other merely seems to do so? Or, on
the contrary, may the whole phenomenon of regeneration, even in these
startling instantaneous examples, possibly be a strictly natural process,
divine in its fruits, of course, but in one case more and in another less
so, and neither more nor less divine in its mere causation and mechanism
than any other process, high or low, of man's interior life?
Before proceeding to answer this question, I must ask you to listen to
some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained the
shifting of men's centres of personal energy within them and the lighting
up of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomena as partly due to
explicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but as due largely
also to the subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by
the experiences of life. When ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into
flower. I have now to speak of the subconscious region, in which such
processes of flowering may occur, in a somewhat less vague way. I only
regret that my limits of time here force me to be so short.
The expression "field of consciousness" has but recently come into vogue
in the psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental life which
figured most was the single "idea" supposed to be a definitely outlined
thing. But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the
actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of
consciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time; and,
second, to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, this field,
with any definiteness.
As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest,
around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively
conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some
fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a
wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often
get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot
beyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which
we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive actually. At other
times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to
a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted.
Different individuals present constitutional differences in this matter of
width of field. Your great organizing geniuses are men with habitually
vast fields of mental vision, in which a whole programme of future
operations will appear dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ahead
into definite directions of advance. In common people there is never this
magnificent inclusive view of a topic. They stumble along, feeling their
way, as it were, from point to point, and often stop entirely. In certain
diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the
past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some
one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
The important fact which this "field" formula commemorates is the
indetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter
which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to
guide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our attention. It
lies around us like a "magnetic field," inside of which our centre of
energy turns like a compass-needle, as the present phase of consciousness
alters into its successor. Our whole past store of memories floats beyond
this margin, ready at a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residual
powers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute our empirical self
stretches continuously beyond it. So vaguely drawn are the outlines
between what is actual and what is only potential at any moment of our
conscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain mental elements
whether we are conscious of them or not.
The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the
marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the
consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal,
inattentive or attentive, is there in the "field" of the moment, all dim
and impossible to assign as the latter's outline may be; and, second, that
what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent, and cannot
be a fact of consciousness at all.
And having reached this point, I must now ask you to recall what I said in
my last lecture about the subconscious life. I said, as you may recollect,
that those who first laid stress upon these phenomena could not know the
facts as we now know them. My first duty now is to tell you what I meant
by such a statement.
I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has occurred
in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the
discovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there
is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre
and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories,
thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary
consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of
some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call
this the most important step forward because, unlike the other advances
which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely
unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature. No other step
forward which psychology has made can proffer any such claim as this.
In particular this discovery of a consciousness existing beyond the field,
or subliminally as Mr. Myers terms it, casts light on many phenomena of
religious biography. That is why I have to advert to it now, although it
is naturally impossible for me in this place to give you any account of
the evidence on which the admission of such a consciousness is based. You
will find it set forth in many recent books, Binet's Alterations of
Personality(122) being perhaps as good a one as any to recommend.
The human material on which the demonstration has been made has so far
been rather limited and, in part at least, eccentric, consisting of
unusually suggestible hypnotic subjects, and of hysteric patients. Yet the
elementary mechanisms of our life are presumably so uniform that what is
shown to be true in a marked degree of some persons is probably true in
some degree of all, and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily high
degree.
The most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultra-
marginal life of this sort is that one's ordinary fields of consciousness
are liable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess the
source, and which, therefore, take for him the form of unaccountable
impulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even of
hallucinations of sight or hearing. The impulses may take the direction of
automatic speech or writing, the meaning of which the subject himself may
not understand even while he utters it; and generalizing this phenomenon,
Mr. Myers has given the name of _automatism_, sensory or motor, emotional
or intellectual, to this whole sphere of effects, due to "uprushes" into
the ordinary consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts
of the mind.
The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of post-hypnotic
suggestion, so-called. You give to a hypnotized subject, adequately
susceptible, an order to perform some designated act--usual or eccentric,
it makes no difference--after he wakes from his hypnotic sleep. Punctually,
when the signal comes or the time elapses upon which you have told him
that the act must ensue, he performs it;--but in so doing he has no
recollection of your suggestion, and he always trumps up an improvised
pretext for his behavior if the act be of an eccentric kind. It may even
be suggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear a voice at a certain
interval after waking, and when the time comes the vision is seen or the
voice heard, with no inkling on the subject's part of its source. In the
wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and
others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have
revealed to us whole systems of underground life, in the shape of memories
of a painful sort which lead a parasitic existence, buried outside of the
primary fields of consciousness, and making irruptions thereinto with
hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion,
and the whole procession of symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of
mind. Alter or abolish by suggestion these subconscious memories, and the
patient immediately gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr.
Myers's sense of the word. These clinical records sound like fairy-tales
when one first reads them, yet it is impossible to doubt their accuracy;
and, the path having been once opened by these first observers, similar
observations have been made elsewhere. They throw, as I said, a wholly new
light upon our natural constitution.
And it seems to me that they make a farther step inevitable. Interpreting
the unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me that hereafter,
wherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it motor impulses, or
obsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or delusion, or hallucination,
we are bound first of all to make search whether it be not an explosion,
into the fields of ordinary consciousness, of ideas elaborated outside of
those fields in subliminal regions of the mind. We should look, therefore,
for its source in the Subject's subconscious life. In the hypnotic cases,
we ourselves create the source by our suggestion, so we know it directly.
In the hysteric cases, the lost memories which are the source have to be
extracted from the patient's Subliminal by a number of ingenious methods,
for an account of which you must consult the books. In other pathological
cases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathic obsessions, the
source is yet to seek, but by analogy it also should be in subliminal
regions which improvements in our methods may yet conceivably put on tap.
There lies the mechanism logically to be assumed,--but the assumption
involves a vast program of work to be done in the way of verification, in
which the religious experiences of man must play their part.(123)
-------------------------------------
And thus I return to our own specific subject of instantaneous
conversions. You remember the cases of Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and the
graduate of Oxford converted at three in the afternoon. Similar
occurrences abound, some with and some without luminous visions, all with
a sense of astonished happiness, and of being wrought on by a higher
control. If, abstracting altogether from the question of their value for
the future spiritual life of the individual, we take them on their
psychological side exclusively, so many peculiarities in them remind us of
what we find outside of conversion that we are tempted to class them along
with other automatisms, and to suspect that what makes the difference
between a sudden and a gradual convert is not necessarily the presence of
divine miracle in the case of one and of something less divine in that of
the other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity, the fact,
namely, that in the recipient of the more instantaneous grace we have one
of those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in which mental
work can go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly
upsetting the equilibrium of the primary consciousness, may come.
I do not see why Methodists need object to such a view. Pray go back and
recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very
first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that
the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment,
I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or
condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the
_fruits for life_ of the state of conversion are good, we ought to
idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology;
if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural
being may have infused it.
Well, how is it with these fruits? If we except the class of preëminent
saints of whom the names illumine history, and consider only the usual run
of "saints," the shopkeeping church-members and ordinary youthful or
middle-aged recipients of instantaneous conversion, whether at revivals or
in the spontaneous course of methodistic growth, you will probably agree
that no splendor worthy of a wholly supernatural creature fulgurates from
them, or sets them apart from the mortals who have never experienced that
favor. Were it true that a suddenly converted man as such is, as Edwards
says,(124) of an entirely different kind from a natural man, partaking as
he does directly of Christ's substance, there surely ought to be some
exquisite class-mark, some distinctive radiance attaching even to the
lowliest specimen of this genus, to which no one of us could remain
insensible, and which, so far as it went, would prove him more excellent
than ever the most highly gifted among mere natural men. But notoriously
there is no such radiance. Converted men as a class are indistinguishable
from natural men; some natural men even excel some converted men in their
fruits; and no one ignorant of doctrinal theology could guess by mere
every-day inspection of the "accidents" of the two groups of persons
before him, that their substance differed as much as divine differs from
human substance.
The believers in the non-natural character of sudden conversion have had
practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class-mark distinctive
of all true converts. The super-normal incidents, such as voices and
visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented
scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected
with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still,
be counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second
birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God,
the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it
has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may
even be found outside of Christianity altogether.
Throughout Jonathan Edwards's admirably rich and delicate description of
the supernaturally infused condition, in his Treatise on Religious
Affections, there is not one decisive trait, not one mark, that
unmistakably parts it off from what may possibly be only an exceptionally
high degree of natural goodness. In fact, one could hardly read a clearer
argument than this book unwittingly offers in favor of the thesis that no
chasm exists between the orders of human excellence, but that here as
elsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, and generation and
regeneration are matters of degree.
All which denial of two objective classes of human beings separated by a
chasm must not leave us blind to the extraordinary momentousness of the
fact of his conversion to the individual himself who gets converted. There
are higher and lower limits of possibility set to each personal life. If a
flood but goes above one's head, its absolute elevation becomes a matter
of small importance; and when we touch our own upper limit and live in our
own highest centre of energy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how
much higher some one else's centre may be. A small man's salvation will
always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts _for him_, and
we should remember this when the fruits of our ordinary evangelicism look
discouraging. Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of these
spiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, might have
been, if such poor grace as they have received had never touched them at
all?(125)
If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class standing for a
grade of spiritual excellence, I believe we shall find natural men and
converts both sudden and gradual in all the classes. The forms which
regenerative change effects have, then, no general spiritual significance,
but only a psychological significance. We have seen how Starbuck's
laborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinary
spiritual growth. Another American psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe,(126)
has analyzed the cases of seventy-seven converts or ex-candidates for
conversion, known to him, and the results strikingly confirm the view that
sudden conversion is connected with the possession of an active subliminal
self. Examining his subjects with reference to their hypnotic sensibility
and to such automatisms as hypnagogic hallucinations, odd impulses,
religious dreams about the time of their conversion, etc., he found these
relatively much more frequent in the group of converts whose
transformation had been "striking," "striking" transformation being
defined as a change which, though not necessarily instantaneous, seems to
the subject of it to be distinctly different from a process of growth,
however rapid.(127) Candidates for conversion at revivals are, as you
know, often disappointed: they experience nothing striking. Professor Coe
had a number of persons of this class among his seventy-seven subjects,
and they almost all, when tested by hypnotism, proved to belong to a
subclass which he calls "spontaneous," that is, fertile in self-
suggestions, as distinguished from a "passive" subclass, to which most of
the subjects of striking transformation belonged. His inference is that
self-suggestion of impossibility had prevented the influence upon these
persons of an environment which, on the more "passive" subjects, had
easily brought forth the effects they looked for. Sharp distinctions are
difficult in these regions, and Professor Coe's numbers are small. But his
methods were careful, and the results tally with what one might expect;
and they seem, on the whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which is
that if you should expose to a converting influence a subject in whom
three factors unite: first, pronounced emotional sensibility; second,
tendency to automatisms; and third, suggestibility of the passive type;
you might then safely predict the result: there would be a sudden
conversion, a transformation of the striking kind.
Does this temperamental origin diminish the significance of the sudden
conversion when it has occurred? Not in the least, as Professor Coe well
says; for "the ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological,
nothing definable in terms of _how it happens_, but something ethical,
definable only in terms of _what is attained_."(128)
As we proceed farther in our inquiry we shall see that what is attained is
often an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic
level, in which impossible things have become possible, and new energies
and endurances are shown. The personality is changed, the man _is_ born
anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the
particular shape to his metamorphosis. "Sanctification" is the technical
name of this result; and erelong examples of it shall be brought before
you. In this lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on the
assurance and peace which fill the hour of change itself.
-------------------------------------
One word more, though, before proceeding to that point, lest the final
purpose of my explanation of suddenness by subliminal activity be
misunderstood. I do indeed believe that if the Subject have no liability
to such subconscious activity, or if his conscious fields have a hard rind
of a margin that resists incursions from beyond it, his conversion must be
gradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growth into new habits.
His possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or pervious
margin, is thus a _conditio sine qua non_ of the Subject's becoming
converted in the instantaneous way. But if you, being orthodox Christians,
ask me as a psychologist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a
subliminal self does not exclude the notion of the direct presence of the
Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist I do not
see why it necessarily should. The lower manifestations of the Subliminal,
indeed, fall within the resources of the personal subject: his ordinary
sense-material, inattentively taken in and subconsciously remembered and
combined, will account for all his usual automatisms. But just as our
primary wide-awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of
things material, so it is logically conceivable that _if there be_ higher
spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition
of their doing so _might be_ our possession of a subconscious region which
alone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might
close a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.
Thus that perception of external control which is so essential a feature
in conversion might, in some cases at any rate, be interpreted as the
orthodox interpret it: forces transcending the finite individual might
impress him, on condition of his being what we may call a subliminal human
specimen. But in any case the _value_ of these forces would have to be
determined by their effects, and the mere fact of their transcendency
would of itself establish no presumption that they were more divine than
diabolical.
I confess that this is the way in which I should rather see the topic left
lying in your minds until I come to a much later lecture, when I hope once
more to gather these dropped threads together into more definitive
conclusions. The notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not at this
point of our inquiry to be held to _exclude_ all notion of a higher
penetration. If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get
access to us only through the subliminal door. (See below, p. 515 ff.)
-------------------------------------
Let us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the hour of the
conversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this sense of
higher control. It is not always, but it is very often present. We saw
examples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. The need of
such a higher controlling agency is well expressed in the short reference
which the eminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makes to the crisis of
his own conversion. It was at Naples in his early manhood, in the summer
of 1827.
"My sadness," he says, "was without limit, and having got entire
possession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent
external acts to the most secret thoughts, and corrupted at their
source my feelings, my judgment, and my happiness. It was then
that I saw that to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my
reason and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be to
act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one of his eyes
by the aid of the other equally blind one. I had then no resource
save in _some influence from without_. I remembered the promise of
the Holy Ghost; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel
had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from
necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this
promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my
soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action,
capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and
exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of the
rest of nature. Renouncing then all merit, all strength,
abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other
title to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw
myself on my knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life.
From this day onwards a new interior life began for me: not that
my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost its sting. Hope had
entered into my heart, and once entered on the path, the God of
Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little
by little did the rest."(129)
It is needless to remind you once more of the admirable congruity of
Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such
experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously _is_
can do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and without resource,
and no works it can accomplish will avail. Redemption from such subjective
conditions must be a free gift or nothing, and grace through Christ's
accomplished sacrifice is such a gift.
"God," says Luther, "is the God of the humble, the miserable, the
oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even
to nothing; and his nature is to give sight to the blind, to
comfort the broken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very
desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of
man's own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean,
miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God
to come to his own natural and proper work. Therefore God must
take this maul in hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and
bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence, that she may
so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn
and damned. But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is
terrified and cast down, he is so little able to raise himself up
again and say, 'Now I am bruised and afflicted enough; now is the
time of grace; now is the time to hear Christ.' The foolishness of
man's heart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself
more laws to satisfy his conscience. 'If I live,' saith he, 'I
will amend my life: I will do this, I will do that.' But here,
except thou do the quite contrary, except thou send Moses away
with his law, and in these terrors and this anguish lay hold upon
Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl, thy
shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works,
thy merits? what shall all these do? what shall the law of Moses
avail? If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits
could have loved the Son of God, and so come to him, what needed
he to deliver himself for me? If I, being a wretch and damned
sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son
of God to be given? But because there was no other price,
therefore he delivered neither sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but
even God himself, entirely and wholly 'for me,' even 'for me,' I
say, a miserable, wretched sinner. Now, therefore, I take comfort
and apply this to _myself_. And this manner of applying is the
very true force and power of faith. For he died _not_ to justify
the righteous, but the _un_-righteous, and to make _them_ the
children of God."(130)
That is, the more literally lost you are, the more literally you are the
very being whom Christ's sacrifice has already saved. Nothing in Catholic
theology, I imagine, has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as this
message from Luther's personal experience. As Protestants are not all sick
souls, of course reliance on what Luther exults in calling the dung of
one's merits, the filthy puddle of one's own righteousness, has come to
the front again in their religion; but the adequacy of his view of
Christianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure is shown by
its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and quickening thing.
Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luther
meant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually conceived
of. But this is only one part of Luther's faith, the other part being far
more vital. This other part is something not intellectual but immediate
and intuitive, the assurance, namely, that I, this individual I, just as I
stand, without one plea, etc., am saved now and forever.(131)
Professor Leuba is undoubtedly right in contending that the conceptual
belief about Christ's work, although so often efficacious and antecedent,
is really accessory and non-essential, and that the "joyous conviction"
can also come by far other channels than this conception. It is to the
joyous conviction itself, the assurance that all is well with one, that he
would give the name of faith _par excellence_.
"When the sense of estrangement," he writes, "fencing man about in
a narrowly limited ego, breaks down, the individual finds himself
'at one with all creation.' He lives in the universal life; he and
man, he and nature, he and God, are one. That state of confidence,
trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement of
moral unity, is the _Faith-state_. Various dogmatic beliefs
suddenly, on the advent of the faith-state, acquire a character of
certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the
ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is
irrelevant. But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of
the faith-state, it is a gross error to imagine that the chief
practical value of the faith-state is its power to stamp with the
seal of reality certain particular theological conceptions.(132)
On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the
psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending
desires to one direction; a growth which expresses itself in new
affective states and new reactions; in larger, nobler, more
Christ-like activities. The ground of the specific assurance in
religious dogmas is then an affective experience. The objects of
faith may even be preposterous; the affective stream will float
them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude. The more
startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems,
the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated
notions."(133)
The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity,
should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith-
state, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to
realize their intensity, unless one have been through the experience one's
self.
The central one is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is
ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the _willingness to be_,
even though the outer conditions should remain the same. The certainty of
God's "grace," of "justification," "salvation," is an objective belief
that usually accompanies the change in Christians; but this may be
entirely lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same--you will
recollect the case of the Oxford graduate: and many might be given where
the assurance of personal salvation was only a later result. A passion of
willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this
state of mind.
The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The
mysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says; and often, nay
usually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words. But these more
intellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat of mysticism.
A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which
the world often appears to undergo. "An appearance of newness beautifies
every object," the precise opposite of that other sort of newness, that
dreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world, which
is experienced by melancholy patients, and of which you may recall my
relating some examples.(134) This sense of clean and beautiful newness
within and without is one of the commonest entries in conversion records.
Jonathan Edwards thus describes it in himself:--
"After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and
became more and more lively, and had more of that inward
sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed
to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine
glory, in almost everything. God's excellency, his wisdom, his
purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon,
and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and
trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my
mind. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so
sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so
terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with
thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm
rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me."(135)
Billy Bray, an excellent little illiterate English evangelist, records his
sense of newness thus:--
"I said to the Lord: 'Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive,
they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall
be opened, and I have faith to believe it.' In an instant the Lord
made me so happy that I cannot express what I felt. I shouted for
joy. I praised God with my whole heart.... I think this was in
November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know. I
remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the
fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new
world. I spent the greater part of my time in praising the
Lord."(136)
Starbuck and Leuba both illustrate this sense of newness by quotations. I
take the two following from Starbuck's manuscript collection. One, a
woman, says:--
"I was taken to a camp-meeting, mother and religious friends
seeking and praying for my conversion. My emotional nature was
stirred to its depths; confessions of depravity and pleading with
God for salvation from sin made me oblivious of all surroundings.
I plead for mercy, and had a vivid realization of forgiveness and
renewal of my nature. When rising from my knees I exclaimed, 'Old
things have passed away, all things have become new.' It was like
entering another world, a new state of existence. Natural objects
were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw
beauty in every material object in the universe, the woods were
vocal with heavenly music; my soul exulted in the love of God, and
I wanted everybody to share in my joy."
The next case is that of a man:--
"I know not how I got back into the encampment, but found myself
staggering up to Rev. ----'s Holiness tent--and as it was full of
seekers and a terrible noise inside, some groaning, some laughing,
and some shouting, and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, I
fell on my face by a bench, and tried to pray, and every time I
would call on God, something like a man's hand would strangle me
by choking. I don't know whether there were any one around or near
me or not. I thought I should surely die if I did not get help,
but just as often as I would pray, that unseen hand was felt on my
throat and my breath squeezed off. Finally something said:
'Venture on the atonement, for you will die anyway if you don't.'
So I made one final struggle to call on God for mercy, with the
same choking and strangling, determined to finish the sentence of
prayer for Mercy, if I did strangle and die, and the last I
remember that time was falling back on the ground with the same
unseen hand on my throat. I don't know how long I lay there or
what was going on. None of my folks were present. When I came to
myself, there were a crowd around me praising God. The very
heavens seemed to open and pour down rays of light and glory. Not
for a moment only, but all day and night, floods of light and
glory seemed to pour through my soul, and oh, how I was changed,
and everything became new. My horses and hogs and even everybody
seemed changed."
This man's case introduces the feature of automatisms, which in
suggestible subjects have been so startling a feature at revivals since,
in Edwards's, Wesley's, and Whitfield's time, these became a regular means
of gospel propagation. They were at first supposed to be semi-miraculous
proofs of "power" on the part of the Holy Ghost; but great divergence of
opinion quickly arose concerning them. Edwards, in his Thoughts on the
Revival of Religion in New England, has to defend them against their
critics; and their value has long been matter of debate even within the
revivalistic denominations.(137) They undoubtedly have no essential
spiritual significance, and although their presence makes his conversion
more memorable to the convert, it has never been proved that converts who
show them are more persevering or fertile in good fruits than those whose
change of heart has had less violent accompaniments. On the whole,
unconsciousness, convulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utterances, and
suffocation, must be simply ascribed to the subject's having a large
subliminal region, involving nervous instability. This is often the
subject's own view of the matter afterwards. One of Starbuck's
correspondents writes, for instance:--
"I have been through the experience which is known as conversion.
My explanation of it is this: the subject works his emotions up to
the breaking point, at the same time resisting their physical
manifestations, such as quickened pulse, etc., and then suddenly
lets them have their full sway over his body. The relief is
something wonderful, and the pleasurable effects of the emotions
are experienced to the highest degree."
There is one form of sensory automatism which possibly deserves special
notice on account of its frequency. I refer to hallucinatory or pseudo-
hallucinatory luminous phenomena, _photisms_, to use the term of the
psychologists. Saint Paul's blinding heavenly vision seems to have been a
phenomenon of this sort; so does Constantine's cross in the sky. The last
case but one which I quoted mentions floods of light and glory. Henry
Alline mentions a light, about whose externality he seems uncertain.
Colonel Gardiner sees a blazing light. President Finney writes:--
"All at once the glory of God shone upon and round about me in a
manner almost marvelous.... A light perfectly ineffable shone in
my soul, that almost prostrated me on the ground.... This light
seemed like the brightness of the sun in every direction. It was
too intense for the eyes.... I think I knew something then, by
actual experience, of that light that prostrated Paul on the way
to Damascus. It was surely a light such as I could not have
endured long."(138)
Such reports of photisms are indeed far from uncommon. Here is another
from Starbuck's collection, where the light appeared evidently external:--
"I had attended a series of revival services for about two weeks
off and on. Had been invited to the altar several times, all the
time becoming more deeply impressed, when finally I decided I must
do this, or I should be lost. Realization of conversion was very
vivid, like a ton's weight being lifted from my heart; a strange
light which seemed to light up the whole room (for it was dark); a
conscious supreme bliss which caused me to repeat 'Glory to God'
for a long time. Decided to be God's child for life, and to give
up my pet ambition, wealth and social position. My former habits
of life hindered my growth somewhat, but I set about overcoming
these systematically, and in one year my whole nature was changed,
i.e., my ambitions were of a different order."
Here is another one of Starbuck's cases, involving a luminous element:--
"I had been clearly converted twenty-three years before, or rather
reclaimed. My experience in regeneration was then clear and
spiritual, and I had not backslidden. But I experienced entire
sanctification on the 15th day of March, 1893, about eleven
o'clock in the morning. The particular accompaniments of the
experience were entirely unexpected. I was quietly sitting at home
singing selections out of Pentecostal Hymns. Suddenly there seemed
to be a something sweeping into me and inflating my entire
being--such a sensation as I had never experienced before. When
this experience came, I seemed to be conducted around a large,
capacious, well-lighted room. As I walked with my invisible
conductor and looked around, a clear thought was coined in my
mind, 'They are not here, they are gone.' As soon as the thought
was definitely formed in my mind, though no word was spoken, the
Holy Spirit impressed me that I was surveying my own soul. Then,
for the first time in all my life, did I know that I was cleansed
from all sin, and filled with the fullness of God."
Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds
one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds
called mescal by the Mexicans:--
"When I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of
God appeared in all his visible creation. I well remember we
reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as
it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may
so express it, in the glory of God."(139)
The most characteristic of all the elements of the conversion crisis, and
the last one of which I shall speak, is the ecstasy of happiness produced.
We have already heard several accounts of it, but I will add a couple
more. President Finney's is so vivid that I give it at length:--
"All my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; and the utterance of
my heart was, 'I want to pour my whole soul out to God.' The
rising of my soul was so great that I rushed into the back room of
the front office, to pray. There was no fire and no light in the
room; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly
light. As I went in and shut the door after me, it seemed as if I
met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. It did not occur to me
then, nor did it for some time afterwards, that it was wholly a
mental state. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him as I
would see any other man. He said nothing, but looked at me in such
a manner as to break me right down at his feet. I have always
since regarded this as a most remarkable state of mind; for it
seemed to me a reality that he stood before me, and I fell down at
his feet and poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like a child,
and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance. It
seemed to me that I bathed his feet with my tears; and yet I had
no distinct impression that I touched him, that I recollect. I
must have continued in this state for a good while; but my mind
was too much absorbed with the interview to recollect anything
that I said. But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to
break off from the interview, I returned to the front office, and
found that the fire that I had made of large wood was nearly
burned out. But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the
fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any
expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that
there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I
had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the
Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go
through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a
wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it
seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not
express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath of
God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like
immense wings.
"No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in
my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I
should say I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my
heart. These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one
after the other, until I recollect I cried out, 'I shall die if
these waves continue to pass over me.' I said, 'Lord, I cannot
bear any more;' yet I had no fear of death.
"How long I continued in this state, with this baptism continuing
to roll over me and go through me, I do not know. But I know it
was late in the evening when a member of my choir--for I was the
leader of the choir--came into the office to see me. He was a
member of the church. He found me in this state of loud weeping,
and said to me, 'Mr. Finney, what ails you?' I could make him no
answer for some time. He then said, 'Are you in pain?' I gathered
myself up as best I could, and replied, 'No, but so happy that I
cannot live.' "
I just now quoted Billy Bray; I cannot do better than give his own brief
account of his post-conversion feelings:--
"I can't help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift
up one foot, and it seems to say 'Glory'; and I lift up the other,
and it seems to say 'Amen'; and so they keep up like that all the
time I am walking."(140)
One word, before I close this lecture, on the question of the transiency
or permanence of these abrupt conversions. Some of you, I feel sure,
knowing that numerous backslidings and relapses take place, make of these
their apperceiving mass for interpreting the whole subject, and dismiss it
with a pitying smile at so much "hysterics." Psychologically, as well as
religiously, however, this is shallow. It misses the point of serious
interest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality of
these shiftings of character to higher levels. Men lapse from every
level--we need no statistics to tell us that. Love is, for instance, well
known not to be irrevocable, yet, constant or inconstant, it reveals new
flights and reaches of ideality while it lasts. These revelations form its
significance to men and women, whatever be its duration. So with the
conversion experience: that it should for even a short time show a human
being what the high-water mark of his spiritual capacity is, this is what
constitutes its importance,--an importance which backsliding cannot
diminish, although persistence might increase it. As a matter of fact, all
the more striking instances of conversion, all those, for instance, which
I have quoted, _have_ been permanent. The case of which there might be
most doubt, on account of its suggesting so strongly an epileptoid
seizure, was the case of M. Ratisbonne. Yet I am informed that
Ratisbonne's whole future was shaped by those few minutes. He gave up his
project of marriage, became a priest, founded at Jerusalem, where he went
to dwell, a mission of nuns for the conversion of the Jews, showed no
tendency to use for egotistic purposes the notoriety given him by the
peculiar circumstances of his conversion,--which, for the rest, he could
seldom refer to without tears,--and in short remained an exemplary son of
the Church until he died, late in the 80's, if I remember rightly.
The only statistics I know of, on the subject of the duration of
conversions, are those collected for Professor Starbuck by Miss Johnston.
They embrace only a hundred persons, evangelical church-members, more than
half being Methodists. According to the statement of the subjects
themselves, there had been backsliding of some sort in nearly all the
cases, 93 per cent. of the women, 77 per cent. of the men. Discussing the
returns more minutely, Starbuck finds that only 6 per cent. are relapses
from the religious faith which the conversion confirmed, and that the
backsliding complained of is in most only a fluctuation in the ardor of
sentiment. Only six of the hundred cases report a change of faith.
Starbuck's conclusion is that the effect of conversion is to bring with it
"a changed attitude towards life, which is fairly constant and permanent,
although the feelings fluctuate.... In other words, the persons who have
passed through conversion, having once taken a stand for the religious
life, tend to feel themselves identified with it, no matter how much their
religious enthusiasm declines."(141)
LECTURES XI, XII, AND XIII. SAINTLINESS.
The last lecture left us in a state of expectancy. What may the practical
fruits for life have been, of such movingly happy conversions as those we
heard of? With this question the really important part of our task opens,
for you remember that we began all this empirical inquiry not merely to
open a curious chapter in the natural history of human consciousness, but
rather to attain a spiritual judgment as to the total value and positive
meaning of all the religious trouble and happiness which we have seen. We
must, therefore, first describe the fruits of the religious life, and then
we must judge them. This divides our inquiry into two distinct parts. Let
us without further preamble proceed to the descriptive task.
It ought to be the pleasantest portion of our business in these lectures.
Some small pieces of it, it is true, may be painful, or may show human
nature in a pathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant, because the
best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has
to show. They have always been esteemed so; here if anywhere is the
genuinely strenuous life; and to call to mind a succession of such
examples as I have lately had to wander through, though it has been only
in the reading of them, is to feel encouraged and uplifted and washed in
better moral air.
The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to
which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for
religious ideals. I can do no better than quote, as to this, some remarks
which Sainte-Beuve in his History of Port-Royal makes on the results of
conversion or the state of grace.
"Even from the purely human point of view," Sainte-Beuve says, "the
phenomenon of grace must still appear sufficiently extraordinary, eminent,
and rare, both in its nature and in its effects, to deserve a closer
study. For the soul arrives thereby at a certain fixed and invincible
state, a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of which the
greatest deeds which it ever performs are executed. Through all the
different forms of communion, and all the diversity of the means which
help to produce this state, whether it be reached by a jubilee, by a
general confession, by a solitary prayer and effusion, whatever in short
be the place and the occasion, it is easy to recognize that it is
fundamentally one state in spirit and in fruits. Penetrate a little
beneath the diversity of circumstances, and it becomes evident that in
Christians of different epochs it is always one and the same modification
by which they are affected: there is veritably a single fundamental and
identical spirit of piety and charity, common to those who have received
grace; an inner state which before all things is one of love and humility,
of infinite confidence in God, and of severity for one's self, accompanied
with tenderness for others. The fruits peculiar to this condition of the
soul have the same savor in all, under distant suns and in different
surroundings, in Saint Teresa of Avila just as in any Moravian brother of
Herrnhut."(142)
Sainte-Beuve has here only the more eminent instances of regeneration in
mind, and these are of course the instructive ones for us also to
consider. These devotees have often laid their course so differently from
other men that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted to call
them monstrous aberrations from the path of nature. I begin, therefore, by
asking a general psychological question as to what the inner conditions
are which may make one human character differ so extremely from another.
I reply at once that where the character, as something distinguished from
the intellect, is concerned, the causes of human diversity lie chiefly in
our _differing susceptibilities of emotional excitement_, and in the
_different impulses and inhibitions_ which these bring in their train. Let
me make this more clear.
Speaking generally, our moral and practical attitude, at any given time,
is always a resultant of two sets of forces within us, impulses pushing us
one way and obstructions and inhibitions holding us back. "Yes! yes!" say
the impulses; "No! no!" say the inhibitions. Few people who have not
expressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of
inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive
pressure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar. The
influence is so incessant that it becomes subconscious. All of you, for
example, sit here with a certain constraint at this moment, and entirely
without express consciousness of the fact, because of the influence of the
occasion. If left alone in the room, each of you would probably
involuntarily rearrange himself, and make his attitude more "free and
easy." But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any
great emotional excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy appear in the
street with his face covered with shaving-lather because a house across
the way was on fire; and a woman will run among strangers in her nightgown
if it be a question of saving her baby's life or her own. Take a self-
indulgent woman's life in general. She will yield to every inhibition set
by her disagreeable sensations, lie late in bed, live upon tea or
bromides, keep indoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds her obedient
to its "no." But make a mother of her, and what have you? Possessed by
maternal excitement, she now confronts wakefulness, weariness, and toil
without an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The inhibitive
power of pain over her is extinguished wherever the baby's interests are
at stake. The inconveniences which this creature occasions have become, as
James Hinton says, the glowing heart of a great joy, and indeed are now
the very conditions whereby the joy becomes most deep.
This is an example of what you have already heard of as the "expulsive
power of a higher affection." But be the affection high or low, it makes
no difference, so long as the excitement it brings be strong enough. In
one of Henry Drummond's discourses he tells of an inundation in India
where an eminence with a bungalow upon it remained unsubmerged, and became
the refuge of a number of wild animals and reptiles in addition to the
human beings who were there. At a certain moment a royal Bengal tiger
appeared swimming towards it, reached it, and lay panting like a dog upon
the ground in the midst of the people, still possessed by such an agony of
terror that one of the Englishmen could calmly step up with a rifle and
blow out its brains. The tiger's habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled
by the emotion of fear, which became sovereign, and formed a new centre
for his character.
Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are
mixed together. In that case one hears both "yeses" and "noes," and the
"will" is called on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier, for
example, with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his fears
impelling him to run, and his propensities to imitation pushing him
towards various courses if his comrades offer various examples. His person
becomes the seat of a mass of interferences; and he may for a time simply
waver, because no one emotion prevails. There is a pitch of intensity,
though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones that one as alone
effective and sweeps its antagonists and all their inhibitions away. The
fury of his comrades' charge, once entered on, will give this pitch of
courage to the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of
fear. In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grow
natural because the inhibitions are annulled. Their "no! no!" not only is
not heard, it does not exist. Obstacles are then like tissue-paper hoops
to the circus rider--no impediment; the flood is higher than the dam they
make. "Lass sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig sind!" cries the grenadier,
frantic over his Emperor's capture, when his wife and babes are suggested;
and men pent into a burning theatre have been known to cut their way
through the crowd with knives.(143)
One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the
composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive
power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere
irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in
subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness,
severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy,
though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to
one's self--it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on
one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing
annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke
says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what
makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest
delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer
themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are
elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-
rooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we
take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called
weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the inaptitude for
these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet
softnesses must often be the targets and the victims.(144)
So far I have spoken of temporary alterations produced by shifting
excitements in the same person. But the relatively fixed differences of
character of different persons are explained in a precisely similar way.
In a man with a liability to a special sort of emotion, whole ranges of
inhibition habitually vanish, which in other men remain effective, and
other sorts of inhibition take their place. When a person has an inborn
genius for certain emotions, his life differs strangely from that of
ordinary people, for none of their usual deterrents check him. Your mere
aspirant to a type of character, on the contrary, only shows, when your
natural lover, fighter, or reformer, with whom the passion is a gift of
nature, comes along, the hopeless inferiority of voluntary to instinctive
action. He has deliberately to overcome his inhibitions; the genius with
the inborn passion seems not to feel them at all; he is free of all that
inner friction and nervous waste. To a Fox, a Garibaldi, a General Booth,
a John Brown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the obstacles omnipotent over
those around them are as if non-existent. Could the rest of us so
disregard them, there might be many such heroes, for many have the wish to
live for similar ideals, and only the adequate degree of inhibition-
quenching fury is lacking.(145)
The difference between willing and merely wishing, between having ideals
that are creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus
depends solely either on the amount of steam-pressure chronically driving
the character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement
transiently acquired. Given a certain amount of love, indignation,
generosity, magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or enthusiasm of self-
surrender, the result is always the same. That whole raft of cowardly
obstructions, which in tame persons and dull moods are sovereign
impediments to action, sinks away at once. Our conventionality,(146) our
shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demands for precedent and
permission, for guarantee and surety, our small suspicions, timidities,
despairs, where are they now? Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in
the sun--
"Wo sind die Sorge nun und Noth
Die mich noch gestern wollt' erschlaffen?
Ich schäm' mich dess' im Morgenroth."
The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly under that their very
contact is unfelt. Set free of them, we float and soar and sing. This
auroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright
and caroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the
controlling emotion is religious. "The true monk," writes an Italian
mystic, "takes nothing with him but his lyre."
-------------------------------------
We may now turn from these psychological generalities to those fruits of
the religious state which form the special subject of our present lecture.
The man who lives in his religious centre of personal energy, and is
actuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previous carnal self
in perfectly definite ways. The new ardor which burns in his breast
consumes in its glow the lower "noes" which formerly beset him, and keeps
him immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of his
nature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry
conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The
stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken
down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of
feeling in those temporary "melting moods" into which either the trials of
real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throw us. Especially if we
weep! For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner
dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain
away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler
leading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not
so with saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and
Loyola, have possessed what the church traditionally reveres as a special
grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood
seems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears
and melting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reign may
come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have
"come to stay."
At the end of the last lecture we saw this permanence to be true of the
general paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in the ebbs of
emotional excitement meaner motives might temporarily prevail and
backsliding might occur. But that lower temptations may remain completely
annulled, apart from transient emotion and as if by alteration of the
man's habitual nature, is also proved by documentary evidence in certain
cases. Before embarking on the general natural history of the regenerate
character, let me convince you of this curious fact by one or two
examples. The most numerous are those of reformed drunkards. You recollect
the case of Mr. Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry McAuley Water Street
Mission abounds in similar instances.(147) You also remember the graduate
of Oxford, converted at three in the afternoon, and getting drunk in the
hay-field the next day, but after that permanently cured of his appetite.
"From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never
want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe, ... the desire for it went
at once and has never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance
in each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptations since
conversion."
Here is an analogous case from Starbuck's manuscript collection:--
"I went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where there was a Holiness
meeting, ... and I began saying, 'Lord, Lord, I must have this
blessing.' Then what was to me an audible voice said: 'Are you
willing to give up everything to the Lord?' and question after
question kept coming up, to all of which I said: 'Yes, Lord; yes,
Lord!' until this came: 'Why do you not accept it _now_?' and I
said: 'I do, Lord.'--I felt no particular joy, only a trust. Just
then the meeting closed, and, as I went out on the street, I met a
gentleman smoking a fine cigar, and a cloud of smoke came into my
face, and I took a long, deep breath of it, and praise the Lord,
all my appetite for it was gone. Then as I walked along the
street, passing saloons where the fumes of liquor came out, I
found that all my taste and longing for that accursed stuff was
gone. Glory to God! ... [But] for ten or eleven long years [after
that] I was in the wilderness with its ups and downs. My appetite
for liquor never came back."
The classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual
temptation in a single hour. To Mr. Spears the colonel said, "I was
effectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was so strongly
addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the head could
have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed, as
entirely as if I had been a sucking child; nor did the temptation return
to this day." Mr. Webster's words on the same subject are these: "One
thing I have heard the colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted
to impurity before his acquaintance with religion; but that, so soon as he
was enlightened from above, he felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing
his nature so wonderfully that his sanctification in this respect seemed
more remarkable than in any other."(148)
Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensities reminds us so
strongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion
that it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the
decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in
hypnotism.(149) Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of cure, after a
few sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which the patient, left to
ordinary moral and physical influences, had struggled in vain. Both
drunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in this way, action through
the subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the prerogative of
inducing relatively stable change. If the grace of God miraculously
operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door, then. But just
_how_ anything operates in this region is still unexplained, and we shall
do well now to say good-by to the _process_ of transformation
altogether,--leaving it, if you like, a good deal of a psychological or
theological mystery,--and to turn our attention to the fruits of the
religious condition, no matter in what way they may have been
produced.(150)
The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is
Saintliness.(151) The saintly character is the character for which
spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and
there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same
in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.(152)
They are these:--
1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world's selfish
little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it
were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power. In Christian
saintliness this power is always personified as God; but abstract moral
ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of holiness or right
may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life, in ways
which I described in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen.(153)
2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own
life, and a willing self-surrender to its control.
3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining
selfhood melt down.
4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious
affections, towards "yes, yes" and away from "no," where the claims of the
non-ego are concerned.
These fundamental inner conditions have characteristic practical
consequences, as follows:--
_a._ _Asceticism._--The self-surrender may become so passionate as to turn
into self-immolation. It may then so overrule the ordinary inhibitions of
the flesh that the saint finds positive pleasure in sacrifice and
asceticism, measuring and expressing as they do the degree of his loyalty
to the higher power.
_b._ _Strength of Soul._--The sense of enlargement of life may be so
uplifting that personal motives and inhibitions, commonly omnipotent,
become too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and
fortitude open out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity takes
their place. Come heaven, come hell, it makes no difference now!
"We forbid ourselves all seeking after popularity, all ambition to
appear important. We pledge ourselves to abstain from falsehood,
in all its degrees. We promise not to create or encourage
illusions as to what is possible, by what we say or write. We
promise to one another active sincerity, which strives to see
truth clearly, and which never fears to declare what it sees.
"We promise deliberate resistance to the tidal waves of fashion,
to the 'booms' and panics of the public mind, to all the forms of
weakness and of fear.
"We forbid ourselves the use of sarcasm. Of serious things we will
speak seriously and unsmilingly, without banter and without the
appearance of banter;--and even so of all things, for there are
serious ways of being light of heart.
"We will put ourselves forward always for what we are, simply and
without false humility, as well as without pedantry, affectation,
or pride."
_c._ _Purity._--The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first,
increase of purity. The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced,
and the cleansing of existence from brutal and sensual elements becomes
imperative. Occasions of contact with such elements are avoided: the
saintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency and keep unspotted from
the world. In some temperaments this need of purity of spirit takes an
ascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless
severity.
_d._ _Charity._--The shifting of the emotional centre brings, secondly,
increase of charity, tenderness for fellow-creatures. The ordinary motives
to antipathy, which usually set such close bounds to tenderness among
human beings, are inhibited. The saint loves his enemies, and treats
loathsome beggars as his brothers.
-------------------------------------
I now have to give some concrete illustrations of these fruits of the
spiritual tree. The only difficulty is to choose, for they are so
abundant.
Since the sense of Presence of a higher and friendly Power seems to be the
fundamental feature in the spiritual life, I will begin with that.
In our narratives of conversion we saw how the world might look shining
and transfigured to the convert,(154) and, apart from anything acutely
religious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us
round with friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the woods or
on the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all whispering
with peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of existence enfold us like
a dry warm climate, or chime through us as if our inner ears were subtly
ringing with the world's security. Thoreau writes:--
"Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I
doubted whether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to
a serene and healthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant.
But, in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts
prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent
society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in
every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and
unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere,
sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human
neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them
since. Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy
and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence
of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be
strange to me again."(155)
In the Christian consciousness this sense of the enveloping friendliness
becomes most personal and definite. "The compensation," writes a German
author, "for the loss of that sense of personal independence which man so
unwillingly gives up, is the disappearance of all _fear_ from one's life,
the quite indescribable and inexplicable feeling of an inner _security_,
which one can only experience, but which, once it has been experienced,
one can never forget."(156)
I find an excellent description of this state of mind in a sermon by Mr.
Voysey:--
"It is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, that this
sense of God's unfailing presence with them in their going out and
in their coming in, and by night and day, is a source of absolute
repose and confident calmness. It drives away all fear of what may
befall them. That nearness of God is a constant security against
terror and anxiety. It is not that they are at all assured of
physical safety, or deem themselves protected by a love which is
denied to others, but that they are in a state of mind equally
ready to be safe or to meet with injury. If injury befall them,
they will be content to bear it because the Lord is their keeper,
and nothing can befall them without his will. If it be his will,
then injury is for them a blessing and no calamity at all. Thus
and thus only is the trustful man protected and shielded from
harm. And I for one--by no means a thick-skinned or hard-nerved
man--am absolutely satisfied with this arrangement, and do not wish
for any other kind of immunity from danger and catastrophe. Quite
as sensitive to pain as the most highly strung organism, I yet
feel that the worst of it is conquered, and the sting taken out of
it altogether, by the thought that God is our loving and sleepless
keeper, and that nothing can hurt us without his will."(157)
More excited expressions of this condition are abundant in religious
literature. I could easily weary you with their monotony. Here is an
account from Mrs. Jonathan Edwards:--
"Last night," Mrs. Edwards writes, "was the sweetest night I ever
had in my life. I never before, for so long a time together,
enjoyed so much of the light and rest and sweetness of heaven in
my soul, but without the least agitation of body during the whole
time. Part of the night I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and
sometimes between sleeping and waking. But all night I continued
in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness
of Christ's excellent love, of his nearness to me, and of my
dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in
an entire rest in him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of
divine love come down from the heart of Christ in heaven into my
heart in a constant stream, like a stream or pencil of sweet
light. At the same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love
to Christ, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and
reflowing of heavenly love, and I appeared to myself to float or
swim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the motes swimming in the
beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which come in at the
window. I think that what I felt each minute was worth more than
all the outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in my
whole life put together. It was pleasure, without the least sting,
or any interruption. It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost
in; it seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain. There
was but little difference, whether I was asleep or awake, but if
there was any difference, the sweetness was greatest while I was
asleep.(158) As I awoke early the next morning, it seemed to me
that I had entirely done with myself. I felt that the opinions of
the world concerning me were nothing, and that I had no more to do
with any outward interest of my own than with that of a person
whom I never saw. The glory of God seemed to swallow up every wish
and desire of my heart.... After retiring to rest and sleeping a
little while, I awoke, and was led to reflect on God's mercy to
me, in giving me, for many years, a willingness to die; and after
that, in making me willing to live, that I might do and suffer
whatever he called me to here. I also thought how God had
graciously given me an entire resignation to his will, with
respect to the kind and manner of death that I should die; having
been made willing to die on the rack, or at the stake, and if it
were God's will, to die in darkness. But now it occurred to me, I
used to think of living no longer than to the ordinary age of man.
Upon this I was led to ask myself, whether I was not willing to be
kept out of heaven even longer; and my whole heart seemed
immediately to reply: Yes, a thousand years, and a thousand in
horror, if it be most for the honor of God, the torment of my body
being so great, awful, and overwhelming that none could bear to
live in the country where the spectacle was seen, and the torment
of my mind being vastly greater. And it seemed to me that I found
a perfect willingness, quietness, and alacrity of soul in
consenting that it should be so, if it were most for the glory of
God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my
mind. The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up,
and every conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible
to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it. This
resignation continued in its clearness and brightness the rest of
the night, and all the next day, and the night following, and on
Monday in the forenoon, without interruption or abatement."(159)
The annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or more
ecstatic than this. "Often the assaults of the divine love," it is said of
the Sister Séraphique de la Martinière, "reduced her almost to the point
of death. She used tenderly to complain of this to God. 'I cannot support
it,' she used to say. 'Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire
under the violence of your love.' "(160)
-------------------------------------
Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a usual fruit
of saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theological
virtues, however limited may have been the kinds of service which the
particular theology enjoined. Brotherly love would follow logically from
the assurance of God's friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as
men being an immediate inference from that of God's fatherhood of us all.
