{"collection":"scripture-revelation","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_621/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_621","id":"gutenberg_621","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/621","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Psychiatry/Psychology","Category: Religion/Spirituality","Conversion","Experience (Religion)","Philosophy and religion","Psychology, Religious","Religion"],"text":"The Varieties of Religious Experience\n\n                         A Study in Human Nature\n\n Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in\n                                1901\u20101902\n\n                                    By\n\n                              William James\n\n                         Longmans, Green, And Co,\n\n              New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras\n\n                                   1917\n\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\nPreface.\nLecture I. Religion And Neurology.\nLecture II. Circumscription of the Topic.\nLecture III. The Reality Of The Unseen.\nLectures IV and V. The Religion Of Healthy\u2010Mindedness.\nLectures VI And VII. The Sick Soul.\nLecture VIII. The Divided Self, And The Process Of Its Unification.\nLecture IX. Conversion.\nLecture X. Conversion\u2014Concluded.\nLectures XI, XII, And XIII. Saintliness.\nLectures XIV And XV. The Value Of Saintliness.\nLectures XVI And XVII. Mysticism.\nLecture XVIII. Philosophy.\nLecture XIX. Other Characteristics.\nLecture XX. Conclusions.\nPostscript.\nIndex.\nFootnotes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n                               [Title Page]\n\n\n\n\n\nTo\n\nC. P. G.\n\nIN FILIAL GRATITUDE AND LOVE\n\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE.\n\n\nThis book would never have been written had I not been honored with an\nappointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of\nEdinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten\nlectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me that\nthe first course might well be a descriptive one on \u201cMan\u2019s Religious\nAppetites,\u201d and the second a metaphysical one on \u201cTheir Satisfaction\nthrough Philosophy.\u201d But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter\nas I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being\npostponed entirely, and the description of man\u2019s religious constitution\nnow fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than\nstated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires\nimmediately to know them should turn to pages 511\u2010519, and to the\n\u201cPostscript\u201d of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express\nthem in more explicit form.\n\nIn my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us\nwiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have\nloaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among\nthe extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some readers I\nmay consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to\noffer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will\nsay, are not sane. If, however, they will have the patience to read to the\nend, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I\nthere combine the religious impulses with other principles of common sense\nwhich serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow the individual\nreader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will.\n\nMy thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D. Starbuck,\nof Stanford University, who made over to me his large collection of\nmanuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East Northfield, a friend\nunseen but proved, to whom I owe precious information; to Theodore\nFlournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller, of Oxford, and to my colleague\nBenjamin Rand, for documents; to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to\nmy friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late\nof Cracow, for important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations\nwith the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at\nGlenmore, above Keene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well\nexpress.\n\nHARVARD UNIVERSITY,\nMarch, 1902.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY.\n\n\nIt is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this\ndesk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of\nreceiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of\nEuropean scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not\na winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from\nScottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or\nliterature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to\ncross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were\nvisiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the\nEuropeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans\nlisten, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure\nit begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.\nParticularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American\nimagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of\nthis university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood.\nProfessor Fraser\u2019s Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the\nfirst philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe\u2010\nstruck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton\u2019s\nclass\u2010room therein contained. Hamilton\u2019s own lectures were the first\nphilosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was\nimmersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of\nreverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self\npromoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official\nhere, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries\nwith it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.\n\nBut since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that\nit would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic\nobligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say\nonly this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to\nrun from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go\nby, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the\nScottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the\nUnited States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher\nmatters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament,\nas well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English\nspeech may more and more pervade and influence the world.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nAs regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this\nlectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the\nhistory of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch\nof learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the\nreligious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other\nof the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem,\ntherefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to\ninvite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.\n\nIf the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather\nreligious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must\nconfine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in\nliterature produced by articulate and fully self\u2010conscious men, in works\nof piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of\na subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full\nsignificance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and\nperfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most\nconcern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the\nreligious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their\nideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern\nwriters, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The\n_documents humains_ which we shall find most instructive need not then be\nsought for in the haunts of special erudition\u2014they lie along the beaten\nhighway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the\ncharacter of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer\u2019s lack of\nspecial theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and\nparagraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some\ntime will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no\ndetriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more\nadventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth\nfrom the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable\nand curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he\nwill necessarily, by his control of so much more out\u2010of\u2010the\u2010way material,\nget much closer to the essence of the matter in hand.\n\nThe question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What\nis their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of\nquestion from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize\nthis fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point\na little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have\nreferred.\n\nIn recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of\ninquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it\ncome about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second,\nWhat is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once\nhere? The answer to the one question is given in an _existential judgment_\nor proposition. The answer to the other is a _proposition of value_, what\nthe Germans call a _Werthurtheil_, or what we may, if we like, denominate\na _spiritual judgment_. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from\nthe other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the\nmind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding\nthem together.\n\nIn the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two\norders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its\nderivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher\ncriticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential\npoint of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what\nbiographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various\ncontributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their\nseveral individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These are\nmanifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the\nanswer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use\nshould such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined,\nbe to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other\nquestion we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as\nto what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for\npurposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called\na spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might\nindeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible\u2019s worth. Thus if\nour theory of revelation\u2010value were to affirm that any book, to possess\nit, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of\nthe writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and\nexpress no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill\nat our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a\nbook may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and\ndeliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner\nexperiences of great\u2010souled persons wrestling with the crises of their\nfate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the\nexistential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the\nvalue; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never\nconfound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same\nconclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of\nthe Bible\u2019s value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment\nas to the foundation of values differs.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nI make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because\nthere are many religious persons\u2014some of you now present, possibly, are\namong them\u2014who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who\nmay therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential\npoint of view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of\nreligious experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically\nand psychologically as if they were mere curious facts of individual\nhistory, some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject,\nand may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of\ndeliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life.\n\nSuch a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since\nsuch a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of\nmuch of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the\npoint.\n\nThere can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life,\nexclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and\neccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who\nfollows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be\nBuddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by\nothers, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by\nimitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this\nsecond\u2010hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original\nexperiences which were the pattern\u2010setters to all this mass of suggested\nfeeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in\nindividuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute\nfever rather. But such individuals are \u201cgeniuses\u201d in the religious line;\nand like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective\nenough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious\ngeniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more\nperhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to\nabnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of\nexalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner\nlife, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no\nmeasure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they\nhave fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all\nsorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.\nOften, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped\nto give them their religious authority and influence.\n\nIf you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is\nfurnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he\nfounded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of\nshams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a\nreturn to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever\nknown in England. So far as our Christian sects to\u2010day are evolving into\nliberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox\nand the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment\nthat in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox\u2019s mind was unsound.\nEvery one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to\ncounty magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior\npower. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a\npsychopath or _d\u00e9traqu\u00e9_ of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in\nentries of this sort:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cAs I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head, and\n    saw three steeple\u2010house spires, and they struck at my life. I\n    asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately\n    the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being\n    come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk\n    into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As\n    soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge\n    and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a\n    great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I\n    commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it\n    was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I\n    put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds; and the poor\n    shepherds trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about a\n    mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the\n    Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, \u2018Wo to the bloody city of\n    Lichfield!\u2019 So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud\n    voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I\n    went into the market\u2010place, and to and fro in the several parts of\n    it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of\n    Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As I went thus crying\n    through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood\n    running down the streets, and the market\u2010place appeared like a\n    pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt\n    myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; and returning to\n    the shepherds gave them some money, and took my shoes of them\n    again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over\n    me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a\n    stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so\n    to do: then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again.\n    After this a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I\n    should be sent to cry against that city, and call it The bloody\n    city! For though the parliament had the minister one while, and\n    the king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during\n    the wars between them, yet there was no more than had befallen\n    many other places. But afterwards I came to understand, that in\n    the Emperor Diocletian\u2019s time a thousand Christians were martyr\u2019d\n    in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the\n    channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the\n    market\u2010place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of\n    those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before,\n    and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon\n    me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord.\u201d\n\n\nBent as we are on studying religion\u2019s existential conditions, we cannot\npossibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject. We must\ndescribe and name them just as if they occurred in non\u2010religious men. It\nis true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our\nemotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any\nother object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object\nis to class it along with something else. But any object that is\ninfinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if\nit must be _sui generis_ and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with\na sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or\napology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. \u201cI am no such thing,\u201d it\nwould say; \u201cI am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.\u201d\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the\nthing originates. Spinoza says: \u201cI will analyze the actions and appetites\nof men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.\u201d And\nelsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their\nproperties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural\nthings, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature\nwith the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that\nits three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine,\nin the introduction to his history of English literature, has written:\n\u201cWhether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have\ntheir causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as\nthere are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue\nare products like vitriol and sugar.\u201d When we read such proclamations of\nthe intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely\neverything, we feel\u2014quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the\nsomewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors\nare actually able to perform\u2014menaced and negated in the springs of our\ninnermost life. Such cold\u2010blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to\nundo our soul\u2019s vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed\nin explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their\nsignificance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than\nthe useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.\n\nPerhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value\nis undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which\nunsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental\nacquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his\ntemperament is so emotional. Fanny\u2019s extraordinary conscientiousness is\nmerely a matter of over\u2010instigated nerves. William\u2019s melancholy about the\nuniverse is due to bad digestion\u2014probably his liver is torpid. Eliza\u2019s\ndelight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter\nwould be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in\nthe open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of\nreasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of\ncriticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them\nand the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence.\nThe macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only\ninstances of the parental instinct of self\u2010sacrifice gone astray. For the\nhysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary\nsubstitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like.(1)\n\nWe are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of\ndiscrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it\nto some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as\noverstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul\u2010\nflights by calling them \u201cnothing but\u201d expressions of our organic\ndisposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our\norganism\u2019s peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value\nas revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical\nmaterialism could be made to hold its tongue.\n\nMedical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple\u2010\nminded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism\nfinishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a\ndischarging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It\nsnuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an\nhereditary degenerate. George Fox\u2019s discontent with the shams of his age,\nand his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a\ndisordered colon. Carlyle\u2019s organ\u2010tones of misery it accounts for by a\ngastro\u2010duodenal catarrh. All such mental over\u2010tensions, it says, are, when\nyou come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto\u2010\nintoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various\nglands which physiology will yet discover.\n\nAnd medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all\nsuch personages is successfully undermined.(2)\n\nLet us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern\npsychology, finding definite psycho\u2010physical connections to hold good,\nassumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states\nupon bodily conditions must be thorough\u2010going and complete. If we adopt\nthe assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be\ntrue in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had\nonce an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an\nhereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto\u2010intoxicated by some\norgan or other, no matter which,\u2014and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can\nsuch an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way\nor another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general\npostulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our\nstates of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic\nprocess as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned\njust as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts\nintimately enough, we should doubtless see \u201cthe liver\u201d determining the\ndicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the\nMethodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one\nway the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another\nway, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our\ndrynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are\nequally organically founded, be they of religious or of non\u2010religious\ncontent.\n\nTo plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in\nrefutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite\nillogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance\nsome psycho\u2010physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with\ndeterminate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts\nand feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our\n_dis_\u2010beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for\nevery one of them without exception flows from the state of their\npossessor\u2019s body at the time.\n\nIt is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no\nsuch sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man\nis sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and\nreveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary\nspiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of\nthese its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt\nto discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them\nwith nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily\naffliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.\n\nLet us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves\nand with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to\nothers, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic\nantecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is\neither because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because\nwe believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life. When we\nspeak disparagingly of \u201cfeverish fancies,\u201d surely the fever\u2010process as\nsuch is not the ground of our disesteem\u2014for aught we know to the contrary,\n103\u00b0 or 104\u00b0 Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for\ntruths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood\u2010heat of 97\nor 98 degrees. It is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or\ntheir inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour. When we\npraise the thoughts which health brings, health\u2019s peculiar chemical\nmetabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment. We know in\nfact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the character of inner\nhappiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good, or else their\nconsistency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our\nneeds, which make them pass for true in our esteem.\n\nNow the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always\nhang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree.\nWhat immediately feels most \u201cgood\u201d is not always most \u201ctrue,\u201d when\nmeasured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between\nPhilip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If\nmerely \u201cfeeling good\u201d could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely\nvalid human experience. But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at\nthe moment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them\nout for any length of time. The consequence of this discrepancy of the two\ncriteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our\nspiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical\nexperience\u2014we shall hereafter hear much of them\u2014that carry an enormous\nsense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But\nthey come seldom, and they do not come to every one; and the rest of life\nmakes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more\nthan it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in\nthese cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the\nsad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a\ndiscordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these\nlectures end.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIt is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely\nmedical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly to\nthe medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of\ngenius promulgated by recent authors. \u201cGenius,\u201d said Dr. Moreau, \u201cis but\none of the many branches of the neuropathic tree.\u201d \u201cGenius,\u201d says Dr.\nLombroso, \u201cis a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid\nvariety, and is allied to moral insanity.\u201d \u201cWhenever a man\u2019s life,\u201d writes\nMr. Nisbet, \u201cis at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with\nsufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study, he inevitably\nfalls into the morbid category.... And it is worthy of remark that, as a\nrule, the greater the genius, the greater the unsoundness.\u201d(3)\n\nNow do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing to their own\nsatisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease, consistently\nproceed thereupon to impugn the _value_ of the fruits? Do they deduce a\nnew spiritual judgment from their new doctrine of existential conditions?\nDo they frankly forbid us to admire the productions of genius from now\nonwards? and say outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new\ntruth?\n\nNo! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here, and\nhold their own against inferences which, in mere love of logical\nconsistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw. One\ndisciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the value of works\nof genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely, as\nhe himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical\narguments.(4) But for the most part the masterpieces are left\nunchallenged; and the medical line of attack either confines itself to\nsuch secular productions as every one admits to be intrinsically\neccentric, or else addresses itself exclusively to religious\nmanifestations. And then it is because the religious manifestations have\nbeen already condemned because the critic dislikes them on internal or\nspiritual grounds.\n\nIn the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any one to\ntry to refute opinions by showing up their author\u2019s neurotic constitution.\nOpinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter\nwhat may be their author\u2019s neurological type. It should be no otherwise\nwith religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual\njudgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate\nfeeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their\nexperiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold\nas true.\n\n_Immediate luminousness_, in short, _philosophical reasonableness_, and\n_moral helpfulness_ are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might\nhave had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now\nsave her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests\nshould show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can\nstand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or\nnervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us\nhere below.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nYou see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles by\nwhich the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided\nin our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for\ntruth which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct\nmark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and absolutely, now\nand forever, against all mistake\u2014such has been the darling dream of\nphilosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the _origin_ of the truth would\nbe an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various origins could\nbe discriminated from one another from this point of view, and the history\nof dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been a favorite test.\nOrigin in immediate intuition; origin in pontifical authority; origin in\nsupernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccountable\nimpression; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing\nitself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterance\ngenerally,\u2014these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one\nopinion after another which we find represented in religious history. The\nmedical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly\nturning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin\nin a destructive instead of an accreditive way.\n\nThey are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as\nsupernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the\nargument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin has\nseldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr. Maudsley\nis perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion on\ngrounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced to write:\u2014\n\n\u201cWhat right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work\nby means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more\nsuitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the work that is done,\nand the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is alone of\nmoment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in\nother qualities of character he was singularly defective\u2014if indeed he were\nhypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic.... Home we come again, then,\nto the old and last resort of certitude,\u2014namely the common assent of\nmankind, or of the competent by instruction and training among\nmankind.\u201d(5)\n\nIn other words, not its origin, but _the way in which it works on the\nwhole_, is Dr. Maudsley\u2019s final test of a belief. This is our own\nempiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on\nsupernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end. Among the\nvisions and messages some have always been too patently silly, among the\ntrances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct\nand character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as\ndivine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to\ndiscriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine\nmiracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to\ncounterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of\nhell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing all\nthe sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the\nend it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall\nknow them, not by their roots, Jonathan Edwards\u2019s Treatise on Religious\nAffections is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The _roots_ of a\nman\u2019s virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are\ninfallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even\nto ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.\n\n\n    \u201cIn forming a judgment of ourselves now,\u201d Edwards writes, \u201cwe\n    should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will\n    chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last\n    day.... There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the\n    existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian\n    practice is not the most decisive evidence.... The degree in which\n    our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which\n    our experience is spiritual and divine.\u201d\n\n\nCatholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which a\nvision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are\nthe only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of\nthe tempter. Says Saint Teresa:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cLike imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to\n    the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere\n    operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead\n    of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust:\n    whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of\n    ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily\n    strength. I alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my\n    visions of being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of\n    my imagination.... I showed them the jewels which the divine hand\n    had left with me:\u2014they were my actual dispositions. All those who\n    knew me saw that I was changed; my confessor bore witness to the\n    fact; this improvement, palpable in all respects, far from being\n    hidden, was brilliantly evident to all men. As for myself, it was\n    impossible to believe that if the demon were its author, he could\n    have used, in order to lose me and lead me to hell, an expedient\n    so contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my vices,\n    and filling me with masculine courage and other virtues instead,\n    for I saw clearly that a single one of these visions was enough to\n    enrich me with all that wealth.\u201d(6)\n\n\nI fear I may have made a longer excursus than was necessary, and that\nfewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may have arisen\namong some of you as I announced my pathological programme. At any rate\nyou must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its results\nexclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will\nscandalize your piety no more.\n\nStill, you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground of our final\nspiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten us at all with\nso much existential study of its conditions? Why not simply leave\npathological questions out?\n\nTo this I reply in two ways: First, I say, irrepressible curiosity\nimperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly, that it always leads to a\nbetter understanding of a thing\u2019s significance to consider its\nexaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest\nrelatives elsewhere. Not that we may thereby swamp the thing in the\nwholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior congeners, but rather\nthat we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits\nconsist, by learning at the same time to what particular dangers of\ncorruption it may also be exposed.\n\nInsane conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special factors\nof the mental life, and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their more\nusual surroundings. They play the part in mental anatomy which the scalpel\nand the microscope play in the anatomy of the body. To understand a thing\nrightly we need to see it both out of its environment and in it, and to\nhave acquaintance with the whole range of its variations. The study of\nhallucinations has in this way been for psychologists the key to their\ncomprehension of normal sensation, that of illusions has been the key to\nthe right comprehension of perception. Morbid impulses and imperative\nconceptions, \u201cfixed ideas,\u201d so called, have thrown a flood of light on the\npsychology of the normal will; and obsessions and delusions have performed\nthe same service for that of the normal faculty of belief.\n\nSimilarly, the nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts, of\nwhich I already made mention, to class it with psychopathical phenomena.\nBorderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental\nbalance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by\nwhich it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities\nwhich, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an\nindividual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect\nhis age, than if his temperament were less neurotic. There is of course no\nspecial affinity between crankiness as such and superior intellect,(7) for\nmost psychopaths have feeble intellects, and superior intellects more\ncommonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic temperament,\nwhatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings\nwith it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky person has\nextraordinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixed ideas and\nobsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and\naction; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it,\nor in some way \u201cworks it off.\u201d \u201cWhat shall I think of it?\u201d a common person\nsays to himself about a vexed question; but in a \u201ccranky\u201d mind \u201cWhat must\nI do about it?\u201d is the form the question tends to take. In the\nautobiography of that high\u2010souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the\nfollowing passage: \u201cPlenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very\nfew care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk\nanything in its support. \u2018Some one ought to do it, but why should I?\u2019 is\nthe ever re\u00ebchoed phrase of weak\u2010kneed amiability. \u2018Some one ought to do\nit, so why not I?\u2019 is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly\nforward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences\nlie whole centuries of moral evolution.\u201d True enough! and between these\ntwo sentences lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard\nand the psychopathic man. Thus, when a superior intellect and a\npsychopathic temperament coalesce\u2014as in the endless permutations and\ncombinations of human faculty, they are bound to coalesce often enough\u2014in\nthe same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of\neffective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do\nnot remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their\nideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their\ncompanions or their age. It is they who get counted when Messrs Lombroso,\nNisbet, and others invoke statistics to defend their paradox.\n\nTo pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as we shall\nsee, constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious\nevolution. Take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers.\nTake the trance\u2010like states of insight into truth which all religious\nmystics report.(8) These are each and all of them special cases of kinds\nof human experience of much wider scope. Religious melancholy, whatever\npeculiarities it may have _qu\u00e2_ religious, is at any rate melancholy.\nReligious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance. And the\nmoment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon\nas it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the moment we agree\nto stand by experimental results and inner quality, in judging of\nvalues,\u2014who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive\nsignificance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious\ntrances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with\nother varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to\nconsider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if\nthey were outside of nature\u2019s order altogether?\n\nI hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this\nsupposition. As regards the psychopathic origin of so many religious\nphenomena, that would not be in the least surprising or disconcerting,\neven were such phenomena certified from on high to be the most precious of\nhuman experiences. No one organism can possibly yield to its owner the\nwhole body of truth. Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even\ndiseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the\npsychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the _sine qu\u00e2\nnon_ of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis\nwhich are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of\nmetaphysics and mysticism which carry one\u2019s interests beyond the surface\nof the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this\ntemperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners\nof the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system,\nforever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking\nHeaven that it hasn\u2019t a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be\nsure to hide forever from its self\u2010satisfied possessors?\n\nIf there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might\nwell be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of\nthe requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may\nlet the matter of religion and neuroticism drop.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, with which the\nvarious religious phenomena must be compared in order to understand them\nbetter, forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed \u201cthe apperceiving\nmass\u201d by which we comprehend them. The only novelty that I can imagine\nthis course of lectures to possess lies in the breadth of the apperceiving\nmass. I may succeed in discussing religious experiences in a wider context\nthan has been usual in university courses.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURE II. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.\n\n\nMost books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise\ndefinition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would\u2010be\ndefinitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course,\nand I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now.\nMeanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one\nanother is enough to prove that the word \u201creligion\u201d cannot stand for any\nsingle principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The\ntheorizing mind tends always to the over\u2010simplification of its materials.\nThis is the root of all that absolutism and one\u2010sided dogmatism by which\nboth philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall\nimmediately into a one\u2010sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit\nfreely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many\ncharacters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we\nshould inquire for the essence of \u201cgovernment,\u201d for example, one man might\ntell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an\narmy, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it\nwould be true that no concrete government can exist without all these\nthings, one of which is more important at one moment and others at\nanother. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles\nhimself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying\nan intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would\nnaturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a\nthing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a\nconception equally complex?(9)\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nConsider also the \u201creligious sentiment\u201d which we see referred to in so\nmany books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity.\n\nIn the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the\nauthors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to\nthe feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others\nconnect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling\nof the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of\nthemselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific\nthing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term \u201creligious\nsentiment\u201d as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious\nobjects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains\nnothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious\nfear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But\nreligious love is only man\u2019s natural emotion of love directed to a\nreligious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so\nto speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion\nof divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic\nthrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only\nthis time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations;\nand similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play\nin the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of\na feeling _plus_ a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course\nare psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but\nthere is no ground for assuming a simple abstract \u201creligious emotion\u201d to\nexist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in\nevery religious experience without exception.\n\nAs there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a\ncommon storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so\nthere might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential\nkind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of\nreligious act.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible\nthat I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a\nfraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set\nup an abstract definition of religion\u2019s essence, and then proceed to\ndefend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me\nfrom taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in _for the\npurpose of these lectures_, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from\nchoosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and\nproclaiming arbitrarily that when I say \u201creligion\u201d I mean _that_. This, in\nfact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the\nfield I choose.\n\nOne way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we\nleave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which\ndivides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on\nthe other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of\nreligion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and\nsacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity,\ntheology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials\nof religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it,\nwe should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning\nthe favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on\nthe contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre\nof interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his\nincompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained,\nis still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital\npart therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are\npersonal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself\nalone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and\nsacraments and other go\u2010betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place.\nThe relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between\nman and his maker.\n\nNow in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch\nentirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider\nas little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods\nthemselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion\npure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly\nconsidered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general\nname. \u201cIt is a part of religion,\u201d you will say, \u201cbut only its unorganized\nrudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man\u2019s\nconscience or morality than his religion. The name \u2018religion\u2019 should be\nreserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and\ninstitution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so\ncalled, is but a fractional element.\u201d\n\nBut if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the\nquestion of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than\nprolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the\npersonal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or\nmorality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion\u2014under either name it\nwill be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove\nto contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain,\nand these elements I shall soon seek to point out; so I will myself\ncontinue to apply the word \u201creligion\u201d to it; and in the last lecture of\nall, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say\nsomething of its relation to them.\n\nIn one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more\nfundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once\nestablished, live at second\u2010hand upon tradition; but the _founders_ of\nevery church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct\npersonal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the\nChrist, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects\nhave been in this case;\u2014so personal religion should still seem the\nprimordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.\n\nThere are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more\nprimordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and\nmagic seem to have preceded inward piety historically\u2014at least our records\nof inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be\nregarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the\ninward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds\nare phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But, quite apart from\nthe fact that many anthropologists\u2014for instance, Jevons and\nFrazer\u2014expressly oppose \u201creligion\u201d and \u201cmagic\u201d to each other, it is\ncertain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism,\nand the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science\nas called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one\nagain; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling\nis in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would\nnot be worth while.\n\nReligion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean\nfor us _the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their\nsolitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to\nwhatever they may consider the divine_. Since the relation may be either\nmoral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the\nsense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical\norganizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have\nalready said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time,\nand we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.\n\nWe escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our\nfield. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word \u201cdivine\u201d\nif we take it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems\nof thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not\npositively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course,\nthe Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the\nBuddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism,\nEmersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract\nIdeality. Not a deity _in concreto_, not a superhuman person, but the\nimmanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the\nuniverse, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to\nthe graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson\nfamous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was\nwhat made the scandal of the performance.\n\n\n    \u201cThese laws,\u201d said the speaker, \u201cexecute themselves. They are out\n    of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in\n    the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant\n    and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who\n    does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts\n    off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just,\n    then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of\n    God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a\n    man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of\n    acquaintance with his own being. Character is always known. Thefts\n    never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of\n    stone walls. The least admixture of a lie\u2014for example, the taint\n    of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable\n    appearance\u2014will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth,\n    and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of\n    the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your\n    witness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is\n    differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different\n    applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the\n    several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these\n    ends, a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being\n    shrinks ... he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until\n    absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law\n    awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious\n    sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its\n    power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the\n    embalmer of the world. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and\n    the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It\n    makes him illimitable. When he says \u2018I ought\u2019; when love warns\n    him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great\n    deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme\n    wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for\n    he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions of this\n    sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity.\n    [They] affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences\n    of the olden time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and\n    fragrant. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose\n    name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this\n    world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.\u201d(10)\n\n\nSuch is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of order,\nwhich soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. But\nwhether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye\u2019s\nbrilliancy or the skin\u2019s softness, or whether it be a self\u2010conscious life\nlike the eye\u2019s seeing or the skin\u2019s feeling, is a decision that never\nunmistakably appears in Emerson\u2019s pages. It quivers on the boundary of\nthese things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the\nliterary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is\nactive. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal\ninterests and keep the world\u2019s balance straight. The sentences in which\nEmerson, to the very end, gave utterance to this faith are as fine as\nanything in literature: \u201cIf you love and serve men, you cannot by any\nhiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are\nalways restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is\nimpossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and\nmonopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar.\nSettles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote,\nand star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.\u201d(11)\n\nNow it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie\nsuch expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to their utterance\nare quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal\nthat Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on\nthe other, make to the individual and the sort of response which he makes\nto them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many\nrespects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response. We must\ntherefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or\nquasi\u2010godless creeds \u201creligions\u201d; and accordingly when in our definition\nof religion we speak of the individual\u2019s relation to \u201cwhat he considers\nthe divine,\u201d we must interpret the term \u201cdivine\u201d very broadly, as denoting\nany object that is god_like_, whether it be a concrete deity or not.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nBut the term \u201cgodlike,\u201d if thus treated as a floating general quality,\nbecomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious\nhistory, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then is\nthat essentially godlike quality\u2014be it embodied in a concrete deity or\nnot\u2014our relation to which determines our character as religious men? It\nwill repay us to seek some answer to this question before we proceed\nfarther.\n\nFor one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being\nand power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape.\nWhat relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth.\nWhatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at\nthis rate be treated as godlike, and a man\u2019s religion might thus be\nidentified with his attitude, whatever it might be, towards what he felt\nto be the primal truth.\n\nSuch a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever\nit is, is a man\u2019s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total\nreaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from\ncasual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or\nprofessional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground\nof existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual\ncosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing,\nlovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of\nthe world\u2019s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual\ntemperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous,\ngloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and\ninarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all\nour answers to the question, \u201cWhat is the character of this universe in\nwhich we dwell?\u201d It expresses our individual sense of it in the most\ndefinite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter\nwhat specific character they may have? Non\u2010religious as some of these\nreactions may be, in one sense of the word \u201creligious,\u201d they yet belong to\n_the general sphere of the religious life_, and so should generically be\nclassed as religious reactions. \u201cHe believes in No\u2010God, and he worships\nhim,\u201d said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine\natheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have\noften enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is\nindistinguishable from religious zeal.\n\nBut so very broad a use of the word \u201creligion\u201d would be inconvenient,\nhowever defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There are trifling,\nsneering attitudes even towards the whole of life; and in some men these\nattitudes are final and systematic. It would strain the ordinary use of\nlanguage too much to call such attitudes religious, even though, from the\npoint of view of an unbiased critical philosophy, they might conceivably\nbe perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon life. Voltaire, for example,\nwrites thus to a friend, at the age of seventy\u2010three: \u201cAs for myself,\u201d he\nsays, \u201cweak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment, I get a\nhundred pike\u2010thrusts, I return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my\ndoor Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and,\nthank God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as\ntragic as it sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of the day, and\nall comes out still more even when all the days are over.\u201d\n\nMuch as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a\nvaletudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is for\nthe moment Voltaire\u2019s reaction on the whole of life. _Je m\u2019en fiche_ is\nthe vulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation \u201cWho cares?\u201d And\nthe happy term _je m\u2019en fichisme_ recently has been invented to designate\nthe systematic determination not to take anything in life too solemnly.\n\u201cAll is vanity\u201d is the relieving word in all difficult crises for this\nmode of thought, which that exquisite literary genius Renan took pleasure,\nin his later days of sweet decay, in putting into coquettishly\nsacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent expressions of the \u201call\nis vanity\u201d state of mind. Take the following passage, for example,\u2014we must\nhold to duty, even against the evidence, Renan says,\u2014but he then goes on:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThere are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy\n    pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange\n    ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be completely\n    wrong. We must listen to the superior voices, but in such a way\n    that if the second hypothesis were true we should not have been\n    too completely duped. If in effect the world be not a serious\n    thing, it is the dogmatic people who will be the shallow ones, and\n    the worldly minded whom the theologians now call frivolous will be\n    those who are really wise.\n\n    \u201c_In utrumque paratus_, then. Be ready for anything\u2014that perhaps\n    is wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to\n    confidence, to skepticism, to optimism, to irony, and we may be\n    sure that at certain moments at least we shall be with the\n    truth.... Good\u2010humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to\n    say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes\n    us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a\n    smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous; but we have the\n    right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal\n    reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter jest for\n    jest; we play the trick that has been played on us. Saint\n    Augustine\u2019s phrase: _Lord, if we are deceived, it is by thee!_\n    remains a fine one, well suited to our modern feeling. Only we\n    wish the Eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept it\n    knowingly and willingly. We are resigned in advance to losing the\n    interest on our investments of virtue, but we wish not to appear\n    ridiculous by having counted on them too securely.\u201d(12)\n\n\nSurely all the usual associations of the word \u201creligion\u201d would have to be\nstripped away if such a systematic _parti pris_ of irony were also to be\ndenoted by the name. For common men \u201creligion,\u201d whatever more special\nmeanings it may have, signifies always a _serious_ state of mind. If any\none phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, \u201cAll\nis _not_ vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.\u201d\nIf it can stop anything, religion as commonly apprehended can stop just\nsuch chaffing talk as Renan\u2019s. It favors gravity, not pertness; it says\n\u201chush\u201d to all vain chatter and smart wit.\n\nBut if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy\ngrumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some\nreligions, but the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of\ndeliverance is held to exist. We shall see enough of the religious\nmelancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to our ordinary\nuse of language, forfeits all title to be called religious when, in Marcus\nAurelius\u2019s racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming\nafter the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a\nNietzsche,\u2014and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own\nsad Carlyle,\u2014though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only\npeevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of\nthe two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings\nof two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness\ngives forth.\n\nThere must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude\nwhich we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if\nsad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being _solemn_\nexperiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I\npropose\u2014arbitrarily again, if you please\u2014to narrow our definition once\nmore by saying that the word \u201cdivine,\u201d as employed therein, shall mean for\nus not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if\ntaken without restriction might well prove too broad. The divine shall\nmean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to\nrespond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.\n\nBut solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of\nvarious shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at\nlast be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where\nthere is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. The\npretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously \u201cscientific\u201d or\n\u201cexact\u201d in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of\nour task. Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or less\nreligious, reactions are more or less total, but the boundaries are always\nmisty, and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree. Nevertheless,\nat their extreme of development, there can never be any question as to\nwhat experiences are religious. The divinity of the object and the\nsolemnity of the reaction are too well marked for doubt. Hesitation as to\nwhether a state of mind is \u201creligious,\u201d or \u201cirreligious,\u201d or \u201cmoral,\u201d or\n\u201cphilosophical,\u201d is only likely to arise when the state of mind is weakly\ncharacterized, but in that case it will be hardly worthy of our study at\nall. With states that can only by courtesy be called religious we need\nhave nothing to do, our only profitable business being with what nobody\ncan possibly feel tempted to call anything else. I said in my former\nlecture that we learn most about a thing when we view it under a\nmicroscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form. This is as true\nof religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact. The only cases likely\nto be profitable enough to repay our attention will therefore be cases\nwhere the religious spirit is unmistakable and extreme. Its fainter\nmanifestations we may tranquilly pass by. Here, for example, is the total\nreaction upon life of Frederick Locker Lampson, whose autobiography,\nentitled \u201cConfidences,\u201d proves him to have been a most amiable man.\n\n\n    \u201cI am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain at the\n    thought of having to part from what has been called the pleasant\n    habit of existence, the sweet fable of life. I would not care to\n    live my wasted life over again, and so to prolong my span. Strange\n    to say, I have but little wish to be younger. I submit with a\n    chill at my heart. I humbly submit because it is the Divine Will,\n    and my appointed destiny. I dread the increase of infirmities that\n    will make me a burden to those around me, those dear to me. No!\n    let me slip away as quietly and comfortably as I can. Let the end\n    come, if peace come with it.\n\n    \u201cI do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this\n    world, or our sojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to\n    place us, and it must please me also. I ask you, what is human\n    life? Is not it a maimed happiness\u2014care and weariness, weariness\n    and care, with the baseless expectation, the strange cozenage of a\n    brighter to\u2010morrow? At best it is but a froward child, that must\n    be played with and humored, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep,\n    and then the care is over.\u201d(13)\n\n\nThis is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and a graceful state of mind.\nFor myself, I should have no objection to calling it on the whole a\nreligious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of you it may\nseem too listless and half\u2010hearted to merit so good a name. But what\nmatters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind religious or\nnot? It is too insignificant for our instruction in any case; and its very\npossessor wrote it down in terms which he would not have used unless he\nhad been thinking of more energetically religious moods in others, with\nwhich he found himself unable to compete. It is with these more energetic\nstates that our sole business lies, and we can perfectly well afford to\nlet the minor notes and the uncertain border go.\n\nIt was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while ago when I\nsaid that personal religion, even without theology or ritual, would prove\nto embody some elements that morality pure and simple does not contain.\nYou may remember that I promised shortly to point out what those elements\nwere. In a general way I can now say what I had in mind.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\n\u201cI accept the universe\u201d is reported to have been a favorite utterance of\nour New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one\nrepeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to\nhave been: \u201cGad! she\u2019d better!\u201d At bottom the whole concern of both\nmorality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the\nuniverse. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and\naltogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and\nunforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of\nliving that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as\nif stunned into submission,\u2014as Carlyle would have us\u2014\u201cGad! we\u2019d\nbetter!\u201d\u2014or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and\nsimple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to\nacknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest\nheart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its\nstrong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest\nnever is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of\nwelcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity\nand enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place.\n\nIt makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether\none accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to\nnecessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. The\ndifference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as that\nbetween the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps by\nwhich an individual may grow from one state into the other, many as are\nthe intermediate stages which different individuals represent, yet when\nyou place the typical extremes beside each other for comparison, you feel\nthat two discontinuous psychological universes confront you, and that in\npassing from one to the other a \u201ccritical point\u201d has been overcome.\n\nIf we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a\ndifference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional mood that\nparts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that has\nordered things, there is a frosty chill about his words which you rarely\nfind in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of religious writing. The\nuniverse is \u201caccepted\u201d by all these writers; but how devoid of passion or\nexultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor is! Compare his fine sentence:\n\u201cIf gods care not for me or my children, here is a reason for it,\u201d with\nJob\u2019s cry: \u201cThough he slay me, yet will I trust in him!\u201d and you\nimmediately see the difference I mean. The _anima mundi_, to whose\ndisposal of his own personal destiny the Stoic consents, is there to be\nrespected and submitted to, but the Christian God is there to be loved;\nand the difference of emotional atmosphere is like that between an arctic\nclimate and the tropics, though the outcome in the way of accepting actual\nconditions uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same.\n\n\n    \u201cIt is a man\u2019s duty,\u201d says Marcus Aurelius, \u201cto comfort himself\n    and wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to\n    find refreshment solely in these thoughts\u2014first that nothing will\n    happen to me which is not conformable to the nature of the\n    universe; and secondly that I need do nothing contrary to the God\n    and deity within me; for there is no man who can compel me to\n    transgress.(14) He is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and\n    separates himself from the reason of our common nature, through\n    being displeased with the things which happen. For the same nature\n    produces these, and has produced thee too. And so accept\n    everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it\n    leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity\n    and felicity of Zeus. For he would not have brought on any man\n    what he has brought, if it were not useful for the whole. The\n    integrity of the whole is mutilated if thou cuttest off anything.\n    And thou dost cut off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art\n    dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anything out of the\n    way.\u201d(15)\n\n\nCompare now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the\nTheologia Germanica:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cWhere men are enlightened with the true light, they renounce all\n    desire and choice, and commit and commend themselves and all\n    things to the eternal Goodness, so that every enlightened man\n    could say: \u2018I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own\n    hand is to a man.\u2019 Such men are in a state of freedom, because\n    they have lost the fear of pain or hell, and the hope of reward or\n    heaven, and are living in pure submission to the eternal Goodness,\n    in the perfect freedom of fervent love. When a man truly\n    perceiveth and considereth himself, who and what he is, and\n    findeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy, he falleth\n    into such a deep abasement that it seemeth to him reasonable that\n    all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him. And\n    therefore he will not and dare not desire any consolation and\n    release; but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he\n    doth not grieve over his sufferings, for they are right in his\n    eyes, and he hath nothing to say against them. This is what is\n    meant by true repentance for sin; and he who in this present time\n    entereth into this hell, none may console him. Now God hath not\n    forsaken a man in this hell, but He is laying his hand upon him,\n    that the man may not desire nor regard anything but the eternal\n    Good only. And then, when the man neither careth for nor desireth\n    anything but the eternal Good alone, and seeketh not himself nor\n    his own things, but the honour of God only, he is made a partaker\n    of all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and consolation, and so\n    the man is henceforth in the kingdom of heaven. This hell and this\n    heaven are two good safe ways for a man, and happy is he who truly\n    findeth them.\u201d(16)\n\n\nHow much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian writer to\naccept his place in the universe is! Marcus Aurelius agrees _to_ the\nscheme\u2014the German theologian agrees _with_ it. He literally _abounds_ in\nagreement, he runs out to embrace the divine decrees.\n\nOccasionally, it is true, the Stoic rises to something like a Christian\nwarmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus Aurelius:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cEverything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee, O\n    Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in\n    due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons\n    bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all things,\n    to thee all things return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops;\n    and wilt thou not say, Dear City of Zeus?\u201d(17)\n\n\nBut compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine Christian\noutpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the\nImitation of Christ:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cLord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that be according as\n    thou wilt. Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou\n    wilt. Do with me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to\n    thine honour. Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will\n    with me in all things.... When could it be evil when thou wert\n    near? I had rather be poor for thy sake than rich without thee. I\n    choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than\n    without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there is heaven;\n    and where thou art not, behold there death and hell.\u201d(18)\n\n\nIt is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an\norgan, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of\nperformance, and to seek its office in that one of its functions which no\nother organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds good in our\npresent quest. The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we\nfinally must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we\ncan meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of course most prominent\nand easy to notice in those religious experiences which are most one\u2010\nsided, exaggerated, and intense.\n\nNow when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiences of\ntamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them\nphilosophical rather than religious, we find a character that is perfectly\ndistinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded as the\npractically important _differentia_ of religion for our purpose; and just\nwhat it is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an\nabstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly\nconceived.\n\nA life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion\nas it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and more by\nobjective ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring\npersonal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far as it\ncalls for \u201cvolunteers.\u201d And for morality life is a war, and the service of\nthe highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for\nvolunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carry on\nthe moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attention away from his own\nfuture, whether in this world or the next. He can train himself to\nindifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever\nobjective interests still remain accessible. He can follow public news,\nand sympathize with other people\u2019s affairs. He can cultivate cheerful\nmanners, and be silent about his miseries. He can contemplate whatever\nideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to him, and\npractice whatever duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his\nethical system requires. Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane.\nHe is a high\u2010hearted freeman and no pining slave. And yet he lacks\nsomething which the Christian _par excellence_, the mystic and ascetic\nsaint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which makes of him a\nhuman being of an altogether different denomination.\n\nThe Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick\u2010room attitude, and\nthe lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased\nconditions of body which probably no other human records show. But whereas\nthe merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, the Christian\nspurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, in\nthe presence of which no exertion of volition is required. The moralist\nmust hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this\nathletic attitude is possible all goes well\u2014morality suffices. But the\nathletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break\ndown even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when\nmorbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one\nall sicklied o\u2019er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest\nthe most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his\nvery powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and\nsecures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such\nhelpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one\nclay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the\nrobustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the\nvanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all\nour morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and\nall our well\u2010doing as the hollowest substitute for that well\u2010_being_ that\nour lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.\n\nAnd here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands.\nThere is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in\nwhich the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by\na willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and\nwaterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become\nthe habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned\ninto our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and\nthat of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present,\nwith no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not\nheld in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and\nwashed away.\n\nWe shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later\nlectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing\nreligion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope,\nambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it\nadds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible\nfrom anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does\ncome,\u2014a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of\nGod\u2019s grace, the theologians say,\u2014is either there or not there for us, and\nthere are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can\nfall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling\nis thus an absolute addition to the Subject\u2019s range of life. It gives him\na new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer\nworld disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which\notherwise would be an empty waste.\n\nIf religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we\nought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this\nenthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so\ncalled can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean\nnothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over,\nthe keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting\npossession spread before our eyes.(19)\n\nThis sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find\nnowhere but in religion. It is parted off from all mere animal happiness,\nall mere enjoyment of the present, by that element of solemnity of which I\nhave already made so much account. Solemnity is a hard thing to define\nabstractly, but certain of its marks are patent enough. A solemn state of\nmind is never crude or simple\u2014it seems to contain a certain measure of its\nown opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its\nsweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent. But\nthere are writers who, realizing that happiness of a supreme sort is the\nprerogative of religion, forget this complication, and call all happiness,\nas such, religious. Mr. Havelock Ellis, for example, identifies religion\nwith the entire field of the soul\u2019s liberation from oppressive moods.\n\n\n    \u201cThe simplest functions of physiological life,\u201d he writes, \u201cmay be\n    its ministers. Every one who is at all acquainted with the Persian\n    mystics knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of\n    religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all ages, some form of\n    physical enlargement\u2014singing, dancing, drinking, sexual\n    excitement\u2014has been intimately associated with worship. Even the\n    momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight\n    an extent, a religious exercise.... Whenever an impulse from the\n    world strikes against the organism, and the resultant is not\n    discomfort or pain, not even the muscular contraction of strenuous\n    manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the whole\n    soul\u2014there is religion. It is the infinite for which we hunger,\n    and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us\n    towards it.