When Christ utters the precepts: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse
you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully
use you, and persecute you," he gives for a reason: "That ye may be the
children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise
on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the
unjust." One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to
one's self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual
excitement, as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief.
But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find
them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible
degree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they
_harmonize_ with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on
general causes; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but
coördinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we
are engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder,
cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and
grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule. The
best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic
affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find
ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain
its parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another. Like love or
fear, the faith-state is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity
with it by organic consequence. Jubilation is an expansive affection, and
all expansive affections are self-forgetful and kindly so long as they
endure.
We find this the case even when they are pathological in origin. In his
instructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie,(161) M. Georges Dumas compares
together the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity, and
shows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other is marked
by altruistic impulses. No human being so stingy and useless as was Marie
in her melancholy period! But the moment the happy period begins,
"sympathy and kindness become her characteristic sentiments. She displays
a universal goodwill, not only of intention, but in act.... She becomes
solicitous of the health of other patients, interested in getting them
out, desirous to procure wool to knit socks for some of them. Never since
she has been under my observation have I heard her in her joyous period
utter any but charitable opinions."(162) And later, Dr. Dumas says of all
such joyous conditions that "unselfish sentiments and tender emotions are
the only affective states to be found in them. The subject's mind is
closed against envy, hatred, and vindictiveness, and wholly transformed
into benevolence, indulgence, and mercy."(163)
There is thus an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and
their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
Along with the happiness, this increase of tenderness is often noted in
narratives of conversion. "I began to work for others";--"I had more tender
feeling for my family and friends";--"I spoke at once to a person with whom
I had been angry";--"I felt for every one, and loved my friends better";--"I
felt every one to be my friend";--these are so many expressions from the
records collected by Professor Starbuck.(164)
"When," says Mrs. Edwards, continuing the narrative from which I
made quotation a moment ago, "I arose on the morning of the
Sabbath, I felt a love to all mankind, wholly peculiar in its
strength and sweetness, far beyond all that I had ever felt
before. The power of that love seemed inexpressible. I thought, if
I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and
cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would still be impossible
that I should cherish any feelings towards them but those of love,
and pity, and ardent desires for their happiness. I never before
felt so far from a disposition to judge and censure others, as I
did that morning. I realized also, in an unusual and very lively
manner, how great a part of Christianity lies in the performance
of our social and relative duties to one another. The same joyful
sense continued throughout the day--a sweet love to God and all
mankind."
Whatever be the explanation of the charity, it may efface all usual human
barriers.(165)
Here, for instance, is an example of Christian non-resistance from Richard
Weaver's autobiography. Weaver was a collier, a semi-professional pugilist
in his younger days, who became a much beloved evangelist. Fighting, after
drinking, seems to have been the sin to which he originally felt his flesh
most perversely inclined. After his first conversion he had a backsliding,
which consisted in pounding a man who had insulted a girl. Feeling that,
having once fallen, he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb,
he got drunk and went and broke the jaw of another man who had lately
challenged him to fight and taunted him with cowardice for refusing as a
Christian man;--I mention these incidents to show how genuine a change of
heart is implied in the later conduct which he describes as follows:--
"I went down the drift and found the boy crying because a fellow-
workman was trying to take the wagon from him by force. I said to
him:--
" 'Tom, you mustn't take that wagon.'
"He swore at me, and called me a Methodist devil. I told him that
God did not tell me to let him rob me. He cursed again, and said
he would push the wagon over me.
" 'Well,' I said, 'let us see whether the devil and thee are
stronger than the Lord and me.'
"And the Lord and I proving stronger than the devil and he, he had
to get out of the way, or the wagon would have gone over him. So I
gave the wagon to the boy. Then said Tom:--
" 'I've a good mind to smack thee on the face.'
" 'Well,' I said, 'if that will do thee any good, thou canst do
it.' So he struck me on the face.
"I turned the other cheek to him, and said, 'Strike again.'
"He struck again and again, till he had struck me five times. I
turned my cheek for the sixth stroke; but he turned away cursing.
I shouted after him: 'The Lord forgive thee, for I do, and the
Lord save thee.'
"This was on a Saturday; and when I went home from the coal-pit my
wife saw my face was swollen, and asked what was the matter with
it. I said: 'I've been fighting, and I've given a man a good
thrashing.'
"She burst out weeping, and said, 'O Richard, what made you
fight?' Then I told her all about it; and she thanked the Lord I
had not struck back.
"But the Lord had struck, and his blows have more effect than
man's. Monday came. The devil began to tempt me, saying: 'The
other men will laugh at thee for allowing Tom to treat thee as he
did on Saturday.' I cried, 'Get thee behind me, Satan;'--and went
on my way to the coal-pit.
"Tom was the first man I saw. I said 'Good-morning,' but got no
reply.
"He went down first. When I got down, I was surprised to see him
sitting on the wagon-road waiting for me. When I came to him he
burst into tears and said: 'Richard, will you forgive me for
striking you?'
" 'I have forgiven thee,' said I; 'ask God to forgive thee. The
Lord bless thee.' I gave him my hand, and we went each to his
work."(166)
"Love your enemies!" Mark you, not simply those who happen not to be your
friends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active enemies. Either this
is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only
that we should, as far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is
sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual
relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the
question: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying, so
obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity may come
to be an irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier
interests aroused? If positive well-wishing could attain so supreme a
degree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might well seem
superhuman beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the life of
other men, and there is no saying, in the absence of positive experience
of an authentic kind,--for there are few active examples in our scriptures,
and the Buddhistic examples are legendary,(167)--what the effects might be:
they might conceivably transform the world.
Psychologically and in principle, the precept "Love your enemies" is not
self-contradictory. It is merely the extreme limit of a kind of
magnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of our
oppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would
involve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole,
and with the present world's arrangements, that a critical point would
practically be passed, and we should be born into another kingdom of
being. Religious emotion makes us feel that other kingdom to be close at
hand, within our reach.
The inhibition of instinctive repugnance is proved not only by the showing
of love to enemies, but by the showing of it to any one who is personally
loathsome. In the annals of saintliness we find a curious mixture of
motives impelling in this direction. Asceticism plays its part; and along
with charity pure and simple, we find humility or the desire to disclaim
distinction and to grovel on the common level before God. Certainly all
three principles were at work when Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola
exchanged their garments with those of filthy beggars. All three are at
work when religious persons consecrate their lives to the care of leprosy
or other peculiarly unpleasant diseases. The nursing of the sick is a
function to which the religious seem strongly drawn, even apart from the
fact that church traditions set that way. But in the annals of this sort
of charity we find fantastic excesses of devotion recorded which are only
explicable by the frenzy of self-immolation simultaneously aroused.
Francis of Assisi kisses his lepers; Margaret Mary Alacoque, Francis
Xavier, St. John of God, and others are said to have cleansed the sores
and ulcers of their patients with their respective tongues; and the lives
of such saints as Elizabeth of Hungary and Madame de Chantal are full of a
sort of reveling in hospital purulence, disagreeable to read of, and which
makes us admire and shudder at the same time.
-------------------------------------
So much for the human love aroused by the faith-state. Let me next speak
of the Equanimity, Resignation, Fortitude, and Patience which it brings.
"A paradise of inward tranquillity" seems to be faith's usual result; and
it is easy, even without being religious one's self, to understand this. A
moment back, in treating of the sense of God's presence, I spoke of the
unaccountable feeling of safety which one may then have. And, indeed, how
can it possibly fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appease
the fret, if one be sensibly conscious that, no matter what one's
difficulties for the moment may appear to be, one's life as a whole is in
the keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust? In deeply religious
men the abandonment of self to this power is passionate. Whoever not only
says, but _feels_, "God's will be done," is mailed against every weakness;
and the whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries, and religious
reformers is there to prove the tranquil-mindedness, under naturally
agitating or distressing circumstances, which self-surrender brings.
The temper of the tranquil-mindedness differs, of course, according as the
person is of a constitutionally sombre or of a constitutionally cheerful
cast of mind. In the sombre it partakes more of resignation and
submission; in the cheerful it is a joyous consent. As an example of the
former temper, I quote part of a letter from Professor Lagneau, a
venerated teacher of philosophy who lately died, a great invalid, at
Paris:--
"My life, for the success of which you send good wishes, will be
what it is able to be. I ask nothing from it, I expect nothing
from it. For long years now I exist, think, and act, and am worth
what I am worth, only through the despair which is my sole
strength and my sole foundation. May it preserve for me, even in
these last trials to which I am coming, the courage to do without
the desire of deliverance. I ask nothing more from the Source
whence all strength cometh, and if that is granted, your wishes
will have been accomplished."(168)
There is something pathetic and fatalistic about this, but the power of
such a tone as a protection against outward shocks is manifest. Pascal is
another Frenchman of pessimistic natural temperament. He expresses still
more amply the temper of self-surrendering submissiveness:--
"Deliver me, Lord," he writes in his prayers, "from the sadness at
my proper suffering which self-love might give, but put into me a
sadness like your own. Let my sufferings appease your choler. Make
them an occasion for my conversion and salvation. I ask you
neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but
that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my
death, for your glory, for my salvation, and for the use of the
Church and of your saints, of whom I would by your grace be one.
You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign
master; do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take
away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing,
Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart
from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not
which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or
poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is
beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets
of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to
fathom."(169)
When we reach more optimistic temperaments, the resignation grows less
passive. Examples are sown so broadcast throughout history that I might
well pass on without citation. As it is, I snatch at the first that occurs
to my mind. Madame Guyon, a frail creature physically, was yet of a happy
native disposition. She went through many perils with admirable serenity
of soul. After being sent to prison for heresy,--
"Some of my friends," she writes, "wept bitterly at the hearing of
it, but such was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it
failed to draw any tears from me.... There appeared to be in me
then, as I find it to be in me now, such an entire loss of what
regards myself, that any of my own interests gave me little pain
or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myself only the very
thing which God does." In another place she writes: "We all of us
came near perishing in a river which we found it necessary to
pass. The carriage sank in the quicksand. Others who were with us
threw themselves out in excessive fright. But I found my thoughts
so much taken up with God that I had no distinct sense of danger.
It is true that the thought of being drowned passed across my
mind, but it cost no other sensation or reflection in me than
this--that I felt quite contented and willing it were so, if it
were my heavenly Father's choice." Sailing from Nice to Genoa, a
storm keeps her eleven days at sea. "As the irritated waves dashed
round us," she writes, "I could not help experiencing a certain
degree of satisfaction in my mind. I pleased myself with thinking
that those mutinous billows, under the command of Him who does all
things rightly, might probably furnish me with a watery grave.
Perhaps I carried the point too far, in the pleasure which I took
in thus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swelling waters.
Those who were with me took notice of my intrepidity."(170)
The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm produces may be even
more buoyant still. I take an example from that charming recent
autobiography, "With Christ at Sea," by Frank Bullen. A couple of days
after he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there gives
an account,--
"It was blowing stiffly," he writes, "and we were carrying a press
of canvas to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four
bells we hauled down the flying-jib, and I sprang out astride the
boom to furl it. I was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it
gave way with me. The sail slipped through my fingers, and I fell
backwards, hanging head downwards over the seething tumult of
shining foam under the ship's bows, suspended by one foot. But I
felt only high exultation in my certainty of eternal life.
Although death was divided from me by a hair's breadth, and I was
acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but joy. I
suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds, but
in that time I lived a whole age of delight. But my body asserted
itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regained the boom.
How I furled the sail I don't know, but I sang at the utmost pitch
of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over the dark
waste of waters."(171)
The annals of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumph for
religious imperturbability. Let me cite as an example the statement of a
humble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV.:--
"They shut all the doors," Blanche Gamond writes, "and I saw six
women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could
hold, and a yard long. He gave me the order, 'Undress yourself,'
which I did. He said, 'You are leaving on your shift; you must
take it off.' They had so little patience that they took it off
themselves, and I was naked from the waist up. They brought a cord
with which they tied me to a beam in the kitchen. They drew the
cord tight with all their strength and asked me, 'Does it hurt
you?' and then they discharged their fury upon me, exclaiming as
they struck me, 'Pray now to your God.' It was the Roulette woman
who held this language. But at this moment I received the greatest
consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since I had the
honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of
being crowned with his mercy and his consolations. Why can I not
write down the inconceivable influences, consolations, and peace
which I felt interiorly? To understand them one must have passed
by the same trial; they were so great that I was ravished, for
there where afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly. In
vain the women cried, 'We must double our blows; she does not feel
them, for she neither speaks nor cries.' And how should I have
cried, since I was swooning with happiness within?"(172)
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to
equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those
shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of
energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that
it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing
the burden down. This abandonment of self-responsibility seems to be the
fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral
practice. It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies.
Mind-cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on
it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of entering
into closest marriage with every speculative creed.(173) Christians who
have it strongly live in what is called "recollection," and are never
anxious about the future, nor worry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint
Catharine of Genoa it is said that "she took cognizance of things, only as
they were presented to her in succession, _moment by moment_." To her holy
soul, "the divine moment was the present moment,... and when the present
moment was estimated in itself and in its relations, and when the duty
that was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as
if it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the
moment which came after."(174)
Hinduism, mind-cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this
concentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand.
-------------------------------------
The next religious symptom which I will note is what I have called Purity
of Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to inner
inconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable. All
the mind's objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the
special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is
unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with
this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of
sacrifice, for the beloved deity's sake, of everything unworthy of him.
Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at a
stroke--we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest. Billy
Bray's account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example of the
latter form of achievement.
"I had been a smoker as well as a drunkard, and I used to love my
tobacco as much as I loved my meat, and I would rather go down
into the mine without my dinner than without my pipe. In the days
of old, the Lord spoke by the mouths of his servants, the
prophets; now he speaks to us by the spirit of his Son. I had not
only the feeling part of religion, but I could hear the small,
still voice within speaking to me. When I took the pipe to smoke,
it would be applied within, 'It is an idol, a lust; worship the
Lord with clean lips.' So, I felt it was not right to smoke. The
Lord also sent a woman to convince me. I was one day in a house,
and I took out my pipe to light it at the fire, and Mary Hawke--for
that was the woman's name--said, 'Do you not feel it is wrong to
smoke?' I said that I felt something inside telling me that it was
an idol, a lust, and she said that was the Lord. Then I said,
'Now, I must give it up, for the Lord is telling me of it inside,
and the woman outside, so the tobacco must go, love it as I may.'
There and then I took the tobacco out of my pocket, and threw it
into the fire, and put the pipe under my foot, 'ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.' And I have not smoked since. I found it hard to
break off old habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and he
gave me strength, for he has said, 'Call upon me in the day of
trouble, and I will deliver thee.' The day after I gave up smoking
I had the toothache so bad that I did not know what to do. I
thought this was owing to giving up the pipe, but I said I would
never smoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head. I said,
'Lord, thou hast told us My yoke is easy and my burden is light,'
and when I said that, all the pain left me. Sometimes the thought
of the pipe would come back to me very strong; but the Lord
strengthened me against the habit, and, bless his name, I have not
smoked since."
Bray's biographer writes that after he had given up smoking, he
thought that he would chew a little, but he conquered this dirty
habit, too. "On one occasion," Bray said, "when at a prayer-
meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me, 'Worship me
with clean lips.' So, when we got up from our knees, I took the
quid out of my mouth and 'whipped 'en' [threw it] under the form.
But, when we got on our knees again, I put another quid into my
mouth. Then the Lord said to me again, 'Worship me with clean
lips.' So I took the quid out of my mouth, and whipped 'en under
the form again, and said, 'Yes, Lord, I will.' From that time I
gave up chewing as well as smoking, and have been a free man."
The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may
take are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example, had hard
battles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity of the
ecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that cost them
most wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own
right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, in
not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox
that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body
of his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so
that their acts and the spirit they professed might be more in accord.
"When the Lord sent me into the world," says Fox in his Journal,
"he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was
required to 'thee' and 'thou' all men and women, without any
respect to rich or poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and
down, I was not to bid people Good-morning, or Good-evening,
neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. This made
the sects and professions rage. Oh! the rage that was in the
priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and
especially in priests and professors: for though 'thou' to a
single person was according to their accidence and grammar rules,
and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it:
and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all
into a rage.... Oh! the scorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the
blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent
for not putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently
plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them. The bad
language and evil usage we received on this account is hard to be
expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing our
lives for this matter, and that by the great professors of
Christianity, who thereby discovered they were not true believers.
And though it was but a small thing in the eye of man, yet a
wonderful confusion it brought among all professors and priests:
but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity of that
custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth's
testimony against it."
In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one time
was secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid
account of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in following
Fox's canons of sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but
Elwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things in a shorter
passage, which I will quote as a characteristic utterance of spiritual
sensibility:--
"By this divine light, then," says Elwood, "I saw that though I
had not the evil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery,
profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I
had, through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been
preserved out of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils
to put away and to cease from; some of which were not by the
world, which lies in wickedness (1 John v. 19), accounted evils,
but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me to be evils,
and as such condemned in me.
"As particularly those fruits and effects of pride that discover
themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel; which I took
too much delight in. This evil of my doings I was required to put
away and cease from; and judgment lay upon me till I did so.
"I took off from my apparel those unnecessary trimmings of lace,
ribbons, and useless buttons, which had no real service, but were
set on only for that which was by mistake called ornament; and I
ceased to wear rings.
"Again, the giving of flattering titles to men between whom and me
there was not any relation to which such titles could be pretended
to belong. This was an evil I had been much addicted to, and was
accounted a ready artist in; therefore this evil also was I
required to put away and cease from. So that thenceforward I durst
not say, Sir, Master, My Lord, Madam (or My Dame); or say Your
Servant to any one to whom I did not stand in the real relation of
a servant, which I had never done to any.
"Again, respect of persons, in uncovering the head and bowing the
knee or body in salutation, was a practice I had been much in the
use of; and this, being one of the vain customs of the world,
introduced by the spirit of the world, instead of the true honor
which this is a false representation of, and used in deceit as a
token of respect by persons one to another, who bear no real
respect one to another; and besides this, being a type and a
proper emblem of that divine honor which all ought to pay to
Almighty God, and which all of all sorts, who take upon them the
Christian name, appear in when they offer their prayers to him,
and therefore should not be given to men;--I found this to be one
of those evils which I had been too long doing; therefore I was
now required to put it away and cease from it.
"Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural
number to a single person, _you_ to one, instead of _thou_,
contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, _thou_
to one, and _you_ to more than one, which had always been used by
God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the
oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later
and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt
nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking
_you_ to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and
hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of
men;--this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this
I was now called out of and required to cease from.
"These and many more evil customs which had sprung up in the night
of darkness and general apostasy from the truth and true religion
were now, by the inshining of this pure ray of divine light in my
conscience, gradually discovered to me to be what I ought to cease
from, shun, and stand a witness against."(175)
These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistency
between profession and deed jarred some of them to active protest. John
Woolman writes in his diary:--
"In these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed;
and have at sundry times walked over ground where much of their
dyestuffs has drained away. This hath produced a longing in my
mind that people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of
person, and cleanness about their houses and garments. Dyes being
invented partly to please the eye, and partly to hide dirt, I have
felt in this weak state, when traveling in dirtiness, and affected
with unwholesome scents, a strong desire that the nature of dyeing
cloth to hide dirt may be more fully considered.
"Washing our garments to keep them sweet is cleanly, but it is the
opposite to real cleanliness to hide dirt in them. Through giving
way to hiding dirt in our garments a spirit which would conceal
that which is disagreeable is strengthened. Real cleanliness
becometh a holy people; but hiding that which is not clean by
coloring our garments seems contrary to the sweetness of
sincerity. Through some sorts of dyes cloth is rendered less
useful. And if the value of dyestuffs, and expense of dyeing, and
the damage done to cloth, were all added together, and that cost
applied to keeping all sweet and clean, how much more would real
cleanliness prevail.
"Thinking often on these things, the use of hats and garments dyed
with a dye hurtful to them, and wearing more clothes in summer
than are useful, grew more uneasy to me; believing them to be
customs which have not their foundation in pure wisdom. The
apprehension of being singular from my beloved friends was a
strait upon me; and thus I continued in the use of some things,
contrary to my judgment, about nine months. Then I thought of
getting a hat the natural color of the fur, but the apprehension
of being looked upon as one affecting singularity felt uneasy to
me. On this account I was under close exercise of mind in the time
of our general spring meeting in 1762, greatly desiring to be
rightly directed; when, being deeply bowed in spirit before the
Lord, I was made willing to submit to what I apprehended was
required of me; and when I returned home, got a hat of the natural
color of the fur.
"In attending meetings, this singularity was a trial to me, and
more especially at this time, as white hats were used by some who
were fond of following the changeable modes of dress, and as some
friends, who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew shy of me,
I felt my way for a time shut up in the exercise of the ministry.
Some friends were apprehensive that my wearing such a hat savored
of an affected singularity: those who spoke with me in a friendly
way, I generally informed in a few words, that I believed my
wearing it was not in my own will."
When the craving for moral consistency and purity is developed to this
degree, the subject may well find the outer world too full of shocks to
dwell in, and can unify his life and keep his soul unspotted only by
withdrawing from it. That law which impels the artist to achieve harmony
in his composition by simply dropping out whatever jars, or suggests a
discord, rules also in the spiritual life. To omit, says Stevenson, is the
one art in literature: "If I knew how to omit, I should ask no other
knowledge." And life, when full of disorder and slackness and vague
superfluity, can no more have what we call character than literature can
have it under similar conditions. So monasteries and communities of
sympathetic devotees open their doors, and in their changeless order,
characterized by omissions quite as much as constituted of actions, the
holy-minded person finds that inner smoothness and cleanness which it is
torture to him to feel violated at every turn by the discordancy and
brutality of secular existence.
-------------------------------------
That the scrupulosity of purity may be carried to a fantastic extreme must
be admitted. In this it resembles Asceticism, to which further symptom of
saintliness we had better turn next. The adjective "ascetic" is applied to
conduct originating on diverse psychological levels, which I might as well
begin by distinguishing from one another.
1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood,
disgusted with too much ease.
2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity,
and non-pampering of the body generally, may be fruits of the love
of purity, shocked by whatever savors of the sensual.
3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may appeal to
the subject in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making
to the Deity whom he acknowledges.
4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments may be due to
pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theological
beliefs concerning expiation. The devotee may feel that he is
buying himself free, or escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by
doing penance now.
5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on
irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixed idea which comes as
a challenge and must be worked off, because only thus does the
subject get his interior consciousness feeling right again.
6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted
by genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence
of which normally pain-giving stimuli are actually felt as
pleasures.
I will try to give an instance under each of these heads in turn; but it
is not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced enough to be
immediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usually
work together. Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must invite
you to some general psychological considerations which apply to all of
them alike.
A strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over our
Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to face physical
pain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should either
endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of
it makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically. The way in which
our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world's
order, and both caused and suffered it as a matter-of-course portion of
their day's work, fills us with amazement. We wonder that any human beings
could have been so callous. The result of this historic alteration is that
even in the Mother Church herself, where ascetic discipline has such a
fixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come into
desuetude, if not discredit. A believer who flagellates or "macerates"
himself to-day arouses more wonder and fear than emulation. Many Catholic
writers who admit that the times have changed in this respect do so
resignedly; and even add that perhaps it is as well not to waste feelings
in regretting the matter, for to return to the heroic corporeal discipline
of ancient days might be an extravagance.
Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive--and instinctive
it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and
painful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely
abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual
to human nature to court the arduous. It is only the extreme
manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox.
The psychological reasons for this lie near the surface. When we drop
abstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it is
a very complex function. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; it
follows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and
it leaves a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner
of the performance. The result is that, quite apart from the immediate
pleasure which any sensible experience may give us, our own general moral
attitude in procuring or undergoing the experience brings with it a
secondary satisfaction or distaste. Some men and women, indeed, there are
who can live on smiles and the word "yes" forever. But for others (indeed
for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive
happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable.
Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency,
and effort, some "no! no!" must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an
existence with character and texture and power. The range of individual
differences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yeses
and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in
the right proportion _for him_. This, he feels, is my proper vocation,
this is the _optimum_, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the
degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I
find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul's
energy expires.
Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or
organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will
run best under a certain steam-pressure, a certain amperage; an organism
under a certain diet, weight, or exercise. You seem to do best, I heard a
doctor say to a patient, at about 140 millimeters of arterial tension. And
it is just so with our sundry souls: some are happiest in calm weather;
some need the sense of tension, of strong volition, to make them feel
alive and well. For these latter souls, whatever is gained from day to day
must be paid for by sacrifice and inhibition, or else it comes too cheap
and has no zest.
Now when characters of this latter sort become religious, they are apt to
turn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their natural
self; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.
When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that Thomas Carlyle
put him into his bath-tub every morning of a freezing Berlin winter, he
proclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism. Even without Carlyle,
most of us find it necessary to our soul's health to start the day with a
rather cool immersion. A little farther along the scale we get such
statements as this, from one of my correspondents, an agnostic:--
"Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so
on the warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me I would
have to get up, no matter what time of night it was, and stand for
a minute in the cold, just so as to prove my manhood."
Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next case we
probably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3--the asceticism becomes far more
systematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whose sense of
moral energy could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms, and I take
his case from Starbuck's manuscript collection.
"I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. I secretly
made burlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore
pebbles in my shoes. I would spend nights flat on my back on the
floor without any covering."
The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, and
given it a market-value in the shape of "merit." But we see the
cultivation of hardship cropping out under every sky and in every faith,
as a spontaneous need of character. Thus we read of Channing, when first
settled as a Unitarian minister, that--
"He was now more simple than ever, and seemed to have become
incapable of any form of self-indulgence. He took the smallest
room in the house for his study, though he might easily have
commanded one more light, airy, and in every way more suitable;
and chose for his sleeping chamber an attic which he shared with a
younger brother. The furniture of the latter might have answered
for the cell of an anchorite, and consisted of a hard mattress on
a cot-bedstead, plain wooden chairs and table, with matting on the
floor. It was without fire, and to cold he was throughout life
extremely sensitive; but he never complained or appeared in any
way to be conscious of inconvenience. 'I recollect,' says his
brother, 'after one most severe night, that in the morning he
sportively thus alluded to his suffering: "If my bed were my
country, I should be somewhat like Bonaparte: I have no control
except over the part which I occupy; the instant I move, frost
takes possession." ' In sickness only would he change for the time
his apartment and accept a few comforts. The dress too that he
habitually adopted was of most inferior quality; and garments were
constantly worn which the world would call mean, though an almost
feminine neatness preserved him from the least appearance of
neglect."(176)
Channing's asceticism, such as it was, was evidently a compound of
hardihood and love of purity. The democracy which is an offshoot of the
enthusiasm of humanity, and of which I will speak later under the head of
the cult of poverty, doubtless bore also a share. Certainly there was no
pessimistic element in his case. In the next case we have a strongly
pessimistic element, so that it belongs under head 4. John Cennick was
Methodism's first lay preacher. In 1735 he was convicted of sin, while
walking in Cheapside,--
"And at once left off song-singing, card-playing, and attending
theatres. Sometimes he wished to go to a popish monastery, to
spend his life in devout retirement. At other times he longed to
live in a cave, sleeping on fallen leaves, and feeding on forest
fruits. He fasted long and often, and prayed nine times a day....
Fancying dry bread too great an indulgence for so great a sinner
as himself, he began to feed on potatoes, acorns, crabs, and
grass; and often wished that he could live on roots and herbs. At
length, in 1737, he found peace with God, and went on his way
rejoicing."(177)
In this poor man we have morbid melancholy and fear, and the sacrifices
made are to purge out sin, and to buy safety. The hopelessness of
Christian theology in respect of the flesh and the natural man generally
has, in systematizing fear, made of it one tremendous incentive to self-
mortification. It would be quite unfair, however, in spite of the fact
that this incentive has often been worked in a mercenary way for hortatory
purposes, to call it a mercenary incentive. The impulse to expiate and do
penance is, in its first intention, far too immediate and spontaneous an
expression of self-despair and anxiety to be obnoxious to any such
reproach. In the form of loving sacrifice, of spending all we have to show
our devotion, ascetic discipline of the severest sort may be the fruit of
highly optimistic religious feeling.
M. Vianney, the curé of Ars, was a French country priest, whose holiness
was exemplary. We read in his life the following account of his inner need
of sacrifice:--
" 'On this path,' M. Vianney said, 'it is only the first step that
costs. There is in mortification a balm and a savor without which
one cannot live when once one has made their acquaintance. There
is but one way in which to give one's self to God,--that is, to
give one's self entirely, and to keep nothing for one's self. The
little that one keeps is only good to double one and make one
suffer.' Accordingly he imposed it on himself that he should never
smell a flower, never drink when parched with thirst, never drive
away a fly, never show disgust before a repugnant object, never
complain of anything that had to do with his personal comfort,
never sit down, never lean upon his elbows when he was kneeling.
The Curé of Ars was very sensitive to cold, but he would never
take means to protect himself against it. During a very severe
winter, one of his missionaries contrived a false floor to his
confessional and placed a metal case of hot water beneath. The
trick succeeded, and the Saint was deceived: 'God is very good,'
he said with emotion. 'This year, through all the cold, my feet
have always been warm.' "(178)
In this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrifices for the pure love
of God was probably the uppermost conscious motive. We may class it, then,
under our head 3. Some authors think that the impulse to sacrifice is the
main religious phenomenon. It is a prominent, a universal phenomenon
certainly, and lies deeper than any special creed. Here, for instance, is
what seems to be a spontaneous example of it, simply expressing what
seemed right at the time between the individual and his Maker. Cotton
Mather, the New England Puritan divine, is generally reputed a rather
grotesque pedant; yet what is more touchingly simple than his relation of
what happened when his wife came to die?
"When I saw to what a point of resignation I was now called of the
Lord," he says, "I resolved, with his help, therein to glorify
him. So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by
her bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest
in the world. With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely
gave her up unto the Lord: and in token of my real _Resignation_,
I gently put her out of my hands, and laid away a most lovely
hand, resolving that I would never touch it more. This was the
hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did. She ...
told me that she signed and sealed my act of resignation. And
though before that she called for me continually, she after this
never asked for me any more."(179)
Father Vianney's asceticism taken in its totality was simply the result of
a permanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm, longing to make proof of
itself. The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collected all
the motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that any one
wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system mapped
out for him in any one of a number of ready-made manuals.(180) The
dominant Church notion of perfection is of course the negative one of
avoidance of sin. Sin proceeds from concupiscence, and concupiscence from
our carnal passions and temptations, chief of which are pride, sensuality
in all its forms, and the loves of worldly excitement and possession. All
these sources of sin must be resisted; and discipline and austerities are
a most efficacious mode of meeting them. Hence there are always in these
books chapters on self-mortification. But whenever a procedure is
codified, the more delicate spirit of it evaporates, and if we wish the
undiluted ascetic spirit,--the passion of self-contempt wreaking itself on
the poor flesh, the divine irrationality of devotion making a sacrificial
gift of all it has (its sensibilities, namely) to the object of its
adoration,--we must go to autobiographies, or other individual documents.
Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flourished--or rather who
existed, for there was little that suggested flourishing about him--in the
sixteenth century, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose.
"First of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitual
affectionate will in all things to imitate Jesus Christ. If
anything agreeable offers itself to your senses, yet does not at
the same time tend purely to the honor and glory of God, renounce
it and separate yourself from it for the love of Christ, who all
his life long had no other taste or wish than to do the will of
his Father whom he called his meat and nourishment. For example,
you take satisfaction in _hearing_ of things in which the glory of
God bears no part. Deny yourself this satisfaction, mortify your
wish to listen. You take pleasure in _seeing_ objects which do not
raise your mind to God: refuse yourself this pleasure, and turn
away your eyes. The same with conversations and all other things.
Act similarly, so far as you are able, with all the operations of
the senses, striving to make yourself free from their yokes.
"The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great
natural passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief. You must seek to
deprive these of every satisfaction and leave them as it were in
darkness and the void. Let your soul therefore turn always:
"Not to what is most easy, but to what is hardest;
"Not to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful;
"Not to what most pleases, but to what disgusts;
"Not to matter of consolation, but to matter for desolation
rather;
"Not to rest, but to labor;
"Not to desire the more, but the less;
"Not to aspire to what is highest and most precious, but to what
is lowest and most contemptible;
"Not to will anything, but to will nothing;
"Not to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst, so
that you may enter for the love of Christ into a complete
destitution, a perfect poverty of spirit, and an absolute
renunciation of everything in this world.
"Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you
will find in a short time great delights and unspeakable
consolations.
"Despise yourself, and wish that others should despise you.
"Speak to your own disadvantage, and desire others to do the same;
"Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it good when others
hold the same;
"To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.
"To know all things, learn to know nothing.
"To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.
"To be all things, be willing to be nothing.
"To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through
whatever experiences you have no taste for.
"To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.
"To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing.
"To be what you are not, experience what you are not."
These later verses play with that vertigo of self-contradiction which is
so dear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical, for in
them Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion of the
All.
"When you stop at one thing, you cease to open yourself to the
All.
"For to come to the All you must give up the All.
"And if you should attain to owning the All, you must own it,
desiring Nothing.
"In this spoliation, the soul finds its tranquillity and rest.
Profoundly established in the centre of its own nothingness, it
can be assailed by naught that comes from below; and since it no
longer desires anything, what comes from above cannot depress it;
for its desires alone are the causes of its woes."(181)
And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all our
heads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathic
individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the
sincere Suso's account of his own self-tortures. Suso, you will remember,
was one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography,
written in the third person, is a classic religious document.
"He was in his youth of a temperament full of fire and life; and
when this began to make itself felt, it was very grievous to him;
and he sought by many devices how he might bring his body into
subjection. He wore for a long time a hair shirt and an iron
chain, until the blood ran from him, so that he was obliged to
leave them off. He secretly caused an undergarment to be made for
him; and in the undergarment he had strips of leather fixed, into
which a hundred and fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp,
were driven, and the points of the nails were always turned
towards the flesh. He had this garment made very tight, and so
arranged as to go round him and fasten in front, in order that it
might fit the closer to his body, and the pointed nails might be
driven into his flesh; and it was high enough to reach upwards to
his navel. In this he used to sleep at night. Now in summer, when
it was hot, and he was very tired and ill from his journeyings, or
when he held the office of lecturer, he would sometimes, as he lay
thus in bonds, and oppressed with toil, and tormented also by
noxious insects, cry aloud and give way to fretfulness, and twist
round and round in agony, as a worm does when run through with a
pointed needle. It often seemed to him as if he were lying upon an
ant-hill, from the torture caused by the insects; for if he wished
to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one
another.(182) Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness
of his heart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man
is killed by murderers or strong beasts of prey it is soon over;
but I lie dying here under the cruel insects, and yet cannot die.
The nights in winter were never so long, nor was the summer so
hot, as to make him leave off this exercise. On the contrary, he
devised something farther--two leathern loops into which he put his
hands, and fastened one on each side his throat, and made the
fastenings so secure that even if his cell had been on fire about
him, he could not have helped himself. This he continued until his
hands and arms had become almost tremulous with the strain, and
then he devised something else: two leather gloves; and he caused
a brazier to fit them all over with sharp-pointed brass tacks, and
he used to put them on at night, in order that if he should try
while asleep to throw off the hair undergarment, or relieve
himself from the gnawings of the vile insects, the tacks might
then stick into his body. And so it came to pass. If ever he
sought to help himself with his hands in his sleep, he drove the
sharp tacks into his breast, and tore himself, so that his flesh
festered. When after many weeks the wounds had healed, he tore
himself again and made fresh wounds.
"He continued this tormenting exercise for about sixteen years. At
the end of this time, when his blood was now chilled, and the fire
of his temperament destroyed, there appeared to him in a vision on
Whitsunday, a messenger from heaven, who told him that God
required this of him no longer. Whereupon he discontinued it, and
threw all these things away into a running stream."
Suso then tells how, to emulate the sorrows of his crucified Lord,
he made himself a cross with thirty protruding iron needles and
nails. This he bore on his bare back between his shoulders day and
night. "The first time that he stretched out this cross upon his
back his tender frame was struck with terror at it, and blunted
the sharp nails slightly against a stone. But soon, repenting of
this womanly cowardice, he pointed them all again with a file, and
placed once more the cross upon him. It made his back, where the
bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he sat down or stood up, it
was as if a hedgehog-skin were on him. If any one touched him
unawares, or pushed against his clothes, it tore him."
Suso next tells of his penitences by means of striking this cross
and forcing the nails deeper into the flesh, and likewise of his
self-scourgings,--a dreadful story,--and then goes on as follows:
"At this same period the Servitor procured an old castaway door,
and he used to lie upon it at night without any bedclothes to make
him comfortable, except that he took off his shoes and wrapped a
thick cloak round him. He thus secured for himself a most
miserable bed; for hard pea-stalks lay in humps under his head,
the cross with the sharp nails stuck into his back, his arms were
locked fast in bonds, the horsehair undergarment was round his
loins, and the cloak too was heavy and the door hard. Thus he lay
in wretchedness, afraid to stir, just like a log, and he would
send up many a sigh to God.
"In winter he suffered very much from the frost. If he stretched
out his feet they lay bare on the floor and froze, if he gathered
them up the blood became all on fire in his legs, and this was
great pain. His feet were full of sores, his legs dropsical, his
knees bloody and seared, his loins covered with scars from the
horsehair, his body wasted, his mouth parched with intense thirst,
and his hands tremulous from weakness. Amid these torments he
spent his nights and days; and he endured them all out of the
greatness of the love which he bore in his heart to the Divine and
Eternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing sufferings
he sought to imitate. After a time he gave up this penitential
exercise of the door, and instead of it he took up his abode in a
very small cell, and used the bench, which was so narrow and short
that he could not stretch himself upon it, as his bed. In this
hole, or upon the door, he lay at night in his usual bonds, for
about eight years. It was also his custom, during the space of
twenty-five years, provided he was staying in the convent, never
to go after compline in winter into any warm room, or to the
convent stove to warm himself, no matter how cold it might be,
unless he was obliged to do so for other reasons. Throughout all
these years he never took a bath, either a water or a sweating
bath; and this he did in order to mortify his comfort-seeking
body. He practiced during a long time such rigid poverty that he
would neither receive nor touch a penny, either with leave or
without it. For a considerable time he strove to attain such a
high degree of purity that he would neither scratch nor touch any
part of his body, save only his hands and feet."(183)
I spare you the recital of poor Suso's self-inflicted tortures from
thirst. It is pleasant to know that after his fortieth year, God showed
him by a series of visions that he had sufficiently broken down the
natural man, and that he might leave these exercises off. His case is
distinctly pathological, but he does not seem to have had the alleviation,
which some ascetics have enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibility capable
of actually turning torment into a perverse kind of pleasure. Of the
founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that
"Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable.... She said that
she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she
might always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a
single day without suffering would be intolerable. She said again
that she was devoured with two unassuageable fevers, one for the
holy communion, the other for suffering, humiliation, and
annihilation. 'Nothing but pain,' she continually said in her
letters, 'makes my life supportable.' "(184)
So much for the phenomena to which the ascetic impulse will in certain
persons give rise. In the ecclesiastically consecrated character three
minor branches of self-mortification have been recognized as indispensable
pathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity, obedience, and poverty
which the monk vows to observe; and upon the heads of obedience and
poverty I will make a few remarks.
-------------------------------------
First, of Obedience. The secular life of our twentieth century opens with
this virtue held in no high esteem. The duty of the individual to
determine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequences seems,
on the contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary Protestant
social ideals. So much so that it is difficult even imaginatively to
comprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their own could ever have
come to think the subjection of its will to that of other finite creatures
recommendable. I confess that to myself it seems something of a mystery.
Yet it evidently corresponds to a profound interior need of many persons,
and we must do our best to understand it.
On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency of obedience in
a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as
meritorious. Next, experience shows that there are times in every one's
life when one can be better counseled by others than by one's self.
Inability to decide is one of the commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves;
friends who see our troubles more broadly, often see them more wisely than
we do; so it is frequently an act of excellent virtue to consult and obey
a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these lower prudential
regions, we find, in the nature of some of the spiritual excitements which
we have been studying, good reasons for idealizing obedience. Obedience
may spring from the general religious phenomenon of inner softening and
self-surrender and throwing one's self on higher powers. So saving are
these attitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utility, they
become ideally consecrated; and in obeying a man whose fallibility we see
through thoroughly, we, nevertheless, may feel much as we do when we
resign our will to that of infinite wisdom. Add self-despair and the
passion of self-crucifixion to this, and obedience becomes an ascetic
sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of whatever prudential uses it
might have.
It is as a sacrifice, a mode of "mortification," that obedience is
primarily conceived by Catholic writers, a "sacrifice which man offers to
God, and of which he is himself both the priest and the victim. By poverty
he immolates his exterior possessions; by chastity he immolates his body;
by obedience he completes the sacrifice, and gives to God all that he yet
holds as his own, his two most precious goods, his intellect and his will.
The sacrifice is then complete and unreserved, a genuine holocaust, for
the entire victim is now consumed for the honor of God."(185) Accordingly,
in Catholic discipline, we obey our superior not as mere man, but as the
representative of Christ. Obeying God in him by our intention, obedience
is easy. But when the text-book theologians marshal collectively all their
reasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds to our ears rather odd.
"One of the great consolations of the monastic life," says a
Jesuit authority, "is the assurance we have that in obeying we can
commit no fault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you
to do this thing or that, but you are certain that you commit no
fault so long as you obey, because God will only ask you if you
have duly performed what orders you received, and if you can
furnish a clear account in that respect, you are absolved
entirely. Whether the things you did were opportune, or whether
there were not something better that might have been done, these
are questions not asked of you, but rather of your Superior. The
moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your
account, and charges it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome well
exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience, 'Oh,
sovereign liberty! Oh, holy and blessed security by which one
becomes almost impeccable!'
"Saint John Climachus is of the same sentiment when he calls
obedience an excuse before God. In fact, when God asks why you
have done this or that, and you reply, it is because I was so
ordered by my Superiors, God will ask for no other excuse. As a
passenger in a good vessel with a good pilot need give himself no
farther concern, but may go to sleep in peace, because the pilot
has charge over all, and 'watches for him'; so a religious person
who lives under the yoke of obedience goes to heaven as if while
sleeping, that is, while leaning entirely on the conduct of his
Superiors, who are the pilots of his vessel, and keep watch for
him continually. It is no small thing, of a truth, to be able to
cross the stormy sea of life on the shoulders and in the arms of
another, yet that is just the grace which God accords to those who
live under the yoke of obedience. Their Superior bears all their
burdens.... A certain grave doctor said that he would rather spend
his life in picking up straws by obedience, than by his own
responsible choice busy himself with the loftiest works of
charity, because one is certain of following the will of God in
whatever one may do from obedience, but never certain in the same
degree of anything which we may do of our own proper
movement."(186)
One should read the letters in which Ignatius Loyola recommends obedience
as the backbone of his order, if one would gain insight into the full
spirit of its cult.(187) They are too long to quote; but Ignatius's belief
is so vividly expressed in a couple of sayings reported by companions
that, though they have been so often cited, I will ask your permission to
copy them once more:--
"I ought," an early biographer reports him as saying, "on entering
religion, and thereafter, to place myself entirely in the hands of
God, and of him who takes His place by His authority. I ought to
desire that my Superior should oblige me to give up my own
judgment, and conquer my own mind. I ought to set up no difference
between one Superior and another, ... but recognize them all as
equal before God, whose place they fill. For if I distinguish
persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience. In the hands of my
Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to
require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters,
to speak or not to speak to such a person, or the like; and I must
put all my fervor in executing zealously and exactly what I am
ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has neither
intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without
resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please any one;
like a stick in the hand of an old man, who uses it according to
his needs and places it where it suits him. So must I be under the
hands of the Order, to serve it in the way it judges most useful.
"I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular
place, to be employed in a particular duty.... I must consider
nothing as belonging to me personally, and as regards the things I
use, be like a statue which lets itself be stripped and never
opposes resistance."(188)
The other saying is reported by Rodriguez in the chapter from which I a
moment ago made quotations. When speaking of the Pope's authority,
Rodriguez writes:--
"Saint Ignatius said, when general of his company, that if the
Holy Father were to order him to set sail in the first bark which
he might find in the port of Ostia, near Rome, and to abandon
himself to the sea, without a mast, without sails, without oars or
rudder or any of the things that are needful for navigation or
subsistence, he would obey not only with alacrity, but without
anxiety or repugnance, and even with a great internal
satisfaction."(189)
With a solitary concrete example of the extravagance to which the virtue
we are considering has been carried, I will pass to the topic next in
order.
"Sister Marie Claire [of Port Royal] had been greatly imbued with
the holiness and excellence of M. de Langres. This prelate, soon
after he came to Port Royal, said to her one day, seeing her so
tenderly attached to Mother Angélique, that it would perhaps be
better not to speak to her again. Marie Claire, greedy of
obedience, took this inconsiderate word for an oracle of God, and
from that day forward remained for several years without once
speaking to her sister."(190)
Our next topic shall be Poverty, felt at all times and under all creeds as
one adornment of a saintly life. Since the instinct of ownership is
fundamental in man's nature, this is one more example of the ascetic
paradox. Yet it appears no paradox at all, but perfectly reasonable, the
moment one recollects how easily higher excitements hold lower cupidities
in check. Having just quoted the Jesuit Rodriguez on the subject of
obedience, I will, to give immediately a concrete turn to our discussion
of poverty, also read you a page from his chapter on this latter virtue.
You must remember that he is writing instructions for monks of his own
order, and bases them all on the text, "Blessed are the poor in spirit."
"If any one of you," he says, "will know whether or not he is
really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the
ordinary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger,
thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See
if you are glad to wear a worn-out habit full of patches. See if
you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are
passed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to
you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these
things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is
proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of
spirit." Rodriguez then goes on to describe the practice of
poverty in more detail. "The first point is that which Saint
Ignatius proposes in his constitutions, when he says, 'Let no one
use anything as if it were his private possession.' 'A religious
person,' he says, 'ought in respect to all the things that he
uses, to be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but
which feels no grief and makes no resistance when one strips it
again. It is in this way that you should feel towards your
clothes, your books, your cell, and everything else that you make
use of; if ordered to quit them, or to exchange them for others,
have no more sorrow than if you were a statue being uncovered. In
this way you will avoid using them as if they were your private
possession. But if, when you give up your cell, or yield
possession of this or that object or exchange it for another, you
feel repugnance and are not like a statue, that shows that you
view these things as if they were your private property.'
"And this is why our holy founder wished the superiors to test
their monks somewhat as God tested Abraham, and to put their
poverty and their obedience to trial, that by this means they may
become acquainted with the degree of their virtue, and gain a
chance to make ever farther progress in perfection, ... making the
one move out of his room when he finds it comfortable and is
attached to it; taking away from another a book of which he is
fond; or obliging a third to exchange his garment for a worse one.
Otherwise we should end by acquiring a species of property in all
these several objects, and little by little the wall of poverty
that surrounds us and constitutes our principal defense would be
thrown down. The ancient fathers of the desert used often thus to
treat their companions.... Saint Dositheus, being sick-nurse,
desired a certain knife, and asked Saint Dorotheus for it, not for
his private use, but for employment in the infirmary of which he
had charge. Whereupon Saint Dorotheus answered him: 'Ha!
Dositheus, so that knife pleases you so much! Will you be the
slave of a knife or the slave of Jesus Christ? Do you not blush
with shame at wishing that a knife should be your master? I will
not let you touch it.' Which reproach and refusal had such an
effect upon the holy disciple that since that time he never
touched the knife again." ...
"Therefore, in our rooms," Father Rodriguez continues, "there must
be no other furniture than a bed, a table, a bench, and a
candlestick, things purely necessary, and nothing more. It is not
allowed among us that our cells should be ornamented with pictures
or aught else, neither armchairs, carpets, curtains, nor any sort
of cabinet or bureau of any elegance. Neither is it allowed us to
keep anything to eat, either for ourselves or for those who may
come to visit us. We must ask permission to go to the refectory
even for a glass of water; and finally we may not keep a book in
which we can write a line, or which we may take away with us. One
cannot deny that thus we are in great poverty. But this poverty is
at the same time a great repose and a great perfection. For it
would be inevitable, in case a religious person were allowed to
own superfluous possessions, that these things would greatly
occupy his mind, be it to acquire them, to preserve them, or to
increase them; so that in not permitting us at all to own them,
all these inconveniences are remedied. Among the various good
reasons why the company forbids secular persons to enter our
cells, the principal one is that thus we may the easier be kept in
poverty. After all, we are all men, and if we were to receive
people of the world into our rooms, we should not have the
strength to remain within the bounds prescribed, but should at
least wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a
better opinion of our scholarship."(191)
Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan dervishes unite with
Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest individual
state, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds for such a
seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those which lie closest to
common human nature.
The opposition between the men who _have_ and the men who _are_ is
immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old-fashioned sense of the man
who is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and reveled
in lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence with these
possessions, but rather with the personal superiorities, the courage,
generosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. To certain
huckstering kinds of consideration he thanked God he was forever
inaccessible, and if in life's vicissitudes he should become destitute
through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was
all the freer to work out his salvation. "Wer nur selbst was hätte," says
Lessing's Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, "mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe
nichts!" This ideal of the well-born man without possessions was embodied
in knight-errantry and templardom; and, hideously corrupted as it has
always been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the
military and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldier as the man
absolutely unencumbered. Owning nothing but his bare life, and willing to
toss that up at any moment when the cause commands him, he is the
representative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer who
pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future,
offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make
his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and
athletic attitude of observation, the property-owner seems buried and
smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, "wading in straw and
rubbish to his knees." The claims which _things_ make are corrupters of
manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress towards
the empyrean.
"Everything I meet with," writes Whitefield, "seems to carry this
voice with it,--'Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim on
earth; have no party or certain dwelling place.' My heart echoes
back, 'Lord Jesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thou
seest me in danger of _nestling_,--in pity--in tender pity,--put a
_thorn_ in my nest to prevent me from it.' "(192)
The loathing of "capital" with which our laboring classes to-day are
growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound
sentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist
poet writes:--
"Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you
have,
"Shall you become beautiful;
"You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones;
"Not by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and
healthy, but rather by discarding them ...
"For a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek what fresh
furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave
behind;
"Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely
use and handle is an impediment."(193)
In short, lives based on having are less free than lives based either on
doing or on being, and in the interest of action people subject to
spiritual excitement throw away possessions as so many clogs. Only those
who have no private interests can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth and
cowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard. When a
brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: "Father, it would be a great
consolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general
should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like also to have
your consent," Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne,
Roland, and Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally
dying on the field of battle. "So care not," he said, "for owning books
and knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness." And when some weeks
later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter,
Francis said: "After you have got your psalter you will crave a breviary;
and after you have got your breviary you will sit in your stall like a
grand prelate, and will say to your brother: 'Hand me my breviary.' ...
And thenceforward he denied all such requests, saying: 'A man possesses of
learning only so much as comes out of him in action, and a monk is a good
preacher only so far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every tree is
known by its fruits.' "(194)
But beyond this more worthily athletic attitude involved in doing and
being, there is, in the desire of not having, something profounder still,
something related to that fundamental mystery of religious experience, the
satisfaction found in absolute surrender to the larger power. So long as
any secular safeguard is retained, so long as any residual prudential
guarantee is clung to, so long the surrender is incomplete, the vital
crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel, and mistrust of the
divine obtains: we hold by two anchors, looking to God, it is true, after
a fashion, but also holding by our proper machinations. In certain medical
experiences we have the same critical point to overcome. A drunkard, or a
morphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the
doctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence.
The tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies of
it among his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled in in case of
need. Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in his own
expedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which the chronically
wakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throws himself on God, but _if_
he should need the other help, there it will be also. Every one knows
cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire for reform,--drunkards
whom, with all their self-reproaches and resolves, one perceives to be
quite unwilling seriously to contemplate _never_ being drunk again! Really
to give up anything on which we have relied, to give it up definitively,
"for good and all" and forever, signifies one of those radical alterations
of character which came under our notice in the lectures on conversion. In
it the inner man rolls over into an entirely different position of
equilibrium, lives in a new centre of energy from this time on, and the
turning-point and hinge of all such operations seems usually to involve
the sincere acceptance of certain nakednesses and destitutions.
Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life, we find this ever-
recurring note: Fling yourself upon God's providence without making any
reserve whatever,--take no thought for the morrow,--sell all you have and
give it to the poor,--only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless will
the higher safety really arrive. As a concrete example let me read a page
from the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, a good woman, much persecuted
in her day by both Protestants and Catholics, because she would not take
her religion at second hand. When a young girl, in her father's house,--
"She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: _Lord, what wilt
thou have me to do?_ And being one night in a most profound
penitence, she said from the bottom of her heart: 'O my Lord! What
must I do to please thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to
my soul and it will hear thee.' At that instant she heard, as if
another had spoke within her: _Forsake all earthly things.
Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself._
She was quite astonished, not understanding this language, and
mused long on these three points, thinking how she could fulfill
them. She thought she could not live without earthly things, nor
without loving the creatures, nor without loving herself. Yet she
said, 'By thy Grace I will do it, Lord!' But when she would
perform her promise, she knew not where to begin. Having thought
on the religious in monasteries, that they forsook all earthly
things by being shut up in a cloister, and the love of themselves
by subjecting of their wills, she asked leave of her father to
enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but he would not
permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave. This
seemed to her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in the
cloister the true Christians she had been seeking, but she found
afterwards that he knew the cloisters better than she; for after
he had forbidden her, and told her he would never permit her to be
a religious, nor give her any money to enter there, yet she went
to Father Laurens, the Director, and offered to serve in the
monastery and work hard for her bread, and be content with little,
if he would receive her. At which he smiled and said: _That cannot
be. We must have money to build; we take no maids without money;
you must find the way to get it, else there is no entry here._
"This astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to
the cloisters, resolving to forsake all company and live alone
till it should please God to show her what she ought to do and
whither to go. She asked always earnestly, 'When shall I be
perfectly thine, O my God?' And she thought he still answered her,
_When thou shalt no longer possess anything, and shalt die to
thyself_. 'And where shall I do that, Lord?' He answered her, _In
the desert_. This made so strong an impression on her soul that
she aspired after this; but being a maid of eighteen years only,
she was afraid of unlucky chances, and was never used to travel,
and knew no way. She laid aside all these doubts and said, 'Lord,
thou wilt guide me how and where it shall please thee. It is for
thee that I do it. I will lay aside my habit of a maid, and will
take that of a hermit that I may pass unknown.' Having then
secretly made ready this habit, while her parents thought to have
married her, her father having promised her to a rich French
merchant, she prevented the time, and on Easter evening, having
cut her hair, put on the habit, and slept a little, she went out
of her chamber about four in the morning, taking nothing but one
penny to buy bread for that day. And it being said to her in the
going out, _Where is thy faith? in a penny?_ she threw it away,
begging pardon of God for her fault, and saying, 'No, Lord, my
faith is not in a penny, but in thee alone.' Thus she went away
wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the cares and good
things of this world, and found her soul so satisfied that she no
longer wished for anything upon earth, resting entirely upon God,
with this only fear lest she should be discovered and be obliged
to return home; for she felt already more content in this poverty
than she had done for all her life in all the delights of the
world."(195)
The penny was a small financial safeguard, but an effective spiritual
obstacle. Not till it was thrown away could the character settle into the
new equilibrium completely.
-------------------------------------
Over and above the mystery of self-surrender, there are in the cult of
poverty other religious mysteries. There is the mystery of veracity:
"Naked came I into the world," etc.,--whoever first said that, possessed
this mystery. My own bare entity must fight the battle--shams cannot save
me. There is also the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality
before God of all his creatures. This sentiment (which seems in general to
have been more widespread in Mohammedan than in Christian lands) tends to
nullify man's usual acquisitiveness. Those who have it spurn dignities and
honors, privileges and advantages, preferring, as I said in a former
lecture, to grovel on the common level before the face of God. It is not
exactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes so close to it in
practice. It is _humanity_, rather, refusing to enjoy anything that others
do not share. A profound moralist, writing of Christ's saying, "Sell all
thou hast and follow me," proceeds as follows:--
"Christ may have meant: If you love mankind absolutely you will as
a result not care for any possessions whatever, and this seems a
very likely proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a
proposition is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a
fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his
conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your
goods, and they would be no loss to you. These truths, while
literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ's love for
mankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every
generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined
intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into the
vortex by their interest in helping mankind, and by the
understanding that comes from actually doing it. The abandonment
of their old mode of life is like dust in the balance. It is done
gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly. Thus the whole question of
the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere
incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we
abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for
others."(196)
But in all these matters of sentiment one must have "been there" one's
self in order to understand them. No American can ever attain to
understanding the loyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German
towards his emperor; nor can a Briton or German ever understand the peace
of heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious
nonsense, between him and the common God of all. If sentiments as simple
as these are mysteries which one must receive as gifts of birth, how much
more is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments which we
have been considering! One can never fathom an emotion or divine its
dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement,
however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical
from without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of
its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw. Piety and
charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and
form another centre of energy altogether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser
vexations may become a consolation; as a supreme love may turn minor
sacrifices into gain; so a supreme trust may render common safeguards
odious, and in certain glows of generous excitement it may appear
unspeakably mean to retain one's hold of personal possessions. The only
sound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale of such emotions, is to
observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record
faithfully what we observe; and this, I need hardly say, is what I have
striven to do in these last two descriptive lectures, which I now hope
will have covered the ground sufficiently for our present needs.
LECTURES XIV AND XV. THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS.
We have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are
regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are
devout. To-day we have to change our attitude from that of description to
that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can
help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life.
Were I to parody Kant, I should say that a "Critique of pure Saintliness"
must be our theme.
If, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject from above
like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man's
perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time
of it. Man's perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end
would be union with his Maker. That union could be pursued by him along
three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively; and
progress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by the
application of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions and
definitions. The absolute significance and value of any bit of religious
experience we might hear of would thus be given almost mathematically into
our hands.
If convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding
ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But we
did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you
remember we made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method; and it
must be confessed that after that act of renunciation we can never hope
for clean-cut and scholastic results. _We_ cannot divide man sharply into
an animal and a rational part. _We_ cannot distinguish natural from
supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God,
and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. We have merely to
collect things together without any special _a priori_ theological system,
and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and
that experience--judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our
instincts, and our common sense are our only guides--decide that _on the
whole_ one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type
condemned. "On the whole,"--I fear we shall never escape complicity with
that qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your
systematizer!
I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of
you to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot.
Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of
such a formless method as I have taken up. A few remarks in deprecation of
such an opinion, and in farther explanation of the empiricist principles
which I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be in place.
-------------------------------------
Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a
religion's fruits in merely human terms of value. How _can_ you measure
their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is
supposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the conduct
instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit
of his religion,--it would be unreasonable only in case he did not exist.
If, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal
sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a
deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a
theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non-
existent; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you
were a scholastic philosopher.
To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain
types of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If
disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices,
instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological
partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.
But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of
an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular
alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their
insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop.
After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves
unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were
perfectly satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common
secular level, and can no longer be believed in. To-day a deity who should
require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be
taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward
in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel
appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him
to men's imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were
respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were
worshiped because such fruits were relished.
Doubtless historic accidents always played some later part, but the
original factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have been
psychological. The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who
founded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them
personally. They could use him. He guided their imagination, warranted
their hopes, and controlled their will,--or else they required him as a
safeguard against the demon and a curber of other people's crimes. In any
case, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them to
yield. So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless; so soon as
they conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted too
extensively other values; so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible,
or immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited, and was erelong
neglected and forgotten. It was in this way that the Greek and Roman gods
ceased to be believed in by educated pagans; it is thus that we ourselves
judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan theologies; Protestants have
so dealt with the Catholic notions of deity, and liberal Protestants with
older Protestant notions; it is thus that Chinamen judge of us, and that
all of us now living will be judged by our descendants. When we cease to
admire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we end by
deeming that deity incredible.
Few historic changes are more curious than these mutations of theological
opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so
ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of
cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been
required by their imagination. They called the cruelty "retributive
justice," and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not
"sovereign" enough. But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal
suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing-out of salvation and
damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could
persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a "delightful
conviction," as of a doctrine "exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,"
appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.
Not only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believed
in by earlier centuries also strikes later centuries with surprise. We
shall see examples of it from the annals of Catholic saintship which make
us rub our Protestant eyes. Ritual worship in general appears to the
modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind,
as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character,
taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and
mumbling and mummery, and finding his "glory" incomprehensibly enhanced
thereby;--just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism
appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of
evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. Luther,
says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his
theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were
destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.
So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our pretensions
to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological
probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other
men's religion, yet this very standard has been begotten out of the drift
of common life. It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and
condemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels
itself to be advancing. Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is
thus the parent of those disbeliefs which, it was charged, were
inconsistent with the experiential method. The inconsistency, you see, is
immaterial, and the charge may be neglected.
If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there
is not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method. The gods
we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us
are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I
then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common
sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life
commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself,
then any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will
stand accredited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all without
reference to anything but human working principles. It is but the
elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest,
applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and
without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long
run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have
_approved_ themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which
they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when
other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions
were supplanted.
The needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp. So the
reproach of vagueness and subjectivity and "on the whole"-ness, which can
with perfect legitimacy be addressed to the empirical method as we are
forced to use it, is after all a reproach to which the entire life of man
in dealing with these matters is obnoxious. No religion has ever yet owed
its prevalence to "apodictic certainty." In a later lecture I will ask
whether objective certainty can ever be added by theological reasoning to
a religion that already empirically prevails.
-------------------------------------
One word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort of an
empirical method we are handing ourselves over to systematic skepticism.
Since it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments and
needs, it would be absurd to affirm that one's own age of the world can be
beyond correction by the next age. Skepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled
out by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which their
conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption from
this universal liability. But to admit one's liability to correction is
one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another. Of
willfully playing into the hands of skepticism we cannot be accused. He
who acknowledges the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance
for it in discussing his observations, is in a much better position for
gaining truth than if he claimed his instrument to be infallible. Or is
dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for
claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not,
what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if,
instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for
her conclusions? If _we_ claim only reasonable probability, it will be as
much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have
within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had,
if we were unconscious of our liability to err.
Nevertheless, dogmatism will doubtless continue to condemn us for this
confession. The mere outward form of inalterable certainty is so precious
to some minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of the
question. They will claim it even where the facts most patently pronounce
its folly. But the safe thing is surely to recognize that all the insights
of creatures of a day like ourselves must be provisional. The wisest of
critics is an altering being, subject to the better insight of the morrow,
and right at any moment, only "up to date" and "on the whole." When larger
ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to
their reception, unfettered by our previous pretensions. "Heartily know,
when half-gods go, the gods arrive."
The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore
entirely unescapable, whatever may be one's own desire to attain the
irreversible. But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question awaits
us, the question whether men's opinions ought to be expected to be
absolutely uniform in this field. Ought all men to have the same religion?
Ought they to approve the same fruits and follow the same leadings? Are
they so like in their inner needs that, for hard and soft, for proud and
humble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy-minded and despairing, exactly
the same religious incentives are required? Or are different functions in
the organism of humanity allotted to different types of man, so that some
may really be the better for a religion of consolation and reassurance,
whilst others are better for one of terror and reproof? It might
conceivably be so; and we shall, I think, more and more suspect it to be
so as we go on. And if it be so, how can any possible judge or critic help
being biased in favor of the religion by which his own needs are best met?
He aspires to impartiality; but he is too close to the struggle not to be
to some degree a participant, and he is sure to approve most warmly those
fruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most nourishing
to _him_.
I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing
myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very
notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see
it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that
we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely
incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those
with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a
perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder
and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to
possess it already wholly. That we can gain more and more of it by moving
always in the right direction, I believe as much as any one, and I hope to
bring you all to my way of thinking before the termination of these
lectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably
against the empiricism which I profess.
I will waste no more words, then, in abstract justification of my method,
but seek immediately to use it upon the facts.
-------------------------------------
In critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very
important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual
personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal
product. I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture.
The word "religion," as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of history
shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and
produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to
"organize" themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with
corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of
dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally
innocent thing; so that when we hear the word "religion" nowadays, we
think inevitably of some "church" or other; and to some persons the word
"church" suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity
of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying
that they are "down" on religion altogether. Even we who belong to
churches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general
condemnation.
But in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern
us at all. The religious experience which we are studying is that which
lives itself out within the private breast. First-hand individual
experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of
innovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world
and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it
into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where
the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others
had to go. George Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no
better at this point than read to you a page from his Journal, referring
to the period of his youth when religion began to ferment within him
seriously.
"I fasted much," Fox says, "walked abroad in solitary places many
days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and
lonesome places until night came on; and frequently in the night
walked mournfully about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in
the time of the first workings of the Lord in me.
"During all this time I was never joined in profession of religion
with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil
company, taking leave of father and mother, and all other
relations, and traveled up and down as a stranger on the earth,
which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself
in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes more, sometimes
less in a place: for I durst not stay long in a place, being
afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young
man, I should be hurt by conversing much with either. For which
reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenly wisdom and
getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward
things, to rely on the Lord alone. As I had forsaken the priests,
so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most
experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that
could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in
all men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor
could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said,
'There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy
condition.' When I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the
Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak
to my condition. I had not fellowship with any people, priests,
nor professors, nor any sort of separated people. I was afraid of
all carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but
corruptions. When I was in the deep, under all shut up, I could
not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows,
and my temptations were so great that I often thought I should
have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how
he was tempted by the same devil, and had overcome him, and had
bruised his head; and that through him and his power, life, grace,
and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. If I
had had a king's diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been
as nothing; for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power.
I saw professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in
that condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I
would have been rid of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon
himself, and my care was cast upon him alone."(197)
A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a
heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely
madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others,
it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove
contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an
orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of
inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand
exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite
of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as
a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious
spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in
purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless, indeed, by
adopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital out of them and
use them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective action of this
politic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealings of the Roman
ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield examples
enough for our instruction.
The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in
water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many
other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and
associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to
religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to
religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the
spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their
turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of
dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an
absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in
general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you
never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology
which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life
which are the exclusive object of our study. The baiting of Jews, the
hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of
Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians,
express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of
which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and
of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the
positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner
force is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in spite of the
Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon
their way to China, that the conduct which he suggested, and in which
other Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to do with
the interior religious life of those concerned in the performance.
Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we make
piety responsible. At most we may blame piety for not availing to check
our natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them with hypocritical
pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and with the pretext
usually couples some restriction; and when the passion gust is over, the
piety may bring a reaction of repentance which the irreligious natural man
would not have shown.
For many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her charge,
religion as such, then, is not to blame. Yet of the charge that over-
zealousness or fanaticism is one of her liabilities we cannot wholly
acquit her, so I will next make a remark upon that point. But I will
preface it by a preliminary remark which connects itself with much that
follows.
-------------------------------------
Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has unquestionably produced in
your minds an impression of extravagance. Is it necessary, some of you
have asked, as one example after another came before us, to be quite so
fantastically good as that? We who have no vocation for the extremer
ranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if our humility,
asceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort. This
practically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to admire in
this field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious
phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of the
golden mean. Political reformers accomplish their successive tasks in the
history of nations by being blind for the time to other causes. Great
schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to reveal,
at the cost of a one-sidedness for which other schools must make amends.
We accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a
kind of indulgence. We are glad they existed to show us that way, but we
are glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life. So of many
of the saints whom we have looked at. We are proud of a human nature that
could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to
follow the example. The conduct we blame ourselves for not following lies
nearer to the middle line of human effort. It is less dependent on
particular beliefs and doctrines. It is such as wears well in different
ages, such as under different skies all judges are able to commend.
The fruits of religion, in other words, are, like all human products,
liable to corruption by excess. Common sense must judge them. It need not
blame the votary; but it may be able to praise him only conditionally, as
one who acts faithfully according to his lights. He shows us heroism in
one way, but the unconditionally good way is that for which no indulgence
need be asked.
We find that error by excess is exemplified by every saintly virtue.
Excess, in human faculties, means usually one-sidedness or want of
balance; for it is hard to imagine an essential faculty too strong, if
only other faculties equally strong be there to coöperate with it in
action. Strong affections need a strong will; strong active powers need a
strong intellect; strong intellect needs strong sympathies, to keep life
steady. If the balance exist, no one faculty can possibly be too strong--we
only get the stronger all-round character. In the life of saints,
technically so called, the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives
the impression of extravagance proves usually on examination to be a
relative deficiency of intellect. Spiritual excitement takes pathological
forms whenever other interests are too few and the intellect too narrow.
We find this exemplified by all the saintly attributes in turn--devout love
of God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray. I will run over
these virtues in succession.
-------------------------------------
First of all let us take Devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices is
called Fanaticism. Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of
ecclesiastical ambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme.
When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feeling
that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, one
of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself.
To adequately realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the one
great merit of the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities by which
savage tribesmen have from time immemorial exhibited their faithfulness to
chieftains are now outbid in favor of the deity. Vocabularies are
exhausted and languages altered in the attempt to praise him enough; death
is looked on as gain if it attract his grateful notice; and the personal
attitude of being his devotee becomes what one might almost call a new and
exalted kind of professional specialty within the tribe.(198) The legends
that gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits of this impulse to
celebrate and glorify. The Buddha(199) and Mohammed(200) and their
companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of
anecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply _abgeschmackt_
and silly, and form a touching expression of man's misguided propensity to
praise.
An immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy for the
deity's honor. How can the devotee show his loyalty better than by
sensitiveness in this regard? The slightest affront or neglect must be
resented, the deity's enemies must be put to shame. In exceedingly narrow
minds and active wills, such a care may become an engrossing
preoccupation; and crusades have been preached and massacres instigated
for no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon the God.
Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and churches
with imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper to a glow,
so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by
some of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its
besetting sins. The saintly temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper
has often to be cruel. It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel. Between
his own and Jehovah's enemies a David knows no difference; a Catherine of
Siena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians which was the scandal
of her epoch, can think of no better method of union among them than a
crusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds no word of protest or regret
over the atrocious tortures with which the Anabaptist leaders were put to
death; and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies into his
hands for "execution." Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds
the partnership not quite unnatural. So, when "freethinkers" tell us that
religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of
the charge.
Fanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrong side of religion's account,
so long as the religious person's intellect is on the stage which the
despotic kind of God satisfies. But as soon as the God is represented as
less intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger.
Fanaticism is found only where the character is masterful and aggressive.
In gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and the intellect
feeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the
exclusion of all practical human interests, which, though innocent enough,
is too one-sided to be admirable. A mind too narrow has room but for one
kind of affection. When the love of God takes possession of such a mind,
it expels all human loves and human uses. There is no English name for
such a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as a _theopathic_
condition.
The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example.
"To be loved here upon the earth," her recent biographer exclaims:
"to be loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be
loved with fidelity, with devotion,--what enchantment! But to be
loved by God! and loved by him to distraction [aimé jusqù'à la
folie]!--Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a
thing. Like Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint
Francis Xavier, she said to God: 'Hold back, O my God, these
torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for their
reception.' "(201)
The most signal proofs of God's love which Margaret Mary received
were her hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most
signal in turn of these were the revelations of Christ's sacred
heart, "surrounded with rays more brilliant than the Sun, and
transparent like a crystal. The wound which he received on the
cross visibly appeared upon it. There was a crown of thorns round
about this divine Heart, and a cross above it." At the same time
Christ's voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames
of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread
the knowledge of them. He thereupon took out her mortal heart,
placed it inside of his own and inflamed it, and then replaced it
in her breast, adding: "Hitherto thou hast taken the name of my
slave, hereafter thou shalt be called the well-beloved disciple of
my Sacred Heart."
In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail the "great
design" which he wished to establish through her instrumentality.
"I ask of thee to bring it about that every first Friday after the
week of holy Sacrament shall be made into a special holy day for
honoring my Heart by a general communion and by services intended
to make honorable amends for the indignities which it has
received. And I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed
with abundance the influences of its love upon all those who pay
to it these honors, or who bring it about that others do the
same."
"This revelation," says Mgr. Bougaud, "is unquestionably the most
important of all the revelations which have illumined the Church since
that of the Incarnation and of the Lord's Supper.... After the Eucharist,
the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart."(202) Well, what were its good
fruits for Margaret Mary's life? Apparently little else but sufferings and
prayers and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. She became
increasingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ's love,--
"which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable
of attending to external duties. They tried her in the infirmary,
but without much success, although her kindness, zeal, and
devotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such
a heroism that our readers would not bear the recital of them.
They tried her in the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as
hopeless--everything dropped out of her hands. The admirable
humility with which she made amends for her clumsiness could not
prevent this from being prejudicial to the order and regularity
which must always reign in a community. They put her in the
school, where the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces out
of her clothes [for relics] as if she were already a saint, but
where she was too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary
attention. Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than
before them was she a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her
in her heaven."(203)
Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual
outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and
modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of
saintship which she embodies. A lower example still of theopathic
saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth
century, whose "Revelations," a well-known mystical authority, consist
mainly of proofs of Christ's partiality for her undeserving person.
Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of the
most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an
individual, form the tissue of this paltry-minded recital.(204) In reading
such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the
twentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield
almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior
intellectual sympathies. What with science, idealism, and democracy, our
own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different
temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal
favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented. Smitten as we are with
the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but
adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an
essential element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood
of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us
curiously shallow and unedifying.
Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many respects,
of whose life we have the record. She had a powerful intellect of the
practical order. She wrote admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a
will equal to any emergency, great talent for politics and business, a
buoyant disposition, and a first-rate literary style. She was tenaciously
aspiring, and put her whole life at the service of her religious ideals.
Yet so paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking, that
(although I know that others have been moved differently) I confess that
my only feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality of soul
should have found such poor employment.
In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor of
superficiality about her genius. A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan,
has divided the human race into two types, whom he calls "shrews" and
"non-shrews" respectively.(205) The shrew-type is defined as possessing an
"active unimpassioned temperament." In other words, shrews are the
"motors," rather than the "sensories,"(206) and their expressions are as a
rule more energetic than the feelings which appear to prompt them. Saint
Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in
this sense of the term. The bustle of her style, as well as of her life,
proves it. Not only must she receive unheard-of personal favors and
spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about
them and _exploiter_ them professionally, and use her expertness to give
instruction to those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not
of radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her "faults"
and "imperfections" in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return
upon herself, as covered with "confusion" at each new manifestation of
God's singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of
shrewdom: a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in
gratitude, and silent. She had some public instincts, it is true; she
hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church's triumph over them; but in
the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless
amatory flirtation--if one may say so without irreverence--between the
devotee and the deity; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this
direction by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is
absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest. Yet
the spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.
We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based
on merits. Any God who, on the one hand, can care to keep a pedantically
minute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such
partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of
favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence. When Luther, in his
immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a
debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he
stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility.
So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions
which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.
-------------------------------------
The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic
characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God must
not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers,
and friends are felt as interfering distractions; for sensitiveness and
narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all
things a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are too much
for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas your aggressive
pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and
divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving
disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he
dwells himself and from which he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside
of the church militant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition
methods, we have the church _fugient_, as one might call it, with its
hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches
pursuing the same object--to unify the life,(207) and simplify the
spectacle presented to the soul. A mind extremely sensitive to inner
discords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering
with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things. Amusements must
go first, then conventional "society," then business, then family duties,
until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for
stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne. The lives of
saints are a history of successive renunciations of complication, one form
of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the
purity of inner tone.(208) "Is it not better," a young sister asks her
Superior, "that I should not speak at all during the hour of recreation,
so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin of which
I might not be conscious?"(209) If the life remains a social one at all,
those who take part in it must follow one identical rule. Embosomed in
this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. The
minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities,
whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a man of the
world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped,
and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this
stability an incomparable kind of mental rest.
We have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of Saint
Louis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification. I think you
will agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external and
discordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire. At the age of
ten, his biographer says:--
"The inspiration came to him to consecrate to the Mother of God
his own virginity--that being to her the most agreeable of possible
presents. Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was
in him, joyous of heart, and burning with love, he made his vow of
perpetual chastity. Mary accepted the offering of his innocent
heart, and obtained for him from God, as a recompense, the
extraordinary grace of never feeling during his entire life the
slightest touch of temptation against the virtue of purity. This
was an altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded even to
Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in that Louis dwelt
always in courts and among great folks, where danger and
opportunity are so unusually frequent. It is true that Louis from
his earliest childhood had shown a natural repugnance for whatever
might be impure or unvirginal, and even for relations of any sort
whatever between persons of opposite sex. But this made it all the
more surprising that he should, especially since this vow, feel it
necessary to have recourse to such a number of expedients for
protecting against even the shadow of danger the virginity which
he had thus consecrated. One might suppose that if any one could
have contented himself with the ordinary precautions, prescribed
for all Christians, it would assuredly have been he. But no! In
the use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight from the
most insignificant occasions, from every possibility of peril,
just as in the mortification of his flesh, he went farther than
the majority of saints. He, who by an extraordinary protection of
God's grace was never tempted, measured all his steps as if he
were threatened on every side by particular dangers. Thenceforward
he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or
when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females
even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all
conversation and every kind of social recreation with them,
although his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced
only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of
every kind."(210)
At the age of twelve, we read of this young man that "if by chance his
mother sent one of her maids of honor to him with a message, he never
allowed her to come in, but listened to her through the barely opened
door, and dismissed her immediately. He did not like to be alone with his
own mother, whether at table or in conversation; and when the rest of the
company withdrew, he sought also a pretext for retiring.... Several great
ladies, relatives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight; and
he made a sort of treaty with his father, engaging promptly and readily to
accede to all his wishes, if he might only be excused from all visits to
ladies." (Ibid., p. 71.)
When he was seventeen years old Louis joined the Jesuit order(211) against
his father's passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house;
and when a year later the father died, he took the loss as a "particular
attention" to himself on God's part, and wrote letters of stilted good
advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon
became so good a monk that if any one asked him the number of his brothers
and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before replying. A
Father asked him one day if he were never troubled by the thought of his
family, to which, "I never think of them except when praying for them,"
was his only answer. Never was he seen to hold in his hand a flower or
anything perfumed, that he might take pleasure in it. On the contrary, in
the hospital, he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting, and
eagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc., from the hands of his
companions. He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn every
conversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained silent. He
systematically refused to notice his surroundings. Being ordered one day
to bring a book from the rector's seat in the refectory, he had to ask
where the rector sat, for in the three months he had eaten bread there, so
carefully did he guard his eyes that he had not noticed the place. One
day, during recess, having looked by chance on one of his companions, he
reproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty. He cultivated
silence, as preserving from sins of the tongue; and his greatest penance
was the limit which his superiors set to his bodily penances. He sought
after false accusations and unjust reprimands as opportunities of
humility; and such was his obedience that, when a room-mate, having no
more paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel free to give it to him
without first obtaining the permission of the superior, who, as such,
stood in the place of God, and transmitted his orders.
I can find no other sorts of fruit than these of Louis's saintship. He
died in 1591, in his twenty-ninth year, and is known in the Church as the
patron of all young people. On his festival, the altar in the chapel
devoted to him in a certain church in Rome "is embosomed in flowers,
arranged with exquisite taste; and a pile of letters may be seen at its
foot, written to the Saint by young men and women, and directed to
'Paradiso.' They are supposed to be burnt unread except by San Luigi, who
must find singular petitions in these pretty little missives, tied up now
with a green ribbon, expressive of hope, now with a red one, emblematic of
love," etc.(212)
Our final judgment of the worth of such a life as this will depend largely
on our conception of God, and of the sort of conduct he is best pleased
with in his creatures. The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paid
little heed to social righteousness; and to leave the world to the devil
whilst saving one's own soul was then accounted no discreditable scheme.
To-day, rightly or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairs is, in
consequence of one of those secular mutations in moral sentiment of which
I spoke, deemed an essential element of worth in character; and to be of
some public or private use is also reckoned as a species of divine
service. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them, the
Xaviers, Brébeufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and fought in their way
for the world's welfare; so their lives to-day inspire us. But when the
intellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin's head,
and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result,
notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. Purity,
we see in the object-lesson, is _not_ the one thing needful; and it is
better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit
usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.
Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next come
upon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has to face the
charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars.
"Resist not evil," "Love your enemies," these are saintly maxims of which
men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are the men of
this world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of
truth?
No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels the complexity
of the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way in which facts and
ideals are interwoven.
Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actor, the objects
for which he acts, and the recipients of the action. In order that conduct
should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, and
reception, should be suited to one another. The best intention will fail
if it either work by false means or address itself to the wrong recipient.
Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine himself to
the actor's animus alone, apart from the other elements of the
performance. As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those
who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and
appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human
crocodiles and boa-constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe
into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by non-resistance
cut off his own survival.
Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man's conduct will appear
perfect only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior environment
is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that
saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an
environment where all were saints already; but by adding that in an
environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it
must be ill adapted. We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical
common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that
actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be,
and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have
systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific
organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving
alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on
the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of
smiting back and not turning the other cheek also.
You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of
Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in
shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and
swindlers.
And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these
hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there
no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he
were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the
wronger's person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live
always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and
impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be
an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not
of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the
golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our
imaginations.
The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of human
tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved
themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past,
in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to _be_
worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the
challenge of their expectation.
From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in
all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to be
a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of virtue
which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors,
_auctores_, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities of development in
human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably hardened
have in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, in ways that
amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we
never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of
love is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-
constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings. We know not the complexities
of personality, the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of the
character-polyhedron, the resources of the subliminal region. St. Paul
long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is
virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul
said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness
of every one expresses itself to-day in all sorts of humane customs and
reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty
and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of
human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of this belief, the tip of
the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which
sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a
wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world
is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's
affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world,
vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them
would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we
naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another;
and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us
would lie in spiritual stagnancy.
Momentarily considered, then, the saint may waste his tenderness and be
the dupe and victim of his charitable fever, but the general function of
his charity in social evolution is vital and essential. If things are ever
to move upward, some one must be ready to take the first step, and assume
the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-
resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods
will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more
powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys
enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what
we already have in safety. But non-resistance, when successful, turns
enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly
methods are, as I said, creative energies; and genuine saints find in the
elevated excitement with which their faith endows them an authority and
impressiveness which makes them irresistible in situations where men of
shallower nature cannot get on at all without the use of worldly prudence.
This practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the
saint's magic gift to mankind.(213) Not only does his vision of a better
world console us for the generally prevailing prose and barrenness; but
even when on the whole we have to confess him ill adapted, he makes some
converts, and the environment gets better for his ministry. He is an
effective ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a
more heavenly order.
In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many
contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their
impracticability and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions,
analogous to the saint's belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They
help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness, and are slow
leavens of a better order.
-------------------------------------
The next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are all ready to
consider without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and excess. The
optimism and refinement of the modern imagination has, as I have already
said elsewhere, changed the attitude of the church towards corporeal
mortification, and a Suso or a Saint Peter of Alcantara(214) appear to us
to-day rather in the light of tragic mountebanks than of sane men
inspiring us with respect. If the inner dispositions are right, we ask,
what need of all this torment, this violation of the outer nature? It
keeps the outer nature too important. Any one who is genuinely emancipated
from the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation,
as alike irrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actions and
experience enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement. As the
Bhagavad-Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions who are still
inwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to the fruits of
action, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quoted in a former
lecture Saint Augustine's antinomian saying: If you only love God enough,
you may safely follow all your inclinations. "He needs no devotional
practices," is one of Ramakrishna's maxims, "whose heart is moved to tears
at the mere mention of the name of Hari."(215) And the Buddha, in pointing
out what he called "the middle way" to his disciples, told them to abstain
from both extremes, excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy
as mere desire and pleasure. The only perfect life, he said, is that of
inner wisdom, which makes one thing as indifferent to us as another, and
thus leads to rest, to peace, and to Nirvâna.(216)
We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older, and directors
of conscience more experienced, they usually have shown a tendency to lay
less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholic teachers have
always professed the rule that, since health is needed for efficiency in
God's service, health must not be sacrificed to mortification. The general
optimism and healthy-mindedness of liberal Protestant circles to-day makes
mortification for mortification's sake repugnant to us. We can no longer
sympathize with cruel deities, and the notion that God can take delight in
the spectacle of sufferings self-inflicted in his honor is abhorrent. In
consequence of all these motives you probably are disposed, unless some
special utility can be shown in some individual's discipline, to treat the
general tendency to asceticism as pathological.
Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter,
distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the
uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty,
ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritual meaning
asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born
philosophy. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the
belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is
neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and
overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic resources, and neutralized and
cleansed away by suffering. As against this view, the ultra-optimistic
form of the once-born philosophy thinks we may treat evil by the method of
ignoring. Let a man who, by fortunate health and circumstances, escapes
the suffering of any great amount of evil in his own person, also close
his eyes to it as it exists in the wider universe outside his private
experience, and he will be quit of it altogether, and can sail through
life happily on a healthy-minded basis. But we saw in our lectures on
melancholy how precarious this attempt necessarily is. Moreover it is but
for the individual; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and
unprovided for in his philosophy.
No such attempt can be a _general_ solution of the problem; and to minds
of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such
optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of a real
deliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escape
by. It leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan.
The real deliverance, the twice-born folk insist, must be of universal
application. Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in
higher excitement, or else their sting remains essentially unbroken. If
one has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this
world's history fairly into his mind,--freezing, drowning, entombment
alive, wild beasts, worse men, and hideous diseases,--he can with
difficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career of worldly prosperity
without suspecting that he may all the while not be really inside the
game, that he may lack the great initiation.
Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takes the
initiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but
something we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter taste
will purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted
parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental
optimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious
solution. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an
answer to the sphinx's riddle.
In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind's common instinct for
reality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be
essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme
mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it
in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties
otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he
suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates
him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if yet we cling to
life, and he is able "to fling it away like a flower" as caring nothing
for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in
his own person feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would
expiate all his shortcomings.
The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who
feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and
excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the
truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of the
cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital
meaning.
Representatively, then, and symbolically, and apart from the vagaries into
which the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it wander,
asceticism must, I believe, be acknowledged to go with the profounder way
of handling the gift of existence. Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub
and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison. The practical course of action
for us, as religious men, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply
to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us to-day turn
them, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the
way of privation and hardship might be objectively useful. The older
monastic asceticism occupied itself with pathetic futilities, or
terminated in the mere egotism of the individual, increasing his own
perfection.(217) But is it not possible for us to discard most of these
older forms of mortification, and yet find saner channels for the heroism
which inspired them?
Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which
constitutes so large a portion of the "spirit" of our age, make somewhat
for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and
facetious way in which most children are brought up to-day--so different
from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical
circles--in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a
certain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of
application for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline?
Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics,
militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the
remedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy
with which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary
religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them.(218) War and
adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves
too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of
exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of
motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and
cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever.
Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our
action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges
of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of
power.
The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary
human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so
the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field,
is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person
he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of
insensibility.
But when we compare the military type of self-severity with that of the
ascetic saint, we find a world-wide difference in all their spiritual
concomitants.
" 'Live and let live,' " writes a clear-headed Austrian officer, "is no
device for an army. Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the
enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war
demands of every one. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too
cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human
reasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he
must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure
of goodness in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace,
require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The
recruit brings with him common moral notions, of which he must seek
immediately to get rid. For him victory, success, must be _everything_.
The most barbaric tendencies in men come to life again in war, and for
war's uses they are incommensurably good."(219)
These words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of the
soldier's life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but
destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non-
military. Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too
feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for
persons or for things, that make for conservation. Yet the fact remains
that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line
of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally
available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale
organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against
effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of
ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we
now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war:
something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and
yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved
itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish
poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might
be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May
not voluntarily accepted poverty be "the strenuous life," without the need
of crushing weaker peoples?
Poverty indeed _is_ the strenuous life,--without brass bands or uniforms or
hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees
the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and
marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that
poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be "the transformation of
military courage," and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in
need of.
Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty
need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be
poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and
save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant
with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in
ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient
idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material
attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our
way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away
our life at any moment irresponsibly,--the more athletic trim, in short,
the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are
scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and
hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and
quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed
to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly
and irreligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to
ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But
wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the
desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of
cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of
conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for
whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which
personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to
unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the
revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of
promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces;
yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit,
and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would
need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we
personally were contented with our poverty.
I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that
the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst
moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
-------------------------------------
I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of
religion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a brief
review and pass to my more general conclusions.
Our question, you will remember, is as to whether religion stands approved
by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character.
Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamental
endowments, found in non-religious individuals. But the whole group of
them forms a combination which, as such, is religious, for it seems to
flow from the sense of the divine as from its psychological centre.
Whoever possesses strongly this sense comes naturally to think that the
smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their
relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields him a
superior denomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which
no other can compare. In social relations his serviceability is exemplary;
he abounds in impulses to help. His help is inward as well as outward, for
his sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected
faculties therein. Instead of placing happiness where common men place it,
in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement, which
converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he
turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and when we are in need of
assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more
certainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his humble-
mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal
pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and his
purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Felicity, purity,
charity, patience, self-severity,--these are splendid excellencies, and the
saint of all men shows them in the completest possible measure.
But, as we saw, all these things together do not make saints infallible.
When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of
holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery,
scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the
very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior
intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and
damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We
must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our
own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment, and estimating
his total function.
Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we must bear in mind that it
is unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as a vice
to the individual, for in religious and theological matters he probably
absorbs his narrowness from his generation. Moreover, we must not confound
the essentials of saintliness, which are those general passions of which I
have spoken, with its accidents, which are the special determinations of
these passions at any historical moment. In these determinations the
saints will usually be loyal to the temporary idols of their tribe. Taking
refuge in monasteries was as much an idol of the tribe in the middle ages,
as bearing a hand in the world's work is to-day. Saint Francis or Saint
Bernard, were they living to-day, would undoubtedly be leading consecrated
lives of some sort, but quite as undoubtedly they would not lead them in
retirement. Our animosity to special historic manifestations must not lead
us to give away the saintly impulses in their essential nature to the
tender mercies of inimical critics.
The most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom I know is Nietzsche.
He contrasts them with the worldly passions as we find these embodied in
the predaceous military character, altogether to the advantage of the
latter. Your born saint, it must be confessed, has something about him
which often makes the gorge of a carnal man rise, so it will be worth
while to consider the contrast in question more fully.
Dislike of the saintly nature seems to be a negative result of the
biologically useful instinct of welcoming leadership, and glorifying the
chief of the tribe. The chief is the potential, if not the actual tyrant,
the masterful, overpowering man of prey. We confess our inferiority and
grovel before him. We quail under his glance, and are at the same time
proud of owning so dangerous a lord. Such instinctive and submissive hero-
worship must have been indispensable in primeval tribal life. In the
endless wars of those times, leaders were absolutely needed for the
tribe's survival. If there were any tribes who owned no leaders, they can
have left no issue to narrate their doom. The leaders always had good
consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who
looked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom
from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward
performances.
Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are
herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barn-yard poultry. There are saints
whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity. Such a man
excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience is full of
scruples and returns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedom nor his
outward power; and unless he found within us an altogether different
faculty of admiration to appeal to, we should pass him by with contempt.
In point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty. Reënacted in
human nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler. The
sexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the man the more admiringly
the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers the more
for being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates the
man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always
charmed the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and
suggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of influences is
unsleeping. The saintly and the worldly ideal pursue their feud in
literature as much as in real life.
For Nietzsche the saint represents little but sneakingness and
slavishness. He is the sophisticated invalid, the degenerate _par
excellence_, the man of insufficient vitality. His prevalence would put
the human type in danger.
"The sick are the greatest danger for the well. The weaker, not
the stronger, are the strong's undoing. It is not _fear_ of our
fellow-man, which we should wish to see diminished; for fear
rouses those who are strong to become terrible in turn themselves,
and preserves the hard-earned and successful type of humanity.
What is to be dreaded by us more than any other doom is not fear,
but rather the great disgust, not fear, but rather the great
pity--disgust and pity for our human fellows.... The _morbid_ are
our greatest peril--not the 'bad' men, not the predatory beings.
Those born wrong, the miscarried, the broken--they it is, the
_weakest_, who are undermining the vitality of the race, poisoning
our trust in life, and putting humanity in question. Every look of
them is a sigh,--'Would I were something other! I am sick and tired
of what I am.' In this swamp-soil of self-contempt, every
poisonous weed flourishes, and all so small, so secret, so
dishonest, and so sweetly rotten. Here swarm the worms of
sensitiveness and resentment; here the air smells odious with
secrecy, with what is not to be acknowledged; here is woven
endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracy
of those who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious;
here the very aspect of the victorious is hated--as if health,
success, strength, pride, and the sense of power were in
themselves things vicious, for which one ought eventually to make
bitter expiation. Oh, how these people would themselves like to
inflict the expiation, how they thirst to be the hangmen! And all
the while their duplicity never confesses their hatred to be
hatred."(220)
Poor Nietzsche's antipathy is itself sickly enough, but we all know what
he means, and he expresses well the clash between the two ideals. The
carnivorous-minded "strong man," the adult male and cannibal, can see
nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint's gentleness and self-
severity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves
essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be
our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this
seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance?
The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree both worlds must
be acknowledged and taken account of; and in the seen world both
aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful. It is a question of
emphasis, of more or less. Is the saint's type or the strong-man's type
the more ideal?