\u201d(20)\n\n\nBut such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of\nhappiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The\nmore commonplace happinesses which we get are \u201creliefs,\u201d occasioned by our\nmomentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its\nmost characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of\nescape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as\na form of sacrifice\u2014inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. If\nyou ask _how_ religion thus falls on the thorns and faces death, and in\nthe very act annuls annihilation, I cannot explain the matter, for it is\nreligion\u2019s secret, and to understand it you must yourself have been a\nreligious man of the extremer type. In our future examples, even of the\nsimplest and healthiest\u2010minded type of religious consciousness, we shall\nfind this complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher happiness\nholds a lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre there is a picture, by\nGuido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan\u2019s neck. The richness of\nthe picture is in large part due to the fiend\u2019s figure being there. The\nrichness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there\u2014that\nis, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, _so long as we\nkeep our foot upon his neck_. In the religious consciousness, that is just\nthe position in which the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is\nfound; and for that very reason the religious consciousness is so rich\nfrom the emotional point of view.(21) We shall see how in certain men and\nwomen it takes on a monstrously ascetic form. There are saints who have\nliterally fed on the negative principle, on humiliation and privation, and\nthe thought of suffering and death,\u2014their souls growing in happiness just\nin proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable. No other\nemotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass. And\nit is for that reason that when we ask our question about the value of\nreligion for human life, I think we ought to look for the answer among\nthese violenter examples rather than among those of a more moderate hue.\n\nHaving the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to start\nwith, we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in these cases,\nrepulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging, we find\nourselves compelled to acknowledge religion\u2019s value and treat it with\nrespect, it will have proved in some way its value for life at large. By\nsubtracting and toning down extravagances we may thereupon proceed to\ntrace the boundaries of its legitimate sway.\n\nTo be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so much with\neccentricities and extremes. \u201cHow _can_ religion on the whole be the most\nimportant of all human functions,\u201d you may ask, \u201cif every several\nmanifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and\npruned away?\u201d Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain\nreasonably,\u2014yet I believe that something like it will have to be our final\ncontention. That personal attitude which the individual finds himself\nimpelled to take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine\u2014and you\nwill remember that this was our definition\u2014will prove to be both a\nhelpless and a sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to\nat least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some\namount of renunciation, great or small, to save our souls alive. The\nconstitution of the world we live in requires it:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cEntbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren!\n    Das ist der ewige Gesang\n    Der jedem an die Ohren klingt,\n    Den, unser ganzes Leben lang\n    Uns heiser jede Stunde singt.\u201d\n\n\nFor when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on\nthe universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort,\ndeliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our\nonly permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall\nshort of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of\nnecessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without\ncomplaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice\nare positively espoused: even unnecessary givings\u2010up are added in order\nthat the happiness may increase. _Religion thus makes easy and felicitous\nwhat in any case is necessary_; and if it be the only agency that can\naccomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands\nvindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life,\nperforming a function which no other portion of our nature can so\nsuccessfully fulfill. From the merely biological point of view, so to call\nit, this is a conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall\ninevitably be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical\nmethod of demonstration which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of\nthe farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say\nnothing now.\n\nBut to foreshadow the terminus of one\u2019s investigations is one thing, and\nto arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning the\nextreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we\nbegin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete\nfacts.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURE III. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN.\n\n\nWere one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and\nmost general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief\nthat there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in\nharmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment\nare the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call\nyour attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an\nattitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our\nattitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due\nto the \u201cobjects\u201d of our consciousness, the things which we believe to\nexist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may\nbe present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In\neither case they elicit from us a _reaction_; and the reaction due to\nthings of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to\nsensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may\nmake us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently\nmore ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of\nmaking them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is\nbased on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a\nweaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.\n\nThe more concrete objects of most men\u2019s religion, the deities whom they\nworship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for\nexample, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of\ntheir Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by\nway of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force\nof the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine\npersonages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in\ngeneral exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in\nthe individual\u2019s past experience directly serves as a model.\n\nBut in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects,\nreligion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power.\nGod\u2019s attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his\nabsoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri\u2010unity, the various\nmysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments,\netc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian\nbelievers.(22) We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible\nimages is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all\nreligions as the _sine qua non_ of a successful orison, or contemplation\nof the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and\nabundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the\nbeliever\u2019s subsequent attitude very powerfully for good.\n\nImmanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God,\nthe design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter.\nThese things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our\nconceptions always require a sense\u2010content to work with, and as the words\n\u201csoul,\u201d \u201cGod,\u201d \u201cimmortality,\u201d cover no distinctive sense\u2010content whatever,\nit follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any\nsignificance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning _for our\npractice_. We can act _as if_ there were a God; feel _as if_ we were free;\nconsider Nature _as if_ she were full of special designs; lay plans _as\nif_ we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a\ngenuine difference in our moral life. Our faith _that_ these\nunintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent\nin _praktischer Hinsicht_, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of\nour action, for a knowledge of _what_ they might be, in case we were\npermitted positively to conceive them. So we have the strange phenomenon,\nas Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real\npresence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion\nwhatsoever.\n\nMy object in thus recalling Kant\u2019s doctrine to your mind is not to express\nany opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his\nphilosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature\nwhich we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration.\nThe sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our\nobject of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so\nto speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet\nthat thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be\npresent to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or\nsight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be\nstrongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if,\nthrough the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going\nin its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different\nattitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an\noutward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so\nstrongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life,\nit would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being.\n\nIt is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have\nthis power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent\narticulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them\nthe same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson\nwhich I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects,\nas we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but\nfor all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend\nit its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all\nthings, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength,\nsignificance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant,\nand just.\n\nSuch ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our\nfacts, the fountain\u2010head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They\ngive its \u201cnature,\u201d as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we\nknow is \u201cwhat\u201d it is by sharing in the nature of one of these\nabstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless\nand featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their\nmeans, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with\nhelplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects,\nthese adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification\nand conception.\n\nThis absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the\ncardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as\nthey do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate\nthem, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings\nthey are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing\nthings of sense are in the realm of space.\n\nPlato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human\nfeeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been\nknown as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for\nexample, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the\nintellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing\nbeauties of the earth. \u201cThe true order of going,\u201d he says, in the often\nquoted passage in his \u201cBanquet,\u201d \u201cis to use the beauties of earth as steps\nalong which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going\nfrom one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to\nfair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair\nnotions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows\nwhat the essence of Beauty is.\u201d(23) In our last lecture we had a glimpse\nof the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the\nabstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a\nfact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to\u2010\nday are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies,\nwe have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed\nin as an ultimate object. \u201cScience\u201d in many minds is genuinely taking the\nplace of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the \u201cLaws of\nNature\u201d as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of\ninterpretation of Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the\nGreek gods were only half\u2010metaphoric personifications of those great\nspheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls\napart\u2014the sky\u2010sphere, the ocean\u2010sphere, the earth\u2010sphere, and the like;\njust as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the\nbreeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these\nphenomena of nature actually wear a human face.(24)\n\nAs regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an\nopinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion\nsomething like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a\n_sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception_ of what\nwe may call \u201c_something there_,\u201d more deep and more general than any of\nthe special and particular \u201csenses\u201d by which the current psychology\nsupposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we\nmight suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so\nhabitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else,\nany idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that\nsame prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally\npossess. So far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality\u2010\nfeeling, they would be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they\nmight be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though\nthey might be such non\u2010entities in point of _whatness_, as Kant makes the\nobjects of his moral theology to be.\n\nThe most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense\nof reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It often\nhappens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed: the person\naffected will feel a \u201cpresence\u201d in the room, definitely localized, facing\nin one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often\ncoming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard,\ntouched, nor cognized in any of the usual \u201csensible\u201d ways. Let me give you\nan example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presence\nreligion is more peculiarly concerned.\n\nAn intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had\nseveral experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response to my\ninquiries:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI have several times within the past few years felt the so\u2010called\n    \u2018consciousness of a presence.\u2019 The experiences which I have in\n    mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience\n    which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons\n    would also call the \u2018consciousness of a presence.\u2019 But the\n    difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great\n    as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I\n    know not where, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with\n    all the ordinary senses alert.\n\n    \u201cIt was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On\n    the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms\n    in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the\n    arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but\n    the sense of presence properly so called came on the next night.\n    After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake\n    awhile thinking on the previous night\u2019s experience, when suddenly\n    I _felt_ something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It\n    remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any\n    ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant\n    \u2018sensation\u2019 connected with it. It stirred something more at the\n    roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had\n    something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain\n    spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism\u2014and yet\n    the feeling was not _pain_ so much as _abhorrence_. At all events,\n    something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more\n    surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living\n    creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an\n    almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the\n    \u2018horrible sensation\u2019 disappeared.\n\n    \u201cOn the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some\n    lectures which I was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these\n    when I became aware of the actual presence (though not of the\n    _coming_) of the thing that was there the night before, and of the\n    \u2018horrible sensation.\u2019 I then mentally concentrated all my effort\n    to charge this \u2018thing,\u2019 if it was evil, to depart, if it was _not_\n    evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain\n    itself, to go, and that I would compel it to go. It went as on the\n    previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state.\n\n    \u201cOn two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same\n    \u2018horrible sensation.\u2019 Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In\n    all three instances the certainty that there in outward space\n    there stood _something_ was indescribably _stronger_ than the\n    ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close\n    presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to\n    me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although\n    I felt it to be like unto myself, so to speak, or finite, small,\n    and distressful, as it were, I didn\u2019t recognize it as any\n    individual being or person.\u201d\n\n\nOf course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the\nreligious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same\ncorrespondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had\nthe sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only\nthen it was filled with a quality of joy.\n\n\n    \u201cThere was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused\n    in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some\n    ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of\n    some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge\n    of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and after it\n    went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality.\n    Everything else might be a dream, but not that.\u201d\n\n\nMy friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter\nexperiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would\nclearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation of the\ndeity\u2019s existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have\nmuch more to say upon this head.\n\nLest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture\nto read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show\nthat we are dealing with a well\u2010marked natural kind of fact. In the first\ncase, which I take from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research,\nthe sense of presence developed in a few moments into a distinctly\nvisualized hallucination,\u2014but I leave that part of the story out.\n\n\n    \u201cI had read,\u201d the narrator says, \u201csome twenty minutes or so, was\n    thoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was perfectly quiet, and\n    for the time being my friends were quite forgotten, when suddenly\n    without a moment\u2019s warning my whole being seemed roused to the\n    highest state of tension or aliveness, and I was aware, with an\n    intenseness not easily imagined by those who had never experienced\n    it, that another being or presence was not only in the room, but\n    quite close to me. I put my book down, and although my excitement\n    was great, I felt quite collected, and not conscious of any sense\n    of fear. Without changing my position, and looking straight at the\n    fire, I knew somehow that my friend A. H. was standing at my left\n    elbow, but so far behind me as to be hidden by the armchair in\n    which I was leaning back. Moving my eyes round slightly without\n    otherwise changing my position, the lower portion of one leg\n    became visible, and I instantly recognized the gray\u2010blue material\n    of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semi\u2010\n    transparent, reminding me of tobacco smoke in\n    consistency,\u201d(25)\u2014and hereupon the visual hallucination came.\n\n\nAnother informant writes:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cQuite early in the night I was awakened.... I felt as if I had\n    been aroused intentionally, and at first thought some one was\n    breaking into the house.... I then turned on my side to go to\n    sleep again, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in\n    the room, and singular to state, it was not the consciousness of a\n    live person, but of a spiritual presence. This may provoke a\n    smile, but I can only tell you the facts as they occurred to me. I\n    do not know how to better describe my sensations than by simply\n    stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence.... I\n    felt also at the same time a strong feeling of superstitious\n    dread, as if something strange and fearful were about to\n    happen.\u201d(26)\n\n\nProfessor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend\nof his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cWhenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it\n    is not due to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have of\n    a foreign presence, external to my body. It is sometimes so\n    definitely characterized that I could point to its exact position.\n    This impression of presence is impossible to describe. It varies\n    in intensity and clearness according to the personality from whom\n    the writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I\n    feel it immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems\n    to recognize it.\u201d\n\n\nIn an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of\npresence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a\ngray\u2010bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself\nunder the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room\ntowards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi\u2010hallucination is an\nexceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual\nimagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive\nthat his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false\nperception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the\nfeelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it\u2014in\nother words, a fully objectified and exteriorized _idea_.\n\nSuch cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for\nquotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental\nmachinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than\nthat which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing of\nthe organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty problem\u2014nothing\ncould be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, with the\nfeeling that our muscles were innervating themselves for action.\nWhatsoever thus innervated our activity, or \u201cmade our flesh creep,\u201d\u2014our\nsenses are what do so oftenest,\u2014might then appear real and present, even\nthough it were but an abstract idea. But with such vague conjectures we\nhave no concern at present, for our interest lies with the faculty rather\nthan with its organic seat.\n\nLike all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has\nits negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which\npersons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cWhen I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by\n    accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of\n    the catastrophes of the heavens,\u201d says Madame Ackermann; \u201cwhen I\n    see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible\n    as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I\n    experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me\n    as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a\n    dream. My last word will be, \u2018I have been dreaming.\u2019 \u201d(27)\n\n\nIn another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the\nunreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.\n\nWe may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious\nsphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the\nobjects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their\nintellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi\u2010sensible\nrealities directly apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of these\nobjects fluctuates, so the believer alternates between warmth and coldness\nin his faith. Other examples will bring this home to one better than\nabstract description, so I proceed immediately to cite some. The first\nexample is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense in question. I\nhave extracted it from an account given me by a scientific man of my\nacquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that\nthe feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an\nintellectual operation properly so\u2010called.\n\n\n    \u201cBetween twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more\n    agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that\n    \u2018indefinite consciousness\u2019 which Herbert Spencer describes so\n    well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality\n    was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer\u2019s philosophy, for although\n    I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never prayed to _It_\n    in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to have\n    been in a relation to _It_ which practically was the same thing as\n    prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especially when I had conflict\n    with other people, either domestically or in the way of business,\n    or when I was depressed in spirits or anxious about affairs, I now\n    recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious\n    relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical _It_.\n    It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to\n    term it, in the particular trouble, and it always strengthened me\n    and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and\n    supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing fountain of\n    living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively\n    turned at times of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know\n    now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of\n    late years the power of communicating with it has left me, and I\n    am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to\n    find it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when\n    sometimes I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to\n    make connection with it. I remember many occasions on which at\n    night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of\n    worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped\n    mentally for the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind\n    which had always seemed to be close at hand as it were, closing\n    the passage, and yielding support, but there was no electric\n    current. A blank was there instead of _It_: I couldn\u2019t find\n    anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting\n    into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to\n    confess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become\n    curiously dead and indifferent; and I can now see that my old\n    experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of\n    the orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have\n    spoken of as \u2018It\u2019 was practically not Spencer\u2019s Unknowable, but\n    just my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for\n    higher sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost.\u201d\n\n\nNothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in\nwhich seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as\nalternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of\nparticular crises in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct\nperception, perhaps, of a living God\u2019s existence, swept in and overwhelmed\nthe languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell\u2019s\ncorrespondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of this kind:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary\u2019s, and\n    happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I\n    said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an\n    argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the\n    whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming from\n    the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me\n    and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air\n    seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something I knew\n    not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. I\n    cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied\n    it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear\n    it and acknowledge its grandeur.\u201d(28)\n\n\nHere is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript\ncommunication by a clergyman,\u2014I take it from Starbuck\u2019s manuscript\ncollection:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop,\n    where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there\n    was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.\n    It was deep calling unto deep,\u2014the deep that my own struggle had\n    opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without,\n    reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me,\n    and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even\n    temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my\n    spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For\n    the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained.\n    It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the\n    effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have\n    melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener\n    conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards,\n    and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of\n    the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held\n    a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I\n    could not any more have doubted that _He_ was there than that I\n    was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of\n    the two.\n\n    \u201cMy highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in\n    me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the\n    Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the\n    same stirring of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face\n    to face with God, and was born anew of his spirit. There was, as I\n    recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except that\n    my early crude conception had, as it were, burst into flower.\n    There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful\n    unfolding. Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the\n    proofs of God\u2019s existence has been able to shake my faith. Having\n    once felt the presence of God\u2019s spirit, I have never lost it again\n    for long. My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply\n    rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme\n    experience, and in the conviction, gained from reading and\n    reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found\n    God. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I am not\n    enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any\n    other charge. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with\n    words rather than put it clearly to your thought. But, such as it\n    is, I have described it as carefully as I now am able to do.\u201d\n\n\nHere is another document, even more definite in character, which, the\nwriter being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.(29)\n\n\n    \u201cI was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramping,\n    and in good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to\n    Trient by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my\n    state of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news\n    from home; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote, for\n    we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertainty\n    about the road we should follow. I can best describe the condition\n    in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at\n    once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt\n    the presence of God\u2014I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of\n    it\u2014as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me\n    altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could\n    barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat\n    down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes\n    overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life\n    he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took\n    pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I\n    was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to\n    the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should\n    do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him,\n    the Almighty God, to be judge of whether I should some time be\n    called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the\n    ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the\n    communion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but\n    very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by the interior\n    emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes,\n    my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me.\n    The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes,\n    although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades\n    waited for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about\n    twenty\u2010five or thirty minutes to join them, for as well as I can\n    remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half an\n    hour. The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly\n    the slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai\n    could have had a more intimate communication with God. I think it\n    well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form,\n    color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence\n    was accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather as\n    if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a\n    _spiritual spirit_. But the more I seek words to express this\n    intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of\n    describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the\n    expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was\n    present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet\n    my consciousness perceived him.\u201d\n\n\nThe adjective \u201cmystical\u201d is technically applied, most often, to states\nthat are of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last\ntwo persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture\nI shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another\nmystical or semi\u2010mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature\nfor ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck\u2019s collection. The lady who gives\nthe account is the daughter of a man well known in his time as a writer\nagainst Christianity. The suddenness of her conversion shows well how\nnative the sense of God\u2019s presence must be to certain minds. She relates\nthat she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian doctrine, but,\nwhen in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends, she read the\nBible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her like\na stream of light.\n\n\n    \u201cTo this day,\u201d she writes, \u201cI cannot understand dallying with\n    religion and the commands of God. The very instant I heard my\n    Father\u2019s cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I\n    ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, \u2018Here, here I am,\n    my Father.\u2019 Oh, happy child, what should I do? \u2018Love me,\u2019 answered\n    my God. \u2018I do, I do,\u2019 I cried passionately. \u2018Come unto me,\u2019 called\n    my Father. \u2018I will,\u2019 my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single\n    question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was\n    good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what\n    I thought of his church, or ... to wait until I should be\n    satisfied. Satisfied! I was satisfied. Had I not found my God and\n    my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not\n    a Church into which I might enter?... Since then I have had direct\n    answers to prayer\u2014so significant as to be almost like talking with\n    God and hearing his answer. The idea of God\u2019s reality has never\n    left me for one moment.\u201d\n\n\nHere is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty\u2010seven, in\nwhich the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less vividly\ndescribed:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period\n    of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked\n    and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary\n    obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and\n    cover my life.... Once it was when from the summit of a high\n    mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending\n    to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again\n    from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a\n    boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a\n    few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about\n    as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these\n    occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by\n    an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I\n    had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my\n    justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with\n    God. Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos.\n    I cannot conceive of life without its presence.\u201d\n\n\nOf the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God\u2019s presence the\nfollowing sample from Professor Starbuck\u2019s manuscript collection may serve\nto give an idea. It is from a man aged forty\u2010nine,\u2014probably thousands of\nunpretending Christians would write an almost identical account.\n\n\n    \u201cGod is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I\n    feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer\n    harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him\n    in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious\n    restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to\n    a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful.\n    He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken\n    that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but\n    generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of\n    Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and\n    care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school\n    matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is\n    mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without\n    it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.\u201d\n\n\nI subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes.\nThey are also from Professor Starbuck\u2019s collection, and their number might\nbe greatly multiplied. The first is from a man twenty\u2010seven years old:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cGod is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers.\n    Thoughts sudden and distinct from any I have been entertaining\n    come to my mind after asking God for his direction. Something over\n    a year ago I was for some weeks in the direst perplexity. When the\n    trouble first appeared before me I was dazed, but before long (two\n    or three hours) I could hear distinctly a passage of Scripture:\n    \u2018My grace is sufficient for thee.\u2019 Every time my thoughts turned\n    to the trouble I could hear this quotation. I don\u2019t think I ever\n    doubted the existence of God, or had him drop out of my\n    consciousness. God has frequently stepped into my affairs very\n    perceptibly, and I feel that he directs many little details all\n    the time. But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me\n    very contrary to my ambitions and plans.\u201d\n\n\nAnother statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so\ndecidedly childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cSometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and\n    before I go out I feel as if God was with me, right side of me,\n    singing and reading the Psalms with me.... And then again I feel\n    as if I could sit beside him, and put my arms around him, kiss\n    him, etc. When I am taking Holy Communion at the altar, I try to\n    get with him and generally feel his presence.\u201d\n\n\nI let a few other cases follow at random:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cGod surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me\n    than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my\n    being.\u201d\u2014\n\n    \u201cThere are times when I seem to stand, in his very presence, to\n    talk with him. Answers to prayer have come, sometimes direct and\n    overwhelming in their revelation of his presence and powers. There\n    are times when God seems far off, but this is always my own\n    fault.\u201d\u2014\n\n    \u201cI have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time\n    soothing, which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me\n    with sustaining arms.\u201d\n\n\nSuch is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness\nof what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized\nwith an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine our\nvital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined\nby the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the\nworld. A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his\nidol, even when his attention is addressed to other matters and he no\nlonger represents her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly\naffects him through and through.\n\nI spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must\ndwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who\nhave them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a\nrule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever\nare. One may indeed be entirely without them; probably more than one of\nyou here present is without them in any marked degree; but if you do have\nthem, and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot\nhelp regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a\nkind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in\nwords, can expel from your belief. The opinion opposed to mysticism in\nphilosophy is sometimes spoken of as _rationalism_. Rationalism insists\nthat all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate\ngrounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1)\ndefinitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation;\n(3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences\nlogically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place\nin the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a\nsplendid intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies\nfruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its\nresult.\n\nNevertheless, if we look on man\u2019s whole mental life as it exists, on the\nlife of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and\nthat they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part\nof it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.\nIt is the part that has the _prestige_ undoubtedly, for it has the\nloquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you\ndown with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same,\nif your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have\nintuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the\nloquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life,\nyour impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared\nthe premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the\nresult; and something in you absolutely _knows_ that that result must be\ntruer than any logic\u2010chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may\ncontradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding\nbelief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it\nargues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God\u2019s existence drawn\nfrom the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly\nconvincing, to\u2010day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the\nsimple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God\nit argued for. Whatever sort of a being God may be, we _know_ to\u2010day that\nhe is nevermore that mere external inventor of \u201ccontrivances\u201d intended to\nmake manifest his \u201cglory\u201d in which our great\u2010grandfathers took such\nsatisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear\nby words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to\naccount for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic\nand tragic personage than that Being.\n\nThe truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate\nreasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality\nhave already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed,\nour intuitions and our reason work together, and great world\u2010ruling\nsystems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow\nup. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of\ntruth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy\ntranslation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the\ndeep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition.\nInstinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the\npresence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your\ncritical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves\nto change his faith.\n\nPlease observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is _better_ that\nthe subconscious and non\u2010rational should thus hold primacy in the\nreligious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so\nhold it as a matter of fact.\n\nSo much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects. Let me now\nsay a brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken.\n\nWe have already agreed that they are _solemn_; and we have seen reason to\nthink that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may\nresult in extreme cases from absolute self\u2010surrender. The sense of the\nkind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with\ndetermining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is\nmore complex than any simple formula allows. In the literature of the\nsubject, sadness and gladness have each been emphasized in turn. The\nancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives\nvoluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the\nless does religious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to\nplay. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary, being the\ngladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of things, being\nthe more complex, is also the more complete; and as we proceed, I think we\nshall have abundant reason for refusing to leave out either the sadness or\nthe gladness, if we look at religion with the breadth of view which it\ndemands. Stated in the completest possible terms, a man\u2019s religion\ninvolves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of his being.\nBut the quantitative mixture and order of these moods vary so much from\none age of the world, from one system of thought, and from one individual\nto another, that you may insist either on the dread and the submission, or\non the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still\nremain materially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally\nsombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize\nopposite aspects of what lies before their eyes.\n\nThe constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious\npeace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion\nand contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and childish\nafter our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper\u2010\ncutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low,\nrather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of\nJob, for example, the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God is the\nexclusive burden of its author\u2019s mind. \u201cIt is as high as heaven; what\ncanst thou do?\u2014deeper than hell; what canst thou know?\u201d There is an\nastringent relish about the truth of this conviction which some men can\nfeel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to the\nfeeling of religious joy.\n\n\n    \u201cIn Job,\u201d says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark\n    Rutherford, \u201cGod reminds us that man is not the measure of his\n    creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory\n    which the intellect of man can grasp. It is _transcendent_\n    everywhere. This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret,\n    if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is\n    nothing more.... God is great, we know not his ways. He takes from\n    us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in patience, we\n    _may_ pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight\n    again. We may or we may not!... What more have we to say now than\n    God said from the whirlwind over two thousand five hundred years\n    ago?\u201d(30)\n\n\nIf we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that\ndeliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether overcome\nand the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions that seem to\nthe sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to leave out all the\nsolemnity that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys.\nIn the opinion of some writers an attitude might be called religious,\nthough no touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission, no tendency to\nflexion, no bowing of the head. Any \u201chabitual and regulated admiration,\u201d\nsays Professor J. R. Seeley,(31) \u201cis worthy to be called a religion\u201d; and\naccordingly he thinks that our Music, our Science, and our so\u2010called\n\u201cCivilization,\u201d as these things are now organized and admiringly believed\nin, form the more genuine religions of our time. Certainly the\nunhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feel that we must inflict our\ncivilization upon \u201clower\u201d races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds\none of nothing so much as of the early spirit of Islam spreading its\nreligion by the sword.\n\nIn my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra\u2010radical opinion of Mr.\nHavelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious\nexercise, for it bears witness to the soul\u2019s emancipation. I quoted this\nopinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores\nmore carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too\ncomplex to be decided off\u2010hand. I propose accordingly that we make of\nreligious optimism the theme of the next two lectures.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURES IV AND V. THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY\u2010MINDEDNESS.\n\n\nIf we were to ask the question: \u201cWhat is human life\u2019s chief concern?\u201d one\nof the answers we should receive would be: \u201cIt is happiness.\u201d How to gain,\nhow to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all\ntimes the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to\nendure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from\nthe experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different kinds of\nconduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the moral\nlife, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the\ninterest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom I\nlately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor\nneed we call mere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admit that\nany persistent enjoyment may _produce_ the sort of religion which consists\nin a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; and we must\nalso acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing religion are\nnew manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner paths to a\nsupernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift of natural existence\nis unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be.\n\nWith such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not\nsurprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief\naffords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he\nalmost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it\nis true\u2014such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the \u201cimmediate inferences\u201d of\nthe religious logic used by ordinary men.\n\n\n    \u201cThe near presence of God\u2019s spirit,\u201d says a German writer,(32)\n    \u201cmay be experienced in its reality\u2014indeed _only_ experienced. And\n    the mark by which the spirit\u2019s existence and nearness are made\n    irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the\n    utterly incomparable _feeling of happiness_ which is connected\n    with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and\n    altogether proper feeling for us to have here below, but is the\n    best and most indispensable proof of God\u2019s reality. No other proof\n    is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from\n    which every efficacious new theology should start.\u201d\n\n\nIn the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the\nsimpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be\ntreated on a later day.\n\nIn many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. \u201cCosmic\nemotion\u201d inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I\nspeak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when\nunhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it,\nas if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age,\npassionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life,\nin spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the\nsinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset their\nreligion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before the\nreformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian\npractices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in\norgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century\nin which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been\nidealized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret,\nwho claimed all natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine\u2019s maxim,\n_Dilige et quod vis fac_,\u2014if you but love [God], you may do as you\nincline,\u2014is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is\npregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of\nconventional morality. According to their characters they have been\nrefined or gross; but their belief has been at all times systematic enough\nto constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of\nfreedom, and the sting of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his\nimmediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of\nwhich there are of course infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlier\nyears of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders\nof the eighteenth century anti\u2010christian movement were of this optimistic\ntype. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their\nfeeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is\nabsolutely good.\n\nIt is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often\nfeminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky\u2010\nblue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all\nenchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill\nof man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from\nthe outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.\n\n\n    \u201cGod has two families of children on this earth,\u201d says Francis W.\n    Newman,(33) \u201c_the once\u2010born_ and _the twice\u2010born_,\u201d and the once\u2010\n    born he describes as follows: \u201cThey see God, not as a strict\n    Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of\n    a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as\n    well as Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical\n    tendencies: they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are\n    not distressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd\n    to call them self\u2010righteous; for they hardly think of themselves\n    _at all_. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening\n    of religion very happy to them: for they no more shrink from God,\n    than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in\n    fact, they have no vivid conception of _any_ of the qualities in\n    which the severer Majesty of God consists.(34) He is to them the\n    impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not\n    in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious\n    nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts\n    and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt\n    them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward\n    disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have\n    a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in\n    their simple worship.\u201d\n\n\nIn the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in\nthan in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of\na decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been\nabundant enough; and in its recent \u201cliberal\u201d developments of Unitarianism\nand latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still\nare playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an\nadmirable example. Theodore Parker is another,\u2014here are a couple of\ncharacteristic passages from Parker\u2019s correspondence.(35)\n\n\n    \u201cOrthodox scholars say: \u2018In the heathen classics you find no\n    consciousness of sin.\u2019 It is very true\u2014God be thanked for it. They\n    were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust,\n    sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got\n    rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of \u2018enmity\n    against God,\u2019 and didn\u2019t sit down and whine and groan against non\u2010\n    existent evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do\n    them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again. But I am not\n    conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know\n    there is much \u2018health in me\u2019; and in my body, even now, there\n    dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul.\u201d\n    In another letter Parker writes: \u201cI have swum in clear sweet\n    waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and\n    the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too\n    strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest\n    boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass,... up to the\n    gray\u2010bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me\n    honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present\n    delight. When I recall the years ... I am filled with a sense of\n    sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so\n    exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of all my\n    delights is still the religious.\u201d\n\n\nAnother good expression of the \u201conce\u2010born\u201d type of consciousness,\ndeveloping straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or\ncrisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent\nUnitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck\u2019s circulars. I quote\na part of it:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which\n    come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the\n    formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any\n    man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was,\n    into a family where the religion is simple and rational; who is\n    trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows,\n    for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I\n    always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the\n    world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was\n    always glad to receive his suggestions to me.... I can remember\n    perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half\u2010\n    philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young\n    men and maidens who were facing the \u2018problem of life.\u2019 I had no\n    idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my\n    might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn\n    seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a\n    chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because\n    he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought\n    to enjoy it.... A child who is early taught that he is God\u2019s\n    child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and\n    that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the\n    conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and\n    probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is\n    born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good.\u201d(36)\n\n\nOne can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a\ntemperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally\nforbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the\ndarker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become\nquasi\u2010pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a\nmomentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital\nan\u00e6sthesia.(37)\n\nThe supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of\ncourse Walt Whitman.\n\n\n    \u201cHis favorite occupation,\u201d writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke, \u201cseemed\n    to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking\n    at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the\n    varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the\n    crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.\n    It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond\n    what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man,\u201d\n    continues Dr. Bucke, \u201cit had not occurred to me that any one could\n    derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He\n    was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all\n    sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as\n    roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things\n    and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to\n    have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him.\n    He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men,\n    women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he\n    liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or\n    her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or\n    dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified,\n    sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke\n    harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even\n    took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew\n    [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not\n    allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy,\n    complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible\n    that these mental states could be absent in him. After long\n    observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or\n    unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of\n    any nationality or class of men, or time in the world\u2019s history,\n    or against any trades or occupations\u2014not even against any animals,\n    insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor\n    any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and\n    death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather,\n    pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very\n    well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was\n    angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt\n    it.\u201d(38)\n\n\nWalt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion\nfrom his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he\nallowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed\nthese in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited\nindividual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a\npassionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by\npersuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things\nare divinely good.\n\nThus it has come about that many persons to\u2010day regard Walt Whitman as the\nrestorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his\nown love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist.\nSocieties are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for\nits propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are\nalready beginning to be drawn;(39) hymns are written by others in his\npeculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of\nthe Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.\n\nWhitman is often spoken of as a \u201cpagan.\u201d The word nowadays means sometimes\nthe mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a\nGreek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither\nof these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere\nanimal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware\nenough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it,\na conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which\nyour genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.\n\n\n    \u201cI could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self\u2010\n                contained,\n    I stand and look at them long and long;\n    They do not sweat and whine about their condition.\n    They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.\n    Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of\n                owning things,\n    Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of\n                years ago,\n    Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.\u201d(40)\n\n\nNo natural pagan could have written these well\u2010known lines. But on the\nother hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness,\neven in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this\nsunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to\nadopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam\u2019s young\nson, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cAh, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos\n    too is dead, who was better far than thou.... Over me too hang\n    death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday\n    when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear\n    he smite, or arrow from the string.\u201d(41)\n\n\nThen Achilles savagely severs the poor boy\u2019s neck with his sword, heaves\nhim by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river\nto eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy\neach ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the\nGreeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and\nentire. Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such\ndesire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so\nmany of _us_ insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be \u201cgood\nin the making,\u201d or something equally ingenious. Good was good, and bad\njust bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of\nnature,\u2014Walt Whitman\u2019s verse, \u201cWhat is called good is perfect and what is\ncalled bad is just as perfect,\u201d would have been mere silliness to\nthem,\u2014nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent \u201canother\nand a better world\u201d of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the\ninnocent goods of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the\ninstinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain,\ngives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality\nWhitman\u2019s outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and\ndefiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,(42) and\nthis diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed\ntowards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in\nimportant respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIf, then, we give the name of healthy\u2010mindedness to the tendency which\nlooks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must\ndistinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic\nway of being healthy\u2010minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy\u2010\nmindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its\nsystematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good.\nEvery abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as\ntheir essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects.\nSystematic healthy\u2010mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and\nuniversal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of\nvision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a\ndifficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with\nhimself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the\nsituation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.\n\nIn the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has\nblindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive\nweapon for self\u2010protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually\nin possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of\nreality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules.\nTo the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then\nand there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may\nthen seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.\n\nBut more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and\nhonest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or _parti pris_.\nMuch of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the\nphenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by\na simple change of the sufferer\u2019s inner attitude from one of fear to one\nof fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after\nvainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully,\nthat a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts\nthat seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape.\nRefuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence;\nturn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are\nconcerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil\ncharacter exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own\nthoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be\nyour principal concern.\n\nThe deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its\nentrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful\nbounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self\u2010\nprotection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals\nhave weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only\npainful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the\npining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have\nbeen engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a\nway out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble\nwhich occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all\ncosts, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout\nit in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is\nimpossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without\nzealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of\nthe objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution\nnot to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within\nourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality\nunder a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its\nneeds.\n\nIn all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the\ntotal frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion\nplays an enormous part in the history of the religious consciousness, and\nwe must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far at\npresent. More ordinary non\u2010mystical conditions of rapture suffice for my\nimmediate contention. All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms\nmake one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease\nto deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the\nwinds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in,\nprovided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave\nits victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems\nto be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement\nwhich engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning\nexperience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in\nthe heroic opportunity and adventure.\n\nThe systematic cultivation of healthy\u2010mindedness as a religious attitude\nis therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is\nanything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even\nwhen our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our\nattention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter\u2010\nhouses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are\nhuddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize\nofficially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer\nand cleaner and better than the world that really is.(43)\n\nThe advance of liberalism, so\u2010called, in Christianity, during the past\nfifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy\u2010mindedness within\nthe church over the morbidness with which the old hell\u2010fire theology was\nmore harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose\npreachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted\nrather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal\npunishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man.\nThey look at the continual preoccupation of the old\u2010fashioned Christian\nwith the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible\nrather than admirable; and a sanguine and \u201cmuscular\u201d attitude, which to\nour forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes\nan ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not\nthey are right, I am only pointing out the change.\n\nThe persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their\nnominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its\nmore pessimistic theological elements. But in that \u201ctheory of evolution\u201d\nwhich, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty\u2010five\nyears swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for\na new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced\nChristianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea\nof a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism\nand progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy\u2010minded so well\nthat it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use.\nAccordingly we find \u201cevolutionism\u201d interpreted thus optimistically and\nembraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a\nmultitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained\nscientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had\nalready begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the\nharshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme. As examples\nare better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer\nto Professor Starbuck\u2019s circular of questions. The writer\u2019s state of mind\nmay by courtesy be called a religion, for it is his reaction on the whole\nnature of things, it is systematic and reflective, and it loyally binds\nhim to certain inner ideals. I think you will recognize in him, coarse\u2010\nmeated and incapable of wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar\ncontemporary type.\n\n\n    Q. _What does Religion mean to you?_\n\n    A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe,\n    useless to others. I am sixty\u2010seven years of age and have resided\n    in X. fifty years, and have been in business forty\u2010five,\n    consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and\n    some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious\n    people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and\n    morality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious\n    convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and\n    sermonizing are pernicious\u2014they teach us to rely on some\n    supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I\n    _tee_totally disbelieve in a God. The God\u2010idea was begotten in\n    ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If\n    I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both\n    mentally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die\n    with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational\n    pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die\u2014there being no immortality\n    in either case.\n\n    Q. _What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God,\n    Heaven, Angels, etc.?_\n\n    A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion. These words\n    mean so much mythic bosh.\n\n    Q. _Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?_\n\n    A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintending kind. A\n    little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific\n    law will convince any one of this fact.\n\n    Q. _What things work most strongly on your emotions?_\n\n    A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like\n    Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc.,\n    etc. Of songs, the Star\u2010spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise,\n    and all moral and soul\u2010stirring songs, but wishy\u2010washy hymns are\n    my detestation. I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather,\n    and until within a few years used to walk Sundays into the\n    country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle forty or\n    fifty. I have dropped the bicycle. I never go to church, but\n    attend lectures when there are any good ones. All of my thoughts\n    and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for\n    instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I\n    endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as the\n    deepest law. Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he\n    will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand\n    years hence.\n\n    Q. _What is your notion of sin?_\n\n    A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental\n    to man\u2019s development not being yet advanced enough. Morbidness\n    over it increases the disease. We should think that a million of\n    years hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order\n    will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of\n    evil or sin.\n\n    Q. _What is your temperament?_\n\n    A. Nervous, active, wide\u2010awake, mentally and physically. Sorry\n    that Nature compels us to sleep at all.\n\n\nIf we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not\nlook to this brother. His contentment with the finite incases him like a\nlobster\u2010shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance\nfrom the Infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism\nwhich may be encouraged by popular science.\n\nTo my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously than\nthat which sets in from natural science towards healthy\u2010mindedness is that\nwhich has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force\nevery day,\u2014I am ignorant what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great\nBritain,\u2014and to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will\ngive the title of the \u201cMind\u2010cure movement.\u201d There are various sects of\nthis \u201cNew Thought,\u201d to use another of the names by which it calls itself;\nbut their agreements are so profound that their differences may be\nneglected for my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without\napology, as if it were a simple thing.\n\nIt is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative\nand a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter\nof a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory\nelements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power.\nIt has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature\nis great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market,\nto be to a certain extent supplied by publishers,\u2014a phenomenon never\nobserved, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest\ninsecure beginnings.\n\nOne of the doctrinal sources of Mind\u2010cure is the four Gospels; another is\nEmersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan\nidealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of \u201claw\u201d and \u201cprogress\u201d\nand \u201cdevelopment\u201d; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of\nwhich I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a\nstrain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind\u2010cure movement is\nan inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an\nintuitive belief in the all\u2010saving power of healthy\u2010minded attitudes as\nsuch, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a\ncorrelative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously\nprecautionary states of mind.(44) Their belief has in a general way been\ncorroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this\nexperience forms to\u2010day a mass imposing in amount.\n\nThe blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; lifelong invalids have\nhad their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable.\nThe deliberate adoption of a healthy\u2010minded attitude has proved possible\nto many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character\nhas gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to\ncountless homes. The indirect influence of this has been great. The mind\u2010\ncure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their\nspirit at second\u2010hand. One hears of the \u201cGospel of Relaxation,\u201d of the\n\u201cDon\u2019t Worry Movement,\u201d of people who repeat to themselves, \u201cYouth,\nhealth, vigor!\u201d when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day.\nComplaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households;\nand more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of\ndisagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences\nand ailments of life. These general tonic effects on public opinion would\nbe good even if the more striking results were non\u2010existent. But the\nlatter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures\nand self\u2010deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human\nfailure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a\ngood deal of the mind\u2010cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with\noptimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect\nfinds it almost impossible to read it at all.\n\nThe plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to\npractical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the\nAmerican people has never been better shown than by the fact that this,\ntheir only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of\nlife, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the\nimportance of mind\u2010cure the medical and clerical professions in the United\nStates are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and protesting, to\nopen their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both\nspeculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the\nablest of the group.(45) It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts\nof persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any\npossibility be influenced by the mind\u2010curers\u2019 ideas. For our immediate\npurpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who\n_can_ be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with\nrespect.(46)\n\nTo come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental\npillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all\nreligious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is\nconnected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder\nsphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The\nshallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts,\nand desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But\nwhereas Christian theology has always considered _frowardness_ to be the\nessential vice of this part of human nature, the mind\u2010curers say that the\nmark of the beast in it is _fear_; and this is what gives such an entirely\nnew religious turn to their persuasion.\n\n\n    \u201cFear,\u201d to quote a writer of the school, \u201chas had its uses in the\n    evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of\n    forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part of\n    the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I\n    find that the fear element of forethought is not stimulating to\n    those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the\n    natural motives, but is weakening and deterrent. As soon as it\n    becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent, and should\n    be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living tissue.\n    To assist in the analysis of fear, and in the denunciation of its\n    expressions, I have coined the word _fearthought_ to stand for the\n    unprofitable element of forethought, and have defined the word\n    \u2018worry\u2019 as _fearthought in contradistinction to forethought_. I\n    have also defined fearthought as _the self\u2010imposed or self\u2010\n    permitted suggestion of inferiority_, in order to place it where\n    it really belongs, in the category of harmful, unnecessary, and\n    therefore not respectable things.\u201d(47)\n\n\nThe \u201cmisery\u2010habit,\u201d the \u201cmartyr\u2010habit,\u201d engendered by the prevalent\n\u201cfearthought,\u201d get pungent criticism from the mind\u2010cure writers:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cConsider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born.\n    There are certain social conventions or customs and alleged\n    requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the\n    world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early\n    training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life.\n    Following close upon this, there is a long series of\n    anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer certain children\u2019s\n    diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thought\n    that we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become\n    childlike; while crowning all is the fear of death. Then there is\n    a long line of particular fears and trouble\u2010bearing expectations,\n    such, for example, as ideas associated with certain articles of\n    food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the\n    aches and pains associated with cold weather, the fear of catching\n    cold if one sits in a draught, the coming of hay\u2010fever upon the\n    14th of August in the middle of the day, and so on through a long\n    list of fears, dreads, worriments, anxieties, anticipations,\n    expectations, pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly train\n    of fateful shapes which our fellow\u2010men, and especially physicians,\n    are ready to help us conjure up, an array worthy to rank with\n    Bradley\u2019s \u2018unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.\u2019\n\n    \u201cYet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumerable\n    volunteers from daily life,\u2014the fear of accident, the possibility\n    of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of robbery, of fire,\n    or the outbreak of war. And it is not deemed sufficient to fear\n    for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we must forthwith fear\n    the worst and apprehend death. If one meets with sorrow ...