It has often been supposed, and even now, I think, it is supposed by most
persons, that there can be one intrinsically ideal type of human
character. A certain kind of man, it is imagined, must be the best man
absolutely and apart from the utility of his function, apart from
economical considerations. The saint's type, and the knight's or
gentleman's type, have always been rival claimants of this absolute
ideality; and in the ideal of military religious orders both types were in
a manner blended. According to the empirical philosophy, however, all
ideals are matters of relation. It would be absurd, for example, to ask
for a definition of "the ideal horse," so long as dragging drays and
running races, bearing children, and jogging about with tradesmen's
packages all remain as indispensable differentiations of equine function.
You may take what you call a general all-round animal as a compromise, but
he will be inferior to any horse of a more specialized type, in some one
particular direction. We must not forget this now when, in discussing
saintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type of manhood. We must test it by
its economical relations.
I think that the method which Mr. Spencer uses in his Data of Ethics will
help to fix our opinion. Ideality in conduct is altogether a matter of
adaptation. A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy
itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive,
others must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is
the present constitution of society, and to the mixture we owe many of our
blessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending to
become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a
state of things as we now live in is the millennium. It is meanwhile quite
possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no
aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness,--any small community of
true friends now realizes such a society. Abstractly considered, such a
society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing
might be realized there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial
society the saint would be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal
would be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one extant
to take advantage of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly
a higher type of man than the "strong man," because he is adapted to the
highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely
possible or not. The strong man would immediately tend by his presence to
make that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything save
in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are.
But if we turn from the abstract question to the actual situation, we find
that the individual saint may be well or ill adapted, according to
particular circumstances. There is, in short, no absoluteness in the
excellence of sainthood. It must be confessed that as far as this world
goes, any one who makes an out-and-out saint of himself does so at his
peril. If he is not a large enough man, he may appear more insignificant
and contemptible, for all his saintship, than if he had remained a
worldling.(221) Accordingly religion has seldom been so radically taken in
our Western world that the devotee could not mix it with some worldly
temper. It has always found good men who could follow most of its
impulses, but who stopped short when it came to non-resistance. Christ
himself was fierce upon occasion. Cromwells, Stonewall Jacksons, Gordons,
show that Christians can be strong men also.
How is success to be absolutely measured when there are so many
environments and so many ways of looking at the adaptation? It cannot be
measured absolutely; the verdict will vary according to the point of view
adopted. From the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure,
because he was beheaded. Yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger
environment of history; and so far as any saint's example is a leaven of
righteousness in the world, and draws it in the direction of more
prevalent habits of saintliness, he is a success, no matter what his
immediate bad fortune may be. The greatest saints, the spiritual heroes
whom every one acknowledges, the Francises, Bernards, Luthers, Loyolas,
Wesleys, Channings, Moodys, Gratrys, the Phillips Brookses, the Agnes
Joneses, Margaret Hallahans, and Dora Pattisons, are successes from the
outset. They show themselves, and there is no question; every one
perceives their strength and stature. Their sense of mystery in things,
their passion, their goodness, irradiate about them and enlarge their
outlines while they soften them. They are like pictures with an atmosphere
and background; and, placed alongside of them, the strong men of this
world and no other seem as dry as sticks, as hard and crude as blocks of
stone or brickbats.
In a general way, then, and "on the whole,"(222) our abandonment of
theological criteria, and our testing of religion by practical common
sense and the empirical method, leave it in possession of its towering
place in history. Economically, the saintly group of qualities is
indispensable to the world's welfare. The great saints are immediate
successes; the smaller ones are at least heralds and harbingers, and they
may be leavens also, of a better mundane order. Let us be saints, then, if
we can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally. But in our
Father's house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself
the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with
what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and
vocation. There are no successes to be guaranteed and no set orders to be
given to individuals, so long as we follow the methods of empirical
philosophy.
-------------------------------------
This is my conclusion so far. I know that on some of your minds it leaves
a feeling of wonder that such a method should have been applied to such a
subject, and this in spite of all those remarks about empiricism which I
made at the beginning of Lecture XIII.(223) How, you say, can religion,
which believes in two worlds and an invisible order, be estimated by the
adaptation of its fruits to this world's order alone? It is its _truth_,
not its utility, you insist, upon which our verdict ought to depend. If
religion is true, its fruits are good fruits, even though in this world
they should prove uniformly ill adapted and full of naught but pathos. It
goes back, then, after all, to the question of the truth of theology. The
plot inevitably thickens upon us; we cannot escape theoretical
considerations. I propose, then, that to some degree we face the
responsibility. Religious persons have often, though not uniformly,
professed to see truth in a special manner. That manner is known as
mysticism. I will consequently now proceed to treat at some length of
mystical phenomena, and after that, though more briefly, I will consider
religious philosophy.
LECTURES XVI AND XVII. MYSTICISM.
Over and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them
open and unfinished until we should have come to the subject of Mysticism.
Some of you, I fear, may have smiled as you noted my reiterated
postponements. But now the hour has come when mysticism must be faced in
good earnest, and those broken threads wound up together. One may say
truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and centre
in mystical states of consciousness; so for us, who in these lectures are
treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such
states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the
other chapters get their light. Whether my treatment of mystical states
will shed more light or darkness, I do not know, for my own constitution
shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them
only at second hand. But though forced to look upon the subject so
externally, I will be as objective and receptive as I can; and I think I
shall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of the states in
question, and of the paramount importance of their function.
First of all, then, I ask, What does the expression "mystical states of
consciousness" mean? How do we part off mystical states from other states?
The words "mysticism" and "mystical" are often used as terms of mere
reproach, to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and
sentimental, and without a base in either facts or logic. For some writers
a "mystic" is any person who believes in thought-transference, or spirit-
return. Employed in this way the word has little value: there are too many
less ambiguous synonyms. So, to keep it useful by restricting it, I will
do what I did in the case of the word "religion," and simply propose to
you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in
calling it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures. In this way
we shall save verbal disputation, and the recriminations that generally go
therewith.
1. _Ineffability._--The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state
of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that
it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given
in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly
experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this
peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like
states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a
certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must
have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in
love one's self to understand a lover's state of mind. Lacking the heart
or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even
likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most
of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.
2. _Noetic quality._--Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical
states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge.
They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the
discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of
significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a
rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.
These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the
sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply
marked, but are usually found. These are:--
3. _Transiency._--Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in
rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the
limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when
faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when
they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is
susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness
and importance.
4. _Passivity._--Although the oncoming of mystical states may be
facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the
attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways
which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of
consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in
abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a
superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with
certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such
as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When
these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be no
recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no significance
for the subject's usual inner life, to which, as it were, it makes a mere
interruption. Mystical states, strictly so called, are never merely
interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound
sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject
between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are,
however, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations and
mixtures.
These four characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of
consciousness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for
careful study. Let it then be called the mystical group.
-------------------------------------
Our next step should be to gain acquaintance with some typical examples.
Professional mystics at the height of their development have often
elaborately organized experiences and a philosophy based thereupon. But
you remember what I said in my first lecture: phenomena are best
understood when placed within their series, studied in their germ and in
their over-ripe decay, and compared with their exaggerated and degenerated
kindred. The range of mystical experience is very wide, much too wide for
us to cover in the time at our disposal. Yet the method of serial study is
so essential for interpretation that if we really wish to reach
conclusions we must use it. I will begin, therefore, with phenomena which
claim no special religious significance, and end with those of which the
religious pretensions are extreme.
The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that
deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which
occasionally sweeps over one. "I've heard that said all my life," we
exclaim, "but I never realized its full meaning until now." "When a
fellow-monk," said Luther, "one day repeated the words of the Creed: 'I
believe in the forgiveness of sins,' I saw the Scripture in an entirely
new light; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I
had found the door of paradise thrown wide open."(224) This sense of
deeper significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single
words,(225) and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea,
odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. Most
of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems
read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which
the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our
hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished
surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only
in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with
our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are
alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we
have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.
A more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an
extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which
sometimes sweeps over us, of having "been here before," as if at some
indefinite past time, in just this place, with just these people, we were
already saying just these things. As Tennyson writes:
"Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams--
"Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare."(226)
Sir James Crichton-Browne has given the technical name of "dreamy states"
to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent consciousness.(227) They
bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and
the feeling of an enlargement of perception which seems imminent but which
never completes itself. In Dr. Crichton-Browne's opinion they connect
themselves with the perplexed and scared disturbances of self-
consciousness which occasionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that
this learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist view of an
intrinsically insignificant phenomenon. He follows it along the downward
ladder, to insanity; our path pursues the upward ladder chiefly. The
divergence shows how important it is to neglect no part of a phenomenon's
connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according to the
context by which we set it off.
Somewhat deeper plunges into mystical consciousness are met with in yet
other dreamy states. Such feelings as these which Charles Kingsley
describes are surely far from being uncommon, especially in youth:--
"When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an
innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but
understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths
which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes....
Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your
mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?"(228)
A much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J. A.
Symonds; and probably more persons than we suspect could give parallels to
it from their own experience.
"Suddenly," writes Symonds, "at church, or in company, or when I
was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I
felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of
my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared
in a series of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from
anæsthetic influence. One reason why I disliked this kind of
trance was that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot even
now find words to render it intelligible. It consisted in a
gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time,
sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem
to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion as
these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the
sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired
intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract
Self. The universe became without form and void of content. But
Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the most
poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find
existence break as breaks a bubble round about it. And what then?
The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that
this state was the last state of the conscious Self, the sense
that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the
abyss, and had arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or
illusion, stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The return to
ordinary conditions of sentient existence began by my first
recovering the power of touch, and then by the gradual though
rapid influx of familiar impressions and diurnal interests. At
last I felt myself once more a human being; and though the riddle
of what is meant by life remained unsolved, I was thankful for
this return from the abyss--this deliverance from so awful an
initiation into the mysteries of skepticism.
"This trance recurred with diminishing frequency until I reached
the age of twenty-eight. It served to impress upon my growing
nature the phantasmal unreality of all the circumstances which
contribute to a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often have I
asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of
denuded, keenly sentient being, Which is the unreality?--the trance
of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue,
or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner
Self and build a self of flesh-and-blood conventionality? Again,
are men the factors of some dream, the dream-like unsubstantiality
of which they comprehend at such eventful moments? What would
happen if the final stage of the trance were reached?"(229)
In a recital like this there is certainly something suggestive of
pathology.(230) The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm
that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as
pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry
seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness
produced by intoxicants and anæsthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway
of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate
the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the
cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes,
discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It
is in fact the great exciter of the _Yes_ function in man. It brings its
votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes
him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run
after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of
symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery
and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we
immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us
only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so
degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic
consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our
opinion of that larger whole.
Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently
diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary
degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This
truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if
any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to
be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning
having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is
persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical
revelation.
Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous
oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced
upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since
remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness,
whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie
potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through
life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus,
and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of
mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and
adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which
leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard
them is the question,--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary
consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish
formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate,
they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back
on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to
which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote
of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the
world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and
troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species,
belong to one and the same genus, but _one of the species_, the nobler and
better one, _is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite
into itself_. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms
of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as
if it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy
means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears
to hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes
in the artificial mystic state of mind.(231)
I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anæsthetic revelation. For
them too it is a monistic insight, in which the _other_ in its various
forms appears absorbed into the One.
"Into this pervading genius," writes one of them, "we pass,
forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God.
There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we
are founded. 'The One remains, the many change and pass;' and each
and every one of us _is_ the One that remains.... This is the
ultimatum.... As sure as being--whence is all our care--so sure is
content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have
triumphed in a solitude that God is not above."(232)
This has the genuine religious mystic ring! I just now quoted J. A.
Symonds. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as
follows:--
"After the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first
in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light,
alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was
going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I
thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became
aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so
to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him
streaming in like light upon me.... I cannot describe the ecstasy
I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the
anæsthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to
return, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade. I
suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and
shrieked out, 'It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too
horrible,' meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment.
Then I flung myself on the ground, and at last awoke covered with
blood, calling to the two surgeons (who were frightened), 'Why did
you not kill me? Why would you not let me die?' Only think of it.
To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very
God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and
then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I
had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain.
"Yet, this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense
of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions
from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not
a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in
that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always
felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?"(233)
With this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple.
Symonds's question takes us back to those examples which you will remember
my quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of sudden
realization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in one shape
or another is not uncommon.
"I know," writes Mr. Trine, "an officer on our police force who
has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in
the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization
of his oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of
Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as
if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so
exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide."(234)
Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such
mystical moods.(235) Most of the striking cases which I have collected
have occurred out of doors. Literature has commemorated this fact in many
passages of great beauty--this extract, for example, from Amiel's Journal
Intime:--
"Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which
sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at
sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again
in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the
foot of a tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at
night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon
the sand and my vision ranging through the milky way;--such grand
and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to
the stars, when one owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatic
hours; in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the
great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and
deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the
blue firmament; ... instants of irresistible intuition in which
one feels one's self great as the universe, and calm as a god....
What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are
enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were
visits of the Holy Ghost."(236)
Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German
idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:--
"I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over
me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in
distant days in the Alps of Dauphiné, I was impelled to kneel
down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the
Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and
knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of
individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to
kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one
imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast
world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great
who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and
it appeared as if I heard their greeting: 'Thou too belongest to
the company of those who overcome.' "(237)
The well-known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this
sporadic type of mystical experience.
"I believe in you, my Soul ...
Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;...
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that
pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love."(238)
I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from
the Autobiography of J. Trevor.(239)
"One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the
Unitarian Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to
accompany them--as though to leave the sunshine on the hills, and
go down there to the chapel, would be for the time an act of
spiritual suicide. And I felt such need for new inspiration and
expansion in my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my
wife and boys to go down into the town, while I went further up
into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness of the
morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my
sense of sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the
road to the 'Cat and Fiddle,' and then returned. On the way back,
suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven--an inward
state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense,
accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light,
as though the external condition had brought about the internal
effect--a feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the
scene around me stood out more clearly and as if nearer to me than
before, by reason of the illumination in the midst of which I
seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though with
decreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time
after, only gradually passing away."
The writer adds that having had further experiences of a similar sort, he
now knows them well.
"The spiritual life," he writes, "justifies itself to those who
live it; but what can we say to those who do not understand? This,
at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are
proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when
brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life.
Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they
are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand
this test. These highest experiences that I have had of God's
presence have been rare and brief--flashes of consciousness which
have compelled me to exclaim with surprise--God is _here_!--or
conditions of exaltation and insight, less intense, and only
gradually passing away. I have severely questioned the worth of
these moments. To no soul have I named them, lest I should be
building my life and work on mere phantasies of the brain. But I
find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out to-day
as the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which
have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and
all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their far-reaching
significance are ever becoming more clear and evident. When they
came, I was living the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I
was not seeking them. What I was seeking, with resolute
determination, was to live more intensely my own life, as against
what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in
the most real seasons that the Real Presence came, and I was aware
that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God."(240)
Even the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the
existence of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely
specific quality, and of the deep impression which they make on those who
have them. A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke, gives to the more
distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic
consciousness. "Cosmic consciousness in its more striking instances is
not," Dr. Bucke says, "simply an expansion or extension of the self-
conscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition of a
function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as
_self_-consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the
higher animals."
"The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a
consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the
universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs
an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the
individual on a new plane of existence--would make him almost a
member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral
exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and
joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as
striking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual
power. With these come what may be called a sense of immortality,
a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall
have this, but the consciousness that he has it already."(241)
It was Dr. Bucke's own experience of a typical onset of cosmic
consciousness in his own person which led him to investigate it in others.
He has printed his conclusions in a highly interesting volume, from which
I take the following account of what occurred to him:--
"I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends,
reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at
midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind,
deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions
called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in
a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking,
but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it
were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I
found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I
thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in
that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself.
Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of
immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an
intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other
things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the
universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary,
a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life.
It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a
consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all
men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any
peradventure all things work together for the good of each and
all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the
worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and
all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few
seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the
reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a
century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision
showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I
saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say
that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest
depression, been lost."(242)
We have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness, as it
comes sporadically. We must next pass to its methodical cultivation as an
element of the religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and
Christians all have cultivated it methodically.
In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial
under the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the
individual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the
diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline
vary slightly in the different systems which teach it. The yogi, or
disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his lower
nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed _samâdhi_, "and
comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know."
He learns--
"That the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond
reason, a superconscious state, and that when the mind gets to
that higher state, then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes....
All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us
scientifically to the superconscious state or samâdhi.... Just as
unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another
work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is not
accompanied with the feeling of egoism.... There is no feeling of
_I_, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness,
objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full
effulgence, and we know ourselves--for Samâdhi lies potential in us
all--for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from
the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and
identical with the Atman or Universal Soul."(243)
The Vedantists say that one may stumble into superconsciousness
sporadically, without the previous discipline, but it is then impure.
Their test of its purity, like our test of religion's value, is empirical:
its fruits must be good for life. When a man comes out of Samâdhi, they
assure us that he remains "enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his
whole character changed, his life changed, illumined."(244)
The Buddhists use the word "samâdhi" as well as the Hindus; but "dhyâna"
is their special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be
four stages recognized in dhyâna. The first stage comes through
concentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes desire, but not
discernment or judgment: it is still intellectual. In the second stage the
intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity remains.
In the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins,
along with memory and self-consciousness. In the fourth stage the
indifference, memory, and self-consciousness are perfected. [Just what
"memory" and "self-consciousness" mean in this connection is doubtful.
They cannot be the faculties familiar to us in the lower life.] Higher
stages still of contemplation are mentioned--a region where there exists
nothing, and where the meditator says: "There exists absolutely nothing,"
and stops. Then he reaches another region where he says: "There are
neither ideas nor absence of ideas," and stops again. Then another region
where, "having reached the end of both idea and perception, he stops
finally." This would seem to be, not yet Nirvâna, but as close an approach
to it as this life affords.(245)
In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are the
possessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia
from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the
hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that
Sufism must have been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. We
Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to
those initiated. To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds,
I will quote a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject.
Al-Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, who flourished in the
eleventh century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors of the Moslem
church, has left us one of the few autobiographies to be found outside of
Christian literature. Strange that a species of book so abundant among
ourselves should be so little represented elsewhere--the absence of
strictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely
literary student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness
of religions other than the Christian.
M. Schmölders has translated a part of Al-Ghazzali's autobiography into
French:(246)--
"The Science of the Sufis," says the Moslem author, "aims at
detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it
for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory
being more easy for me than practice, I read [certain books] until
I understood all that can be learned by study and hearsay. Then I
recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is
just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the
transformation of the soul. How great, for example, is the
difference between knowing the definitions of health, of satiety,
with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or
filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists,--as
being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the
stomach,--and _being_ drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken
man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it
interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the
physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness
consists, and what are its predisposing conditions. Similarly
there is a difference between knowing the nature of abstinence,
and _being_ abstinent or having one's soul detached from the
world.--Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but
what was left could be learned neither by study nor through the
ears, but solely by giving one's self up to ecstasy and leading a
pious life.
"Reflecting on my situation, I found myself tied down by a
multitude of bonds--temptations on every side. Considering my
teaching, I found it was impure before God. I saw myself
struggling with all my might to achieve glory and to spread my
name. [Here follows an account of his six months' hesitation to
break away from the conditions of his life at Bagdad, at the end
of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.] Then,
feeling my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own will,
I repaired to God like a man in distress who has no more
resources. He answered, as he answers the wretch who invokes him.
My heart no longer felt any difficulty in renouncing glory,
wealth, and my children. So I quitted Bagdad, and reserving from
my fortune only what was indispensable for my subsistence, I
distributed the rest. I went to Syria, where I remained about two
years, with no other occupation than living in retreat and
solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training
myself to purify my soul, to make my character perfect, to prepare
my heart for meditating on God--all according to the methods of the
Sufis, as I had read of them.
"This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude, and to
complete the purification of my heart and fit it for meditation.
But the vicissitudes of the times, the affairs of the family, the
need of subsistence, changed in some respects my primitive
resolve, and interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life.
I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy, save in a few
single hours; nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining this
state. Every time that the accidents led me astray, I sought to
return; and in this situation I spent ten years. During this
solitary state things were revealed to me which it is impossible
either to describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that
the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path of God. Both in their
acts and in their inaction, whether internal or external, they are
illumined by the light which proceeds from the prophetic source.
The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of
all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life
consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul,
and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up
entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi
life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God. The
intuitions and all that precede are, so to speak, only the
threshold for those who enter. From the beginning, revelations
take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before them,
whilst wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets. They
hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport
rises from the perception of forms and figures to a degree which
escapes all expression, and which no man may seek to give an
account of without his words involving sin.
"Whoever has had no experience of the transport knows of the true
nature of prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be
sure of its existence, both by experience and by what he hears the
Sufis say. As there are men endowed only with the sensitive
faculty who reject what is offered them in the way of objects of
the pure understanding, so there are intellectual men who reject
and avoid the things perceived by the prophetic faculty. A blind
man can understand nothing of colors save what he has learned by
narration and hearsay. Yet God has brought prophetism near to men
in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principal
characters. This state is sleep. If you were to tell a man who was
himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are
people who at times swoon away so as to resemble dead men, and who
[in dreams] yet perceive things that are hidden, he would deny it
[and give his reasons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be
refuted by actual experience. Wherefore, just as the understanding
is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discern various
intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the
prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden
things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief
properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the
transport, by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is
endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and
which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you
know their true nature, since one knows only what one can
comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of
the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the
objects with one's hand."(247)
This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism.
Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no
one else. In this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledge given to us
in sensations more than that given by conceptual thought. Thought, with
its remoteness and abstractness, has often enough in the history of
philosophy been contrasted unfavorably with sensation. It is a commonplace
of metaphysics that God's knowledge cannot be discursive but must be
intuitive, that is, must be constructed more after the pattern of what in
ourselves is called immediate feeling, than after that of proposition and
judgment. But _our_ immediate feelings have no content but what the five
senses supply; and we have seen and shall see again that mystics may
emphatically deny that the senses play any part in the very highest type
of knowledge which their transports yield.
-------------------------------------
In the Christian church there have always been mystics. Although many of
them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes
of the authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as
precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based upon
them, in which everything legitimate finds its place.(248) The basis of
the system is "orison" or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul
towards God. Through the practice of orison the higher levels of mystical
experience may be attained. It is odd that Protestantism, especially
evangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything
methodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant
mystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It
has been left to our mind-curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into
our religious life.
The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind's detachment from
outer sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal
things. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises recommend the
disciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts to imagine
holy scenes. The acme of this kind of discipline would be a semi-
hallucinatory mono-ideism--an imaginary figure of Christ, for example,
coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether
literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism.(249) But in
certain cases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest
raptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then
insusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous
as to this. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of
them, thus describes the condition called the "union of love," which, he
says, is reached by "dark contemplation." In this the Deity compenetrates
the soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul--
"finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the
sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling
with which she is filled.... We receive this mystical knowledge of
God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the
sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other
circumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and
the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor
impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness,
although the mysterious and sweet-tasting wisdom comes home so
clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing a
certain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can
understand it, use and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it,
nor communicate any idea of it, even though all the while it be a
mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness
when it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarity of the
divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and
supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both
inner and outer, and impose silence upon them.... The soul then
feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which no
created thing has access, in an immense and boundless desert,
desert the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this
abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the
well-springs of the comprehension of love, ... and recognizes,
however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how
utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek
to discourse of divine things by their means."(250)
I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian
mystical life.(251) Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and
moreover, I confess that the subdivisions and names which we find in the
Catholic books seem to me to represent nothing objectively distinct. So
many men, so many minds: I imagine that these experiences can be as
infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals.
The cognitive aspects of them, their value in the way of revelation, is
what we are directly concerned with, and it is easy to show by citation
how strong an impression they leave of being revelations of new depths of
truth. Saint Teresa is the expert of experts in describing such
conditions, so I will turn immediately to what she says of one of the
highest of them, the "orison of union."
"In the orison of union," says Saint Teresa, "the soul is fully
awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this
world and in respect of herself. During the short time the union
lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if
she would, she could not think of any single thing. Thus she needs
to employ no artifice in order to arrest the use of her
understanding: it remains so stricken with inactivity that she
neither knows what she loves, nor in what manner she loves, nor
what she wills. In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the
world and lives solely in God.... I do not even know whether in
this state she has enough life left to breathe. It seems to me she
has not; or at least that if she does breathe, she is unaware of
it. Her intellect would fain understand something of what is going
on within her, but it has so little force now that it can act in
no way whatsoever. So a person who falls into a deep faint appears
as if dead....
"Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with himself,
suspend the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees,
hears, nor understands, so long as she is united with God. But
this time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is.
God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a
way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for
her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth
remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years
should pass without the condition returning, she can neither
forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you,
nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can see and
understand that she has been in God, since during the union she
has neither sight nor understanding, I reply that she does not see
it then, but that she sees it clearly later, after she has
returned to herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which
abides with her and which God alone can give her. I knew a person
who was ignorant of the truth that God's mode of being in
everything must be either by presence, by power, or by essence,
but who, after having received the grace of which I am speaking,
believed this truth in the most unshakable manner. So much so
that, having consulted a half-learned man who was as ignorant on
this point as she had been before she was enlightened, when he
replied that God is in us only by 'grace,' she disbelieved his
reply, so sure she was of the true answer; and when she came to
ask wiser doctors, they confirmed her in her belief, which much
consoled her....
"But how, you will repeat, _can_ one have such certainty in
respect to what one does not see? This question, I am powerless to
answer. These are secrets of God's omnipotence which it does not
appertain to me to penetrate. All that I know is that I tell the
truth; and I shall never believe that any soul who does not
possess this certainty has ever been really united to God."(252)
The kinds of truth communicable in mystical ways, whether these be
sensible or supersensible, are various. Some of them relate to this
world,--visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden
understanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events, for example; but
the most important revelations are theological or metaphysical.
"Saint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynez that a single
hour of meditation at Manresa had taught him more truths about
heavenly things than all the teachings of all the doctors put
together could have taught him.... One day in orison, on the steps
of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner
the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world. On another
occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and
it was given him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to
the weak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery
of the holy Trinity. This last vision flooded his heart with such
sweetness, that the mere memory of it in after times made him shed
abundant tears."(253)
Similarly with Saint Teresa. "One day, being in orison," she
writes, "it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all
things are seen and contained in God. I did not perceive them in
their proper form, and nevertheless the view I had of them was of
a sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly impressed upon my
soul. It is one of the most signal of all the graces which the
Lord has granted me.... The view was so subtile and delicate that
the understanding cannot grasp it."(254)
She goes on to tell how it was as if the Deity were an enormous and
sovereignly limpid diamond, in which all our actions were contained in
such a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never before. On
another day, she relates, while she was reciting the Athanasian Creed,--
"Our Lord made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be
in three Persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as
extremely surprised as I was comforted, ... and now, when I think
of the holy Trinity, or hear It spoken of, I understand how the
three adorable Persons form only one God and I experience an
unspeakable happiness."
On still another occasion, it was given to Saint Teresa to see and
understand in what wise the Mother of God had been assumed into her place
in Heaven.(255)
The deliciousness of some of these states seems to be beyond anything
known in ordinary consciousness. It evidently involves organic
sensibilities, for it is spoken of as something too extreme to be borne,
and as verging on bodily pain.(256) But it is too subtle and piercing a
delight for ordinary words to denote. God's touches, the wounds of his
spear, references to ebriety and to nuptial union have to figure in the
phraseology by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses both swoon
away in these highest states of ecstasy. "If our understanding
comprehends," says Saint Teresa, "it is in a mode which remains unknown to
it, and it can understand nothing of what it comprehends. For my own part,
I do not believe that it does comprehend, because, as I said, it does not
understand itself to do so. I confess that it is all a mystery in which I
am lost."(257) In the condition called _raptus_ or ravishment by
theologians, breathing and circulation are so depressed that it is a
question among the doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarily
dissevered from the body. One must read Saint Teresa's descriptions and
the very exact distinctions which she makes, to persuade one's self that
one is dealing, not with imaginary experiences, but with phenomena which,
however rare, follow perfectly definite psychological types.
-------------------------------------
To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and
imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a
corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological
conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that
fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness
which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must
not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into
their fruits for life.
Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction, for one thing,
seems not to have been altogether absent as a result. You may remember the
helplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary Alacoque.
Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the care taken of them by
admiring followers. The "other-worldliness" encouraged by the mystical
consciousness makes this over-abstraction from practical life peculiarly
liable to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally passive and
the intellect feeble; but in natively strong minds and characters we find
quite opposite results. The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit
of ecstasy as far as it has often been carried, appear for the most part
to have shown indomitable spirit and energy, and all the more so for the
trances in which they indulged.
Saint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one of
the most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived. Saint John of
the Cross, writing of the intuitions and "touches" by which God reaches
the substance of the soul, tells us that--
"They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be
sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which
the soul during its whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and
to leave it adorned with virtues and loaded with supernatural
gifts. A single one of these intoxicating consolations may reward
it for all the labors undergone in its life--even were they
numberless. Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an
impassioned desire to suffer for its God, the soul then is seized
with a strange torment--that of not being allowed to suffer
enough."(258)
Saint Teresa is as emphatic, and much more detailed. You may perhaps
remember a passage I quoted from her in my first lecture.(259) There are
many similar pages in her autobiography. Where in literature is a more
evidently veracious account of the formation of a new centre of spiritual
energy, than is given in her description of the effects of certain
ecstasies which in departing leave the soul upon a higher level of
emotional excitement?
"Often, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the
ecstasy, the soul emerges from it full of health and admirably
disposed for action ... as if God had willed that the body itself,
already obedient to the soul's desires, should share in the soul's
happiness.... The soul after such a favor is animated with a
degree of courage so great that if at that moment its body should
be torn to pieces for the cause of God, it would feel nothing but
the liveliest comfort. Then it is that promises and heroic
resolutions spring up in profusion in us, soaring desires, horror
of the world, and the clear perception of our proper
nothingness.... What empire is comparable to that of a soul who,
from this sublime summit to which God has raised her, sees all the
things of earth beneath her feet, and is captivated by no one of
them? How ashamed she is of her former attachments! How amazed at
her blindness! What lively pity she feels for those whom she
recognizes still shrouded in the darkness!... She groans at having
ever been sensitive to points of honor, at the illusion that made
her ever see as honor what the world calls by that name. Now she
sees in this name nothing more than an immense lie of which the
world remains a victim. She discovers, in the new light from
above, that in genuine honor there is nothing spurious, that to be
faithful to this honor is to give our respect to what deserves to
be respected really, and to consider as nothing, or as less than
nothing, whatsoever perishes and is not agreeable to God.... She
laughs when she sees grave persons, persons of orison, caring for
points of honor for which she now feels profoundest contempt. It
is suitable to the dignity of their rank to act thus, they
pretend, and it makes them more useful to others. But she knows
that in despising the dignity of their rank for the pure love of
God they would do more good in a single day than they would effect
in ten years by preserving it.... She laughs at herself that there
should ever have been a time in her life when she made any case of
money, when she ever desired it.... Oh! if human beings might only
agree together to regard it as so much useless mud, what harmony
would then reign in the world! With what friendship we would all
treat each other if our interest in honor and in money could but
disappear from earth! For my own part, I feel as if it would be a
remedy for all our ills."(260)
Mystical conditions may, therefore, render the soul more energetic in the
lines which their inspiration favors. But this could be reckoned an
advantage only in case the inspiration were a true one. If the inspiration
were erroneous, the energy would be all the more mistaken and misbegotten.
So we stand once more before that problem of truth which confronted us at
the end of the lectures on saintliness. You will remember that we turned
to mysticism precisely to get some light on truth. Do mystical states
establish the truth of those theological affections in which the saintly
life has its root?
In spite of their repudiation of articulate self-description, mystical
states in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible
to give the outcome of the majority of them in terms that point in
definite philosophical directions. One of these directions is optimism,
and the other is monism. We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary
consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a
vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them
as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than
to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and
peacefully closes the account. Their very denial of every adjective you
may propose as applicable to the ultimate truth,--He, the Self, the Atman,
is to be described by "No! no!" only, say the Upanishads,(261)--though it
seems on the surface to be a no-function, is a denial made on behalf of a
deeper yes. Whoso calls the Absolute anything in particular, or says that
it is _this_, seems implicitly to shut it off from being _that_--it is as
if he lessened it. So we deny the "this," negating the negation which it
seems to us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmative attitude
by which we are possessed. The fountain-head of Christian mysticism is
Dionysius the Areopagite. He describes the absolute truth by negatives
exclusively.
"The cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it
imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence; nor is it reason
or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither
number, nor order, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality,
nor inequality, nor similarity, nor dissimilarity. It neither
stands, nor moves, nor rests.... It is neither essence, nor
eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to
it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or
wisdom; not one; not unity; not divinity or goodness; nor even
spirit as we know it," etc., _ad libitum_.(262)
But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because the truth
falls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is above
them. It is _super_-lucent, _super_-splendent, _super_-essential,
_super_-sublime, _super_ everything that can be named. Like Hegel in his
logic, mystics journey towards the positive pole of truth only by the
"Methode der Absoluten Negativität."(263)
Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings.
As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, "where never was
seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no
one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in
itself."(264) As when Boehme writes of the Primal Love, that "it may fitly
be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as nothing
with respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not comprehensible by any
of them. And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore free from
all things, and is that only good, which a man cannot express or utter
what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared, to express it
by."(265) Or as when Angelus Silesius sings:--
"Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier;
Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst, je mehr entwind er dir."(266)
To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as a mode of
passage towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the
subtlest of moral counterparts in the sphere of the personal will. Since
denial of the finite self and its wants, since asceticism of some sort, is
found in religious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and
more blessed life, this moral mystery intertwines and combines with the
intellectual mystery in all mystical writings.
"Love," continues Behmen, is Nothing, for "when thou art gone
forth wholly from the Creature and from that which is visible, and
art become Nothing to all that is Nature and Creature, then thou
art in that eternal One, which is God himself, and then thou shalt
feel within thee the highest virtue of Love.... The treasure of
treasures for the soul is where she goeth out of the Somewhat into
that Nothing out of which all things may be made. The soul here
saith, _I have nothing_, for I am utterly stripped and naked; _I
can do nothing_, for I have no manner of power, but am as water
poured out; _I am nothing_, for all that I am is no more than an
image of Being, and only God is to me I AM; and so, sitting down
in my own Nothingness, I give glory to the eternal Being, and
_will nothing_ of myself, that so God may will all in me, being
unto me my God and all things."(267)
In Paul's language, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. Only when
I become as nothing can God enter in and no difference between his life
and mine remain outstanding.(268)
This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the
Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become
one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the
everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by
differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in
Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so
that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought
to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the
mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native
land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech
antedates languages, and they do not grow old.(269)
"That art Thou!" say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: "Not a part,
not a mode of That, but identically That, that absolute Spirit of the
World." "As pure water poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O
Gautama, is the Self of a thinker who knows. Water in water, fire in fire,
ether in ether, no one can distinguish them; likewise a man whose mind has
entered into the Self."(270) " 'Every man,' says the Sufi Gulshan-Râz,
'whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that
there is no being save only One.... In his divine majesty the _me_, the
_we_, the _thou_, are not found, for in the One there can be no
distinction. Every being who is annulled and entirely separated from
himself, hears resound outside of him this voice and this echo: _I am
God_: he has an eternal way of existing, and is no longer subject to
death.' "(271) In the vision of God, says Plotinus, "what sees is not our
reason, but something prior and superior to our reason.... He who thus
sees does not properly see, does not distinguish or imagine two things. He
changes, he ceases to be himself, preserves nothing of himself. Absorbed
in God, he makes but one with him, like a centre of a circle coinciding
with another centre."(272) "Here," writes Suso, "the spirit dies, and yet
is all alive in the marvels of the Godhead ... and is lost in the
stillness of the glorious dazzling obscurity and of the naked simple
unity. It is in this modeless _where_ that the highest bliss is to be
found."(273) "Ich bin so gross als Gott," sings Angelus Silesius again,
"Er ist als ich so klein; Er kann nicht über mich, ich unter ihm nicht
sein."(274)
In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as "dazzling
obscurity," "whispering silence," "teeming desert," are continually met
with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the
element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many
mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions.
"He who would hear the voice of Nada, 'the Soundless Sound,' and
comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dhâranâ.... When to
himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he
sees in dreams; when he has ceased to hear the many, he may
discern the ONE--the inner sound which kills the outer.... For then
the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear
will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE.... And now thy _Self_ is lost
in SELF, _thyself_ unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which
thou first didst radiate.... Behold! thou hast become the Light,
thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou
art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that
resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin
exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. _Om tat
Sat._"(275)
These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably
stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music
gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to
contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There
is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom
mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the
infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon
our shores.
"Here begins the sea that ends not till the world's end. Where we
stand,
Could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond these waves that
gleam,
We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man hath
scanned....
Ah, but here man's heart leaps, yearning towards the gloom with
venturous glee,
From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the
sea."(276)
That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our
"immortality," if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already
now and here, which we find so often expressed to-day in certain
philosophic circles, finds its support in a "hear, hear!" or an "amen,"
which floats up from that mysteriously deeper level.(277) We recognize the
passwords to the mystical region as we hear them, but we cannot use them
ourselves; it alone has the keeping of "the password primeval."(278)
I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly
as I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the mystic range
of consciousness. _It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at
least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes
best with twice-bornness and so-called other-worldly states of mind._
-------------------------------------
My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Does
it furnish any _warrant for the truth_ of the twice-bornness and
supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to
this question as concisely as I can.
In brief my answer is this,--and I will divide it into three parts:--
(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right
to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those
who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic
consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They
show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the
possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us
vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.
I will take up these points one by one.
1.
As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced
and emphatic sort _are_ usually authoritative over those who have
them.(279) They have been "there," and know. It is vain for rationalism to
grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be
a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order
him to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse,
but we cannot change his mind--we commonly attach it only the more
stubbornly to its beliefs.(280) It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter
of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our
own more "rational" beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in
nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have
assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as
direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever
were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in
abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological
quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression,--that is, they are
face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.
The mystic is, in short, _invulnerable_, and must be left, whether we
relish it or not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says
Tolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith-state and mystic state are
practically convertible terms.
2.
But I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought
to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are
ourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they can
ever ask of us in this life is to admit that they establish a presumption.
They form a consensus and have an unequivocal outcome; and it would be
odd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experience should
prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom, however, this would only be an
appeal to numbers, like the appeal of rationalism the other way; and the
appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for
"suggestive," not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to
do so suits our life.
But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far from being
strong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic, etc.,
I am afraid I over-simplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons,
and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic
religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a "privileged
case." It is an _extract_, kept true to type by the selection of the
fittest specimens and their preservation in "schools." It is carved out
from a much larger mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as
religious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the
supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious
mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools,
is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and
antinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian church.(281) It is
dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it
pantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists.
They are with few exceptions non-metaphysical minds, for whom "the
category of personality" is absolute. The "union" of man with God is for
them much more like an occasional miracle than like an original
identity.(282) How different again, apart from the happiness common to
all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard
Jefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively
Christian sort.(283) The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement,
union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of
its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material
furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only
they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood.
We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in
favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the
absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world. It
is only relatively in favor of all these things--it passes out of common
human consciousness in the direction in which they lie.
So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for
religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no
accumulated traditions except those which the text-books on insanity
supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant cases in which
"mystical ideas" are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or
deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they
sometimes call it, we may have a _diabolical_ mysticism, a sort of
religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable
importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with
new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the
same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is
pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are
dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the
point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and
these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great
subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit
the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region
contains every kind of matter: "seraph and snake" abide there side by
side. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be
sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total
context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense.
Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not
mystics ourselves.
Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation to
acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by
their intrinsic nature.(284)
3.
Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely
overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and
ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states
merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of
consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition,
gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us
fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active
life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that
our senses have immediately seized.(285) It is the rationalistic critic
rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials
have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new
meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more
enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether
mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows
through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive
world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical
windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider
world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of
this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal
regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and
its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider
world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and
subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary
naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet
the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing
with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in
our approach to the final fullness of the truth.
-------------------------------------
In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states
indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But
the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious
sentiments even of non-mystical men incline. They tell of the supremacy of
the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us
_hypotheses_, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as
thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to
which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be
after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.
"Oh, the little more, and how much it is; and the little less, and what
worlds away!" It may be that possibility and permission of this sort are
all that the religious consciousness requires to live on. In my last
lecture I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case.
Meanwhile, however, I am sure that for many of my readers this diet is too
slender. If supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are true, you
think, then not so much permission, as compulsion to believe, ought to be
found. Philosophy has always professed to prove religious truth by
coercive argument; and the construction of philosophies of this kind has
always been one favorite function of the religious life, if we use this
term in the large historic sense. But religious philosophy is an enormous
subject, and in my next lecture I can only give that brief glance at it
which my limits will allow.
LECTURE XVIII. PHILOSOPHY.
The subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is the
sense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We turned
first to mysticism for an answer, and found that although mysticism is
entirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too private (and also too
various) in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority. But
philosophy publishes results which claim to be universally valid if they
are valid at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can
philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man's sense of
the divine?
I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at
the goal to which I am tending. I have undermined the authority of
mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek to
discredit that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is
nothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on
that vivid sense of the reality of things unseen of which in my second
lecture and in the lecture on Mysticism I gave so many examples. It is
essentially private and individualistic; it always exceeds our powers of
formulation; and although attempts to pour its contents into a philosophic
mould will probably always go on, men being what they are, yet these
attempts are always secondary processes which in no way add to the
authority, or warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they
derive their own stimulus and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may
themselves possess. In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend
feeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and
unreflective, and to dissuade you from the hope of any Theology worthy of
the name.
To a certain extent I have to admit that you guess rightly. I do believe
that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and
theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text
into another tongue. But all such statements are misleading from their
brevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly
what I mean.
When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a
world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any
philosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate
intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness
and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other,
would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess.
Men would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and
criticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done. In
the science they would have left a certain amount of "psychical research,"
even as they now will probably have to re-admit a certain amount. But
high-flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic
theology, these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no
need of commerce with such deities. These speculations must, it seems to
me, be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect
into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint.
But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by
feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which
feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an
account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas,
declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they
should even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the
opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox
whatever territory she touches. To find an escape from obscure and wayward
personal persuasion to truth objectively valid for all thinking men has
ever been the intellect's most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from
unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way
to its deliverances, has been reason's task.
I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this
task.(286) We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect
from participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing with
ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal
ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted
congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits. The
philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us.
Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so
we have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal formulas.
Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion;
and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the
criticisms of one man's constructions by another, philosophy will always
have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very
lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now
onwards) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious
experience some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which
everybody may agree.
Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably
engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical
theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of
another. Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have become
possible, alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by which the
commerce between creeds used exclusively to be carried on. We have the
beginnings of a "Science of Religions," so-called; and if these lectures
could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such a science, I
should be made very happy.
But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive or
comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their
subject-matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations,
operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not
coördinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains.
-------------------------------------
The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pretends to be
something altogether different from this. It assumes to construct
religious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of
logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective facts. It
calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute, as
the case may be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches
them in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity.
Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls. All-
inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous,
true;--what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system would offer
to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of
sensible things? Accordingly, we find inculcated in the theological
schools of to-day, almost as much as in those of the fore-time, a disdain
for merely possible or probable truth, and of results that only private
assurance can grasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain.
Principal John Caird, for example, writes as follows in his Introduction
to the Philosophy of Religion:--
"Religion must indeed be a thing of the heart; but in order to
elevate it from the region of subjective caprice and waywardness,
and to distinguish between that which is true and false in
religion, we must appeal to an objective standard. That which
enters the heart must first be discerned by the intelligence to be
_true_. It must be seen as having in its own nature a _right_ to
dominate feeling, and as constituting the principle by which
feeling must be judged.(287) In estimating the religious character
of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is, not how
they feel, but what they think and believe--not whether their
religion is one which manifests itself in emotions, more or less
vehement and enthusiastic, but what are the _conceptions_ of God
and divine things by which these emotions are called forth.
Feeling is necessary in religion, but it is by the _content_ or
intelligent basis of a religion, and not by feeling, that its
character and worth are to be determined."(288)
Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, gives more
emphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment.(289) Theology, he
says, is a science in the strictest sense of the word. I will tell you, he
says, what it is not--not "physical evidences" for God, not "natural
religion," for these are but vague subjective interpretations:--
"If," he continues, "the Supreme Being is powerful or skillful,
just so far as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows
skill, if his moral law is to be ascertained simply by the
physical processes of the animal frame, or his will gathered from
the immediate issues of human affairs, if his Essence is just as
high and deep and broad as the universe and no more; if this be
the fact, then will I confess that there is no specific science
about God, that theology is but a name, and a protest in its
behalf an hypocrisy. Then, pious as it is to think of Him, while
the pageant of experiment or abstract reasoning passes by, still
such piety is nothing more than a poetry of thought, or an
ornament of language, a certain view taken of Nature which one man
has and another has not, which gifted minds strike out, which
others see to be admirable and ingenious, and which all would be
the better for adopting. It is but the theology of Nature, just as
we talk of the _philosophy_ or the _romance_ of history, or the
_poetry_ of childhood, or the picturesque or the sentimental or
the humorous, or any other abstract quality which the genius or
the caprice of the individual, or the fashion of the day, or the
consent of the world, recognizes in any set of objects which are
subjected to its contemplation. I do not see much difference
between avowing that there is no God, and implying that nothing
definite can be known for certain about Him."
What I mean by Theology, continues Newman, is none of these
things: "I simply mean the _Science of God_, or the truths we know
about God, put into a system, just as we have a science of the
stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call
it geology."
In both these extracts we have the issue clearly set before us: Feeling
valid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally.
The test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology based on pure reason
must in point of fact convince men universally. If it did not, wherein
would its superiority consist? If it only formed sects and schools, even
as sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its programme
of freeing us from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly
definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion
on universal reason simplifies my procedure to-day. I need not discredit
philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I
show that as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be
"objectively" convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not
banish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does. I
believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of
divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or
in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our
passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds
arguments for our conviction, for indeed it _has_ to find them. It
amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and
plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.(290)
-------------------------------------
Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older
systematic theology. You find them in both Protestant and Catholic
manuals, best of all in the innumerable text-books published since Pope
Leo's Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas. I glance first at
the arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes God's existence,
after that at those by which it establishes his nature.(291)
The arguments for God's existence have stood for hundreds of years with
the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally
discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and
surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God
already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are
atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The
"cosmological" one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the world
to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself
contains. The "argument from design" reasons, from the fact that Nature's
laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted to each other,
that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The "moral argument"
is that the moral law presupposes a lawgiver. The "argument _ex consensu
gentium_" is that the belief in God is so widespread as to be grounded in
the rational nature of man, and should therefore carry authority with it.
As I just said, I will not discuss these arguments technically. The bare
fact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or
to neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as
religion's all-sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would
be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed
too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of
theology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have
revolutionized it. Conceived as we now conceive them, as so many fortunate
escapes from almost limitless processes of destruction, the benevolent
adaptations which we find in Nature suggest a deity very different from
the one who figured in the earlier versions of the argument.(292)
The fact is that these arguments do but follow the combined suggestions of
the facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They only
corroborate our pre-existent partialities.
-------------------------------------
If philosophy can do so little to establish God's existence, how stands it
with her efforts to define his attributes? It is worth while to look at
the attempts of systematic theology in this direction.
Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says, he
differs from all his creatures in possessing existence _a se_.
From this "a-se-ity" on God's part, theology deduces by mere logic
most of his other perfections. For instance, he must be both
_necessary_ and _absolute_, cannot not be, and cannot in any way
be determined by anything else. This makes Him absolutely
unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for
limitation is non-being; and God is being itself. This
unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect. Moreover, God is
_One_, and _Only_, for the infinitely perfect can admit no peer.
He is _Spiritual_, for were He composed of physical parts, some
other power would have to combine them into the total, and his
aseity would thus be contradicted. He is therefore both simple and
non-physical in nature. He is _simple metaphysically_ also, that
is to say, his nature and his existence cannot be distinct, as
they are in finite substances which share their formal natures
with one another, and are individual only in their material
aspect. Since God is one and only, his _essentia_ and his _esse_
must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all
those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things,
between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being
and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it is true,
of God's powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations
are only "virtual," and made from the human point of view. In God
all these points of view fall into an absolute identity of being.
This absence of all potentiality in God obliges Him to be
_immutable_. He is actuality, through and through. Were there
anything potential about Him, He would either lose or gain by its
actualization, and either loss or gain would contradict his
perfection. He cannot, therefore, change. Furthermore, He is
_immense_, _boundless_; for could He be outlined in space, He
would be composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility.
He is therefore _omnipresent_, indivisibly there, at every point
of space. He is similarly wholly present at every point of
time,--in other words _eternal_. For if He began in time, He would
need a prior cause, and that would contradict his aseity. If He
ended, it would contradict his necessity. If He went through any
succession, it would contradict his immutability.
He has _intelligence_ and _will_ and every other creature-
perfection, for _we_ have them, and _effectus nequit superare
causam_. In Him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in
act, and their _object_, since God can be bounded by naught that
is external, can primarily be nothing else than God himself. He
knows himself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and wills
himself with an infinite self-pleasure.(293) Since He must of
logical necessity thus love and will himself, He cannot be called
"free" _ad intra_, with the freedom of contrarieties that
characterizes finite creatures. _Ad extra_, however, or with
respect to his creation, God is free. He cannot _need_ to create,
being perfect in being and in happiness already. He _wills_ to
create, then, by an absolute freedom.
Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and
freedom, God is a _person_; and a _living_ person also, for He is
both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this
distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely
_self-sufficient_: his _self-knowledge_ and _self-love_ are both
of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions
to perfect them.
He is _omniscient_, for in knowing himself as Cause He knows all
creature things and events by implication. His knowledge is
_previsive_, for He is present to all time. Even our free acts are
known beforehand to Him, for otherwise his wisdom would admit of
successive moments of enrichment, and this would contradict his
immutability. He is _omnipotent_ for everything that does not
involve logical contradiction. He can make _being_--in other words
his power includes _creation_. If what He creates were made of his
own substance, it would have to be infinite in essence, as that
substance is; but it is finite; so it must be non-divine in
substance. If it were made of a substance, an eternally existing
matter, for example, which God found there to his hand, and to
which He simply gave its form, that would contradict God's
definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of something
caused already. The things he creates, then, He creates _ex
nihilo_, and gives them absolute being as so many finite
substances additional to himself. The forms which he imprints upon
them have their prototypes in his ideas. But as in God there is no
such thing as multiplicity, and as these ideas for us are
manifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they are in God and the
way in which our minds externally imitate them. We must attribute
them to Him only in a _terminative_ sense, as differing aspects,
from the finite point of view, of his unique essence.
God of course is holy, good, and just. He can do no evil, for He
is positive being's fullness, and evil is negation. It is true
that He has created physical evil in places, but only as a means
of wider good, for _bonum totius præeminet bonum partis_. Moral
evil He cannot will, either as end or means, for that would
contradict his holiness. By creating free beings He _permits_ it
only, neither his justice nor his goodness obliging Him to prevent
the recipients of freedom from misusing the gift.
As regards God's purpose in creating, primarily it can only have
been to exercise his absolute freedom by the manifestation to
others of his glory. From this it follows that the others must be
rational beings, capable in the first place of knowledge, love,
and honor, and in the second place of happiness, for the knowledge
and love of God is the mainspring of felicity. In so far forth one
may say that God's secondary purpose in creating is _love_.
I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations
farther, into the mysteries of God's Trinity, for example. What I have
given will serve as a specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology of
both Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled with enthusiasm at God's
list of perfections, continues the passage which I began to quote to you
by a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly
refrain from adding them, in spite of the inroad they would make upon our
time.(294) He first enumerates God's attributes sonorously, then
celebrates his ownership of everything in earth and Heaven, and the
dependence of all that happens upon his permissive will. He gives us
scholastic philosophy "touched with emotion," and every philosophy should
be touched with emotion to be rightly understood. Emotionally, then,
dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of Newman's. It
will aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this point
I make a short digression.
-------------------------------------
What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The Continental
schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man's
thinking is organically connected with his conduct. It seems to me to be
the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic
connection in view. The guiding principle of British philosophy has in
fact been that every difference must _make_ a difference, every
theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that
the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining
what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other
being true. What is the particular truth in question _known as_? In what
facts does it result? What is its cash-value in terms of particular
experience? This is the characteristic English way of taking up a
question. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of
personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular
memories, says he. That is the only concretely verifiable part of its
significance. All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness
of the spiritual substance on which it is based, are therefore void of
intelligible meaning; and propositions touching such ideas may be
indifferently affirmed or denied. So Berkeley with his "matter." The cash-
value of matter is our physical sensations. That is what it is known as,
all that we concretely verify of its conception. That, therefore, is the
whole meaning of the term "matter"--any other pretended meaning is mere
wind of words. Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as
habitual antecedence, and as tendency on our part to look for something
definite to come. Apart from this practical meaning it has no significance
whatever, and books about it may be committed to the flames, says Hume.
Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, James Mill, John Mill, and Professor
Bain, have followed more or less consistently the same method; and
Shadworth Hodgson has used the principle with full explicitness. When all
is said and done, it was English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who
introduced "the critical method" into philosophy, the one method fitted to
make philosophy a study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can
possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make
an appreciable difference to us in action? And what could it matter, if
all propositions were practically indifferent, which of them we should
agree to call true or which false?
An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders
Peirce, has rendered thought a service by disentangling from the
particulars of its application the principle by which these men were
instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to
it a Greek name. He calls it the principle of _pragmatism_, and he defends
it somewhat as follows:(295)--
Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of
belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has
found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely
begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of
thinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If there were
any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought's practical
consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought's
significance. To develop a thought's meaning we need therefore only
determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its
sole significance; and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-
distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in
anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect
clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what
sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and
what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true. Our
conception of these practical consequences is for us the whole of our
conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive
significance at all.
This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. Such a
principle will help us on this occasion to decide, among the various
attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God's perfections,
whether some be not far less significant than others.
If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God's metaphysical
attributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral
attributes, I think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to
believe them, we still should have to confess them to be destitute of all
intelligible significance. Take God's aseity, for example; or his
necessariness; his immateriality; his "simplicity" or superiority to the
kind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite beings, his
indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity,
substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his
repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his
"personality," apart from the moral qualities which it may comport; his
relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self-sufficiency,
self-love, and absolute felicity in himself:--candidly speaking, how do
such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? And if
they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what
vital difference can it possibly make to a man's religion whether they be
true or false?
For my own part, although I dislike to say aught that may grate upon
tender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these
attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of the
smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should be
true. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the
better to God's simplicity? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior,
to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middle of
the century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out-of-
door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers
of living animals' habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the
"closet-naturalists," as he called them, the collectors and classifiers,
and handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to think
that a closet-naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun.
But surely the systematic theologians are the closet-naturalists of the
deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid's sense. What is their deduction of
metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic
dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs,
something that might be worked out from the mere word "God" by one of
those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has
contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of
the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians' hands, they are
only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms;
verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that
of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent.
Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our
knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to
flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from
this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract
definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something
different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these
things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of
vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so
many instances, renewing themselves _in sæcula sæculorum_ in the lives of
humble private men.
So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of
practical religion, the metaphysical monster which they offer to our
worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind.
-------------------------------------
What shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically, they
stand on an entirely different footing. They positively determine fear and
hope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life. It needs
but a glance at them to show how great is their significance.
God's holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing but the
good. Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph. Being omniscient, he
can see us in the dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he sees.
Being loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable, we can count on him
securely. These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is
highly important that we should be informed concerning them. That God's
purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an
attribute which has definite relations to our practical life. Among other
things it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian
countries. If dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a
God with characters like these exists, she may well claim to give a solid
basis to religious sentiment. But verily, how stands it with her
arguments?
It stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not
only do post-Kantian idealists reject them root and branch, but it is a
plain historic fact that they never have converted any one who has found
in the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced it, reasons for
doubting that a good God can have framed it. To prove God's goodness by
the scholastic argument that there is no non-being in his essence would
sound to such a witness simply silly.
No! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and
definitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to
the deity: "I will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by
the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee." An intellect
perplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence--such is the
situation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but
who remains religious still.(296)
We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good-by to dogmatic theology.
In all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant. Modern idealism,
I repeat, has said good-by to this theology forever. Can modern idealism
give faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self for
witness?
-------------------------------------
The basis of modern idealism is Kant's doctrine of the Transcendental Ego
of Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that
the consciousness "I think them" must (potentially or actually) accompany
all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the "I" in question
had remained for them identified with the personal individual. Kant
abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all
his categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental Ego had no
theological implications.
It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant's notion of
_Bewusstsein überhaupt_, or abstract consciousness, into an infinite
concrete self-consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in which
our sundry personal self-consciousnesses have their being. It would lead
me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation
was in point of fact effected. Suffice it to say that in the Hegelian
school, which to-day so deeply influences both British and American
thinking, two principles have borne the brunt of the operation.
The first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never
gives us more than a post-mortem dissection of _disjecta membra_, and that
the fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that
every object which our thought may propose to itself involves the notion
of some other object which seems at first to negate the first one.
The second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already
virtually to be beyond it. The mere asking of a question or expression of
a dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already
imminent; the finite, realized as such, is already the infinite _in
posse_.
Applying these principles, we seem to get a propulsive force into our
logic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark self-identity in each
thing never attains to. The objects of our thought now _act_ within our
thought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and
develop. They introduce something other than themselves along with them;
and this other, at first only ideal or potential, presently proves itself
also to be actual. It supersedes the thing at first supposed, and both
verifies and corrects it, in developing the fullness of its meaning.
The program is excellent; the universe _is_ a place where things are
followed by other things that both correct and fulfill them; and a logic
which gave us something like this movement of fact would express truth far
better than the traditional school-logic, which never gets of its own
accord from anything to anything else, and registers only predictions and
subsumptions, or static resemblances and differences. Nothing could be
more unlike the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic.
Let me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish
transcendentalist whom I have already named.
"How are we to conceive," Principal Caird writes, "of the reality
in which all intelligence rests?" He replies: "Two things may
without difficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an
absolute Spirit, and conversely that it is only in communion with
this absolute Spirit or Intelligence that the finite Spirit can
realize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest movement of human
intelligence would be arrested, if it did not presuppose the
absolute reality of intelligence, of thought itself. Doubt or
denial themselves presuppose and indirectly affirm it. When I
pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be
relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or to
the thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of
all individual minds as such I can abstract; I can think them
away. But that which I cannot think away is thought or self-
consciousness itself, in its independence and absoluteness, or, in
other words, an Absolute Thought or Self-Consciousness."
Here, you see, Principal Caird makes the transition which Kant did not
make: he converts the omnipresence of consciousness in general as a
condition of "truth" being anywhere possible, into an omnipresent
universal consciousness, which he identifies with God in his concreteness.
He next proceeds to use the principle that to acknowledge your limits is
in essence to be beyond them; and makes the transition to the religious
experience of individuals in the following words:--
"If [Man] were only a creature of transient sensations and
impulses, of an ever coming and going succession of intuitions,
fancies, feelings, then nothing could ever have for him the
character of objective truth or reality. But it is the prerogative
of man's spiritual nature that he can yield himself up to a
thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own. As a
thinking, self-conscious being, indeed, he may be said, by his
very nature, to live in the atmosphere of the Universal Life. As a
thinking being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my
consciousness every movement of self-assertion, every notion and
opinion that is merely mine, every desire that belongs to me as
this particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought
that is universal--in one word, to live no more my own life, but
let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and
Eternal life of spirit. And yet it is just in this renunciation of
self that I truly gain myself, or realize the highest
possibilities of my own nature. For whilst in one sense we give up
self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that
to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self.
The life of absolute reason is not a life that is foreign to us."
Nevertheless, Principal Caird goes on to say, so far as we are able
outwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it offers remains incomplete.
Whatever we may be _in posse_, the very best of us _in actu_ falls very
short of being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and self-
sacrifice even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves.
They do not quite identify it with the Infinite. Man's ideal destiny,
infinite in abstract logic, might thus seem in practice forever
unrealizable.
"Is there, then," our author continues, "no solution of the
contradiction between the ideal and the actual? We answer, There
is such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond
the sphere of morality into that of religion. It may be said to be
the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with
morality, that it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipation
into realization; that instead of leaving man in the interminable
pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of
a divine or infinite life. Whether we view religion from the human
side or the divine--as the surrender of the soul to God, or as the
life of God in the soul--in either aspect it is of its very essence
that the Infinite has ceased to be a far-off vision, and has
become a present reality. The very first pulsation of the
spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its significance, is the
indication that the division between the Spirit and its object has
vanished, that the ideal has become real, that the finite has
reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and life of
the Infinite.
"Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the
future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth
in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the
struggle. In that act which constitutes the beginning of the
religious life--call it faith, or trust, or self-surrender, or by
whatever name you will--there is involved the identification of the
finite with a life which is eternally realized. It is true indeed
that the religious life is progressive; but understood in the
light of the foregoing idea, religious progress is not progress
_towards_, but _within_ the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the
vain attempt by endless finite additions or increments to become
possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor, by the
constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that
infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession. The
whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but
it is given implicitly. The position of the man who has entered on
the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not
really belong to him: they are excrescences which have no organic
relation to his true nature: they are already virtually, as they
will be actually, suppressed and annulled, and in the very process
of being annulled they become the means of spiritual progress.
Though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict, [yet] in
that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the struggle is
over, the victory already achieved. It is not a finite but an
infinite life which the spirit lives. Every pulse-beat of its
[existence] is the expression and realization of the life of
God."(297)
You will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of the
religious consciousness could be better than these words of your lamented
preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture of those crises
of conversion of which we have been hearing; they utter what the mystic
felt but was unable to communicate; and the saint, in hearing them,
recognizes his own experience. It is indeed gratifying to find the content
of religion reported so unanimously. But when all is said and done, has
Principal Caird--and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of
thinking--transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of
the individual, and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason?
Has he made religion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from
a private faith into a public certainty? Has he rescued its affirmations
from obscurity and mystery?
I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply
reaffirmed the individual's experiences in a more generalized vocabulary.
And again, I can be excused from proving technically that the
transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can
point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously
disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. The whole of
Germany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelian argumentation.
As for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Fraser's and Professor
Pringle-Pattison's memorable criticisms, with which so many of you are
familiar.(298) Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as
objectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be, could it
possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive?
What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a fact of
experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it
and ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite
perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet, surely
abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are in need of.
Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret them; but
they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality.
There is always a _plus_, a _thisness_, which feeling alone can answer
for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function, unable to
warrant faith's veracity, and so I revert to the thesis which I announced
at the beginning of this lecture.
In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to
demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances
of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.
-------------------------------------
It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this
negative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she
_can_ do for religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for
criticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology into
science of religions, she can make herself enormously useful.
The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels
in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions.
Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from
these definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove
historic incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious
constructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also
eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or
incongruous.
Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum of
conceptions that at least are possible. With these she can deal as
_hypotheses_, testing them in all the manners, whether negative or
positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their
number, as some are found more open to objection. She can perhaps become
the champion of one which she picks out as being the most closely verified
or verifiable. She can refine upon the definition of this hypothesis,
distinguishing between what is innocent over-belief and symbolism in the
expression of it, and what is to be literally taken. As a result, she can
offer mediation between different believers, and help to bring about
consensus of opinion. She can do this the more successfully, the better
she discriminates the common and essential from the individual and local
elements of the religious beliefs which she compares.
I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not
eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a
physical science. Even the personally non-religious might accept its
conclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of
optics--it might appear as foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of
optics has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified
later, by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions
would depend for its original material on facts of personal experience,
and would have to square itself with personal experience through all its
critical reconstructions. It could never get away from concrete life, or
work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every
science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that
its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words, but truth
and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers
and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too
late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his
volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession
condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and
irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic
photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion,
the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas
are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.
In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of
religious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last
one, I will try my own hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which
it is a witness.
LECTURE XIX. OTHER CHARACTERISTICS.
We have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism and
philosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion, its uses to the
individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the
world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the
empirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though the
qualification "on the whole" may always have to be added. In this lecture
we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the
religious consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic
elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general
review and draw our independent conclusions.
The first point I will speak of is the part which the æsthetic life plays
in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago,
involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need
formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too
contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list
of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to
consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them(299) puts
us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral
service, he shows how high is their æsthetic value. It enriches our bare
piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it
enriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes
and stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our
devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may
sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like
Newman's(300) grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of
that of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols.
Among the buildings-out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges
in, the æsthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing
of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to
put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of
certain æsthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although
some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for
others _richness_ is the supreme imaginative requirement.(301) When one's
mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve
the purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional and
complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with
authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for
adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the
Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then
as if in presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture;
one hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific
vibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a noble
complexity, in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way to
jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is
insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place,
how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of
those isolated religious lives whose boast it is that "man in the bush
with God may meet."(302) What a pulverization and leveling of what a
gloriously piled-up structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives
of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse
for a palace.
It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient
empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one
gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the
gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up
with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it
may be, from a "home" upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a
Bible on its centre-table. It pauperizes the monarchical imagination!
The strength of these æsthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible,
it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual
profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in
making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter
offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many
cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its
multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to
Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to
the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the
antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance
are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they
are childish in the pleasing sense of "childlike"--innocent and amiable,
and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition
of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they
are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out
their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at
his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some
hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand
each other--their centres of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous
truth and human nature's intricacies are always in need of a mutual
interpreter.(303) So much for the æsthetic diversities in the religious
consciousness.
In most books on religion, three things are represented as its most
essential elements. These are Sacrifice, Confession, and Prayer. I must
say a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly. First of
Sacrifice.
Sacrifices to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship; but, as cults have
grown refined, burnt offerings and the blood of he-goats have been
superseded by sacrifices more spiritual in their nature. Judaism, Islam,
and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice; so does Christianity,
save in so far as the notion is preserved in transfigured form in the
mystery of Christ's atonement. These religions substitute offerings of the
heart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vain oblations. In
the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity
encourage we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some
sort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its
significance as symbolic of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is
taken strenuously, calls for.(304) But, as I said my say about those, and
as these lectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions
of derivation, I will pass from the subject of Sacrifice altogether and
turn to that of Confession.
-------------------------------------
In regard to Confession I will also be most brief, saying my word about it
psychologically, not historically. Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice,
it corresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part
of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one's
self in need of, in order to be in right relations to one's deity. For him
who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has
exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at
least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue--he lives
at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of
confession in Anglo-Saxon communities is a little hard to account for.
Reaction against popery is of course the historic explanation, for in
popery confession went with penances and absolution, and other
inadmissible practices. But on the side of the sinner himself it seems as
if the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of
its satisfaction. One would think that in more men the shell of secrecy
would have had to open, the pent-in abscess to burst and gain relief, even
though the ear that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic
church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricular
confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We
English-speaking Protestants, in the general self-reliance and
unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take God alone
into our confidence.(305)
-------------------------------------
The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer,--and this time it must be
less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especially
against prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As
regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to
stand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to
recovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a
normal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be
deleterious. The case of the weather is different. Notwithstanding the
recency of the opposite belief,(306) every one now knows that droughts and
storms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot
avert them. But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if
we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward
communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can
easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.
Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
"Religion," says a liberal French theologian, "is an intercourse, a
conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress with
the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which
its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized by prayer.
Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer
that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or
neighboring phenomena as purely moral or æsthetic sentiment. Religion is
nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save
itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act
is prayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere
repetition of certain sacred formulæ, but the very movement itself of the
soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious
power of which it feels the presence,--it may be even before it has a name
by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no
religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the
soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living
religion. One sees from this why 'natural religion,' so-called, is not
properly a religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in
mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no
interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom
this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of
rationalism, of critical investigations, it never was anything but an
abstraction. An artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner
hardly one of the characters proper to religion."(307)
It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of
M. Sabatier's contention. The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner
fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has
shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the
consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves
and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This
intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it
be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be
really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for
its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense
that _something is transacting_, is of course a feeling of what is
illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as
containing elements of delusion,--these undoubtedly everywhere exist,--but
as being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists
have always said it was. At most there might remain, when the direct
experiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential
belief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But
this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be to
persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators' part at
a play, whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem
ourselves to be actors, and not in a play, but in a very serious reality.
The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the
question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The
conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is
the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great
differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been
supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened man can
nowadays believe in. It may well prove that the sphere of influence in
prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is
only the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer's
effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion, in the vital sense
in which these lectures study it, must stand or fall by the persuasion
that effects of some sort genuinely do occur. Through prayer, religion
insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about:
energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and
operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of
facts.
This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late
Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it. It shows
how independent the prayer-instinct is of usual doctrinal complications.
Mr. Myers writes:--
"I am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have
rather strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the
facts. There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that
universe is in actual relation with the material. From the
spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the material;
the energy which makes the life of each individual spirit. Our
spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this energy, and
the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, much as the
vigor of our absorption of material nutriment changes from hour to
hour.
"I call these 'facts' because I think that some scheme of this
kind is the only one consistent with our actual evidence; too
complex to summarize here. How, then, should we _act_ on these
facts? Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life
as possible, and we must place our minds in any attitude which
experience shows to be favorable to such indrawal. _Prayer_ is the
general name for that attitude of open and earnest expectancy. If
we then ask to _whom_ to pray, the answer (strangely enough) must
be that _that_ does not much matter. The prayer is not indeed a
purely subjective thing;--it means a real increase in intensity of
absorption of spiritual power or grace;--but we do not know enough
of what takes place in the spiritual world to know how the prayer
operates;--_who_ is cognizant of it, or through what channel the
grace is given. Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any
rate the highest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge.
But it would be rash to say that Christ himself _hears us_; while
to say that _God_ hears us is merely to restate the first
principle,--that grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world."
Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that
power is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions,
if we have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confine itself to
the description of phenomena; and as a concrete example of an extreme
sort, of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take
a case with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Müller of
Bristol, who died in 1898. Müller's prayers were of the crassest
petitional order. Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible
promises in literal sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his
own worldly foresight, but by the Lord's hand. He had an extraordinarily
active and successful career, among the fruits of which were the
distribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text, in
different languages; the equipment of several hundred missionaries; the
circulation of more than a hundred and eleven million of scriptural books,
pamphlets, and tracts; the building of five large orphanages, and the
keeping and educating of thousands of orphans; finally, the establishment
of schools in which over a hundred and twenty-one thousand youthful and
adult pupils were taught. In the course of this work Mr. Müller received
and administered nearly a million and a half of pounds sterling, and
traveled over two hundred thousand miles of sea and land.(308) During the
sixty-eight years of his ministry, he never owned any property except his
clothes and furniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at the age of
eighty-six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds.
His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not
to acquaint other people with the details of his temporary
necessities. For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to
the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always
answered if one have trust enough. "When I lose such a thing as a
key," he writes, "I ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look
for an answer to my prayer; when a person with whom I have made an
appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I
begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to
hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do not
understand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the
Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct me,
and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time when, and
the manner how it should be; when I am going to minister in the
Word, I seek help from the Lord, and ... am not cast down, but of
good cheer because I look for his assistance."
Müller's custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week.
"As the Lord deals out to us by the day, ... the week's payment
might become due and we have no money to meet it; and thus those
with whom we deal might be inconvenienced by us, and we be found
acting against the commandment of the Lord: 'Owe no man anything.'
From this day and henceforward whilst the Lord gives to us our
supplies by the day, we purpose to pay at once for every article
as it is purchased, and never to buy anything except we can pay
for it at once, however much it may seem to be needed, and however
much those with whom we deal may wish to be paid only by the
week."
The articles needed of which Müller speaks were the food, fuel,
etc., of his orphanages. Somehow, near as they often come to going
without a meal, they hardly ever seem actually to have done so.
"Greater and more manifest nearness of the Lord's presence I have
never had than when after breakfast there were no means for dinner
for more than a hundred persons; or when after dinner there were
no means for the tea, and yet the Lord provided the tea; and all
this without one single human being having been informed about our
need.... Through Grace my mind is so fully assured of the
faithfulness of the Lord, that in the midst of the greatest need,
I am enabled in peace to go about my other work. Indeed, did not
the Lord give me this, which is the result of trusting in him, I
should scarcely be able to work at all; for it is now
comparatively a rare thing that a day comes when I am not in need
for one or another part of the work."(309)
In building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, Müller
affirms that his prime motive was "to have something to point to
as a visible proof that our God and Father is the same faithful
God that he ever was,--as willing as ever to prove himself the
living God, in our day as formerly, to all that put their trust in
him."(310) For this reason he refused to borrow money for any of
his enterprises. "How does it work when we thus anticipate God by
going our own way? We certainly weaken faith instead of increasing
it; and each time we work thus a deliverance of our own we find it
more and more difficult to trust in God, till at last we give way
entirely to our natural fallen reason and unbelief prevails. How
different if one is enabled to wait God's own time, and to look
alone to him for help and deliverance! When at last help comes,
after many seasons of prayer it may be, how sweet it is, and what
a present recompense! Dear Christian reader, if you have never
walked in this path of obedience before, do so now, and you will
then know experimentally the sweetness of the joy which results
from it."(311)
When the supplies came in but slowly, Müller always considered
that this was for the trial of his faith and patience. When his
faith and patience had been sufficiently tried, the Lord would
send more means. "And thus it has proved,"--I quote from his
diary,--"for to-day was given me the sum of 2050 pounds, of which
2000 are for the building fund [of a certain house], and 50 for
present necessities. It is impossible to describe my joy in God
when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor
surprised; for I _look out_ for answers to my prayers. _I believe
that God hears me._ Yet my heart was so full of joy that I could
only _sit_ before God, and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel vii.
At last I cast myself flat down upon my face and burst forth in
thanksgiving to God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for
his blessed service."(312)
George Müller's is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more
so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man's intellectual horizon.
His God was, as he often said, his business partner. He seems to have been
for Müller little more than a sort of supernatural clergyman interested in
the congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his saints,
and in the orphanages and other enterprises, but unpossessed of any of
those vaster and wilder and more ideal attributes with which the human
imagination elsewhere has invested him. Müller, in short, was absolutely
unphilosophical. His intensely private and practical conception of his
relations with the Deity continued the traditions of the most primitive
human thought.(313) When we compare a mind like his with such a mind as,
for example, Emerson's or Phillips Brooks's, we see the range which the
religions consciousness covers.
There is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional prayer.
The evangelical journals are filled with such answers, and books are
devoted to the subject,(314) but for us Müller's case will suffice.
-------------------------------------
A less sturdy beggar-like fashion of leading the prayerful life is
followed by innumerable other Christians. Persistence in leaning on the
Almighty for support and guidance will, such persons say, bring with it
proofs, palpable but much more subtle, of his presence and active
influence. The following description of a "led" life, by a German writer
whom I have already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians
in every country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One
finds in this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty,--
"That books and words (and sometimes people) come to one's
cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them; that
one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining
ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray, until
the peril is past--this being especially the case with temptations
to vanity and sensuality; that paths on which one ought not to
wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns; but that on the
other side great obstacles are suddenly removed; that when the
time has come for something, one suddenly receives a courage that
formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter that until then
was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents, yea, even pieces of
knowledge and insight, in one's self, of which it is impossible to
say whence they come; finally, that persons help us or decline to
help us, favor us or refuse us, as if they had to do so against
their will, so that often those indifferent or even unfriendly to
us yield us the greatest service and furtherance. (God takes often
their worldly goods, from those whom he leads, at just the right
moment, when they threaten to impede the effort after higher
interests.)
"Besides all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which
it is not easy to give account. There is no doubt whatever that
now one walks continually through 'open doors' and on the easiest
roads, with as little care and trouble as it is possible to
imagine.
"Furthermore one finds one's self settling one's affairs neither
too early nor too late, whereas they were wont to be spoiled by
untimeliness, even when the preparations had been well laid. In
addition to this, one does them with perfect tranquillity of mind,
almost as if they were matters of no consequence, like errands
done by us for another person, in which case we usually act more
calmly than when we act in our own concerns. Again, one finds that
one can _wait_ for everything patiently, and that is one of life's
great arts. One finds also that each thing comes duly, one thing
after the other, so that one gains time to make one's footing sure
before advancing farther. And then everything occurs to us at the
right moment, just what we ought to do, etc., and often in a very
striking way, just as if a third person were keeping watch over
those things which we are in easy danger of forgetting.
"Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer or
ask for what is needed, and what we should never have had the
courage or resolution to undertake of our own accord.
"Through all these experiences one finds that one is kindly and
tolerant of other people, even of such as are repulsive,
negligent, or ill-willed, for they also are instruments of good in
God's hand, and often most efficient ones. Without these thoughts
it would be hard for even the best of us always to keep our
equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine guidance, one
sees many a thing in life quite differently from what would
otherwise be possible.
"All these are things that every human being _knows_, who has had
experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could
be brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are
unable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of
its own accord."(315)
Such accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is, not that
particular events are tempered more towardly to us by a superintending
providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that by cultivating the
continuous sense of our connection with the power that made things as they
are, we are tempered more towardly for their reception. The outward face
of nature need not alter, but the expressions of meaning in it alter. It
was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on
a person without love, or upon the same person with love. In the latter
case intercourse springs into new vitality. So when one's affections keep
in touch with the divinity of the world's authorship, fear and egotism
fall away; and in the equanimity that follows, one finds in the hours, as
they succeed each other, a series of purely benignant opportunities. It is
as if all doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed. We meet a new
world when we meet the old world in the spirit which this kind of prayer
infuses.
Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.(316) It is that
of mind-curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the so-called "liberal"
Christians. As an expression of it, I will quote a page from one of
Martineau's sermons:--
"The universe, open to the eye to-day, looks as it did a thousand
years ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty
with which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and
gardens of the world. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we
cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the
margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the
day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret
grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and
solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should
discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the
moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of
greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed
us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far
spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God's hand
is, _there_ is miracle: and it is simply an indevoutness which
imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of
God. The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our
eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High
is never tired, than the strange things which he does not love
well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath
the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the
Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which
Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise. It is no outward change,
no shifting in time or place; but only the loving meditation of
the pure in heart, that can reawaken the Eternal from the sleep
within our souls: that can render him a reality again, and
reassert for him once more his ancient name of 'the Living
God.' "(317)
When we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read in
common matters superior expressions of meaning. The deadness with which
custom invests the familiar vanishes, and existence as a whole appears
transfigured. The state of a mind thus awakened from torpor is well
expressed in these words, which I take from a friend's letter:--
"If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and bounties
we are privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their number (so
great that we can imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time
even to begin to review the things we may imagine _we have not_).
We sum them and realize that _we are actually killed with God's
kindness_; that we are surrounded by bounties upon bounties,
without which all would fall. Should we not love it; should we not
feel buoyed up by the Eternal Arms?"
Sometimes this realization that facts are of divine sending, instead of
being habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience. Father Gratry gives
this instance from his youthful melancholy period:--
"One day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with
something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor
drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked
behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a holiday.
His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment at
least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for fault-
finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit,
better time or measure, more clearness or richness, than were in
this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction.
I was enchanted and consoled; the perfection of this wretched act
did me good. Good is at least possible, I said, since the ideal
can thus sometimes get embodied."(318)
In Sénancour's novel of Obermann a similar transient lifting of the veil
is recorded. In Paris streets, on a March day, he comes across a flower in
bloom, a jonquil:
"It was the strongest expression of desire: it was the first
perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man.
This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world,
arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so
instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of
relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless
beauty.... I shall never inclose in a conception this power, this
immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will
contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which,
it seems, nature has not made actual."(319)
We heard in previous lectures of the vivified face of the world as it may
appear to converts after their awakening.(320) As a rule, religious
persons generally assume that whatever natural facts connect themselves in
any way with their destiny are significant of the divine purposes with
them. Through prayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to
them, and if it be "trial," strength to endure the trial is given. Thus at
all stages of the prayerful life we find the persuasion that in the
process of communion energy from on high flows in to meet demand, and
becomes operative within the phenomenal world. So long as this
operativeness is admitted to be real, it makes no essential difference
whether its immediate effects be subjective or objective. The fundamental
religious point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, which otherwise would
slumber, does become active, and spiritual work of some kind is effected
really.
So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion. As
the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture.
-------------------------------------
The last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to touch upon
is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with
the subconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my
opening lecture(321) about the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament
in religious biography. You will in point of fact hardly find a religious
leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of automatisms. I
speak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose followers regard
automatic utterance and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration, I
speak of leaders of thought and subjects of intellectualized experience.
Saint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as
was the importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of Christian
saints and heresiarchs, including the greatest, the Bernards, the Loyolas,
the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, rapt
conditions, guiding impressions, and "openings." They had these things,
because they had exalted sensibility, and to such things persons of
exalted sensibility are liable. In such liability there lie, however,
consequences for theology. Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms
corroborate them. Incursions from beyond the transmarginal region have a
peculiar power to increase conviction. The inchoate sense of presence is
infinitely stronger than conception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom
equal to the evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear
their Saviour reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatisms, though
rarer, are, if possible, even more convincing than sensations. The
subjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their
will. The evidence is dynamic; the God or spirit moves the very organs of
their body.(322)
The great field for this sense of being the instrument of a higher power
is of course "inspiration." It is easy to discriminate between the
religious leaders who have been habitually subject to inspiration and
those who have not. In the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint
Paul (apart from his gift of tongues), of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of
Luther, of Wesley, automatic or semi-automatic composition appears to have
been only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets, on the contrary, in
Mohammed, in some of the Alexandrians, in many minor Catholic saints, in
Fox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to have been frequent,
sometimes habitual. We have distinct professions of being under the
direction of a foreign power, and serving as its mouthpiece. As regards
the Hebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an author who has made a
careful study of them, to see--
"How, one after another, the same features are reproduced in the
prophetic books. The process is always extremely different from
what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into
spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own genius. There
is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his finger, so
to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always comes in the
form of an overpowering force from without, against which he
struggles, but in vain. Listen, for instance, [to] the opening of
the book of Jeremiah. Read through in like manner the first two
chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel.
"It is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the
prophet passes through a crisis which is clearly not self-caused.
Scattered all through the prophetic writings are expressions which
speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the
prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time,
constraining his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a
higher meaning than their own. For instance, this of Isaiah's:
'The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand,'--an emphatic phrase
which denotes the overmastering nature of the impulse,--'and
instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people.'
... Or passages like this from Ezekiel: 'The hand of the Lord God
fell upon me,' 'The hand of the Lord was strong upon me.' The one
standing characteristic of the prophet is that he speaks with the
authority of Jehovah himself. Hence it is that the prophets one
and all preface their addresses so confidently, 'The Word of the
Lord,' or 'Thus saith the Lord.' They have even the audacity to
speak in the first person, as if Jehovah himself were speaking. As
in Isaiah: 'Hearken unto me, O Jacob, and Israel my called; I am
He, I am the First, I also am the last,'--and so on. The
personality of the prophet sinks entirely into the background; he
feels himself for the time being the mouthpiece of the
Almighty."(323)
"We need to remember that prophecy was a profession, and that the
prophets formed a professional class. There were schools of the
prophets, in which the gift was regularly cultivated. A group of
young men would gather round some commanding figure--a Samuel or an
Elisha--and would not only record or spread the knowledge of his
sayings and doings, but seek to catch themselves something of his
inspiration. It seems that music played its part in their
exercises.... It is perfectly clear that by no means all of these
Sons of the prophets ever succeeded in acquiring more than a very
small share in the gift which they sought. It was clearly possible
to 'counterfeit' prophecy. Sometimes this was done
deliberately.... But it by no means follows that in all cases
where a false message was given, the giver of it was altogether
conscious of what he was doing."(324)
Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of Alexandria
describes his inspiration:--
"Sometimes, when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly
become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me,
and implanted in me from on high; so that through the influence of
divine inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have known
neither the place in which I was, nor those who were present, nor
myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was writing; for then I
have been conscious of a richness of interpretation, an enjoyment
of light, a most penetrating insight, a most manifest energy in
all that was to be done; having such effect on my mind as the
clearest ocular demonstration would have on the eyes."(325)
If we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed's revelations all came from the
subconscious sphere. To the question in what way he got them,--
"Mohammed is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a knell
as from a bell, and that this had the strongest effect on him; and
when the angel went away, he had received the revelation.
Sometimes again he held converse with the angel as with a man, so
as easily to understand his words. The later authorities, however,
... distinguish still other kinds. In the Itgân (103) the
following are enumerated: 1, revelations with sound of bell, 2, by
inspiration of the holy spirit in M.'s heart, 3, by Gabriel in
human form, 4, by God immediately, either when awake (as in his
journey to heaven) or in dream.... In Almawâhib alladunîya the
kinds are thus given: 1, Dream, 2, Inspiration of Gabriel in the
Prophet's heart, 3, Gabriel taking Dahya's form, 4, with the bell-
sound, etc., 5, Gabriel in propriâ personâ (only twice), 6,
revelation in heaven, 7, God appearing in person, but veiled, 8,
God revealing himself immediately without veil. Others add two
other stages, namely: 1, Gabriel in the form of still another man,
2, God showing himself personally in dream."(326)
In none of these cases is the revelation distinctly motor. In the case of
Joseph Smith (who had prophetic revelations innumerable in addition to the
revealed translation of the gold plates which resulted in the Book of
Mormon), although there may have been a motor element, the inspiration
seems to have been predominantly sensorial. He began his translation by
the aid of the "peep-stones" which he found, or thought or said that he
found, with the gold plates,--apparently a case of "crystal gazing." For
some of the other revelations he used the peep-stones, but seems generally
to have asked the Lord for more direct instruction.(327)
Other revelations are described as "openings"--Fox's, for example, were
evidently of the kind known in spiritistic circles of to-day as
"impressions." As all effective initiators of change must needs live to
some degree upon this psychopathic level of sudden perception or
conviction of new truth, or of impulse to action so obsessive that it must
be worked off, I will say nothing more about so very common a phenomenon.
When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration, we take religious
mysticism into the account, when we recall the striking and sudden
unifications of a discordant self which we saw in conversion, and when we
review the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity, and self-severity
met with in saintliness, we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in
religion we have a department of human nature with unusually close
relations to the trans-marginal or subliminal region. If the word
"subliminal" is offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychical
research or other aberrations, call it by any other name you please, to
distinguish it from the level of full sunlit consciousness. Call this
latter the A-region of personality, if you care to, and call the other the
B-region. The B-region, then, is obviously the larger part of each of us,
for it is the abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of
everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example,
such things as all our momentarily inactive memories, and it harbors the
springs of all our obscurely motived passions, impulses, likes, dislikes,
and prejudices. Our intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions,
persuasions, convictions, and in general all our non-rational operations,
come from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may
return to it. In it arise whatever mystical experiences we may have, and
our automatisms, sensory or motor; our life in hypnotic and "hypnoid"
conditions, if we are subjects to such conditions; our delusions, fixed
ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; our supra-
normal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It
is also the fountain-head of much that feeds our religion. In persons deep
in the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen,--and this is my
conclusion,--the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any
rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had
emphatic influence in shaping religious history.
With this conclusion I turn back and close the circle which I opened in my
first lecture, terminating thus the review which I then announced of inner
religious phenomena as we find them in developed and articulate human
individuals. I might easily, if the time allowed, multiply both my
documents and my discriminations, but a broad treatment is, I believe, in
itself better, and the most important characteristics of the subject lie,
I think, before us already. In the next lecture, which is also the last
one, we must try to draw the critical conclusions which so much material
may suggest.
LECTURE XX. CONCLUSIONS.
The material of our study of human nature is now spread before us; and in
this parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw our
theoretical and practical conclusions. In my first lecture, defending the
empirical method, I foretold that whatever conclusions we might come to
could be reached by spiritual judgments only, appreciations of the
significance for life of religion, taken "on the whole." Our conclusions
cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions would be, but I will formulate
them, when the time comes, as sharply as I can.
Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the
religious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs:--
1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which
it draws its chief significance;
2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true
end;
3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof--be that spirit
"God" or "law"--is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual
energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within
the phenomenal world.
Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics:--
4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form
either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism.
5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to
others, a preponderance of loving affections.
In illustrating these characteristics by documents, we have been literally
bathed in sentiment. In re-reading my manuscript, I am almost appalled at
the amount of emotionality which I find in it. After so much of this, we
can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the work that
lies before us.
The sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence of the fact
that I sought them among the extravagances of the subject. If any of you
are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are,
nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt my
selection to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might
have stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer
examples as yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets of
any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be
eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine what they
tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment
independently. Even so with religion. We who have pursued such radical
expressions of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as
authentically as any one can know them who learns them from another; and
we have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical question:
what are the dangers in this element of life? and in what proportion may
it need to be restrained by other elements, to give the proper balance?
-------------------------------------
But this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately and
get it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us.(328)
Ought it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other
elements should be identical? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the
lives of all men should show identical religious elements? In other words,
is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds
regrettable?
To these questions I answer "No" emphatically. And my reason is that I do
not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and
with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly
the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical
difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions.
Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of
fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us
must soften himself, another must harden himself; one must yield a point,
another must stand firm,--in order the better to defend the position
assigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced
to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer.
The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities,
by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find
worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's total
message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. So
a "god of battles" must be allowed to be the god for one kind of person, a
god of peace and heaven and home, the god for another. We must frankly
recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not
interchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous,
destruction of the self must be an element of our religion; why need it be
one if we are good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls,
we require a religion of deliverance; but why think so much of
deliverance, if we are healthy-minded?(329) Unquestionably, some men have
the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the
social world; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whate'er it
be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best.
-------------------------------------
But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if we should
all espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In answering
this question I must open again the general relations of the theoretic to
the active life.
Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al-
Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism,--that to understand the
causes of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be
drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and
elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified,
by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be
considered true; and yet the best man at this science might be the man who
found it hardest to be personally devout. _Tout savoir c'est tout
pardonner._ The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many persons as an
example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a
dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one's living
faith.(330) If religion be a function by which either God's cause or man's
cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however
narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however
much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place
in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
For this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent for
living religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a
science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic
attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by
active faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions
constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all the
necessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence the
same conclusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced. Suppose that
she agrees that religion, wherever it is an active thing, involves a
belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerful communion
with them,(331) work is done, and something real comes to pass. She has
now to exert her critical activity, and to decide how far, in the light of
other sciences and in that of general philosophy, such beliefs can be
considered _true_.
Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not only are the other
sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, but in their
present state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know
nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical
commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which general
philosophy inclines. The scientist, so-called, is, during his scientific
hours at least, so materialistic that one may well say that on the whole
the influence of science goes against the notion that religion should be
recognized at all. And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within the
very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this science has to
become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a
presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious
probably is false. In the "prayerful communion" of savages with such
mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what
genuine spiritual work--even though it were work relative only to their
dark savage obligations--can possibly be done.
The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as
likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the
essence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air about us that
religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of "survival," an
atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its more
enlightened examples has outgrown; and this notion our religious
anthropologists at present do little to counteract.
This view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it with
some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the
"Survival theory," for brevity's sake.
The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves,
is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny.
Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human
egotism. The gods believed in--whether by crude savages or by men
disciplined intellectually--agree with each other in recognizing personal
calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this
being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite
as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that
the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.
Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal
point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws
indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs
her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates.
Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist
in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that
for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament
showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now
as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the
heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds
where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will
count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of
chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies
to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the
present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of
the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular
scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing,
achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one
distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a
sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now
follows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology
which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite
grotesque,(332) representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest
things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom
science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who
does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his
processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which
coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of
the wind and water. Our private selves are like those
bubbles,--epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them;
their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world's
irremediable currents of events.
You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat religion as a
mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the
most primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them
and get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, the one
great object in our dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors,
dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bull stories were
inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date such
distinctions as those between what has been verified and what is only
conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects of existence,
were hardly suspected or conceived. Whatever you imagined in a lively
manner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and
whatever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet
been contradicted, most things were taken into the mind from the point of
view of their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself
exclusively to the æsthetic and dramatic aspects of events.(333)
How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, for explanation
and prevision, of those mathematical and mechanical modes of conception
which science uses, was a result that could not possibly have been
expected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction, position, what
thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the richer animistic aspects
of Nature, the peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena
picturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first singled out
and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge
of Nature's life? Well, it is still in these richer animistic and dramatic
aspects that religion delights to dwell. It is the terror and beauty of
phenomena, the "promise" of the dawn and of the rainbow, the "voice" of
the thunder, the "gentleness" of the summer rain, the "sublimity" of the
stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the
religious mind still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore,
the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields
he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in reply
to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with
security and peace.
Pure anachronism! says the survival-theory;--anachronism for which
deanthropomorphization of the imagination is the remedy required. The less
we mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell in universal and
impersonal terms, the truer heirs of Science we become.
In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific attitude
makes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it to be shallow, and
I can now state my reason in comparatively few words. That reason is that,
so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the
symbols of reality, but _as soon as we deal with private and personal
phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the
term_. I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.