\n    sympathy means to enter into and increase the suffering.\u201d(48)\n\n    \u201cMan,\u201d to quote another writer, \u201coften has fear stamped upon him\n    before his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear;\n    all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death,\n    and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and\n    depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and\n    specification.... Think of the millions of sensitive and\n    responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the\n    dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that\n    health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love,\n    exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though\n    unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean\n    of morbidity.\u201d(49)\n\n\nAlthough the disciples of the mind\u2010cure often use Christian terminology,\none sees from such quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man\ndiverges from that of ordinary Christians.(50)\n\nTheir notion of man\u2019s higher nature is hardly less divergent, being\ndecidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in man appears in the mind\u2010cure\nphilosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly subconscious; and through the\nsubconscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without any\nmiracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this view is\nvariously expressed by different writers, we find in it traces of\nChristian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the\nmodern psychology of the subliminal self. A quotation or two will put us\nat the central point of view:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThe great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite\n    life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and\n    through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back\n    of all is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it\n    Kindly Light, Providence, the Over\u2010Soul, Omnipotence, or whatever\n    term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to\n    the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone,\n    so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing that is\n    outside. He is the life of our life, our very life itself. We are\n    partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in\n    that we are individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite\n    Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence\n    the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and\n    so are one. They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in\n    degree.\n\n    \u201cThe great central fact in human life is the coming into a\n    conscious vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite\n    Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In\n    just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our\n    oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine\n    inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of\n    the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels through which the\n    Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In just the degree in\n    which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will\n    exchange dis\u2010ease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and\n    pain for abounding health and strength. To recognize our own\n    divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is to attach\n    the belts of our machinery to the powerhouse of the Universe. One\n    need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can rise to\n    any heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all\n    the higher powers of the Universe combine to help us\n    heavenward.\u201d(51)\n\n\nLet me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete\naccounts of experience with the mind\u2010cure religion. I have many answers\nfrom correspondents\u2014the only difficulty is to choose. The first two whom I\nshall quote are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as\nfollows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power,\nby which all mind\u2010cure disciples are inspired.\n\n\n    \u201cThe first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or\n    depression is the _human sense of separateness_ from that Divine\n    Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in\n    serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene: \u2018I and my\n    Father are one,\u2019 has no further need of healer, or of healing.\n    This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for\n    wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine\n    union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on\n    this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific\n    Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the\n    consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark?\n\n    \u201cThis possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been\n    abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a\n    record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and\n    lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they\n    are to\u2010day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was\n    dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I\n    have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a\n    vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a\n    moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly\n    with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For\n    how can a conscious part of Deity be sick?\u2014since \u2018Greater is he\n    that is _with_ us than all that can strive against us.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\nMy second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cLife seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking\n    down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous\n    prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of\n    insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the\n    digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of\n    doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed\n    up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never\n    recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me.\n\n    \u201cI think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning\n    the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental\n    touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of\n    life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost\n    unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves _actually_, that\n    is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest\n    consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination\n    from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and\n    invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that\n    to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence\n    of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the\n    objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have\n    engrossed you without.\n\n    \u201cI have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily\n    health _as such_, because that comes of itself, as an incidental\n    result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to\n    have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to\n    above. That which we usually make the object of life, those outer\n    things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and\n    die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they\n    should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere\n    outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the\n    bosom of the spirit. This life is the real seeking of the kingdom\n    of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so that all\n    else comes as that which shall be \u2018added unto you\u2019\u2014as quite\n    incidental and as a surprise to us, perhaps; and yet it is the\n    proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre of\n    our being.\n\n    \u201cWhen I say that we commonly make the object of our life that\n    which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which\n    the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in\n    business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown\n    in philanthropic undertakings. Such things should be results, not\n    objects. I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem\n    harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept\n    them\u2014I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in\n    their various development, these being mostly approved by the\n    masses, although they may be unreal, and even unhealthy\n    superfluities.\u201d\n\n\nHere is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read you\nthese cases without comment,\u2014they express so many varieties of the state\nof mind we are studying.\n\n\n    \u201cI had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year.\n    [Details of ill\u2010health are given which I omit.] I had been in\n    Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but\n    steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of\n    October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it\n    were these words: \u2018You will be healed and do a work you never\n    dreamed of.\u2019 These words were impressed upon my mind with such\n    power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I\n    believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness,\n    which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within\n    two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer\n    (this was January 7, 1881). The healer said: \u2018There is nothing but\n    Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal\n    belief; as a man thinketh so is he.\u2019 I could not accept all she\n    said, but I translated all that was there for _me_ in this way:\n    \u2018There is nothing but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely\n    dependent upon Him; mind is given me to use; and by just so much\n    of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I\n    shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past\n    experience.\u2019 That day I commenced accordingly to take a little of\n    every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself:\n    \u2018The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I have\n    eaten.\u2019 By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to\n    bed and fell asleep, saying: \u2018I am soul, spirit, just one with\n    God\u2019s Thought of me,\u2019 and slept all night without waking, for the\n    first time in several years [the distress\u2010turns had usually\n    recurred about two o\u2019clock in the night]. I felt the next day like\n    an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that\n    would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able\n    to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began\n    to have my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to\n    me like stepping\u2010stones. I will note a few of them; they came\n    about two weeks apart.\n\n    \u201c1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.\n\n    \u201c2d. I am Soul, therefore I _am_ well.\n\n    \u201c3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four\u2010footed beast with\n    a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering,\n    with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I\n    resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and refused to even\n    look at my old self in this form.\n\n    \u201c4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with\n    faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge.\n\n    \u201c5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing\n    look; and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner\n    consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for\n    I was Soul, an expression of God\u2019s Perfect Thought. That was to me\n    the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I\n    appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my\n    real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees\n    (though it took me two years of hard work to get there) _I\n    expressed health continuously throughout my whole body_.\n\n    \u201cIn my subsequent nineteen years\u2019 experience I have never known\n    this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I\n    have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have\n    learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child.\u201d\n\n\nBut I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you\nback to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records of\nexperience how impossible it is not to class mind\u2010cure as primarily a\nreligious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God\u2019s\nlife is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ\u2019s\nmessage which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of\nyour very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.(52)\n\nBut philosophers usually profess to give a quasi\u2010logical explanation of\nthe existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world,\nthe existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness,\nthe mind\u2010curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no\nspeculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for\neverybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill\nagree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as\na \u201cmystery\u201d or \u201cproblem,\u201d or in \u201claying to heart\u201d the lesson of its\nexperience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don\u2019t reason about it,\nas Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya,\nignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended\nand forgotten. Christian Science so\u2010called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the\nmost radical branch of mind\u2010cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is\nsimply a _lie_, and any one who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic\nideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit\nattention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad\nspeculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical\nmerits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a\nmind\u2010curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good?\n\nAfter all, it is the life that tells; and mind\u2010cure has developed a living\nsystem of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous\nliterature of the _Di\u00e4tetik der Seele_ into the shade. This system is\nwholly and exclusively compacted of optimism: \u201cPessimism leads to\nweakness. Optimism leads to power.\u201d \u201cThoughts are things,\u201d as one of the\nmost vigorous mind\u2010cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each\nof his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and\nsuccess, before you know it these things will also be your outward\nportion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic\nthinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet\nto the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic\nmodes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind\u2010curers here bring\nin a doctrine that thoughts are \u201cforces,\u201d and that, by virtue of a law\nthat like attracts like, one man\u2019s thoughts draw to themselves as allies\nall the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one\ngets, by one\u2019s thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization\nof one\u2019s desires; and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the\nheavenly forces on one\u2019s side by opening one\u2019s own mind to their influx.\n\nOn the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the\nmind\u2010cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the\nbeliever in moralism and works, with his anxious query, \u201cWhat shall I do\nto be saved?\u201d Luther and Wesley replied: \u201cYou are saved now, if you would\nbut believe it.\u201d And the mind\u2010curers come with precisely similar words of\nemancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception\nof salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor\nnevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. _Things are wrong\nwith them_; and \u201cWhat shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?\u201d\nis the form of their question. And the answer is: \u201cYou _are_ well, sound,\nand clear already, if you did but know it.\u201d \u201cThe whole matter may be\nsummed up in one sentence,\u201d says one of the authors whom I have already\nquoted, \u201c_God is well, and so are you_. You must awaken to the knowledge\nof your real being.\u201d\n\nThe adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of\nmankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same\nadequacy holds in the case of the mind\u2010cure message, foolish as it may\nsound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its\ntherapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined\n(probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its\nmanifestations(53)) to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the\npopular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their\nday.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nBut I here fear that I may begin to \u201cjar upon the nerves\u201d of some of the\nmembers of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may\nthink, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures.\nI can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these\nlectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous\ndiversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their\nwants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be\nclassed under different heads. The result is that we have really different\ntypes of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer\nacquaintance with the healthy\u2010minded type, we must take it where we find\nit in most radical form. The psychology of individual types of character\nhas hardly begun even to be sketched as yet\u2014our lectures may possibly\nserve as a crumb\u2010like contribution to the structure. The first thing to\nbear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico\u2010academic\u2010\nscientific type, the officially and conventionally \u201ccorrect\u201d type, \u201cthe\ndeadly respectable\u201d type, for which to ignore others is a besetting\ntemptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena\nfrom our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in\nanything like them ourselves.\n\nNow the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic\nconversions, and of what I call the mind\u2010cure movement seems to prove the\nexistence of numerous persons in whom\u2014at any rate at a certain stage in\ntheir development\u2014a change of character for the better, so far from being\nfacilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place\nall the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed. Official\nmoralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. \u201cBe vigilant, day\nand night,\u201d they adjure us; \u201chold your passive tendencies in check; shrink\nfrom no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent.\u201d But the persons I\nspeak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure\nand vexation in their hands, and only makes them two\u2010fold more the\nchildren of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude\nbecomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses\nto run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.\n\nUnder these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by\ninnumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti\u2010moralistic\nmethod, by the \u201csurrender\u201d of which I spoke in my second lecture.\nPassivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the\nrule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the\ncare of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what\nbecomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect\ninward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you\nsincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self\u2010\ndespair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage\ninto _nothing_ of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical\npoint must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must\ngive way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event\n(as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic,\nand leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an\nexternal power.\n\nWhatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one\nfundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or\nincapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic\ncharacter. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails\nto cast doubt on its reality. They _know_; for they have actually _felt_\nthe higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.\n\nA story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found\nhimself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught\na branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for\nhours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a\ndespairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches.\nIf he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared.\nAs the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the\neverlasting arms receive _us_ if we confide absolutely in them, and give\nup the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its\nprecautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.\n\nThe mind\u2010curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience.\nThey have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting\ngo, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by\nfaith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of\npersons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran\ntheology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and\nfinding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or\ngreat or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative\nphenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of\nhuman nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic\u2010\nidealistic, or a medical\u2010materialistic view of their ultimate causal\nexplanation.(54)\n\nWhen we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shall learn\nsomething more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the\nmind\u2010curer\u2019s _methods_.\n\nThey are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of\nenvironment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education. But the\nword \u201csuggestion,\u201d having acquired official status, is unfortunately\nalready beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon\ninvestigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying\nsusceptibilities of individual cases. \u201cSuggestion\u201d is only another name\nfor the power of ideas, _so far as they prove efficacious over belief and\nconduct_. Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over\nothers. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are\nnot so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churches are\nnot efficacious in the therapeutic direction to\u2010day, whatever they may\nhave been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why\nthe salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving\nof the word \u201csuggestion\u201d as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr.\nGoddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to\nnothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that \u201cReligion [and\nby this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is\nin mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our\nreligious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done.\u201d And this in\nspite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely\n_nothing_, or did nothing until mind\u2010cure came to the rescue.(55)\n\nAn idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a\nrevelation. The mind\u2010cure with its gospel of healthy\u2010mindedness has come\nas a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left\nhardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. In what can the\noriginality of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel,\nuntil then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some\ngroup of human beings?\n\nThe force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the\nforce of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of\nsuccess. If mind\u2010cure should ever become official, respectable, and\nintrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its\nacuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The\nchurch knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the\nacute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many,\nindurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes\nto the movings of the Spirit. \u201cWe may pray,\u201d says Jonathan Edwards,\n\u201cconcerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may\neither be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by\nsome at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural\nmen, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if\nthey were all dead.\u201d(56)\n\nThe next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large numbers,\nof minds who unite healthy\u2010mindedness with readiness for regeneration by\nletting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural\nman, Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either the\none or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character\nformed of this peculiar mingling of elements. However few of us here\npresent may belong to such a type, it is now evident that it forms a\nspecific moral combination, well represented in the world.\n\nFinally, mind\u2010cure has made what in our protestant countries is an\nunprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasoned\nadvice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise\nin passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even\ninvoked something like hypnotic practice. I quote some passages at\nrandom:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThe value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on\n    which the New Thought most strongly insists,\u2014the development\n    namely from within outward, from small to great.(57) Consequently\n    one\u2019s thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though\n    this trust be literally like a step in the dark.(58) To attain the\n    ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought\n    advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the\n    attainment of self\u2010control. One is to learn to marshal the\n    tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a\n    unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times\n    for silent meditation, by one\u2019s self, preferably in a room where\n    the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New\n    Thought terms, this is called \u2018entering the silence.\u2019 \u201d(59)\n\n    \u201cThe time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street\n    you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of\n    your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and\n    everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace,\n    Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you.\n    This is the spirit of continual prayer.(60) One of the most\n    intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where\n    several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often\n    talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds\n    about him, this self\u2010centred faithful man would, in any moment of\n    perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him\n    that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and\n    thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though he\n    were alone in some primeval wood. Taking his difficulty with him\n    into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to which\n    he expected a certain answer, he would remain utterly passive\n    until the reply came, and never once through many years\u2019\n    experience did he find himself disappointed or misled.\u201d(61)\n\n\nWherein, I should like to know, does this _intrinsically_ differ from the\npractice of \u201crecollection\u201d which plays so great a part in Catholic\ndiscipline? Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so\nknown among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus\ndefined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on\nContemplation.\n\n\n    \u201cIt is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all\n    places and circumstances makes us see him present, lets us commune\n    respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and\n    affection for him.... Would you escape from every ill? Never lose\n    this recollection of God, neither in prosperity nor in adversity,\n    nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke not, to excuse\n    yourself from this duty, either the difficulty or the importance\n    of your business, for you can always remember that God sees you,\n    that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an hour you forget\n    him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection. If you cannot\n    practice this exercise continuously, at least make yourself as\n    familiar with it as possible; and, like unto those who in a\n    rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can, go as\n    often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your\n    soul.\u201d(62)\n\n\nAll the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course\nunlike anything in mind\u2010cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the\nexercise is identical in both communions, and in both communions those who\nurge it write with authority, for they have evidently experienced in their\nown persons that whereof they tell. Compare again some mind\u2010cure\nutterances:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cHigh, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and\n    strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it\n    forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the\n    mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty,\n    wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may\n    at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance\n    will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally\n    delightful.\n\n    \u201cThe soul\u2019s real world is that which it has built of its thoughts,\n    mental states, and imaginations. If we _will_, we can turn our\n    backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into\n    the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence.\n    The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will\n    attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as\n    air inclines to a vacuum.... Whenever the thought is not occupied\n    with one\u2019s daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into\n    the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day,\n    and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful\n    exercise may be engaged in to great advantage. If one who has\n    never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought\u2010\n    forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here\n    suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and\n    nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and\n    superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons the outside world,\n    with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes\n    into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune\n    and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so\n    that the \u2018still, small voice\u2019 is audible, the tumultuous waves of\n    external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego\n    gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the\n    Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which\n    is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is soul\u2010contact\n    with the Parent\u2010Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health,\n    and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain.\u201d(63)\n\n\nWhen we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep an\nimmersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all\nover, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with which\nthis little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed\naway\u2014doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract\ntalk and rhetoric set down _pour encourager les autres_. You will then be\nconvinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of \u201cunion\u201d form a\nperfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul may\noccasionally partake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper\nsense than they live by anything else with which they have acquaintance.\nThis brings me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should\nlike to pass from the subject of healthy\u2010mindedness, and close a topic\nwhich I fear is already only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation\nof all this systematized healthy\u2010mindedness and mind\u2010cure religion to\nscientific method and the scientific life.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIn a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of\nreligion to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on the\nother. There are plenty of persons to\u2010day\u2014\u201cscientists\u201d or \u201cpositivists,\u201d\nthey are fond of calling themselves\u2014who will tell you that religious\nthought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of\nconsciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long\nsince left behind and outgrown. If you ask them to explain themselves more\nfully, they will probably say that for primitive thought everything is\nconceived of under the form of personality. The savage thinks that things\noperate by personal forces, and for the sake of individual ends. For him,\neven external nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these\nwere so many elementary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these\npositivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an\nelementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really\nelementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho\u2010physical,\nwhich are all impersonal and general in character. Nothing individual\naccomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and\nexemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquire of them by what\nmeans science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its\npersonal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say it has been\nby the strict use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out\nscience\u2019s conceptions practically, they will say, the conceptions that\nignore personality altogether, and you will always be corroborated. The\nworld is so made that all your expectations will be experientially\nverified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you\ninfer them impersonal and universal.\n\nBut here we have mind\u2010cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy,\nsetting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says,\nand every day will practically prove you right. That the controlling\nenergies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are\nforces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your\nindividual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and\nmental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify\nthese primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind\u2010cure\nmovement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but\nby palpable experiential results. Here, in the very heyday of science\u2019s\nauthority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific\nphilosophy, and succeeds by using science\u2019s own peculiar methods and\nweapons. Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain\nways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw\nourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not\nimpugned, but corroborated by its observation.\n\nHow conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident enough\nfrom the narratives which I have quoted. I will quote yet another couple\nof shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn. Here is\none:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cOne of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two\n    months after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right\n    ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had to\n    use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully\n    guarding it ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I made the\n    positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being): \u2018There is\n    nothing but God, all life comes from him perfectly. I cannot be\n    sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.\u2019 Well, I never\n    had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day.\u201d\n\n\nThe next case not only illustrates experiment and verification, but also\nthe element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made such\naccount.\n\n\n    \u201cI went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not\n    been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling\n    increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and\n    faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an\n    attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the\n    grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The mind\u2010cure\n    teachings that I had been listening to all the winter thereupon\n    came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to\n    test myself. On my way home I met a friend, and I refrained with\n    some effort from telling her how I felt. That was the first step\n    gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send\n    for the doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until\n    morning and see how I felt. Then followed one of the most\n    beautiful experiences of my life.\n\n    \u201cI cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did \u2018lie\n    down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.\u2019 I gave up all\n    fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and\n    obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought.\n    My dominant idea was: \u2018Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto\n    me even as thou wilt,\u2019 and a perfect confidence that all would be\n    well, that all _was_ well. The creative life was flowing into me\n    every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in\n    harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding. There\n    was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness\n    of time or space or persons; but only of love and happiness and\n    faith.\n\n    \u201cI do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep;\n    but when I woke up in the morning, _I was well_.\u201d\n\n\nThese are exceedingly trivial instances,(64) but in them, if we have\nanything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification. For\nthe point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider\nthe patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they\nseemed to _themselves_ to have been cured by the experiments tried was\nenough to make them converts to the system. And although it is evident\nthat one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not\nevery one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than every\none can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom he calls in), yet\nit would surely be pedantic and over\u2010scrupulous for those who _can_ get\ntheir savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such\nexperimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for more\nscientific therapeutics. What are we to think of all this? Has science\nmade too wide a claim?\n\nI believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the\nleast, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this\nhour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them)\nplainly show the universe to be a more many\u2010sided affair than any sect,\neven the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our\nverifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated\nsystems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why\nin the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of\nideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the\nworld can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled\nby different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of\nprofit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some\nother kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all\nof us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in\npreventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape\nof mind\u2010cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and\nprevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better\nin a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the\nreligion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world\u2019s treasure\u2010\nhouse to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently\nneither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other\u2019s simultaneous use. And\nwhy, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many\ninterpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in\nalternation by using different conceptions and assuming different\nattitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial\nfacts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or\nby quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and\nscience, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to\nlife, would be co\u2010eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in\nindividualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever from\nbeing driven by science from the field to\u2010day. Numbers of educated people\nstill find it the directest experimental channel by which to carry on\ntheir intercourse with reality.(65)\n\nThe case of mind\u2010cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the\ntemptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention,\nbut I must content myself to\u2010day with this very brief indication. In a\nlater lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive\nthought will have to receive much more explicit attention.\n\n\n\n\nAppendix\n\n\n(See note to p. 121.)\n\n\n    CASE I. \u201cMy own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one\n    of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been\n    a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and\n    writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out\n    from exercise of any kind under penalty of immediate and great\n    exhaustion. I had been under the care of doctors of the highest\n    standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me\n    I had had great faith, with no or ill result. Then, at a time when\n    I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground, I heard some things\n    that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it;\n    I had no great hope of getting any good from it\u2014it was a _chance_\n    I tried, partly because my thought was interested by the new\n    possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only\n    chance I then could see. I went to X. in Boston, from whom some\n    friends of mine had got, or thought that they had got, great help;\n    the treatment was a silent one; little was said, and that little\n    carried no conviction to my mind; whatever influence was exerted\n    was that of another person\u2019s thought or feeling silently projected\n    on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as\n    we sat still together. I believed from the start in the\n    _possibility_ of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to\n    shape, helping or hindering, the body\u2019s nerve\u2010activities, and I\n    thought telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief\n    in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any\n    mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that\n    might have brought imagination strongly into play.\n\n    \u201cI sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first\n    with no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite\n    suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising\n    within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting\u2010places, of\n    power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had\n    long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb. I\n    began to read and walk as I had not done for years, and the change\n    was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This tide seemed to mount\n    for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, I\n    came away, taking the treatment up again a few months later. The\n    lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining ground\n    instead of losing it, but with this lift the influence seemed in a\n    way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality\n    of the power had gained immensely from this first experience, and\n    should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength\n    if my belief in it had been the potent factor there, I never after\n    this got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as\n    this which came when I made trial of it first, with little faith\n    and doubtful expectation. It is difficult to put all the evidence\n    in such a matter into words, to gather up into a distinct\n    statement all that one bases one\u2019s conclusions on, but I have\n    always felt that I had abundant evidence to justify (to myself, at\n    least) the conclusion that I came to then, and since have held to,\n    that the physical change which came at that time was, first, the\n    result of a change wrought within me by a change of mental state;\n    and, secondly, that that change of mental state was not, save in a\n    very secondary way, brought about through the influence of an\n    excited imagination, or a _consciously_ received suggestion of an\n    hypnotic sort. Lastly, I believe that this change was the result\n    of my receiving telepathically, and upon a mental stratum quite\n    below the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and more\n    energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought\n    was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of\n    this attitude upon me. In my case the disease was distinctly what\n    would be classed as nervous, not organic; but from such\n    opportunities as I have had of observing, I have come to the\n    conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an\n    arbitrary one, the nerves controlling the internal activities and\n    the nutrition of the body throughout; and I believe that the\n    central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres,\n    can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, if it can\n    be brought to bear. In my judgment the question is simply how to\n    bring it to bear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable\n    differences in the results obtained through mental healing do but\n    show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the\n    means we should take to make them effective. That these results\n    are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and\n    others makes me sure; that the conscious mind, the imagination,\n    enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, but\n    in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary ones, it hardly\n    seems to enter in at all. On the whole I am inclined to think that\n    as the healing action, like the morbid one, springs from the plane\n    of the normally _un_conscious mind, so the strongest and most\n    effective impressions are those which _it_ receives, in some as\n    yet unknown, subtle way, _directly_ from a healthier mind whose\n    state, through a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces.\u201d\n\n    CASE II. \u201cAt the urgent request of friends, and with no faith and\n    hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful\n    experience with a Christian Scientist), our little daughter was\n    placed under the care of a healer, and cured of a trouble about\n    which the physician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis.\n    This interested me, and I began studying earnestly the method and\n    philosophy of this method of healing. Gradually an inner peace and\n    tranquillity came to me in so positive a way that my manner\n    changed greatly. My children and friends noticed the change and\n    commented upon it. All feelings of irritability disappeared. Even\n    the expression of my face changed noticeably.\n\n    \u201cI had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discussion,\n    both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive\n    toward the views of others. I had been nervous and irritable,\n    coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache\n    induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh. I grew\n    serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely disappeared.\n    I had been in the habit of approaching every business interview\n    with an almost morbid dread. I now meet every one with confidence\n    and inner calm.\n\n    \u201cI may say that the growth has all been toward the elimination of\n    selfishness. I do not mean simply the grosser, more sensual forms,\n    but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such as\n    express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has\n    been in the direction of a practical, working realization of the\n    immanence of God and the Divinity of man\u2019s true, inner self.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURES VI AND VII. THE SICK SOUL.\n\n\nAt our last meeting, we considered the healthy\u2010minded temperament, the\ntemperament which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering,\nand in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of\ncrystallization in which the individual\u2019s character is set. We saw how\nthis temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a\nreligion in which good, even the good of this world\u2019s life, is regarded as\nthe essential thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion\ndirects him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the\nuniverse by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of\nthem, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on\noccasion, by denying outright that they exist. Evil is a disease; and\nworry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only\nadds to the original complaint. Even repentance and remorse, affections\nwhich come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and\nrelaxing impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness,\nand forget that you ever had relations with sin.\n\nSpinoza\u2019s philosophy has this sort of healthy\u2010mindedness woven into the\nheart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom\nReason leads, according to Spinoza, is led altogether by the influence\nover his mind of good. Knowledge of evil is an \u201cinadequate\u201d knowledge, fit\nonly for slavish minds. So Spinoza categorically condemns repentance. When\nmen make mistakes, he says,\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cOne might perhaps expect gnawings of conscience and repentance to\n    help to bring them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude\n    (as every one does conclude) that these affections are good\n    things. Yet when we look at the matter closely, we shall find that\n    not only are they not good, but on the contrary deleterious and\n    evil passions. For it is manifest that we can always get along\n    better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and\n    remorse. Harmful are these and evil, inasmuch as they form a\n    particular kind of sadness; and the disadvantages of sadness,\u201d he\n    continues, \u201cI have already proved, and shown that we should strive\n    to keep it from our life. Just so we should endeavor, since\n    uneasiness of conscience and remorse are of this kind of\n    complexion, to flee and shun these states of mind.\u201d(66)\n\n\nWithin the Christian body, for which repentance of sins has from the\nbeginning been the critical religious act, healthy\u2010mindedness has always\ncome forward with its milder interpretation. Repentance according to such\nhealthy\u2010minded Christians means _getting away from_ the sin, not groaning\nand writhing over its commission. The Catholic practice of confession and\nabsolution is in one of its aspects little more than a systematic method\nof keeping healthy\u2010mindedness on top. By it a man\u2019s accounts with evil are\nperiodically squared and audited, so that he may start the clean page with\nno old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will tell us how clean and fresh and\nfree he feels after the purging operation. Martin Luther by no means\nbelonged to the healthy\u2010minded type in the radical sense in which we have\ndiscussed it, and he repudiated priestly absolution for sin. Yet in this\nmatter of repentance he had some very healthy\u2010minded ideas, due in the\nmain to the largeness of his conception of God.\n\n\n    \u201cWhen I was a monk,\u201d he says, \u201cI thought that I was utterly cast\n    away, if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say,\n    if I felt any evil motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or envy\n    against any brother. I assayed many ways to help to quiet my\n    conscience, but it would not be; for the concupiscence and lust of\n    my flesh did always return, so that I could not rest, but was\n    continually vexed with these thoughts: This or that sin thou hast\n    committed: thou art infected with envy, with impatiency, and such\n    other sins: therefore thou art entered into this holy order in\n    vain, and all thy good works are unprofitable. But if then I had\n    rightly understood these sentences of Paul: \u2018The flesh lusteth\n    contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit contrary to the flesh; and\n    these two are one against another, so that ye cannot do the things\n    that ye would do,\u2019 I should not have so miserably tormented\n    myself, but should have thought and said to myself, as now\n    commonly I do, \u2018Martin, thou shalt not utterly be without sin, for\n    thou hast flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the battle thereof.\u2019 I\n    remember that Staupitz was wont to say, \u2018I have vowed unto God\n    above a thousand times that I would become a better man: but I\n    never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter I will make no such\n    vow: for I have now learned by experience that I am not able to\n    perform it. Unless, therefore, God be favorable and merciful unto\n    me for Christ\u2019s sake, I shall not be able, with all my vows and\n    all my good deeds, to stand before him.\u2019 This (of Staupitz\u2019s) was\n    not only a true, but also a godly and a holy desperation; and this\n    must they all confess, both with mouth and heart, who will be\n    saved. For the godly trust not to their own righteousness. They\n    look unto Christ their reconciler, who gave his life for their\n    sins. Moreover, they know that the remnant of sin which is in\n    their flesh is not laid to their charge, but freely pardoned.\n    Notwithstanding, in the mean while they fight in spirit against\n    the flesh, lest they should _fulfill_ the lusts thereof; and\n    although they feel the flesh to rage and rebel, and themselves\n    also do fall sometimes into sin through infirmity, yet are they\n    not discouraged, nor think therefore that their state and kind of\n    life, and the works which are done according to their calling,\n    displease God; but they raise up themselves by faith.\u201d(67)\n\n\nOne of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual genius,\nMolinos, the founder of Quietism, so abominably condemned was his healthy\u2010\nminded opinion of repentance:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cWhen thou fallest into a fault, in what matter soever it be, do\n    not trouble nor afflict thyself for it. For they are effects of\n    our frail Nature, stained by Original Sin. The common enemy will\n    make thee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that\n    thou walkest in error, and therefore art out of God and his favor,\n    and herewith would he make thee distrust of the divine Grace,\n    telling thee of thy misery, and making a giant of it; and putting\n    it into thy head that every day thy soul grows worse instead of\n    better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul,\n    open thine eyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical\n    suggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting in the mercy divine.\n    Would not he be a mere fool who, running at tournament with\n    others, and falling in the best of the career, should lie weeping\n    on the ground and afflicting himself with discourses upon his\n    fall? Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take the\n    course again, for he that rises again quickly and continues his\n    race is as if he had never fallen. If thou seest thyself fallen\n    once and a thousand times, thou oughtest to make use of the remedy\n    which I have given thee, that is, a loving confidence in the\n    divine mercy. These are the weapons with which thou must fight and\n    conquer cowardice and vain thoughts. This is the means thou\n    oughtest to use\u2014not to lose time, not to disturb thyself, and reap\n    no good.\u201d(68)\n\n\nNow in contrast with such healthy\u2010minded views as these, if we treat them\nas a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite\nview, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the\npersuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and\nthat the world\u2019s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to\nheart. We have now to address ourselves to this more morbid way of looking\nat the situation. But as I closed our last hour with a general\nphilosophical reflection on the healthy\u2010minded way of taking life, I\nshould like at this point to make another philosophical reflection upon it\nbefore turning to that heavier task. You will excuse the brief delay.\n\nIf we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the\ninterpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that\nhas always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever\nit has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has\nshown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All\u2010in\u2010All. In other\nwords, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become\npantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of\nabsolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical\ntheism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not\nto say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a\nuniverse composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed\nto believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others\nare subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible\nfor the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were not\nfinally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like\neverything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to\nsee how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This\ndifficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears\nas one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an _Individual_, and in it\nthe worst parts must be as essential as the best, must be as necessary to\nmake the individual what he is; since if any part whatever in an\nindividual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be _that_\nindividual at all. The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously\nrepresented both in Scotland and America to\u2010day, has to struggle with this\ndifficulty quite as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and\nalthough it would be premature to say that there is no speculative issue\nwhatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no\nclear or easy issue, and that the only _obvious_ escape from paradox here\nis to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and to allow the\nworld to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate\nor collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an\nabsolutely unitary fact. For then evil would not need to be essential; it\nmight be, and may always have been, an independent portion that had no\nrational or absolute right to live with the rest, and which we might\nconceivably hope to see got rid of at last.\n\nNow the gospel of healthy\u2010mindedness, as we have described it, casts its\nvote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the monistic\nphilosopher finds himself more or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that\neverything actual is rational, and that evil, as an element dialectically\nrequired, must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function\nawarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy\u2010mindedness refuses to\nsay anything of the sort.(69) Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational,\nand _not_ to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final\nsystem of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality,\na waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of\nit, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal, so far from being co\u2010\nextensive with the whole actual, is a mere _extract_ from the actual,\nmarked by its deliverance from all contact with this diseased, inferior,\nand excrementitious stuff.\n\nHere we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us,\nof there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole\nin conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view\nof any system which those other elements make up, can only be considered\nso much irrelevance and accident\u2014so much \u201cdirt,\u201d as it were, and matter\nout of place. I ask you now not to forget this notion; for although most\nphilosophers seem either to forget it or to disdain it too much ever to\nmention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselves in the end\nas containing an element of truth. The mind\u2010cure gospel thus once more\nappears to us as having dignity and importance. We have seen it to be a\ngenuine religion, and no mere silly appeal to imagination to cure disease;\nwe have seen its method of experimental verification to be not unlike the\nmethod of all science; and now here we find mind\u2010cure as the champion of a\nperfectly definite conception of the metaphysical structure of the world.\nI hope that, in view of all this, you will not regret my having pressed it\nupon your attention at such length.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nLet us now say good\u2010by for a while to all this way of thinking, and turn\ntowards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the\nconsciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its\npresence. Just as we saw that in healthy\u2010mindedness there are shallower\nand profounder levels, happiness like that of the mere animal, and more\nregenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there different levels of the\nmorbid mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There are\npeople for whom evil means only a mal\u2010adjustment with _things_, a wrong\ncorrespondence of one\u2019s life with the environment. Such evil as this is\ncurable, in principle at least, upon the natural plane, for merely by\nmodifying either the self or the things, or both at once, the two terms\nmay be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there\nare others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular\nouter things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice\nin his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any\nsuperficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires\na supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more\ntowards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins\nin the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended\nrather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of\nsomething ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to\nbe removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.(70) These comparisons\nof races are always open to exception, but undoubtedly the northern tone\nin religion has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion,\nand this way of feeling, being the more extreme, we shall find by far the\nmore instructive for our study.\n\nRecent psychology has found great use for the word \u201cthreshold\u201d as a\nsymbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into\nanother. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man\u2019s consciousness in\ngeneral, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer\nstimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high\nthreshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low\nthreshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to\nsmall differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low\n\u201cdifference\u2010threshold\u201d\u2014his mind easily steps over it into the\nconsciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak\nof a \u201cpain\u2010threshold,\u201d a \u201cfear\u2010threshold,\u201d a \u201cmisery\u2010threshold,\u201d and find\nit quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying\ntoo high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The\nsanguine and healthy\u2010minded live habitually on the sunny side of their\nmisery\u2010line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and\napprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle\nor two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have\nbeen born close to the pain\u2010threshold, which the slightest irritants\nfatally send them over.\n\nDoes it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the\npain\u2010threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who\nhabitually lived on the other? This question, of the relativity of\ndifferent types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally\nat this point, and will become a serious problem ere we have done. But\nbefore we confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the\nunpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in\ncontrast to the healthy\u2010minded, have to say of the secrets of their\nprison\u2010house, their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then\nresolutely turn our backs on the once\u2010born and their sky\u2010blue optimistic\ngospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, \u201cHurrah\nfor the Universe!\u2014God\u2019s in his Heaven, all\u2019s right with the world.\u201d Let us\nsee rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human\nhelplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more\ncomplicated key to the meaning of the situation.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nTo begin with, how _can_ things so insecure as the successful experiences\nof this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its\nweakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most\nprosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are\nalways interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of\npleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of\nnausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that\nsound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming\nfrom a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz\nof life ceases at their touch as a piano\u2010string stops sounding when the\ndamper falls upon it.\n\nOf course the music can commence again;\u2014and again and again,\u2014at intervals.\nBut with this the healthy\u2010minded consciousness is left with an\nirremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws\nits breath on sufferance and by an accident.\n\nEven if we suppose a man so packed with healthy\u2010mindedness as never to\nhave experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals, still,\nif he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his own lot with\nthat of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just a lucky\nchance and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born\nto an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security!\nWhat kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is,\n\u201cThank God, it has let me off clear this time!\u201d Is not its blessedness a\nfragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike\nthe snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success,\neven on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied\nby the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one\nof failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched\nfar higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals\nof which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows\nhimself to be found wanting.\n\nWhen such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this\nwise, how must it be with less successful men?\n\n\n    \u201cI will say nothing,\u201d writes Goethe in 1824, \u201cagainst the course\n    of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and\n    burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I\n    have not had four weeks of genuine well\u2010being. It is but the\n    perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.\u201d\n\n\nWhat single\u2010handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther? yet\nwhen he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an\nabsolute failure.\n\n\n    \u201cI am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith\n    and carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last\n    Judgment: I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst\n    forth, and I shall be at rest.\u201d\u2014And having a necklace of white\n    agates in his hand at the time he added: \u201cO God, grant that it may\n    come without delay. I would readily eat up this necklace to\u2010day,\n    for the Judgment to come to\u2010morrow.\u201d\u2014The Electress Dowager, one\n    day when Luther was dining with her, said to him: \u201cDoctor, I wish\n    you may live forty years to come.\u201d \u201cMadam,\u201d replied he, \u201crather\n    than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of\n    Paradise.\u201d\n\n\nFailure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it\nwith our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the\nmemorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning\nemphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal\nexpiation, will satisfy the world\u2019s demands, but every pound of flesh\nexacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering\nknown to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to\nthese results.\n\nAnd they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and\neverlasting is evidently an integral part of life. \u201cThere is indeed one\nelement in human destiny,\u201d Robert Louis Stevenson writes, \u201cthat not\nblindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we\nare not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.\u201d(71) And our\nnature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians\nshould have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the\npersonal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of\nlife\u2019s significance is reached?(72)\n\nBut this is only the first stage of the world\u2010sickness. Make the human\nbeing\u2019s sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over\nthe misery\u2010threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments\nthemselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods\nperish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and\nhealth and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust and\ndisappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of\neverything is the great spectre of universal death, the all\u2010encompassing\nblackness:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cWhat profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under\n    the Sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and\n    behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which\n    befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so\n    dieth the other; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust\n    again.... The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a\n    reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love and\n    their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any\n    more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the Sun....\n    Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes\n    to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in\n    them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they\n    shall be many.\u201d\n\n\nIn short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But\nif the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are\nequally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems\ninfected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.\n\nTo a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the\njoy\u2010destroying chill which such a contemplation engenders, the only relief\nthat healthy\u2010mindedness can give is by saying: \u201cStuff and nonsense, get\nout into the open air!\u201d or \u201cCheer up, old fellow, you\u2019ll be all right\nerelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!\u201d But in all seriousness,\ncan such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To\nascribe religious value to mere happy\u2010go\u2010lucky contentment with one\u2019s\nbrief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness\nand superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for _that_ cure. The\nfact that we _can_ die, that we _can_ be ill at all, is what perplexes us;\nthe fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that\nperplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable\nto illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies\nbeyond the Goods of nature.\n\nIt all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. \u201cThe\ntrouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and\ngoodness,\u201d said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort,\n\u201cand nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and\ndisconcerted at its being possible.\u201d And so with most of us: a little\ncooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal\ntoughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain\u2010threshold,\nwill bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into\nfull view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life\nand glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing\nquarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely\nnaturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure\nto end in sadness.\n\nThis sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or\nnaturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy\u2010mindedness do its\nbest with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and\nforgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of,\nand the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the\nindividual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact\ndepends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its\nsignificance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be\nknown to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy,\nits glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal\ndisease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he\nknows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge\nknocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of\ndeath and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.\n\nThe lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of\npossibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an\neternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let\nHeaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and\nhope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;\u2014and his days pass by with\nzest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place\nround them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all\npermanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science\nevolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the\nthrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.\n\nFor naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a\nposition similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake,\nsurrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that\nlittle by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near\nwhen the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously\nwill be the human creature\u2019s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer\nand more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night,\nthe more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of\nthe total situation.\n\nThe early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as models\nof the healthy\u2010minded joyousness which the religion of nature may\nengender. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks\u2014Homer\u2019s flow\nof enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines upon is steady. But even\nin Homer the reflective passages are cheerless,(73) and the moment the\nGreeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they became\nunmitigated pessimists.(74) The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that\nfollows too much happiness, the all\u2010encompassing death, fate\u2019s dark\nopacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed\nbackground of their imagination. The beautiful joyousness of their\npolytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable\nin quality of preciousness to those which we shall erelong see that\nBrahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice\u2010born people whose\nreligion is non\u2010naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism\nand renunciation.\n\nStoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance\nwhich the Greek mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: \u201cSeek not\nto be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always\nlinked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the\ndeeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiming\nlow; and above all do not fret.\u201d The Stoic said: \u201cThe only genuine good\nthat life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all\nother goods are lies.\u201d Each of these philosophies is in its degree a\nphilosophy of despair in nature\u2019s boons. Trustful self\u2010abandonment to the\njoys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and\nStoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust\u2010\nand\u2010ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy\nof indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and\ngives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms of\nresignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which\nman\u2019s primitive intoxication with sense\u2010happiness is sure to undergo. In\nthe one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite\ncold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they\nwere merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to\nall time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished\nin the evolution of the world\u2010sick soul.(75) They mark the conclusion of\nwhat we call the once\u2010born period, and represent the highest flights of\nwhat twice\u2010born religion would call the purely natural man\u2014Epicureanism,\nwhich can only by great courtesy be called a religion, showing his\nrefinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world\nin the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity.\nCompared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated\nChristian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts\nfor equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity.\n\nPlease observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to _judge_\nany of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety.\n\nThe securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice\u2010\nborn make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a more\nradical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered. We have seen\nhow the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off from the goods of nature.\nBut there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may\nbe entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from\nthe mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something\nmore is needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The\nindividual must in his own person become the prey of a pathological\nmelancholy. As the healthy\u2010minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil\u2019s\nvery existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself\nto ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the\nleast reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a\nrare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one\nseldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the\nmost atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic\nconstitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its\nactive entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that\nfollows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance\nabsolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal\ndocuments. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost\nan indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle\nof our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all\nseriously, we must be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below\nthe smooth and lying official conversational surface.\n\nOne can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it is\nmere passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack\nof taste and zest and spring. Professor Ribot has proposed the name\n_anhedonia_ to designate this condition.\n\n\n    \u201cThe state of _anhedonia_, if I may coin a new word to pair off\n    with _analgesia_,\u201d he writes, \u201chas been very little studied, but\n    it exists. A young girl was smitten with a liver disease which for\n    some time altered her constitution. She felt no longer any\n    affection for her father and mother. She would have played with\n    her doll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure in the\n    act. The same things which formerly convulsed her with laughter\n    entirely failed to interest her now. Esquirol observed the case of\n    a very intelligent magistrate who was also a prey to hepatic\n    disease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested\n    neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of emotional\n    reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he\n    could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his\n    home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little,\n    he said, as a theorem of Euclid.\u201d(76)\n\n\nProlonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary condition\nof anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is imagined only to be\nturned from with disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connected\nwith the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character, both\nintellectual and moral, is well described by the Catholic philosopher,\nFather Gratry, in his autobiographical recollections. In consequence of\nmental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young\nGratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms which he thus\ndescribes:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start,\n    thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic school,\n    or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring\n    into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And\n    when these impressions were past, all day long without respite I\n    suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation, verging on\n    despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned!\n    I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had\n    never even thought of hell. My mind had never turned in that\n    direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had impressed me in\n    that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and all at once, I\n    suffered in a measure what is suffered there.\n\n    \u201cBut what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of\n    heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of\n    anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It\n    was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows\n    less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in\n    inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love\u2014all these\n    words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have\n    talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling\n    anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping\n    anything from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my\n    great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived\n    any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An abstract\n    heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for\n    eternity.\u201d(77)\n\n\nSo much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling. A\nmuch worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical\nneuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of\nvarious characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing;\nsometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self\u2010mistrust\nand self\u2010despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient\nmay rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he\nmay or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should\nso have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our\nclassifications with too much respect. Moreover, it is only a relatively\nsmall proportion of cases that connect themselves with the religious\nsphere of experience at all. Exasperated cases, for instance, as a rule do\nnot. I quote now literally from the first case of melancholy on which I\nlay my hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French asylum.\n\n\n    \u201cI suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and morally.\n    Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep\n    since I am shut up here, and the little rest I get is broken by\n    bad dreams, and I am waked with a jump by nightmares, dreadful\n    visions, lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear, atrocious fear,\n    presses me down, holds me without respite, never lets me go. Where\n    is the justice in it all! What have I done to deserve this excess\n    of severity? Under what form will this fear crush me? What would I\n    not owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Eat, drink, lie\n    awake all night, suffer without interruption\u2014such is the fine\n    legacy I have received from my mother! What I fail to understand\n    is this abuse of power. There are limits to everything, there is a\n    middle way. But God knows neither middle way nor limits. I say\n    God, but why? All I have known so far has been the devil. After\n    all, I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I drift along,\n    thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage nor\n    means here to execute the act. As you read this, it will easily\n    prove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas are incoherent\n    enough\u2014I can see that myself. But I cannot keep myself from being\n    either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are, from whom should I\n    ask pity? I am defenseless against the invisible enemy who is\n    tightening his coils around me. I should be no better armed\n    against him even if I saw him, or had seen him. Oh, if he would\n    but kill me, devil take him! Death, death, once for all! But I\n    stop. I have raved to you long enough. I say raved, for I can\n    write no otherwise, having neither brain nor thoughts left. O God!\n    what a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless\n    between an evening and a morning; and how true and right I was\n    when in our philosophy\u2010year in college I chewed the cud of\n    bitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more pain in\n    life than gladness\u2014it is one long agony until the grave. Think how\n    gay it makes me to remember that this horrible misery of mine,\n    coupled with this unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred,\n    who knows how many more years!\u201d(78)\n\n\nThis letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire consciousness\nof the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of\nthere being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His\nattention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And\nsecondly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind\nfrom taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact\nrather towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part\nwhatever in the construction of religious systems.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nReligious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has left\nus, in his book called My Confession, a wonderful account of the attack of\nmelancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions. The latter in\nsome respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents two characters\nwhich make it a typical document for our present purpose. First it is a\nwell\u2010marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite for all life\u2019s\nvalues; and second, it shows how the altered and estranged aspect which\nthe world assumed in consequence of this stimulated Tolstoy\u2019s intellect to\na gnawing, carking questioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean\nto quote Tolstoy at some length; but before doing so, I will make a\ngeneral remark on each of these two points.\n\nFirst on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general.\n\nIt is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional\ncomments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings in\ndifferent persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is\nno rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the\nsentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in another\nsphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the\nsubject\u2019s being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all\nthe emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it\n_as it exists_, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable,\nhopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to\nrealize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the\nuniverse would then have importance beyond another; and the whole\ncollection of its things and series of its events would be without\nsignificance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value,\ninterest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus\npure gifts of the spectator\u2019s mind. The passion of love is the most\nfamiliar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it\ndoes not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the\nvalue of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont\nBlanc from a corpse\u2010like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole\nworld to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So\nwith fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are\nthere, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost\nalways upon non\u2010logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited\ninterest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world,\njust so are the passions themselves _gifts_,\u2014gifts to us, from sources\nsometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always non\u2010logical and beyond\nour control. How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the\nromance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old\nearth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts,\neither of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it\nlisteth; and the world\u2019s materials lend their surface passively to all the\ngifts alike, as the stage\u2010setting receives indifferently whatever\nalternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus\nin the gallery.\n\nMeanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the effective\nworld of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and\nemotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert\neither factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we\ncall pathological ensues.\n\nIn Tolstoy\u2019s case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a\ntime wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole\nexpression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion\nor religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence\nof the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of\nnature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In\nmelancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse\ndirection. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its\ncolor is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it\nglares with. \u201cIt is as if I lived in another century,\u201d says one asylum\npatient.\u2014\u201cI see everything through a cloud,\u201d says another, \u201cthings are not\nas they were, and I am changed.\u201d\u2014\u201cI see,\u201d says a third, \u201cI touch, but the\nthings do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of\neverything.\u201d\u2014\u201cPersons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come from a\ndistant world.\u201d\u2014\u201cThere is no longer any past for me; people appear so\nstrange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a\ntheatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can no\nlonger find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but\nleaves no impression.\u201d\u2014\u201cI weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the\nthings I see are not real things.\u201d\u2014Such are expressions that naturally\nrise to the lips of melancholy subjects describing their changed\nstate.(79)\n\nNow there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest\nastonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery\nis concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world\nis so double\u2010faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An\nurgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity,\nand in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter,\nthe sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious\nsolution.\n\nAt about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments\nof perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not \u201chow to live,\u201d\nor what to do. It is obvious that these were moments in which the\nexcitement and interest which our functions naturally bring had ceased.\nLife had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead.\nThings were meaningless whose meaning had always been self\u2010evident. The\nquestions \u201cWhy?\u201d and \u201cWhat next?\u201d began to beset him more and more\nfrequently. At first it seemed as if such questions must be answerable,\nand as if he could easily find the answers if he would take the time; but\nas they ever became more urgent, he perceived that it was like those first\ndiscomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little attention till they\nrun into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took\nfor a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for\nhim, means his death.\n\nThese questions \u201cWhy?\u201d \u201cWherefore?\u201d \u201cWhat for?\u201d found no response.\n\n\n    \u201cI felt,\u201d says Tolstoy, \u201cthat something had broken within me on\n    which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold\n    on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force\n    impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It\n    cannot be said exactly that I _wished_ to kill myself, for the\n    force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more\n    general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old\n    aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction.\n    It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.\n\n    \u201cBehold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope\n    in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every\n    night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting,\n    lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end\n    to myself with my gun.\n\n    \u201cI did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven\n    to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it.\n\n    \u201cAll this took place at a time when so far as all my outer\n    circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a\n    good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large\n    property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I\n    was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever\n    been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without\n    exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I\n    was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a\n    physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of\n    my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my\n    brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.\n\n    \u201cAnd yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my\n    life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the\n    very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid\n    jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live only so\n    long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows\n    sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What\n    is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in\n    it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.\n\n    \u201cThe oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a\n    wild beast is very old.\n\n    \u201cSeeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler\n    jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this\n    well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And\n    the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey\n    of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be\n    devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush\n    which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands\n    weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate;\n    but still he clings, and sees two mice, one white, the other\n    black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing\n    off its roots.\n\n    \u201cThe traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish;\n    but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves\n    of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue\n    and licks them off with rapture.\n\n    \u201cThus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable\n    dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot\n    comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey\n    which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer,\n    and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the\n    branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable\n    dragon and the mice\u2014I cannot turn my gaze away from them.\n\n    \u201cThis is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every\n    one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to\u2010day?\n    Of what I shall do to\u2010morrow? What will be the outcome of all my\n    life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in\n    life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does\n    not undo and destroy?\n\n    \u201cThese questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid\n    child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human\n    being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I\n    experienced, for life to go on.\n\n    \u201c \u2018But perhaps,\u2019 I often said to myself, \u2018there may be something I\n    have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that\n    this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.\u2019 And I\n    sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge\n    acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with\n    no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously\n    and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a man\n    who is lost and seeks to save himself,\u2014and I found nothing. I\n    became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had\n    sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And\n    not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing\n    which was leading me to despair\u2014the meaningless absurdity of\n    life\u2014is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.\u201d\n\n\nTo prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer.\nAnd he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are\naccustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking\nthe honey without seeing the dragon or the mice,\u2014\u201cand from such a way,\u201d he\nsays, \u201cI can learn nothing, after what I now know;\u201d or reflective\nepicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts,\u2014which is only a\nmore deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly suicide; or\nseeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the\nbush of life.\n\nSuicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical\nintellect.\n\n\n    \u201cYet,\u201d says Tolstoy, \u201cwhilst my intellect was working, something\n    else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed\u2014a\n    consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force\n    that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw\n    me out of my situation of despair.... During the whole course of\n    this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end\n    the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all\n    that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and\n    observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining\n    emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst\n    for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement\n    of my ideas,\u2014in fact, it was the direct contrary of that\n    movement,\u2014but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of\n    dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst\n    of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of\n    dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some\n    one.\u201d(80)\n\n\nOf the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which, starting from\nthis idea of God, led to Tolstoy\u2019s recovery, I will say nothing in this\nlecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest\nus now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary\nlife, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man\nas powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a\nmockery.\n\nWhen disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a\n_restitutio ad integrum_. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the\nhappiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any\ndoes come,\u2014and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though\nits form is sometimes very acute,\u2014is not the simple ignorance of ill, but\nsomething vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its\nelements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling\u2010block and terror\nbecause it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is\none of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the\nsufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a\ndeeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nWe find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrined in\nliterature in John Bunyan\u2019s autobiography. Tolstoy\u2019s preoccupations were\nlargely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what\nso troubled him; but poor Bunyan\u2019s troubles were over the condition of his\nown personal self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament,\nsensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and\ninsistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and\nsensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory\nand sometimes favorable, would come in a half\u2010hallucinatory form as if\nthey were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a\nshuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self\u2010contempt and\ndespair.\n\n\n    \u201cNay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse; now I am farther from\n    conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burned at\n    the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas,\n    I could neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any\n    of his things. Sometimes I would tell my condition to the people\n    of God, which, when they heard, they would pity me, and would tell\n    of the Promises. But they had as good have told me that I must\n    reach the Sun with my finger as have bidden me receive or rely\n    upon the Promise. [Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, I\n    never was more tender than now; I durst not take a pin or stick,\n    though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and\n    would smart at every touch; I could not tell how to speak my\n    words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I\n    then go, in all I did or said! I found myself as on a miry bog\n    that shook if I did but stir; and was as there left both by God\n    and Christ, and the spirit, and all good things.\n\n    \u201cBut my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my\n    affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes\n    than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God\u2019s eyes too. Sin and\n    corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as\n    water would bubble out of a fountain. I could have changed heart\n    with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me\n    for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am\n    forsaken of God; and thus I continued a long while, even for some\n    years together.\n\n    \u201cAnd now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts,\n    birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a\n    sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they\n    were not to go to hell\u2010fire after death. I could therefore have\n    rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed\n    the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been\n    in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul\n    to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was\n    like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken\n    to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I\n    could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My\n    heart was at times exceedingly hard. If I would have given a\n    thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one; no, nor\n    sometimes scarce desire to shed one.\n\n    \u201cI was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so\n    know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid\n    to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself! Anything\n    but a man! and in any condition but my own.\u201d(81)\n\n\nPoor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we must also\npostpone that part of his story to another hour. In a later lecture I will\nalso give the end of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist\nwho worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly\ndescribes the high\u2010water mark of the religious melancholy which formed its\nbeginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan\u2019s.\n\n\n    \u201cEverything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed\n    accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales\n    seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of\n    the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my\n    ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that every\n    one I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to\n    acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea sometimes\n    it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as the most\n    guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of the vanity\n    and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole\n    world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system\n    of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought would\n    be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And\n    when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before\n    morning. I would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing\n    with all my heart I was in their place, that I might have no soul\n    to lose; and when I have seen birds flying over my head, have\n    often thought within myself, Oh, that I could fly away from my\n    danger and distress! Oh, how happy should I be, if I were in their\n    place!\u201d(82)\n\n\nEnvy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this\ntype of sadness.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear.\nHere is an excellent example, for permission to print which I have to\nthank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the subject was\nevidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes, his\ncase has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.\n\n\n    \u201cWhilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general\n    depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into\n    a dressing\u2010room in the twilight to procure some article that was\n    there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just\n    as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own\n    existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an\n    epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black\u2010haired\n    youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all\n    day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall,\n    with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray\n    undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing\n    his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian\n    cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and\n    looking absolutely non\u2010human. This image and my fear entered into\n    a species of combination with each other. _That shape am I_, I\n    felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against\n    that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck\n    for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of\n    my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if\n    something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I\n    became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was\n    changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a\n    horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the\n    insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never\n    felt since.(83) It was like a revelation; and although the\n    immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me\n    sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It\n    gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the\n    dark alone.\n\n    \u201cIn general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how\n    other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so\n    unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life.\n    My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a\n    perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may\n    well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of\n    my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience\n    of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.\u201d\n\n\nOn asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant by these\nlast words, the answer he wrote was this:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had\n    not clung to scripture\u2010texts like \u2018The eternal God is my refuge,\u2019\n    etc., \u2018Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy\u2010laden,\u2019 etc.,\n    \u2018I am the resurrection and the life,\u2019 etc., I think I should have\n    grown really insane.\u201d(84)\n\n\nThere is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at are enough.\nOne of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense of\nsin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe;\u2014and in one\nor other of these three ways it always is that man\u2019s original optimism and\nself\u2010satisfaction get leveled with the dust.\n\nIn none of these cases was there any intellectual insanity or delusion\nabout matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the chapter of really\ninsane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a\nworse story still\u2014desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe\ncoagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror,\nsurrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual\nperception of evil, but the grisly blood\u2010freezing heart\u2010palsying sensation\nof it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live\nfor a moment in its presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual\nrefined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a\nneed of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem:\nHelp! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says\nthings that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as\nthese. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint,\nif it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser\nreligions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and\nsupernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some\nconstitutions need them too much.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nArrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally\narise between the healthy\u2010minded way of viewing life and the way that\ntakes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter\nway, the morbid\u2010minded way, as we might call it, healthy\u2010mindedness pure\nand simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy\u2010minded way,\non the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased.\nWith their grubbing in rat\u2010holes instead of living in the light; with\ntheir manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind\nof misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath\nand cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and\nburning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt\nthat, however it may have been in the past, the healthy\u2010minded would at\npresent show themselves the less indulgent party of the two.\n\nIn our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are\nwe to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are bound to say that\nmorbid\u2010mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its\nsurvey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one\u2019s attention\nfrom evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as\nit will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more\ngenerally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of\nits successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a\nreligious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy\ncomes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one\u2019s self, there\nis no doubt that healthy\u2010mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical\ndoctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account\nfor are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best\nkey to life\u2019s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to\nthe deepest levels of truth.\n\nThe normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which\ninsane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its\ninnings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic\u2019s visions of horror are all\ndrawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the\nshambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of\nhelpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there\nyourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard\nfor our imagination\u2014they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet\nthere is no tooth in any one of those museum\u2010skulls that did not daily\nthrough long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in\ndespair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to\ntheir victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to\u2010\nday. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays\nwith the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws.\nCrocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life\nas real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every\nday that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts\nclutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac\nfeels is the literally right reaction on the situation.(85)\n\nIt may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute\ntotality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to\nhigher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so\nextreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect\nof such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical\nresource. This question must confront us on a later day. But\nprovisionally, and as a mere matter of program and method, since the evil\nfacts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic\npresumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that\nsystematic healthy\u2010mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow,\npain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally\nless complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in\ntheir scope.\n\nThe completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the\npessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and\nChristianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially\nreligions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can\nbe born into the real life. In my next lecture, I will try to discuss some\nof the psychological conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now\nonward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which\nwe have recently been dwelling on.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURE VIII. THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION.\n\n\nThe last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil as a\npervasive element of the world we live in. At the close of it we were\nbrought into full view of the contrast between the two ways of looking at\nlife which are characteristic respectively of what we called the healthy\u2010\nminded, who need to be born only once, and of the sick souls, who must be\ntwice\u2010born in order to be happy. The result is two different conceptions\nof the universe of our experience. In the religion of the once\u2010born the\nworld is a sort of rectilinear or one\u2010storied affair, whose accounts are\nkept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally\nthey appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and\nminuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist\nin living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice\u2010\nborn, on the other hand, the world is a double\u2010storied mystery. Peace\ncannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of\nminuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and\ntransient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is\nby death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can\nnever be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our\nreal good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step\nin the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the\nspiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the\nother.\n\nIn their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two\ntypes are violently contrasted; though here as in most other current\nclassifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and\nthe concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties\nand mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize the difference: you\nunderstand, for example, the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere\nsky\u2010blue healthy\u2010minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion\nof the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the\nMethodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the\ninversion of natural appearances the essence of God\u2019s truth.(86)\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe psychological basis of the twice\u2010born character seems to be a certain\ndiscordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an\nincompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.\n\n\n    \u201cHomo duplex, homo duplex!\u201d writes Alphonse Daudet. \u201cThe first\n    time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my\n    brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, \u2018He is\n    dead, he is dead!\u2019 While my first self wept, my second self\n    thought, \u2018How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at\n    the theatre.\u2019 I was then fourteen years old.\n\n    \u201cThis horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection.\n    Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on\n    foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me\n    that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or\n    put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!\u201d(87)\n\n\nRecent works on the psychology of character have had much to say upon this\npoint.(88) Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is\nharmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are\nconsistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the\nguidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their\nlives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted;\nand are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result\nin a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the\nconsequences may be inconvenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent\nkinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant\u2019s\nautobiography.\n\n\n    \u201cI have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength,\n    and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to\n    suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoe\u2010lace was untied would\n    feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unlucky string;\n    as a girl I would shrink away from strangers and think myself\n    unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude to any\n    one who noticed me kindly; as the young mistress of a house I was\n    afraid of my servants, and would let careless work pass rather\n    than bear the pain of reproving the ill\u2010doer; when I have been\n    lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the platform, I\n    have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel rather\n    than to ring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the\n    platform in defense of any cause I cared for, I shrink from\n    quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am a coward at heart in\n    private while a good fighter in public. How often have I passed\n    unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up my courage to find fault\n    with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and\n    how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty\n    platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass\n    for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to\n    make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on\n    the platform, opposition makes me speak my best.\u201d(89)\n\n\nThis amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but a\nstronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject\u2019s life.\nThere are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags,\nas now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars\nwith their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt\ntheir most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of\nrepentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.\n\nHeterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of\ninheritance\u2014the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic\nancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.(90) This\nexplanation may pass for what it is worth\u2014it certainly needs\ncorroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be,\nwe find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament, of\nwhich I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament make\nthe inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently,\nindeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to\na man at all. A \u201cd\u00e9g\u00e9n\u00e9r\u00e9 sup\u00e9rieur\u201d is simply a man of sensibility in\nmany directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in keeping his\nspiritual house in order and running his furrow straight, because his\nfeelings and impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the\nhaunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid\nscruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperament\nwhen it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of\nheterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, \u201cSell\nChrist for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!\u201d which would run\nthrough his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath\nwith retorting, \u201cI will not, I will not,\u201d he impulsively said, \u201cLet him go\nif he will,\u201d and this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a\nyear. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions,\nascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connects\nitself with the life of the subconscious self, so\u2010called, of which we must\nere\u2010long speak more directly.\n\nNow in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in\nproportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified\ntemptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly\npsychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in\nthe straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the\nlower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a\ncomparative chaos within us\u2014they must end by forming a stable system of\nfunctions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the\nperiod of order\u2010making and struggle. If the individual be of tender\nconscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form\nof moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and\nof standing in false relations to the author of one\u2019s being and appointer\nof one\u2019s spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and \u201cconviction\nof sin\u201d that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant\nChristianity. The man\u2019s interior is a battle\u2010ground for what he feels to\nbe two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor Hugo\nmakes his Mahomet say:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cJe suis le champ vil des sublimes combats:\n    Tant\u00f4t l\u2019homme d\u2019en haut, et tant\u00f4t l\u2019homme d\u2019en bas;\n    Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne,\n    Comme dans le d\u00e9sert le sable et la citerne.\u201d\n\n\nWrong living, impotent aspirations; \u201cWhat I would, that do I not; but what\nI hate, that do I,\u201d as Saint Paul says; self\u2010loathing, self\u2010despair; an\nunintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the\nheir.\n\nLet me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with\nmelancholy in the form of self\u2010condemnation and sense of sin. Saint\nAugustine\u2019s case is a classic example. You all remember his half\u2010pagan,\nhalf\u2010Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan,\nhis adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his restless\nsearch for truth and purity of life; and finally how, distracted by the\nstruggle between the two souls in his breast, and ashamed of his own\nweakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown\noff the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and\nthe higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, \u201c_Sume, lege_\u201d (take\nand read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, \u201cnot in\nchambering and wantonness,\u201d etc., which seemed directly sent to his\naddress, and laid the inner storm to rest forever.(91) Augustine\u2019s\npsychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a\ndivided self which has never been surpassed.\n\n\n    \u201cThe new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough to\n    overcome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So\n    these two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other\n    spiritual, contended with each other and disturbed my soul. I\n    understood by my own experience what I had read, \u2018flesh lusteth\n    against spirit, and spirit against flesh.\u2019 It was myself indeed in\n    both the wills, yet more myself in that which I approved in myself\n    than in that which I disapproved in myself. Yet it was through\n    myself that habit had attained so fierce a mastery over me,\n    because I had willingly come whither I willed not. Still bound to\n    earth, I refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as much afraid to\n    be freed from all bonds, as I ought to have feared being trammeled\n    by them.\n\n    \u201cThus the thoughts by which I meditated upon thee were like the\n    efforts of one who would awake, but being overpowered with\n    sleepiness is soon asleep again. Often does a man when heavy\n    sleepiness is on his limbs defer to shake it off, and though not\n    approving it, encourage it; even so I was sure it was better to\n    surrender to thy love than to yield to my own lusts, yet, though\n    the former course convinced me, the latter pleased and held me\n    bound. There was naught in me to answer thy call, \u2018Awake, thou\n    sleeper,\u2019 but only drawling, drowsy words, \u2018Presently; yes,\n    presently; wait a little while.\u2019 But the \u2018presently\u2019 had no\n    \u2018present,\u2019 and the \u2018little while\u2019 grew long.... For I was afraid\n    thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once of my disease\n    of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than to see\n    extinguished. With what lashes of words did I not scourge my own\n    soul. Yet it shrank back; it refused, though it had no excuse to\n    offer.... I said within myself: \u2018Come, let it be done now,\u2019 and as\n    I said it, I was on the point of the resolve. I all but did it,\n    yet I did not do it. And I made another effort, and almost\n    succeeded, yet I did not reach it, and did not grasp it,\n    hesitating to die to death, and live to life; and the evil to\n    which I was so wonted held me more than the better life I had not\n    tried.\u201d(92)\n\n\nThere could be no more perfect description of the divided will, when the\nhigher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive\nintensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists),\nthat enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously\ninto life and quell the lower tendencies forever. In a later lecture we\nshall have much to say about this higher excitability.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nI find another good description of the divided will in the autobiography\nof Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist, of whose melancholy I read a\nbrief account in my last lecture. The poor youth\u2019s sins were, as you will\nsee, of the most harmless order, yet they interfered with what proved to\nbe his truest vocation, so they gave him great distress.\n\n\n    \u201cI was now very moral in my life, but found no rest of conscience.\n    I now began to be esteemed in young company, who knew nothing of\n    my mind all this while, and their esteem began to be a snare to my\n    soul, for I soon began to be fond of carnal mirth, though I still\n    flattered myself that if I did not get drunk, nor curse, nor\n    swear, there would be no sin in frolicking and carnal mirth, and I\n    thought God would indulge young people with some (what I called\n    simple or civil) recreation. I still kept a round of duties, and\n    would not suffer myself to run into any open vices, and so got\n    along very well in time of health and prosperity, but when I was\n    distressed or threatened by sickness, death, or heavy storms of\n    thunder, my religion would not do, and I found there was something\n    wanting, and would begin to repent my going so much to frolics,\n    but when the distress was over, the devil and my own wicked heart,\n    with the solicitations of my associates, and my fondness for young\n    company, were such strong allurements, I would again give way, and\n    thus I got to be very wild and rude, at the same time kept up my\n    rounds of secret prayer and reading; but God, not willing I should\n    destroy myself, still followed me with his calls, and moved with\n    such power upon my conscience, that I could not satisfy myself\n    with my diversions, and in the midst of my mirth sometimes would\n    have such a sense of my lost and undone condition, that I would\n    wish myself from the company, and after it was over, when I went\n    home, would make many promises that I would attend no more on\n    these frolics, and would beg forgiveness for hours and hours; but\n    when I came to have the temptation again, I would give way: no\n    sooner would I hear the music and drink a glass of wine, but I\n    would find my mind elevated and soon proceed to any sort of\n    merriment or diversion, that I thought was not debauched or openly\n    vicious; but when I returned from my carnal mirth I felt as guilty\n    as ever, and could sometimes not close my eyes for some hours\n    after I had gone to my bed. I was one of the most unhappy\n    creatures on earth.\n\n    \u201cSometimes I would leave the company (often speaking to the\n    fiddler to cease from playing, as if I was tired), and go out and\n    walk about crying and praying, as if my very heart would break,\n    and beseeching God that he would not cut me off, nor give me up to\n    hardness of heart. Oh, what unhappy hours and nights I thus wore\n    away! When I met sometimes with merry companions, and my heart was\n    ready to sink, I would labor to put on as cheerful a countenance\n    as possible, that they might not distrust anything, and sometimes\n    would begin some discourse with young men or young women on\n    purpose, or propose a merry song, lest the distress of my soul\n    would be discovered, or mistrusted, when at the same time I would\n    then rather have been in a wilderness in exile, than with them or\n    any of their pleasures or enjoyments. Thus for many months when I\n    was in company, I would act the hypocrite and feign a merry heart,\n    but at the same time would endeavor as much as I could to shun\n    their company, oh wretched and unhappy mortal that I was!\n    Everything I did, and wherever I went, I was still in a storm, and\n    yet I continued to be the chief contriver and ringleader of the\n    frolics for many months after; though it was a toil and torment to\n    attend them; but the devil and my own wicked heart drove me about\n    like a slave, telling me that I must do this and do that, and bear\n    this and bear that, and turn here and turn there, to keep my\n    credit up, and retain the esteem of my associates: and all this\n    while I continued as strict as possible in my duties, and left no\n    stone unturned to pacify my conscience, watching even against my\n    thoughts, and praying continually wherever I went: for I did not\n    think there was any sin in my conduct, when I was among carnal\n    company, because I did not take any satisfaction there, but only\n    followed it, I thought, for sufficient reasons.\n\n    \u201cBut still, all that I did or could do, conscience would roar\n    night and day.\u201d\n\n\nSaint Augustine and Alline both emerged into the smooth waters of inner\nunity and peace, and I shall next ask you to consider more closely some of\nthe peculiarities of the process of unification, when it occurs. It may\ncome gradually, or it may occur abruptly; it may come through altered\nfeelings, or through altered powers of action; or it may come through new\nintellectual insights, or through experiences which we shall later have to\ndesignate as \u201cmystical.\u201d However it come, it brings a characteristic sort\nof relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the\nreligious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in\nwhich men gain that gift. Easily, permanently, and successfully, it often\ntransforms the most intolerable misery into the profoundest and most\nenduring happiness.\n\nBut to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and\nthe process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord\nis a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of\nmental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form. In\njudging of the religious types of regeneration which we are about to\nstudy, it is important to recognize that they are only one species of a\ngenus that contains other types as well. For example, the new birth may be\naway from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity\ninto freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the\nindividual\u2019s life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition,\ncupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion. In all these instances we have\nprecisely the same psychological form of event,\u2014a firmness, stability, and\nequilibrium succeeding a period of storm and stress and inconsistency. In\nthese non\u2010religious cases the new man may also be born either gradually or\nsuddenly.\n\nThe French philosopher Jouffroy has left an eloquent memorial of his own\n\u201ccounter\u2010conversion,\u201d as the transition from orthodoxy to infidelity has\nbeen well styled by Mr. Starbuck. Jouffroy\u2019s doubts had long harassed him;\nbut he dates his final crisis from a certain night when his disbelief grew\nfixed and stable, and where the immediate result was sadness at the\nillusions he had lost.\n\n\n    \u201cI shall never forget that night of December,\u201d writes Jouffroy,\n    \u201cin which the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was\n    torn. I hear again my steps in that narrow naked chamber where\n    long after the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking\n    up and down. I see again that moon, half\u2010veiled by clouds, which\n    now and again illuminated the frigid window\u2010panes. The hours of\n    the night flowed on and I did not note their passage. Anxiously I\n    followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer they descended\n    towards the foundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one by\n    one all the illusions which until then had screened its windings\n    from my view, made them every moment more clearly visible.\n\n    \u201cVainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor\n    clings to the fragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at the\n    unknown void in which I was about to float, I turned with them\n    towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and\n    sacred to me: the inflexible current of my thought was too\n    strong,\u2014parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me to let go\n    of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more\n    severe as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end\n    was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was\n    left that stood erect.\n\n    \u201cThis moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning I threw\n    myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so\n    smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another\n    life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live\n    alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiled me thither,\n    and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this\n    discovery were the saddest of my life.\u201d(93)\n\n\nIn John Foster\u2019s Essay on Decision of Character, there is an account of a\ncase of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to\nquote:\u2014\n\n\n    A young man, it appears, \u201cwasted, in two or three years, a large\n    patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless\n    associates who called themselves his friends, and who, when his\n    last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or\n    contempt. Reduced to absolute want, he one day went out of the\n    house with an intention to put an end to his life; but wandering\n    awhile almost unconsciously, he came to the brow of an eminence\n    which overlooked what were lately his estates. Here he sat down,\n    and remained fixed in thought a number of hours, at the end of\n    which he sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion.\n    He had formed his resolution, which was, that all these estates\n    should be his again; he had formed his plan, too, which he\n    instantly began to execute. He walked hastily forward, determined\n    to seize the first opportunity, of however humble a kind, to gain\n    any money, though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and\n    resolved absolutely not to spend, if he could help it, a farthing\n    of whatever he might obtain. The first thing that drew his\n    attention was a heap of coals shot out of carts on the pavement\n    before a house. He offered himself to shovel or wheel them into\n    the place where they were to be laid, and was employed. He\n    received a few pence for the labor; and then, in pursuance of the\n    saving part of his plan, requested some small gratuity of meat and\n    drink, which was given him. He then looked out for the next thing\n    that might chance; and went, with indefatigable industry, through\n    a succession of servile employments in different places, of longer\n    and shorter duration, still scrupulous in avoiding, as far as\n    possible, the expense of a penny. He promptly seized every\n    opportunity which could advance his design, without regarding the\n    meanness of occupation or appearance. By this method he had\n    gained, after a considerable time, money enough to purchase in\n    order to sell again a few cattle, of which he had taken pains to\n    understand the value. He speedily but cautiously turned his first\n    gains into second advantages; retained without a single deviation\n    his extreme parsimony; and thus advanced by degrees into larger\n    transactions and incipient wealth. I did not hear, or have\n    forgotten, the continued course of his life, but the final result\n    was, that he more than recovered his lost possessions, and died an\n    inveterate miser, worth \u00a360,000.\u201d(94)\n\n\nLet me turn now to the kind of case, the religious case, namely, that\nimmediately concerns us. Here is one of the simplest possible type, an\naccount of the conversion to the systematic religion of healthy\u2010mindedness\nof a man who must already have been naturally of the healthy\u2010minded type.\nIt shows how, when the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall.\n\nMr. Horace Fletcher, in his little book called Menticulture, relates that\na friend with whom he was talking of the self\u2010control attained by the\nJapanese through their practice of the Buddhist discipline said:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201c \u2018You must first get rid of anger and worry.\u2019 \u2018But,\u2019 said I, \u2018is\n    that possible?\u2019 \u2018Yes,\u2019 replied he; \u2018it is possible to the\n    Japanese, and ought to be possible to us.\u2019\n\n    \u201cOn my way back I could think of nothing else but the words \u2018get\n    rid, get rid\u2019; and the idea must have continued to possess me\n    during my sleeping hours, for the first consciousness in the\n    morning brought back the same thought, with the revelation of a\n    discovery, which framed itself into the reasoning, \u2018If it is\n    possible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it necessary to\n    have them at all?\u2019 I felt the strength of the argument, and at\n    once accepted the reasoning. The baby had discovered that it could\n    walk. It would scorn to creep any longer.\n\n    \u201cFrom the instant I realized that these cancer spots of worry and\n    anger were removable, they left me. With the discovery of their\n    weakness they were exorcised. From that time life has had an\n    entirely different aspect.\n\n    \u201cAlthough from that moment the possibility and desirability of\n    freedom from the depressing passions has been a reality to me, it\n    took me some months to feel absolute security in my new position;\n    but, as the usual occasions for worry and anger have presented\n    themselves over and over again, and I have been unable to feel\n    them in the slightest degree, I no longer dread or guard against\n    them, and I am amazed at my increased energy and vigor of mind; at\n    my strength to meet situations of all kinds, and at my disposition\n    to love and appreciate everything.\n\n    \u201cI have had occasion to travel more than ten thousand miles by\n    rail since that morning. The same Pullman porter, conductor,\n    hotel\u2010waiter, peddler, book\u2010agent, cabman, and others who were\n    formerly a source of annoyance and irritation have been met, but I\n    am not conscious of a single incivility. All at once the whole\n    world has turned good to me. I have become, as it were, sensitive\n    only to the rays of good.\n\n    \u201cI could recount many experiences which prove a brand\u2010new\n    condition of mind, but one will be sufficient. Without the\n    slightest feeling of annoyance or impatience, I have seen a train\n    that I had planned to take with a good deal of interested and\n    pleasurable anticipation move out of the station without me,\n    because my baggage did not arrive. The porter from the hotel came\n    running and panting into the station just as the train pulled out\n    of sight. When he saw me, he looked as if he feared a scolding,\n    and began to tell of being blocked in a crowded street and unable\n    to get out. When he had finished, I said to him: \u2018It doesn\u2019t\n    matter at all, you couldn\u2019t help it, so we will try again to\u2010\n    morrow. Here is your fee, I am sorry you had all this trouble in\n    earning it.\u2019 The look of surprise that came over his face was so\n    filled with pleasure that I was repaid on the spot for the delay\n    in my departure. Next day he would not accept a cent for the\n    service, and he and I are friends for life.\n\n    \u201cDuring the first weeks of my experience I was on guard only\n    against worry and anger; but, in the mean time, having noticed the\n    absence of the other depressing and dwarfing passions, I began to\n    trace a relationship, until I was convinced that they are all\n    growths from the two roots I have specified. I have felt the\n    freedom now for so long a time that I am sure of my relation\n    toward it; and I could no more harbor any of the thieving and\n    depressing influences that once I nursed as a heritage of humanity\n    than a fop would voluntarily wallow in a filthy gutter.\n\n    \u201cThere is no doubt in my mind that pure Christianity and pure\n    Buddhism, and the Mental Sciences and all Religions, fundamentally\n    teach what has been a discovery to me; but none of them have\n    presented it in the light of a simple and easy process of\n    elimination. At one time I wondered if the elimination would not\n    yield to indifference and sloth. In my experience, the contrary is\n    the result. I feel such an increased desire to do something useful\n    that it seems as if I were a boy again and the energy for play had\n    returned. I could fight as readily as (and better than) ever, if\n    there were occasion for it. It does not make one a coward. It\n    can\u2019t, since fear is one of the things eliminated. I notice the\n    absence of timidity in the presence of any audience. When a boy, I\n    was standing under a tree which was struck by lightning, and\n    received a shock from the effects of which I never knew exemption\n    until I had dissolved partnership with worry. Since then,\n    lightning and thunder have been encountered under conditions which\n    would formerly have caused great depression and discomfort,\n    without [my] experiencing a trace of either. Surprise is also\n    greatly modified, and one is less liable to become startled by\n    unexpected sights or noises.\n\n    \u201cAs far as I am individually concerned, I am not bothering myself\n    at present as to what the results of this emancipated condition\n    may be. I have no doubt that the perfect health aimed at by\n    Christian Science may be one of the possibilities, for I note a\n    marked improvement in the way my stomach does its duty in\n    assimilating the food I give it to handle, and I am sure it works\n    better to the sound of a song than under the friction of a frown.\n    Neither am I wasting any of this precious time formulating an idea\n    of a future existence or a future Heaven. The Heaven that I have\n    within myself is as attractive as any that has been promised or\n    that I can imagine; and I am willing to let the growth lead where\n    it will, as long as the anger and their brood have no part in\n    misguiding it.\u201d(95)\n\n\nThe older medicine used to speak of two ways, _lysis_ and _crisis_, one\ngradual, the other abrupt, in which one might recover from a bodily\ndisease. In the spiritual realm there are also two ways, one gradual, the\nother sudden, in which inner unification may occur. Tolstoy and Bunyan may\nagain serve us as examples, examples, as it happens, of the gradual way,\nthough it must be confessed at the outset that it is hard to follow these\nwindings of the hearts of others, and one feels that their words do not\nreveal their total secret.\n\nHowe\u2019er this be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending questioning, seemed to\ncome to one insight after another. First he perceived that his conviction\nthat life was meaningless took only this finite life into account. He was\nlooking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole\nresult could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics\nwhich end with 0=0. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by\nitself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the\ninfinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and life grows\npossible again.\n\n\n    \u201cSince mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has\n    been the faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the\n    sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy\n    himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we\n    live. If Man did not believe that he must live for something, he\n    would not live at all. The idea of an infinite God, of the\n    divinity of the soul, of the union of men\u2019s actions with God\u2014these\n    are ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human\n    thought. They are ideas without which there would be no life,\n    without which I myself,\u201d said Tolstoy, \u201cwould not exist. I began\n    to see that I had no right to rely on my individual reasoning and\n    neglect these answers given by faith, for they are the only\n    answers to the question.\u201d\n\n\nYet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in\ngrossest superstition? It is impossible,\u2014but yet their life! their life!\nIt is normal. It is happy! It is an answer to the question!\n\nLittle by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction\u2014he says it took\nhim two years to arrive there\u2014that his trouble had not been with life in\ngeneral, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the\nupper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personally\nalways led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality,\nand personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work\nfor animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to\nbe simple, to believe in God, therein lay happiness again.\n\n\n    \u201cI remember,\u201d he says, \u201cone day in early spring, I was alone in\n    the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened,\n    and my thought went back to what for these three years it always\n    was busy with\u2014the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how\n    did I ever come by the idea?\n\n    \u201cAnd again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations\n    towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning....\n    Why do I look farther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he,\n    without whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and to live are\n    one and the same thing. God is what life is. Well, then! live,\n    seek God, and there will be no life without him....\n\n    \u201cAfter this, things cleared up within me and about me better than\n    ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from\n    suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But\n    as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled\n    within me, and I had reached my moral death\u2010bed, just as gradually\n    and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was\n    strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It\n    was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole\n    purpose of my life was to be _better_. I gave up the life of the\n    conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on\n    life, which its superfluities simply keep us from\n    comprehending,\u201d\u2014and Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the\n    peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so,\n    ever since.(96)\n\n\nAs I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental\nvitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was\nlogically called for by the clash between his inner character and his\nouter activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of\nthose primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities,\nthe cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization\nare profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities lie with\nmore natural and animal things. His crisis was the getting of his soul in\norder, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from\nfalsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of\nheterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level.\nAnd though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps,\nof the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel\nas if it might be better for us if we could.\n\nBunyan\u2019s recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together he\nwas alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but\nat last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of\nChrist.\n\n\n    \u201cMy peace would be in and out twenty times a day; comfort now and\n    trouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as\n    full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold.\u201d When a good text\n    comes home to him, \u201cThis,\u201d he writes, \u201cgave me good encouragement\n    for the space of two or three hours\u201d; or \u201cThis was a good day to\n    me, I hope I shall not forget it\u201d; or \u201cThe glory of these words\n    was then so weighty on me that I was ready to swoon as I sat; yet\n    not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace\u201d; or\n    \u201cThis made a strange seizure on my spirit; it brought light with\n    it, and commanded a silence in my heart of all those tumultuous\n    thoughts that before did use, like masterless hell\u2010hounds, to roar\n    and bellow and make a hideous noise within me. It showed me that\n    Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken and cast off my Soul.\u201d\n\n    Such periods accumulate until he can write: \u201cAnd now remained only\n    the hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond\n    me, only some drops would still remain, that now and then would\n    fall upon me\u201d;\u2014and at last: \u201cNow did my chains fall off my legs\n    indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations\n    also fled away; so that from that time, those dreadful Scriptures\n    of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing, for\n    the grace and love of God.... Now could I see myself in Heaven and\n    Earth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my\n    Righteousness and Life, though on Earth by my body or person....\n    Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night; I could scarce\n    lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ.\u201d\n\n\nBunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic\nconstitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his non\u2010\nconformity, his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker and\ndoer of good, and the immortal Allegory which he wrote has brought the\nvery spirit of religious patience home to English hearts.\n\nBut neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy\u2010\nminded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget\nits taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep. Each\nof them realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness; yet\nthe sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith\nby which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that as a matter\nof fact they could and did find _something_ welling up in the inner\nreaches of their consciousness, by which such extreme sadness could be\novercome. Tolstoy does well to talk of it as _that by which men live_; for\nthat is exactly what it is, a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force\nthat re\u2010infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of\nthe evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable. For\nTolstoy\u2019s perceptions of evil appear within their sphere to have remained\nunmodified. His later works show him implacable to the whole system of\nofficial values: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of\nempire; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the\nprofessions; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and\nevery other pompous crime and lying institution of this world. To all\npatience with such things his experience has been for him a permanent\nministry of death.\n\nBunyan also leaves this world to the enemy.\n\n\n    \u201cI must first pass a sentence of death,\u201d he says, \u201cupon everything\n    that can properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon\n    myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyments, and all,\n    as dead to me, and myself as dead to them; to trust in God through\n    Christ, as touching the world to come; and as touching this world,\n    to count the grave my house, to make my bed in darkness, and to\n    say to corruption, Thou art my father, and to the worm, Thou art\n    my mother and sister.... The parting with my wife and my poor\n    children hath often been to me as the pulling of my flesh from my\n    bones, especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart than\n    all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou\n    like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten,\n    must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand\n    calamities, though I cannot now endure that the wind should blow\n    upon thee. But yet I must venture you all with God, though it\n    goeth to the quick to leave you.\u201d(97)\n\n\nThe \u201chue of resolution\u201d is there, but the full flood of ecstatic\nliberation seems never to have poured over poor John Bunyan\u2019s soul.\n\nThese examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general way with the\nphenomenon technically called \u201cConversion.\u201d In the next lecture I shall\ninvite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some detail.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURE IX. CONVERSION.\n\n\nTo be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience\nreligion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the\nprocess, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and\nconsciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously\nright superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious\nrealities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms,\nwhether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to\nbring such a moral change about.\n\nBefore entering upon a minuter study of the process, let me enliven our\nunderstanding of the definition by a concrete example. I choose the quaint\ncase of an unlettered man, Stephen H. Bradley, whose experience is related\nin a scarce American pamphlet.(98)\n\nI select this case because it shows how in these inner alterations one may\nfind one unsuspected depth below another, as if the possibilities of\ncharacter lay disposed in a series of layers or shells, of whose existence\nwe have no premonitory knowledge.\n\nBradley thought that he had been already fully converted at the age of\nfourteen.\n\n\n    \u201cI thought I saw the Saviour, by faith, in human shape, for about\n    one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to\n    me, Come. The next day I rejoiced with trembling; soon after, my\n    happiness was so great that I said that I wanted to die; this\n    world had no place in my affections, as I knew of, and every day\n    appeared as solemn to me as the Sabbath. I had an ardent desire\n    that all mankind might feel as I did; I wanted to have them all\n    love God supremely. Previous to this time I was very selfish and\n    self\u2010righteous; but now I desired the welfare of all mankind, and\n    could with a feeling heart forgive my worst enemies, and I felt as\n    if I should be willing to bear the scoffs and sneers of any\n    person, and suffer anything for His sake, if I could be the means\n    in the hands of God, of the conversion of one soul.\u201d\n\n    Nine years later, in 1829, Mr. Bradley heard of a revival of\n    religion that had begun in his neighborhood. \u201cMany of the young\n    converts,\u201d he says, \u201cwould come to me when in meeting and ask me\n    if I had religion, and my reply generally was, I hope I have. This\n    did not appear to satisfy them; they said they _knew they_ had it.\n    I requested them to pray for me, thinking with myself, that if I\n    had not got religion now, after so long a time professing to be a\n    Christian, that it was time I had, and hoped their prayers would\n    be answered in my behalf.\n\n    \u201cOne Sabbath, I went to hear the Methodist at the Academy. He\n    spoke of the ushering in of the day of general judgment; and he\n    set it forth in such a solemn and terrible manner as I never heard\n    before. The scene of that day appeared to be taking place, and so\n    awakened were all the powers of my mind that, like Felix, I\n    trembled involuntarily on the bench where I was sitting, though I\n    felt nothing at heart. The next day evening I went to hear him\n    again. He took his text from Revelation: \u2018And I saw the dead,\n    small and great, stand before God.\u2019 And he represented the terrors\n    of that day in such a manner that it appeared as if it would melt\n    the heart of stone. When he finished his discourse, an old\n    gentleman turned to me and said, \u2018This is what I call preaching.\u2019\n    I thought the same; but my feelings were still unmoved by what he\n    said, and I did not enjoy religion, but I believe he did.\n\n    \u201cI will now relate my experience of the power of the Holy Spirit\n    which took place on the same night. Had any person told me\n    previous to this that I could have experienced the power of the\n    Holy Spirit in the manner which I did, I could not have believed\n    it, and should have thought the person deluded that told me so. I\n    went directly home after the meeting, and when I got home I\n    wondered what made me feel so stupid. I retired to rest soon after\n    I got home, and felt indifferent to the things of religion until I\n    began to be exercised by the Holy Spirit, which began in about\n    five minutes after, in the following manner:\u2014\n\n    \u201cAt first, I began to feel my heart beat very quick all on a\n    sudden, which made me at first think that perhaps something is\n    going to ail me, though I was not alarmed, for I felt no pain. My\n    heart increased in its beating, which soon convinced me that it\n    was the Holy Spirit from the effect it had on me. I began to feel\n    exceedingly happy and humble, and such a sense of unworthiness as\n    I never felt before. I could not very well help speaking out,\n    which I did, and said, Lord, I do not deserve this happiness, or\n    words to that effect, while there was a stream (resembling air in\n    feeling) came into my mouth and heart in a more sensible manner\n    than that of drinking anything, which continued, as near as I\n    could judge, five minutes or more, which appeared to be the cause\n    of such a palpitation of my heart. It took complete possession of\n    my soul, and I am certain that I desired the Lord, while in the\n    midst of it, not to give me any more happiness, for it seemed as\n    if I could not contain what I had got. My heart seemed as if it\n    would burst, but it did not stop until I felt as if I was\n    unutterably full of the love and grace of God. In the mean time\n    while thus exercised, a thought arose in my mind, what can it\n    mean? and all at once, as if to answer it, my memory became\n    exceedingly clear, and it appeared to me just as if the New\n    Testament was placed open before me, eighth chapter of Romans, and\n    as light as if some candle lighted was held for me to read the\n    26th and 27th verses of that chapter, and I read these words: \u2018The\n    Spirit helpeth our infirmities with groanings which cannot be\n    uttered.\u2019 And all the time that my heart was a\u2010beating, it made me\n    groan like a person in distress, which was not very easy to stop,\n    though I was in no pain at all, and my brother being in bed in\n    another room came and opened the door, and asked me if I had got\n    the toothache. I told him no, and that he might get to sleep. I\n    tried to stop. I felt unwilling to go to sleep myself, I was so\n    happy, fearing I should lose it\u2014thinking within myself\n\n    \u2018My willing soul would stay\n      In such a frame as this.\u2019\n\n    And while I lay reflecting, after my heart stopped beating,\n    feeling as if my soul was full of the Holy Spirit, I thought that\n    perhaps there might be angels hovering round my bed. I felt just\n    as if I wanted to converse with them, and finally I spoke, saying,\n    \u2018O ye affectionate angels! how is it that ye can take so much\n    interest in our welfare, and we take so little interest in our\n    own.\u2019 After this, with difficulty I got to sleep; and when I awoke\n    in the morning my first thoughts were: What has become of my\n    happiness? and, feeling a degree of it in my heart, I asked for\n    more, which was given to me as quick as thought. I then got up to\n    dress myself, and found to my surprise that I could but just\n    stand. It appeared to me as if it was a little heaven upon earth.\n    My soul felt as completely raised above the fears of death as of\n    going to sleep; and like a bird in a cage, I had a desire, if it\n    was the will of God, to get released from my body and to dwell\n    with Christ, though willing to live to do good to others, and to\n    warn sinners to repent. I went downstairs feeling as solemn as if\n    I had lost all my friends, and thinking with myself, that I would\n    not let my parents know it until I had first looked into the\n    Testament. I went directly to the shelf and looked into it, at the\n    eighth chapter of Romans, and every verse seemed to almost speak\n    and to confirm it to be truly the Word of God, and as if my\n    feelings corresponded with the meaning of the word. I then told my\n    parents of it, and told them that I thought that they must see\n    that when I spoke, that it was not my own voice, for it appeared\n    so to me. My speech seemed entirely under the control of the\n    Spirit within me; I do not mean that the words which I spoke were\n    not my own, for they were. I thought that I was influenced similar\n    to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost (with the exception of\n    having power to give it to others, and doing what they did). After\n    breakfast I went round to converse with my neighbors on religion,\n    which I could not have been hired to have done before this, and at\n    their request I prayed with them, though I had never prayed in\n    public before.\n\n    \u201cI now feel as if I had discharged my duty by telling the truth,\n    and hope by the blessing of God, it may do some good to all who\n    shall read it. He has fulfilled his promise in sending the Holy\n    Spirit down into our hearts, or mine at least, and I now defy all\n    the Deists and Atheists in the world to shake my faith in Christ.\u201d\n\n\nSo much for Mr. Bradley and his conversion, of the effect of which upon\nhis later life we gain no information. Now for a minuter survey of the\nconstituent elements of the conversion process.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIf you open the chapter on Association, of any treatise on Psychology, you\nwill read that a man\u2019s ideas, aims, and objects form diverse internal\ngroups and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each \u201caim\u201d\nwhich he follows awakens a certain specific kind of interested excitement,\nand gathers a certain group of ideas together in subordination to it as\nits associates; and if the aims and excitements are distinct in kind,\ntheir groups of ideas may have little in common. When one group is present\nand engrosses the interest, all the ideas connected with other groups may\nbe excluded from the mental field. The President of the United States\nwhen, with paddle, gun, and fishing\u2010rod, he goes camping in the wilderness\nfor a vacation, changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The\npresidential anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the\nofficial habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those\nwho knew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not \u201cknow him for\nthe same person\u201d if they saw him as the camper.\n\nIf now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests\nto gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes\na permanently transformed being. Our ordinary alterations of character, as\nwe pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called\ntransformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another\nin the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel\ndefinitively its previous rivals from the individual\u2019s life, we tend to\nspeak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a\n\u201ctransformation.\u201d\n\nThese alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be\ndivided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two or\nmore different groups of aims, of which one practically holds the right of\nway and instigates activity, whilst the others are only pious wishes, and\nnever practically come to anything. Saint Augustine\u2019s aspirations to a\npurer life, in our last lecture, were for a while an example. Another\nwould be the President in his full pride of office, wondering whether it\nwere not all vanity, and whether the life of a wood\u2010chopper were not the\nwholesomer destiny. Such fleeting aspirations are mere _velleitates_,\nwhimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind, and the real\nself of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely\ndifferent system. As life goes on, there is a constant change of our\ninterests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from\nmore central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central\nparts of consciousness. I remember, for instance, that one evening when I\nwas a youth, my father read aloud from a Boston newspaper that part of\nLord Gifford\u2019s will which founded these four lectureships. At that time I\ndid not think of being a teacher of philosophy: and what I listened to was\nas remote from my own life as if it related to the planet Mars. Yet here I\nam, with the Gifford system part and parcel of my very self, and all my\nenergies, for the time being, devoted to successfully identifying myself\nwith it. My soul stands now planted in what once was for it a practically\nunreal object, and speaks from it as from its proper habitat and centre.\n\nWhen I say \u201cSoul,\u201d you need not take me in the ontological sense unless\nyou prefer to; for although ontological language is instinctive in such\nmatters, yet Buddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe the facts in\nthe phenomenal terms which are their favorites. For them the soul is only\na succession of fields of consciousness: yet there is found in each field\na part, or sub\u2010field, which figures as focal and contains the excitement,\nand from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken. Talking of\nthis part, we involuntarily apply words of perspective to distinguish it\nfrom the rest, words like \u201chere,\u201d \u201cthis,\u201d \u201cnow,\u201d \u201cmine,\u201d or \u201cme\u201d; and we\nascribe to the other parts the positions \u201cthere,\u201d \u201cthen,\u201d \u201cthat,\u201d \u201chis\u201d or\n\u201cthine,\u201d \u201cit,\u201d \u201cnot me.\u201d But a \u201chere\u201d can change to a \u201cthere,\u201d and a\n\u201cthere\u201d become a \u201chere,\u201d and what was \u201cmine\u201d and what was \u201cnot mine\u201d\nchange their places.\n\nWhat brings such changes about is the way in which emotional excitement\nalters. Things hot and vital to us to\u2010day are cold to\u2010morrow. It is as if\nseen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear to us,\nand from these hot parts personal desire and volition make their sallies.\nThey are in short the centres of our dynamic energy, whereas the cold\nparts leave us indifferent and passive in proportion to their coldness.\n\nWhether such language be rigorously exact is for the present of no\nimportance. It is exact enough, if you recognize from your own experience\nthe facts which I seek to designate by it.\n\nNow there may be great oscillation in the emotional interest, and the hot\nplaces may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run\nthrough burnt\u2010up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self we\nheard so much of in the previous lecture. Or the focus of excitement and\nheat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie\npermanently within a certain system; and then, if the change be a\nreligious one, we call it a _conversion_, especially if it be by crisis,\nor sudden.\n\nLet us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in a man\u2019s consciousness,\nthe group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works,\ncall it _the habitual centre of his personal energy_. It makes a great\ndifference to a man whether one set of his ideas, or another, be the\ncentre of his energy; and it makes a great difference, as regards any set\nof ideas which he may possess, whether they become central or remain\nperipheral in him. To say that a man is \u201cconverted\u201d means, in these terms,\nthat religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take\na central place, and that religious aims form the habitual centre of his\nenergy.\n\nNow if you ask of psychology just _how_ the excitement shifts in a man\u2019s\nmental system, and _why_ aims that were peripheral become at a certain\nmoment central, psychology has to reply that although she can give a\ngeneral description of what happens, she is unable in a given case to\naccount accurately for all the single forces at work. Neither an outside\nobserver nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully how\nparticular experiences are able to change one\u2019s centre of energy so\ndecisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We have\na thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real\nmeaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has\nsuddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are\ndead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live\nones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re\u2010\ncrystallize about it. We may say that the heat and liveliness mean only\nthe \u201cmotor efficacy,\u201d long deferred but now operative, of the idea; but\nsuch talk itself is only circumlocution, for whence the sudden motor\nefficacy? And our explanations then get so vague and general that one\nrealizes all the more the intense individuality of the whole phenomenon.\n\nIn the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical\nequilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it\narouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually\ncheck or reinforce one another. The collection of ideas alters by\nsubtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies\nalter as the organism gets more aged. A mental system may be undermined or\nweakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet\nfor a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden\nemotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration,\nwill make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity\nsinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the\ncentre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new\nstructure remains permanent.