-------------------------------------
The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an
objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably
more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or
suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given
time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner "state" in
which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous,--the
cosmic times and spaces, for example,--whereas the inner state may be the
most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far
as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose
existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while
the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our
experience are one. A conscious field _plus_ its object as felt or thought
of _plus_ an attitude towards the object _plus_ the sense of a self to
whom the attitude belongs--such a concrete bit of personal experience may
be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not
a mere abstract element of experience, such as the "object" is when taken
all alone. It is a _full_ fact, even though it be an insignificant fact;
it is of the _kind_ to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the
motor currents of the world run through the like of it; it is on the line
connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling which
each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately
feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism,
may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up
the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that
should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality
only half made up.(334)
If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic
elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs
solely through the egotistic places,--they are strung upon it like so many
beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the
individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out
from the description--they being as describable as anything else--would be
something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a
solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual's religion may
be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may
be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow
and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on
taking no account of anything private at all.
A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word "raisin,"
with one real egg instead of the word "egg," might be an inadequate meal,
but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of the
survival-theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements
exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with
reading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however
particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be
answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and
living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become
profound. But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly
repudiate the survival-theory of religion, as being founded on an
egregious mistake. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many
errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should
therefore leave off being religious at all.(335) By being religious we
establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points
at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our
private destiny, after all.
You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures,
and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in
religion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded
in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of
character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in
the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is
actually done.(336) Compared with this world of living individualized
feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect
contemplates is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or
kinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension,
the movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture
of an express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I
have heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?(337)
Let us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herself with personal
destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities
which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history. The
next thing to decide is what she reveals about those destinies, or whether
indeed she reveals anything distinct enough to be considered a general
message to mankind. We have done as you see, with our preliminaries, and
our final summing up can now begin.
I am well aware that after all the palpitating documents which I have
quoted, and all the perspectives of emotion-inspiring institution and
belief that my previous lectures have opened, the dry analysis to which I
now advance may appear to many of you like an anti-climax, a tapering-off
and flattening out of the subject, instead of a crescendo of interest and
result. I said awhile ago that the religious attitude of Protestants
appears poverty-stricken to the Catholic imagination. Still more poverty-
stricken, I fear, may my final summing up of the subject appear at first
to some of you. On which account I pray you now to bear this point in
mind, that in the present part of it I am expressly trying to reduce
religion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free from
individualistic excrescences, which all religions contain as their
nucleus, and on which it may be hoped that all religious persons may
agree. That established, we should have a result which might be small, but
would at least be solid; and on it and round it the ruddier additional
beliefs on which the different individuals make their venture might be
grafted, and flourish as richly as you please. I shall add my own over-
belief (which will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a
critical philosopher), and you will, I hope, also add your over-beliefs,
and we shall soon be in the varied world of concrete religious
constructions once more. For the moment, let me dryly pursue the analytic
part of the task.
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct
may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the
whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have
prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the
other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist
saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories
which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you
wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct
as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that
the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business,
while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which
may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united
into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs
with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life
to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to
draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.
The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychological order
do they belong?
The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls a "sthenic"
affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, "dynamogenic" order
which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture,
but especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we have
seen how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts
endurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and
glory to the common objects of life.(338) The name of "faith-state," by
which Professor Leuba designates it, is a good one.(339) It is a
biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely
accurate in classing faith among the forces _by which men live_.(340) The
total absence of it, anhedonia,(341) means collapse.
The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content. We saw
examples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine presence, or in
such mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described.(342) It may be a mere vague
enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that
great and wondrous things are in the air.(343)
When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith-
state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief,(344) and this explains
the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest
details of their so widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith-state
together, as forming "religions," and treating these as purely subjective
phenomena, without regard to the question of their "truth," we are
obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and
endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions
of mankind. Their stimulant and anæsthetic effect is so great that
Professor Leuba, in a recent article,(345) goes so far as to say that so
long as men can _use_ their God, they care very little who he is, or even
whether he is at all. "The truth of the matter can be put," says Leuba,
"in this way: _God is not known, he is not understood; he is
used_--sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as
friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the
religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist?
How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God,
but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the
last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every
level of development, is the religious impulse."(346)
At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be considered
vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem
that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a
permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content,
and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.
-------------------------------------
We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility,
and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself.
First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common
nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously?
And second, ought we to consider the testimony true?
I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the
affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do
indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in
which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts:--
1. An uneasiness; and
2. Its solution.
1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is
_something wrong about us_ as we naturally stand.
2. The solution is a sense that _we are saved from the wrongness_ by
making proper connection with the higher powers.
In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness
takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think
we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds
if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like
these:--
The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it,
is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch
with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part
there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most
helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no
means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or
salvation) arrives,(347) the man identifies his real being with the
germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. _He
becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous
with a _MORE_ of the same quality, which is operative in the universe
outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a
fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone
to pieces in the wreck._
It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in these
very simple general terms.(348) They allow for the divided self and the
struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of
the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping
power and yet account for our sense of union with it;(349) and they fully
justify our feelings of security and joy. There is probably no
autobiographic document, among all those which I have quoted, to which the
description will not well apply. One need only add such specific details
as will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments,
and one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their
individual forms.
So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only
psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological
worth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has
them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux
where the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but
his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite of
the effects produced. I now turn to my second question: What is the
objective "truth" of their content?(350)
The part of the content concerning which the question of truth most
pertinently arises is that "MORE of the same quality" with which our own
higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working
relation. Is such a "more" merely our own notion, or does it really exist?
If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And in
what form should we conceive of that "union" with it of which religious
geniuses are so convinced?
It is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform
their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light. They
all agree that the "more" really exists; though some of them hold it to
exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied
to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal
structure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as
exists, and that something really is effected for the better when you
throw your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experience of
"union" with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly.
Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and
grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism,
carry on inveterate disputes.
At the end of my lecture on Philosophy(351) I held out the notion that an
impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their
discrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate in
terms to which physical science need not object. This, I said, she might
adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general
belief. I also said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own
hand at framing such an hypothesis.
The time has now come for this attempt. Who says "hypothesis" renounces
the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is,
accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your
scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse
to welcome it as true.
-------------------------------------
The "more," as we called it, and the meaning of our "union" with it, form
the nucleus of our inquiry. Into what definite description can these words
be translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never
do for us to place ourselves offhand at the position of a particular
theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to
define the "more" as Jehovah, and the "union" as his imputation to us of
the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and,
from our present standpoint at least, would be an over-belief.
We must begin by using less particularized terms; and, since one of the
duties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with
the rest of science, we shall do well to seek first of all a way of
describing the "more," which psychologists may also recognize as real. The
_subconscious self_ is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity;
and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required.
Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally
more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The
exploration of the transmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously
undertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal
Consciousness(352) is as true as when it was first written: "Each of us is
in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows--an
individuality which can never express itself completely through any
corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but
there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it
seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve."(353) Much
of the content of this larger background against which our conscious being
stands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jingles,
inhibitive timidities, "dissolutive" phenomena of various sorts, as Myers
calls them, enter into it for a large part. But in it many of the
performances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study of
conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how
striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life.
Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its
_farther_ side, the "more" with which in religious experience we feel
ourselves connected is on its _hither_ side the subconscious continuation
of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact
as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with "science" which the
ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian's contention
that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it
is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to
take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external
control. In the religious life the control is felt as "higher"; but since
on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden
mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is
a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true.
This doorway into the subject seems to me the best one for a science of
religions, for it mediates between a number of different points of view.
Yet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves as soon as
we step through it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness
carries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs
begin: here mysticism and the conversion-rapture and Vedantism and
transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations(354) and
tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always
one with God and identical with the soul of the world.(355) Here the
prophets of all the different religions come with their visions, voices,
raptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenticate his own
peculiar faith.
Those of us who are not personally favored with such specific revelations
must stand outside of them altogether and, for the present at least,
decide that, since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines,
they neutralize one another and leave no fixed result. If we follow any
one of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and embrace monistic
pantheism on non-mystical grounds, we do so in the exercise of our
individual freedom, and build out our religion in the way most congruous
with our personal susceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities
intellectual ones play a decisive part. Although the religious question is
primarily a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union
which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiritual excitement in which
the gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in an individual
until certain particular intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say,
come home to him, are touched.(356) These ideas will thus be essential to
that individual's religion;--which is as much as to say that over-beliefs
in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should
treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not
intolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting
and valuable things about a man are usually his over-beliefs.
Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common
and generic, we have in _the fact that the conscious person is continuous
with a wider self through which saving experiences come_,(357) a positive
content of religious experience which, it seems to me, _is literally and
objectively true as far as it goes_. If I now proceed to state my own
hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality,
I shall be offering my own over-belief--though I know it will appear a
sorry under-belief to some of you--for which I can only bespeak the same
indulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours.
-------------------------------------
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether
other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely "understandable"
world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever
you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and
most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way
for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more
intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we
belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the
unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in
this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite
personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way
of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.(358)
But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a
reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling
the unseen or mystical world unreal.
God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the
supreme reality, so I will call this higher part of the universe by the
name of God.(359) We and God have business with each other; and in opening
ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe,
at those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn
genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us
fulfills or evades God's demands. As far as this goes I probably have you
with me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call the
instinctive belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects.
The real effects in question, so far as I have as yet admitted them, are
exerted on the personal centres of energy of the various subjects, but the
spontaneous faith of most of the subjects is that they embrace a wider
sphere than this. Most religious men believe (or "know," if they be
mystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of beings
to whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is a
sense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are _all_ saved, in spite
of the gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God's
existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently
preserved. This world may indeed, as science assures us, some day burn up
or freeze; but if it is part of his order, the old ideals are sure to be
brought elsewhere to fruition, so that where God is, tragedy is only
provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the
absolutely final things. Only when this farther step of faith concerning
God is taken, and remote objective consequences are predicted, does
religion, as it seems to me, get wholly free from the first immediate
subjective experience, and bring a _real hypothesis_ into play. A good
hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the
phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not
prolific enough. God, meaning only what enters into the religious man's
experience of union, falls short of being an hypothesis of this more
useful order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to
justify the subject's absolute confidence and peace.
That the God with whom, starting from the hither side of our own extra-
marginal self, we come at its remoter margin into commerce should be the
absolute world-ruler, is of course a very considerable over-belief. Over-
belief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one's religion.
Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the
philosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to
say that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere
illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like
love, which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that, as we have
seen abundantly. But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new
_facts_ as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the
materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have,
over and above the altered expression, _a natural constitution_ different
at some point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be
such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must
be required.
This thoroughly "pragmatic" view of religion has usually been taken as a
matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles
into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave.
It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding
any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling
it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it
stands.
I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It
gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must
claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more
characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of
energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But the over-
belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist.
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our
present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that
exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a
meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences
and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at
certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my
poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and
true. I _can_, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's
attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of
scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear
that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the
word "bosh!" Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name,
and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively,
invincibly urges me beyond the narrow "scientific" bounds. Assuredly, the
real world is of a different temperament,--more intricately built than
physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both
hold me to the over-belief which I express. Who knows whether the
faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may
not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own
greater tasks?
POSTSCRIPT.
In writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much at simplification
that I fear that my general philosophic position received so scant a
statement as hardly to be intelligible to some of my readers. I therefore
add this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy but
little the defect. In a later work I may be enabled to state my position
more amply and consequently more clearly.
Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the
attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature
long ago, and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a
familiar head. If one should make a division of all thinkers into
naturalists and supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to go, along
with most philosophers, into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a
crasser and a more refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined
division that most philosophers at the present day belong. If not regular
transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough
to bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of
phenomenal events. Refined supernaturalism is universalistic
supernaturalism; for the "crasser" variety "piecemeal" supernaturalism
would perhaps be the better name. It went with that older theology which
to-day is supposed to reign only among uneducated people, or to be found
among the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant is thought to
have displaced. It admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no
intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together
by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that
causally determine the real world's details. In this the refined
supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence.
For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never
bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world,
for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is
a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different "-ology,"
and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which
existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of
experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of
nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in
response to prayer, are bound to think it must.
Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or
scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the
Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here
below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the
piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it
seems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physical
science at their face-value, and leaves the laws of life just as
naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are
bad. It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments
which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the
existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of
taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to
evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to
believe that principles can exist which make no difference in facts.(360)
But all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the question
of God's existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars
which that existence may be expected to entail. That no concrete
particular of experience should alter its complexion in consequence of a
God being there seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the
thesis to which (implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to
cling. It is only with experience _en bloc_, it says, that the Absolute
maintains relations. It condescends to no transactions of detail.
I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order
the better to describe my general point of view; but as I apprehend the
Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that. All
supernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law;
but for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally so far as
it remains unweakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics, the word
"judgment" here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic
appreciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it
carries, on the contrary, _execution_ with it, is _in __ rebus_ as well as
_post rem_, and operates "causally" as partial factor in the total fact.
The universe becomes a gnosticism(361) pure and simple on any other terms.
But this view that judgment and execution go together is that of the
crasser supernaturalist way of thinking, so the present volume must on the
whole be classed with the other expressions of that creed.
I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought in
academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his
back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and
locked. In spite of its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual
tastes, I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism
and a complete discussion of all its metaphysical bearings will show it to
be the hypothesis by which the largest number of legitimate requirements
are met. That of course would be a program for other books than this; what
I now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic reader the place where
I belong.
If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God's
existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no
hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of "prayerful communion,"
especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region
take part in it, immediately suggests. The appearance is that in this
phenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in
another sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our
centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable
in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our
every-day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are
intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness
of the "subliminal" door, we have the elements of a theory to which the
phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the
importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so
naturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it would seem as
though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects
within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs.
The difference in natural "fact" which most of us would assign as the
first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I
imagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the great
majority of our own race _means_ immortality, and nothing else. God is the
producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written
down as an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing in my
lectures about immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a
secondary point. If our ideals are only cared for in "eternity," I do not
see why we might not be willing to resign their care to other hands than
ours. Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves,
and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them
noble, I know not how to decide. It seems to me that it is eminently a
case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove
"spirit-return," though I have the highest respect for the patient labors
of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their
favorable conclusions. I consequently leave the matter open, with this
brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why
immortality got no mention in the body of this book.
The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the "God" of
ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with
certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on
philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of
course to be "one and only" and to be "infinite"; and the notion of many
finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider,
and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual
clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have
studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist
belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can
experience union with _something_ larger than ourselves and in that union
find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and
mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both "pass to the limit" and
identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of
the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the
example which they set.
Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me
sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion
continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him
and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be
both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do,
if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be
infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a
larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but
the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a
collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no
absolute unity realized in it at all.(362) Thus would a sort of polytheism
return upon us--a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my
only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience
clearly within its proper bounds. [Compare p. 132 above.]
Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by
the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so
still to-day) that unless there be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of
security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only,
_all_ is saved. If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some
portion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our
religious consolation would thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what
was said on pages 131-133, about the possibility of there being portions
of the universe that may irretrievably be lost. Common sense is less
sweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be,
and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly
lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the
world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part.
Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when
taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details.
Some men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved
remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that
their cause will prevail--all of us are willing, whenever our activity-
excitement rises sufficiently high. I think, in fact, that a final
philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis
more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it. For
practical life at any rate, the _chance_ of salvation is enough. No fact
in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a
chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney
says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of
which the keynote is hope.(363) But all these statements are
unsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to
return to the same questions in another book.
INDEX.
Absolute, oneness with the, 419.
Abstractness of religious objects, 53.
ACHILLES, 86.
ACKERMANN, MADAME, 63.
Adaptation to environment, of things, 438;
of saints, 374-377.
Æsthetic elements in religions, 460.
Alacoque, 310, 344, 413.
Alcohol, 387.
AL-GHAZZALI, 402.
ALI, 341.
ALLEINE, 228.
ALLINE, 159, 217.
Alternations of personality, 193.
ALVAREZ DE PAZ, 116.
AMIEL, 394.
Anæsthesia, 288.
Anæsthetic revelation, 387-393.
ANGELUS SILESIUS, 417.
Anger, 181, 264.
"Anhedonia," 145.
Aristocratic type, 371.
ARISTOTLE, 495.
Ars, le Curé d', 302.
Asceticism, 273, 296-310, 360-365.
Aseity, God's, 439, 445.
Atman, 400.
Attributes of God, 440;
their æsthetic use, 458.
AUGUSTINE, SAINT, 171, 361, 496.
AURELIUS, see MARCUS.
Automatic writing, 62, 478.
Automatisms, 234, 250, 478-483.
BALDWIN, 347, 503.
BASHKIRTSEFF, 83.
BEECHER, 256.
BEHMEN, see BOEHME.
Belief, due to non-rationalistic impulses, 73.
BESANT, MRS., 23, 168.
Bhagavad-Gita, 361.
BLAVATSKY, MADAM, 421.
BLOOD, 389.
BLUMHARDT, 113.
BOEHME, 410, 417, 418.
BOOTH, 203.
BOUGAUD, 344.
BOURGET, 263.
BOURIGNON, 321.
BOWNE, 502.
BRAINERD, 212, 253.
BRAY, 249, 256, 290.
BROOKS, 512.
BROWNELL, 515.
BUCKE, 398.
Buddhism, 31, 34, 522.
Buddhist mysticism, 401.
BULLEN, 287.
BUNYAN, 157, 160.
BUTTERWORTH, 411.
CAIRD, EDWARD, 106.
CAIRD, J., on feeling in religion, 434;
on absolute self, 450;
he does not prove, but reaffirms, religion's dicta, 453.
CALL, 289.
CARLYLE, 41, 300.
CARPENTER, 319.
Catharine, Saint, of Genoa, 289.
Catholicism and Protestantism compared, 114, 227, 336, 461.
Causality of God, 517, 522.
Cause, 502.
CENNICK, 301.
Centres of personal energy, 196, 267, 523.
Cerebration, unconscious, 207.
Chance, 526.
CHANNING, 300, 488.
CHAPMAN, 324.
Character, cause of its alterations, 193;
scheme of its differences of type, 197, 214.
Causes of its diversity, 261;
balance of, 340.
Charity, 274, 278, 310, 355.
Chastity, 310.
Chiefs of tribes, 371.
Christian Science, 106.
Christ's atonement, 129, 245.
Churches, 335, 460.
CLARK, 389.
CLISSOLD, 481.
COE, 240.
Conduct, perfect, 355.
Confession, 462.
Consciousness, fields of, 231;
subliminal, 233.
Consistency, 296.
Conversion, to avarice, 178.
Conversion, Fletcher's, 181;
Tolstoy's, 184;
Bunyan's, 186;
in general, Lectures IX and X, passim;
Bradley's, 189;
compared with natural moral growth, 199;
Hadley's, 201;
two types of, 205 ff.;
Brainerd's, 212;
Alline's, 217;
Oxford graduate's, 221;
Ratisbonne's, 223;
instantaneous, 227;
is it a natural phenomenon? 230;
subliminal action involved, in sudden cases, 236, 240;
fruits of, 237;
its momentousness, 239;
may be supernatural, 242;
its concomitants:
sense of higher control, 244,
happiness, 248,
automatisms, 250,
luminous phenomena, 251;
its degree of permanence, 256.
Cosmic consciousness, 398.
Counter-conversion, 176.
Courage, 265, 287.
Crankiness, see Psychopathy.
CRICHTON-BROWNE, 384, 386.
Criminal character, 263.
Criteria of value of spiritual affections, 18.
CRUMP, 239.
Cure of bad habits, 270.
DAUDET, 167.
Death, 139, 364.
DERHAM, 493.
Design, argument from, 438, 492 ff.
Devoutness, 340.
DIONYSIUS AREOPAGITICUS, 416.
Disease, 99, 113.
Disorder in contents of world, 438.
Divided Self, Lecture VIII, passim;
Cases of:
Saint Augustine, 172,
H. Alline, 173.
Divine, the, 31.
Dog, 281.
Dogmatism, 326, 333.
DOWIE, 113.
DRESSER, H. W., 96, 99, 289, 516.
Drink, 268.
Drummer, 476.
DRUMMOND, 262.
Drunkenness, 387, 403, 488.
"Dryness," 204.
DUMAS, 279.
Dyes, on clothing, 294.
Earnestness, 264.
Ecclesiastical spirit, the, 335, 338.
ECKHART, 417.
EDDY, 106.
EDWARDS, JONATHAN, 20, 114, 200, 229, 238, 239, 248, 330.
EDWARDS, MRS. J., 276, 280.
Effects of religious states, 21.
Effeminacy, 365.
Ego of Apperception, 449.
ELLIS, HAVELOCK, 418.
ELWOOD, 292.
EMERSON, 32, 56, 167, 205, 239, 330.
Emotion, as alterer of life's value, 150;
of the character, 195, 261 ff., 279.
Empirical method, 18, 327 ff., 443.
Enemies, love your, 278, 283.
Energy, personal, 196;
mystical states increase it, 414.
Environment, 356, 374.
Epictetus, 474.
Epicureans, 143.
Equanimity, 284.
Ether, mystical effects of, 392.
Evil, ignored by healthy-mindedness, 88, 106, 131;
due to _things_ or to the _Self_, 134;
its reality, 163.
Evolutionist optimism, 91.
Excesses of piety, 340.
Excitement, its effects, 195, 266, 279, 325.
Experience, religious, the essence of, 508.
Extravagances of piety, 339, 486.
Extreme cases, why we take them, 486.
Failure, 139.
Faith, 246, 506.
Faith-state, 505.
Fanaticism, 338 ff.
Fear, 98, 159, 161, 263, 275.
Feeling deeper than intellect in religion, 431.
FIELDING, 436.
FINNEY, 207, 215.
FLETCHER, 98, 181.
FLOURNOY, 67, 514.
Flower, 476.
FOSTER, 178, 383.
FOX, GEORGE, 7, 291, 335, 411.
FRANCIS, SAINT, D'ASSISI, 319.
FRANCIS, SAINT, DE SALES, 11.
FRASER, 454.
Fruits, of conversion, 237;
of religion, 327;
of Saintliness, 357.
FULLER, 41.
GAMOND, 288.
GARDINER, 269.
Genius and insanity, 16.
Geniuses, see Religious leaders.
Gentleman, character of the, 317, 371.
GERTRUDE, SAINT, 345.
"Gifts," 151.
Glory of God, 342.
GOD, 31;
sense of his presence, 66-72, 272, 275 ff.;
historic changes in idea of him, 74, 328 ff., 493;
mind-curer's idea of him, 101;
his honor, 342;
described by negatives, 417;
his attributes, scholastic proof of, 439;
the metaphysical ones are for us meaningless, 445;
the moral ones are ill-deduced, 447;
he is not a mere inference, 502;
is _used_, not known, 506;
his existence must make a difference among phenomena, 517, 522;
his relation to the subconscious region, 242, 515;
his tasks, 519;
may be finite and plural, 525.
GODDARD, 96.
GOERRES, 407.
GOETHE, 137.
GOUGH, 203.
GOURDON, 171.
"Grace," the operation of, 226;
the state of, 260.
GRATRY, 146, 476, 506.
Greeks, their pessimism, 86, 142.
Guidance, 472.
GURNEY, 527.
GUYON, 276, 286.
HADLEY, 201, 268.
HALE, 82.
HAMON, 367.
Happiness, 47-49, 79, 248, 279.
HARNACK, 100.
Healthy-mindedness, Lectures IV and V, passim;
its philosophy of evil, 131;
compared with morbid-mindedness, 162, 488.
Heart, softening of, 267.
HEGEL, 389, 449, 454.
HELMONT, VAN, 497.
Heroism, 364, 488, note.
Heterogeneous personality, 169, 193.
Higher criticism, 4.
HILTY, 79, 275, 472.
HODGSON, R., 524.
HOMER, 86.
HUGO, 171.
Hypocrisy, 338.
Hypothesis, what make a useful one, 517.
HYSLOP, 524.
IGNATIUS LOYOLA, 313, 406, 410.
Illness, 113.
"Imitation of Christ," the, 44.
Immortality, 524.
Impulses, 261.
Individuality, 501.
Inhibitions, 261 ff.
Insane melancholy and religion, 144.
Insanity and genius, 16;
and happiness, 279.
Institutional religion, 335.
Intellect a secondary force in religion, 431, 514.
Intellectual weakness of some saints, 370.
Intolerance, 342.
Irascibility, 264.
JESUS, HARNACK on, 100.
JOB, 76, 448.
JOHN, SAINT, OF THE CROSS, 304, 407, 413.
JOHNSTON, 258.
JONQUIL, 476.
JORDAN, 347.
JOUFFROY, 176, 198.
Judgments, existential and spiritual, 4.
KANT, 54, 448.
Karma, 522.
KELLNER, 401.
Kindliness, see Charity.
KINGSLEY, 385.
LAGNEAU, 285.
Leaders, see Religious leaders.
Leaders, of tribes, 371.
LEJEUNE, 113, 312.
LESSING, 318.
LEUBA, 201, 203, 220, 246, 506.
Life, its significance, 151.
Life, the subconscious, 207, 209.
LOCKER-LAMPSON, 39.
Logic, Hegelian, 449.
Louis, Saint, of Gonzaga, 350.
Love, see Charity.
Love, cases of falling out of, 179.
Love of God, 276.
Love your enemies, 278, 283.
LOWELL, 65.
Loyalty, to God, 342.
LUTFULLAH, 164.
LUTHER, 128, 137, 244, 330, 348, 382.
Lutheran self-despair, 108, 211.
Luxury, 365.
LYCAON, 86.
Lyre, 267.
Mahomet, 171.
See MOHAMMED.
MARCUS AURELIUS, 42, 44, 474.
MARGARET MARY, see ALACOQUE.
Margin of consciousness, 232.
MARSHALL, 503.
MARTINEAU, 475.
MATHER, 303.
MAUDSLEY, 19.
Meaning of life, 151.
Medical criticism of religion, 413.
Medical materialism, 10 ff.
Melancholy, 145, 279;
Lectures V and VI, passim;
cases of, 148, 149, 157, 159, 198.
Melting moods, 267.
Method of judging value of religion, 18, 327.
Methodism, 227, 237.
MEYSENBUG, 395.
Militarism, 365-367.
Military type of character, 371.
MILL, 204.
Mind-cure, its sources and history, 94-97;
its opinion of fear, 98;
cases of, 102-105, 120, 123;
its message, 108;
its methods, 112-123;
it uses verification, 120-124;
its philosophy of evil, 131.
Miraculous character of conversion, 227.
MOHAMMED, 341, 481.
MOLINOS, 130.
MOLTKE, VON, 264, 367.
Monasteries, 296.
Monism, 416.
Morbidness compared with healthy-mindedness, 488.
See, also, Melancholy.
Mormon revelations, 482.
Mortification, see Asceticism.
MUIR, 482.
MULFORD, 497.
MÜLLER, 468.
MURISIER, 349.
MYERS, 233, 234, 466, 511, 524.
Mystic states, their effects, 21, 414.
Mystical experiences, 66.
Mysticism, Lectures XVI and XVII, passim;
its marks, 380;
its theoretic results, 416, 422, 428;
it cannot warrant truth, 422;
its results, 425;
its relation to the sense of union, 509.
Mystical region of experience, 515.
Natural theology, 492.
Naturalism, 141, 167.
Nature, scientific view of, 491.
Negative accounts of deity, 417.
NELSON, 208, 423.
NETTLETON, 215.
NEWMAN, F. W., 80.
NEWMAN, J. H., on dogmatic theology, 434, 442;
his type of imagination, 459.
NIETZSCHE, 371, 372.
Nitrous oxide, its mystical effects, 387.
No-function, 261-263, 299, 387, 416.
Non-resistance, 281, 358, 376.
Obedience, 310.
OBERMANN, 476.
O'CONNELL, 257.
Omit, 296.
"Once-born" type, 80, 166, 363, 488.
Oneness with God, see Union.
Optimism, systematic, 88;
and evolutionism, 91;
it may be shallow, 364.
Orderliness of world, 438.
Organism determines all mental states whatsoever, 14.
Origin of mental states no criterion of their value, 14 ff.
Orison, 406.
Over-beliefs, 513;
the author's, 515.
Over-soul, 516.
Oxford, graduate of, 220, 268.
Pagan feeling, 86.
Pantheism, 131, 416.
PARKER, 83.
PASCAL, 286.
PATON, 359.
PAUL, SAINT, 171, 357.
PEEK, 253.
PEIRCE, 444.
Penny, 323.
PERREYVE, 505.
Persecutions, 338, 342.
Personality, explained away by science, 119, 491;
heterogeneous, 169;
alterations of, 193, 210 ff.;
is reality, 499. See Character.
PETER, SAINT, OF ALCANTARA, 360.
PHILO, 481.
Philosophy, Lecture XVIII, passim;
must coerce assent, 433;
scholastic, 439;
idealistic, 448;
unable to give a theoretic warrant to faith, 455;
its true office in religion, 455.
Photisms, 251.
Piety, 339 ff.
Pluralism, 131.
Polytheism, 131, 526.
Poverty, 315, 367.
"Pragmatism," 444, 519, 522-524.
Prayer, 463;
its definition, 464;
its essence, 465;
petitional, 467;
its effects, 474-477, 523.
"Presence," sense of, 58-63.
Presence of God, 66-72, 272, 275 ff., 396, 418.
Presence of God, the practice of, 116.
Primitive human thought, 495.
PRINGLE-PATTISON, 454.
Prophets, the Hebrew, 479.
Protestant theology, 244.
Protestantism and Catholicism, 114, 227, 330, 461.
Providential leading, 472.
Psychopathy and religion, 22 ff.
PUFFER, 394.
Purity, 274, 290, 348.
Quakers, 7, 291.
RAMAKRISHNA, 361, 365.
Rationalism, 73, 74;
its authority overthrown by mysticism, 428.
RATISBONNE, 223, 257.
Reality of unseen objects, Lecture III, passim.
RÉCÉJAC, 407, 509.
"Recollection," 116, 289.
Redemption, 157.
Reformation of character, 320.
Regeneration, see Conversion;
by relaxation, 111.
REID, 446.
Relaxation, salvation by, 110.
See Surrender.
Religion, to be tested by fruits, not by origin, 10 ff., 331;
its definition, 26, 31;
is solemn, 37;
compared with Stoicism, 41;
its unique function, 51;
abstractness of its objects, 54;
differs according to temperament, 75, 135, 333,
and ought to differ, 487;
considered to be a "survival," 118, 490, 498;
its relations to melancholy, 145;
worldly passions may combine with it, 337;
its essential characters, 369, 485;
its relation to prayer, 463-466;
asserts a fact, not a theory, 489;
its truth, 377;
more than science, it holds by concrete reality, 500;
attempts to evaporate it into philosophy, 502;
it is concerned with personal destinies, 491, 503;
with feeling and conduct, 504;
is a sthenic affection, 505;
is for life, not for knowledge, 506;
its essential contents, 508;
it postulates issues of fact, 518.
Religious emotion, 279.
Religious leaders, often nervously unstable, 6 ff., 30;
their loneliness, 335.
"Religious sentiment," 27.
RENAN, 37.
Renunciations, 349.
Repentance, 127.
Resignation, 286.
Revelation, the anæsthetic, 387-393.
Revelations, see Automatisms.
Revelations, in Mormon Church, 482.
Revivalism, 228.
RIBET, 407.
RIBOT, 145, 502.
RODRIGUEZ, 313, 314, 317.
ROYCE, 454.
RUTHERFORD, MARK, 76.
SABATIER, A., 464.
Sacrifice, 303, 462.
SAINT-PIERRE, 83.
SAINTE-BEUVE, 260, 315.
Saintliness, Sainte-Beuve on, 260;
its characteristics, 272, 370;
criticism of, 326 ff.
Saintly conduct, 356-377.
Saints, dislike of natural man for, 371.
Salvation, 526.
SANDAYS, 480.
SATAN, in picture, 50.
SCHEFFLER, 417.
Scholastic arguments for God, 437.
Science, ignores personality and teleology, 491;
her "facts," 500, 501.
"Science of Religions," 433, 455, 456, 488-490.
Scientific conceptions, their late adoption, 496.
Second-birth, 157, 165, 166.
SEELEY, 77.
Self of the world, 449.
Self-despair, 110, 129, 208.
Self-surrender, 110, 208.
SÉNANCOUR, 476.
SETH, 454.
Sexual temptation, 269.
Sexuality as cause of religion, 10, 11.
"Shrew," 347.
Sickness, 113.
Sick souls, Lectures V and VI, passim.
SIGHELE, 263.
Sin, 209.
Sinners, Christ died for, 129.
Skepticism, 332 ff.
SKOBELEFF, 265.
SMITH, JOSEPH, 482.
Softening of the heart, 267.
Solemnity, 37, 48.
Soul, 195.
Soul, strength of, 273.
SPENCER, 355, 374.
SPINOZA, 9, 127.
Spiritism, 514.
Spirit-return, 524.
Spiritual judgments, 4.
Spiritual states, tests of their value, 18.
STARBUCK, 198, 199, 204, 206, 208-210, 249, 253, 258, 268, 276, 323, 353,
394.
STEVENSON, 138, 296.
Stoicism, 42-45, 143.
Strange appearance of world, 151.
Strength of soul, 273.
Subconscious action in conversion, 236, 242.
Subconscious life, 115, 207, 209, 233, 236, 270, 483.
Subconscious Self, as intermediary between the Self and God, 511.
Subliminal, see Subconscious.
Sufis, 402, 420.
Suggestion, 112, 234.
Suicide, 147.
Supernaturalism its two kinds, 520;
criticism of universalistic, 521.
Supernatural world, 518.
Surrender, salvation by, 110, 208, 211.
Survival-theory of religion, 490, 498, 500.
SUSO, 306, 349.
SWINBURNE, 421.
SYMONDS, 385, 390.
Sympathetic magic, 496.
Sympathy, see Charity.
Systems, philosophic, 433.
Taine, 9.
TAYLOR, 246.
Tenderness, see Charity.
TENNYSON, 383, 384.
TERESA, SAINT, 20, 346, 360, 408, 411, 412, 414.
Theologia Germanica, 43.
Theologians, systematic, 446.
"Theopathy," 343.
THOREAU, 275.
Threshold, 135.
Tiger, 164, 262.
Tobacco, 270, 290.
TOLSTOY, 149, 178, 184.
TOWIANSKI, 281.
Tragedy of life, 363.
Tranquillity, 285.
Transcendentalism criticised, 522.
Transcendentalists, 516.
TREVOR, 396.
TRINE, 101, 394.
Truth of religion, how to be tested, 377;
what it is, 509;
mystical perception of, 380, 410.
"Twice-born," type, 166, 363, 488.
TYNDALL, 299.
"Unconscious cerebration," 207.
Unification of Self, 183, 349.
"UNION MORALE," 272.
Union with God, 408, 418, 425, 451, 509 ff.
See lectures on Conversion, passim.
Unity of universe, 131.
Unreality, sense of, 63.
Unseen realities, Lecture III, passim.
Upanishads, 419.
UPHAM, 289.
Utopias, 360.
VACHEROT, 502.
Value of spiritual affections, how tested, 18.
VAMBÉRY, 341.
Vedantism, 400, 419, 513, 522.
Veracity, 7, 291 ff.
VIVEKANANDA, 513.
VOLTAIRE, 38.
VOYSEY, 275.
War, 365-367.
Wealth-worship, 365.
WEAVER, 281.
WESLEY, 227.
Wesleyan self-despair, 108, 211.
WHITEFIELD, 318.
WHITMAN, 84, 395, 396, 506.
WOLFF, 492, 493.
WOOD, HENRY, 96, 99, 117.
World, soul of the, 449.
Worry, 98, 181.
Yes-function, 261-263, 299, 387.
Yoga, 400.
YOUNG, 256.
FOOTNOTES
1 As with many ideas that float in the air of one's time, this notion
shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only
partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are
less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as
perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often
employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation may be
best understood by remembering that its _fons et origo_ was Luther's
wish to marry a nun:--the effects are infinitely wider than the
alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true
that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are
undisguisedly amatory--e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in
polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few
Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an
aberration of the digestive function, and prove one's point by the
worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some
other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself
in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism
gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to
expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as
common in religious literature as is language drawn from the sexual
life. We "hunger and thirst" after righteousness; we "find the Lord
a sweet savor;" we "taste and see that he is good." "Spiritual milk
for American babes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments," is a
sub-title of the once famous New England Primer, and Christian
devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from
the point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe.
Saint François de Sales, for instance, thus describes the "orison of
quietude": "In this state the soul is like a little child still at
the breast, whose mother, to caress him whilst he is still in her
arms, makes her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving
his lips. So it is here.... Our Lord desires that our will should be
satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majesty pours into our
mouth, and that we should relish the sweetness without even knowing
that it cometh from the Lord." And again: "Consider the little
infants, united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothers,
you will see that from time to time they press themselves closer by
little starts to which the pleasure of sucking prompts them. Even
so, during its orison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makes
attempts at closer union by movements during which it presses closer
upon the divine sweetness." Chemin de la Perfection, ch. xxxi.;
Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i.
In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion
of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of
respiratory oppression: "Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my
groaning is not hid from thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth
me; my bones are hot with my roaring all the night long; as the hart
panteth after the water-brooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my
God." _God's Breath in Man_ is the title of the chief work of our
best known American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris); and in certain non-
Christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline
consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration.
These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in
favor of the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will
then say that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere. The
two main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion,
they will say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and
therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which
the retort again is easy. Even were the asserted synchrony
unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not only the
sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during
adolescence. One might then as well set up the thesis that the
interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and
sociology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that
in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual
instinct:--but that would be too absurd. Moreover, if the argument
from synchrony is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that
the religious age _par excellence_ would seem to be old age, when
the uproar of the sexual life is past?
The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end
look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The
moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the
main from the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about
the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and
acts impelled to. Any _general_ assimilation is simply impossible:
what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast. If now
the defenders of the sex-theory say that this makes no difference to
their thesis; that without the chemical contributions which the sex-
organs make to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to
carry on religious activities, this final proposition may be true or
not true; but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive: we
can deduce no consequences from it which help us to interpret
religion's meaning or value. In this sense the religious life
depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys
as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its point
in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the dependence,
_somehow_, of the mind upon the body.
2 For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning, see an
article on "les Variétés du Type dévot," by Dr. Binet-Sanglé, in the
Revue de l'Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.
3 J. F. NISBET: The Insanity of Genius, 3d ed., London, 1893, pp. xvi,
xxiv.
4 MAX NORDAU, in his bulky book entitled _Degeneration_.
5 H. MAUDSLEY: Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886, pp.
257, 256.
6 Autobiography, ch. xxviii.
7 Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems to
consist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty
of association by similarity.
8 I may refer to a criticism of the insanity theory of genius in the
Psychological Review, ii. 287 (1895).
9 I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and
admirable remarks on the futility of all these definitions of
religion, in an article by Professor Leuba, published in the Monist
for January, 1901, after my own text was written.
10 Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged).
11 Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.
12 Feuilles détachées, pp. 394-398 (abridged).
13 Op. cit., pp. 314, 313.
14 Book V., ch. x. (abridged).
15 Book V., ch. ix. (abridged).
16 Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth's translation.
17 Book IV., § 23.
18 Benham's translation: Book III., chaps. xv., lix. Compare Mary Moody
Emerson: "Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest, the
loneliest sufferer, with one proviso,--that I know it is His agency.
I will love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of
mine." R. W. EMERSON: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188.
19 Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in
whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are
religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they
are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish,
without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its
typical _differentia_.
20 The New Spirit, p. 232.
21 I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and
friend, Charles Carroll Everett.
22 Example: "I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the
passages which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his
distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject that
requires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one
so much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead,
and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit
in its effect on us." AUGUSTUS HARE: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare
to Lucy H. Hare.
23 Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.
24 Example: "Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she
shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman
weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is."
B. de St. Pierre.
25 Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26.
26 E. GURNEY: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384.
27 Pensées d'un Solitaire, p. 66.
28 Letters of Lowell, i. 75.
29 I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy's permission, from his rich
collection of psychological documents.
30 Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198.
31 In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d edition,
Boston, 1886, pp. 91, 122.
32 C. HILTY: Glück, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.
33 The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89,
91.
34 I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that
she "could always cuddle up to God."
35 JOHN WEISS: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.
36 STARBUCK: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306.
37 "I know not to what physical laws philosophers will some day refer
the feelings of melancholy. For myself, I find that they are the
most voluptuous of all sensations," writes Saint Pierre, and
accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on Nature to
the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines de la
Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude--each of them more optimistic than
the last.
This finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adolescence.
The truth-telling Marie Bashkirtseff expresses it well:--
"In this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don't
condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you
believe it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my
grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being
exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and
I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It would be
cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating. I cry, I grieve,
and at the same time I am pleased--no, not exactly that--I know not
how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I find
everything agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for
happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable. It is not I who
undergo all this--my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me
which is above me is glad of it all." Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff,
i. 67.
38 R. M. BUCKE: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged.
39 I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published
monthly at Philadelphia.
40 Song of Myself, 32.
41 Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation.
42 "God is afraid of me!" remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend in
my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and
cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian
education in humility still rankled in his breast.
43 "As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered
child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity,
to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim,
obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and
orgiastic--or mænadic--foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit
reconciles me." R. L. STEVENSON: Letters, ii. 355.
44 "Cautionary Verses for Children": this title of a much used work,
published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of
evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the
idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel
freedom. Mind-cure might be briefly called a reaction against all
that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of
our century in the evangelical circles of England and America.
45 I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. Henry Wood, especially the
former. Mr. Dresser's works are published by G. P. Putnam's Sons,
New York and London; Mr. Wood's by Lee & Shepard, Boston.
46 Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another reporter,
Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Clark University, whose thesis on "the Effects
of Mind on Body as evidenced by Faith Cures" is published in the
American Journal of Psychology for 1899 (vol. x.). This critic,
after a wide study of the facts, concludes that the cures by mind-
cure exist, but are in no respect different from those now
officially recognized in medicine as cures by suggestion; and the
end of his essay contains an interesting physiological speculation
as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of the
reprint). As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself,
Dr. Goddard writes: "In spite of the severe criticism we have made
of reports of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material,
showing a powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are
of diseases that have been diagnosed and treated by the best
physicians of the country, or which prominent hospitals have tried
their hand at curing, but without success. People of culture and
education have been treated by this method with satisfactory
results. Diseases of long standing have been ameliorated, and even
cured.... We have traced the mental element through primitive
medicine and folk-medicine of to-day, patent medicine, and
witchcraft. We are convinced that it is impossible to account for
the existence of these practices, if they did not cure disease, and
that if they cured disease, it must have been the mental element
that was effective. The same argument applies to those modern
schools of mental therapeutics--Divine Healing and Christian Science.
It is hardly conceivable that the large body of intelligent people
who comprise the body known distinctively as Mental Scientists
should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is
not a thing of a day; it is not confined to a few; it is not local.
It is true that many failures are recorded, but that only adds to
the argument. There must be many and striking successes to
counterbalance the failures, otherwise the failures would have ended
the delusion.... Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental
Science do not, and never can in the very nature of things, cure all
diseases; nevertheless, the practical applications of the general
principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent
disease.... We do find sufficient evidence to convince us that the
proper reform in mental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of
ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch; would even delay the
approach of death to many a victim beyond the power of absolute
cure, and the faithful adherence to a truer philosophy of life will
keep many a man well, and give the doctor time to devote to
alleviating ills that are unpreventable" (pp. 33, 34 of reprint).
47 HORACE FLETCHER: Happiness as found in Forethought _minus_
Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii. Chicago and New York, Stone,
1897, pp. 21-25, abridged.
48 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38.
49 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, Boston,
1899, p. 54.
50 Whether it differs so much from Christ's own notion is for the
exegetists to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about evil
and disease much as our mind-curers do. "What is the answer which
Jesus sends to John the Baptist?" asks Harnack, and says it is this:
" 'The blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and
the deaf hear, the dead rise up, and the gospel is preached to the
poor.' That is the 'coming of the kingdom,' or rather in these
saving works the kingdom is already there. By the overcoming and
removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by these actual effects
John is to see that the new time has arrived. The casting out of
devils is only a part of this work of redemption, _but Jesus points
to that as the sense and seal of his mission_. Thus to the wretched,
sick, and poor did he address himself, but not as a moralist, and
without a trace of sentimentalism. He never makes groups and
departments of the ills; he never spends time in asking whether the
sick one 'deserves' to be cured; and it never occurs to him to
sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness
is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has a healthy use. No, he
calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, all
wretchedness, is for him something dreadful; it is of the great
kingdom of Satan; but he feels the power of the Saviour within him.
He knows that advance is possible only when weakness is overcome,
when sickness is made well." Das Wesen des Christenthums, 1900, p.
39.
51 R. W. TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N. Y., 1899.
I have strung scattered passages together.
52 The Cairds, for example. In EDWARD CAIRD'S Glasgow Lectures of
1890-92 passages like this abound:--
"The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that
'the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand,'
passes with scarce a break into the announcement that 'the kingdom
of God is among you'; and the importance of this announcement is
asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak, a difference _in
kind_ between the greatest saints and prophets who lived under the
previous reign of division, and 'the least in the kingdom of
heaven.' The highest ideal is brought close to men and declared to
be within their reach, they are called on to be 'perfect as their
Father in heaven is perfect.' The sense of alienation and distance
from God which had grown upon the pious in Israel just in proportion
as they had learned to look upon Him as no mere national divinity,
but as a God of justice who would punish Israel for its sin as
certainly as Edom or Moab, is declared to be no longer in place; and
the typical form of Christian prayer points to the abolition of the
contrast between this world and the next which through all the
history of the Jews had continually been growing wider: 'As in
heaven, so on earth.' The sense of the division of man from God, as
a finite being from the Infinite, as weak and sinful from the
Omnipotent Goodness, is not indeed lost; but it can no longer
overpower the consciousness of oneness. The terms 'Son' and 'Father'
at once state the opposition and mark its limit. They show that it
is not an absolute opposition, but one which presupposes an
indestructible principle of unity, that can and must become a
principle of reconciliation." The Evolution of Religion, ii. pp.
146, 147.
53 It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which
assumes more and more the form of mind-cure experience and academic
philosophy mutually impregnating each other, will score the
practical triumphs of the less critical and rational sects.
54 The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new
nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up.
The pantheistic explanation (which is that of most mind-curers) is
by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or
greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own
"subconscious" self), the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust
and anxiety are removed. The medico-materialistic explanation is
that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left
to act automatically by the shunting-out of physiologically (though
in this instance not spiritually) "higher" ones which, seeking to
regulate, only succeed in inhibiting results.--Whether this third
explanation might, in a psycho-physical account of the universe, be
combined with either of the others may be left an open question
here.
55 Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard
sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either
as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising
virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning "merit." "Illness,"
says a good Catholic writer (P. LEJEUNE: Introd. à la Vie Mystique,
1899, p. 218), "is the most excellent of corporeal mortifications,
the mortification which one has not one's self chosen, which is
imposed directly by God, and is the direct expression of his will.
'If other mortifications are of silver,' Mgr. Gay says, 'this one is
of gold; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of
original sin, still on its greater side, as coming (like all that
happens) from the providence of God, it is of divine manufacture.
And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is!... I do not
hesitate to say that patience in a long illness is mortification's
very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified
souls.' " According to this view, disease should in any case be
submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even
be blasphemous to wish it away.
Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special
miracle have at all times been recognized within the church's pale,
almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It
was one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to
be possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession
and conversion on the patient's part, and prayer on the priest's,
was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh.
Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly
thirty years. Blumhardt's Life by Zündel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887)
gives in chapters ix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of
his healing activity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine
interposition. Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non-
fanatical character, and in this part of his work followed no
previous model. In Chicago to-day we have the case of Dr. J. A.
Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly "Leaves of Healing"
were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who,
although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as
"diabolical counterfeits" of his own exclusively "Divine Healing,"
must on the whole be counted into the mind-cure movement. In mind-
cure circles the fundamental article of faith is that disease should
never be accepted. It is wholly of the pit. God wants us to be
absolutely healthy, and we should not tolerate ourselves on any
lower terms.
56 Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quote these
words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see
that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members.
57 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46.
58 DRESSER: Living by the Spirit, 58.
59 DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 33.
60 TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214.
61 TRINE: p. 117.
62 Quoted by LEJEUNE: Introd. à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66.
63 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70
(abridged).
64 See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by
friends.
65 Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally
into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they
must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are
questions that only the future can answer. What is certain now is
the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to
some part of the world's truth, each verified in some degree, each
leaving out some part of real experience.
66 Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x.
67 Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510-514 (abridged).
68 MOLINOS: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii. (abridged).
69 I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure
writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their
attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be
logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher
Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence,
namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite
sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a
part, if only it be the most ideal part.
70 Cf. J. MILSAND: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, _passim_.
71 He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness: "Our business is to
continue to fail in good spirits."
72 The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal
against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the
opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a
residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told
off--our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of
a better self _in posse_ at least. But the world deals with us _in
actu_ and not _in posse_: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed
at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All-
knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who
is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy: only by
an All-knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very
definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life.
73 E.g., Iliad, XVII. 446: "Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than
man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth."
74 E.g., Theognis, 425-428: "Best of all for all things upon earth is
it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun; next best
to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades." See also the
almost identical passage in OEdipus in Colonus, 1225.--The Anthology
is full of pessimistic utterances: "Naked came I upon the earth,
naked I go below the ground--why then do I vainly toil when I see the
end naked before me?"--"How did I come to be? Whence am I? Wherefore
did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know?
Being naught I came to life: once more shall I be what I was.
Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of mortals."--"For death we
are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly
butchered."
The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern
variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the
pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of
sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for
pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic
literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor
key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of
lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as
this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved
for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the
Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the
same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic.
75 For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post
brings me some aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in
Heidelberg which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of
Epicureanism: "By the word 'happiness' every human being understands
something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds.
The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more
definite term _contentment_. What education should chiefly aim at is
to save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring
condition, but by no means an indispensable one, of contentment.
Woman's heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which
she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But the
wise man will always prefer work chosen by himself."
76 RIBOT: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54.
77 A. GRATRY: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119-121, abridged.
Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate
with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide
supply such examples as the following:--
An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, and
leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her parents
she writes:--
"Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than
life, and that is death. So good-by forever, my dear parents. It is
nobody's fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to
fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some
day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has
come.... It is a wonder I have put this off so long, but I thought
perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all thought out of my head."
To her brother she writes: "Good-by forever, my own dearest brother.
By the time you get this I shall be gone forever. I know, dear love,
there is no forgiveness for what I am going to do.... I am tired of
living, so am willing to die.... Life may be sweet to some, but
death to me is sweeter." S. A. K. STRAHAN: Suicide and Insanity, 2d
edition, London, 1894, p. 131.
78 ROUBINOVITCH ET TOULOUSE: La Mélancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged.
79 I cull these examples from the work of G. DUMAS: La Tristesse et la
Joie, 1900.
80 My extracts are from the French translation by "ZONIA." In abridging
I have taken the liberty of transposing one passage.
81 Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I have printed a number of
detached passages continuously.
82 The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston, 1806, pp.
25, 26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr.
Benjamin Rand.
83 Compare Bunyan: "There was I struck into a very great trembling,
insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very
body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the
dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned
that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging
and heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was,
especially at some times, as if my breast-bone would have split
asunder.... Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden
that was upon me; which burden also did so oppress me that I could
neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet."
84 For another case of fear equally sudden, see HENRY JAMES: Society
the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 ff.
85 Example: "It was about eleven o'clock at night ... but I strolled on
still with the people.... Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a
crackling was heard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in
an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one
of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling
of an eye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor
victim's bones in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, 'Ho hai!'
involuntarily reëchoed by all of us, was over in three seconds; and
then I know not what happened till I returned to my senses, when I
found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if prepared
to be devoured by our enemy, the sovereign of the forest. I find my
pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our
limbs stiffened, our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat
violently, and only a whisper of the same 'Ho hai!' was heard from
us. In this state we crept on all fours for some distance back, and
then ran for life with the speed of an Arab horse for about half an
hour, and fortunately happened to come to a small village.... After
this every one of us was attacked with fever, attended with
shivering, in which deplorable state we remained till
morning."--Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohammedan Gentleman,
Leipzig, 1857, p. 112.
86 E.g., "Our young people are diseased with the theological problems
of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These
never presented a practical difficulty to any man--never darkened
across any man's road, who did not go out of his way to seek them.
These are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs," etc.
EMERSON: "Spiritual Laws."
87 Notes sur la Vie, p. 1.
88 See, for example, F. Paulhan, in his book Les Caractères, 1894, who
contrasts les Equilibrés, les Unifiés, with les Inquiets, les
Contrariants, les Incohérents, les Emiettés, as so many diverse
psychic types.
89 ANNIE BESANT: an Autobiography, p. 82.
90 SMITH BAKER, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September,
1893.
91 LOUIS GOURDON (Essai sur la Conversion de Saint Augustine, Paris,
Fischbacher, 1900) has shown by an analysis of Augustine's writings
immediately after the date of his conversion (A. D. 386) that the
account he gives in the Confessions is premature. The crisis in the
garden marked a definitive conversion from his former life, but it
was to the neo-platonic spiritualism and only a halfway stage toward
Christianity. The latter he appears not fully and radically to have
embraced until four years more had passed.
92 Confessions, Book VIII., chaps. v., vii., xi., abridged.
93 TH. JOUFFROY: Nouveaux Mélanges philosophiques, 2me édition, p. 83.
I add two other cases of counter-conversion dating from a certain
moment. The first is from Professor Starbuck's manuscript
collection, and the narrator is a woman.
"Away down in the bottom of my heart, I believe I was always more or
less skeptical about 'God;' skepticism grew as an undercurrent, all
through my early youth, but it was controlled and covered by the
emotional elements in my religious growth. When I was sixteen I
joined the church and was asked if I loved God. I replied 'Yes,' as
was customary and expected. But instantly with a flash something
spoke within me, 'No, you do not.' I was haunted for a long time
with shame and remorse for my falsehood and for my wickedness in not
loving God, mingled with fear that there might be an avenging God
who would punish me in some terrible way.... At nineteen, I had an
attack of tonsilitis. Before I had quite recovered, I heard told a
story of a brute who had kicked his wife downstairs, and then
continued the operation until she became insensible. I felt the
horror of the thing keenly. Instantly this thought flashed through
my mind: 'I have no use for a God who permits such things.' This
experience was followed by months of stoical indifference to the God
of my previous life, mingled with feelings of positive dislike and a
somewhat proud defiance of him. I still thought there might be a
God. If so he would probably damn me, but I should have to stand it.
I felt very little fear and no desire to propitiate him. I have
never had any personal relations with him since this painful
experience."
The second case exemplifies how small an additional stimulus will
overthrow the mind into a new state of equilibrium when the process
of preparation and incubation has proceeded far enough. It is like
the proverbial last straw added to the camel's burden, or that touch
of a needle which makes the salt in a supersaturated fluid suddenly
begin to crystallize out.
Tolstoy writes: "S., a frank and intelligent man, told me as follows
how he ceased to believe:--
"He was twenty-six years old when one day on a hunting expedition,
the time for sleep having come, he set himself to pray according to
the custom he had held from childhood.
"His brother, who was hunting with him, lay upon the hay and looked
at him. When S. had finished his prayer and was turning to sleep,
the brother said, 'Do you still keep up that thing?' Nothing more
was said. But since that day, now more than thirty years ago, S. has
never prayed again; he never takes communion, and does not go to
church. All this, not because he became acquainted with convictions
of his brother which he then and there adopted; not because he made
any new resolution in his soul, but merely because the words spoken
by his brother were like the light push of a finger against a
leaning wall already about to tumble by its own weight. These words
but showed him that the place wherein he supposed religion dwelt in
him had long been empty, and that the sentences he uttered, the
crosses and bows which he made during his prayer, were actions with
no inner sense. Having once seized their absurdity, he could no
longer keep them up." My Confession, p. 8.
94 Op. cit., Letter III., abridged.
I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession,
and which represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent
sort of conversion, if the opposite of "falling in love," falling
out of love, may be so termed. Falling in love also conforms
frequently to this type, a latent process of unconscious preparation
often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is
irretrievably done. The free and easy tone in this narrative gives
it a sincerity that speaks for itself.
"For two years of this time I went through a very bad experience,
which almost drove me mad. I had fallen violently in love with a
girl who, young as she was, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As
I look back on her now, I hate her, and wonder how I could ever have
fallen so low as to be worked upon to such an extent by her
attractions. Nevertheless, I fell into a regular fever, could think
of nothing else; whenever I was alone, I pictured her attractions,
and spent most of the time when I should have been working, in
recalling our previous interviews, and imagining future
conversations. She was very pretty, good humored, and jolly to the
last degree, and intensely pleased with my admiration. Would give me
no decided answer yes or no, and the queer thing about it was that
whilst pursuing her for her hand, I secretly knew all along that she
was unfit to be a wife for me, and that she never would say yes.
Although for a year we took our meals at the same boarding-house, so
that I saw her continually and familiarly, our closer relations had
to be largely on the sly, and this fact, together with my jealousy
of another one of her male admirers, and my own conscience despising
me for my uncontrollable weakness, made me so nervous and sleepless
that I really thought I should become insane. I understand well
those young men murdering their sweethearts, which appear so often
in the papers. Nevertheless I did love her passionately, and in some
ways she did deserve it.
"The queer thing was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all
stopped. I was going to my work after breakfast one morning,
thinking as usual of her and of my misery, when, just as if some
outside power laid hold of me, I found myself turning round and
almost running to my room, where I immediately got out all the
relics of her which I possessed, including some hair, all her notes
and letters, and ambrotypes on glass. The former I made a fire of,
the latter I actually crushed beneath my heel, in a sort of fierce
joy of revenge and punishment. I now loathed and despised her
altogether, and as for myself I felt as if a load of disease had
suddenly been removed from me. That was the end. I never spoke to
her or wrote to her again in all the subsequent years, and I have
never had a single moment of loving thought towards one who for so
many months entirely filled my heart. In fact, I have always rather
hated her memory, though now I can see that I had gone unnecessarily
far in that direction. At any rate, from that happy morning onward I
regained possession of my own proper soul, and have never since
fallen into any similar trap."
This seems to me an unusually clear example of two different levels
of personality, inconsistent in their dictates, yet so well balanced
against each other as for a long time to fill the life with discord
and dissatisfaction. At last, not gradually, but in a sudden crisis,
the unstable equilibrium is resolved, and this happens so
unexpectedly that it is as if, to use the writer's words, "some
outside power laid hold."
Professor Starbuck gives an analogous case, and a converse case of
hatred suddenly turning into love, in his Psychology of Religion, p.
141. Compare the other highly curious instances which he gives on
pp. 137-144, of sudden non-religious alterations of habit or
character. He seems right in conceiving all such sudden changes as
results of special cerebral functions unconsciously developing until
they are ready to play a controlling part, when they make irruption
into the conscious life. When we treat of sudden "conversion," I
shall make as much use as I can of this hypothesis of subconscious
incubation.
95 H. FLETCHER: Menticulture, or the A-B-C of True Living, New York and
Chicago, 1899, pp. 26-36, abridged.
96 I have considerably abridged Tolstoy's words in my translation.
97 In my quotations from Bunyan I have omitted certain intervening
portions of the text.
98 A sketch of the life of Stephen H. Bradley, from the age of five to
twenty-four years, including his remarkable experience of the power
of the Holy Spirit on the second evening of November, 1829. Madison,
Connecticut, 1830.
99 Jouffroy is an example: "Down this slope it was that my intelligence
had glided, and little by little it had got far from its first
faith. But this melancholy revolution had not taken place in the
broad daylight of my consciousness; too many scruples, too many
guides and sacred affections had made it dreadful to me, so that I
was far from avowing to myself the progress it had made. It had gone
on in silence, by an involuntary elaboration of which I was not the
accomplice; and although I had in reality long ceased to be a
Christian, yet, in the innocence of my intention, I should have
shuddered to suspect it, and thought it calumny had I been accused
of such a falling away." Then follows Jouffroy's account of his
counter-conversion, quoted above on p. 176.
100 One hardly needs examples; but for love, see p. 179, note; for fear,
p. 162; for remorse, see Othello after the murder; for anger, see
Lear after Cordelia's first speech to him; for resolve, see p. 178
(J. Foster case). Here is a pathological case in which _guilt_ was
the feeling that suddenly exploded: "One night I was seized on
entering bed with a rigor, such as Swedenborg describes as coming
over him with a sense of holiness, but over me with a sense of
_guilt_. During that whole night I lay under the influence of the
rigor, and from its inception I felt that I was under the curse of
God. I have never done one act of duty in my life--sins against God
and man, beginning as far as my memory goes back--a wildcat in human
shape."
101 E. D. STARBUCK: The Psychology of Religion, pp. 224, 262.
102 No one understands this better than Jonathan Edwards understood it
already. Conversion narratives of the more commonplace sort must
always be taken with the allowances which he suggests: "A rule
received and established by common consent has a very great, though
to many persons an insensible influence in forming their notions of
the process of their own experience. I know very well how they
proceed as to this matter, for I have had frequent opportunities of
observing their conduct. Very often their experience at first
appears like a confused chaos, but then those parts are selected
which bear the nearest resemblance to such particular steps as are
insisted on; and these are dwelt upon in their thoughts, and spoken
of from time to time, till they grow more and more conspicuous in
their view, and other parts which are neglected grow more and more
obscure. Thus what they have experienced is insensibly strained, so
as to bring it to an exact conformity to the scheme already
established in their minds. And it becomes natural also for
ministers, who have to deal with those who insist upon distinctness
and clearness of method, to do so too." Treatise on Religious
Affections.
103 Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena, American Journal
of Psychology, vii. 309 (1896).
104 I have abridged Mr. Hadley's account. For other conversions of
drunkards, see his pamphlet, Rescue Mission Work, published at the
Old Jerry M'Auley Water Street Mission, New York city. A striking
collection of cases also appears in the appendix to Professor
Leuba's article.
105 A restaurant waiter served provisionally as Gough's "Saviour."
General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, considers that the
first vital step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel
that some decent human being cares enough for them to take an
interest in the question whether they are to rise or sink.
106 The crisis of apathetic melancholy--no use in life--into which J. S.
Mill records that he fell, and from which he emerged by the reading
of Marmontel's Memoirs (Heaven save the mark!) and Wordsworth's
poetry, is another intellectual and general metaphysical case. See
Mill's Autobiography, New York, 1873, pp. 141, 148.
107 Starbuck, in addition to "escape from sin," discriminates "spiritual
illumination" as a distinct type of conversion experience.
Psychology of Religion, p. 85.
108 Psychology of Religion, p. 117.
109 Psychology of Religion, p. 385. Compare, also, pp. 137-144 and 262.
110 For instance, C. G. Finney italicizes the volitional element: "Just
at this point the whole question of Gospel salvation opened to my
mind in a manner most marvelous to me at the time. I think I then
saw, as clearly as I ever have in my life, the reality and fullness
of the atonement of Christ. Gospel salvation seemed to me to be an
offer of something to be accepted, and all that was necessary on my
part was to get my own consent to give up my sins and accept Christ.
After this distinct revelation had stood for some little time before
my mind, the question seemed to be put, 'Will you accept it now, to-
day?' I replied, 'Yes; _I will accept it to-day, or I will die in
the attempt!_' " He then went into the woods, where he describes his
struggles. He could not pray, his heart was hardened in its pride.
"I then reproached myself for having promised to give my heart to
God before I left the woods. When I came to try, I found I could
not.... My inward soul hung back, and there was no going out of my
heart to God. The thought was pressing me, of the rashness of my
promise that I would give my heart to God that day, or die in the
attempt. It seemed to me as if that was binding on my soul; and yet
I was going to break my vow. A great sinking and discouragement came
over me, and I felt almost too weak to stand upon my knees. Just at
this moment I again thought I heard some one approach me, and I
opened my eyes to see whether it were so. But right there the
revelation of my pride of heart, as the great difficulty that stood
in the way, was distinctly shown to me. An overwhelming sense of my
wickedness in being ashamed to have a human being see me on my knees
before God took such powerful possession of me, that I _cried at the
top of my voice, and exclaimed that I would not leave that place if
all the men on earth and all the devils in hell surrounded me_.
'What!' I said, 'such a degraded sinner as I am, on my knees
confessing my sins to the great and holy God; and ashamed to have
any human being, and a sinner like myself, find me on my knees
endeavoring to make my peace with my offended God!' The sin appeared
awful, infinite. It broke me down before the Lord." Memoirs, pp.
14-16, abridged.
111 STARBUCK: Op. cit., pp. 91, 114.
112 Extracts from the Journal of Mr. John Nelson, London, no date, p.
24.
113 STARBUCK, p. 64.
114 STARBUCK, p. 115.
115 STARBUCK, p. 113.
116 EDWARD'S and DWIGHT'S Life of Brainerd, New Haven, 1822, pp. 45-47,
abridged.
117 Describing the whole phenomenon as a change of equilibrium, we might
say that the movement of new psychic energies towards the personal
centre and the recession of old ones towards the margin (or the
rising of some objects above, and the sinking of others below the
conscious threshold) were only two ways of describing an indivisible
event. Doubtless this is often absolutely true, and Starbuck is
right when he says that "self-surrender" and "new determination,"
though seeming at first sight to be such different experiences, are
"really the same thing. Self-surrender sees the change in terms of
the old self; determination sees it in terms of the new." Op. cit.,
p. 160.
118 A. A. BONAR: Nettleton and his Labors, Edinburgh, 1854, p. 261.
119 CHARLES G. FINNEY: Memoirs written by Himself, 1876, pp. 17, 18.
120 Life and Journals, Boston, 1806, pp. 31-40, abridged.
121 My quotations are made from an Italian translation of this letter in
the Biografia del Sig. M. A. Ratisbonne, Ferrara, 1843, which I have
to thank Monsignore D. O'Connell of Rome for bringing to my notice.
I abridge the original.
122 Published in the International Scientific Series.
123 The reader will here please notice that in my exclusive reliance in
the last lecture on the subconscious "incubation" of motives
deposited by a growing experience, I followed the method of
employing accepted principles of explanation as far as one can. The
subliminal region, whatever else it may be, is at any rate a place
now admitted by psychologists to exist for the accumulation of
vestiges of sensible experience (whether inattentively or
attentively registered), and for their elaboration according to
ordinary psychological or logical laws into results that end by
attaining such a "tension" that they may at times enter
consciousness with something like a burst. It thus is "scientific"
to interpret all otherwise unaccountable invasive alterations of
consciousness as results of the tension of subliminal memories
reaching the bursting-point. But candor obliges me to confess that
there are occasional bursts into consciousness of results of which
it is not easy to demonstrate any prolonged subconscious incubation.
Some of the cases I used to illustrate the sense of presence of the
unseen in Lecture III were of this order (compare pages 59, 61, 62,
67); and we shall see other experiences of the kind when we come to
the subject of mysticism. The case of Mr. Bradley, that of M.
Ratisbonne, possibly that of Colonel Gardiner, possibly that of
Saint Paul, might not be so easily explained in this simple way. The
result, then, would have to be ascribed either to a merely
physiological nerve storm, a "discharging lesion" like that of
epilepsy; or, in case it were useful and rational, as in the two
latter cases named, to some more mystical or theological hypothesis.
I make this remark in order that the reader may realize that the
subject is really complex. But I shall keep myself as far as
possible at present to the more "scientific" view; and only as the
plot thickens in subsequent lectures shall I consider the question
of its absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all the facts. That
subconscious incubation explains a great number of them, there can
be no doubt.
124 Edwards says elsewhere: "I am bold to say that the work of God in
the conversion of one soul, considered together with the source,
foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit, end, and
eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the
creation of the whole material universe."
125 Emerson writes: "When we see a soul whose acts are regal, graceful,
and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and
are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say: Crump is a better
man, with his grunting resistance to all his native devils." True
enough. Yet Crump may really be the better _Crump_, for his inner
discords and second birth; and your once-born "regal" character,
though indeed always better than poor Crump, may fall far short of
what he individually might be had he only some Crump-like capacity
for compunction over his own peculiar diabolisms, graceful and
pleasant and invariably gentlemanly as these may be.
126 In his book, The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900.
127 Op. cit., p. 112.
128 Op. cit., p. 144.
129 I piece together a quotation made by W. Monod, in his book La Vie,
and a letter printed in the work: Adolphe Monod: I., Souvenirs de sa
Vie, 1885, p. 433.
130 Commentary on Galatians, ch. iii. verse 19, and ch. ii. verse 20,
abridged.
131 In some conversions, both steps are distinct; in this one, for
example:--
"Whilst I was reading the evangelical treatise, I was soon struck by
an expression: 'the finished work of Christ.' 'Why,' I asked of
myself, 'does the author use these terms? Why does he not say "the
atoning work"?' Then these words, 'It is finished,' presented
themselves to my mind. 'What is it that is finished?' I asked, and
in an instant my mind replied: 'A perfect expiation for sin; entire
satisfaction has been given; the debt has been paid by the
Substitute. Christ has died for our sins; not for ours only, but for
those of all men. If, then, the entire work is finished, all the
debt paid, what remains for me to do?' In another instant the light
was shed through my mind by the Holy Ghost, and the joyous
conviction was given me that nothing more was to be done, save to
fall on my knees, to accept this Saviour and his love, to praise God
forever." Autobiography of Hudson Taylor. I translate back into
English from the French translation of Challand (Geneva, no date),
the original not being accessible.
132 Tolstoy's case was a good comment on those words. There was almost
no theology in his conversion. His faith-state was the sense come
back that life was infinite in its moral significance.
133 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345-347, abridged.
134 Above, p. 152.
135 DWIGHT: Life of Edwards, New York, 1830, p. 61, abridged.
136 W. F. BOURNE: The King's Son, a Memoir of Billy Bray, London,
Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887, p. 9.
137 Consult WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE: Lectures on Revivals of Religion, New
York, 1832, in the long Appendix to which the opinions of a large
number of ministers are given.
138 Memoirs, p. 34.
139 These reports of sensorial photism shade off into what are evidently
only metaphorical accounts of the sense of new spiritual
illumination, as, for instance, in Brainerd's statement: "As I was
walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the
apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, for
I saw no such thing, nor any imagination of a body of light in the
third heavens, or anything of that nature, but it was a new inward
apprehension or view that I had of God."
In a case like this next one from Starbuck's manuscript collection,
the lighting up of the darkness is probably also metaphorical:--
"One Sunday night, I resolved that when I got home to the ranch
where I was working, I would offer myself with my faculties and all
to God to be used only by and for him.... It was raining and the
roads were muddy; but this desire grew so strong that I kneeled down
by the side of the road and told God all about it, intending then to
get up and go on. Such a thing as any special answer to my prayer
never entered my mind, having been converted by faith, but still
being most undoubtedly saved. Well, while I was praying, I remember
holding out my hands to God and telling him they should work for
him, my feet walk for him, my tongue speak for him, etc., etc., if
he would only use me as his instrument and give me a satisfying
experience--when suddenly the darkness of the night seemed lit up--I
felt, realized, knew, that God heard and answered my prayer. Deep
happiness came over me; I felt I was accepted into the inner circle
of God's loved ones."
In the following case also the flash of light is metaphorical:--
"A prayer meeting had been called for at close of evening service.
The minister supposed me impressed by his discourse (a mistake--he
was dull). He came and, placing his hand upon my shoulder, said: 'Do
you not want to give your heart to God?' I replied in the
affirmative. Then said he, 'Come to the front seat.' They sang and
prayed and talked with me. I experienced nothing but unaccountable
wretchedness. They declared that the reason why I did not 'obtain
peace' was because I was not willing to give up all to God. After
about two hours the minister said we would go home. As usual, on
retiring, I prayed. In great distress, I at this time simply said,
'Lord, I have done all I can, I leave the whole matter with thee.'
Immediately, like a flash of light, there came to me a great peace,
and I arose and went into my parents' bedroom and said, 'I do feel
so wonderfully happy.' This I regard as the hour of conversion. It
was the hour in which I became assured of divine acceptance and
favor. So far as my life was concerned, it made little immediate
change."
140 I add in a note a few more records:--
"One morning, being in deep distress, fearing every moment I should
drop into hell, I was constrained to cry in earnest for mercy, and
the Lord came to my relief, and delivered my soul from the burden
and guilt of sin. My whole frame was in a tremor from head to foot,
and my soul enjoyed sweet peace. The pleasure I then felt was
indescribable. The happiness lasted about three days, during which
time I never spoke to any person about my feelings." Autobiography
of DAN YOUNG, edited by W. P. STRICKLAND, New York, 1860.
"In an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God's taking care
of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world
was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and
began to cry and laugh." H. W. BEECHER, quoted by LEUBA.
"My tears of sorrow changed to joy, and I lay there praising God in
such ecstasy of joy as only the soul who experiences it can
realize."--"I cannot express how I felt. It was as if I had been in a
dark dungeon and lifted into the light of the sun. I shouted and I
sang praise unto him who loved me and washed me from my sins. I was
forced to retire into a secret place, for the tears did flow, and I
did not wish my shopmates to see me, and yet I could not keep it a
secret."--"I experienced joy almost to weeping."--"I felt my face must
have shone like that of Moses. I had a general feeling of buoyancy.
It was the greatest joy it was ever my lot to experience."--"I wept
and laughed alternately. I was as light as if walking on air. I felt
as if I had gained greater peace and happiness than I had ever
expected to experience." STARBUCK'S correspondents.
141 Psychology of Religion, pp. 360, 357.
142 SAINTE-BEUVE: Port-Royal, vol. i. pp. 95 and 106, abridged.
143 " 'Love would not be love,' says Bourget, 'unless it could carry one
to crime.' And so one may say that no passion would be a veritable
passion unless it could carry one to crime." (SIGHELE: Psychologie
des Sectes, p. 136.) In other words, great passions annul the
ordinary inhibitions set by "conscience." And conversely, of all the
criminal human beings, the false, cowardly, sensual, or cruel
persons who actually live, there is perhaps not one whose criminal
impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the presence of
some other emotion to which his character is also potentially
liable, provided that other emotion be only made intense enough.
Fear is usually the most available emotion for this result in this
particular class of persons. It stands for conscience, and may here
be classed appropriately as a "higher affection." If we are soon to
die, or if we believe a day of judgment to be near at hand, how
quickly do we put our moral house in order--we do not see how sin can
evermore exert temptation over us! Old-fashioned hell-fire
Christianity well knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent
in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion value.
144 Example: Benjamin Constant was often marveled at as an extraordinary
instance of superior intelligence with inferior character. He writes
(Journal, Paris, 1895, p. 56), "I am tossed and dragged about by my
miserable weakness. Never was anything so ridiculous as my
indecision. Now marriage, now solitude; now Germany, now France,
hesitation upon hesitation, and all because at bottom I am _unable
to give up anything_." He can't "get mad" at any of his
alternatives; and the career of a man beset by such an all-round
amiability is hopeless.
145 The great thing which the higher excitabilities give is _courage_;
and the addition or subtraction of a certain amount of this quality
makes a different man, a different life. Various excitements let the
courage loose. Trustful hope will do it; inspiring example will do
it; love will do it; wrath will do it. In some people it is natively
so high that the mere touch of danger does it, though danger is for
most men the great inhibitor of action. "Love of adventure" becomes
in such persons a ruling passion. "I believe," says General
Skobeleff, "that my bravery is simply the passion and at the same
time the contempt of danger. The risk of life fills me with an
exaggerated rapture. The fewer there are to share it, the more I
like it. The participation of my body in the event is required to
furnish me an adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears
to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger
into which I can throw myself headforemost, attracts me, moves me,
intoxicates me. I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run
after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop. Were
it always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure. When I
throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it, my heart
palpitates with the uncertainty; I could wish at once to have it
appear and yet to delay. A sort of painful and delicious shiver
shakes me; my entire nature runs to meet the peril with an impetus
that my will would in vain try to resist." (JULIETTE ADAM: Le
Général Skobeleff, Nouvelle Revue, 1886, abridged.) Skobeleff seems
to have been a cruel egoist; but the disinterested Garibaldi, if one
may judge by his "Memorie," lived in an unflagging emotion of
similar danger-seeking excitement.
146 See the case on p. 70, above, where the writer describes his
experiences of communion with the Divine as consisting "merely in
the _temporary obliteration of the conventionalities_ which usually
cover my life."
147 Above, p. 201. "The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is
religiomania," is a saying I have heard quoted from some medical
man.
148 Doddridge's Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious Tract
Society, pp. 23-32.
149 Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck's book, in which a
"sensory automatism" brought about quickly what prayers and resolves
had been unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:--
"When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was
on me, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God
to quit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was
fifty-three, as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to
me. I did not hear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of
double think. It said, 'Louisa, lay down smoking.' At once I
replied, 'Will you take the desire away?' But it only kept saying:
'Louisa, lay down smoking.' Then I got up, laid my pipe on the
mantel-shelf, and never smoked again or had any desire to. The
desire was gone as though I had never known it or touched tobacco.
The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gave me the
least wish to touch it again." The Psychology of Religion, p. 142.
150 Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old
influences physiologically, as a cutting off of the connection
between higher and lower cerebral centres. "This condition," he
says, "in which the association-centres connected with the spiritual
life are cut off from the lower, is often reflected in the way
correspondents describe their experiences.... For example:
'Temptations from without still assail me, but there is nothing
_within_ to respond to them.' The ego [here] is wholly identified
with the higher centres, whose quality of feeling is that of
withinness. Another of the respondents says: 'Since then, although
Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of brass around me, so
that his darts cannot touch me.' "--Unquestionably, functional
exclusions of this sort must occur in the cerebral organ. But on the
side accessible to introspection, their causal condition is nothing
but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so high and
strong as to be sovereign; and it must be frankly confessed that we
do not know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one
person and not in another. We can only give our imagination a
certain delusive help by mechanical analogies.
If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its
different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided
solid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might
liken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body.
As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in which it lies
on surface A, for instance, it will linger for a time unstably
halfway up, and if the lever cease to urge it, it will tumble back
or "relapse" under the continued pull of gravity. But if at last it
rotate far enough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond surface A
altogether, the body will fall over, on surface B, say, and abide
there permanently. The pulls of gravity towards A have vanished, and
may now be disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune against
farther attraction from their direction.
In this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional
influences making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to
the ancient drawbacks and inhibitions. So long as the emotional
influence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes it
produces are unstable, and the man relapses into his original
attitude. But when a certain intensity is attained by the new
emotion, a critical point is passed, and there then ensues an
irreversible revolution, equivalent to the production of a new
nature.
151 I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of "sanctimoniousness"
which sometimes clings to it, because no other word suggests as well
the exact combination of affections which the text goes on to
describe.
152 "It will be found," says Dr. W. R. INGE (in his lectures on
Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 326), "that men of preëminent
saintliness agree very closely in what they tell us. They tell us
that they have arrived at an unshakable conviction, not based on
inference but on immediate experience, that God is a spirit with
whom the human spirit can hold intercourse; that in him meet all
that they can imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can
see his footprints everywhere in nature, and feel his presence
within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as
they come to themselves they come to him. They tell us what
separates us from him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in
all its forms; and, secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that
these are the ways of darkness and death, which hide from us the
face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light,
which shineth more and more unto the perfect day."
153 The "enthusiasm of humanity" may lead to a life which coalesces in
many respects with that of Christian saintliness. Take the following
rules proposed to members of the Union pour l'Action morale, in the
Bulletin de l'Union, April 1-15, 1894. See, also, Revue Bleue,
August 13, 1892.
"We would make known in our own persons the usefulness of rule, of
discipline, of resignation and renunciation; we would teach the
necessary perpetuity of suffering, and explain the creative part
which it plays. We would wage war upon false optimism; on the base
hope of happiness coming to us ready made; on the notion of a
salvation by knowledge alone, or by material civilization alone,
vain symbol as this is of civilization, precarious external
arrangement, ill-fitted to replace the intimate union and consent of
souls. We would wage war also on bad morals, whether in public or in
private life; on luxury, fastidiousness, and over-refinement; on all
that tends to increase the painful, immoral, and anti-social
multiplication of our wants; on all that excites envy and dislike in
the soul of the common people, and confirms the notion that the
chief end of life is freedom to enjoy. We would preach by our
example the respect of superiors and equals, the respect of all men;
affectionate simplicity in our relations with inferiors and
insignificant persons; indulgence where our own claims only are
concerned, but firmness in our demands where they relate to duties
towards others or towards the public.
"For the common people are what we help them to become; their vices
are our vices, gazed upon, envied, and imitated; and if they come
back with all their weight upon us, it is but just."
154 Above, pp. 248 ff.
155 H. THOREAU: Walden, Riverside edition, p. 206, abridged.
156 C. H. HILTY: Glück, vol. i. p. 85.
157 The Mystery of Pain and Death, London, 1892, p. 258.
158 Compare Madame Guyon: "It was my practice to arise at midnight for
purposes of devotion.... It seemed to me that God came at the
precise time and woke me from sleep in order that I might enjoy him.
When I was out of health or greatly fatigued, he did not awake me,
but at such times I felt, even in my sleep, a singular possession of
God. He loved me so much that he seemed to pervade my being, at a
time when I could be only imperfectly conscious of his presence. My
sleep is sometimes broken,--a sort of half sleep; but my soul seems
to be awake enough to know God, when it is hardly capable of knowing
anything else." T. C. UPHAM: The Life and Religious Experiences of
Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, vol. i. p. 260.
159 I have considerably abridged the words of the original, which is
given in EDWARDS'S Narrative of the Revival in New England.
160 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, 1894, p. 125.
161 Paris, 1900.
162 Page 130.
163 Page 167.
164 Op. cit., p. 127.
165 The barrier between men and animals also. We read of Towianski, an
eminent Polish patriot and mystic, that "one day one of his friends
met him in the rain, caressing a big dog which was jumping upon him
and covering him horribly with mud. On being asked why he permitted
the animal thus to dirty his clothes, Towianski replied: 'This dog,
whom I am now meeting for the first time, has shown a great fellow-
feeling for me, and a great joy in my recognition and acceptance of
his greetings. Were I to drive him off, I should wound his feelings
and do him a moral injury. It would be an offense not only to him,
but to all the spirits of the other world who are on the same level
with him. The damage which he does to my coat is as nothing in
comparison with the wrong which I should inflict upon him, in case I
were to remain indifferent to the manifestations of his friendship.
We ought,' he added, 'both to lighten the condition of animals,
whenever we can, and at the same time to facilitate in ourselves
that union of the world of all spirits, which the sacrifice of
Christ has made possible.' " André Towianski, Traduction de
l'Italien, Turin, 1897 (privately printed). I owe my knowledge of
this book and of Towianski to my friend Professor W. Lutoslawski,
author of "Plato's Logic."
166 J. PATTERSON'S Life of Richard Weaver, pp. 66-68, abridged.
167 As where the future Buddha, incarnated as a hare, jumps into the
fire to cook himself for a meal for a beggar--having previously
shaken himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur
should perish with him.
168 Bulletin de l'Union pour l'Action Morale, September, 1894.
169 B. PASCAL: Prières pour les Maladies, §§ xiii., xiv., abridged.
170 From THOMAS C. UPHAM'S Life and Religious Opinions and Experiences
of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, ii. 48, i. 141, 413,
abridged.
171 Op. cit., London, 1901, p. 130.
172 CLAPARÈDE et GOTY: Deux Héroines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, p. 112.
173 Compare these three different statements of it: A. P. CALL: As a
Matter of Course, Boston, 1894; H. W. DRESSER: Living by the Spirit,
New York and London, 1900; H. W. SMITH: The Christian's Secret of a
Happy Life, published by the Willard Tract Repository, and now in
thousands of hands.
174 T. C. UPHAM: Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, 3d ed., New York,
1864, pp. 158, 172-174.
175 The History of THOMAS ELWOOD, written by Himself, London, 1885, pp.
32-34.
176 Memoirs of W.E. Channing, Boston, 1840, i. 196.
177 L. TYERMAN: The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, i. 274.
178 A. MOUNIN: Le Curé d'Ars, Vie de M. J. B. M. Vianney, 1864, p. 545,
abridged.
179 B. WENDELL: Cotton Mather, New York, no date, p. 198.
180 That of the earlier Jesuit, RODRIGUEZ, which has been translated
into all languages, is one of the best known. A convenient modern
manual, very well put together, is L'Ascétique Chrétienne, by M. J.
RIBET, Paris, Poussielgue, nouvelle édition, 1898.
181 SAINT JEAN DE LA CROIX, Vie et OEuvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99,
abridged.
182 "Insects," i.e. lice, were an unfailing token of mediæval sainthood.
We read of Francis of Assisi's sheepskin that "often a companion of
the saint would take it to the fire to clean and _dispediculate_ it,
doing so, as he said, because the seraphic father himself was no
enemy of _pedocchi_, but on the contrary kept them on him (le
portava adosso), and held it for an honor and a glory to wear these
celestial pearls in his habit." Quoted by P. SABATIER: Speculum
Perfectionis, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 231, note.
183 The Life of the Blessed HENRY SUSO, by Himself, translated by T. F.
KNOX, London, 1865, pp. 56-80, abridged.
184 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp.
265, 171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387.
185 LEJEUNE: Introduction à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaust
simile goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola.
186 ALFONSO RODRIGUEZ, S. J.: Pratique de la Perfection Chrétienne, Part
iii., Treatise v., ch. x.
187 Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translated into French by
BOUIX, Paris, 1870.
188 BARTOLI-MICHEL, ii. 13.
189 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi.
190 SAINTE-BEUVE: Histoire de Port Royal, i. 346.
191 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise iii., chaps. vi., vii.
192 R. PHILIP: The Life and Times of George Whitefield, London, 1842, p.
366.
193 EDWARD CARPENTER: Towards Democracy, p. 362, abridged.
194 Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. SABATIER, Paris, 1898, pp. 10, 13.
195 An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, London, 1699, pp. 269, 270,
abridged.
Another example from Starbuck's MS. collection:--
"At a meeting held at six the next morning, I heard a man relate his
experience. He said: The Lord asked him if he would confess Christ
among the quarrymen with whom he worked, and he said he would. Then
he asked him if he would give up to be used of the Lord the four
hundred dollars he had laid up, and he said he would, and thus the
Lord saved him. The thought came to me at once that I had never made
a real consecration either of myself or of my property to the Lord,
but had always tried to serve the Lord in _my_ way. Now the Lord
asked me if I would serve him in _his_ way, and go out alone and
penniless if he so ordered. The question was pressed home, and I
must decide: To forsake all and have him, or have all and lose him!
I soon decided to take him; and the blessed assurance came, that he
had taken me for his own, and my joy was full. I returned home from
the meeting with feelings as simple as a child. I thought all would
be glad to hear of the joy of the Lord that possessed me, and so I
began to tell the simple story. But to my great surprise, the
pastors (for I attended meetings in three churches) opposed the
experience and said it was fanaticism, and one told the members of
his church to shun those that professed it, and I soon found that my
foes were those of my own household."
196 J. J. CHAPMAN, in the Political Nursery, vol. iv. p. 4, April, 1900,
abridged.
197 GEORGE FOX: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59-61, abridged.
198 Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint
Francis to Christ's wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ's
childhood; Saint Bernard to his humanity; Saint Teresa to Saint
Joseph, etc. The Shi-ite Mohammedans venerate Ali, the Prophet's
son-in-law, instead of Abu-bekr, his brother-in-law. Vambéry
describes a dervish whom he met in Persia, "who had solemnly vowed,
thirty years before, that he would never employ his organs of speech
otherwise but in uttering, everlastingly, the name of his favorite,
_Ali, Ali_. He thus wished to signify to the world that he was the
most devoted partisan of that Ali who had been dead a thousand
years. In his own home, speaking with his wife, children, and
friends, no other word but 'Ali!' ever passed his lips. If he wanted
food or drink or anything else, he expressed his wants still by
repeating 'Ali!' Begging or buying at the bazaar, it was always
'Ali!' Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on his
monotonous 'Ali!' Latterly his zeal assumed such tremendous
proportions that, like a madman, he would race, the whole day, up
and down the streets of the town, throwing his stick high up into
the air, and shriek out, all the while, at the top of his voice,
'Ali!' This dervish was venerated by everybody as a saint, and
received everywhere with the greatest distinction." ARMINIUS
VAMBÉRY, his Life and Adventures, written by Himself, London, 1889,
p. 69. On the anniversary of the death of Hussein, Ali's son, the
Shi-ite Moslems still make the air resound with cries of his name
and Ali's.
199 Compare H. C. WARREN: Buddhism in Translation, Cambridge, U. S.,
1898, passim.
200 Compare J. L. MERRICK: The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as
contained in the Sheeah traditions of the Hyat-ul-Kuloob, Boston,
1850, passim.
201 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, p.
145.
202 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp.
365, 241.
203 BOUGAUD: Op. cit., p. 267.
204 Examples: "Suffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory of
God, to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in
her mouth, when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her
lovingly, and to find comfort Himself in these odors. After having
gently breathed them in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to
the Saints, as if contented with what He had done: 'See the new
present which my betrothed has given Me!'
"One day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sung the words,
'_Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus_.' The Son of God leaning towards her
like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to
her at the second Sanctus: 'In this _Sanctus_ addressed to my
person, receive with this kiss all the sanctity of my divinity and
of my humanity, and let it be to thee a sufficient preparation for
approaching the communion table.' And the next following Sunday,
while she was thanking God for this favor, behold the Son of God,
more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in His arms as if
He were proud of her, and presents her to God the Father, in that
perfection of sanctity with which He had dowered her. And the Father
took such delight in this soul thus presented by His only Son, that,
as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gave her, and the Holy
Ghost gave her also, the Sanctity attributed to each by His own
_Sanctus_--and thus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of
the blessing of _Sanctity_, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by
Wisdom, and by Love." Révélations de Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898,
i. 44, 186.
205 FURNEAUX JORDAN: Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition.
Later editions change the nomenclature.
206 As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M.
BALDWIN'S little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.
207 On this subject I refer to the work of M. MURISIER (Les Maladies du
Sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the
mainspring of the whole religious life. But _all_ strongly ideal
interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to
subordinate everything to themselves. One would infer from M.
Murisier's pages that this formal condition was peculiarly
characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost
neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the
present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of
material content which is characteristic, and which is more
important by far than any general psychological form. In spite of
this criticism, I find M. Murisier's book highly instructive.
208 Example: "At the first beginning of the Servitor's [Suso's] interior
life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he
marked out for himself, in thought, three circles, within which he
shut himself up, as in a spiritual intrenchment. The first circle
was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he was within this
circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second circle
was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and
outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for
him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside these
circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild
animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and
therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness." The Life of
the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by KNOX, London,
1865, p. 168.
209 Vie des premières Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congrégation de St.
Dominique, à Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129.
210 MESCHLER'S Life of Saint Louis of Gonzaga, French translation by
LEBRÉQUIER, 1891; p. 40.
211 In his boyish note-book he praises the monastic life for its freedom
from sin, and for the imperishable treasures, which it enables us to
store up, "of merit in God's eyes which makes of Him our debtor for
all Eternity." Loc. cit., p. 62.
212 Mademoiselle Mori, a novel quoted in HARE'S Walks in Rome, 1900, i.
55.
I cannot resist the temptation to quote from Starbuck's book, p.
388, another case of purification by elimination. It runs as
follows:--
"The signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of
frequent occurrence. They get out of tune with other people; often
they will have nothing to do with churches, which they regard as
worldly; they become hypercritical towards others; they grow
careless of their social, political, and financial obligations. As
an instance of this type may be mentioned a woman of sixty-eight of
whom the writer made a special study. She had been a member of one
of the most active and progressive churches in a busy part of a
large city. Her pastor described her as having reached the
censorious stage. She had grown more and more out of sympathy with
the church; her connection with it finally consisted simply in
attendance at prayer-meeting, at which her only message was that of
reproof and condemnation of the others for living on a low plane. At
last she withdrew from fellowship with any church. The writer found
her living alone in a little room on the top story of a cheap
boarding-house, quite out of touch with all human relations, but
apparently happy in the enjoyment of her own spiritual blessings.
Her time was occupied in writing booklets on sanctification--page
after page of dreamy rhapsody. She proved to be one of a small group
of persons who claim that entire salvation involves three steps
instead of two; not only must there be conversion and
sanctification, but a third, which they call 'crucifixion' or
'perfect redemption,' and which seems to bear the same relation to
sanctification that this bears to conversion. She related how the
Spirit had said to her, 'Stop going to church. Stop going to
holiness meetings. Go to your own room and I will teach you.' She
professes to care nothing for colleges, or preachers, or churches,
but only cares to listen to what God says to her. Her description of
her experience seemed entirely consistent; she is happy and
contented, and her life is entirely satisfactory to herself. While
listening to her own story, one was tempted to forget that it was
from the life of a person who could not live by it in conjunction
with her fellows."
213 The best missionary lives abound in the victorious combination of
non-resistance with personal authority. John G. Paton, for example,
in the New Hebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals, preserves a
charmed life by dint of it. When it comes to the point, no one ever
dares actually to strike him. Native converts, inspired by him,
showed analogous virtue. "One of our chiefs, full of the Christ-
kindled desire to seek and to save, sent a message to an inland
chief, that he and four attendants would come on Sabbath and tell
them the gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came back sternly
forbidding their visit, and threatening with death any Christian
that approached their village. Our chief sent in response a loving
message, telling them that Jehovah had taught the Christians to
return good for evil, and that they would come unarmed to tell them
the story of how the Son of God came into the world and died in
order to bless and save his enemies. The heathen chief sent back a
stern and prompt reply once more: 'If you come, you will be killed.'
On Sabbath morn the Christian chief and his four companions were met
outside the village by the heathen chief, who implored and
threatened them once more. But the former said:--
" 'We come to you without weapons of war! We come only to tell you
about Jesus. We believe that He will protect us to-day.'