\n\nFormed associations of ideas and habits are usually factors of retardation\nin such changes of equilibrium. New information, however acquired, plays\nan accelerating part in the changes; and the slow mutation of our\ninstincts and propensities, under the \u201cunimaginable touch of time\u201d has an\nenormous influence. Moreover, all these influences may work subconsciously\nor half unconsciously.(99) And when you get a Subject in whom the\nsubconscious life\u2014of which I must speak more fully soon\u2014is largely\ndeveloped, and in whom motives habitually ripen in silence, you get a case\nof which you can never give a full account, and in which, both to the\nSubject and the onlookers, there may appear an element of marvel.\nEmotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in\nprecipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in\nwhich love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one\nare known to everybody.(100) Hope, happiness, security, resolve, emotions\ncharacteristic of conversion, can be equally explosive. And emotions that\ncome in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.\n\nIn his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Starbuck of\nCalifornia has shown by a statistical inquiry how closely parallel in its\nmanifestations the ordinary \u201cconversion\u201d which occurs in young people\nbrought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a larger\nspiritual life which is a normal phase of adolescence in every class of\nhuman beings. The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and\nseventeen. The symptoms are the same,\u2014sense of incompleteness and\nimperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense of\nsin; anxiety about the hereafter; distress over doubts, and the like. And\nthe result is the same,\u2014a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence\nin self gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider\noutlook. In spontaneous religious awakening, apart from revivalistic\nexamples, and in the ordinary storm and stress and moulting\u2010time of\nadolescence, we also may meet with mystical experiences, astonishing the\nsubjects by their suddenness, just as in revivalistic conversion. The\nanalogy, in fact, is complete; and Starbuck\u2019s conclusion as to these\nordinary youthful conversions would seem to be the only sound one:\nConversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to\nthe passage from the child\u2019s small universe to the wider intellectual and\nspiritual life of maturity.\n\n\u201cTheology,\u201d says Dr. Starbuck, \u201ctakes the adolescent tendencies and builds\nupon them; it sees that the essential thing in adolescent growth is\nbringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity and\npersonal insight. It accordingly brings those means to bear which will\nintensify the normal tendencies. It shortens up the period of duration of\nstorm and stress.\u201d The conversion phenomena of \u201cconviction of sin\u201d last,\nby this investigator\u2019s statistics, about one fifth as long as the periods\nof adolescent storm and stress phenomena of which he also got statistics,\nbut they are very much more intense. Bodily accompaniments, loss of sleep\nand appetite, for example, are much more frequent in them. \u201cThe essential\ndistinction appears to be that conversion intensifies but shortens the\nperiod by bringing the person to a definite crisis.\u201d(101)\n\nThe conversions which Dr. Starbuck here has in mind are of course mainly\nthose of very commonplace persons, kept true to a pre\u2010appointed type by\ninstruction, appeal, and example. The particular form which they affect is\nthe result of suggestion and imitation.(102) If they went through their\ngrowth\u2010crisis in other faiths and other countries, although the essence of\nthe change would be the same (since it is one in the main so inevitable),\nits accidents would be different. In Catholic lands, for example, and in\nour own Episcopalian sects, no such anxiety and conviction of sin is usual\nas in sects that encourage revivals. The sacraments being more relied on\nin these more strictly ecclesiastical bodies, the individual\u2019s personal\nacceptance of salvation needs less to be accentuated and led up to.\n\nBut every imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I\npropose that for the future we keep as close as may be to the more first\u2010\nhand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to be found\nin sporadic adult cases.\n\nProfessor Leuba, in a valuable article on the psychology of\nconversion,(103) subordinates the theological aspect of the religious life\nalmost entirely to its moral aspect. The religious sense he defines as\n\u201cthe feeling of un\u2010wholeness, of moral imperfection, of sin, to use the\ntechnical word, accompanied by the yearning after the peace of unity.\u201d\n\u201cThe word \u2018religion,\u2019 \u201d he says, \u201cis getting more and more to signify the\nconglomerate of desires and emotions springing from the sense of sin and\nits release\u201d; and he gives a large number of examples, in which the sin\nranges from drunkenness to spiritual pride, to show that the sense of it\nmay beset one and crave relief as urgently as does the anguish of the\nsickened flesh or any form of physical misery.\n\nUndoubtedly this conception covers an immense number of cases. A good one\nto use as an example is that of Mr. S. H. Hadley, who after his conversion\nbecame an active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New York. His\nexperience runs as follows:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cOne Tuesday evening I sat in a saloon in Harlem, a homeless,\n    friendless, dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold everything that\n    would bring a drink. I could not sleep unless I was dead drunk. I\n    had not eaten for days, and for four nights preceding I had\n    suffered with delirium tremens, or the horrors, from midnight till\n    morning. I had often said, \u2018I will never be a tramp. I will never\n    be cornered, for when that time comes, if ever it comes, I will\n    find a home in the bottom of the river.\u2019 But the Lord so ordered\n    it that when that time did come I was not able to walk one quarter\n    of the way to the river. As I sat there thinking, I seemed to feel\n    some great and mighty presence. I did not know then what it was. I\n    did learn afterwards that it was Jesus, the sinner\u2019s friend. I\n    walked up to the bar and pounded it with my fist till I made the\n    glasses rattle. Those who stood by drinking looked on with\n    scornful curiosity. I said I would never take another drink, if I\n    died on the street, and really I felt as though that would happen\n    before morning. Something said, \u2018If you want to keep this promise,\n    go and have yourself locked up.\u2019 I went to the nearest station\u2010\n    house and had myself locked up.\n\n    \u201cI was placed in a narrow cell, and it seemed as though all the\n    demons that could find room came in that place with me. This was\n    not all the company I had, either. No, praise the Lord; that dear\n    Spirit that came to me in the saloon was present, and said, Pray.\n    I did pray, and though I did not feel any great help, I kept on\n    praying. As soon as I was able to leave my cell I was taken to the\n    police court and remanded back to the cell. I was finally\n    released, and found my way to my brother\u2019s house, where every care\n    was given me. While lying in bed the admonishing Spirit never left\n    me, and when I arose the following Sabbath morning I felt that day\n    would decide my fate, and toward evening it came into my head to\n    go to Jerry M\u2019Auley\u2019s Mission. I went. The house was packed, and\n    with great difficulty I made my way to the space near the\n    platform. There I saw the apostle to the drunkard and the\n    outcast\u2014that man of God, Jerry M\u2019Auley. He rose, and amid deep\n    silence told his experience. There was a sincerity about this man\n    that carried conviction with it, and I found myself saying, \u2018I\n    wonder if God can save _me_?\u2019 I listened to the testimony of\n    twenty\u2010five or thirty persons, every one of whom had been saved\n    from rum, and I made up my mind that I would be saved or die right\n    there. When the invitation was given, I knelt down with a crowd of\n    drunkards. Jerry made the first prayer. Then Mrs. M\u2019Auley prayed\n    fervently for us. Oh, what a conflict was going on for my poor\n    soul! A blessed whisper said, \u2018Come\u2019; the devil said, \u2018Be\n    careful.\u2019 I halted but a moment, and then, with a breaking heart,\n    I said, \u2018Dear Jesus, can you help me?\u2019 Never with mortal tongue\n    can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had\n    been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious\n    brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a\n    free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of\n    resting on Jesus! I felt that Christ with all his brightness and\n    power had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had passed\n    away and all things had become new.\n\n    \u201cFrom that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey,\n    and I have never seen money enough to make me take one. I promised\n    God that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong\n    drink, I would work for him all my life. He has done his part, and\n    I have been trying to do mine.\u201d(104)\n\n\nDr. Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinal theology in such\nan experience, which starts with the absolute need of a higher helper, and\nends with the sense that he has helped us. He gives other cases of\ndrunkards\u2019 conversions which are purely ethical, containing, as recorded,\nno theological beliefs whatever. John B. Gough\u2019s case, for instance, is\npractically, says Dr. Leuba, the conversion of an atheist\u2014neither God nor\nJesus being mentioned.(105) But in spite of the importance of this type of\nregeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment, this writer\nsurely makes it too exclusive. It corresponds to the subjectively centred\nform of morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But\nwe saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of melancholy\nalso, in which the lack of rational meaning of the universe, and of life\nanyhow, is the burden that weighs upon one\u2014you remember Tolstoy\u2019s\ncase.(106) So there are distinct elements in conversion, and their\nrelations to individual lives deserve to be discriminated.(107)\n\nSome persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any\ncircumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the\ncentre of their spiritual energy. They may be excellent persons, servants\nof God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They\nare either incapable of imagining the invisible; or else, in the language\nof devotion, they are life\u2010long subjects of \u201cbarrenness\u201d and \u201cdryness.\u201d\nSuch inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intellectual in\nits origin. Their religious faculties may be checked in their natural\ntendency to expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the\npessimistic and materialistic beliefs, for example, within which so many\ngood souls, who in former times would have freely indulged their religious\npropensities, find themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or the\nagnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, under which so\nmany of us to\u2010day lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In many\npersons such inhibitions are never overcome. To the end of their days they\nrefuse to believe, their personal energy never gets to its religious\ncentre, and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity.\n\nIn other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men an\u00e6sthetic on\nthe religious side, deficient in that category of sensibility. Just as a\nbloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain to the\nreckless \u201canimal spirits\u201d enjoyed by those of sanguine temperament; so the\nnature which is spiritually barren may admire and envy faith in others,\nbut can never compass the enthusiasm and peace which those who are\ntemperamentally qualified for faith enjoy. All this may, however, turn out\neventually to have been a matter of temporary inhibition. Even late in\nlife some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the\nbarrenest breast, and the man\u2019s hard heart may soften and break into\nreligious feeling. Such cases more than any others suggest the idea that\nsudden conversion is by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not\nimagine ourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nNow there are two forms of mental occurrence in human beings, which lead\nto a striking difference in the conversion process, a difference to which\nProfessor Starbuck has called attention. You know how it is when you try\nto recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working for\nit, by mentally running over the places, persons, and things with which\nthe word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as\nif the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name\nwere _jammed_, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more\nfrom rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the\neffort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an\nhour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says, as\ncarelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden process was\nstarted in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, and\nmade the result come as if it came spontaneously. A certain music teacher,\nsays Dr. Starbuck, says to her pupils after the thing to be done has been\nclearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted: \u201cStop trying and it\nwill do itself!\u201d(108)\n\nThere is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntary and\nunconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished; and we find\nboth ways exemplified in the history of conversion, giving us two types,\nwhich Starbuck calls the _volitional type_ and the _type by self\u2010\nsurrender_ respectively.\n\nIn the volitional type the regenerative change is usually gradual, and\nconsists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral and\nspiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at which the\nmovement forward seems much more rapid. This psychological fact is\nabundantly illustrated by Dr. Starbuck. Our education in any practical\naccomplishment proceeds apparently by jerks and starts, just as the growth\nof our physical bodies does.\n\n\n    \u201cAn athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of\n    the fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as\n    the convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on\n    engaging in the sport, there may come a day when all at once the\n    game plays itself through him\u2014when he loses himself in some great\n    contest. In the same way, a musician may suddenly reach a point at\n    which pleasure in the technique of the art entirely falls away,\n    and in some moment of inspiration he becomes the instrument\n    through which music flows. The writer has chanced to hear two\n    different married persons, both of whose wedded lives had been\n    beautiful from the beginning, relate that not until a year or more\n    after marriage did they awake to the full blessedness of married\n    life. So it is with the religious experience of these persons we\n    are studying.\u201d(109)\n\n\nWe shall erelong hear still more remarkable illustrations of\nsubconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which we\nsuddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton and Professor Laycock of\nEdinburgh were among the first to call attention to this class of effects;\nbut Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the term\n\u201cunconscious cerebration,\u201d which has since then been a popular phrase of\nexplanation. The facts are now known to us far more extensively than he\ncould know them, and the adjective \u201cunconscious,\u201d being for many of them\nalmost certainly a misnomer, is better replaced by the vaguer term\n\u201csubconscious\u201d or \u201csubliminal.\u201d\n\nOf the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give\nexamples,(110) but they are as a rule less interesting than those of the\nself\u2010surrender type, in which the subconscious effects are more abundant\nand often startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter, the more so\nbecause the difference between the two types is after all not radical.\nEven in the most voluntarily built\u2010up sort of regeneration there are\npassages of partial self\u2010surrender interposed; and in the great majority\nof all cases, when the will has done its uttermost towards bringing one\nclose to the complete unification aspired after, it seems that the very\nlast step must be left to other forces and performed without the help of\nits activity. In other words, self\u2010surrender becomes then indispensable.\n\u201cThe personal will,\u201d says Dr. Starbuck, \u201cmust be given up. In many cases\nrelief persistently refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or\nto make an effort in the direction he desires to go.\u201d\n\n\n    \u201cI had said I would not give up; but when my will was broken, it\n    was all over,\u201d writes one of Starbuck\u2019s correspondents.\u2014Another\n    says: \u201cI simply said: \u2018Lord, I have done all I can; I leave the\n    whole matter with Thee;\u2019 and immediately there came to me a great\n    peace.\u201d\u2014Another: \u201cAll at once it occurred to me that I might be\n    saved, too, if I would stop trying to do it all myself, and follow\n    Jesus: somehow I lost my load.\u201d\u2014Another: \u201cI finally ceased to\n    resist, and gave myself up, though it was a hard struggle.\n    Gradually the feeling came over me that I had done my part, and\n    God was willing to do his.\u201d(111)\u2014\u201cLord, Thy will be done; damn or\n    save!\u201d cries John Nelson,(112) exhausted with the anxious struggle\n    to escape damnation; and at that moment his soul was filled with\n    peace.\n\n\nDr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account\u2014so\nfar as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all\u2014of the reasons why\nself\u2010surrender at the last moment should be so indispensable. To begin\nwith, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion:\nfirst, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the \u201csin\u201d which he is\neager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to\ncompass. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far\nmore distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any\npositive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the \u201csin\u201d\nalmost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is \u201c_a\nprocess of struggling away from sin rather than of striving towards\nrighteousness_.\u201d(113) A man\u2019s conscious wit and will, so far as they\nstrain towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and\ninaccurately imagined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic\nripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and\nhis conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the\nscenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement; and the\nrearrangement towards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely\ndefinite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and\ndetermines. It may consequently be actually interfered with (_jammed_, as\nit were, like the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it),\nby his voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction.\n\nStarbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he says\nthat to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where\nthe imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary,\nthe subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self\n_in posse_ which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and\nvaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing centre.\nWhat then must the person do? \u201cHe must relax,\u201d says Dr. Starbuck,\u2014\u201cthat\nis, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness,\nwhich has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own\nway the work it has begun.... The act of yielding, in this point of view,\nis giving one\u2019s self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new\npersonality, and living, from within, the truth of it which had before\nbeen viewed objectively.\u201d(114)\n\n\u201cMan\u2019s extremity is God\u2019s opportunity\u201d is the theological way of putting\nthis fact of the need of self\u2010surrender; whilst the physiological way of\nstating it would be, \u201cLet one do all in one\u2019s power, and one\u2019s nervous\nsystem will do the rest.\u201d Both statements acknowledge the same fact.(115)\n\nTo state it in terms of our own symbolism: When the new centre of personal\nenergy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to\nopen into flower, \u201chands off\u201d is the only word for us, it must burst forth\nunaided!\n\nWe have used the vague and abstract language of psychology. But since, in\nany terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves\nupon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than\nwe are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why self\u2010surrender\nhas been and always must be regarded as the vital turning\u2010point of the\nreligious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of\nouter works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole\ndevelopment of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more\nthan the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self\u2010\nsurrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism; from\nthat to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical Christianity\naltogether, to pure \u201cliberalism\u201d or transcendental idealism, whether or\nnot of the mind\u2010cure type, taking in the medi\u00e6val mystics, the quietists,\nthe pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress\ntowards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the\nindividual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of\ndoctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery.\n\nPsychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point,\nsince both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious\nindividual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology,\ndefining these forces as \u201csubconscious,\u201d and speaking of their effects as\ndue to \u201cincubation,\u201d or \u201ccerebration,\u201d implies that they do not transcend\nthe individual\u2019s personality; and herein she diverges from Christian\ntheology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of\nthe Deity. I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence\nfinal, but leave the question for a while in abeyance\u2014continued inquiry\nmay enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nRevert, then, for a moment more to the psychology of self\u2010surrender.\n\nWhen you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent\nin to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable,\nand then simply tell him that all is well with him, that he must stop his\nworry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety, you seem to him\nto come with pure absurdities. The only positive consciousness he has\ntells him that all is _not_ well, and the better way you offer sounds\nsimply as if you proposed to him to assert cold\u2010blooded falsehoods. \u201cThe\nwill to believe\u201d cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves\nmore faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot\ncreate a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us\nof its opposite. The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the\nform of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively\nwill a pure negation.\n\nThere are only two ways in which it is possible to get rid of anger,\nworry, fear, despair, or other undesirable affections. One is that an\nopposite affection should overpoweringly break over us, and the other is\nby getting so exhausted with the struggle that we have to stop,\u2014so we drop\ndown, give up, and _don\u2019t care_ any longer. Our emotional brain\u2010centres\nstrike work, and we lapse into a temporary apathy. Now there is\ndocumentary proof that this state of temporary exhaustion not infrequently\nforms part of the conversion crisis. So long as the egoistic worry of the\nsick soul guards the door, the expansive confidence of the soul of faith\ngains no presence. But let the former faint away, even but for a moment,\nand the latter can profit by the opportunity, and, having once acquired\npossession, may retain it. Carlyle\u2019s Teufelsdr\u00f6ckh passes from the\neverlasting No to the everlasting Yes through a \u201cCentre of Indifference.\u201d\n\nLet me give you a good illustration of this feature in the conversion\nprocess. That genuine saint, David Brainerd, describes his own crisis in\nthe following words:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cOne morning, while I was walking in a solitary place as usual, I\n    at once saw that all my contrivances and projects to effect or\n    procure deliverance and salvation for myself were utterly in vain;\n    I was brought quite to a stand, as finding myself totally lost. I\n    saw that it was forever impossible for me to do anything towards\n    helping or delivering myself, that I had made all the pleas I ever\n    could have made to all eternity; and that all my pleas were vain,\n    for I saw that self\u2010interest had led me to pray, and that I had\n    never once prayed from any respect to the glory of God. I saw that\n    there was no necessary connection between my prayers and the\n    bestowment of divine mercy; that they laid not the least\n    obligation upon God to bestow his grace upon me; and that there\n    was no more virtue or goodness in them than there would be in my\n    paddling with my hand in the water. I saw that I had been heaping\n    up my devotions before God, fasting, praying, etc., pretending,\n    and indeed really thinking sometimes that I was aiming at the\n    glory of God; whereas I never once truly intended it, but only my\n    own happiness. I saw that as I had never done anything for God, I\n    had no claim on anything from him but perdition, on account of my\n    hypocrisy and mockery. When I saw evidently that I had regard to\n    nothing but self\u2010interest, then my duties appeared a vile mockery\n    and a continual course of lies, for the whole was nothing but\n    self\u2010worship, and an horrid abuse of God.\n\n    \u201cI continued, as I remember, in this state of mind, from Friday\n    morning till the Sabbath evening following (July 12, 1739), when I\n    was walking again in the same solitary place. Here, in a mournful\n    melancholy state _I was attempting to pray; but found no heart to\n    engage in that or any other duty; my former concern, exercise, and\n    religious affections were now gone. I thought that the Spirit of\n    God had quite left me; but still was not distressed; yet\n    disconsolate, as if there was nothing in heaven or earth could\n    make me happy. Having been thus endeavoring to pray\u2014though, as I\n    thought, very stupid and senseless_\u2014for near half an hour; then,\n    as I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to\n    open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external\n    brightness, nor any imagination of a body of light, but it was a\n    new inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never\n    had before, nor anything which had the least resemblance to it. I\n    had no particular apprehension of any one person in the Trinity,\n    either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost; but it appeared to\n    be Divine glory. My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable, to see\n    such a God, such a glorious Divine Being; and I was inwardly\n    pleased and satisfied that he should be God over all for ever and\n    ever. My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency\n    of God that I was even swallowed up in him; at least to that\n    degree that I had no thought about my own salvation, and scarce\n    reflected that there was such a creature as myself. I continued in\n    this state of inward joy, peace, and astonishing, till near dark\n    without any sensible abatement; and then began to think and\n    examine what I had seen; and felt sweetly composed in my mind all\n    the evening following. I felt myself in a new world, and\n    everything about me appeared with a different aspect from what it\n    was wont to do. At this time, the way of salvation opened to me\n    with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that I\n    wondered I should ever think of any other way of salvation; was\n    amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances, and complied\n    with this lovely, blessed, and excellent way before. If I could\n    have been saved by my own duties or any other way that I had\n    formerly contrived, my whole soul would now have refused it. I\n    wondered that all the world did not see and comply with this way\n    of salvation, entirely by the righteousness of Christ.\u201d(116)\n\n\nI have italicized the passage which records the exhaustion of the anxious\nemotion hitherto habitual. In a large proportion, perhaps the majority, of\nreports, the writers speak as if the exhaustion of the lower and the\nentrance of the higher emotion were simultaneous,(117) yet often again\nthey speak as if the higher actively drove the lower out. This is\nundoubtedly true in a great many instances, as we shall presently see. But\noften there seems little doubt that both conditions\u2014subconscious ripening\nof the one affection and exhaustion of the other\u2014must simultaneously have\nconspired, in order to produce the result.\n\n\n    T. W. B., a convert of Nettleton\u2019s, being brought to an acute\n    paroxysm of conviction of sin, ate nothing all day, locked himself\n    in his room in the evening in complete despair, crying aloud, \u201cHow\n    long, O Lord, how long?\u201d \u201cAfter repeating this and similar\n    language,\u201d he says, \u201cseveral times, _I seemed to sink away into a\n    state of insensibility_. When I came to myself again I was on my\n    knees, praying not for myself but for others. I felt submission to\n    the will of God, willing that he should do with me as should seem\n    good in his sight. My concern seemed all lost in concern for\n    others.\u201d(118)\n\n    Our great American revivalist Finney writes: \u201cI said to myself:\n    \u2018What is this? I must have grieved the Holy Ghost entirely away. I\n    have lost all my conviction. I have not a particle of concern\n    about my soul; and it must be that the Spirit has left me.\u2019 \u2018Why!\u2019\n    thought I, \u2018I never was so far from being concerned about my own\n    salvation in my life.\u2019... I tried to recall my convictions, to get\n    back again the load of sin under which I had been laboring. I\n    tried in vain to make myself anxious. I was so quiet and peaceful\n    that I tried to feel concerned about that, lest it should be the\n    result of my having grieved the Spirit away.\u201d(119)\n\n\nBut beyond all question there are persons in whom, quite independently of\nany exhaustion in the Subject\u2019s capacity for feeling, or even in the\nabsence of any acute previous feeling, the higher condition, having\nreached the due degree of energy, bursts through all barriers and sweeps\nin like a sudden flood. These are the most striking and memorable cases,\nthe cases of instantaneous conversion to which the conception of divine\ngrace has been most peculiarly attached. I have given one of them at\nlength\u2014the case of Mr. Bradley. But I had better reserve the other cases\nand my comments on the rest of the subject for the following lecture.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURE X. CONVERSION\u2014CONCLUDED.\n\n\nIn this lecture we have to finish the subject of Conversion, considering\nat first those striking instantaneous instances of which Saint Paul\u2019s is\nthe most eminent, and in which, often amid tremendous emotional excitement\nor perturbation of the senses, a complete division is established in the\ntwinkling of an eye between the old life and the new. Conversion of this\ntype is an important phase of religious experience, owing to the part\nwhich it has played in Protestant theology, and it behooves us to study it\nconscientiously on that account.\n\nI think I had better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to\na more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for,\nas Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a\ngeneralization than just so far as one\u2019s previous acquaintance with\nparticulars enables one to take it in. I will go back, then, to the case\nof our friend Henry Alline, and quote his report of the 26th of March,\n1775, on which his poor divided mind became unified for good.\n\n\n    \u201cAs I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamenting my\n    miserable lost and undone condition, and almost ready to sink\n    under my burden, I thought I was in such a miserable case as never\n    any man was before. I returned to the house, and when I got to the\n    door, just as I was stepping off the threshold, the following\n    impressions came into my mind like a powerful but small still\n    voice. You have been seeking, praying, reforming, laboring,\n    reading, hearing, and meditating, and what have you done by it\n    towards your salvation? Are you any nearer to conversion now than\n    when you first began? Are you any more prepared for heaven, or\n    fitter to appear before the impartial bar of God, than when you\n    first began to seek?\n\n    \u201cIt brought such conviction on me that I was obliged to say that I\n    did not think I was one step nearer than at first, but as much\n    condemned, as much exposed, and as miserable as before. I cried\n    out within myself, O Lord God, I am lost, and if thou, O Lord,\n    dost not find out some new way, I know nothing of, I shall never\n    be saved, for the ways and methods I have prescribed to myself\n    have all failed me, and I am willing they should fail. O Lord,\n    have mercy! O Lord, have mercy!\n\n    \u201cThese discoveries continued until I went into the house and sat\n    down. After I sat down, being all in confusion, like a drowning\n    man that was just giving up to sink, and almost in an agony, I\n    turned very suddenly round in my chair, and seeing part of an old\n    Bible lying in one of the chairs, I caught hold of it in great\n    haste; and opening it without any premeditation, cast my eyes on\n    the 38th Psalm, which was the first time I ever saw the word of\n    God: it took hold of me with such power that it seemed to go\n    through my whole soul, so that it seemed as if God was praying in,\n    with, and for me. About this time my father called the family to\n    attend prayers; I attended, but paid no regard to what he said in\n    his prayer, but continued praying in those words of the Psalm. Oh,\n    help me, help me! cried I, thou Redeemer of souls, and save me, or\n    I am gone forever; thou canst this night, if thou pleasest, with\n    one drop of thy blood atone for my sins, and appease the wrath of\n    an angry God. At that instant of time when I gave all up to him to\n    do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule\n    over me at his pleasure, redeeming love broke into my soul with\n    repeated scriptures, with such power that my whole soul seemed to\n    be melted down with love; the burden of guilt and condemnation was\n    gone, darkness was expelled, my heart humbled and filled with\n    gratitude, and my whole soul, that was a few minutes ago groaning\n    under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown God for help,\n    was now filled with immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith,\n    freed from the chains of death and darkness, and crying out, My\n    Lord and my God; thou art my rock and my fortress, my shield and\n    my high tower, my life, my joy, my present and my everlasting\n    portion. Looking up, I thought I saw that same light [he had on\n    more than one previous occasion seen subjectively a bright blaze\n    of light], though it appeared different; and as soon as I saw it,\n    the design was opened to me, according to his promise, and I was\n    obliged to cry out: Enough, enough, O blessed God! The work of\n    conversion, the change, and the manifestations of it are no more\n    disputable than that light which I see, or anything that ever I\n    saw.\n\n    \u201cIn the midst of all my joys, in less than half an hour after my\n    soul was set at liberty, the Lord discovered to me my labor in the\n    ministry and call to preach the gospel. I cried out, Amen, Lord,\n    I\u2019ll go; send me, send me. I spent the greatest part of the night\n    in ecstasies of joy, praising and adoring the Ancient of Days for\n    his free and unbounded grace. After I had been so long in this\n    transport and heavenly frame that my nature seemed to require\n    sleep, I thought to close my eyes for a few moments; then the\n    devil stepped in, and told me that if I went to sleep, I should\n    lose it all, and when I should awake in the morning I would find\n    it to be nothing but a fancy and delusion. I immediately cried\n    out, O Lord God, if I am deceived, undeceive me.\n\n    \u201cI then closed my eyes for a few minutes, and seemed to be\n    refreshed with sleep; and when I awoke, the first inquiry was,\n    Where is my God? And in an instant of time, my soul seemed awake\n    in and with God, and surrounded by the arms of everlasting love.\n    About sunrise I arose with joy to relate to my parents what God\n    had done for my soul, and declared to them the miracle of God\u2019s\n    unbounded grace. I took a Bible to show them the words that were\n    impressed by God on my soul the evening before; but when I came to\n    open the Bible, it appeared all new to me.\n\n    \u201cI so longed to be useful in the cause of Christ, in preaching the\n    gospel, that it seemed as if I could not rest any longer, but go I\n    must and tell the wonders of redeeming love. I lost all taste for\n    carnal pleasures, and carnal company, and was enabled to forsake\n    them.\u201d(120)\n\n\nYoung Mr. Alline, after the briefest of delays, and with no book\u2010learning\nbut his Bible, and no teaching save that of his own experience, became a\nChristian minister, and thenceforward his life was fit to rank, for its\nausterity and single\u2010mindedness, with that of the most devoted saints. But\nhappy as he became in his strenuous way, he never got his taste for even\nthe most innocent carnal pleasures back. We must class him, like Bunyan\nand Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron of melancholy left a\npermanent imprint. His redemption was into another universe than this mere\nnatural world, and life remained for him a sad and patient trial. Years\nlater we can find him making such an entry as this in his diary: \u201cOn\nWednesday the 12th I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby\nto be the means of excluding carnal mirth.\u201d\n\nThe next case I will give is that of a correspondent of Professor Leuba,\nprinted in the latter\u2019s article, already cited, in vol. vi. of the\nAmerican Journal of Psychology. This subject was an Oxford graduate, the\nson of a clergyman, and the story resembles in many points the classic\ncase of Colonel Gardiner, which everybody may be supposed to know. Here it\nis, somewhat abridged:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cBetween the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I never\n    darkened the door of my father\u2019s church, although I lived with him\n    for eight years, making what money I wanted by journalism, and\n    spending it in high carousal with any one who would sit with me\n    and drink it away. So I lived, sometimes drunk for a week\n    together, and then a terrible repentance, and would not touch a\n    drop for a whole month.\n\n    \u201cIn all this period, that is, up to thirty\u2010three years of age, I\n    never had a desire to reform on religious grounds. But all my\n    pangs were due to some terrible remorse I used to feel after a\n    heavy carousal, the remorse taking the shape of regret after my\n    folly in wasting my life in such a way\u2014a man of superior talents\n    and education. This terrible remorse turned me gray in one night,\n    and whenever it came upon me I was perceptibly grayer the next\n    morning. What I suffered in this way is beyond the expression of\n    words. It was hell\u2010fire in all its most dreadful tortures. Often\n    did I vow that if I got over \u2018this time\u2019 I would reform. Alas, in\n    about three days I fully recovered, and was as happy as ever. So\n    it went on for years, but, with a physique like a rhinoceros, I\n    always recovered, and as long as I let drink alone, no man was as\n    capable of enjoying life as I was.\n\n    \u201cI was converted in my own bedroom in my father\u2019s rectory house at\n    precisely three o\u2019clock in the afternoon of a hot July day (July\n    13, 1886). I was in perfect health, having been off from the drink\n    for nearly a month. I was in no way troubled about my soul. In\n    fact, God was not in my thoughts that day. A young lady friend\n    sent me a copy of Professor Drummond\u2019s Natural Law in the\n    Spiritual World, asking me my opinion of it as a literary work\n    only. Being proud of my critical talents and wishing to enhance\n    myself in my new friend\u2019s esteem, I took the book to my bedroom\n    for quiet, intending to give it a thorough study, and then write\n    her what I thought of it. It was here that God met me face to\n    face, and I shall never forget the meeting. \u2018He that hath the Son\n    hath life eternal, he that hath not the Son hath not life.\u2019 I had\n    read this scores of times before, but this made all the\n    difference. I was now in God\u2019s presence and my attention was\n    absolutely \u2018soldered\u2019 on to this verse, and I was not allowed to\n    proceed with the book till I had fairly considered what these\n    words really involved. Only then was I allowed to proceed, feeling\n    all the while that there was another being in my bedroom, though\n    not seen by me. The stillness was very marvelous, and I felt\n    supremely happy. It was most unquestionably shown me, in one\n    second of time, that I had never touched the Eternal: and that if\n    I died then, I must inevitably be lost. I was undone. I knew it as\n    well as I now know I am saved. The Spirit of God showed it me in\n    ineffable love; there was no terror in it; I felt God\u2019s love so\n    powerfully upon me that only a mighty sorrow crept over me that I\n    had lost all through my own folly; and what was I to do? What\n    could I do? I did not repent even; God never asked me to repent.\n    All I felt was \u2018I am undone,\u2019 and God cannot help it, although he\n    loves me. No fault on the part of the Almighty. All the time I was\n    supremely happy: I felt like a little child before his father. I\n    had done wrong, but my Father did not scold me, but loved me most\n    wondrously. Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to a certainty,\n    and being naturally of a brave disposition I did not quail under\n    it, but deep sorrow for the past, mixed with regret for what I had\n    lost, took hold upon me, and my soul thrilled within me to think\n    it was all over. Then there crept in upon me so gently, so\n    lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it after\n    all? The old, old story over again, told in the simplest way:\n    \u2018There is no name under heaven whereby ye can be saved except that\n    of the Lord Jesus Christ.\u2019 No words were spoken to me; my soul\n    seemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from that hour to\n    this, nearly nine years now, there has never been in my life one\n    doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father both worked\n    upon me that afternoon in July, both differently, and both in the\n    most perfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced there and then in a\n    conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in\n    less than twenty\u2010four hours.\n\n    \u201cBut a time of trouble was yet to come. The day after my\n    conversion I went into the hay\u2010field to lend a hand with the\n    harvest, and not having made any promise to God to abstain or\n    drink in moderation only, I took too much and came home drunk. My\n    poor sister was heart\u2010broken; and I felt ashamed of myself and got\n    to my bedroom at once, where she followed me, weeping copiously.\n    She said I had been converted and fallen away instantly. But\n    although I was quite full of drink (not muddled, however), I knew\n    that God\u2019s work begun in me was not going to be wasted. About\n    midday I made on my knees the first prayer before God for twenty\n    years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for\n    I would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I committed\n    myself to him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was\n    going to be destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was\n    willing. In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From\n    that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never\n    want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe: after being a\n    regular smoker from my twelfth year the desire for it went at\n    once, and has never returned. So with every known sin, the\n    deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had\n    no temptation since conversion, God seemingly having shut out\n    Satan from that course with me. He gets a free hand in other ways,\n    but never on sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all\n    ownership in my own life, he has guided me in a thousand ways, and\n    has opened my path in a way almost incredible to those who do not\n    enjoy the blessing of a truly surrendered life.\u201d\n\n\nSo much for our graduate of Oxford, in whom you notice the complete\nabolition of an ancient appetite as one of the conversion\u2019s fruits.\n\nThe most curious record of sudden conversion with which I am acquainted is\nthat of M. Alphonse Ratisbonne, a freethinking French Jew, to Catholicism,\nat Rome in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend, written a few months\nlater, the convert gives a palpitating account of the circumstances.(121)\nThe predisposing conditions appear to have been slight. He had an elder\nbrother who had been converted and was a Catholic priest. He was himself\nirreligious, and nourished an antipathy to the apostate brother and\ngenerally to his \u201ccloth.\u201d Finding himself at Rome in his twenty\u2010ninth\nyear, he fell in with a French gentleman who tried to make a proselyte of\nhim, but who succeeded no farther after two or three conversations than to\nget him to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal round his neck, and to\naccept and read a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin. M. Ratisbonne\nrepresents his own part in the conversations as having been of a light and\nchaffing order; but he notes the fact that for some days he was unable to\nbanish the words of the prayer from his mind, and that the night before\nthe crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in the imagery of which a black\ncross with no Christ upon it figured. Nevertheless, until noon of the next\nday he was free in mind and spent the time in trivial conversations. I now\ngive his own words.\n\n\n    \u201cIf at this time any one had accosted me, saying: \u2018Alphonse, in a\n    quarter of an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God\n    and Saviour; you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the\n    ground in a humble church; you shall be smiting your breast at the\n    foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of\n    Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your\n    life for the Catholic faith; you shall renounce the world and its\n    pomps and pleasures; renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if\n    need be, your betrothed; the affections of your family, the esteem\n    of your friends, and your attachment to the Jewish people; you\n    shall have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his\n    cross till death;\u2019\u2014if, I say, a prophet had come to me with such a\n    prediction, I should have judged that only one person could be\n    more mad than he,\u2014whosoever, namely, might believe in the\n    possibility of such senseless folly becoming true. And yet that\n    folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.\n\n    \u201cComing out of the caf\u00e9 I met the carriage of Monsieur B. [the\n    proselyting friend]. He stopped and invited me in for a drive, but\n    first asked me to wait for a few minutes whilst he attended to\n    some duty at the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of\n    waiting in the carriage, I entered the church myself to look at\n    it. The church of San Andrea was poor, small, and empty; I believe\n    that I found myself there almost alone. No work of art attracted\n    my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its interior\n    without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only\n    remember an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning\n    before me as I mused. In an instant the dog had disappeared, the\n    whole church had vanished, I no longer saw anything, ... or more\n    truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone.\n\n    \u201cHeavens, how can I speak of it? Oh no! human words cannot attain\n    to expressing the inexpressible. Any description, however sublime\n    it might be, could be but a profanation of the unspeakable truth.\n\n    \u201cI was there prostrate on the ground, bathed in my tears, with my\n    heart beside itself, when M. B. called me back to life. I could\n    not reply to the questions which followed from him one upon the\n    other. But finally I took the medal which I had on my breast, and\n    with all the effusion of my soul I kissed the image of the Virgin,\n    radiant with grace, which it bore. Oh, indeed, it was She! It was\n    indeed She! [What he had seen had been a vision of the Virgin.]\n\n    \u201cI did not know where I was: I did not know whether I was Alphonse\n    or another. I only felt myself changed and believed myself another\n    me; I looked for myself in myself and did not find myself. In the\n    bottom of my soul I felt an explosion of the most ardent joy; I\n    could not speak; I had no wish to reveal what had happened. But I\n    felt something solemn and sacred within me which made me ask for a\n    priest. I was led to one; and there, alone, after he had given me\n    the positive order, I spoke as best I could, kneeling, and with my\n    heart still trembling. I could give no account to myself of the\n    truth of which I had acquired a knowledge and a faith. All that I\n    can say is that in an instant the bandage had fallen from my eyes;\n    and not one bandage only, but the whole manifold of bandages in\n    which I had been brought up. One after another they rapidly\n    disappeared, even as the mud and ice disappear under the rays of\n    the burning sun.\n\n    \u201cI came out as from a sepulchre, from an abyss of darkness; and I\n    was living, perfectly living. But I wept, for at the bottom of\n    that gulf I saw the extreme of misery from which I had been saved\n    by an infinite mercy; and I shuddered at the sight of my\n    iniquities, stupefied, melted, overwhelmed with wonder and with\n    gratitude. You may ask me how I came to this new insight, for\n    truly I had never opened a book of religion nor even read a single\n    page of the Bible, and the dogma of original sin is either\n    entirely denied or forgotten by the Hebrews of to\u2010day, so that I\n    had thought so little about it that I doubt whether I ever knew\n    its name. But how came I, then, to this perception of it? I can\n    answer nothing save this, that on entering that church I was in\n    darkness altogether, and on coming out of it I saw the fullness of\n    the light. I can explain the change no better than by the simile\n    of a profound sleep or the analogy of one born blind who should\n    suddenly open his eyes to the day. He sees, but cannot define the\n    light which bathes him and by means of which he sees the objects\n    which excite his wonder. If we cannot explain physical light, how\n    can we explain the light which is the truth itself? And I think I\n    remain within the limits of veracity when I say that without\n    having any knowledge of the letter of religious doctrine, I now\n    intuitively perceived its sense and spirit. Better than if I saw\n    them, I _felt_ those hidden things; I felt them by the\n    inexplicable effects they produced in me. It all happened in my\n    interior mind; and those impressions, more rapid than thought,\n    shook my soul, revolved and turned it, as it were, in another\n    direction, towards other aims, by other paths. I express myself\n    badly. But do you wish, Lord, that I should inclose in poor and\n    barren words sentiments which the heart alone can understand?\u201d\n\n\nI might multiply cases almost indefinitely, but these will suffice to show\nyou how real, definite, and memorable an event a sudden conversion may be\nto him who has the experience. Throughout the height of it he undoubtedly\nseems to himself a passive spectator or undergoer of an astounding process\nperformed upon him from above. There is too much evidence of this for any\ndoubt of it to be possible. Theology, combining this fact with the\ndoctrines of election and grace, has concluded that the spirit of God is\nwith us at these dramatic moments in a peculiarly miraculous way, unlike\nwhat happens at any other juncture of our lives. At that moment, it\nbelieves, an absolutely new nature is breathed into us, and we become\npartakers of the very substance of the Deity.\n\nThat the conversion should be instantaneous seems called for on this view,\nand the Moravian Protestants appear to have been the first to see this\nlogical consequence. The Methodists soon followed suit, practically if not\ndogmatically, and a short time ere his death, John Wesley wrote:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cIn London alone I found 652 members of our Society who were\n    exceeding clear in their experience, and whose testimony I could\n    see no reason to doubt. And every one of these (without a single\n    exception) has declared that his deliverance from sin was\n    instantaneous; that the change was wrought in a moment. Had half\n    of these, or one third, or one in twenty, declared it was\n    _gradually_ wrought in _them_, I should have believed this, with\n    regard to _them_, and thought that _some_ were gradually\n    sanctified and some instantaneously. But as I have not found, in\n    so long a space of time, a single person speaking thus, I cannot\n    but believe that sanctification is commonly, if not always, an\n    instantaneous work.\u201d Tyerman\u2019s Life of Wesley, i. 463.\n\n\nAll this while the more usual sects of Protestantism have set no such\nstore by instantaneous conversion. For them as for the Catholic Church,\nChrist\u2019s blood, the sacraments, and the individual\u2019s ordinary religious\nduties are practically supposed to suffice to his salvation, even though\nno acute crisis of self\u2010despair and surrender followed by relief should be\nexperienced. For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there have been a\ncrisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, not effectively received,\nand Christ\u2019s sacrifice in so far forth is incomplete. Methodism surely\nhere follows, if not the healthier\u2010minded, yet on the whole the profounder\nspiritual instinct. The individual models which it has set up as typical\nand worthy of imitation are not only the more interesting dramatically,\nbut psychologically they have been the more complete.\n\nIn the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain and America we have, so\nto speak, the codified and stereotyped procedure to which this way of\nthinking has led. In spite of the unquestionable fact that saints of the\nonce\u2010born type exist, that there may be a gradual growth in holiness\nwithout a cataclysm; in spite of the obvious leakage (as one may say) of\nmuch mere natural goodness into the scheme of salvation; revivalism has\nalways assumed that only its own type of religious experience can be\nperfect; you must first be nailed on the cross of natural despair and\nagony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be miraculously released.\n\nIt is natural that those who personally have traversed such an experience\nshould carry away a feeling of its being a miracle rather than a natural\nprocess. Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visions witnessed;\nautomatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems, after the surrender\nof the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and\ntaken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness,\nrightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant as well to warrant one\u2019s\nbelief in a radically new substantial nature.\n\n\n    \u201cConversion,\u201d writes the New England Puritan, Joseph Alleine, \u201cis\n    not the putting in a patch of holiness; but with the true convert\n    holiness is woven into all his powers, principles, and practice.\n    The sincere Christian is quite a new fabric, from the foundation\n    to the top\u2010stone. He is a new man, a new creature.\u201d\n\n    And Jonathan Edwards says in the same strain: \u201cThose gracious\n    influences which are the effects of the Spirit of God are\n    altogether supernatural\u2014are quite different from anything that\n    unregenerate men experience. They are what no improvement, or\n    composition of natural qualifications or principles will ever\n    produce; because they not only differ from what is natural, and\n    from everything that natural men experience in degree and\n    circumstances, but also in kind, and are of a nature far more\n    excellent. From hence it follows that in gracious affections there\n    are [also] new perceptions and sensations entirely different in\n    their nature and kind from anything experienced by the [same]\n    saints before they were sanctified.... The conceptions which the\n    saints have of the loveliness of God, and that kind of delight\n    which they experience in it, are quite peculiar, and entirely\n    different from anything which a natural man can possess, or of\n    which he can form any proper notion.\u201d\n\n\nAnd that such a glorious transformation as this ought of necessity to be\npreceded by despair is shown by Edwards in another passage.\n\n\n    \u201cSurely it cannot be unreasonable,\u201d he says, \u201cthat before God\n    delivers us from a state of sin and liability to everlasting woe,\n    he should give us some considerable sense of the evil from which\n    he delivers us, in order that we may know and feel the importance\n    of salvation, and be enabled to appreciate the value of what God\n    is pleased to do for us. As those who are saved are successively\n    in two extremely different states\u2014first in a state of condemnation\n    and then in a state of justification and blessedness\u2014and as God,\n    in the salvation of men, deals with them as rational and\n    intelligent creatures, it appears agreeable to this wisdom, that\n    those who are saved should be made sensible of their Being, in\n    those two different states. In the first place, that they should\n    be made sensible of their state of condemnation; and afterwards,\n    of their state of deliverance and happiness.\u201d\n\n\nSuch quotations express sufficiently well for our purpose the doctrinal\ninterpretation of these changes. Whatever part suggestion and imitation\nmay have played in producing them in men and women in excited assemblies,\nthey have at any rate been in countless individual instances an original\nand unborrowed experience. Were we writing the story of the mind from the\npurely natural\u2010history point of view, with no religious interest whatever,\nwe should still have to write down man\u2019s liability to sudden and complete\nconversion as one of his most curious peculiarities.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nWhat, now, must we ourselves think of this question? Is an instantaneous\nconversion a miracle in which God is present as he is present in no change\nof heart less strikingly abrupt? Are there two classes of human beings,\neven among the apparently regenerate, of which the one class really\npartakes of Christ\u2019s nature while the other merely seems to do so? Or, on\nthe contrary, may the whole phenomenon of regeneration, even in these\nstartling instantaneous examples, possibly be a strictly natural process,\ndivine in its fruits, of course, but in one case more and in another less\nso, and neither more nor less divine in its mere causation and mechanism\nthan any other process, high or low, of man\u2019s interior life?\n\nBefore proceeding to answer this question, I must ask you to listen to\nsome more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained the\nshifting of men\u2019s centres of personal energy within them and the lighting\nup of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomena as partly due to\nexplicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but as due largely\nalso to the subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by\nthe experiences of life. When ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into\nflower. I have now to speak of the subconscious region, in which such\nprocesses of flowering may occur, in a somewhat less vague way. I only\nregret that my limits of time here force me to be so short.\n\nThe expression \u201cfield of consciousness\u201d has but recently come into vogue\nin the psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental life which\nfigured most was the single \u201cidea\u201d supposed to be a definitely outlined\nthing. But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the\nactual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of\nconsciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time; and,\nsecond, to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, this field,\nwith any definiteness.\n\nAs our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest,\naround which the objects of which we are less and less attentively\nconscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some\nfields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a\nwide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often\nget glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot\nbeyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which\nwe seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive actually. At other\ntimes, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to\na point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted.\n\nDifferent individuals present constitutional differences in this matter of\nwidth of field. Your great organizing geniuses are men with habitually\nvast fields of mental vision, in which a whole programme of future\noperations will appear dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ahead\ninto definite directions of advance. In common people there is never this\nmagnificent inclusive view of a topic. They stumble along, feeling their\nway, as it were, from point to point, and often stop entirely. In certain\ndiseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the\npast or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some\none simple emotion or sensation of the body.\n\nThe important fact which this \u201cfield\u201d formula commemorates is the\nindetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter\nwhich the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to\nguide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our attention. It\nlies around us like a \u201cmagnetic field,\u201d inside of which our centre of\nenergy turns like a compass\u2010needle, as the present phase of consciousness\nalters into its successor. Our whole past store of memories floats beyond\nthis margin, ready at a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residual\npowers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute our empirical self\nstretches continuously beyond it. So vaguely drawn are the outlines\nbetween what is actual and what is only potential at any moment of our\nconscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain mental elements\nwhether we are conscious of them or not.\n\nThe ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the\nmarginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the\nconsciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal,\ninattentive or attentive, is there in the \u201cfield\u201d of the moment, all dim\nand impossible to assign as the latter\u2019s outline may be; and, second, that\nwhat is absolutely extra\u2010marginal is absolutely non\u2010existent, and cannot\nbe a fact of consciousness at all.\n\nAnd having reached this point, I must now ask you to recall what I said in\nmy last lecture about the subconscious life. I said, as you may recollect,\nthat those who first laid stress upon these phenomena could not know the\nfacts as we now know them. My first duty now is to tell you what I meant\nby such a statement.\n\nI cannot but think that the most important step forward that has occurred\nin psychology since I have been a student of that science is the\ndiscovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there\nis not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre\nand margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories,\nthoughts, and feelings which are extra\u2010marginal and outside of the primary\nconsciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of\nsome sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call\nthis the most important step forward because, unlike the other advances\nwhich psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely\nunsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature. No other step\nforward which psychology has made can proffer any such claim as this.\n\nIn particular this discovery of a consciousness existing beyond the field,\nor subliminally as Mr. Myers terms it, casts light on many phenomena of\nreligious biography. That is why I have to advert to it now, although it\nis naturally impossible for me in this place to give you any account of\nthe evidence on which the admission of such a consciousness is based. You\nwill find it set forth in many recent books, Binet\u2019s Alterations of\nPersonality(122) being perhaps as good a one as any to recommend.\n\nThe human material on which the demonstration has been made has so far\nbeen rather limited and, in part at least, eccentric, consisting of\nunusually suggestible hypnotic subjects, and of hysteric patients. Yet the\nelementary mechanisms of our life are presumably so uniform that what is\nshown to be true in a marked degree of some persons is probably true in\nsome degree of all, and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily high\ndegree.\n\nThe most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultra\u2010\nmarginal life of this sort is that one\u2019s ordinary fields of consciousness\nare liable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess the\nsource, and which, therefore, take for him the form of unaccountable\nimpulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even of\nhallucinations of sight or hearing. The impulses may take the direction of\nautomatic speech or writing, the meaning of which the subject himself may\nnot understand even while he utters it; and generalizing this phenomenon,\nMr. Myers has given the name of _automatism_, sensory or motor, emotional\nor intellectual, to this whole sphere of effects, due to \u201cuprushes\u201d into\nthe ordinary consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts\nof the mind.\n\nThe simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of post\u2010hypnotic\nsuggestion, so\u2010called. You give to a hypnotized subject, adequately\nsusceptible, an order to perform some designated act\u2014usual or eccentric,\nit makes no difference\u2014after he wakes from his hypnotic sleep. Punctually,\nwhen the signal comes or the time elapses upon which you have told him\nthat the act must ensue, he performs it;\u2014but in so doing he has no\nrecollection of your suggestion, and he always trumps up an improvised\npretext for his behavior if the act be of an eccentric kind. It may even\nbe suggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear a voice at a certain\ninterval after waking, and when the time comes the vision is seen or the\nvoice heard, with no inkling on the subject\u2019s part of its source. In the\nwonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and\nothers, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have\nrevealed to us whole systems of underground life, in the shape of memories\nof a painful sort which lead a parasitic existence, buried outside of the\nprimary fields of consciousness, and making irruptions thereinto with\nhallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion,\nand the whole procession of symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of\nmind. Alter or abolish by suggestion these subconscious memories, and the\npatient immediately gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr.\nMyers\u2019s sense of the word. These clinical records sound like fairy\u2010tales\nwhen one first reads them, yet it is impossible to doubt their accuracy;\nand, the path having been once opened by these first observers, similar\nobservations have been made elsewhere. They throw, as I said, a wholly new\nlight upon our natural constitution.\n\nAnd it seems to me that they make a farther step inevitable. Interpreting\nthe unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me that hereafter,\nwherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it motor impulses, or\nobsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or delusion, or hallucination,\nwe are bound first of all to make search whether it be not an explosion,\ninto the fields of ordinary consciousness, of ideas elaborated outside of\nthose fields in subliminal regions of the mind. We should look, therefore,\nfor its source in the Subject\u2019s subconscious life. In the hypnotic cases,\nwe ourselves create the source by our suggestion, so we know it directly.\nIn the hysteric cases, the lost memories which are the source have to be\nextracted from the patient\u2019s Subliminal by a number of ingenious methods,\nfor an account of which you must consult the books. In other pathological\ncases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathic obsessions, the\nsource is yet to seek, but by analogy it also should be in subliminal\nregions which improvements in our methods may yet conceivably put on tap.\nThere lies the mechanism logically to be assumed,\u2014but the assumption\ninvolves a vast program of work to be done in the way of verification, in\nwhich the religious experiences of man must play their part.(123)\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nAnd thus I return to our own specific subject of instantaneous\nconversions. You remember the cases of Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and the\ngraduate of Oxford converted at three in the afternoon. Similar\noccurrences abound, some with and some without luminous visions, all with\na sense of astonished happiness, and of being wrought on by a higher\ncontrol. If, abstracting altogether from the question of their value for\nthe future spiritual life of the individual, we take them on their\npsychological side exclusively, so many peculiarities in them remind us of\nwhat we find outside of conversion that we are tempted to class them along\nwith other automatisms, and to suspect that what makes the difference\nbetween a sudden and a gradual convert is not necessarily the presence of\ndivine miracle in the case of one and of something less divine in that of\nthe other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity, the fact,\nnamely, that in the recipient of the more instantaneous grace we have one\nof those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in which mental\nwork can go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly\nupsetting the equilibrium of the primary consciousness, may come.\n\nI do not see why Methodists need object to such a view. Pray go back and\nrecollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very\nfirst lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that\nthe worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment,\nI said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or\ncondition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the\n_fruits for life_ of the state of conversion are good, we ought to\nidealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology;\nif not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural\nbeing may have infused it.\n\nWell, how is it with these fruits? If we except the class of pre\u00ebminent\nsaints of whom the names illumine history, and consider only the usual run\nof \u201csaints,\u201d the shopkeeping church\u2010members and ordinary youthful or\nmiddle\u2010aged recipients of instantaneous conversion, whether at revivals or\nin the spontaneous course of methodistic growth, you will probably agree\nthat no splendor worthy of a wholly supernatural creature fulgurates from\nthem, or sets them apart from the mortals who have never experienced that\nfavor. Were it true that a suddenly converted man as such is, as Edwards\nsays,(124) of an entirely different kind from a natural man, partaking as\nhe does directly of Christ\u2019s substance, there surely ought to be some\nexquisite class\u2010mark, some distinctive radiance attaching even to the\nlowliest specimen of this genus, to which no one of us could remain\ninsensible, and which, so far as it went, would prove him more excellent\nthan ever the most highly gifted among mere natural men. But notoriously\nthere is no such radiance. Converted men as a class are indistinguishable\nfrom natural men; some natural men even excel some converted men in their\nfruits; and no one ignorant of doctrinal theology could guess by mere\nevery\u2010day inspection of the \u201caccidents\u201d of the two groups of persons\nbefore him, that their substance differed as much as divine differs from\nhuman substance.\n\nThe believers in the non\u2010natural character of sudden conversion have had\npractically to admit that there is no unmistakable class\u2010mark distinctive\nof all true converts. The super\u2010normal incidents, such as voices and\nvisions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented\nscripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected\nwith the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still,\nbe counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second\nbirth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God,\nthe permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it\nhas to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may\neven be found outside of Christianity altogether.\n\nThroughout Jonathan Edwards\u2019s admirably rich and delicate description of\nthe supernaturally infused condition, in his Treatise on Religious\nAffections, there is not one decisive trait, not one mark, that\nunmistakably parts it off from what may possibly be only an exceptionally\nhigh degree of natural goodness. In fact, one could hardly read a clearer\nargument than this book unwittingly offers in favor of the thesis that no\nchasm exists between the orders of human excellence, but that here as\nelsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, and generation and\nregeneration are matters of degree.\n\nAll which denial of two objective classes of human beings separated by a\nchasm must not leave us blind to the extraordinary momentousness of the\nfact of his conversion to the individual himself who gets converted. There\nare higher and lower limits of possibility set to each personal life. If a\nflood but goes above one\u2019s head, its absolute elevation becomes a matter\nof small importance; and when we touch our own upper limit and live in our\nown highest centre of energy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how\nmuch higher some one else\u2019s centre may be. A small man\u2019s salvation will\nalways be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts _for him_, and\nwe should remember this when the fruits of our ordinary evangelicism look\ndiscouraging. Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of these\nspiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, might have\nbeen, if such poor grace as they have received had never touched them at\nall?(125)\n\nIf we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class standing for a\ngrade of spiritual excellence, I believe we shall find natural men and\nconverts both sudden and gradual in all the classes. The forms which\nregenerative change effects have, then, no general spiritual significance,\nbut only a psychological significance. We have seen how Starbuck\u2019s\nlaborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinary\nspiritual growth. Another American psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe,(126)\nhas analyzed the cases of seventy\u2010seven converts or ex\u2010candidates for\nconversion, known to him, and the results strikingly confirm the view that\nsudden conversion is connected with the possession of an active subliminal\nself. Examining his subjects with reference to their hypnotic sensibility\nand to such automatisms as hypnagogic hallucinations, odd impulses,\nreligious dreams about the time of their conversion, etc., he found these\nrelatively much more frequent in the group of converts whose\ntransformation had been \u201cstriking,\u201d \u201cstriking\u201d transformation being\ndefined as a change which, though not necessarily instantaneous, seems to\nthe subject of it to be distinctly different from a process of growth,\nhowever rapid.(127) Candidates for conversion at revivals are, as you\nknow, often disappointed: they experience nothing striking. Professor Coe\nhad a number of persons of this class among his seventy\u2010seven subjects,\nand they almost all, when tested by hypnotism, proved to belong to a\nsubclass which he calls \u201cspontaneous,\u201d that is, fertile in self\u2010\nsuggestions, as distinguished from a \u201cpassive\u201d subclass, to which most of\nthe subjects of striking transformation belonged. His inference is that\nself\u2010suggestion of impossibility had prevented the influence upon these\npersons of an environment which, on the more \u201cpassive\u201d subjects, had\neasily brought forth the effects they looked for. Sharp distinctions are\ndifficult in these regions, and Professor Coe\u2019s numbers are small. But his\nmethods were careful, and the results tally with what one might expect;\nand they seem, on the whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which is\nthat if you should expose to a converting influence a subject in whom\nthree factors unite: first, pronounced emotional sensibility; second,\ntendency to automatisms; and third, suggestibility of the passive type;\nyou might then safely predict the result: there would be a sudden\nconversion, a transformation of the striking kind.\n\nDoes this temperamental origin diminish the significance of the sudden\nconversion when it has occurred? Not in the least, as Professor Coe well\nsays; for \u201cthe ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological,\nnothing definable in terms of _how it happens_, but something ethical,\ndefinable only in terms of _what is attained_.\u201d(128)\n\nAs we proceed farther in our inquiry we shall see that what is attained is\noften an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic\nlevel, in which impossible things have become possible, and new energies\nand endurances are shown. The personality is changed, the man _is_ born\nanew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the\nparticular shape to his metamorphosis. \u201cSanctification\u201d is the technical\nname of this result; and erelong examples of it shall be brought before\nyou. In this lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on the\nassurance and peace which fill the hour of change itself.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nOne word more, though, before proceeding to that point, lest the final\npurpose of my explanation of suddenness by subliminal activity be\nmisunderstood. I do indeed believe that if the Subject have no liability\nto such subconscious activity, or if his conscious fields have a hard rind\nof a margin that resists incursions from beyond it, his conversion must be\ngradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growth into new habits.\nHis possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or pervious\nmargin, is thus a _conditio sine qua non_ of the Subject\u2019s becoming\nconverted in the instantaneous way. But if you, being orthodox Christians,\nask me as a psychologist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a\nsubliminal self does not exclude the notion of the direct presence of the\nDeity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist I do not\nsee why it necessarily should. The lower manifestations of the Subliminal,\nindeed, fall within the resources of the personal subject: his ordinary\nsense\u2010material, inattentively taken in and subconsciously remembered and\ncombined, will account for all his usual automatisms. But just as our\nprimary wide\u2010awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of\nthings material, so it is logically conceivable that _if there be_ higher\nspiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition\nof their doing so _might be_ our possession of a subconscious region which\nalone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might\nclose a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.\n\nThus that perception of external control which is so essential a feature\nin conversion might, in some cases at any rate, be interpreted as the\northodox interpret it: forces transcending the finite individual might\nimpress him, on condition of his being what we may call a subliminal human\nspecimen. But in any case the _value_ of these forces would have to be\ndetermined by their effects, and the mere fact of their transcendency\nwould of itself establish no presumption that they were more divine than\ndiabolical.\n\nI confess that this is the way in which I should rather see the topic left\nlying in your minds until I come to a much later lecture, when I hope once\nmore to gather these dropped threads together into more definitive\nconclusions. The notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not at this\npoint of our inquiry to be held to _exclude_ all notion of a higher\npenetration. If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get\naccess to us only through the subliminal door. (See below, p. 515 ff.)\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nLet us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the hour of the\nconversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this sense of\nhigher control. It is not always, but it is very often present. We saw\nexamples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. The need of\nsuch a higher controlling agency is well expressed in the short reference\nwhich the eminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makes to the crisis of\nhis own conversion. It was at Naples in his early manhood, in the summer\nof 1827.\n\n\n    \u201cMy sadness,\u201d he says, \u201cwas without limit, and having got entire\n    possession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent\n    external acts to the most secret thoughts, and corrupted at their\n    source my feelings, my judgment, and my happiness. It was then\n    that I saw that to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my\n    reason and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be to\n    act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one of his eyes\n    by the aid of the other equally blind one. I had then no resource\n    save in _some influence from without_. I remembered the promise of\n    the Holy Ghost; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel\n    had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from\n    necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this\n    promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my\n    soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action,\n    capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and\n    exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of the\n    rest of nature. Renouncing then all merit, all strength,\n    abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other\n    title to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw\n    myself on my knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life.\n    From this day onwards a new interior life began for me: not that\n    my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost its sting. Hope had\n    entered into my heart, and once entered on the path, the God of\n    Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little\n    by little did the rest.\u201d(129)\n\n\nIt is needless to remind you once more of the admirable congruity of\nProtestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such\nexperiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously _is_\ncan do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and without resource,\nand no works it can accomplish will avail. Redemption from such subjective\nconditions must be a free gift or nothing, and grace through Christ\u2019s\naccomplished sacrifice is such a gift.\n\n\n    \u201cGod,\u201d says Luther, \u201cis the God of the humble, the miserable, the\n    oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even\n    to nothing; and his nature is to give sight to the blind, to\n    comfort the broken\u2010hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very\n    desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of\n    man\u2019s own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean,\n    miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God\n    to come to his own natural and proper work. Therefore God must\n    take this maul in hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and\n    bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence, that she may\n    so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn\n    and damned. But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is\n    terrified and cast down, he is so little able to raise himself up\n    again and say, \u2018Now I am bruised and afflicted enough; now is the\n    time of grace; now is the time to hear Christ.\u2019 The foolishness of\n    man\u2019s heart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself\n    more laws to satisfy his conscience. \u2018If I live,\u2019 saith he, \u2018I\n    will amend my life: I will do this, I will do that.\u2019 But here,\n    except thou do the quite contrary, except thou send Moses away\n    with his law, and in these terrors and this anguish lay hold upon\n    Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl, thy\n    shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works,\n    thy merits? what shall all these do? what shall the law of Moses\n    avail? If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits\n    could have loved the Son of God, and so come to him, what needed\n    he to deliver himself for me? If I, being a wretch and damned\n    sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son\n    of God to be given? But because there was no other price,\n    therefore he delivered neither sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but\n    even God himself, entirely and wholly \u2018for me,\u2019 even \u2018for me,\u2019 I\n    say, a miserable, wretched sinner. Now, therefore, I take comfort\n    and apply this to _myself_. And this manner of applying is the\n    very true force and power of faith. For he died _not_ to justify\n    the righteous, but the _un_\u2010righteous, and to make _them_ the\n    children of God.\u201d(130)\n\n\nThat is, the more literally lost you are, the more literally you are the\nvery being whom Christ\u2019s sacrifice has already saved. Nothing in Catholic\ntheology, I imagine, has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as this\nmessage from Luther\u2019s personal experience. As Protestants are not all sick\nsouls, of course reliance on what Luther exults in calling the dung of\none\u2019s merits, the filthy puddle of one\u2019s own righteousness, has come to\nthe front again in their religion; but the adequacy of his view of\nChristianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure is shown by\nits wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and quickening thing.\n\nFaith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luther\nmeant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually conceived\nof. But this is only one part of Luther\u2019s faith, the other part being far\nmore vital. This other part is something not intellectual but immediate\nand intuitive, the assurance, namely, that I, this individual I, just as I\nstand, without one plea, etc., am saved now and forever.(131)\n\nProfessor Leuba is undoubtedly right in contending that the conceptual\nbelief about Christ\u2019s work, although so often efficacious and antecedent,\nis really accessory and non\u2010essential, and that the \u201cjoyous conviction\u201d\ncan also come by far other channels than this conception. It is to the\njoyous conviction itself, the assurance that all is well with one, that he\nwould give the name of faith _par excellence_.\n\n\n    \u201cWhen the sense of estrangement,\u201d he writes, \u201cfencing man about in\n    a narrowly limited ego, breaks down, the individual finds himself\n    \u2018at one with all creation.\u2019 He lives in the universal life; he and\n    man, he and nature, he and God, are one. That state of confidence,\n    trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement of\n    moral unity, is the _Faith\u2010state_. Various dogmatic beliefs\n    suddenly, on the advent of the faith\u2010state, acquire a character of\n    certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the\n    ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is\n    irrelevant. But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of\n    the faith\u2010state, it is a gross error to imagine that the chief\n    practical value of the faith\u2010state is its power to stamp with the\n    seal of reality certain particular theological conceptions.(132)\n    On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the\n    psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending\n    desires to one direction; a growth which expresses itself in new\n    affective states and new reactions; in larger, nobler, more\n    Christ\u2010like activities. The ground of the specific assurance in\n    religious dogmas is then an affective experience. The objects of\n    faith may even be preposterous; the affective stream will float\n    them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude. The more\n    startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems,\n    the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated\n    notions.\u201d(133)\n\n\nThe characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity,\nshould, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith\u2010\nstate, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to\nrealize their intensity, unless one have been through the experience one\u2019s\nself.\n\nThe central one is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is\nultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the _willingness to be_,\neven though the outer conditions should remain the same. The certainty of\nGod\u2019s \u201cgrace,\u201d of \u201cjustification,\u201d \u201csalvation,\u201d is an objective belief\nthat usually accompanies the change in Christians; but this may be\nentirely lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same\u2014you will\nrecollect the case of the Oxford graduate: and many might be given where\nthe assurance of personal salvation was only a later result. A passion of\nwillingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this\nstate of mind.\n\nThe second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The\nmysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says; and often, nay\nusually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words. But these more\nintellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat of mysticism.\n\nA third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which\nthe world often appears to undergo. \u201cAn appearance of newness beautifies\nevery object,\u201d the precise opposite of that other sort of newness, that\ndreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world, which\nis experienced by melancholy patients, and of which you may recall my\nrelating some examples.(134) This sense of clean and beautiful newness\nwithin and without is one of the commonest entries in conversion records.\nJonathan Edwards thus describes it in himself:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cAfter this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and\n    became more and more lively, and had more of that inward\n    sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed\n    to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine\n    glory, in almost everything. God\u2019s excellency, his wisdom, his\n    purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon,\n    and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and\n    trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my\n    mind. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so\n    sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so\n    terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with\n    thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm\n    rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me.\u201d(135)\n\n\nBilly Bray, an excellent little illiterate English evangelist, records his\nsense of newness thus:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI said to the Lord: \u2018Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive,\n    they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall\n    be opened, and I have faith to believe it.\u2019 In an instant the Lord\n    made me so happy that I cannot express what I felt. I shouted for\n    joy. I praised God with my whole heart.... I think this was in\n    November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know. I\n    remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the\n    fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new\n    world. I spent the greater part of my time in praising the\n    Lord.\u201d(136)\n\n\nStarbuck and Leuba both illustrate this sense of newness by quotations. I\ntake the two following from Starbuck\u2019s manuscript collection. One, a\nwoman, says:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI was taken to a camp\u2010meeting, mother and religious friends\n    seeking and praying for my conversion. My emotional nature was\n    stirred to its depths; confessions of depravity and pleading with\n    God for salvation from sin made me oblivious of all surroundings.\n    I plead for mercy, and had a vivid realization of forgiveness and\n    renewal of my nature. When rising from my knees I exclaimed, \u2018Old\n    things have passed away, all things have become new.\u2019 It was like\n    entering another world, a new state of existence. Natural objects\n    were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw\n    beauty in every material object in the universe, the woods were\n    vocal with heavenly music; my soul exulted in the love of God, and\n    I wanted everybody to share in my joy.\u201d\n\n\nThe next case is that of a man:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI know not how I got back into the encampment, but found myself\n    staggering up to Rev. \u2014\u2014\u2019s Holiness tent\u2014and as it was full of\n    seekers and a terrible noise inside, some groaning, some laughing,\n    and some shouting, and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, I\n    fell on my face by a bench, and tried to pray, and every time I\n    would call on God, something like a man\u2019s hand would strangle me\n    by choking. I don\u2019t know whether there were any one around or near\n    me or not. I thought I should surely die if I did not get help,\n    but just as often as I would pray, that unseen hand was felt on my\n    throat and my breath squeezed off. Finally something said:\n    \u2018Venture on the atonement, for you will die anyway if you don\u2019t.\u2019\n    So I made one final struggle to call on God for mercy, with the\n    same choking and strangling, determined to finish the sentence of\n    prayer for Mercy, if I did strangle and die, and the last I\n    remember that time was falling back on the ground with the same\n    unseen hand on my throat. I don\u2019t know how long I lay there or\n    what was going on. None of my folks were present. When I came to\n    myself, there were a crowd around me praising God. The very\n    heavens seemed to open and pour down rays of light and glory. Not\n    for a moment only, but all day and night, floods of light and\n    glory seemed to pour through my soul, and oh, how I was changed,\n    and everything became new. My horses and hogs and even everybody\n    seemed changed.\u201d\n\n\nThis man\u2019s case introduces the feature of automatisms, which in\nsuggestible subjects have been so startling a feature at revivals since,\nin Edwards\u2019s, Wesley\u2019s, and Whitfield\u2019s time, these became a regular means\nof gospel propagation. They were at first supposed to be semi\u2010miraculous\nproofs of \u201cpower\u201d on the part of the Holy Ghost; but great divergence of\nopinion quickly arose concerning them. Edwards, in his Thoughts on the\nRevival of Religion in New England, has to defend them against their\ncritics; and their value has long been matter of debate even within the\nrevivalistic denominations.(137) They undoubtedly have no essential\nspiritual significance, and although their presence makes his conversion\nmore memorable to the convert, it has never been proved that converts who\nshow them are more persevering or fertile in good fruits than those whose\nchange of heart has had less violent accompaniments. On the whole,\nunconsciousness, convulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utterances, and\nsuffocation, must be simply ascribed to the subject\u2019s having a large\nsubliminal region, involving nervous instability. This is often the\nsubject\u2019s own view of the matter afterwards. One of Starbuck\u2019s\ncorrespondents writes, for instance:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI have been through the experience which is known as conversion.\n    My explanation of it is this: the subject works his emotions up to\n    the breaking point, at the same time resisting their physical\n    manifestations, such as quickened pulse, etc., and then suddenly\n    lets them have their full sway over his body. The relief is\n    something wonderful, and the pleasurable effects of the emotions\n    are experienced to the highest degree.\u201d\n\n\nThere is one form of sensory automatism which possibly deserves special\nnotice on account of its frequency. I refer to hallucinatory or pseudo\u2010\nhallucinatory luminous phenomena, _photisms_, to use the term of the\npsychologists. Saint Paul\u2019s blinding heavenly vision seems to have been a\nphenomenon of this sort; so does Constantine\u2019s cross in the sky. The last\ncase but one which I quoted mentions floods of light and glory. Henry\nAlline mentions a light, about whose externality he seems uncertain.\nColonel Gardiner sees a blazing light. President Finney writes:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cAll at once the glory of God shone upon and round about me in a\n    manner almost marvelous.... A light perfectly ineffable shone in\n    my soul, that almost prostrated me on the ground.... This light\n    seemed like the brightness of the sun in every direction. It was\n    too intense for the eyes.... I think I knew something then, by\n    actual experience, of that light that prostrated Paul on the way\n    to Damascus. It was surely a light such as I could not have\n    endured long.\u201d(138)\n\n\nSuch reports of photisms are indeed far from uncommon. Here is another\nfrom Starbuck\u2019s collection, where the light appeared evidently external:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI had attended a series of revival services for about two weeks\n    off and on. Had been invited to the altar several times, all the\n    time becoming more deeply impressed, when finally I decided I must\n    do this, or I should be lost. Realization of conversion was very\n    vivid, like a ton\u2019s weight being lifted from my heart; a strange\n    light which seemed to light up the whole room (for it was dark); a\n    conscious supreme bliss which caused me to repeat \u2018Glory to God\u2019\n    for a long time. Decided to be God\u2019s child for life, and to give\n    up my pet ambition, wealth and social position. My former habits\n    of life hindered my growth somewhat, but I set about overcoming\n    these systematically, and in one year my whole nature was changed,\n    i.e., my ambitions were of a different order.\u201d\n\n\nHere is another one of Starbuck\u2019s cases, involving a luminous element:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI had been clearly converted twenty\u2010three years before, or rather\n    reclaimed. My experience in regeneration was then clear and\n    spiritual, and I had not backslidden. But I experienced entire\n    sanctification on the 15th day of March, 1893, about eleven\n    o\u2019clock in the morning. The particular accompaniments of the\n    experience were entirely unexpected. I was quietly sitting at home\n    singing selections out of Pentecostal Hymns. Suddenly there seemed\n    to be a something sweeping into me and inflating my entire\n    being\u2014such a sensation as I had never experienced before. When\n    this experience came, I seemed to be conducted around a large,\n    capacious, well\u2010lighted room. As I walked with my invisible\n    conductor and looked around, a clear thought was coined in my\n    mind, \u2018They are not here, they are gone.\u2019 As soon as the thought\n    was definitely formed in my mind, though no word was spoken, the\n    Holy Spirit impressed me that I was surveying my own soul. Then,\n    for the first time in all my life, did I know that I was cleansed\n    from all sin, and filled with the fullness of God.\u201d\n\n\nLeuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds\none of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds\ncalled mescal by the Mexicans:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cWhen I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of\n    God appeared in all his visible creation. I well remember we\n    reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as\n    it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may\n    so express it, in the glory of God.\u201d(139)\n\n\nThe most characteristic of all the elements of the conversion crisis, and\nthe last one of which I shall speak, is the ecstasy of happiness produced.\nWe have already heard several accounts of it, but I will add a couple\nmore. President Finney\u2019s is so vivid that I give it at length:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cAll my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; and the utterance of\n    my heart was, \u2018I want to pour my whole soul out to God.\u2019 The\n    rising of my soul was so great that I rushed into the back room of\n    the front office, to pray. There was no fire and no light in the\n    room; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly\n    light. As I went in and shut the door after me, it seemed as if I\n    met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. It did not occur to me\n    then, nor did it for some time afterwards, that it was wholly a\n    mental state. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him as I\n    would see any other man. He said nothing, but looked at me in such\n    a manner as to break me right down at his feet. I have always\n    since regarded this as a most remarkable state of mind; for it\n    seemed to me a reality that he stood before me, and I fell down at\n    his feet and poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like a child,\n    and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance. It\n    seemed to me that I bathed his feet with my tears; and yet I had\n    no distinct impression that I touched him, that I recollect. I\n    must have continued in this state for a good while; but my mind\n    was too much absorbed with the interview to recollect anything\n    that I said. But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to\n    break off from the interview, I returned to the front office, and\n    found that the fire that I had made of large wood was nearly\n    burned out. But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the\n    fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any\n    expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that\n    there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I\n    had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the\n    Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go\n    through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a\n    wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it\n    seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not\n    express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath of\n    God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like\n    immense wings.\n\n    \u201cNo words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in\n    my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I\n    should say I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my\n    heart. These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one\n    after the other, until I recollect I cried out, \u2018I shall die if\n    these waves continue to pass over me.\u2019 I said, \u2018Lord, I cannot\n    bear any more;\u2019 yet I had no fear of death.\n\n    \u201cHow long I continued in this state, with this baptism continuing\n    to roll over me and go through me, I do not know. But I know it\n    was late in the evening when a member of my choir\u2014for I was the\n    leader of the choir\u2014came into the office to see me. He was a\n    member of the church. He found me in this state of loud weeping,\n    and said to me, \u2018Mr. Finney, what ails you?\u2019 I could make him no\n    answer for some time. He then said, \u2018Are you in pain?\u2019 I gathered\n    myself up as best I could, and replied, \u2018No, but so happy that I\n    cannot live.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\nI just now quoted Billy Bray; I cannot do better than give his own brief\naccount of his post\u2010conversion feelings:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI can\u2019t help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift\n    up one foot, and it seems to say \u2018Glory\u2019; and I lift up the other,\n    and it seems to say \u2018Amen\u2019; and so they keep up like that all the\n    time I am walking.\u201d(140)\n\n\nOne word, before I close this lecture, on the question of the transiency\nor permanence of these abrupt conversions. Some of you, I feel sure,\nknowing that numerous backslidings and relapses take place, make of these\ntheir apperceiving mass for interpreting the whole subject, and dismiss it\nwith a pitying smile at so much \u201chysterics.\u201d Psychologically, as well as\nreligiously, however, this is shallow. It misses the point of serious\ninterest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality of\nthese shiftings of character to higher levels. Men lapse from every\nlevel\u2014we need no statistics to tell us that. Love is, for instance, well\nknown not to be irrevocable, yet, constant or inconstant, it reveals new\nflights and reaches of ideality while it lasts. These revelations form its\nsignificance to men and women, whatever be its duration. So with the\nconversion experience: that it should for even a short time show a human\nbeing what the high\u2010water mark of his spiritual capacity is, this is what\nconstitutes its importance,\u2014an importance which backsliding cannot\ndiminish, although persistence might increase it. As a matter of fact, all\nthe more striking instances of conversion, all those, for instance, which\nI have quoted, _have_ been permanent. The case of which there might be\nmost doubt, on account of its suggesting so strongly an epileptoid\nseizure, was the case of M. Ratisbonne. Yet I am informed that\nRatisbonne\u2019s whole future was shaped by those few minutes. He gave up his\nproject of marriage, became a priest, founded at Jerusalem, where he went\nto dwell, a mission of nuns for the conversion of the Jews, showed no\ntendency to use for egotistic purposes the notoriety given him by the\npeculiar circumstances of his conversion,\u2014which, for the rest, he could\nseldom refer to without tears,\u2014and in short remained an exemplary son of\nthe Church until he died, late in the 80\u2019s, if I remember rightly.\n\nThe only statistics I know of, on the subject of the duration of\nconversions, are those collected for Professor Starbuck by Miss Johnston.\nThey embrace only a hundred persons, evangelical church\u2010members, more than\nhalf being Methodists. According to the statement of the subjects\nthemselves, there had been backsliding of some sort in nearly all the\ncases, 93 per cent. of the women, 77 per cent. of the men. Discussing the\nreturns more minutely, Starbuck finds that only 6 per cent. are relapses\nfrom the religious faith which the conversion confirmed, and that the\nbacksliding complained of is in most only a fluctuation in the ardor of\nsentiment. Only six of the hundred cases report a change of faith.\nStarbuck\u2019s conclusion is that the effect of conversion is to bring with it\n\u201ca changed attitude towards life, which is fairly constant and permanent,\nalthough the feelings fluctuate.... In other words, the persons who have\npassed through conversion, having once taken a stand for the religious\nlife, tend to feel themselves identified with it, no matter how much their\nreligious enthusiasm declines.\u201d(141)\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURES XI, XII, AND XIII. SAINTLINESS.\n\n\nThe last lecture left us in a state of expectancy. What may the practical\nfruits for life have been, of such movingly happy conversions as those we\nheard of? With this question the really important part of our task opens,\nfor you remember that we began all this empirical inquiry not merely to\nopen a curious chapter in the natural history of human consciousness, but\nrather to attain a spiritual judgment as to the total value and positive\nmeaning of all the religious trouble and happiness which we have seen. We\nmust, therefore, first describe the fruits of the religious life, and then\nwe must judge them. This divides our inquiry into two distinct parts. Let\nus without further preamble proceed to the descriptive task.\n\nIt ought to be the pleasantest portion of our business in these lectures.\nSome small pieces of it, it is true, may be painful, or may show human\nnature in a pathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant, because the\nbest fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has\nto show. They have always been esteemed so; here if anywhere is the\ngenuinely strenuous life; and to call to mind a succession of such\nexamples as I have lately had to wander through, though it has been only\nin the reading of them, is to feel encouraged and uplifted and washed in\nbetter moral air.\n\nThe highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to\nwhich the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for\nreligious ideals. I can do no better than quote, as to this, some remarks\nwhich Sainte\u2010Beuve in his History of Port\u2010Royal makes on the results of\nconversion or the state of grace.\n\n\u201cEven from the purely human point of view,\u201d Sainte\u2010Beuve says, \u201cthe\nphenomenon of grace must still appear sufficiently extraordinary, eminent,\nand rare, both in its nature and in its effects, to deserve a closer\nstudy. For the soul arrives thereby at a certain fixed and invincible\nstate, a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of which the\ngreatest deeds which it ever performs are executed. Through all the\ndifferent forms of communion, and all the diversity of the means which\nhelp to produce this state, whether it be reached by a jubilee, by a\ngeneral confession, by a solitary prayer and effusion, whatever in short\nbe the place and the occasion, it is easy to recognize that it is\nfundamentally one state in spirit and in fruits. Penetrate a little\nbeneath the diversity of circumstances, and it becomes evident that in\nChristians of different epochs it is always one and the same modification\nby which they are affected: there is veritably a single fundamental and\nidentical spirit of piety and charity, common to those who have received\ngrace; an inner state which before all things is one of love and humility,\nof infinite confidence in God, and of severity for one\u2019s self, accompanied\nwith tenderness for others. The fruits peculiar to this condition of the\nsoul have the same savor in all, under distant suns and in different\nsurroundings, in Saint Teresa of Avila just as in any Moravian brother of\nHerrnhut.\u201d(142)\n\nSainte\u2010Beuve has here only the more eminent instances of regeneration in\nmind, and these are of course the instructive ones for us also to\nconsider. These devotees have often laid their course so differently from\nother men that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted to call\nthem monstrous aberrations from the path of nature. I begin, therefore, by\nasking a general psychological question as to what the inner conditions\nare which may make one human character differ so extremely from another.\n\nI reply at once that where the character, as something distinguished from\nthe intellect, is concerned, the causes of human diversity lie chiefly in\nour _differing susceptibilities of emotional excitement_, and in the\n_different impulses and inhibitions_ which these bring in their train. Let\nme make this more clear.\n\nSpeaking generally, our moral and practical attitude, at any given time,\nis always a resultant of two sets of forces within us, impulses pushing us\none way and obstructions and inhibitions holding us back. \u201cYes! yes!\u201d say\nthe impulses; \u201cNo! no!\u201d say the inhibitions. Few people who have not\nexpressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of\ninhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive\npressure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar. The\ninfluence is so incessant that it becomes subconscious. All of you, for\nexample, sit here with a certain constraint at this moment, and entirely\nwithout express consciousness of the fact, because of the influence of the\noccasion. If left alone in the room, each of you would probably\ninvoluntarily rearrange himself, and make his attitude more \u201cfree and\neasy.\u201d But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any\ngreat emotional excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy appear in the\nstreet with his face covered with shaving\u2010lather because a house across\nthe way was on fire; and a woman will run among strangers in her nightgown\nif it be a question of saving her baby\u2019s life or her own. Take a self\u2010\nindulgent woman\u2019s life in general. She will yield to every inhibition set\nby her disagreeable sensations, lie late in bed, live upon tea or\nbromides, keep indoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds her obedient\nto its \u201cno.\u201d But make a mother of her, and what have you? Possessed by\nmaternal excitement, she now confronts wakefulness, weariness, and toil\nwithout an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The inhibitive\npower of pain over her is extinguished wherever the baby\u2019s interests are\nat stake. The inconveniences which this creature occasions have become, as\nJames Hinton says, the glowing heart of a great joy, and indeed are now\nthe very conditions whereby the joy becomes most deep.\n\nThis is an example of what you have already heard of as the \u201cexpulsive\npower of a higher affection.\u201d But be the affection high or low, it makes\nno difference, so long as the excitement it brings be strong enough. In\none of Henry Drummond\u2019s discourses he tells of an inundation in India\nwhere an eminence with a bungalow upon it remained unsubmerged, and became\nthe refuge of a number of wild animals and reptiles in addition to the\nhuman beings who were there. At a certain moment a royal Bengal tiger\nappeared swimming towards it, reached it, and lay panting like a dog upon\nthe ground in the midst of the people, still possessed by such an agony of\nterror that one of the Englishmen could calmly step up with a rifle and\nblow out its brains. The tiger\u2019s habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled\nby the emotion of fear, which became sovereign, and formed a new centre\nfor his character.\n\nSometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are\nmixed together. In that case one hears both \u201cyeses\u201d and \u201cnoes,\u201d and the\n\u201cwill\u201d is called on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier, for\nexample, with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his fears\nimpelling him to run, and his propensities to imitation pushing him\ntowards various courses if his comrades offer various examples. His person\nbecomes the seat of a mass of interferences; and he may for a time simply\nwaver, because no one emotion prevails. There is a pitch of intensity,\nthough, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones that one as alone\neffective and sweeps its antagonists and all their inhibitions away. The\nfury of his comrades\u2019 charge, once entered on, will give this pitch of\ncourage to the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of\nfear. In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grow\nnatural because the inhibitions are annulled. Their \u201cno! no!\u201d not only is\nnot heard, it does not exist. Obstacles are then like tissue\u2010paper hoops\nto the circus rider\u2014no impediment; the flood is higher than the dam they\nmake. \u201cLass sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig sind!\u201d cries the grenadier,\nfrantic over his Emperor\u2019s capture, when his wife and babes are suggested;\nand men pent into a burning theatre have been known to cut their way\nthrough the crowd with knives.(143)\n\nOne mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the\ncomposition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive\npower over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere\nirascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in\nsubtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness,\nseverity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy,\nthough energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to\none\u2019s self\u2014it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on\none, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing\nannihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke\nsays of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what\nmakes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest\ndelights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer\nthemselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are\nelicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long\u2010\nrooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we\ntake a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called\nweakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the inaptitude for\nthese sacrificial moods, of which one\u2019s own inferior self and its pet\nsoftnesses must often be the targets and the victims.(144)\n\nSo far I have spoken of temporary alterations produced by shifting\nexcitements in the same person. But the relatively fixed differences of\ncharacter of different persons are explained in a precisely similar way.\nIn a man with a liability to a special sort of emotion, whole ranges of\ninhibition habitually vanish, which in other men remain effective, and\nother sorts of inhibition take their place. When a person has an inborn\ngenius for certain emotions, his life differs strangely from that of\nordinary people, for none of their usual deterrents check him. Your mere\naspirant to a type of character, on the contrary, only shows, when your\nnatural lover, fighter, or reformer, with whom the passion is a gift of\nnature, comes along, the hopeless inferiority of voluntary to instinctive\naction. He has deliberately to overcome his inhibitions; the genius with\nthe inborn passion seems not to feel them at all; he is free of all that\ninner friction and nervous waste. To a Fox, a Garibaldi, a General Booth,\na John Brown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the obstacles omnipotent over\nthose around them are as if non\u2010existent. Could the rest of us so\ndisregard them, there might be many such heroes, for many have the wish to\nlive for similar ideals, and only the adequate degree of inhibition\u2010\nquenching fury is lacking.(145)\n\nThe difference between willing and merely wishing, between having ideals\nthat are creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus\ndepends solely either on the amount of steam\u2010pressure chronically driving\nthe character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement\ntransiently acquired. Given a certain amount of love, indignation,\ngenerosity, magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or enthusiasm of self\u2010\nsurrender, the result is always the same. That whole raft of cowardly\nobstructions, which in tame persons and dull moods are sovereign\nimpediments to action, sinks away at once. Our conventionality,(146) our\nshyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demands for precedent and\npermission, for guarantee and surety, our small suspicions, timidities,\ndespairs, where are they now? Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in\nthe sun\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cWo sind die Sorge nun und Noth\n    Die mich noch gestern wollt\u2019 erschlaffen?\n    Ich sch\u00e4m\u2019 mich dess\u2019 im Morgenroth.\u201d\n\n\nThe flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly under that their very\ncontact is unfelt. Set free of them, we float and soar and sing. This\nauroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright\nand caroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the\ncontrolling emotion is religious. \u201cThe true monk,\u201d writes an Italian\nmystic, \u201ctakes nothing with him but his lyre.\u201d\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nWe may now turn from these psychological generalities to those fruits of\nthe religious state which form the special subject of our present lecture.\nThe man who lives in his religious centre of personal energy, and is\nactuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previous carnal self\nin perfectly definite ways. The new ardor which burns in his breast\nconsumes in its glow the lower \u201cnoes\u201d which formerly beset him, and keeps\nhim immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of his\nnature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry\nconventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The\nstone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken\ndown. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of\nfeeling in those temporary \u201cmelting moods\u201d into which either the trials of\nreal life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throw us. Especially if we\nweep! For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner\ndam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain\naway, leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler\nleading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not\nso with saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and\nLoyola, have possessed what the church traditionally reveres as a special\ngrace, the so\u2010called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood\nseems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears\nand melting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reign may\ncome by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have\n\u201ccome to stay.\u201d\n\nAt the end of the last lecture we saw this permanence to be true of the\ngeneral paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in the ebbs of\nemotional excitement meaner motives might temporarily prevail and\nbacksliding might occur. But that lower temptations may remain completely\nannulled, apart from transient emotion and as if by alteration of the\nman\u2019s habitual nature, is also proved by documentary evidence in certain\ncases. Before embarking on the general natural history of the regenerate\ncharacter, let me convince you of this curious fact by one or two\nexamples. The most numerous are those of reformed drunkards. You recollect\nthe case of Mr. Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry McAuley Water Street\nMission abounds in similar instances.(147) You also remember the graduate\nof Oxford, converted at three in the afternoon, and getting drunk in the\nhay\u2010field the next day, but after that permanently cured of his appetite.\n\u201cFrom that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never\nwant it. The same thing occurred with my pipe, ... the desire for it went\nat once and has never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance\nin each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptations since\nconversion.\u201d\n\nHere is an analogous case from Starbuck\u2019s manuscript collection:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where there was a Holiness\n    meeting, ... and I began saying, \u2018Lord, Lord, I must have this\n    blessing.\u2019 Then what was to me an audible voice said: \u2018Are you\n    willing to give up everything to the Lord?\u2019 and question after\n    question kept coming up, to all of which I said: \u2018Yes, Lord; yes,\n    Lord!\u2019 until this came: \u2018Why do you not accept it _now_?\u2019 and I\n    said: \u2018I do, Lord.\u2019\u2014I felt no particular joy, only a trust. Just\n    then the meeting closed, and, as I went out on the street, I met a\n    gentleman smoking a fine cigar, and a cloud of smoke came into my\n    face, and I took a long, deep breath of it, and praise the Lord,\n    all my appetite for it was gone. Then as I walked along the\n    street, passing saloons where the fumes of liquor came out, I\n    found that all my taste and longing for that accursed stuff was\n    gone. Glory to God! ... [But] for ten or eleven long years [after\n    that] I was in the wilderness with its ups and downs. My appetite\n    for liquor never came back.\u201d\n\n\nThe classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual\ntemptation in a single hour. To Mr. Spears the colonel said, \u201cI was\neffectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was so strongly\naddicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the head could\nhave cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed, as\nentirely as if I had been a sucking child; nor did the temptation return\nto this day.\u201d Mr. Webster\u2019s words on the same subject are these: \u201cOne\nthing I have heard the colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted\nto impurity before his acquaintance with religion; but that, so soon as he\nwas enlightened from above, he felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing\nhis nature so wonderfully that his sanctification in this respect seemed\nmore remarkable than in any other.\u201d(148)\n\nSuch rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensities reminds us so\nstrongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion\nthat it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the\ndecisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in\nhypnotism.(149) Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of cure, after a\nfew sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which the patient, left to\nordinary moral and physical influences, had struggled in vain. Both\ndrunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in this way, action through\nthe subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the prerogative of\ninducing relatively stable change. If the grace of God miraculously\noperates, it probably operates through the subliminal door, then. But just\n_how_ anything operates in this region is still unexplained, and we shall\ndo well now to say good\u2010by to the _process_ of transformation\naltogether,\u2014leaving it, if you like, a good deal of a psychological or\ntheological mystery,\u2014and to turn our attention to the fruits of the\nreligious condition, no matter in what way they may have been\nproduced.(150)\n\nThe collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is\nSaintliness.(151) The saintly character is the character for which\nspiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and\nthere is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same\nin all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.(152)\n\nThey are these:\u2014\n\n1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world\u2019s selfish\nlittle interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it\nwere sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power. In Christian\nsaintliness this power is always personified as God; but abstract moral\nideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of holiness or right\nmay also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life, in ways\nwhich I described in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen.(153)\n\n2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own\nlife, and a willing self\u2010surrender to its control.\n\n3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining\nselfhood melt down.\n\n4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious\naffections, towards \u201cyes, yes\u201d and away from \u201cno,\u201d where the claims of the\nnon\u2010ego are concerned.\n\nThese fundamental inner conditions have characteristic practical\nconsequences, as follows:\u2014\n\n_a._ _Asceticism._\u2014The self\u2010surrender may become so passionate as to turn\ninto self\u2010immolation. It may then so overrule the ordinary inhibitions of\nthe flesh that the saint finds positive pleasure in sacrifice and\nasceticism, measuring and expressing as they do the degree of his loyalty\nto the higher power.\n\n_b._ _Strength of Soul._\u2014The sense of enlargement of life may be so\nuplifting that personal motives and inhibitions, commonly omnipotent,\nbecome too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and\nfortitude open out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity takes\ntheir place. Come heaven, come hell, it makes no difference now!\n\n\n    \u201cWe forbid ourselves all seeking after popularity, all ambition to\n    appear important. We pledge ourselves to abstain from falsehood,\n    in all its degrees. We promise not to create or encourage\n    illusions as to what is possible, by what we say or write. We\n    promise to one another active sincerity, which strives to see\n    truth clearly, and which never fears to declare what it sees.\n\n    \u201cWe promise deliberate resistance to the tidal waves of fashion,\n    to the \u2018booms\u2019 and panics of the public mind, to all the forms of\n    weakness and of fear.\n\n    \u201cWe forbid ourselves the use of sarcasm. Of serious things we will\n    speak seriously and unsmilingly, without banter and without the\n    appearance of banter;\u2014and even so of all things, for there are\n    serious ways of being light of heart.\n\n    \u201cWe will put ourselves forward always for what we are, simply and\n    without false humility, as well as without pedantry, affectation,\n    or pride.\u201d\n\n\n_c._ _Purity._\u2014The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first,\nincrease of purity. The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced,\nand the cleansing of existence from brutal and sensual elements becomes\nimperative. Occasions of contact with such elements are avoided: the\nsaintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency and keep unspotted from\nthe world. In some temperaments this need of purity of spirit takes an\nascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless\nseverity.\n\n_d._ _Charity._\u2014The shifting of the emotional centre brings, secondly,\nincrease of charity, tenderness for fellow\u2010creatures. The ordinary motives\nto antipathy, which usually set such close bounds to tenderness among\nhuman beings, are inhibited. The saint loves his enemies, and treats\nloathsome beggars as his brothers.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nI now have to give some concrete illustrations of these fruits of the\nspiritual tree. The only difficulty is to choose, for they are so\nabundant.\n\nSince the sense of Presence of a higher and friendly Power seems to be the\nfundamental feature in the spiritual life, I will begin with that.\n\nIn our narratives of conversion we saw how the world might look shining\nand transfigured to the convert,(154) and, apart from anything acutely\nreligious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us\nround with friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the woods or\non the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all whispering\nwith peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of existence enfold us like\na dry warm climate, or chime through us as if our inner ears were subtly\nringing with the world\u2019s security. Thoreau writes:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cOnce, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I\n    doubted whether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to\n    a serene and healthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant.\n    But, in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts\n    prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent\n    society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in\n    every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and\n    unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere,\n    sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human\n    neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them\n    since. Every little pine\u2010needle expanded and swelled with sympathy\n    and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence\n    of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be\n    strange to me again.\u201d(155)\n\n\nIn the Christian consciousness this sense of the enveloping friendliness\nbecomes most personal and definite. \u201cThe compensation,\u201d writes a German\nauthor, \u201cfor the loss of that sense of personal independence which man so\nunwillingly gives up, is the disappearance of all _fear_ from one\u2019s life,\nthe quite indescribable and inexplicable feeling of an inner _security_,\nwhich one can only experience, but which, once it has been experienced,\none can never forget.\u201d(156)\n\nI find an excellent description of this state of mind in a sermon by Mr.\nVoysey:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cIt is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, that this\n    sense of God\u2019s unfailing presence with them in their going out and\n    in their coming in, and by night and day, is a source of absolute\n    repose and confident calmness. It drives away all fear of what may\n    befall them. That nearness of God is a constant security against\n    terror and anxiety. It is not that they are at all assured of\n    physical safety, or deem themselves protected by a love which is\n    denied to others, but that they are in a state of mind equally\n    ready to be safe or to meet with injury. If injury befall them,\n    they will be content to bear it because the Lord is their keeper,\n    and nothing can befall them without his will. If it be his will,\n    then injury is for them a blessing and no calamity at all. Thus\n    and thus only is the trustful man protected and shielded from\n    harm. And I for one\u2014by no means a thick\u2010skinned or hard\u2010nerved\n    man\u2014am absolutely satisfied with this arrangement, and do not wish\n    for any other kind of immunity from danger and catastrophe. Quite\n    as sensitive to pain as the most highly strung organism, I yet\n    feel that the worst of it is conquered, and the sting taken out of\n    it altogether, by the thought that God is our loving and sleepless\n    keeper, and that nothing can hurt us without his will.\u201d(157)\n\n\nMore excited expressions of this condition are abundant in religious\nliterature. I could easily weary you with their monotony. Here is an\naccount from Mrs. Jonathan Edwards:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cLast night,\u201d Mrs. Edwards writes, \u201cwas the sweetest night I ever\n    had in my life. I never before, for so long a time together,\n    enjoyed so much of the light and rest and sweetness of heaven in\n    my soul, but without the least agitation of body during the whole\n    time. Part of the night I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and\n    sometimes between sleeping and waking. But all night I continued\n    in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness\n    of Christ\u2019s excellent love, of his nearness to me, and of my\n    dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in\n    an entire rest in him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of\n    divine love come down from the heart of Christ in heaven into my\n    heart in a constant stream, like a stream or pencil of sweet\n    light. At the same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love\n    to Christ, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and\n    reflowing of heavenly love, and I appeared to myself to float or\n    swim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the motes swimming in the\n    beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which come in at the\n    window. I think that what I felt each minute was worth more than\n    all the outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in my\n    whole life put together. It was pleasure, without the least sting,\n    or any interruption. It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost\n    in; it seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain. There\n    was but little difference, whether I was asleep or awake, but if\n    there was any difference, the sweetness was greatest while I was\n    asleep.(158) As I awoke early the next morning, it seemed to me\n    that I had entirely done with myself. I felt that the opinions of\n    the world concerning me were nothing, and that I had no more to do\n    with any outward interest of my own than with that of a person\n    whom I never saw. The glory of God seemed to swallow up every wish\n    and desire of my heart.... After retiring to rest and sleeping a\n    little while, I awoke, and was led to reflect on God\u2019s mercy to\n    me, in giving me, for many years, a willingness to die; and after\n    that, in making me willing to live, that I might do and suffer\n    whatever he called me to here. I also thought how God had\n    graciously given me an entire resignation to his will, with\n    respect to the kind and manner of death that I should die; having\n    been made willing to die on the rack, or at the stake, and if it\n    were God\u2019s will, to die in darkness. But now it occurred to me, I\n    used to think of living no longer than to the ordinary age of man.\n    Upon this I was led to ask myself, whether I was not willing to be\n    kept out of heaven even longer; and my whole heart seemed\n    immediately to reply: Yes, a thousand years, and a thousand in\n    horror, if it be most for the honor of God, the torment of my body\n    being so great, awful, and overwhelming that none could bear to\n    live in the country where the spectacle was seen, and the torment\n    of my mind being vastly greater. And it seemed to me that I found\n    a perfect willingness, quietness, and alacrity of soul in\n    consenting that it should be so, if it were most for the glory of\n    God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my\n    mind. The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up,\n    and every conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible\n    to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it. This\n    resignation continued in its clearness and brightness the rest of\n    the night, and all the next day, and the night following, and on\n    Monday in the forenoon, without interruption or abatement.\u201d(159)\n\n\nThe annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or more\necstatic than this. \u201cOften the assaults of the divine love,\u201d it is said of\nthe Sister S\u00e9raphique de la Martini\u00e8re, \u201creduced her almost to the point\nof death. She used tenderly to complain of this to God. \u2018I cannot support\nit,\u2019 she used to say. \u2018Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire\nunder the violence of your love.\u2019 \u201d(160)\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nLet me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a usual fruit\nof saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theological\nvirtues, however limited may have been the kinds of service which the\nparticular theology enjoined. Brotherly love would follow logically from\nthe assurance of God\u2019s friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as\nmen being an immediate inference from that of God\u2019s fatherhood of us all.\nWhen Christ utters the precepts: \u201cLove your enemies, bless them that curse\nyou, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully\nuse you, and persecute you,\u201d he gives for a reason: \u201cThat ye may be the\nchildren of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise\non the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the\nunjust.\u201d One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to\none\u2019s self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual\nexcitement, as results of the all\u2010leveling character of theistic belief.\nBut these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find\nthem in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible\ndegree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they\n_harmonize_ with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on\ngeneral causes; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but\nco\u00f6rdinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we\nare engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder,\ncosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and\ngrit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule. The\nbest thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic\naffection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find\nourselves at home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain\nits parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another. Like love or\nfear, the faith\u2010state is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity\nwith it by organic consequence. Jubilation is an expansive affection, and\nall expansive affections are self\u2010forgetful and kindly so long as they\nendure.\n\nWe find this the case even when they are pathological in origin. In his\ninstructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie,(161) M. Georges Dumas compares\ntogether the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity, and\nshows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other is marked\nby altruistic impulses. No human being so stingy and useless as was Marie\nin her melancholy period! But the moment the happy period begins,\n\u201csympathy and kindness become her characteristic sentiments. She displays\na universal goodwill, not only of intention, but in act.... She becomes\nsolicitous of the health of other patients, interested in getting them\nout, desirous to procure wool to knit socks for some of them. Never since\nshe has been under my observation have I heard her in her joyous period\nutter any but charitable opinions.\u201d(162) And later, Dr. Dumas says of all\nsuch joyous conditions that \u201cunselfish sentiments and tender emotions are\nthe only affective states to be found in them. The subject\u2019s mind is\nclosed against envy, hatred, and vindictiveness, and wholly transformed\ninto benevolence, indulgence, and mercy.\u201d(163)\n\nThere is thus an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and\ntheir companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.\nAlong with the happiness, this increase of tenderness is often noted in\nnarratives of conversion. \u201cI began to work for others\u201d;\u2014\u201cI had more tender\nfeeling for my family and friends\u201d;\u2014\u201cI spoke at once to a person with whom\nI had been angry\u201d;\u2014\u201cI felt for every one, and loved my friends better\u201d;\u2014\u201cI\nfelt every one to be my friend\u201d;\u2014these are so many expressions from the\nrecords collected by Professor Starbuck.(164)\n\n\n    \u201cWhen,\u201d says Mrs. Edwards, continuing the narrative from which I\n    made quotation a moment ago, \u201cI arose on the morning of the\n    Sabbath, I felt a love to all mankind, wholly peculiar in its\n    strength and sweetness, far beyond all that I had ever felt\n    before. The power of that love seemed inexpressible. I thought, if\n    I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and\n    cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would still be impossible\n    that I should cherish any feelings towards them but those of love,\n    and pity, and ardent desires for their happiness. I never before\n    felt so far from a disposition to judge and censure others, as I\n    did that morning. I realized also, in an unusual and very lively\n    manner, how great a part of Christianity lies in the performance\n    of our social and relative duties to one another. The same joyful\n    sense continued throughout the day\u2014a sweet love to God and all\n    mankind.\u201d\n\n\nWhatever be the explanation of the charity, it may efface all usual human\nbarriers.(165)\n\nHere, for instance, is an example of Christian non\u2010resistance from Richard\nWeaver\u2019s autobiography. Weaver was a collier, a semi\u2010professional pugilist\nin his younger days, who became a much beloved evangelist. Fighting, after\ndrinking, seems to have been the sin to which he originally felt his flesh\nmost perversely inclined. After his first conversion he had a backsliding,\nwhich consisted in pounding a man who had insulted a girl. Feeling that,\nhaving once fallen, he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb,\nhe got drunk and went and broke the jaw of another man who had lately\nchallenged him to fight and taunted him with cowardice for refusing as a\nChristian man;\u2014I mention these incidents to show how genuine a change of\nheart is implied in the later conduct which he describes as follows:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI went down the drift and found the boy crying because a fellow\u2010\n    workman was trying to take the wagon from him by force. I said to\n    him:\u2014\n\n    \u201c \u2018Tom, you mustn\u2019t take that wagon.\u2019\n\n    \u201cHe swore at me, and called me a Methodist devil. I told him that\n    God did not tell me to let him rob me. He cursed again, and said\n    he would push the wagon over me.\n\n    \u201c \u2018Well,\u2019 I said, \u2018let us see whether the devil and thee are\n    stronger than the Lord and me.\u2019\n\n    \u201cAnd the Lord and I proving stronger than the devil and he, he had\n    to get out of the way, or the wagon would have gone over him. So I\n    gave the wagon to the boy. Then said Tom:\u2014\n\n    \u201c \u2018I\u2019ve a good mind to smack thee on the face.\u2019\n\n    \u201c \u2018Well,\u2019 I said, \u2018if that will do thee any good, thou canst do\n    it.\u2019 So he struck me on the face.\n\n    \u201cI turned the other cheek to him, and said, \u2018Strike again.\u2019\n\n    \u201cHe struck again and again, till he had struck me five times. I\n    turned my cheek for the sixth stroke; but he turned away cursing.\n    I shouted after him: \u2018The Lord forgive thee, for I do, and the\n    Lord save thee.\u2019\n\n    \u201cThis was on a Saturday; and when I went home from the coal\u2010pit my\n    wife saw my face was swollen, and asked what was the matter with\n    it. I said: \u2018I\u2019ve been fighting, and I\u2019ve given a man a good\n    thrashing.\u2019\n\n    \u201cShe burst out weeping, and said, \u2018O Richard, what made you\n    fight?\u2019 Then I told her all about it; and she thanked the Lord I\n    had not struck back.\n\n    \u201cBut the Lord had struck, and his blows have more effect than\n    man\u2019s. Monday came. The devil began to tempt me, saying: \u2018The\n    other men will laugh at thee for allowing Tom to treat thee as he\n    did on Saturday.\u2019 I cried, \u2018Get thee behind me, Satan;\u2019\u2014and went\n    on my way to the coal\u2010pit.\n\n    \u201cTom was the first man I saw. I said \u2018Good\u2010morning,\u2019 but got no\n    reply.\n\n    \u201cHe went down first. When I got down, I was surprised to see him\n    sitting on the wagon\u2010road waiting for me. When I came to him he\n    burst into tears and said: \u2018Richard, will you forgive me for\n    striking you?\u2019\n\n    \u201c \u2018I have forgiven thee,\u2019 said I; \u2018ask God to forgive thee. The\n    Lord bless thee.\u2019 I gave him my hand, and we went each to his\n    work.\u201d(166)\n\n\n\u201cLove your enemies!\u201d Mark you, not simply those who happen not to be your\nfriends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active enemies. Either this\nis a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only\nthat we should, as far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is\nsincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual\nrelation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the\nquestion: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying, so\nobliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity may come\nto be an irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier\ninterests aroused? If positive well\u2010wishing could attain so supreme a\ndegree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might well seem\nsuperhuman beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the life of\nother men, and there is no saying, in the absence of positive experience\nof an authentic kind,\u2014for there are few active examples in our scriptures,\nand the Buddhistic examples are legendary,(167)\u2014what the effects might be:\nthey might conceivably transform the world.\n\nPsychologically and in principle, the precept \u201cLove your enemies\u201d is not\nself\u2010contradictory. It is merely the extreme limit of a kind of\nmagnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of our\noppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would\ninvolve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole,\nand with the present world\u2019s arrangements, that a critical point would\npractically be passed, and we should be born into another kingdom of\nbeing. Religious emotion makes us feel that other kingdom to be close at\nhand, within our reach.\n\nThe inhibition of instinctive repugnance is proved not only by the showing\nof love to enemies, but by the showing of it to any one who is personally\nloathsome. In the annals of saintliness we find a curious mixture of\nmotives impelling in this direction. Asceticism plays its part; and along\nwith charity pure and simple, we find humility or the desire to disclaim\ndistinction and to grovel on the common level before God. Certainly all\nthree principles were at work when Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola\nexchanged their garments with those of filthy beggars. All three are at\nwork when religious persons consecrate their lives to the care of leprosy\nor other peculiarly unpleasant diseases. The nursing of the sick is a\nfunction to which the religious seem strongly drawn, even apart from the\nfact that church traditions set that way. But in the annals of this sort\nof charity we find fantastic excesses of devotion recorded which are only\nexplicable by the frenzy of self\u2010immolation simultaneously aroused.\nFrancis of Assisi kisses his lepers; Margaret Mary Alacoque, Francis\nXavier, St. John of God, and others are said to have cleansed the sores\nand ulcers of their patients with their respective tongues; and the lives\nof such saints as Elizabeth of Hungary and Madame de Chantal are full of a\nsort of reveling in hospital purulence, disagreeable to read of, and which\nmakes us admire and shudder at the same time.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nSo much for the human love aroused by the faith\u2010state. Let me next speak\nof the Equanimity, Resignation, Fortitude, and Patience which it brings.\n\n\u201cA paradise of inward tranquillity\u201d seems to be faith\u2019s usual result; and\nit is easy, even without being religious one\u2019s self, to understand this. A\nmoment back, in treating of the sense of God\u2019s presence, I spoke of the\nunaccountable feeling of safety which one may then have. And, indeed, how\ncan it possibly fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appease\nthe fret, if one be sensibly conscious that, no matter what one\u2019s\ndifficulties for the moment may appear to be, one\u2019s life as a whole is in\nthe keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust? In deeply religious\nmen the abandonment of self to this power is passionate. Whoever not only\nsays, but _feels_, \u201cGod\u2019s will be done,\u201d is mailed against every weakness;\nand the whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries, and religious\nreformers is there to prove the tranquil\u2010mindedness, under naturally\nagitating or distressing circumstances, which self\u2010surrender brings.\n\nThe temper of the tranquil\u2010mindedness differs, of course, according as the\nperson is of a constitutionally sombre or of a constitutionally cheerful\ncast of mind. In the sombre it partakes more of resignation and\nsubmission; in the cheerful it is a joyous consent. As an example of the\nformer temper, I quote part of a letter from Professor Lagneau, a\nvenerated teacher of philosophy who lately died, a great invalid, at\nParis:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cMy life, for the success of which you send good wishes, will be\n    what it is able to be. I ask nothing from it, I expect nothing\n    from it. For long years now I exist, think, and act, and am worth\n    what I am worth, only through the despair which is my sole\n    strength and my sole foundation. May it preserve for me, even in\n    these last trials to which I am coming, the courage to do without\n    the desire of deliverance. I ask nothing more from the Source\n    whence all strength cometh, and if that is granted, your wishes\n    will have been accomplished.\u201d(168)\n\n\nThere is something pathetic and fatalistic about this, but the power of\nsuch a tone as a protection against outward shocks is manifest. Pascal is\nanother Frenchman of pessimistic natural temperament. He expresses still\nmore amply the temper of self\u2010surrendering submissiveness:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cDeliver me, Lord,\u201d he writes in his prayers, \u201cfrom the sadness at\n    my proper suffering which self\u2010love might give, but put into me a\n    sadness like your own. Let my sufferings appease your choler. Make\n    them an occasion for my conversion and salvation. I ask you\n    neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but\n    that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my\n    death, for your glory, for my salvation, and for the use of the\n    Church and of your saints, of whom I would by your grace be one.\n    You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign\n    master; do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take\n    away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing,\n    Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart\n    from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not\n    which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or\n    poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is\n    beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets\n    of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to\n    fathom.\u201d(169)\n\n\nWhen we reach more optimistic temperaments, the resignation grows less\npassive. Examples are sown so broadcast throughout history that I might\nwell pass on without citation. As it is, I snatch at the first that occurs\nto my mind. Madame Guyon, a frail creature physically, was yet of a happy\nnative disposition. She went through many perils with admirable serenity\nof soul. After being sent to prison for heresy,\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cSome of my friends,\u201d she writes, \u201cwept bitterly at the hearing of\n    it, but such was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it\n    failed to draw any tears from me.... There appeared to be in me\n    then, as I find it to be in me now, such an entire loss of what\n    regards myself, that any of my own interests gave me little pain\n    or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myself only the very\n    thing which God does.\u201d In another place she writes: \u201cWe all of us\n    came near perishing in a river which we found it necessary to\n    pass. The carriage sank in the quicksand. Others who were with us\n    threw themselves out in excessive fright. But I found my thoughts\n    so much taken up with God that I had no distinct sense of danger.\n    It is true that the thought of being drowned passed across my\n    mind, but it cost no other sensation or reflection in me than\n    this\u2014that I felt quite contented and willing it were so, if it\n    were my heavenly Father\u2019s choice.\u201d Sailing from Nice to Genoa, a\n    storm keeps her eleven days at sea. \u201cAs the irritated waves dashed\n    round us,\u201d she writes, \u201cI could not help experiencing a certain\n    degree of satisfaction in my mind. I pleased myself with thinking\n    that those mutinous billows, under the command of Him who does all\n    things rightly, might probably furnish me with a watery grave.\n    Perhaps I carried the point too far, in the pleasure which I took\n    in thus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swelling waters.\n    Those who were with me took notice of my intrepidity.\u201d(170)\n\n\nThe contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm produces may be even\nmore buoyant still. I take an example from that charming recent\nautobiography, \u201cWith Christ at Sea,\u201d by Frank Bullen. A couple of days\nafter he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there gives\nan account,\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cIt was blowing stiffly,\u201d he writes, \u201cand we were carrying a press\n    of canvas to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four\n    bells we hauled down the flying\u2010jib, and I sprang out astride the\n    boom to furl it. I was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it\n    gave way with me. The sail slipped through my fingers, and I fell\n    backwards, hanging head downwards over the seething tumult of\n    shining foam under the ship\u2019s bows, suspended by one foot. But I\n    felt only high exultation in my certainty of eternal life.\n    Although death was divided from me by a hair\u2019s breadth, and I was\n    acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but joy. I\n    suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds, but\n    in that time I lived a whole age of delight. But my body asserted\n    itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regained the boom.\n    How I furled the sail I don\u2019t know, but I sang at the utmost pitch\n    of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over the dark\n    waste of waters.\u201d(171)\n\n\nThe annals of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumph for\nreligious imperturbability. Let me cite as an example the statement of a\nhumble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV.:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThey shut all the doors,\u201d Blanche Gamond writes, \u201cand I saw six\n    women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could\n    hold, and a yard long. He gave me the order, \u2018Undress yourself,\u2019\n    which I did. He said, \u2018You are leaving on your shift; you must\n    take it off.\u2019 They had so little patience that they took it off\n    themselves, and I was naked from the waist up. They brought a cord\n    with which they tied me to a beam in the kitchen. They drew the\n    cord tight with all their strength and asked me, \u2018Does it hurt\n    you?\u2019 and then they discharged their fury upon me, exclaiming as\n    they struck me, \u2018Pray now to your God.\u2019 It was the Roulette woman\n    who held this language. But at this moment I received the greatest\n    consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since I had the\n    honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of\n    being crowned with his mercy and his consolations. Why can I not\n    write down the inconceivable influences, consolations, and peace\n    which I felt interiorly? To understand them one must have passed\n    by the same trial; they were so great that I was ravished, for\n    there where afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly. In\n    vain the women cried, \u2018We must double our blows; she does not feel\n    them, for she neither speaks nor cries.\u2019 And how should I have\n    cried, since I was swooning with happiness within?\u201d(172)\n\n\nThe transition from tenseness, self\u2010responsibility, and worry, to\nequanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those\nshiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of\nenergy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that\nit so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing\nthe burden down. This abandonment of self\u2010responsibility seems to be the\nfundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral\npractice. It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies.\nMind\u2010cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on\nit as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of entering\ninto closest marriage with every speculative creed.(173) Christians who\nhave it strongly live in what is called \u201crecollection,\u201d and are never\nanxious about the future, nor worry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint\nCatharine of Genoa it is said that \u201cshe took cognizance of things, only as\nthey were presented to her in succession, _moment by moment_.\u201d To her holy\nsoul, \u201cthe divine moment was the present moment,... and when the present\nmoment was estimated in itself and in its relations, and when the duty\nthat was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as\nif it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the\nmoment which came after.\u201d(174)\n\nHinduism, mind\u2010cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this\nconcentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe next religious symptom which I will note is what I have called Purity\nof Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to inner\ninconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable. All\nthe mind\u2019s objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the\nspecial spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is\nunspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with\nthis exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of\nsacrifice, for the beloved deity\u2019s sake, of everything unworthy of him.\nSometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at a\nstroke\u2014we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest. Billy\nBray\u2019s account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example of the\nlatter form of achievement.\n\n\n    \u201cI had been a smoker as well as a drunkard, and I used to love my\n    tobacco as much as I loved my meat, and I would rather go down\n    into the mine without my dinner than without my pipe. In the days\n    of old, the Lord spoke by the mouths of his servants, the\n    prophets; now he speaks to us by the spirit of his Son. I had not\n    only the feeling part of religion, but I could hear the small,\n    still voice within speaking to me. When I took the pipe to smoke,\n    it would be applied within, \u2018It is an idol, a lust; worship the\n    Lord with clean lips.\u2019 So, I felt it was not right to smoke. The\n    Lord also sent a woman to convince me. I was one day in a house,\n    and I took out my pipe to light it at the fire, and Mary Hawke\u2014for\n    that was the woman\u2019s name\u2014said, \u2018Do you not feel it is wrong to\n    smoke?\u2019 I said that I felt something inside telling me that it was\n    an idol, a lust, and she said that was the Lord. Then I said,\n    \u2018Now, I must give it up, for the Lord is telling me of it inside,\n    and the woman outside, so the tobacco must go, love it as I may.\u2019\n    There and then I took the tobacco out of my pocket, and threw it\n    into the fire, and put the pipe under my foot, \u2018ashes to ashes,\n    dust to dust.\u2019 And I have not smoked since. I found it hard to\n    break off old habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and he\n    gave me strength, for he has said, \u2018Call upon me in the day of\n    trouble, and I will deliver thee.\u2019 The day after I gave up smoking\n    I had the toothache so bad that I did not know what to do. I\n    thought this was owing to giving up the pipe, but I said I would\n    never smoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head. I said,\n    \u2018Lord, thou hast told us My yoke is easy and my burden is light,\u2019\n    and when I said that, all the pain left me. Sometimes the thought\n    of the pipe would come back to me very strong; but the Lord\n    strengthened me against the habit, and, bless his name, I have not\n    smoked since.\u201d\n\n    Bray\u2019s biographer writes that after he had given up smoking, he\n    thought that he would chew a little, but he conquered this dirty\n    habit, too. \u201cOn one occasion,\u201d Bray said, \u201cwhen at a prayer\u2010\n    meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me, \u2018Worship me\n    with clean lips.\u2019 So, when we got up from our knees, I took the\n    quid out of my mouth and \u2018whipped \u2019en\u2019 [threw it] under the form.\n    But, when we got on our knees again, I put another quid into my\n    mouth. Then the Lord said to me again, \u2018Worship me with clean\n    lips.\u2019 So I took the quid out of my mouth, and whipped \u2019en under\n    the form again, and said, \u2018Yes, Lord, I will.\u2019 From that time I\n    gave up chewing as well as smoking, and have been a free man.\u201d\n\n\nThe ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may\ntake are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example, had hard\nbattles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity of the\necclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that cost them\nmost wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own\nright to social veracity and sincerity in their thee\u2010ing and thou\u2010ing, in\nnot doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox\nthat these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body\nof his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so\nthat their acts and the spirit they professed might be more in accord.\n\n\n    \u201cWhen the Lord sent me into the world,\u201d says Fox in his Journal,\n    \u201che forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was\n    required to \u2018thee\u2019 and \u2018thou\u2019 all men and women, without any\n    respect to rich or poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and\n    down, I was not to bid people Good\u2010morning, or Good\u2010evening,\n    neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. This made\n    the sects and professions rage. Oh! the rage that was in the\n    priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and\n    especially in priests and professors: for though \u2018thou\u2019 to a\n    single person was according to their accidence and grammar rules,\n    and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it:\n    and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all\n    into a rage.... Oh! the scorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the\n    blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent\n    for not putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently\n    plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them. The bad\n    language and evil usage we received on this account is hard to be\n    expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing our\n    lives for this matter, and that by the great professors of\n    Christianity, who thereby discovered they were not true believers.\n    And though it was but a small thing in the eye of man, yet a\n    wonderful confusion it brought among all professors and priests:\n    but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity of that\n    custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth\u2019s\n    testimony against it.\u201d\n\n\nIn the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one time\nwas secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid\naccount of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in following\nFox\u2019s canons of sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but\nElwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things in a shorter\npassage, which I will quote as a characteristic utterance of spiritual\nsensibility:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cBy this divine light, then,\u201d says Elwood, \u201cI saw that though I\n    had not the evil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery,\n    profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I\n    had, through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been\n    preserved out of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils\n    to put away and to cease from; some of which were not by the\n    world, which lies in wickedness (1 John v. 19), accounted evils,\n    but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me to be evils,\n    and as such condemned in me.\n\n    \u201cAs particularly those fruits and effects of pride that discover\n    themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel; which I took\n    too much delight in. This evil of my doings I was required to put\n    away and cease from; and judgment lay upon me till I did so.\n\n    \u201cI took off from my apparel those unnecessary trimmings of lace,\n    ribbons, and useless buttons, which had no real service, but were\n    set on only for that which was by mistake called ornament; and I\n    ceased to wear rings.\n\n    \u201cAgain, the giving of flattering titles to men between whom and me\n    there was not any relation to which such titles could be pretended\n    to belong. This was an evil I had been much addicted to, and was\n    accounted a ready artist in; therefore this evil also was I\n    required to put away and cease from. So that thenceforward I durst\n    not say, Sir, Master, My Lord, Madam (or My Dame); or say Your\n    Servant to any one to whom I did not stand in the real relation of\n    a servant, which I had never done to any.\n\n    \u201cAgain, respect of persons, in uncovering the head and bowing the\n    knee or body in salutation, was a practice I had been much in the\n    use of; and this, being one of the vain customs of the world,\n    introduced by the spirit of the world, instead of the true honor\n    which this is a false representation of, and used in deceit as a\n    token of respect by persons one to another, who bear no real\n    respect one to another; and besides this, being a type and a\n    proper emblem of that divine honor which all ought to pay to\n    Almighty God, and which all of all sorts, who take upon them the\n    Christian name, appear in when they offer their prayers to him,\n    and therefore should not be given to men;\u2014I found this to be one\n    of those evils which I had been too long doing; therefore I was\n    now required to put it away and cease from it.\n\n    \u201cAgain, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural\n    number to a single person, _you_ to one, instead of _thou_,\n    contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, _thou_\n    to one, and _you_ to more than one, which had always been used by\n    God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the\n    oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later\n    and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt\n    nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking\n    _you_ to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and\n    hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of\n    men;\u2014this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this\n    I was now called out of and required to cease from.\n\n    \u201cThese and many more evil customs which had sprung up in the night\n    of darkness and general apostasy from the truth and true religion\n    were now, by the inshining of this pure ray of divine light in my\n    conscience, gradually discovered to me to be what I ought to cease\n    from, shun, and stand a witness against.\u201d(175)\n\n\nThese early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistency\nbetween profession and deed jarred some of them to active protest. John\nWoolman writes in his diary:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cIn these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed;\n    and have at sundry times walked over ground where much of their\n    dyestuffs has drained away. This hath produced a longing in my\n    mind that people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of\n    person, and cleanness about their houses and garments. Dyes being\n    invented partly to please the eye, and partly to hide dirt, I have\n    felt in this weak state, when traveling in dirtiness, and affected\n    with unwholesome scents, a strong desire that the nature of dyeing\n    cloth to hide dirt may be more fully considered.\n\n    \u201cWashing our garments to keep them sweet is cleanly, but it is the\n    opposite to real cleanliness to hide dirt in them. Through giving\n    way to hiding dirt in our garments a spirit which would conceal\n    that which is disagreeable is strengthened. Real cleanliness\n    becometh a holy people; but hiding that which is not clean by\n    coloring our garments seems contrary to the sweetness of\n    sincerity. Through some sorts of dyes cloth is rendered less\n    useful. And if the value of dyestuffs, and expense of dyeing, and\n    the damage done to cloth, were all added together, and that cost\n    applied to keeping all sweet and clean, how much more would real\n    cleanliness prevail.\n\n    \u201cThinking often on these things, the use of hats and garments dyed\n    with a dye hurtful to them, and wearing more clothes in summer\n    than are useful, grew more uneasy to me; believing them to be\n    customs which have not their foundation in pure wisdom. The\n    apprehension of being singular from my beloved friends was a\n    strait upon me; and thus I continued in the use of some things,\n    contrary to my judgment, about nine months. Then I thought of\n    getting a hat the natural color of the fur, but the apprehension\n    of being looked upon as one affecting singularity felt uneasy to\n    me. On this account I was under close exercise of mind in the time\n    of our general spring meeting in 1762, greatly desiring to be\n    rightly directed; when, being deeply bowed in spirit before the\n    Lord, I was made willing to submit to what I apprehended was\n    required of me; and when I returned home, got a hat of the natural\n    color of the fur.\n\n    \u201cIn attending meetings, this singularity was a trial to me, and\n    more especially at this time, as white hats were used by some who\n    were fond of following the changeable modes of dress, and as some\n    friends, who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew shy of me,\n    I felt my way for a time shut up in the exercise of the ministry.\n    Some friends were apprehensive that my wearing such a hat savored\n    of an affected singularity: those who spoke with me in a friendly\n    way, I generally informed in a few words, that I believed my\n    wearing it was not in my own will.\u201d\n\n\nWhen the craving for moral consistency and purity is developed to this\ndegree, the subject may well find the outer world too full of shocks to\ndwell in, and can unify his life and keep his soul unspotted only by\nwithdrawing from it. That law which impels the artist to achieve harmony\nin his composition by simply dropping out whatever jars, or suggests a\ndiscord, rules also in the spiritual life. To omit, says Stevenson, is the\none art in literature: \u201cIf I knew how to omit, I should ask no other\nknowledge.\u201d And life, when full of disorder and slackness and vague\nsuperfluity, can no more have what we call character than literature can\nhave it under similar conditions. So monasteries and communities of\nsympathetic devotees open their doors, and in their changeless order,\ncharacterized by omissions quite as much as constituted of actions, the\nholy\u2010minded person finds that inner smoothness and cleanness which it is\ntorture to him to feel violated at every turn by the discordancy and\nbrutality of secular existence.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThat the scrupulosity of purity may be carried to a fantastic extreme must\nbe admitted. In this it resembles Asceticism, to which further symptom of\nsaintliness we had better turn next. The adjective \u201cascetic\u201d is applied to\nconduct originating on diverse psychological levels, which I might as well\nbegin by distinguishing from one another.