"As they pressed steadily forward towards the village, spears began
to be thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except one
dexterous warriors; and others they literally received with their
bare hands, and turned them aside in an incredible manner. The
heathen, apparently thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them
without weapons of war, and not even flinging back their own spears
which they had caught, after having thrown what the old chief called
'a shower of spears,' desisted from mere surprise. Our Christian
chief called out, as he and his companions drew up in the midst of
them on the village public ground:--
" 'Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once
we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we
come, not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our
dark hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other
weapons of war, and to hear what we can tell you about the love of
God, our great Father, the only living God.'
"The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on
these Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened
for the first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We
lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of
Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas,
amongst all those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on
the part of converts cannot be recited." JOHN G. PATON, Missionary
to the New Hebrides, An Autobiography, second part, London, 1890, p.
243.
214 Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French
translation, p. 333), "had passed forty years without ever sleeping
more than an hour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this
was the one that had cost him the most. To compass it, he kept
always on his knees or on his feet. The little sleep he allowed
nature to take was snatched in a sitting posture, his head leaning
against a piece of wood fixed in the wall. Even had he wished to lie
down, it would have been impossible, because his cell was only four
feet and a half long. In the course of all these years he never
raised his hood, no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain's
strength. He never put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse
sackcloth, with nothing else upon his skin. This garment was as
scant as possible, and over it a little cloak of the same stuff.
When the cold was great he took off the cloak and opened for a while
the door and little window of his cell. Then he closed them and
resumed the mantle,--his way, as he told us, of warming himself, and
making his body feel a better temperature. It was a frequent thing
with him to eat once only in three days; and when I expressed my
surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired the
habit. One of his companions has assured me that he has gone
sometimes eight days without food.... His poverty was extreme; and
his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he
had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any
of the monks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he
never raised his eyes, and only found his way about by following the
others. He showed this same modesty on public highways. He spent
many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed
to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent to him
whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first
came to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed
of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this
sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke unless he was
questioned, but his intellectual right-mindedness and grace gave to
all his words an irresistible charm."
215 F. MAX MÜLLER: Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 180.
216 OLDENBERG: Buddha; translated by W. HOEY, London, 1882, p. 127.
217 "The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint
as regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away." Ramakrishna,
his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 172.
218 "When a church has to be run by oysters, ice-cream, and fun," I read
in an American religious paper, "you may be sure that it is running
away from Christ." Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the
present plight of many of our churches.
219 C. V. B. K.: Friedens- und Kriegs-moral der Heere. Quoted by HAMON:
Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. xli.
220 Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, § 14. I have abridged,
and in one place transposed, a sentence.
221 We all know _daft_ saints, and they inspire a queer kind of
aversion. But in comparing saints with strong men we must choose
individuals on the same intellectual level. The under-witted strong
man, homologous in his sphere with the under-witted saint, is the
bully of the slums, the hooligan or rowdy. Surely on this level also
the saint preserves a certain superiority.
222 See above, p. 327.
223 Above, pp. 327-334.
224 Newman's _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_ is another instance.
225 "Mesopotamia" is the stock comic instance.--An excellent old German
lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me
her _Sehnsucht_ that she might yet visit "Philadelphia," whose
wondrous name had always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster it
is said that "single words (as _chalcedony_), or the names of
ancient heroes, had a mighty fascination over him. 'At any time the
word _hermit_ was enough to transport him.' The words _woods_ and
_forests_ would produce the most powerful emotion." Foster's Life,
by RYLAND, New York, 1846, p. 3.
226 The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of
himself as follows:--
"I have never had any revelations through anæsthetics, but a kind of
waking trance--this for lack of a better word--I have frequently had,
quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come
upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all
at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of
individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away
into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the
clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words--where death
was an almost laughable impossibility--the loss of personality (if so
it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed
of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly
beyond words?"
Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this
condition: "By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It
is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder,
associated with absolute clearness of mind." Memoirs of Alfred
Tennyson, ii. 473.
227 The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the Cavendish Lecture,
on Dreamy Mental States, London, Baillière, 1895. They have been a
good deal discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example,
BERNARD-LEROY: L'Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898.
228 Charles Kingsley's Life, i. 55, quoted by INGE: Christian Mysticism,
London, 1899, p. 341.
229 H. F. BROWN: J. A. Symonds, a Biography, London, 1895, pp. 29-31,
abridged.
230 Crichton-Browne expressly says that Symonds's "highest nerve centres
were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental
states which afflicted him so grievously." Symonds was, however, a
perfect monster of many-sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic
gives no objective grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save
that Symonds complained occasionally, as all susceptible and
ambitious men complain, of lassitude and uncertainty as to his
life's mission.
231 What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being
with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his
whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his
consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept
subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical
level, and the _Aufgabe_ of making it articulate was surely set to
Hegel's intellect by mystical feeling.
232 BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD: The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of
Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made
several attempts to adumbrate the anæsthetic revelation, in
pamphlets of rare literary distinction, privately printed and
distributed by himself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who
died young at Amherst in the '80's, much lamented by those who knew
him, was also impressed by the revelation. "In the first place," he
once wrote to me, "Mr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if
anything, non-emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood
says, 'the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, but how,
the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the
vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at
stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and
presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late.
It is an _initiation of the past_.' The real secret would be the
formula by which the 'now' keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet
never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating?
The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is
static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer--we
simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why are twice two
four? Because, in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life
no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is a-going. But
the revelation adds: it goes because it is and _was_ a-going. You
walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary
philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail. The more he hunts
the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his
heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is
already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand
it. But at the moment of recovery from anæsthesis, just then,
_before starting on life_, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my
heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting.
The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished
before we set out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished,
not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being
already there),--which may occur vicariously in this life when we
cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile
upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we
are forever half a second too late--that's all. 'You could kiss your
own lips, and have all the fun to yourself,' it says, if you only
knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay
there till you got round to them. Why don't you manage it somehow?"
Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will at least recognize
the region of thought of which Mr. Clark writes, as familiar. In his
latest pamphlet, "Tennyson's Trances and the Anæsthetic Revelation,"
Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows:--
"The Anæsthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the
Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the
Inevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive
is inherent--it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate,
nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or
purpose, it knows not of.
"It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things;
but it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a
secular and intimately personal illumination of the nature and
motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent--as if it should
have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof.
"Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes
directly such a matter of course--so old-fashioned, and so akin to
proverbs, that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense
of safety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal. But
no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he
is realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.
"Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it
could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal
consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its
occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import,--with only
this consolatory afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth,
and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning,
or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in 'spiritual
things.'
"The lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom is within. All
days are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of
eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the
row of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so
may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity
for which each of us stands.
"This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my
first printed mention of it I declared: 'The world is no more the
alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still
sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray
gull lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues
with a fearless eye.' And now, after twenty-seven years of this
experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while
I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know--as having
known--the meaning of Existence: the sane centre of the universe--at
once the wonder and the assurance of the soul--for which the speech
of reason has as yet no name but the Anæsthetic Revelation."--I have
considerably abridged the quotation.
233 Op. cit., pp. 78-80, abridged. I subjoin, also abridging it, another
interesting anæsthetic revelation communicated to me in manuscript
by a friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking
ether for a surgical operation.
"I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I
remembered having heard it said that people 'learn through
suffering,' and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this
saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, 'to suffer _is_ to
learn.'
"With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately
preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was
most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.
"A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was
on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway.
The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people
close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight
line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short
conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be
directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his
own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying
with all his might to do was to _change his course_, to _bend_ the
line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he
wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that
he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my
hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at
the acutest point of this, as he passed, I _saw_. I understood for a
moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could
remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and
I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute
angle, I should have both suffered and 'seen' still more, and should
probably have died.
"He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life
passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of
distress, and I _understood_ them. _This_ was what it had all meant,
_this_ was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. I
did not see God's purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire
relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a
man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting a
cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on waking, my first feeling
was, and it came with tears, 'Domine non sum digna,' for I had been
lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized that in
that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and
purely than I had ever done in my life before, or that I am capable
of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing
something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent
of my capacity for suffering.
"While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so
deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the _love_ of God,
nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I
could only just catch, saying, 'Knowledge and Love are One, and the
_measure_ is suffering'--I give the words as they came to me. With
that I came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with
the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be
called the 'cause' of my experience was a slight operation under
insufficient ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common
city window in a common city street. If I had to formulate a few of
the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as
follows:--
"The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness.
The veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;--the
passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and
defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does;--the
impossibility of discovery without its price;--finally, the excess of
what the suffering 'seer' or genius pays over what his generation
gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to
save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and
satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the
lac away, dropping _one_ rupee, and says, 'That you may give them.
That you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.') I perceived
also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over
what we can demonstrate.
"And so on!--these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms; but
for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even
such words as these has been given me by an ether dream."
234 In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.
235 The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this from
Starbuck's manuscript collection:--
"I never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood
at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the
immensity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an
atom too small for the notice of Almighty God."
I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck's collection:--
"In that time the consciousness of God's nearness came to me
sometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence,
I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the
moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a
personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of
something bigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one
with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I
exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all--the
drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree-trunks, and so
on. In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I
wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing
self in a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy
because that perception was not constant." The cases quoted in my
third lecture, pp. 66, 67, 70, are still better ones of this type.
In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol.
lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of
the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the
object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences,
of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the
constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the
object in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must refer the
reader to the highly instructive article, which seems to me to throw
light upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to account
for the rapture or the revelation-value of the experience in the
Subject's eyes.
236 Op. cit., i. 43-44.
237 Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years
she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.
238 Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was
probably with him a chronic mystical perception: "There is," he
writes, "apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior
human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument,
frequently without what is called education (though I think it the
goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of
the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this
multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe
and general unsettledness, we call _the world_; a soul-sight of that
divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of
things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial,
however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.
[Of] such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism
explains only the surface." Whitman charges it against Carlyle that
he lacked this perception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia,
1882, p. 174.
239 My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged.
240 Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged.
241 Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human Mind,
Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.
242 Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privately printed
pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke's larger work, and differs
verbally a little from the text of the latter.
243 My quotations are from VIVEKANANDA, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The
completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by
VIHARI LALA MITRA: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta,
1891-99.
244 A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of Yoga
with those of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible
by us, says: "It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and
happy men.... Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his
thoughts and his body, he grows into a 'character.' By the
subjection of his impulses and propensities to his will, and the
fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, he becomes a
'personality' hard to influence by others, and thus almost the
opposite of what we usually imagine a 'medium' so-called, or
'psychic subject' to be." KARL KELLNER: Yoga: Eine Skizze, München,
1896, p. 21.
245 I follow the account in C. F. KOEPPEN: Die Religion des Buddha,
Berlin, 1857, i. 585 ff.
246 For a full account of him, see D. B. MACDONALD: The Life of Al-
Ghazzali, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899,
vol. xx. p. 71.
247 A. SCHMÖLDERS: Essai sur les écoles philosophiques chez les Arabes,
Paris, 1842, pp. 54-68, abridged.
248 GÖRRES'S Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So
does RIBET'S Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more
methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of VALLGORNERA, 2
vols., Turin, 1890.
249 M. RÉCÉJAC, in a recent volume, makes them essential. Mysticism he
defines as "the tendency to draw near to the Absolute morally, _and
by the aid of Symbols_." See his Fondements de la Connaissance
mystique, Paris, 1897, p. 66. But there are unquestionably mystical
conditions in which sensible symbols play no part.
250 Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book ii. ch.
xvii., in Vie et OEuvres, 3me édition, Paris, 1893, iii. 428-432.
Chapter xi. of book ii. of Saint John's Ascent of Carmel is devoted
to showing the harmfulness for the mystical life of the use of
sensible imagery.
251 In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations,
verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as "levitation,"
stigmatization, and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which
mystics have often presented (or are believed to have presented),
have no essential mystical significance, for they occur with no
consciousness of illumination whatever, when they occur, as they
often do, in persons of non-mystical mind. Consciousness of
illumination is for us the essential mark of "mystical" states.
252 The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, ch. i., in OEuvres, translated by
Bouix, iii. 421-424.
253 BARTOLI-MICHEL: Vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola, i. 34-36. Others have
had illuminations about the created world, Jacob Boehme, for
instance. At the age of twenty-five he was "surrounded by the divine
light, and replenished with the heavenly knowledge; insomuch as
going abroad into the fields to a green, at Görlitz, he there sat
down, and viewing the herbs and grass of the field, in his inward
light he saw into their essences, use, and properties, which was
discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures." Of
a later period of experience he writes: "In one quarter of an hour I
saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an
university. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the Byss and
the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holy Trinity, the
descent and original of the world and of all creatures through the
divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the
external and visible world being of a procreation or extern birth
from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the
whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and the mutual
original and existence; and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb
of eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder at
it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly
apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with the pen.
For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all
things are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible for me to
explicate the same." Jacob Behmen's Theosophic Philosophy, etc., by
EDWARD TAYLOR, London, 1691, pp. 425, 427, abridged. So George Fox:
"I was come up to the state of Adam in which he was before he fell.
The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me, how all things
had their names given to them, according to their nature and virtue.
I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practice physic for
the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures
were so opened to me by the Lord." Journal, Philadelphia, no date,
p. 69. Contemporary "Clairvoyance" abounds in similar revelations.
Andrew Jackson Davis's cosmogonies, for example, or certain
experiences related in the delectable "Reminiscences and Memories of
Henry Thomas Butterworth," Lebanon, Ohio, 1886.
254 Vie, pp. 581, 582.
255 Loc. cit., p. 574.
256 Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the body has a part
and pure spiritual pain (Interior Castle, 6th Abode, ch. xi.). As
for the bodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as
"penetrating to the marrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures
affect only the surface of the senses. I think," she adds, "that
this is a just description, and I cannot make it better." Ibid., 5th
Abode, ch. i.
257 Vie, p. 198.
258 OEuvres, ii. 320.
259 Above, p. 21.
260 Vie, pp. 229, 200, 231-233, 243.
261 MÜLLER'S translation, part ii. p. 180.
262 T. DAVIDSON'S translation, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy,
1893, vol. xxii. p. 399.
263 "Deus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihil vocatur." Scotus
Erigena, quoted by ANDREW SETH: Two Lectures on Theism, New York,
1897, p. 55.
264 J. ROYCE: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282.
265 Jacob Behmen's Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, translated by
BERNARD HOLLAND, London, 1901, p. 48.
266 Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25.
267 Op. cit., pp. 42, 74, abridged.
268 From a French book I take this mystical expression of happiness in
God's indwelling presence:--
"Jesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. It is not so much
a habitation, an association, as a sort of fusion. Oh, new and
blessed life! life which becomes each day more luminous.... The wall
before me, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour
because the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall they light up a
conflagration of glory; the smallest speck of glass sparkles, each
grain of sand emits fire; even so there is a royal song of triumph
in my heart because the Lord is there. My days succeed each other;
yesterday a blue sky; to-day a clouded sun; a night filled with
strange dreams; but as soon as the eyes open, and I regain
consciousness and seem to begin life again, it is always the same
figure before me, always the same presence filling my heart....
Formerly the day was dulled by the absence of the Lord. I used to
wake invaded by all sorts of sad impressions, and I did not find him
on my path. To-day he is with me; and the light cloudiness which
covers things is not an obstacle to my communion with him. I feel
the pressure of his hand, I feel something else which fills me with
a serene joy; shall I dare to speak it out? Yes, for it is the true
expression of what I experience. The Holy Spirit is not merely
making me a visit; it is no mere dazzling apparition which may from
one moment to another spread its wings and leave me in my night, it
is a permanent habitation. He can depart only if he takes me with
him. More than that; he is not other than myself: he is one with me.
It is not a juxtaposition, it is a penetration, a profound
modification of my nature, a new manner of my being." Quoted from
the MS. "of an old man" by WILFRED MONOD: Il Vit: six méditations
sur le mystère chrétien, pp. 280-283.
269 Compare M. MAETERLINCK: L'Ornement des Noces spirituelles de
Ruysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, Introduction, p. xix.
270 Upanishads, M. MÜLLER'S translation, ii. 17, 334.
271 SCHMÖLDERS: Op. cit., p. 210.
272 Enneads, BOUILLIER'S translation, Paris, 1861, iii. 561. Compare pp.
473-477, and vol. i. p. 27.
273 Autobiography, pp. 309, 310.
274 Op. cit., Strophe 10.
275 H. P. BLAVATSKY: The Voice of the Silence.
276 SWINBURNE: On the Verge, in "A Midsummer Vacation."
277 Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399.
278 As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical
region and the discursive life is contained in an article on
Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, by F. C. S. SCHILLER, in Mind, vol. ix.,
1900.
279 I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the
books are full, where the director (but usually not the subject)
remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from
the demon.
280 Example: Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching
Methodism: "My soul was as a watered garden, and I could sing
praises to God all day long; for he turned my captivity into joy,
and gave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed
of down. Now could I say, 'God's service is perfect freedom,' and I
was carried out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the
same river of peace which my God gave so largely to me." Journal,
London, no date, p. 172.
281 RUYSBROECK, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a
chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. DELACROIX'S book
(Essai sur le mysticisme spéculatif en Allemagne au XIVme Siècle,
Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A. JUNDT:
Les Amis de Dieu au XIVme Siècle, Thèse de Strasbourg, 1879.
282 Compare PAUL ROUSSELOT: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch.
xii.
283 See CARPENTER'S Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and
JEFFERIES'S wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my
Heart.
284 In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration, "MAX NORDAU"
seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the
lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden
significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant
uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a
degenerate brain. These give to him who has the experience a vague
and vast sense of its leading further, yet they awaken no definite
or useful consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible
one for certain sorts of feeling of significance; and other
alienists (WERNICKE, for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie,
Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have explained "paranoiac" conditions by a
laming of the association-organ. But the higher mystical flights,
with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no
such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to
ascribe them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral
activity correlative to which we as yet know nothing.
285 They sometimes add subjective _audita et visa_ to the facts, but as
these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no
alteration in the facts of sense.
286 Compare Professor W. WALLACE'S Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and
Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.
287 Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.
288 Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized.
289 Discourse II. § 7.
290 As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions,
and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious
beliefs, see the striking work of H. FIELDING, The Hearts of Men,
London, 1902, which came into my hands after my text was written.
"Creeds," says the author, "are the grammar of religion, they are to
religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our
wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never
proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and
changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow" (p. 313). The
whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts, is little
more than an amplification of this text.
291 For convenience' sake, I follow the order of A. STÖCKL'S Lehrbuch
der Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. BOEDDER'S
Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual;
but an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant
theologians as C. HODGE: Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A.
H. STRONG: Systematic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.
292 It must not be forgotten that any form of _dis_order in the world
might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of
disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be
named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The
ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past
history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the
fullness of time just that particular arrangement of débris of
masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes
would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or
good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere
from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and
save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly
invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The
first is physical: Nature's forces tend of their own accord only to
disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture.
This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light
of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second
principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement
that for _us_ is "disorderly" can possibly have been an object of
design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the
interests of anthropomorphic Theism.
When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way
or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize
them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain
types of arrangement, useful, æsthetic, or moral,--so interested that
whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our
attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world
selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our
point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at,
and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly
arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a
thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by
eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost
any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then
say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that
the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our
dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast _plenum_ in
which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable
directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines
we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither
named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things
'unadapted' to each other in this world than there are things
'adapted'; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with
regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of
thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our
memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the
collection of them fills our encyclopædias. Yet all the while
between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects
that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet
attracted our attention.
The facts of order from which the physico-theological argument
starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary
human products. So long as this is the case, although of course no
argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him
will fail to constitute a knock-down proof of his existence. It will
be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him
already.
293 For the scholastics the _facultas appetendi_ embraces feeling,
desire, and will.
294 Op. cit., Discourse III. § 7.
295 In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science
Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286.
296 Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive
justice. But who, in the present state of theological opinion on
that point, will dare maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in
some shape is rendered certain by pure logic? Theology herself has
largely based this doctrine upon revelation; and, in discussing it,
has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas of
criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But the very notion
that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing
sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams and
rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our
modern imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon
such a basis.
297 John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London
and New York, 1880, pp. 243-250, and 291-299, much abridged.
298 A. C. FRASER: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and
London, 1899, especially part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.; A. SETH
[PRINGLE-PATTISON]: Hegelianism and Personality, Ibid., 1890,
passim.
The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual Soul
of the world, with which I am acquainted, are those of my colleague,
Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston, 1885;
in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; and lately in
his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2
vols., New York and London, 1901-02. I doubtless seem to some of my
readers to evade the philosophic duty which my thesis in this
lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to meet Professor
Royce's arguments articulately. I admit the momentary evasion. In
the present lectures, which are cast throughout in a popular mould,
there seemed no room for subtle metaphysical discussion, and for
tactical purposes it was sufficient, the contention of philosophy
being what it is (namely, that religion can be transformed into a
universally convincing science), to point to the fact that no
religious philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers.
Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may be
followed by another, if I am spared to write it, in which not only
Professor Royce's arguments, but others for monistic absolutism
shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their
great importance calls for. At present I resign myself to lying
passive under the reproach of superficiality.
299 Idea of a University, Discourse III. § 7.
300 Newman's imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system
that he can write: "From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the
fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I
cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion." And
again, speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: "I
loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop's sight, as if it were
the sight of God." Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50.
301 The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical
importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under
the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and
must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 280 ff.).
For others, on the contrary, superabundance, over-pressure,
stimulation, lots of superficial relations, are indispensable. There
are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their
debts, bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their
letters answered, their perplexities relieved, and their duties
fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes
with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day
stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with
ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions--some of
us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a
mass of lying and sophistication.
302 In Newman's Lectures on Justification, Lecture VIII. § 6, there is a
splendid passage expressive of this æsthetic way of feeling the
Christian scheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote.
303 Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the "meek lover of
the good," alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own
sakes, with the elaborate "business" that goes on in Catholic
devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more
complex businesses. An essentially worldly-minded Catholic woman can
become a visitor of the sick on purely coquettish principles, with
her confessor and director, her "merit" storing up, her patron
saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his
attention as a professional _dévote_, her definite "exercises," and
her definitely recognized social _pose_ in the organization.
304 Above, p. 362 ff.
305 A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work
by FRANK GRANGER: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii.
306 Example: "The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in
Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as
the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, 'You
Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to
church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under
water.' " R. W. EMERSON: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363.
307 AUGUSTE SABATIER: Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion, 2me
éd., 1897, pp. 24-26, abridged.
308 My authority for these statistics is the little work on Müller, by
FREDERIC G. WARNE, New York, 1898.
309 The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings with
George Müller, New American edition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194,
219.
310 Ibid., p. 126.
311 Op. cit., p. 383, abridged.
312 Ibid., p. 323.
313 I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even
more primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber's
English Garland, vol. vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor,
along with an English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689,
set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made the other
five prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lyde thus describes how
in this feat he found his God a very present help in time of
trouble:--
"With the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and one
more did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman which hung
about my middle hang very heavy, I said to the boy, 'Go round the
binnacle, and knock down that man that hangeth on my back.' So the
boy did strike him one blow on the head which made him fall.... Then
I looked about for a marlin spike or anything else to strike them
withal. But seeing nothing, I said, 'LORD! what shall I do?' Then
casting up my eye upon my left side, and seeing a marlin spike
hanging, I jerked my right arm and took hold, and struck the point
four times about a quarter of an inch deep into the skull of that
man that had hold of my left arm. [One of the Frenchmen then hauled
the marlin spike away from him.] But through GOD'S wonderful
providence! it either fell out of his hand, or else he threw it
down, and at this time the Almighty GOD gave me strength enough to
take one man in one hand, and throw at the other's head: and looking
about again to see anything to strike them withal, but seeing
nothing, I said, 'LORD! what shall I do now?' And then it pleased
GOD to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of
the men had hold of my right arm, yet GOD Almighty strengthened me
so that I put my right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife
and sheath, ... put it between my legs and drew it out, and then cut
the man's throat with it that had his back to my breast: and he
immediately dropt down, and scarce ever stirred after."--I have
slightly abridged Lyde's narrative.
314 As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the BISHOP OF RIPON and
others, London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to
Prayer, Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. HASTINGS: The Guiding Hand,
or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances,
Boston, 1898 (?).
315 C. HILTY: Glück, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff.
316 "Good Heaven!" says Epictetus, "any one thing in the creation is
sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful
mind. The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from
milk, and wool from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not,
whether we dig or plough or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is
God, who has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground;
great is God, who has given us hands and instruments of digestion;
who has given us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These
things we ought forever to celebrate.... But because the most of you
are blind and insensible, there must be some one to fill this
station, and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what
else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a
nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan,
the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my
duty to praise God ... and I call on you to join the same song."
Works, book i. ch. xvi., CARTER-HIGGINSON translation, abridged.
317 JAMES MARTINEAU: end of the sermon "Help Thou Mine Unbelief," in
Endeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page
the extract from Voysey on p. 275, above, and those from Pascal and
Madame Guyon on p. 286.
318 Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122.
319 Op. cit., Letter XXX.
320 Above, p. 248 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the
world, in Melancholiacs, p. 151.
321 Above, pp. 24, 25.
322 A friend of mine, a first-rate psychologist, who is a subject of
graphic automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent
actuation in the movements of his arm, when he writes automatically,
is so distinct that it obliges him to abandon a psychophysical
theory which he had previously believed in, the theory, namely, that
we have no feeling of the discharge downwards of our voluntary
motor-centres. We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or
the _sense of an absence_ would not be so striking as it is in these
experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in
religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statements as
Antonia Bourignon's, that "I do nothing but lend my hand and spirit
to another power than mine," is shown by the context to indicate
inspiration rather than directly automatic writing. In some
eccentric sects this latter occurs. The most striking instance of it
is probably the bulky volume called, 'Oahspe, a new Bible in the
Words of Jehovah and his angel ambassadors,' Boston and London,
1891, written and illustrated automatically by DR. NEWBROUGH of New
York, whom I understand to be now, or to have been lately, at the
head of the spiritistic community of Shalam in New Mexico. The
latest automatically written book which has come under my notice is
"Zertoulem's Wisdom of the Ages," by GEORGE A. FULLER, Boston, 1901.
323 W. SANDAY: The Oracles of God, London, 1892, pp. 49-56, abridged.
324 Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses's and Isaiah's
commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. iii. and iv., and Isaiah,
chap. vi.
325 Quoted by AUGUSTUS CLISSOLD: The Prophetic Spirit in Genius and
Madness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg's
case is of course the palmary one of _audita et visa_, serving as a
basis of religious revelation.
326 NÖLDEKE, Geschichte des Qorâns, 1860, p. 16. Compare the fuller
account in Sir WILLIAM MUIR'S Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch.
iii.
327 The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations
accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an
obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote
the following extract:--
"It may be very interesting for you to know that the President [Mr.
Snow] of the Mormon Church claims to have had a number of
revelations very recently from heaven. To explain fully what these
revelations are, it is necessary to know that we, as a people,
believe that the Church of Jesus Christ has again been established
through messengers sent from heaven. This Church has at its head a
prophet, seer, and revelator, who gives to man God's holy will.
Revelation is the means through which the will of God is declared
directly and in fullness to man. These revelations are got through
dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind, by voices without
visional appearance, or by actual manifestations of the Holy
Presence before the eye. We believe that God has come in person and
spoken to our prophet and revelator."
328 For example, on pages 135, 163, 333, above.
329 From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the
morbid mind, and between the once-born and the twice-born types, of
which I spoke in earlier lectures (see pp. 162-167), cease to be the
radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice-born look down
upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once-born as being
"mere morality," and not properly religion. "Dr. Channing," an
orthodox minister is reported to have said, "is excluded from the
highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his
character." It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the
twice-born--holding as it does more of the element of evil in
solution--is the wider and completer. The "heroic" or "solemn" way in
which life comes to them is a "higher synthesis" into which healthy-
mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not
evaded, but sublated in the higher religious cheer of these persons
(see pp. 47-52, 362-365). But the final consciousness which each
type reaches of union with the divine has the same practical
significance for the individual; and individuals may well be allowed
to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their several
temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the
mind-cure form of healthy-mindedness, we found abundant examples of
regenerative process. The severity of the crisis in this process is
a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink the
consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short-circuit and
get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in
many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual
as a once-born or a twice-born subject.
330 Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above.
331 "Prayerful" taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 463
ff.
332 How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian
Wolff, in whose dry-as-dust head all the learning of the early
eighteenth century was concentrated, should have preserved such a
baby-like faith in the personal and human character of Nature as to
expound her operations as he did in his work on the uses of natural
things? This, for example, is the account he gives of the sun and
its utility:--
"We see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable
conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men
and beasts, may inhabit its surface. Since men are the most
reasonable of creatures, and able to infer God's invisible being
from the contemplation of the world, the sun in so far forth
contributes to the primary purpose of creation: without it the race
of man could not be preserved or continued.... The sun makes
daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the other planets; and
daylight is of the utmost utility to us; for by its means we can
commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night-time
would either be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without
our going to the expense of artificial light. The beasts of the
field can find food by day which they would not be able to find at
night. Moreover we owe it to the sunlight that we are able to see
everything that is on the earth's surface, not only near by, but
also at a distance, and to recognize both near and far things
according to their species, which again is of manifold use to us not
only in the business necessary to human life, and when we are
traveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of Nature, which
knowledge for the most part depends on observations made with the
help of sight, and, without the sunshine, would have been
impossible. If any one would rightly impress on his mind the great
advantages which he derives from the sun, let him imagine himself
living through only one month, and see how it would be with all his
undertakings, if it were not day but night. He would then be
sufficiently convinced out of his own experience, especially if he
had much work to carry on in the street or in the fields.... From
the sun we learn to recognize when it is midday, and by knowing this
point of time exactly, we can set our clocks right, on which account
astronomy owes much to the sun.... By help of the sun one can find
the meridian.... But the meridian is the basis of our sun-dials, and
generally speaking, we should have no sun-dials if we had no sun."
Vernünftige Gedanken von den Absichten der natürlichen Dinge, 1782,
pp. 74-84.
Or read the account of God's beneficence in the institution of "the
great variety throughout the world of men's faces, voices, and
handwriting," given in Derham's Physico-theology, a book that had
much vogue in the eighteenth century. "Had Man's body," says Dr.
Derham, "been made according to any of the Atheistical Schemes, or
any other Method than that of the infinite Lord of the World, this
wise Variety would never have been: but Men's Faces would have been
cast in the same, or not a very different Mould, their Organs of
Speech would have sounded the same or not so great a Variety of
Notes; and the same Structure of Muscles and Nerves would have given
the Hand the same Direction in Writing. And in this Case, what
Confusion, what Disturbance, what Mischiefs would the world
eternally have lain under! No Security could have been to our
persons; no Certainty, no Enjoyment of our Possessions; no Justice
between Man and Man; no Distinction between Good and Bad, between
Friends and Foes, between Father and Child, Husband and Wife, Male
or Female; but all would have been turned topsy-turvy, by being
exposed to the Malice of the Envious and ill-Natured, to the Fraud
and Violence of Knaves and Robbers, to the Forgeries of the crafty
Cheat, to the Lusts of the Effeminate and Debauched, and what not!
Our Courts of Justice can abundantly testify the dire Effects of
Mistaking Men's Faces, of counterfeiting their Hands, and forging
Writings. But now as the infinitely wise Creator and Ruler hath
ordered the Matter, every man's Face can distinguish him in the
Light, and his Voice in the Dark; his Hand-writing can speak for him
though absent, and be his Witness, and secure his Contracts in
future Generations. A manifest as well as admirable Indication of
the divine Superintendence and Management."
A God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable
signing of bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after the heart
of eighteenth century Anglicanism.
I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham's "Vindication of God by
the Institution of Hills and Valleys," and Wolff's altogether
culinary account of the institution of Water:--
"The uses," says Wolff, "which water serves in human life are plain
to see and need not be described at length. Water is a universal
drink of man and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks
that are artificial, they could not do this without water. Beer is
brewed of water and malt, and it is the water in it which quenches
thirst. Wine is prepared from grapes, which could never have grown
without the help of water; and the same is true of those drinks
which in England and other places they produce from fruit....
Therefore since God so planned the world that men and beasts should
live upon it and find there everything required for their necessity
and convenience, he also made water as one means whereby to make the
earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this is all the more
manifest when we consider the advantages which we obtain from this
same water for the cleaning of our household utensils, of our
clothing, and of other matters.... When one goes into a grinding-
mill one sees that the grindstone must always be kept wet and then
one will get a still greater idea of the use of water."
Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty,
discourses as follows: "Some constitutions are indeed of so happy a
strength, and so confirmed an health, as to be indifferent to almost
any place or temperature of the air. But then others are so weakly
and feeble, as not to be able to bear one, but can live comfortably
in another place. With some the more subtle and finer air of the
hills doth best agree, who are languishing and dying in the feculent
and grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous air
of the valleys and waters. But contrariwise, others languish on the
hills, and grow lusty and strong in the warmer air of the valleys.
"So that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills to
the vales, is an admirable easement, refreshment, and great benefit
to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind; affording those an
easy and comfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably,
languish, and pine away.
"To this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another great
convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious places
for habitation, serving (as an eminent author wordeth it) as screens
to keep off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly
winds, and reflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams, and so
rendering our habitations both more comfortable and more cheerly in
winter.
"Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and
the rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and
lofty piles are not, as they are charged, such rude and useless
excrescences of our ill-formed globe; but the admirable tools of
nature, contrived and ordered by the infinite Creator, to do one of
its most useful works. For, was the surface of the earth even and
level, and the middle parts of its islands and continents not
mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be
no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters; but,
instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higher
lands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate and
perhaps stink, and also drown large tracts of land.
"[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler
they may seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of
the great Creator, and wisely appointed by him for the good of our
sublunary world."
333 Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. One
need only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions
by Aristotle, as, for example, his explanation of the power of the
lever to make a small weight raise a larger one. This is due,
according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculous character of the
circle and of all circular movement. The circle is both convex and
concave; it is made by a fixed point and a moving line, which
contradict each other; and whatever moves in a circle moves in
opposite directions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle is the most
"natural" movement; and the long arm of the lever, moving, as it
does, in the larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural
motion, and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the
explanation by Herodotus of the position of the sun in winter: It
moves to the south because of the cold which drives it into the warm
parts of the heavens over Libya. Or listen to Saint Augustine's
speculations: "Who gave to chaff such power to freeze that it
preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it
ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties of fire
itself, which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright, and
which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolors almost all
that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy
cinders?... Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal,
which is so brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a slight
pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisture rots
it, nor any time causes it to decay." City of God, book xxi. ch. iv.
Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and
unnaturalness, the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial
qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and
destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which they originally
fastened our attention.
If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic
invoked on every page. Take, for example, the famous vulnerary
ointment attributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety of
receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a
wild boar, or a bear; powdered earthworms, the _usnia_, or mossy
growth on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other
materials equally unpleasant--the whole prepared under the planet
Venus if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn. Then, if a
splinter of wood, dipped in the patient's blood, or the bloodstained
weapon that wounded him, be immersed in this ointment, the wound
itself being tightly bound up, the latter infallibly gets well,--I
quote now Van Helmont's account,--for the blood on the weapon or
splinter, containing in it the spirit of the wounded man, is roused
to active excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there
results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin-german,
the blood in the patient's body. This it does by sucking out the
dolorous and exotic impression from the wounded part. But to do this
it has to implore the aid of the bull's fat, and other portions of
the unguent. The reason why bull's fat is so powerful is that the
bull at the time of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and
vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a higher flame of
revenge about him than any other animal. And thus we have made it
out, says this author, that the admirable efficacy of the ointment
ought to be imputed, not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but
simply to the energy of the _posthumous character of Revenge_
remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat in the
unguent. J. B. VAN HELMONT: A Ternary of Paradoxes, translated by
WALTER CHARLETON, London, 1650.--I much abridge the original in my
citations.
The author goes on to prove by the analogy of many other natural
facts that this sympathetic action between things at a distance is
the true rationale of the case. "If," he says, "the heart of a
horse, slain by a witch, taken out of the yet reeking carcase, be
impaled upon an arrow and roasted, immediately the whole witch
becomes tormented with the insufferable pains and cruelty of the
fire, which could by no means happen unless there preceded a
conjunction of the spirit of the witch with the spirit of the horse.
In the reeking and yet panting heart, the spirit of the witch is
kept captive, and the retreat of it prevented by the arrow
transfixed. Similarly hath not many a murdered carcase at the
coroner's inquest suffered a fresh hæmorrhage or cruentation at the
presence of the assassin?--the blood being, as in a furious fit of
anger, enraged and agitated by the impress of revenge conceived
against the murderer, at the instant of the soul's compulsive exile
from the body. So, if you have dropsy, gout, or jaundice, by
including some of your warm blood in the shell and white of an egg,
which, exposed to a gentle heat, and mixed with a bait of flesh, you
shall give to a hungry dog or hog, the disease shall instantly pass
from you into the animal, and leave you entirely. And similarly
again, if you burn some of the milk either of a cow or of a woman,
the gland from which it issued will dry up. A gentleman at Brussels
had his nose mowed off in a combat, but the celebrated surgeon
Tagliacozzus digged a new nose for him out of the skin of the arm of
a porter at Bologna. About thirteen months after his return to his
own country, the engrafted nose grew cold, putrefied, and in a few
days dropped off, and it was then discovered that the porter had
expired, near about the same punctilio of time. There are still at
Brussels eye-witnesses of this occurrence," says Van Helmont; and
adds, "I pray what is there in this of superstition or of exalted
imagination?"
Modern mind-cure literature--the works of Prentice Mulford, for
example--is full of sympathetic magic.
334 Compare Lotze's doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to the
notion of a thing as it is "in itself" is by conceiving it as it is
_for_ itself; i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private
sense of "pinch" or inner activity of some sort going with it.
335 Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as wholesale
as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV how the religious
conception of the universe seems to many mind-curers 'verified' from
day to day by their experience of fact. "Experience of fact" is a
field with so many things in it that the sectarian scientist,
methodically declining, as he does, to recognize such "facts" as
mind-curers and others like them experience, otherwise than by such
rude heads of classification as "bosh," "rot," "folly," certainly
leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious
interest of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality,
would never have succeeded in getting itself recorded at all. We
know this to be true already in certain cases; it may, therefore, be
true in others as well. Miraculous healings have always been part of
the supernaturalist stock in trade, and have always been dismissed
by the scientist as figments of the imagination. But the scientist's
tardy education in the facts of hypnotism has recently given him an
apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order, and he consequently
now allows that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call
them effects of "suggestion." Even the stigmata of the cross on
Saint Francis's hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable.
Similarly, the time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is
on the point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that
he has the name of "hystero-demonopathy" by which to apperceive it.
No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of occultist
phenomena under newly found scientist titles may proceed--even
"prophecy," even "levitation," might creep into the pale.
Thus the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may not
necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the
personalism and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to
primitive thinking, be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The final
human opinion may, in short, in some manner now impossible to
foresee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of
progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this
were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day
appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than
the definitively triumphant position which the sectarian scientist
at present so confidently announces it to be.
336 Hume's criticism has banished causation from the world of physical
objects, and "Science" is absolutely satisfied to define cause in
terms of concomitant change--read Mach, Pearson, Ostwald. The
"original" of the notion of causation is in our inner personal
experience, and only there can causes in the old-fashioned sense be
directly observed and described.
337 When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps the best
thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_," I
recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual
terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference,
however inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint
Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the
intellect's pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the
intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing
effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under
those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every one
should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian
Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New
York, 1898, 1899, 1900). See the positively expulsive purpose of
philosophy properly so called:--
"Religion," writes M. Vacherot (La Religion, Paris, 1869, pp. 313,
436, et passim), "answers to a transient state or condition, not to
a permanent determination of human nature, being merely an
expression of that stage of the human mind which is dominated by the
imagination.... Christianity has but a single possible final heir to
its estate, and that is scientific philosophy."
In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des
Sentiments, p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion. He sums
it up in a single formula--the ever-growing predominance of the
rational intellectual element, with the gradual fading out of the
emotional element, this latter tending to enter into the group of
purely intellectual sentiments. "Of religious sentiment properly so
called, nothing survives at last save a vague respect for the
unknowable _x_ which is a last relic of the fear, and a certain
attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love, that
characterized the earlier periods of religious growth. To state this
more simply, _religion tends to turn into religious
philosophy_.--These are psychologically entirely different things,
the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas the
other is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great
inspired leader, calling into play the entire thinking and feeling
organism of man."
I find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion
lies in individuality in attempts like those of Professor Baldwin
(Mental Development, Social and Ethical Interpretations, ch. x.) and
Mr. H. R. Marshall (Instinct and Reason, chaps, viii. to xii.) to
make it a purely "conservative social force."
338 Compare, for instance, pages 203, 219, 223, 226, 249 to 256, 275 to
278.
339 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345.
340 Above, p. 184.
341 Above, p. 145.
342 Above, p. 400.
343 Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: "I do not know how to deal
with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It
overwhelms me; I want to _do_ something, yet I can do nothing and am
fit for nothing.... I would fain do _great things_." Again, after an
inspiring interview, he writes: "I went homewards, intoxicated with
joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in
solitude, far from all men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took
a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking at the heavens,
regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily
back--I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must
have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade." A.
GRATRY: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89.
This primacy, in the faith-state, of vague expansive impulse over
direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman's lines (Leaves of
Grass, 1872, p. 190):--
"O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs,
as the trees and animals do....
Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still
urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and defeated."
This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by
its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production,
would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths.
Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country's expansive
destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source
in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the
exceedingness of the possible over the real.
344 Compare LEUBA: Loc. cit., pp. 346-349.
345 The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536,
July, 1901.
346 Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer's
extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily
seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what
W. BENDER says (in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38):
"Not the question about God, and not the inquiry into the origin and
purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man. All
religious views of life are anthropocentric." "Religion is that
activity of the human impulse towards self-preservation by means of
which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through
against the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely
towards the world's ordering and governing powers when the limits of
his own strength are reached." The whole book is little more than a
development of these words.
347 Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others
gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life.
348 The practical difficulties are: 1, to "realize the reality" of one's
higher part; 2, to identify one's self with it exclusively; and 3,
to identify it with all the rest of ideal being.
349 "When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness
possessed by the sense of a being at once _excessive_ and
_identical_ with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough
to be me. The 'objectivity' of it ought in that case to be called
_excessivity_, rather, or exceedingness." RÉCÉJAC: Essai sur les
fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46.
350 The word "truth" is here taken to mean something additional to bare
value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe
that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true.
351 Above, p. 455.
352 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii. p. 305.
For a full statement of Mr. Myers's views, I may refer to his
posthumous work, "Human Personality in the Light of Recent
Research," which is already announced by Messrs. Longmans, Green &
Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first time proposed as a
general psychological problem the exploration of the subliminal
region of consciousness throughout its whole extent, and made the
first methodical steps in its topography by treating as a natural
series a mass of subliminal facts hitherto considered only as
curious isolated facts, and subjecting them to a systematized
nomenclature. How important this exploration will prove, future work
upon the path which Myers has opened can alone show. Compare my
paper: "Frederic Myers's Services to Psychology," in the said
Proceedings, part xlii., May, 1901.
353 Compare the inventory given above on pp. 483-4, and also what is
said of the subconscious self on pp. 233-236, 240-242.
354 Compare above, pp. 419 ff.
355 One more expression of this belief, to increase the reader's
familiarity with the notion of it:--
"If this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and you
come in and begin to weep and wail, 'Oh, the darkness,' will the
darkness vanish? Bring the light in, strike a match, and light comes
in a moment. So what good will it do you to think all your lives,
'Oh, I have done evil, I have made many mistakes'? It requires no
ghost to tell us that. Bring in the light, and the evil goes in a
moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up yourselves, the
effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one
whom you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state
that even when we see the vilest of human beings we can see the God
within, and instead of condemning, say, 'Rise, thou effulgent One,
rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless,
rise almighty, and manifest your nature.' ... This is the highest
prayer that the Advaita teaches. This is the one prayer: remembering
our nature." ... "Why does man go out to look for a God?... It is
your own heart beating, and you did not know, you were mistaking it
for something external. He, nearest of the near, my own self, the
reality of my own life, my body and my soul.--I am Thee and Thou art
Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become
pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that
already. Every good thought which you think or act upon is simply
tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God
behind, manifests itself--the eternal Subject of everything, the
eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it
were, a lower step, a degradation. We are It already; how to know
It?" SWAMI VIVEKANANDA: Addresses, No. XII., Practical Vedanta, part
iv. pp. 172, 174, London, 1897; and Lectures, The Real and the
Apparent Man, p. 24, abridged.
356 For instance, here is a case where a person exposed from her birth
to Christian ideas had to wait till they came to her clad in
spiritistic formulas before the saving experience set in:--
"For myself I can say that spiritualism has saved me. It was
revealed to me at a critical moment of my life, and without it I
don't know what I should have done. It has taught me to detach
myself from worldly things and to place my hope in things to come.
Through it I have learned to see in all men, even in those most
criminal, even in those from whom I have most suffered, undeveloped
brothers to whom I owed assistance, love, and forgiveness. I have
learned that I must lose my temper over nothing, despise no one, and
pray for all. Most of all I have learned to pray! And although I
have still much to learn in this domain, prayer ever brings me more
strength, consolation, and comfort. I feel more than ever that I
have only made a few steps on the long road of progress; but I look
at its length without dismay, for I have confidence that the day
will come when all my efforts shall be rewarded. So Spiritualism has
a great place in my life, indeed it holds the first place there."
Flournoy Collection.
357 "The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter,
is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of
electro-magnetism." W. C. BROWNELL, Scribner's Magazine, vol. xxx.
p. 112.
358 That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called prayer,
is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly
in the preceding lectures. I append another concrete example to
reinforce the impression on the reader's mind:--
"Man can learn to transcend these limitations [of finite thought]
and draw power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence is known
through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act
of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious
experience. It is not an ecstasy; it is not a trance. It is not
super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self-
hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational,
common-sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense-
perception to the phenomena of seership, from the thought of self to
a distinctively higher realm.... For example, if the lower self be
nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be
calm. This is not done by a word simply. Again I say, it is not
hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of
peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The
power can be as surely used as the sun's rays can be focused and
made to do work, to set fire to wood." The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp.
4, 6, Boston, August, 1901.
359 Transcendentalists are fond of the term "Over-soul," but as a rule
they use it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of
communion. "God" is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion,
and that is the aspect which I wish to emphasize.
360 Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world
makes _this_ difference, that facts _exist_. We owe it to the
Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. "A world" of
fact!--that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest
unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds
work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in
at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal
affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all
the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too
late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world
absolutely, before this world was born. It is strange, I have heard
a friend say, to see this blind corner into which Christian thought
has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no particular
weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is
on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd
evolution from the God of David's psalms!
361 See my Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897,
p. 165.
362 Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture On Human
Immortality, Boston and London, 1899.
363 Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148, 149.
***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE***
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