\n\n\n    1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood,\n    disgusted with too much ease.\n\n    2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity,\n    and non\u2010pampering of the body generally, may be fruits of the love\n    of purity, shocked by whatever savors of the sensual.\n\n    3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may appeal to\n    the subject in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making\n    to the Deity whom he acknowledges.\n\n    4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments may be due to\n    pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theological\n    beliefs concerning expiation. The devotee may feel that he is\n    buying himself free, or escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by\n    doing penance now.\n\n    5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on\n    irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixed idea which comes as\n    a challenge and must be worked off, because only thus does the\n    subject get his interior consciousness feeling right again.\n\n    6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted\n    by genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence\n    of which normally pain\u2010giving stimuli are actually felt as\n    pleasures.\n\n\nI will try to give an instance under each of these heads in turn; but it\nis not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced enough to be\nimmediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usually\nwork together. Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must invite\nyou to some general psychological considerations which apply to all of\nthem alike.\n\nA strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over our\nWestern world. We no longer think that we are called on to face physical\npain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should either\nendure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of\nit makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically. The way in which\nour ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world\u2019s\norder, and both caused and suffered it as a matter\u2010of\u2010course portion of\ntheir day\u2019s work, fills us with amazement. We wonder that any human beings\ncould have been so callous. The result of this historic alteration is that\neven in the Mother Church herself, where ascetic discipline has such a\nfixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come into\ndesuetude, if not discredit. A believer who flagellates or \u201cmacerates\u201d\nhimself to\u2010day arouses more wonder and fear than emulation. Many Catholic\nwriters who admit that the times have changed in this respect do so\nresignedly; and even add that perhaps it is as well not to waste feelings\nin regretting the matter, for to return to the heroic corporeal discipline\nof ancient days might be an extravagance.\n\nWhere to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive\u2014and instinctive\nit appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and\npainful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely\nabnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual\nto human nature to court the arduous. It is only the extreme\nmanifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox.\n\nThe psychological reasons for this lie near the surface. When we drop\nabstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it is\na very complex function. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; it\nfollows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and\nit leaves a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner\nof the performance. The result is that, quite apart from the immediate\npleasure which any sensible experience may give us, our own general moral\nattitude in procuring or undergoing the experience brings with it a\nsecondary satisfaction or distaste. Some men and women, indeed, there are\nwho can live on smiles and the word \u201cyes\u201d forever. But for others (indeed\nfor most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive\nhappiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable.\nSome austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency,\nand effort, some \u201cno! no!\u201d must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an\nexistence with character and texture and power. The range of individual\ndifferences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yeses\nand noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in\nthe right proportion _for him_. This, he feels, is my proper vocation,\nthis is the _optimum_, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the\ndegree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I\nfind the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul\u2019s\nenergy expires.\n\nEvery individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or\norganism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will\nrun best under a certain steam\u2010pressure, a certain amperage; an organism\nunder a certain diet, weight, or exercise. You seem to do best, I heard a\ndoctor say to a patient, at about 140 millimeters of arterial tension. And\nit is just so with our sundry souls: some are happiest in calm weather;\nsome need the sense of tension, of strong volition, to make them feel\nalive and well. For these latter souls, whatever is gained from day to day\nmust be paid for by sacrifice and inhibition, or else it comes too cheap\nand has no zest.\n\nNow when characters of this latter sort become religious, they are apt to\nturn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their natural\nself; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.\n\nWhen Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that Thomas Carlyle\nput him into his bath\u2010tub every morning of a freezing Berlin winter, he\nproclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism. Even without Carlyle,\nmost of us find it necessary to our soul\u2019s health to start the day with a\nrather cool immersion. A little farther along the scale we get such\nstatements as this, from one of my correspondents, an agnostic:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cOften at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so\n    on the warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me I would\n    have to get up, no matter what time of night it was, and stand for\n    a minute in the cold, just so as to prove my manhood.\u201d\n\n\nSuch cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next case we\nprobably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3\u2014the asceticism becomes far more\nsystematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whose sense of\nmoral energy could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms, and I take\nhis case from Starbuck\u2019s manuscript collection.\n\n\n    \u201cI practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. I secretly\n    made burlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore\n    pebbles in my shoes. I would spend nights flat on my back on the\n    floor without any covering.\u201d\n\n\nThe Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, and\ngiven it a market\u2010value in the shape of \u201cmerit.\u201d But we see the\ncultivation of hardship cropping out under every sky and in every faith,\nas a spontaneous need of character. Thus we read of Channing, when first\nsettled as a Unitarian minister, that\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cHe was now more simple than ever, and seemed to have become\n    incapable of any form of self\u2010indulgence. He took the smallest\n    room in the house for his study, though he might easily have\n    commanded one more light, airy, and in every way more suitable;\n    and chose for his sleeping chamber an attic which he shared with a\n    younger brother. The furniture of the latter might have answered\n    for the cell of an anchorite, and consisted of a hard mattress on\n    a cot\u2010bedstead, plain wooden chairs and table, with matting on the\n    floor. It was without fire, and to cold he was throughout life\n    extremely sensitive; but he never complained or appeared in any\n    way to be conscious of inconvenience. \u2018I recollect,\u2019 says his\n    brother, \u2018after one most severe night, that in the morning he\n    sportively thus alluded to his suffering: \u201cIf my bed were my\n    country, I should be somewhat like Bonaparte: I have no control\n    except over the part which I occupy; the instant I move, frost\n    takes possession.\u201d \u2019 In sickness only would he change for the time\n    his apartment and accept a few comforts. The dress too that he\n    habitually adopted was of most inferior quality; and garments were\n    constantly worn which the world would call mean, though an almost\n    feminine neatness preserved him from the least appearance of\n    neglect.\u201d(176)\n\n\nChanning\u2019s asceticism, such as it was, was evidently a compound of\nhardihood and love of purity. The democracy which is an offshoot of the\nenthusiasm of humanity, and of which I will speak later under the head of\nthe cult of poverty, doubtless bore also a share. Certainly there was no\npessimistic element in his case. In the next case we have a strongly\npessimistic element, so that it belongs under head 4. John Cennick was\nMethodism\u2019s first lay preacher. In 1735 he was convicted of sin, while\nwalking in Cheapside,\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cAnd at once left off song\u2010singing, card\u2010playing, and attending\n    theatres. Sometimes he wished to go to a popish monastery, to\n    spend his life in devout retirement. At other times he longed to\n    live in a cave, sleeping on fallen leaves, and feeding on forest\n    fruits. He fasted long and often, and prayed nine times a day....\n    Fancying dry bread too great an indulgence for so great a sinner\n    as himself, he began to feed on potatoes, acorns, crabs, and\n    grass; and often wished that he could live on roots and herbs. At\n    length, in 1737, he found peace with God, and went on his way\n    rejoicing.\u201d(177)\n\n\nIn this poor man we have morbid melancholy and fear, and the sacrifices\nmade are to purge out sin, and to buy safety. The hopelessness of\nChristian theology in respect of the flesh and the natural man generally\nhas, in systematizing fear, made of it one tremendous incentive to self\u2010\nmortification. It would be quite unfair, however, in spite of the fact\nthat this incentive has often been worked in a mercenary way for hortatory\npurposes, to call it a mercenary incentive. The impulse to expiate and do\npenance is, in its first intention, far too immediate and spontaneous an\nexpression of self\u2010despair and anxiety to be obnoxious to any such\nreproach. In the form of loving sacrifice, of spending all we have to show\nour devotion, ascetic discipline of the severest sort may be the fruit of\nhighly optimistic religious feeling.\n\nM. Vianney, the cur\u00e9 of Ars, was a French country priest, whose holiness\nwas exemplary. We read in his life the following account of his inner need\nof sacrifice:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201c \u2018On this path,\u2019 M. Vianney said, \u2018it is only the first step that\n    costs. There is in mortification a balm and a savor without which\n    one cannot live when once one has made their acquaintance. There\n    is but one way in which to give one\u2019s self to God,\u2014that is, to\n    give one\u2019s self entirely, and to keep nothing for one\u2019s self. The\n    little that one keeps is only good to double one and make one\n    suffer.\u2019 Accordingly he imposed it on himself that he should never\n    smell a flower, never drink when parched with thirst, never drive\n    away a fly, never show disgust before a repugnant object, never\n    complain of anything that had to do with his personal comfort,\n    never sit down, never lean upon his elbows when he was kneeling.\n    The Cur\u00e9 of Ars was very sensitive to cold, but he would never\n    take means to protect himself against it. During a very severe\n    winter, one of his missionaries contrived a false floor to his\n    confessional and placed a metal case of hot water beneath. The\n    trick succeeded, and the Saint was deceived: \u2018God is very good,\u2019\n    he said with emotion. \u2018This year, through all the cold, my feet\n    have always been warm.\u2019 \u201d(178)\n\n\nIn this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrifices for the pure love\nof God was probably the uppermost conscious motive. We may class it, then,\nunder our head 3. Some authors think that the impulse to sacrifice is the\nmain religious phenomenon. It is a prominent, a universal phenomenon\ncertainly, and lies deeper than any special creed. Here, for instance, is\nwhat seems to be a spontaneous example of it, simply expressing what\nseemed right at the time between the individual and his Maker. Cotton\nMather, the New England Puritan divine, is generally reputed a rather\ngrotesque pedant; yet what is more touchingly simple than his relation of\nwhat happened when his wife came to die?\n\n\n    \u201cWhen I saw to what a point of resignation I was now called of the\n    Lord,\u201d he says, \u201cI resolved, with his help, therein to glorify\n    him. So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by\n    her bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest\n    in the world. With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely\n    gave her up unto the Lord: and in token of my real _Resignation_,\n    I gently put her out of my hands, and laid away a most lovely\n    hand, resolving that I would never touch it more. This was the\n    hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did. She ...\n    told me that she signed and sealed my act of resignation. And\n    though before that she called for me continually, she after this\n    never asked for me any more.\u201d(179)\n\n\nFather Vianney\u2019s asceticism taken in its totality was simply the result of\na permanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm, longing to make proof of\nitself. The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collected all\nthe motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that any one\nwishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system mapped\nout for him in any one of a number of ready\u2010made manuals.(180) The\ndominant Church notion of perfection is of course the negative one of\navoidance of sin. Sin proceeds from concupiscence, and concupiscence from\nour carnal passions and temptations, chief of which are pride, sensuality\nin all its forms, and the loves of worldly excitement and possession. All\nthese sources of sin must be resisted; and discipline and austerities are\na most efficacious mode of meeting them. Hence there are always in these\nbooks chapters on self\u2010mortification. But whenever a procedure is\ncodified, the more delicate spirit of it evaporates, and if we wish the\nundiluted ascetic spirit,\u2014the passion of self\u2010contempt wreaking itself on\nthe poor flesh, the divine irrationality of devotion making a sacrificial\ngift of all it has (its sensibilities, namely) to the object of its\nadoration,\u2014we must go to autobiographies, or other individual documents.\n\nSaint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flourished\u2014or rather who\nexisted, for there was little that suggested flourishing about him\u2014in the\nsixteenth century, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose.\n\n\n    \u201cFirst of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitual\n    affectionate will in all things to imitate Jesus Christ. If\n    anything agreeable offers itself to your senses, yet does not at\n    the same time tend purely to the honor and glory of God, renounce\n    it and separate yourself from it for the love of Christ, who all\n    his life long had no other taste or wish than to do the will of\n    his Father whom he called his meat and nourishment. For example,\n    you take satisfaction in _hearing_ of things in which the glory of\n    God bears no part. Deny yourself this satisfaction, mortify your\n    wish to listen. You take pleasure in _seeing_ objects which do not\n    raise your mind to God: refuse yourself this pleasure, and turn\n    away your eyes. The same with conversations and all other things.\n    Act similarly, so far as you are able, with all the operations of\n    the senses, striving to make yourself free from their yokes.\n\n    \u201cThe radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great\n    natural passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief. You must seek to\n    deprive these of every satisfaction and leave them as it were in\n    darkness and the void. Let your soul therefore turn always:\n\n    \u201cNot to what is most easy, but to what is hardest;\n\n    \u201cNot to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful;\n\n    \u201cNot to what most pleases, but to what disgusts;\n\n    \u201cNot to matter of consolation, but to matter for desolation\n    rather;\n\n    \u201cNot to rest, but to labor;\n\n    \u201cNot to desire the more, but the less;\n\n    \u201cNot to aspire to what is highest and most precious, but to what\n    is lowest and most contemptible;\n\n    \u201cNot to will anything, but to will nothing;\n\n    \u201cNot to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst, so\n    that you may enter for the love of Christ into a complete\n    destitution, a perfect poverty of spirit, and an absolute\n    renunciation of everything in this world.\n\n    \u201cEmbrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you\n    will find in a short time great delights and unspeakable\n    consolations.\n\n    \u201cDespise yourself, and wish that others should despise you.\n\n    \u201cSpeak to your own disadvantage, and desire others to do the same;\n\n    \u201cConceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it good when others\n    hold the same;\n\n    \u201cTo enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.\n\n    \u201cTo know all things, learn to know nothing.\n\n    \u201cTo possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.\n\n    \u201cTo be all things, be willing to be nothing.\n\n    \u201cTo get to where you have no taste for anything, go through\n    whatever experiences you have no taste for.\n\n    \u201cTo learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.\n\n    \u201cTo reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing.\n\n    \u201cTo be what you are not, experience what you are not.\u201d\n\n\nThese later verses play with that vertigo of self\u2010contradiction which is\nso dear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical, for in\nthem Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion of the\nAll.\n\n\n    \u201cWhen you stop at one thing, you cease to open yourself to the\n    All.\n\n    \u201cFor to come to the All you must give up the All.\n\n    \u201cAnd if you should attain to owning the All, you must own it,\n    desiring Nothing.\n\n    \u201cIn this spoliation, the soul finds its tranquillity and rest.\n    Profoundly established in the centre of its own nothingness, it\n    can be assailed by naught that comes from below; and since it no\n    longer desires anything, what comes from above cannot depress it;\n    for its desires alone are the causes of its woes.\u201d(181)\n\n\nAnd now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all our\nheads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathic\nindividual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the\nsincere Suso\u2019s account of his own self\u2010tortures. Suso, you will remember,\nwas one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography,\nwritten in the third person, is a classic religious document.\n\n\n    \u201cHe was in his youth of a temperament full of fire and life; and\n    when this began to make itself felt, it was very grievous to him;\n    and he sought by many devices how he might bring his body into\n    subjection. He wore for a long time a hair shirt and an iron\n    chain, until the blood ran from him, so that he was obliged to\n    leave them off. He secretly caused an undergarment to be made for\n    him; and in the undergarment he had strips of leather fixed, into\n    which a hundred and fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp,\n    were driven, and the points of the nails were always turned\n    towards the flesh. He had this garment made very tight, and so\n    arranged as to go round him and fasten in front, in order that it\n    might fit the closer to his body, and the pointed nails might be\n    driven into his flesh; and it was high enough to reach upwards to\n    his navel. In this he used to sleep at night. Now in summer, when\n    it was hot, and he was very tired and ill from his journeyings, or\n    when he held the office of lecturer, he would sometimes, as he lay\n    thus in bonds, and oppressed with toil, and tormented also by\n    noxious insects, cry aloud and give way to fretfulness, and twist\n    round and round in agony, as a worm does when run through with a\n    pointed needle. It often seemed to him as if he were lying upon an\n    ant\u2010hill, from the torture caused by the insects; for if he wished\n    to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one\n    another.(182) Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness\n    of his heart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man\n    is killed by murderers or strong beasts of prey it is soon over;\n    but I lie dying here under the cruel insects, and yet cannot die.\n    The nights in winter were never so long, nor was the summer so\n    hot, as to make him leave off this exercise. On the contrary, he\n    devised something farther\u2014two leathern loops into which he put his\n    hands, and fastened one on each side his throat, and made the\n    fastenings so secure that even if his cell had been on fire about\n    him, he could not have helped himself. This he continued until his\n    hands and arms had become almost tremulous with the strain, and\n    then he devised something else: two leather gloves; and he caused\n    a brazier to fit them all over with sharp\u2010pointed brass tacks, and\n    he used to put them on at night, in order that if he should try\n    while asleep to throw off the hair undergarment, or relieve\n    himself from the gnawings of the vile insects, the tacks might\n    then stick into his body. And so it came to pass. If ever he\n    sought to help himself with his hands in his sleep, he drove the\n    sharp tacks into his breast, and tore himself, so that his flesh\n    festered. When after many weeks the wounds had healed, he tore\n    himself again and made fresh wounds.\n\n    \u201cHe continued this tormenting exercise for about sixteen years. At\n    the end of this time, when his blood was now chilled, and the fire\n    of his temperament destroyed, there appeared to him in a vision on\n    Whitsunday, a messenger from heaven, who told him that God\n    required this of him no longer. Whereupon he discontinued it, and\n    threw all these things away into a running stream.\u201d\n\n    Suso then tells how, to emulate the sorrows of his crucified Lord,\n    he made himself a cross with thirty protruding iron needles and\n    nails. This he bore on his bare back between his shoulders day and\n    night. \u201cThe first time that he stretched out this cross upon his\n    back his tender frame was struck with terror at it, and blunted\n    the sharp nails slightly against a stone. But soon, repenting of\n    this womanly cowardice, he pointed them all again with a file, and\n    placed once more the cross upon him. It made his back, where the\n    bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he sat down or stood up, it\n    was as if a hedgehog\u2010skin were on him. If any one touched him\n    unawares, or pushed against his clothes, it tore him.\u201d\n\n    Suso next tells of his penitences by means of striking this cross\n    and forcing the nails deeper into the flesh, and likewise of his\n    self\u2010scourgings,\u2014a dreadful story,\u2014and then goes on as follows:\n    \u201cAt this same period the Servitor procured an old castaway door,\n    and he used to lie upon it at night without any bedclothes to make\n    him comfortable, except that he took off his shoes and wrapped a\n    thick cloak round him. He thus secured for himself a most\n    miserable bed; for hard pea\u2010stalks lay in humps under his head,\n    the cross with the sharp nails stuck into his back, his arms were\n    locked fast in bonds, the horsehair undergarment was round his\n    loins, and the cloak too was heavy and the door hard. Thus he lay\n    in wretchedness, afraid to stir, just like a log, and he would\n    send up many a sigh to God.\n\n    \u201cIn winter he suffered very much from the frost. If he stretched\n    out his feet they lay bare on the floor and froze, if he gathered\n    them up the blood became all on fire in his legs, and this was\n    great pain. His feet were full of sores, his legs dropsical, his\n    knees bloody and seared, his loins covered with scars from the\n    horsehair, his body wasted, his mouth parched with intense thirst,\n    and his hands tremulous from weakness. Amid these torments he\n    spent his nights and days; and he endured them all out of the\n    greatness of the love which he bore in his heart to the Divine and\n    Eternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing sufferings\n    he sought to imitate. After a time he gave up this penitential\n    exercise of the door, and instead of it he took up his abode in a\n    very small cell, and used the bench, which was so narrow and short\n    that he could not stretch himself upon it, as his bed. In this\n    hole, or upon the door, he lay at night in his usual bonds, for\n    about eight years. It was also his custom, during the space of\n    twenty\u2010five years, provided he was staying in the convent, never\n    to go after compline in winter into any warm room, or to the\n    convent stove to warm himself, no matter how cold it might be,\n    unless he was obliged to do so for other reasons. Throughout all\n    these years he never took a bath, either a water or a sweating\n    bath; and this he did in order to mortify his comfort\u2010seeking\n    body. He practiced during a long time such rigid poverty that he\n    would neither receive nor touch a penny, either with leave or\n    without it. For a considerable time he strove to attain such a\n    high degree of purity that he would neither scratch nor touch any\n    part of his body, save only his hands and feet.\u201d(183)\n\n\nI spare you the recital of poor Suso\u2019s self\u2010inflicted tortures from\nthirst. It is pleasant to know that after his fortieth year, God showed\nhim by a series of visions that he had sufficiently broken down the\nnatural man, and that he might leave these exercises off. His case is\ndistinctly pathological, but he does not seem to have had the alleviation,\nwhich some ascetics have enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibility capable\nof actually turning torment into a perverse kind of pleasure. Of the\nfounder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that\n\n\n    \u201cHer love of pain and suffering was insatiable.... She said that\n    she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she\n    might always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a\n    single day without suffering would be intolerable. She said again\n    that she was devoured with two unassuageable fevers, one for the\n    holy communion, the other for suffering, humiliation, and\n    annihilation. \u2018Nothing but pain,\u2019 she continually said in her\n    letters, \u2018makes my life supportable.\u2019 \u201d(184)\n\n\nSo much for the phenomena to which the ascetic impulse will in certain\npersons give rise. In the ecclesiastically consecrated character three\nminor branches of self\u2010mortification have been recognized as indispensable\npathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity, obedience, and poverty\nwhich the monk vows to observe; and upon the heads of obedience and\npoverty I will make a few remarks.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nFirst, of Obedience. The secular life of our twentieth century opens with\nthis virtue held in no high esteem. The duty of the individual to\ndetermine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequences seems,\non the contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary Protestant\nsocial ideals. So much so that it is difficult even imaginatively to\ncomprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their own could ever have\ncome to think the subjection of its will to that of other finite creatures\nrecommendable. I confess that to myself it seems something of a mystery.\nYet it evidently corresponds to a profound interior need of many persons,\nand we must do our best to understand it.\n\nOn the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency of obedience in\na firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as\nmeritorious. Next, experience shows that there are times in every one\u2019s\nlife when one can be better counseled by others than by one\u2019s self.\nInability to decide is one of the commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves;\nfriends who see our troubles more broadly, often see them more wisely than\nwe do; so it is frequently an act of excellent virtue to consult and obey\na doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these lower prudential\nregions, we find, in the nature of some of the spiritual excitements which\nwe have been studying, good reasons for idealizing obedience. Obedience\nmay spring from the general religious phenomenon of inner softening and\nself\u2010surrender and throwing one\u2019s self on higher powers. So saving are\nthese attitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utility, they\nbecome ideally consecrated; and in obeying a man whose fallibility we see\nthrough thoroughly, we, nevertheless, may feel much as we do when we\nresign our will to that of infinite wisdom. Add self\u2010despair and the\npassion of self\u2010crucifixion to this, and obedience becomes an ascetic\nsacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of whatever prudential uses it\nmight have.\n\nIt is as a sacrifice, a mode of \u201cmortification,\u201d that obedience is\nprimarily conceived by Catholic writers, a \u201csacrifice which man offers to\nGod, and of which he is himself both the priest and the victim. By poverty\nhe immolates his exterior possessions; by chastity he immolates his body;\nby obedience he completes the sacrifice, and gives to God all that he yet\nholds as his own, his two most precious goods, his intellect and his will.\nThe sacrifice is then complete and unreserved, a genuine holocaust, for\nthe entire victim is now consumed for the honor of God.\u201d(185) Accordingly,\nin Catholic discipline, we obey our superior not as mere man, but as the\nrepresentative of Christ. Obeying God in him by our intention, obedience\nis easy. But when the text\u2010book theologians marshal collectively all their\nreasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds to our ears rather odd.\n\n\n    \u201cOne of the great consolations of the monastic life,\u201d says a\n    Jesuit authority, \u201cis the assurance we have that in obeying we can\n    commit no fault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you\n    to do this thing or that, but you are certain that you commit no\n    fault so long as you obey, because God will only ask you if you\n    have duly performed what orders you received, and if you can\n    furnish a clear account in that respect, you are absolved\n    entirely. Whether the things you did were opportune, or whether\n    there were not something better that might have been done, these\n    are questions not asked of you, but rather of your Superior. The\n    moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your\n    account, and charges it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome well\n    exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience, \u2018Oh,\n    sovereign liberty! Oh, holy and blessed security by which one\n    becomes almost impeccable!\u2019\n\n    \u201cSaint John Climachus is of the same sentiment when he calls\n    obedience an excuse before God. In fact, when God asks why you\n    have done this or that, and you reply, it is because I was so\n    ordered by my Superiors, God will ask for no other excuse. As a\n    passenger in a good vessel with a good pilot need give himself no\n    farther concern, but may go to sleep in peace, because the pilot\n    has charge over all, and \u2018watches for him\u2019; so a religious person\n    who lives under the yoke of obedience goes to heaven as if while\n    sleeping, that is, while leaning entirely on the conduct of his\n    Superiors, who are the pilots of his vessel, and keep watch for\n    him continually. It is no small thing, of a truth, to be able to\n    cross the stormy sea of life on the shoulders and in the arms of\n    another, yet that is just the grace which God accords to those who\n    live under the yoke of obedience. Their Superior bears all their\n    burdens.... A certain grave doctor said that he would rather spend\n    his life in picking up straws by obedience, than by his own\n    responsible choice busy himself with the loftiest works of\n    charity, because one is certain of following the will of God in\n    whatever one may do from obedience, but never certain in the same\n    degree of anything which we may do of our own proper\n    movement.\u201d(186)\n\n\nOne should read the letters in which Ignatius Loyola recommends obedience\nas the backbone of his order, if one would gain insight into the full\nspirit of its cult.(187) They are too long to quote; but Ignatius\u2019s belief\nis so vividly expressed in a couple of sayings reported by companions\nthat, though they have been so often cited, I will ask your permission to\ncopy them once more:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI ought,\u201d an early biographer reports him as saying, \u201con entering\n    religion, and thereafter, to place myself entirely in the hands of\n    God, and of him who takes His place by His authority. I ought to\n    desire that my Superior should oblige me to give up my own\n    judgment, and conquer my own mind. I ought to set up no difference\n    between one Superior and another, ... but recognize them all as\n    equal before God, whose place they fill. For if I distinguish\n    persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience. In the hands of my\n    Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to\n    require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters,\n    to speak or not to speak to such a person, or the like; and I must\n    put all my fervor in executing zealously and exactly what I am\n    ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has neither\n    intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without\n    resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please any one;\n    like a stick in the hand of an old man, who uses it according to\n    his needs and places it where it suits him. So must I be under the\n    hands of the Order, to serve it in the way it judges most useful.\n\n    \u201cI must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular\n    place, to be employed in a particular duty.... I must consider\n    nothing as belonging to me personally, and as regards the things I\n    use, be like a statue which lets itself be stripped and never\n    opposes resistance.\u201d(188)\n\n\nThe other saying is reported by Rodriguez in the chapter from which I a\nmoment ago made quotations. When speaking of the Pope\u2019s authority,\nRodriguez writes:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cSaint Ignatius said, when general of his company, that if the\n    Holy Father were to order him to set sail in the first bark which\n    he might find in the port of Ostia, near Rome, and to abandon\n    himself to the sea, without a mast, without sails, without oars or\n    rudder or any of the things that are needful for navigation or\n    subsistence, he would obey not only with alacrity, but without\n    anxiety or repugnance, and even with a great internal\n    satisfaction.\u201d(189)\n\n\nWith a solitary concrete example of the extravagance to which the virtue\nwe are considering has been carried, I will pass to the topic next in\norder.\n\n\n    \u201cSister Marie Claire [of Port Royal] had been greatly imbued with\n    the holiness and excellence of M. de Langres. This prelate, soon\n    after he came to Port Royal, said to her one day, seeing her so\n    tenderly attached to Mother Ang\u00e9lique, that it would perhaps be\n    better not to speak to her again. Marie Claire, greedy of\n    obedience, took this inconsiderate word for an oracle of God, and\n    from that day forward remained for several years without once\n    speaking to her sister.\u201d(190)\n\n\nOur next topic shall be Poverty, felt at all times and under all creeds as\none adornment of a saintly life. Since the instinct of ownership is\nfundamental in man\u2019s nature, this is one more example of the ascetic\nparadox. Yet it appears no paradox at all, but perfectly reasonable, the\nmoment one recollects how easily higher excitements hold lower cupidities\nin check. Having just quoted the Jesuit Rodriguez on the subject of\nobedience, I will, to give immediately a concrete turn to our discussion\nof poverty, also read you a page from his chapter on this latter virtue.\nYou must remember that he is writing instructions for monks of his own\norder, and bases them all on the text, \u201cBlessed are the poor in spirit.\u201d\n\n\n    \u201cIf any one of you,\u201d he says, \u201cwill know whether or not he is\n    really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the\n    ordinary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger,\n    thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See\n    if you are glad to wear a worn\u2010out habit full of patches. See if\n    you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are\n    passed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to\n    you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these\n    things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is\n    proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of\n    spirit.\u201d Rodriguez then goes on to describe the practice of\n    poverty in more detail. \u201cThe first point is that which Saint\n    Ignatius proposes in his constitutions, when he says, \u2018Let no one\n    use anything as if it were his private possession.\u2019 \u2018A religious\n    person,\u2019 he says, \u2018ought in respect to all the things that he\n    uses, to be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but\n    which feels no grief and makes no resistance when one strips it\n    again. It is in this way that you should feel towards your\n    clothes, your books, your cell, and everything else that you make\n    use of; if ordered to quit them, or to exchange them for others,\n    have no more sorrow than if you were a statue being uncovered. In\n    this way you will avoid using them as if they were your private\n    possession. But if, when you give up your cell, or yield\n    possession of this or that object or exchange it for another, you\n    feel repugnance and are not like a statue, that shows that you\n    view these things as if they were your private property.\u2019\n\n    \u201cAnd this is why our holy founder wished the superiors to test\n    their monks somewhat as God tested Abraham, and to put their\n    poverty and their obedience to trial, that by this means they may\n    become acquainted with the degree of their virtue, and gain a\n    chance to make ever farther progress in perfection, ... making the\n    one move out of his room when he finds it comfortable and is\n    attached to it; taking away from another a book of which he is\n    fond; or obliging a third to exchange his garment for a worse one.\n    Otherwise we should end by acquiring a species of property in all\n    these several objects, and little by little the wall of poverty\n    that surrounds us and constitutes our principal defense would be\n    thrown down. The ancient fathers of the desert used often thus to\n    treat their companions.... Saint Dositheus, being sick\u2010nurse,\n    desired a certain knife, and asked Saint Dorotheus for it, not for\n    his private use, but for employment in the infirmary of which he\n    had charge. Whereupon Saint Dorotheus answered him: \u2018Ha!\n    Dositheus, so that knife pleases you so much! Will you be the\n    slave of a knife or the slave of Jesus Christ? Do you not blush\n    with shame at wishing that a knife should be your master? I will\n    not let you touch it.\u2019 Which reproach and refusal had such an\n    effect upon the holy disciple that since that time he never\n    touched the knife again.\u201d ...\n\n    \u201cTherefore, in our rooms,\u201d Father Rodriguez continues, \u201cthere must\n    be no other furniture than a bed, a table, a bench, and a\n    candlestick, things purely necessary, and nothing more. It is not\n    allowed among us that our cells should be ornamented with pictures\n    or aught else, neither armchairs, carpets, curtains, nor any sort\n    of cabinet or bureau of any elegance. Neither is it allowed us to\n    keep anything to eat, either for ourselves or for those who may\n    come to visit us. We must ask permission to go to the refectory\n    even for a glass of water; and finally we may not keep a book in\n    which we can write a line, or which we may take away with us. One\n    cannot deny that thus we are in great poverty. But this poverty is\n    at the same time a great repose and a great perfection. For it\n    would be inevitable, in case a religious person were allowed to\n    own superfluous possessions, that these things would greatly\n    occupy his mind, be it to acquire them, to preserve them, or to\n    increase them; so that in not permitting us at all to own them,\n    all these inconveniences are remedied. Among the various good\n    reasons why the company forbids secular persons to enter our\n    cells, the principal one is that thus we may the easier be kept in\n    poverty. After all, we are all men, and if we were to receive\n    people of the world into our rooms, we should not have the\n    strength to remain within the bounds prescribed, but should at\n    least wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a\n    better opinion of our scholarship.\u201d(191)\n\n\nSince Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan dervishes unite with\nJesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest individual\nstate, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds for such a\nseemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those which lie closest to\ncommon human nature.\n\nThe opposition between the men who _have_ and the men who _are_ is\nimmemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old\u2010fashioned sense of the man\nwho is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and reveled\nin lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence with these\npossessions, but rather with the personal superiorities, the courage,\ngenerosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. To certain\nhuckstering kinds of consideration he thanked God he was forever\ninaccessible, and if in life\u2019s vicissitudes he should become destitute\nthrough their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was\nall the freer to work out his salvation. \u201cWer nur selbst was h\u00e4tte,\u201d says\nLessing\u2019s Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, \u201cmein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe\nnichts!\u201d This ideal of the well\u2010born man without possessions was embodied\nin knight\u2010errantry and templardom; and, hideously corrupted as it has\nalways been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the\nmilitary and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldier as the man\nabsolutely unencumbered. Owning nothing but his bare life, and willing to\ntoss that up at any moment when the cause commands him, he is the\nrepresentative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer who\npays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future,\noffers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make\nhis bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and\nathletic attitude of observation, the property\u2010owner seems buried and\nsmothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, \u201cwading in straw and\nrubbish to his knees.\u201d The claims which _things_ make are corrupters of\nmanhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress towards\nthe empyrean.\n\n\n    \u201cEverything I meet with,\u201d writes Whitefield, \u201cseems to carry this\n    voice with it,\u2014\u2018Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim on\n    earth; have no party or certain dwelling place.\u2019 My heart echoes\n    back, \u2018Lord Jesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thou\n    seest me in danger of _nestling_,\u2014in pity\u2014in tender pity,\u2014put a\n    _thorn_ in my nest to prevent me from it.\u2019 \u201d(192)\n\n\nThe loathing of \u201ccapital\u201d with which our laboring classes to\u2010day are\ngrowing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound\nsentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist\npoet writes:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cNot by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you\n    have,\n\n    \u201cShall you become beautiful;\n\n    \u201cYou must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones;\n\n    \u201cNot by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and\n    healthy, but rather by discarding them ...\n\n    \u201cFor a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek what fresh\n    furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave\n    behind;\n\n    \u201cKnowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely\n    use and handle is an impediment.\u201d(193)\n\n\nIn short, lives based on having are less free than lives based either on\ndoing or on being, and in the interest of action people subject to\nspiritual excitement throw away possessions as so many clogs. Only those\nwho have no private interests can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth and\ncowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard. When a\nbrother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: \u201cFather, it would be a great\nconsolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general\nshould concede to me this indulgence, still I should like also to have\nyour consent,\u201d Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne,\nRoland, and Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally\ndying on the field of battle. \u201cSo care not,\u201d he said, \u201cfor owning books\nand knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness.\u201d And when some weeks\nlater the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter,\nFrancis said: \u201cAfter you have got your psalter you will crave a breviary;\nand after you have got your breviary you will sit in your stall like a\ngrand prelate, and will say to your brother: \u2018Hand me my breviary.\u2019 ...\nAnd thenceforward he denied all such requests, saying: \u2018A man possesses of\nlearning only so much as comes out of him in action, and a monk is a good\npreacher only so far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every tree is\nknown by its fruits.\u2019 \u201d(194)\n\nBut beyond this more worthily athletic attitude involved in doing and\nbeing, there is, in the desire of not having, something profounder still,\nsomething related to that fundamental mystery of religious experience, the\nsatisfaction found in absolute surrender to the larger power. So long as\nany secular safeguard is retained, so long as any residual prudential\nguarantee is clung to, so long the surrender is incomplete, the vital\ncrisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel, and mistrust of the\ndivine obtains: we hold by two anchors, looking to God, it is true, after\na fashion, but also holding by our proper machinations. In certain medical\nexperiences we have the same critical point to overcome. A drunkard, or a\nmorphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the\ndoctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence.\nThe tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies of\nit among his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled in in case of\nneed. Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in his own\nexpedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which the chronically\nwakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throws himself on God, but _if_\nhe should need the other help, there it will be also. Every one knows\ncases of this incomplete and ineffective desire for reform,\u2014drunkards\nwhom, with all their self\u2010reproaches and resolves, one perceives to be\nquite unwilling seriously to contemplate _never_ being drunk again! Really\nto give up anything on which we have relied, to give it up definitively,\n\u201cfor good and all\u201d and forever, signifies one of those radical alterations\nof character which came under our notice in the lectures on conversion. In\nit the inner man rolls over into an entirely different position of\nequilibrium, lives in a new centre of energy from this time on, and the\nturning\u2010point and hinge of all such operations seems usually to involve\nthe sincere acceptance of certain nakednesses and destitutions.\n\nAccordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life, we find this ever\u2010\nrecurring note: Fling yourself upon God\u2019s providence without making any\nreserve whatever,\u2014take no thought for the morrow,\u2014sell all you have and\ngive it to the poor,\u2014only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless will\nthe higher safety really arrive. As a concrete example let me read a page\nfrom the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, a good woman, much persecuted\nin her day by both Protestants and Catholics, because she would not take\nher religion at second hand. When a young girl, in her father\u2019s house,\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cShe spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: _Lord, what wilt\n    thou have me to do?_ And being one night in a most profound\n    penitence, she said from the bottom of her heart: \u2018O my Lord! What\n    must I do to please thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to\n    my soul and it will hear thee.\u2019 At that instant she heard, as if\n    another had spoke within her: _Forsake all earthly things.\n    Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself._\n    She was quite astonished, not understanding this language, and\n    mused long on these three points, thinking how she could fulfill\n    them. She thought she could not live without earthly things, nor\n    without loving the creatures, nor without loving herself. Yet she\n    said, \u2018By thy Grace I will do it, Lord!\u2019 But when she would\n    perform her promise, she knew not where to begin. Having thought\n    on the religious in monasteries, that they forsook all earthly\n    things by being shut up in a cloister, and the love of themselves\n    by subjecting of their wills, she asked leave of her father to\n    enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but he would not\n    permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave. This\n    seemed to her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in the\n    cloister the true Christians she had been seeking, but she found\n    afterwards that he knew the cloisters better than she; for after\n    he had forbidden her, and told her he would never permit her to be\n    a religious, nor give her any money to enter there, yet she went\n    to Father Laurens, the Director, and offered to serve in the\n    monastery and work hard for her bread, and be content with little,\n    if he would receive her. At which he smiled and said: _That cannot\n    be. We must have money to build; we take no maids without money;\n    you must find the way to get it, else there is no entry here._\n\n    \u201cThis astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to\n    the cloisters, resolving to forsake all company and live alone\n    till it should please God to show her what she ought to do and\n    whither to go. She asked always earnestly, \u2018When shall I be\n    perfectly thine, O my God?\u2019 And she thought he still answered her,\n    _When thou shalt no longer possess anything, and shalt die to\n    thyself_. \u2018And where shall I do that, Lord?\u2019 He answered her, _In\n    the desert_. This made so strong an impression on her soul that\n    she aspired after this; but being a maid of eighteen years only,\n    she was afraid of unlucky chances, and was never used to travel,\n    and knew no way. She laid aside all these doubts and said, \u2018Lord,\n    thou wilt guide me how and where it shall please thee. It is for\n    thee that I do it. I will lay aside my habit of a maid, and will\n    take that of a hermit that I may pass unknown.\u2019 Having then\n    secretly made ready this habit, while her parents thought to have\n    married her, her father having promised her to a rich French\n    merchant, she prevented the time, and on Easter evening, having\n    cut her hair, put on the habit, and slept a little, she went out\n    of her chamber about four in the morning, taking nothing but one\n    penny to buy bread for that day. And it being said to her in the\n    going out, _Where is thy faith? in a penny?_ she threw it away,\n    begging pardon of God for her fault, and saying, \u2018No, Lord, my\n    faith is not in a penny, but in thee alone.\u2019 Thus she went away\n    wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the cares and good\n    things of this world, and found her soul so satisfied that she no\n    longer wished for anything upon earth, resting entirely upon God,\n    with this only fear lest she should be discovered and be obliged\n    to return home; for she felt already more content in this poverty\n    than she had done for all her life in all the delights of the\n    world.\u201d(195)\n\n\nThe penny was a small financial safeguard, but an effective spiritual\nobstacle. Not till it was thrown away could the character settle into the\nnew equilibrium completely.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nOver and above the mystery of self\u2010surrender, there are in the cult of\npoverty other religious mysteries. There is the mystery of veracity:\n\u201cNaked came I into the world,\u201d etc.,\u2014whoever first said that, possessed\nthis mystery. My own bare entity must fight the battle\u2014shams cannot save\nme. There is also the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality\nbefore God of all his creatures. This sentiment (which seems in general to\nhave been more widespread in Mohammedan than in Christian lands) tends to\nnullify man\u2019s usual acquisitiveness. Those who have it spurn dignities and\nhonors, privileges and advantages, preferring, as I said in a former\nlecture, to grovel on the common level before the face of God. It is not\nexactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes so close to it in\npractice. It is _humanity_, rather, refusing to enjoy anything that others\ndo not share. A profound moralist, writing of Christ\u2019s saying, \u201cSell all\nthou hast and follow me,\u201d proceeds as follows:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cChrist may have meant: If you love mankind absolutely you will as\n    a result not care for any possessions whatever, and this seems a\n    very likely proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a\n    proposition is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a\n    fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his\n    conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your\n    goods, and they would be no loss to you. These truths, while\n    literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ\u2019s love for\n    mankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every\n    generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined\n    intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into the\n    vortex by their interest in helping mankind, and by the\n    understanding that comes from actually doing it. The abandonment\n    of their old mode of life is like dust in the balance. It is done\n    gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly. Thus the whole question of\n    the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere\n    incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we\n    abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for\n    others.\u201d(196)\n\n\nBut in all these matters of sentiment one must have \u201cbeen there\u201d one\u2019s\nself in order to understand them. No American can ever attain to\nunderstanding the loyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German\ntowards his emperor; nor can a Briton or German ever understand the peace\nof heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious\nnonsense, between him and the common God of all. If sentiments as simple\nas these are mysteries which one must receive as gifts of birth, how much\nmore is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments which we\nhave been considering! One can never fathom an emotion or divine its\ndictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement,\nhowever, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical\nfrom without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of\nits own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw. Piety and\ncharity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and\nform another centre of energy altogether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser\nvexations may become a consolation; as a supreme love may turn minor\nsacrifices into gain; so a supreme trust may render common safeguards\nodious, and in certain glows of generous excitement it may appear\nunspeakably mean to retain one\u2019s hold of personal possessions. The only\nsound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale of such emotions, is to\nobserve as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record\nfaithfully what we observe; and this, I need hardly say, is what I have\nstriven to do in these last two descriptive lectures, which I now hope\nwill have covered the ground sufficiently for our present needs.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURES XIV AND XV. THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS.\n\n\nWe have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are\nregarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are\ndevout. To\u2010day we have to change our attitude from that of description to\nthat of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can\nhelp us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life.\nWere I to parody Kant, I should say that a \u201cCritique of pure Saintliness\u201d\nmust be our theme.\n\nIf, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject from above\nlike Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man\u2019s\nperfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time\nof it. Man\u2019s perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end\nwould be union with his Maker. That union could be pursued by him along\nthree paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively; and\nprogress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by the\napplication of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions and\ndefinitions. The absolute significance and value of any bit of religious\nexperience we might hear of would thus be given almost mathematically into\nour hands.\n\nIf convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding\nourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But we\ndid cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you\nremember we made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method; and it\nmust be confessed that after that act of renunciation we can never hope\nfor clean\u2010cut and scholastic results. _We_ cannot divide man sharply into\nan animal and a rational part. _We_ cannot distinguish natural from\nsupernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God,\nand which are counterfeit operations of the demon. We have merely to\ncollect things together without any special _a priori_ theological system,\nand out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and\nthat experience\u2014judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our\ninstincts, and our common sense are our only guides\u2014decide that _on the\nwhole_ one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type\ncondemned. \u201cOn the whole,\u201d\u2014I fear we shall never escape complicity with\nthat qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your\nsystematizer!\n\nI also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of\nyou to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot.\nSkepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of\nsuch a formless method as I have taken up. A few remarks in deprecation of\nsuch an opinion, and in farther explanation of the empiricist principles\nwhich I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be in place.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nAbstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a\nreligion\u2019s fruits in merely human terms of value. How _can_ you measure\ntheir worth without considering whether the God really exists who is\nsupposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the conduct\ninstituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit\nof his religion,\u2014it would be unreasonable only in case he did not exist.\nIf, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal\nsacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a\ndeity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a\ntheoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non\u2010\nexistent; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you\nwere a scholastic philosopher.\n\nTo this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain\ntypes of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If\ndisbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices,\ninstincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological\npartisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.\n\nBut such common\u2010sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of\nan empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular\nalteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their\ninsight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop.\nAfter an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves\nunfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were\nperfectly satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common\nsecular level, and can no longer be believed in. To\u2010day a deity who should\nrequire bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be\ntaken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward\nin his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel\nappetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him\nto men\u2019s imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were\nrespected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were\nworshiped because such fruits were relished.\n\nDoubtless historic accidents always played some later part, but the\noriginal factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have been\npsychological. The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who\nfounded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them\npersonally. They could use him. He guided their imagination, warranted\ntheir hopes, and controlled their will,\u2014or else they required him as a\nsafeguard against the demon and a curber of other people\u2019s crimes. In any\ncase, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them to\nyield. So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless; so soon as\nthey conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted too\nextensively other values; so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible,\nor immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited, and was erelong\nneglected and forgotten. It was in this way that the Greek and Roman gods\nceased to be believed in by educated pagans; it is thus that we ourselves\njudge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan theologies; Protestants have\nso dealt with the Catholic notions of deity, and liberal Protestants with\nolder Protestant notions; it is thus that Chinamen judge of us, and that\nall of us now living will be judged by our descendants. When we cease to\nadmire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we end by\ndeeming that deity incredible.\n\nFew historic changes are more curious than these mutations of theological\nopinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so\nineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of\ncruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been\nrequired by their imagination. They called the cruelty \u201cretributive\njustice,\u201d and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not\n\u201csovereign\u201d enough. But to\u2010day we abhor the very notion of eternal\nsuffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing\u2010out of salvation and\ndamnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could\npersuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a \u201cdelightful\nconviction,\u201d as of a doctrine \u201cexceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,\u201d\nappears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.\nNot only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believed\nin by earlier centuries also strikes later centuries with surprise. We\nshall see examples of it from the annals of Catholic saintship which make\nus rub our Protestant eyes. Ritual worship in general appears to the\nmodern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra\u2010puritanic type of mind,\nas if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character,\ntaking delight in toy\u2010shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and\nmumbling and mummery, and finding his \u201cglory\u201d incomprehensibly enhanced\nthereby;\u2014just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism\nappears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of\nevangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. Luther,\nsays Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his\ntheses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were\ndestined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.\n\nSo far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our pretensions\nto empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological\nprobability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other\nmen\u2019s religion, yet this very standard has been begotten out of the drift\nof common life. It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and\ncondemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels\nitself to be advancing. Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is\nthus the parent of those disbeliefs which, it was charged, were\ninconsistent with the experiential method. The inconsistency, you see, is\nimmaterial, and the charge may be neglected.\n\nIf we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there\nis not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method. The gods\nwe stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us\nare reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I\nthen propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common\nsense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life\ncommends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself,\nthen any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will\nstand accredited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all without\nreference to anything but human working principles. It is but the\nelimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest,\napplied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and\nwithout prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long\nrun established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have\n_approved_ themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which\nthey found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when\nother faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions\nwere supplanted.\n\nThe needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp. So the\nreproach of vagueness and subjectivity and \u201con the whole\u201d\u2010ness, which can\nwith perfect legitimacy be addressed to the empirical method as we are\nforced to use it, is after all a reproach to which the entire life of man\nin dealing with these matters is obnoxious. No religion has ever yet owed\nits prevalence to \u201capodictic certainty.\u201d In a later lecture I will ask\nwhether objective certainty can ever be added by theological reasoning to\na religion that already empirically prevails.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nOne word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort of an\nempirical method we are handing ourselves over to systematic skepticism.\n\nSince it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments and\nneeds, it would be absurd to affirm that one\u2019s own age of the world can be\nbeyond correction by the next age. Skepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled\nout by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which their\nconclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption from\nthis universal liability. But to admit one\u2019s liability to correction is\none thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another. Of\nwillfully playing into the hands of skepticism we cannot be accused. He\nwho acknowledges the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance\nfor it in discussing his observations, is in a much better position for\ngaining truth than if he claimed his instrument to be infallible. Or is\ndogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for\nclaiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not,\nwhat command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if,\ninstead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for\nher conclusions? If _we_ claim only reasonable probability, it will be as\nmuch as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have\nwithin their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had,\nif we were unconscious of our liability to err.\n\nNevertheless, dogmatism will doubtless continue to condemn us for this\nconfession. The mere outward form of inalterable certainty is so precious\nto some minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of the\nquestion. They will claim it even where the facts most patently pronounce\nits folly. But the safe thing is surely to recognize that all the insights\nof creatures of a day like ourselves must be provisional. The wisest of\ncritics is an altering being, subject to the better insight of the morrow,\nand right at any moment, only \u201cup to date\u201d and \u201con the whole.\u201d When larger\nranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to\ntheir reception, unfettered by our previous pretensions. \u201cHeartily know,\nwhen half\u2010gods go, the gods arrive.\u201d\n\nThe fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore\nentirely unescapable, whatever may be one\u2019s own desire to attain the\nirreversible. But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question awaits\nus, the question whether men\u2019s opinions ought to be expected to be\nabsolutely uniform in this field. Ought all men to have the same religion?\nOught they to approve the same fruits and follow the same leadings? Are\nthey so like in their inner needs that, for hard and soft, for proud and\nhumble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy\u2010minded and despairing, exactly\nthe same religious incentives are required? Or are different functions in\nthe organism of humanity allotted to different types of man, so that some\nmay really be the better for a religion of consolation and reassurance,\nwhilst others are better for one of terror and reproof? It might\nconceivably be so; and we shall, I think, more and more suspect it to be\nso as we go on. And if it be so, how can any possible judge or critic help\nbeing biased in favor of the religion by which his own needs are best met?\nHe aspires to impartiality; but he is too close to the struggle not to be\nto some degree a participant, and he is sure to approve most warmly those\nfruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most nourishing\nto _him_.\n\nI am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing\nmyself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very\nnotion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see\nit applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that\nwe or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely\nincorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those\nwith which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a\nperverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder\nand doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to\npossess it already wholly. That we can gain more and more of it by moving\nalways in the right direction, I believe as much as any one, and I hope to\nbring you all to my way of thinking before the termination of these\nlectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably\nagainst the empiricism which I profess.\n\nI will waste no more words, then, in abstract justification of my method,\nbut seek immediately to use it upon the facts.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIn critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very\nimportant to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual\npersonal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal\nproduct. I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture.\nThe word \u201creligion,\u201d as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of history\nshows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and\nproduce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to\n\u201corganize\u201d themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with\ncorporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of\ndogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally\ninnocent thing; so that when we hear the word \u201creligion\u201d nowadays, we\nthink inevitably of some \u201cchurch\u201d or other; and to some persons the word\n\u201cchurch\u201d suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity\nof superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying\nthat they are \u201cdown\u201d on religion altogether. Even we who belong to\nchurches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general\ncondemnation.\n\nBut in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern\nus at all. The religious experience which we are studying is that which\nlives itself out within the private breast. First\u2010hand individual\nexperience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of\ninnovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world\nand lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it\ninto the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where\nthe Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others\nhad to go. George Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no\nbetter at this point than read to you a page from his Journal, referring\nto the period of his youth when religion began to ferment within him\nseriously.\n\n\n    \u201cI fasted much,\u201d Fox says, \u201cwalked abroad in solitary places many\n    days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and\n    lonesome places until night came on; and frequently in the night\n    walked mournfully about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in\n    the time of the first workings of the Lord in me.\n\n    \u201cDuring all this time I was never joined in profession of religion\n    with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil\n    company, taking leave of father and mother, and all other\n    relations, and traveled up and down as a stranger on the earth,\n    which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself\n    in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes more, sometimes\n    less in a place: for I durst not stay long in a place, being\n    afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young\n    man, I should be hurt by conversing much with either. For which\n    reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenly wisdom and\n    getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward\n    things, to rely on the Lord alone. As I had forsaken the priests,\n    so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most\n    experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that\n    could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in\n    all men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor\n    could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said,\n    \u2018There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy\n    condition.\u2019 When I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the\n    Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak\n    to my condition. I had not fellowship with any people, priests,\n    nor professors, nor any sort of separated people. I was afraid of\n    all carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but\n    corruptions. When I was in the deep, under all shut up, I could\n    not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows,\n    and my temptations were so great that I often thought I should\n    have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how\n    he was tempted by the same devil, and had overcome him, and had\n    bruised his head; and that through him and his power, life, grace,\n    and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. If I\n    had had a king\u2019s diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been\n    as nothing; for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power.\n    I saw professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in\n    that condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I\n    would have been rid of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon\n    himself, and my care was cast upon him alone.\u201d(197)\n\n\nA genuine first\u2010hand religious experience like this is bound to be a\nheterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely\nmadman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others,\nit becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove\ncontagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an\northodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of\ninwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand\nexclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite\nof whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as\na staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious\nspirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in\npurer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless, indeed, by\nadopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital out of them and\nuse them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective action of this\npolitic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealings of the Roman\necclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield examples\nenough for our instruction.\n\nThe plain fact is that men\u2019s minds are built, as has been often said, in\nwater\u2010tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many\nother things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and\nassociations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to\nreligion\u2019s account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to\nreligion proper, but rather to religion\u2019s wicked practical partner, the\nspirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their\nturn chargeable to religion\u2019s wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of\ndogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an\nabsolutely closed\u2010in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in\ngeneral is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you\nnever to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology\nwhich it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life\nwhich are the exclusive object of our study. The baiting of Jews, the\nhunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of\nMethodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians,\nexpress much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of\nwhich we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and\nof eccentric and non\u2010conforming men as aliens, than they express the\npositive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner\nforce is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in spite of the\nChristian unction with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon\ntheir way to China, that the conduct which he suggested, and in which\nother Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to do with\nthe interior religious life of those concerned in the performance.\n\nWell, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we make\npiety responsible. At most we may blame piety for not availing to check\nour natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them with hypocritical\npretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and with the pretext\nusually couples some restriction; and when the passion gust is over, the\npiety may bring a reaction of repentance which the irreligious natural man\nwould not have shown.\n\nFor many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her charge,\nreligion as such, then, is not to blame. Yet of the charge that over\u2010\nzealousness or fanaticism is one of her liabilities we cannot wholly\nacquit her, so I will next make a remark upon that point. But I will\npreface it by a preliminary remark which connects itself with much that\nfollows.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nOur survey of the phenomena of saintliness has unquestionably produced in\nyour minds an impression of extravagance. Is it necessary, some of you\nhave asked, as one example after another came before us, to be quite so\nfantastically good as that? We who have no vocation for the extremer\nranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if our humility,\nasceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort. This\npractically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to admire in\nthis field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious\nphenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of the\ngolden mean. Political reformers accomplish their successive tasks in the\nhistory of nations by being blind for the time to other causes. Great\nschools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to reveal,\nat the cost of a one\u2010sidedness for which other schools must make amends.\nWe accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a\nkind of indulgence. We are glad they existed to show us that way, but we\nare glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life. So of many\nof the saints whom we have looked at. We are proud of a human nature that\ncould be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to\nfollow the example. The conduct we blame ourselves for not following lies\nnearer to the middle line of human effort. It is less dependent on\nparticular beliefs and doctrines. It is such as wears well in different\nages, such as under different skies all judges are able to commend.\n\nThe fruits of religion, in other words, are, like all human products,\nliable to corruption by excess. Common sense must judge them. It need not\nblame the votary; but it may be able to praise him only conditionally, as\none who acts faithfully according to his lights. He shows us heroism in\none way, but the unconditionally good way is that for which no indulgence\nneed be asked.\n\nWe find that error by excess is exemplified by every saintly virtue.\nExcess, in human faculties, means usually one\u2010sidedness or want of\nbalance; for it is hard to imagine an essential faculty too strong, if\nonly other faculties equally strong be there to co\u00f6perate with it in\naction. Strong affections need a strong will; strong active powers need a\nstrong intellect; strong intellect needs strong sympathies, to keep life\nsteady. If the balance exist, no one faculty can possibly be too strong\u2014we\nonly get the stronger all\u2010round character. In the life of saints,\ntechnically so called, the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives\nthe impression of extravagance proves usually on examination to be a\nrelative deficiency of intellect. Spiritual excitement takes pathological\nforms whenever other interests are too few and the intellect too narrow.\nWe find this exemplified by all the saintly attributes in turn\u2014devout love\nof God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray. I will run over\nthese virtues in succession.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nFirst of all let us take Devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices is\ncalled Fanaticism. Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of\necclesiastical ambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme.\nWhen an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feeling\nthat a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, one\nof the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself.\nTo adequately realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the one\ngreat merit of the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities by which\nsavage tribesmen have from time immemorial exhibited their faithfulness to\nchieftains are now outbid in favor of the deity. Vocabularies are\nexhausted and languages altered in the attempt to praise him enough; death\nis looked on as gain if it attract his grateful notice; and the personal\nattitude of being his devotee becomes what one might almost call a new and\nexalted kind of professional specialty within the tribe.(198) The legends\nthat gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits of this impulse to\ncelebrate and glorify. The Buddha(199) and Mohammed(200) and their\ncompanions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of\nanecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply _abgeschmackt_\nand silly, and form a touching expression of man\u2019s misguided propensity to\npraise.\n\nAn immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy for the\ndeity\u2019s honor. How can the devotee show his loyalty better than by\nsensitiveness in this regard? The slightest affront or neglect must be\nresented, the deity\u2019s enemies must be put to shame. In exceedingly narrow\nminds and active wills, such a care may become an engrossing\npreoccupation; and crusades have been preached and massacres instigated\nfor no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon the God.\nTheologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and churches\nwith imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper to a glow,\nso that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by\nsome of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its\nbesetting sins. The saintly temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper\nhas often to be cruel. It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel. Between\nhis own and Jehovah\u2019s enemies a David knows no difference; a Catherine of\nSiena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians which was the scandal\nof her epoch, can think of no better method of union among them than a\ncrusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds no word of protest or regret\nover the atrocious tortures with which the Anabaptist leaders were put to\ndeath; and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies into his\nhands for \u201cexecution.\u201d Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds\nthe partnership not quite unnatural. So, when \u201cfreethinkers\u201d tell us that\nreligion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of\nthe charge.\n\nFanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrong side of religion\u2019s account,\nso long as the religious person\u2019s intellect is on the stage which the\ndespotic kind of God satisfies. But as soon as the God is represented as\nless intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger.\n\nFanaticism is found only where the character is masterful and aggressive.\nIn gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and the intellect\nfeeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the\nexclusion of all practical human interests, which, though innocent enough,\nis too one\u2010sided to be admirable. A mind too narrow has room but for one\nkind of affection. When the love of God takes possession of such a mind,\nit expels all human loves and human uses. There is no English name for\nsuch a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as a _theopathic_\ncondition.\n\nThe blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example.\n\n\n    \u201cTo be loved here upon the earth,\u201d her recent biographer exclaims:\n    \u201cto be loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be\n    loved with fidelity, with devotion,\u2014what enchantment! But to be\n    loved by God! and loved by him to distraction [aim\u00e9 jusq\u00f9\u2019\u00e0 la\n    folie]!\u2014Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a\n    thing. Like Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint\n    Francis Xavier, she said to God: \u2018Hold back, O my God, these\n    torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for their\n    reception.\u2019 \u201d(201)\n\n    The most signal proofs of God\u2019s love which Margaret Mary received\n    were her hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most\n    signal in turn of these were the revelations of Christ\u2019s sacred\n    heart, \u201csurrounded with rays more brilliant than the Sun, and\n    transparent like a crystal. The wound which he received on the\n    cross visibly appeared upon it. There was a crown of thorns round\n    about this divine Heart, and a cross above it.\u201d At the same time\n    Christ\u2019s voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames\n    of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread\n    the knowledge of them. He thereupon took out her mortal heart,\n    placed it inside of his own and inflamed it, and then replaced it\n    in her breast, adding: \u201cHitherto thou hast taken the name of my\n    slave, hereafter thou shalt be called the well\u2010beloved disciple of\n    my Sacred Heart.\u201d\n\n    In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail the \u201cgreat\n    design\u201d which he wished to establish through her instrumentality.\n    \u201cI ask of thee to bring it about that every first Friday after the\n    week of holy Sacrament shall be made into a special holy day for\n    honoring my Heart by a general communion and by services intended\n    to make honorable amends for the indignities which it has\n    received. And I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed\n    with abundance the influences of its love upon all those who pay\n    to it these honors, or who bring it about that others do the\n    same.\u201d\n\n\n\u201cThis revelation,\u201d says Mgr. Bougaud, \u201cis unquestionably the most\nimportant of all the revelations which have illumined the Church since\nthat of the Incarnation and of the Lord\u2019s Supper.... After the Eucharist,\nthe supreme effort of the Sacred Heart.\u201d(202) Well, what were its good\nfruits for Margaret Mary\u2019s life? Apparently little else but sufferings and\nprayers and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. She became\nincreasingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ\u2019s love,\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cwhich grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable\n    of attending to external duties. They tried her in the infirmary,\n    but without much success, although her kindness, zeal, and\n    devotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such\n    a heroism that our readers would not bear the recital of them.\n    They tried her in the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as\n    hopeless\u2014everything dropped out of her hands. The admirable\n    humility with which she made amends for her clumsiness could not\n    prevent this from being prejudicial to the order and regularity\n    which must always reign in a community. They put her in the\n    school, where the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces out\n    of her clothes [for relics] as if she were already a saint, but\n    where she was too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary\n    attention. Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than\n    before them was she a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her\n    in her heaven.\u201d(203)\n\n\nPoor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual\noutlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and\nmodern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of\nsaintship which she embodies. A lower example still of theopathic\nsaintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth\ncentury, whose \u201cRevelations,\u201d a well\u2010known mystical authority, consist\nmainly of proofs of Christ\u2019s partiality for her undeserving person.\nAssurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of the\nmost absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an\nindividual, form the tissue of this paltry\u2010minded recital.(204) In reading\nsuch a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the\ntwentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield\nalmost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior\nintellectual sympathies. What with science, idealism, and democracy, our\nown imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different\ntemperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal\nfavors, with whom our ancestors were so contented. Smitten as we are with\nthe vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but\nadulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an\nessential element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood\nof former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us\ncuriously shallow and unedifying.\n\nTake Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many respects,\nof whose life we have the record. She had a powerful intellect of the\npractical order. She wrote admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a\nwill equal to any emergency, great talent for politics and business, a\nbuoyant disposition, and a first\u2010rate literary style. She was tenaciously\naspiring, and put her whole life at the service of her religious ideals.\nYet so paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking, that\n(although I know that others have been moved differently) I confess that\nmy only feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality of soul\nshould have found such poor employment.\n\nIn spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor of\nsuperficiality about her genius. A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan,\nhas divided the human race into two types, whom he calls \u201cshrews\u201d and\n\u201cnon\u2010shrews\u201d respectively.(205) The shrew\u2010type is defined as possessing an\n\u201cactive unimpassioned temperament.\u201d In other words, shrews are the\n\u201cmotors,\u201d rather than the \u201csensories,\u201d(206) and their expressions are as a\nrule more energetic than the feelings which appear to prompt them. Saint\nTeresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in\nthis sense of the term. The bustle of her style, as well as of her life,\nproves it. Not only must she receive unheard\u2010of personal favors and\nspiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about\nthem and _exploiter_ them professionally, and use her expertness to give\ninstruction to those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not\nof radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her \u201cfaults\u201d\nand \u201cimperfections\u201d in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return\nupon herself, as covered with \u201cconfusion\u201d at each new manifestation of\nGod\u2019s singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of\nshrewdom: a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in\ngratitude, and silent. She had some public instincts, it is true; she\nhated the Lutherans, and longed for the church\u2019s triumph over them; but in\nthe main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless\namatory flirtation\u2014if one may say so without irreverence\u2014between the\ndevotee and the deity; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this\ndirection by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is\nabsolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest. Yet\nthe spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.\n\nWe have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based\non merits. Any God who, on the one hand, can care to keep a pedantically\nminute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such\npartialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of\nfavor, is too small\u2010minded a God for our credence. When Luther, in his\nimmense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a\ndebit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he\nstretched the soul\u2019s imagination and saved theology from puerility.\n\nSo much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions\nwhich might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic\ncharacters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God must\nnot be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers,\nand friends are felt as interfering distractions; for sensitiveness and\nnarrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all\nthings a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are too much\nfor their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas your aggressive\npietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and\ndivergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving\ndisorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he\ndwells himself and from which he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside\nof the church militant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition\nmethods, we have the church _fugient_, as one might call it, with its\nhermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches\npursuing the same object\u2014to unify the life,(207) and simplify the\nspectacle presented to the soul. A mind extremely sensitive to inner\ndiscords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering\nwith the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things. Amusements must\ngo first, then conventional \u201csociety,\u201d then business, then family duties,\nuntil at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for\nstated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne. The lives of\nsaints are a history of successive renunciations of complication, one form\nof contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the\npurity of inner tone.(208) \u201cIs it not better,\u201d a young sister asks her\nSuperior, \u201cthat I should not speak at all during the hour of recreation,\nso as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin of which\nI might not be conscious?\u201d(209) If the life remains a social one at all,\nthose who take part in it must follow one identical rule. Embosomed in\nthis monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. The\nminuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities,\nwhether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a man of the\nworld. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped,\nand there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this\nstability an incomparable kind of mental rest.\n\nWe have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of Saint\nLouis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification. I think you\nwill agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external and\ndiscordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire. At the age of\nten, his biographer says:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThe inspiration came to him to consecrate to the Mother of God\n    his own virginity\u2014that being to her the most agreeable of possible\n    presents. Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was\n    in him, joyous of heart, and burning with love, he made his vow of\n    perpetual chastity. Mary accepted the offering of his innocent\n    heart, and obtained for him from God, as a recompense, the\n    extraordinary grace of never feeling during his entire life the\n    slightest touch of temptation against the virtue of purity. This\n    was an altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded even to\n    Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in that Louis dwelt\n    always in courts and among great folks, where danger and\n    opportunity are so unusually frequent. It is true that Louis from\n    his earliest childhood had shown a natural repugnance for whatever\n    might be impure or unvirginal, and even for relations of any sort\n    whatever between persons of opposite sex. But this made it all the\n    more surprising that he should, especially since this vow, feel it\n    necessary to have recourse to such a number of expedients for\n    protecting against even the shadow of danger the virginity which\n    he had thus consecrated. One might suppose that if any one could\n    have contented himself with the ordinary precautions, prescribed\n    for all Christians, it would assuredly have been he. But no! In\n    the use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight from the\n    most insignificant occasions, from every possibility of peril,\n    just as in the mortification of his flesh, he went farther than\n    the majority of saints. He, who by an extraordinary protection of\n    God\u2019s grace was never tempted, measured all his steps as if he\n    were threatened on every side by particular dangers. Thenceforward\n    he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or\n    when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females\n    even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all\n    conversation and every kind of social recreation with them,\n    although his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced\n    only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of\n    every kind.\u201d(210)\n\n\nAt the age of twelve, we read of this young man that \u201cif by chance his\nmother sent one of her maids of honor to him with a message, he never\nallowed her to come in, but listened to her through the barely opened\ndoor, and dismissed her immediately. He did not like to be alone with his\nown mother, whether at table or in conversation; and when the rest of the\ncompany withdrew, he sought also a pretext for retiring.... Several great\nladies, relatives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight; and\nhe made a sort of treaty with his father, engaging promptly and readily to\naccede to all his wishes, if he might only be excused from all visits to\nladies.\u201d (Ibid., p. 71.)\n\nWhen he was seventeen years old Louis joined the Jesuit order(211) against\nhis father\u2019s passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house;\nand when a year later the father died, he took the loss as a \u201cparticular\nattention\u201d to himself on God\u2019s part, and wrote letters of stilted good\nadvice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon\nbecame so good a monk that if any one asked him the number of his brothers\nand sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before replying. A\nFather asked him one day if he were never troubled by the thought of his\nfamily, to which, \u201cI never think of them except when praying for them,\u201d\nwas his only answer. Never was he seen to hold in his hand a flower or\nanything perfumed, that he might take pleasure in it. On the contrary, in\nthe hospital, he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting, and\neagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc., from the hands of his\ncompanions. He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn every\nconversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained silent. He\nsystematically refused to notice his surroundings. Being ordered one day\nto bring a book from the rector\u2019s seat in the refectory, he had to ask\nwhere the rector sat, for in the three months he had eaten bread there, so\ncarefully did he guard his eyes that he had not noticed the place. One\nday, during recess, having looked by chance on one of his companions, he\nreproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty. He cultivated\nsilence, as preserving from sins of the tongue; and his greatest penance\nwas the limit which his superiors set to his bodily penances. He sought\nafter false accusations and unjust reprimands as opportunities of\nhumility; and such was his obedience that, when a room\u2010mate, having no\nmore paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel free to give it to him\nwithout first obtaining the permission of the superior, who, as such,\nstood in the place of God, and transmitted his orders.\n\nI can find no other sorts of fruit than these of Louis\u2019s saintship. He\ndied in 1591, in his twenty\u2010ninth year, and is known in the Church as the\npatron of all young people. On his festival, the altar in the chapel\ndevoted to him in a certain church in Rome \u201cis embosomed in flowers,\narranged with exquisite taste; and a pile of letters may be seen at its\nfoot, written to the Saint by young men and women, and directed to\n\u2018Paradiso.\u2019 They are supposed to be burnt unread except by San Luigi, who\nmust find singular petitions in these pretty little missives, tied up now\nwith a green ribbon, expressive of hope, now with a red one, emblematic of\nlove,\u201d etc.(212)\n\nOur final judgment of the worth of such a life as this will depend largely\non our conception of God, and of the sort of conduct he is best pleased\nwith in his creatures. The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paid\nlittle heed to social righteousness; and to leave the world to the devil\nwhilst saving one\u2019s own soul was then accounted no discreditable scheme.\nTo\u2010day, rightly or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairs is, in\nconsequence of one of those secular mutations in moral sentiment of which\nI spoke, deemed an essential element of worth in character; and to be of\nsome public or private use is also reckoned as a species of divine\nservice. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them, the\nXaviers, Br\u00e9beufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and fought in their way\nfor the world\u2019s welfare; so their lives to\u2010day inspire us. But when the\nintellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin\u2019s head,\nand cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result,\nnotwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. Purity,\nwe see in the object\u2010lesson, is _not_ the one thing needful; and it is\nbetter that a life should contract many a dirt\u2010mark, than forfeit\nusefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.\n\nProceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next come\nupon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has to face the\ncharge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars.\n\u201cResist not evil,\u201d \u201cLove your enemies,\u201d these are saintly maxims of which\nmen of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are the men of\nthis world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of\ntruth?\n\nNo simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels the complexity\nof the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way in which facts and\nideals are interwoven.\n\nPerfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actor, the objects\nfor which he acts, and the recipients of the action. In order that conduct\nshould be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, and\nreception, should be suited to one another. The best intention will fail\nif it either work by false means or address itself to the wrong recipient.\nThus no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine himself to\nthe actor\u2019s animus alone, apart from the other elements of the\nperformance. As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those\nwho hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and\nappeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human\ncrocodiles and boa\u2010constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe\ninto the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by non\u2010resistance\ncut off his own survival.\n\nHerbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man\u2019s conduct will appear\nperfect only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior environment\nis it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that\nsaintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an\nenvironment where all were saints already; but by adding that in an\nenvironment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it\nmust be ill adapted. We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical\ncommon sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that\nactually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non\u2010resistance may be,\nand often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have\nsystematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific\norganization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving\nalms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on\nthe excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of\nsmiting back and not turning the other cheek also.\n\nYou will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of\nQuakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in\nshooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and\nswindlers.\n\nAnd yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these\nhard\u2010headed, hard\u2010hearted, and hard\u2010fisted methods exclusively, were there\nno one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he\nwere worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the\nwronger\u2019s person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live\nalways on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and\nimpulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be\nan infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not\nof a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the\ngolden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our\nimaginations.\n\nThe saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of human\ntenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved\nthemselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past,\nin spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to _be_\nworthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the\nchallenge of their expectation.\n\nFrom this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in\nall saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to be\na genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of virtue\nwhich it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors,\n_auctores_, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities of development in\nhuman souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably hardened\nhave in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, in ways that\namazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we\nnever can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of\nlove is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa\u2010\nconstrictors as of fixedly incurable beings. We know not the complexities\nof personality, the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of the\ncharacter\u2010polyhedron, the resources of the subliminal region. St. Paul\nlong ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is\nvirtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul\nsaid, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness\nof every one expresses itself to\u2010day in all sorts of humane customs and\nreformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty\nand to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of\nhuman tenderness, are the great torch\u2010bearers of this belief, the tip of\nthe wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which\nsparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a\nwave\u2010crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world\nis not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world\u2019s\naffairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world,\nvivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them\nwould lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we\nnaturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another;\nand without that over\u2010trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us\nwould lie in spiritual stagnancy.\n\nMomentarily considered, then, the saint may waste his tenderness and be\nthe dupe and victim of his charitable fever, but the general function of\nhis charity in social evolution is vital and essential. If things are ever\nto move upward, some one must be ready to take the first step, and assume\nthe risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non\u2010\nresistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods\nwill or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more\npowerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys\nenemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what\nwe already have in safety. But non\u2010resistance, when successful, turns\nenemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly\nmethods are, as I said, creative energies; and genuine saints find in the\nelevated excitement with which their faith endows them an authority and\nimpressiveness which makes them irresistible in situations where men of\nshallower nature cannot get on at all without the use of worldly prudence.\nThis practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the\nsaint\u2019s magic gift to mankind.(213) Not only does his vision of a better\nworld console us for the generally prevailing prose and barrenness; but\neven when on the whole we have to confess him ill adapted, he makes some\nconverts, and the environment gets better for his ministry. He is an\neffective ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a\nmore heavenly order.\n\nIn this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many\ncontemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their\nimpracticability and non\u2010adaptation to present environmental conditions,\nanalogous to the saint\u2019s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They\nhelp to break the edge of the general reign of hardness, and are slow\nleavens of a better order.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are all ready to\nconsider without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and excess. The\noptimism and refinement of the modern imagination has, as I have already\nsaid elsewhere, changed the attitude of the church towards corporeal\nmortification, and a Suso or a Saint Peter of Alcantara(214) appear to us\nto\u2010day rather in the light of tragic mountebanks than of sane men\ninspiring us with respect. If the inner dispositions are right, we ask,\nwhat need of all this torment, this violation of the outer nature? It\nkeeps the outer nature too important. Any one who is genuinely emancipated\nfrom the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation,\nas alike irrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actions and\nexperience enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement. As the\nBhagavad\u2010Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions who are still\ninwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to the fruits of\naction, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quoted in a former\nlecture Saint Augustine\u2019s antinomian saying: If you only love God enough,\nyou may safely follow all your inclinations. \u201cHe needs no devotional\npractices,\u201d is one of Ramakrishna\u2019s maxims, \u201cwhose heart is moved to tears\nat the mere mention of the name of Hari.\u201d(215) And the Buddha, in pointing\nout what he called \u201cthe middle way\u201d to his disciples, told them to abstain\nfrom both extremes, excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy\nas mere desire and pleasure. The only perfect life, he said, is that of\ninner wisdom, which makes one thing as indifferent to us as another, and\nthus leads to rest, to peace, and to Nirv\u00e2na.(216)\n\nWe find accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older, and directors\nof conscience more experienced, they usually have shown a tendency to lay\nless stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholic teachers have\nalways professed the rule that, since health is needed for efficiency in\nGod\u2019s service, health must not be sacrificed to mortification. The general\noptimism and healthy\u2010mindedness of liberal Protestant circles to\u2010day makes\nmortification for mortification\u2019s sake repugnant to us. We can no longer\nsympathize with cruel deities, and the notion that God can take delight in\nthe spectacle of sufferings self\u2010inflicted in his honor is abhorrent. In\nconsequence of all these motives you probably are disposed, unless some\nspecial utility can be shown in some individual\u2019s discipline, to treat the\ngeneral tendency to asceticism as pathological.\n\nYet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter,\ndistinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the\nuselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty,\nought to rehabilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritual meaning\nasceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice\u2010born\nphilosophy. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the\nbelief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is\nneither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and\novercome by an appeal to the soul\u2019s heroic resources, and neutralized and\ncleansed away by suffering. As against this view, the ultra\u2010optimistic\nform of the once\u2010born philosophy thinks we may treat evil by the method of\nignoring. Let a man who, by fortunate health and circumstances, escapes\nthe suffering of any great amount of evil in his own person, also close\nhis eyes to it as it exists in the wider universe outside his private\nexperience, and he will be quit of it altogether, and can sail through\nlife happily on a healthy\u2010minded basis. But we saw in our lectures on\nmelancholy how precarious this attempt necessarily is. Moreover it is but\nfor the individual; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and\nunprovided for in his philosophy.\n\nNo such attempt can be a _general_ solution of the problem; and to minds\nof sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such\noptimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of a real\ndeliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escape\nby. It leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan.\nThe real deliverance, the twice\u2010born folk insist, must be of universal\napplication. Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in\nhigher excitement, or else their sting remains essentially unbroken. If\none has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this\nworld\u2019s history fairly into his mind,\u2014freezing, drowning, entombment\nalive, wild beasts, worse men, and hideous diseases,\u2014he can with\ndifficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career of worldly prosperity\nwithout suspecting that he may all the while not be really inside the\ngame, that he may lack the great initiation.\n\nWell, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takes the\ninitiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but\nsomething we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter taste\nwill purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted\nparts of it that healthy\u2010mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental\noptimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious\nsolution. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an\nanswer to the sphinx\u2019s riddle.\n\nIn these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind\u2019s common instinct for\nreality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be\nessentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life\u2019s supreme\nmystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it\nin any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man\u2019s frailties\notherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he\nsuffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates\nhim forever. Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if yet we cling to\nlife, and he is able \u201cto fling it away like a flower\u201d as caring nothing\nfor it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in\nhis own person feels that a high\u2010hearted indifference to life would\nexpiate all his shortcomings.\n\nThe metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who\nfeeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and\nexcellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the\ntruth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of the\ncross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital\nmeaning.\n\nRepresentatively, then, and symbolically, and apart from the vagaries into\nwhich the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it wander,\nasceticism must, I believe, be acknowledged to go with the profounder way\nof handling the gift of existence. Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub\nand flattery and sponge\u2010cake in comparison. The practical course of action\nfor us, as religious men, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply\nto turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us to\u2010day turn\nthem, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the\nway of privation and hardship might be objectively useful. The older\nmonastic asceticism occupied itself with pathetic futilities, or\nterminated in the mere egotism of the individual, increasing his own\nperfection.(217) But is it not possible for us to discard most of these\nolder forms of mortification, and yet find saner channels for the heroism\nwhich inspired them?\n\nDoes not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which\nconstitutes so large a portion of the \u201cspirit\u201d of our age, make somewhat\nfor effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and\nfacetious way in which most children are brought up to\u2010day\u2014so different\nfrom the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical\ncircles\u2014in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a\ncertain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of\napplication for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline?\n\nMany of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics,\nmilitarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the\nremedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy\nwith which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary\nreligion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them.(218) War and\nadventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves\ntoo tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of\nexertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of\nmotivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and\ncold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever.\nDeath turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our\naction vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges\nof new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of\npower.\n\nThe beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary\nhuman nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so\nthe most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field,\nis weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person\nhe may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of\ninsensibility.\n\nBut when we compare the military type of self\u2010severity with that of the\nascetic saint, we find a world\u2010wide difference in all their spiritual\nconcomitants.\n\n\u201c \u2018Live and let live,\u2019 \u201d writes a clear\u2010headed Austrian officer, \u201cis no\ndevice for an army. Contempt for one\u2019s own comrades, for the troops of the\nenemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one\u2019s own person, are what war\ndemands of every one. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too\ncruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human\nreasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he\nmust be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure\nof goodness in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace,\nrequire of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The\nrecruit brings with him common moral notions, of which he must seek\nimmediately to get rid. For him victory, success, must be _everything_.\nThe most barbaric tendencies in men come to life again in war, and for\nwar\u2019s uses they are incommensurably good.\u201d(219)\n\nThese words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of the\nsoldier\u2019s life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but\ndestruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non\u2010\nmilitary. Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too\nfeelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for\npersons or for things, that make for conservation. Yet the fact remains\nthat war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line\nof aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally\navailable. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale\norganization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against\neffeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of\nascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we\nnow need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war:\nsomething heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and\nyet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved\nitself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish\npoverty\u2010worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might\nbe something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May\nnot voluntarily accepted poverty be \u201cthe strenuous life,\u201d without the need\nof crushing weaker peoples?\n\nPoverty indeed _is_ the strenuous life,\u2014without brass bands or uniforms or\nhysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees\nthe way in which wealth\u2010getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and\nmarrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that\npoverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be \u201cthe transformation of\nmilitary courage,\u201d and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in\nneed of.\n\nAmong us English\u2010speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty\nneed once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be\npoor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and\nsave his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant\nwith the money\u2010making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in\nambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient\nidealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material\nattachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our\nway by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away\nour life at any moment irresponsibly,\u2014the more athletic trim, in short,\nthe moral fighting shape. When we of the so\u2010called better classes are\nscared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and\nhardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and\nquake at the thought of having a child without a bank\u2010account and doomed\nto manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly\nand irreligious a state of opinion.\n\nIt is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to\nideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But\nwealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the\ndesire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of\ncowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of\nconjunctures in which a wealth\u2010bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for\nwhom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which\npersonal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to\nunpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the\nrevolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of\npromotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces;\nyet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit,\nand our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would\nneed its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we\npersonally were contented with our poverty.\n\nI recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that\nthe prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst\nmoral disease from which our civilization suffers.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nI have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of\nreligion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a brief\nreview and pass to my more general conclusions.\n\nOur question, you will remember, is as to whether religion stands approved\nby its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character.\nSingle attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamental\nendowments, found in non\u2010religious individuals. But the whole group of\nthem forms a combination which, as such, is religious, for it seems to\nflow from the sense of the divine as from its psychological centre.\nWhoever possesses strongly this sense comes naturally to think that the\nsmallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their\nrelation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields him a\nsuperior denomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which\nno other can compare. In social relations his serviceability is exemplary;\nhe abounds in impulses to help. His help is inward as well as outward, for\nhis sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected\nfaculties therein. Instead of placing happiness where common men place it,\nin comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement, which\nconverts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he\nturns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and when we are in need of\nassistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more\ncertainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his humble\u2010\nmindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal\npretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and his\npurity gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Felicity, purity,\ncharity, patience, self\u2010severity,\u2014these are splendid excellencies, and the\nsaint of all men shows them in the completest possible measure.\n\nBut, as we saw, all these things together do not make saints infallible.\nWhen their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of\nholy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption, self\u2010torment, prudery,\nscrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the\nvery intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior\nintellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and\ndamnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We\nmust judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our\nown intellectual standards, placing him in his environment, and estimating\nhis total function.\n\nNow in the matter of intellectual standards, we must bear in mind that it\nis unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as a vice\nto the individual, for in religious and theological matters he probably\nabsorbs his narrowness from his generation. Moreover, we must not confound\nthe essentials of saintliness, which are those general passions of which I\nhave spoken, with its accidents, which are the special determinations of\nthese passions at any historical moment. In these determinations the\nsaints will usually be loyal to the temporary idols of their tribe. Taking\nrefuge in monasteries was as much an idol of the tribe in the middle ages,\nas bearing a hand in the world\u2019s work is to\u2010day. Saint Francis or Saint\nBernard, were they living to\u2010day, would undoubtedly be leading consecrated\nlives of some sort, but quite as undoubtedly they would not lead them in\nretirement. Our animosity to special historic manifestations must not lead\nus to give away the saintly impulses in their essential nature to the\ntender mercies of inimical critics.\n\nThe most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom I know is Nietzsche.\nHe contrasts them with the worldly passions as we find these embodied in\nthe predaceous military character, altogether to the advantage of the\nlatter. Your born saint, it must be confessed, has something about him\nwhich often makes the gorge of a carnal man rise, so it will be worth\nwhile to consider the contrast in question more fully.\n\nDislike of the saintly nature seems to be a negative result of the\nbiologically useful instinct of welcoming leadership, and glorifying the\nchief of the tribe. The chief is the potential, if not the actual tyrant,\nthe masterful, overpowering man of prey. We confess our inferiority and\ngrovel before him. We quail under his glance, and are at the same time\nproud of owning so dangerous a lord. Such instinctive and submissive hero\u2010\nworship must have been indispensable in primeval tribal life. In the\nendless wars of those times, leaders were absolutely needed for the\ntribe\u2019s survival. If there were any tribes who owned no leaders, they can\nhave left no issue to narrate their doom. The leaders always had good\nconsciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who\nlooked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom\nfrom inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward\nperformances.\n\nCompared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are\nherbivorous animals, tame and harmless barn\u2010yard poultry. There are saints\nwhose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity. Such a man\nexcites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience is full of\nscruples and returns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedom nor his\noutward power; and unless he found within us an altogether different\nfaculty of admiration to appeal to, we should pass him by with contempt.\n\nIn point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty. Re\u00ebnacted in\nhuman nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler. The\nsexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the man the more admiringly\nthe stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers the more\nfor being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates the\nman by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always\ncharmed the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and\nsuggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of influences is\nunsleeping. The saintly and the worldly ideal pursue their feud in\nliterature as much as in real life.\n\nFor Nietzsche the saint represents little but sneakingness and\nslavishness. He is the sophisticated invalid, the degenerate _par\nexcellence_, the man of insufficient vitality. His prevalence would put\nthe human type in danger.\n\n\n    \u201cThe sick are the greatest danger for the well. The weaker, not\n    the stronger, are the strong\u2019s undoing. It is not _fear_ of our\n    fellow\u2010man, which we should wish to see diminished; for fear\n    rouses those who are strong to become terrible in turn themselves,\n    and preserves the hard\u2010earned and successful type of humanity.\n    What is to be dreaded by us more than any other doom is not fear,\n    but rather the great disgust, not fear, but rather the great\n    pity\u2014disgust and pity for our human fellows.... The _morbid_ are\n    our greatest peril\u2014not the \u2018bad\u2019 men, not the predatory beings.\n    Those born wrong, the miscarried, the broken\u2014they it is, the\n    _weakest_, who are undermining the vitality of the race, poisoning\n    our trust in life, and putting humanity in question. Every look of\n    them is a sigh,\u2014\u2018Would I were something other! I am sick and tired\n    of what I am.\u2019 In this swamp\u2010soil of self\u2010contempt, every\n    poisonous weed flourishes, and all so small, so secret, so\n    dishonest, and so sweetly rotten. Here swarm the worms of\n    sensitiveness and resentment; here the air smells odious with\n    secrecy, with what is not to be acknowledged; here is woven\n    endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracy\n    of those who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious;\n    here the very aspect of the victorious is hated\u2014as if health,\n    success, strength, pride, and the sense of power were in\n    themselves things vicious, for which one ought eventually to make\n    bitter expiation. Oh, how these people would themselves like to\n    inflict the expiation, how they thirst to be the hangmen! And all\n    the while their duplicity never confesses their hatred to be\n    hatred.\u201d(220)\n\n\nPoor Nietzsche\u2019s antipathy is itself sickly enough, but we all know what\nhe means, and he expresses well the clash between the two ideals. The\ncarnivorous\u2010minded \u201cstrong man,\u201d the adult male and cannibal, can see\nnothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint\u2019s gentleness and self\u2010\nseverity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves\nessentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be\nour chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this\nseen world be aggressiveness or non\u2010resistance?\n\nThe debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree both worlds must\nbe acknowledged and taken account of; and in the seen world both\naggressiveness and non\u2010resistance are needful. It is a question of\nemphasis, of more or less. Is the saint\u2019s type or the strong\u2010man\u2019s type\nthe more ideal?\n\nIt has often been supposed, and even now, I think, it is supposed by most\npersons, that there can be one intrinsically ideal type of human\ncharacter. A certain kind of man, it is imagined, must be the best man\nabsolutely and apart from the utility of his function, apart from\neconomical considerations. The saint\u2019s type, and the knight\u2019s or\ngentleman\u2019s type, have always been rival claimants of this absolute\nideality; and in the ideal of military religious orders both types were in\na manner blended. According to the empirical philosophy, however, all\nideals are matters of relation. It would be absurd, for example, to ask\nfor a definition of \u201cthe ideal horse,\u201d so long as dragging drays and\nrunning races, bearing children, and jogging about with tradesmen\u2019s\npackages all remain as indispensable differentiations of equine function.\nYou may take what you call a general all\u2010round animal as a compromise, but\nhe will be inferior to any horse of a more specialized type, in some one\nparticular direction. We must not forget this now when, in discussing\nsaintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type of manhood. We must test it by\nits economical relations.\n\nI think that the method which Mr. Spencer uses in his Data of Ethics will\nhelp to fix our opinion. Ideality in conduct is altogether a matter of\nadaptation. A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy\nitself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive,\nothers must be non\u2010resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is\nthe present constitution of society, and to the mixture we owe many of our\nblessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending to\nbecome bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a\nstate of things as we now live in is the millennium. It is meanwhile quite\npossible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no\naggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness,\u2014any small community of\ntrue friends now realizes such a society. Abstractly considered, such a\nsociety on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing\nmight be realized there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial\nsociety the saint would be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal\nwould be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one extant\nto take advantage of his non\u2010resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly\na higher type of man than the \u201cstrong man,\u201d because he is adapted to the\nhighest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely\npossible or not. The strong man would immediately tend by his presence to\nmake that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything save\nin a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are.\n\nBut if we turn from the abstract question to the actual situation, we find\nthat the individual saint may be well or ill adapted, according to\nparticular circumstances. There is, in short, no absoluteness in the\nexcellence of sainthood. It must be confessed that as far as this world\ngoes, any one who makes an out\u2010and\u2010out saint of himself does so at his\nperil. If he is not a large enough man, he may appear more insignificant\nand contemptible, for all his saintship, than if he had remained a\nworldling.(221) Accordingly religion has seldom been so radically taken in\nour Western world that the devotee could not mix it with some worldly\ntemper. It has always found good men who could follow most of its\nimpulses, but who stopped short when it came to non\u2010resistance. Christ\nhimself was fierce upon occasion. Cromwells, Stonewall Jacksons, Gordons,\nshow that Christians can be strong men also.\n\nHow is success to be absolutely measured when there are so many\nenvironments and so many ways of looking at the adaptation? It cannot be\nmeasured absolutely; the verdict will vary according to the point of view\nadopted. From the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure,\nbecause he was beheaded. Yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger\nenvironment of history; and so far as any saint\u2019s example is a leaven of\nrighteousness in the world, and draws it in the direction of more\nprevalent habits of saintliness, he is a success, no matter what his\nimmediate bad fortune may be. The greatest saints, the spiritual heroes\nwhom every one acknowledges, the Francises, Bernards, Luthers, Loyolas,\nWesleys, Channings, Moodys, Gratrys, the Phillips Brookses, the Agnes\nJoneses, Margaret Hallahans, and Dora Pattisons, are successes from the\noutset. They show themselves, and there is no question; every one\nperceives their strength and stature. Their sense of mystery in things,\ntheir passion, their goodness, irradiate about them and enlarge their\noutlines while they soften them. They are like pictures with an atmosphere\nand background; and, placed alongside of them, the strong men of this\nworld and no other seem as dry as sticks, as hard and crude as blocks of\nstone or brickbats.\n\nIn a general way, then, and \u201con the whole,\u201d(222) our abandonment of\ntheological criteria, and our testing of religion by practical common\nsense and the empirical method, leave it in possession of its towering\nplace in history. Economically, the saintly group of qualities is\nindispensable to the world\u2019s welfare. The great saints are immediate\nsuccesses; the smaller ones are at least heralds and harbingers, and they\nmay be leavens also, of a better mundane order. Let us be saints, then, if\nwe can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally. But in our\nFather\u2019s house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself\nthe kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with\nwhat he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and\nvocation. There are no successes to be guaranteed and no set orders to be\ngiven to individuals, so long as we follow the methods of empirical\nphilosophy.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThis is my conclusion so far. I know that on some of your minds it leaves\na feeling of wonder that such a method should have been applied to such a\nsubject, and this in spite of all those remarks about empiricism which I\nmade at the beginning of Lecture XIII.(223) How, you say, can religion,\nwhich believes in two worlds and an invisible order, be estimated by the\nadaptation of its fruits to this world\u2019s order alone? It is its _truth_,\nnot its utility, you insist, upon which our verdict ought to depend. If\nreligion is true, its fruits are good fruits, even though in this world\nthey should prove uniformly ill adapted and full of naught but pathos. It\ngoes back, then, after all, to the question of the truth of theology. The\nplot inevitably thickens upon us; we cannot escape theoretical\nconsiderations. I propose, then, that to some degree we face the\nresponsibility. Religious persons have often, though not uniformly,\nprofessed to see truth in a special manner. That manner is known as\nmysticism. I will consequently now proceed to treat at some length of\nmystical phenomena, and after that, though more briefly, I will consider\nreligious philosophy.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURES XVI AND XVII. MYSTICISM.\n\n\nOver and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them\nopen and unfinished until we should have come to the subject of Mysticism.\nSome of you, I fear, may have smiled as you noted my reiterated\npostponements. But now the hour has come when mysticism must be faced in\ngood earnest, and those broken threads wound up together. One may say\ntruly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and centre\nin mystical states of consciousness; so for us, who in these lectures are\ntreating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such\nstates of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the\nother chapters get their light. Whether my treatment of mystical states\nwill shed more light or darkness, I do not know, for my own constitution\nshuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them\nonly at second hand. But though forced to look upon the subject so\nexternally, I will be as objective and receptive as I can; and I think I\nshall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of the states in\nquestion, and of the paramount importance of their function.\n\nFirst of all, then, I ask, What does the expression \u201cmystical states of\nconsciousness\u201d mean? How do we part off mystical states from other states?\n\nThe words \u201cmysticism\u201d and \u201cmystical\u201d are often used as terms of mere\nreproach, to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and\nsentimental, and without a base in either facts or logic. For some writers\na \u201cmystic\u201d is any person who believes in thought\u2010transference, or spirit\u2010\nreturn. Employed in this way the word has little value: there are too many\nless ambiguous synonyms. So, to keep it useful by restricting it, I will\ndo what I did in the case of the word \u201creligion,\u201d and simply propose to\nyou four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in\ncalling it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures. In this way\nwe shall save verbal disputation, and the recriminations that generally go\ntherewith.\n\n1. _Ineffability._\u2014The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state\nof mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that\nit defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given\nin words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly\nexperienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this\npeculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like\nstates of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a\ncertain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must\nhave musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in\nlove one\u2019s self to understand a lover\u2019s state of mind. Lacking the heart\nor ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even\nlikely to consider him weak\u2010minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most\nof us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.\n\n2. _Noetic quality._\u2014Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical\nstates seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge.\nThey are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the\ndiscursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of\nsignificance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a\nrule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after\u2010time.\n\nThese two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the\nsense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply\nmarked, but are usually found. These are:\u2014\n\n3. _Transiency._\u2014Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in\nrare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the\nlimit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when\nfaded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when\nthey recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is\nsusceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness\nand importance.\n\n4. _Passivity._\u2014Although the oncoming of mystical states may be\nfacilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the\nattention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways\nwhich manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of\nconsciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in\nabeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a\nsuperior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with\ncertain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such\nas prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When\nthese latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be no\nrecollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no significance\nfor the subject\u2019s usual inner life, to which, as it were, it makes a mere\ninterruption. Mystical states, strictly so called, are never merely\ninterruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound\nsense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject\nbetween the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are,\nhowever, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations and\nmixtures.\n\nThese four characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of\nconsciousness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for\ncareful study. Let it then be called the mystical group.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nOur next step should be to gain acquaintance with some typical examples.\nProfessional mystics at the height of their development have often\nelaborately organized experiences and a philosophy based thereupon. But\nyou remember what I said in my first lecture: phenomena are best\nunderstood when placed within their series, studied in their germ and in\ntheir over\u2010ripe decay, and compared with their exaggerated and degenerated\nkindred. The range of mystical experience is very wide, much too wide for\nus to cover in the time at our disposal. Yet the method of serial study is\nso essential for interpretation that if we really wish to reach\nconclusions we must use it. I will begin, therefore, with phenomena which\nclaim no special religious significance, and end with those of which the\nreligious pretensions are extreme.\n\nThe simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that\ndeepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which\noccasionally sweeps over one. \u201cI\u2019ve heard that said all my life,\u201d we\nexclaim, \u201cbut I never realized its full meaning until now.\u201d \u201cWhen a\nfellow\u2010monk,\u201d said Luther, \u201cone day repeated the words of the Creed: \u2018I\nbelieve in the forgiveness of sins,\u2019 I saw the Scripture in an entirely\nnew light; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I\nhad found the door of paradise thrown wide open.\u201d(224) This sense of\ndeeper significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single\nwords,(225) and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea,\nodors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. Most\nof us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems\nread when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which\nthe mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our\nhearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished\nsurfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only\nin proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with\nour own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are\nalive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we\nhave kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.\n\nA more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an\nextremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which\nsometimes sweeps over us, of having \u201cbeen here before,\u201d as if at some\nindefinite past time, in just this place, with just these people, we were\nalready saying just these things. As Tennyson writes:\n\n\n    \u201cMoreover, something is or seems,\n    That touches me with mystic gleams,\n    Like glimpses of forgotten dreams\u2014\n\n    \u201cOf something felt, like something here;\n    Of something done, I know not where;\n    Such as no language may declare.\u201d(226)\n\n\nSir James Crichton\u2010Browne has given the technical name of \u201cdreamy states\u201d\nto these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent consciousness.(227) They\nbring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and\nthe feeling of an enlargement of perception which seems imminent but which\nnever completes itself. In Dr. Crichton\u2010Browne\u2019s opinion they connect\nthemselves with the perplexed and scared disturbances of self\u2010\nconsciousness which occasionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that\nthis learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist view of an\nintrinsically insignificant phenomenon. He follows it along the downward\nladder, to insanity; our path pursues the upward ladder chiefly. The\ndivergence shows how important it is to neglect no part of a phenomenon\u2019s\nconnections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according to the\ncontext by which we set it off.\n\nSomewhat deeper plunges into mystical consciousness are met with in yet\nother dreamy states. Such feelings as these which Charles Kingsley\ndescribes are surely far from being uncommon, especially in youth:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cWhen I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an\n    innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but\n    understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths\n    which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes....\n    Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your\n    mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?\u201d(228)\n\n\nA much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J. A.\nSymonds; and probably more persons than we suspect could give parallels to\nit from their own experience.\n\n\n    \u201cSuddenly,\u201d writes Symonds, \u201cat church, or in company, or when I\n    was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I\n    felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of\n    my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared\n    in a series of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from\n    an\u00e6sthetic influence. One reason why I disliked this kind of\n    trance was that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot even\n    now find words to render it intelligible. It consisted in a\n    gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time,\n    sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem\n    to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion as\n    these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the\n    sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired\n    intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract\n    Self. The universe became without form and void of content. But\n    Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the most\n    poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find\n    existence break as breaks a bubble round about it. And what then?\n    The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that\n    this state was the last state of the conscious Self, the sense\n    that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the\n    abyss, and had arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or\n    illusion, stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The return to\n    ordinary conditions of sentient existence began by my first\n    recovering the power of touch, and then by the gradual though\n    rapid influx of familiar impressions and diurnal interests. At\n    last I felt myself once more a human being; and though the riddle\n    of what is meant by life remained unsolved, I was thankful for\n    this return from the abyss\u2014this deliverance from so awful an\n    initiation into the mysteries of skepticism.\n\n    \u201cThis trance recurred with diminishing frequency until I reached\n    the age of twenty\u2010eight. It served to impress upon my growing\n    nature the phantasmal unreality of all the circumstances which\n    contribute to a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often have I\n    asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of\n    denuded, keenly sentient being, Which is the unreality?\u2014the trance\n    of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue,\n    or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner\n    Self and build a self of flesh\u2010and\u2010blood conventionality? Again,\n    are men the factors of some dream, the dream\u2010like unsubstantiality\n    of which they comprehend at such eventful moments? What would\n    happen if the final stage of the trance were reached?\u201d(229)\n\n\nIn a recital like this there is certainly something suggestive of\npathology.(230) The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm\nthat public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as\npathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry\nseem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness\nproduced by intoxicants and an\u00e6sthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway\nof alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate\nthe mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the\ncold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes,\ndiscriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It\nis in fact the great exciter of the _Yes_ function in man. It brings its\nvotary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes\nhim for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run\nafter it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of\nsymphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery\nand tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we\nimmediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us\nonly in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so\ndegrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic\nconsciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our\nopinion of that larger whole.\n\nNitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently\ndiluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary\ndegree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This\ntruth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if\nany words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to\nbe the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning\nhaving been there persists; and I know more than one person who is\npersuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical\nrevelation.\n\nSome years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous\noxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced\nupon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since\nremained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational\nconsciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness,\nwhilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie\npotential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through\nlife without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus,\nand at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of\nmentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and\nadaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which\nleaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard\nthem is the question,\u2014for they are so discontinuous with ordinary\nconsciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish\nformulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate,\nthey forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back\non my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to\nwhich I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote\nof it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the\nworld, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and\ntroubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species,\nbelong to one and the same genus, but _one of the species_, the nobler and\nbetter one, _is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite\ninto itself_. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms\nof common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as\nif it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy\nmeans, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears\nto hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes\nin the artificial mystic state of mind.(231)\n\nI just now spoke of friends who believe in the an\u00e6sthetic revelation. For\nthem too it is a monistic insight, in which the _other_ in its various\nforms appears absorbed into the One.\n\n\n    \u201cInto this pervading genius,\u201d writes one of them, \u201cwe pass,\n    forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God.\n    There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we\n    are founded. \u2018The One remains, the many change and pass;\u2019 and each\n    and every one of us _is_ the One that remains.... This is the\n    ultimatum.... As sure as being\u2014whence is all our care\u2014so sure is\n    content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have\n    triumphed in a solitude that God is not above.\u201d(232)\n\n\nThis has the genuine religious mystic ring! I just now quoted J. A.\nSymonds. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as\nfollows:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cAfter the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first\n    in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light,\n    alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was\n    going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I\n    thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became\n    aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so\n    to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him\n    streaming in like light upon me.... I cannot describe the ecstasy\n    I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the\n    an\u00e6sthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to\n    return, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade. I\n    suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and\n    shrieked out, \u2018It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too\n    horrible,\u2019 meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment.\n    Then I flung myself on the ground, and at last awoke covered with\n    blood, calling to the two surgeons (who were frightened), \u2018Why did\n    you not kill me? Why would you not let me die?\u2019 Only think of it.\n    To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very\n    God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and\n    then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I\n    had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain.\n\n    \u201cYet, this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense\n    of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions\n    from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not\n    a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in\n    that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always\n    felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?\u201d(233)\n\n\nWith this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple.\nSymonds\u2019s question takes us back to those examples which you will remember\nmy quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of sudden\nrealization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in one shape\nor another is not uncommon.\n\n\n    \u201cI know,\u201d writes Mr. Trine, \u201can officer on our police force who\n    has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in\n    the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization\n    of his oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of\n    Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as\n    if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so\n    exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide.\u201d(234)\n\n\nCertain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such\nmystical moods.(235) Most of the striking cases which I have collected\nhave occurred out of doors. Literature has commemorated this fact in many\npassages of great beauty\u2014this extract, for example, from Amiel\u2019s Journal\nIntime:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cShall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which\n    sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at\n    sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again\n    in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the\n    foot of a tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at\n    night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon\n    the sand and my vision ranging through the milky way;\u2014such grand\n    and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to\n    the stars, when one owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatic\n    hours; in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the\n    great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and\n    deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the\n    blue firmament; ... instants of irresistible intuition in which\n    one feels one\u2019s self great as the universe, and calm as a god....\n    What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are\n    enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were\n    visits of the Holy Ghost.\u201d(236)\n\n\nHere is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German\nidealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over\n    me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in\n    distant days in the Alps of Dauphin\u00e9, I was impelled to kneel\n    down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the\n    Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and\n    knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of\n    individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to\n    kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one\n    imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast\n    world\u2010encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great\n    who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and\n    it appeared as if I heard their greeting: \u2018Thou too belongest to\n    the company of those who overcome.\u2019 \u201d(237)\n\n\nThe well\u2010known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this\nsporadic type of mystical experience.\n\n\n    \u201cI believe in you, my Soul ...\n    Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;...\n    Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.\n    I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning.\n    Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that\n                pass all the argument of the earth,\n    And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,\n    And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,\n    And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women\n                my sisters and lovers,\n    And that a kelson of the creation is love.\u201d(238)\n\n\nI could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from\nthe Autobiography of J. Trevor.(239)\n\n\n    \u201cOne brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the\n    Unitarian Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to\n    accompany them\u2014as though to leave the sunshine on the hills, and\n    go down there to the chapel, would be for the time an act of\n    spiritual suicide. And I felt such need for new inspiration and\n    expansion in my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my\n    wife and boys to go down into the town, while I went further up\n    into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness of the\n    morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my\n    sense of sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the\n    road to the \u2018Cat and Fiddle,\u2019 and then returned. On the way back,\n    suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven\u2014an inward\n    state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense,\n    accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light,\n    as though the external condition had brought about the internal\n    effect\u2014a feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the\n    scene around me stood out more clearly and as if nearer to me than\n    before, by reason of the illumination in the midst of which I\n    seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though with\n    decreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time\n    after, only gradually passing away.\u201d\n\n\nThe writer adds that having had further experiences of a similar sort, he\nnow knows them well.\n\n\n    \u201cThe spiritual life,\u201d he writes, \u201cjustifies itself to those who\n    live it; but what can we say to those who do not understand? This,\n    at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are\n    proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when\n    brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life.\n    Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they\n    are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand\n    this test. These highest experiences that I have had of God\u2019s\n    presence have been rare and brief\u2014flashes of consciousness which\n    have compelled me to exclaim with surprise\u2014God is _here_!\u2014or\n    conditions of exaltation and insight, less intense, and only\n    gradually passing away. I have severely questioned the worth of\n    these moments. To no soul have I named them, lest I should be\n    building my life and work on mere phantasies of the brain. But I\n    find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out to\u2010day\n    as the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which\n    have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and\n    all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their far\u2010reaching\n    significance are ever becoming more clear and evident. When they\n    came, I was living the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I\n    was not seeking them. What I was seeking, with resolute\n    determination, was to live more intensely my own life, as against\n    what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in\n    the most real seasons that the Real Presence came, and I was aware\n    that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God.\u201d(240)\n\n\nEven the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the\nexistence of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely\nspecific quality, and of the deep impression which they make on those who\nhave them. A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke, gives to the more\ndistinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic\nconsciousness. \u201cCosmic consciousness in its more striking instances is\nnot,\u201d Dr. Bucke says, \u201csimply an expansion or extension of the self\u2010\nconscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition of a\nfunction as distinct from any possessed by the average man as\n_self_\u2010consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the\nhigher animals.\u201d\n\n\n    \u201cThe prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a\n    consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the\n    universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs\n    an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the\n    individual on a new plane of existence\u2014would make him almost a\n    member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral\n    exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and\n    joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as\n    striking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual\n    power. With these come what may be called a sense of immortality,\n    a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall\n    have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.\u201d(241)\n\n\nIt was Dr. Bucke\u2019s own experience of a typical onset of cosmic\nconsciousness in his own person which led him to investigate it in others.\nHe has printed his conclusions in a highly interesting volume, from which\nI take the following account of what occurred to him:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends,\n    reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at\n    midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind,\n    deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions\n    called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in\n    a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking,\n    but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it\n    were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I\n    found myself wrapped in a flame\u2010colored cloud. For an instant I\n    thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in\n    that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself.\n    Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of\n    immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an\n    intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other\n    things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the\n    universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary,\n    a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life.\n    It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a\n    consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all\n    men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any\n    peradventure all things work together for the good of each and\n    all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the\n    worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and\n    all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few\n    seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the\n    reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a\n    century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision\n    showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I\n    saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say\n    that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest\n    depression, been lost.\u201d(242)\n\n\nWe have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness, as it\ncomes sporadically. We must next pass to its methodical cultivation as an\nelement of the religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and\nChristians all have cultivated it methodically.\n\nIn India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial\nunder the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the\nindividual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the\ndiet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline\nvary slightly in the different systems which teach it. The yogi, or\ndisciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his lower\nnature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed _sam\u00e2dhi_, \u201cand\ncomes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know.\u201d\nHe learns\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThat the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond\n    reason, a superconscious state, and that when the mind gets to\n    that higher state, then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes....\n    All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us\n    scientifically to the superconscious state or sam\u00e2dhi.... Just as\n    unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another\n    work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is not\n    accompanied with the feeling of egoism.... There is no feeling of\n    _I_, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness,\n    objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full\n    effulgence, and we know ourselves\u2014for Sam\u00e2dhi lies potential in us\n    all\u2014for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from\n    the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and\n    identical with the Atman or Universal Soul.\u201d(243)\n\n\nThe Vedantists say that one may stumble into superconsciousness\nsporadically, without the previous discipline, but it is then impure.\nTheir test of its purity, like our test of religion\u2019s value, is empirical:\nits fruits must be good for life. When a man comes out of Sam\u00e2dhi, they\nassure us that he remains \u201cenlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his\nwhole character changed, his life changed, illumined.\u201d(244)\n\nThe Buddhists use the word \u201csam\u00e2dhi\u201d as well as the Hindus; but \u201cdhy\u00e2na\u201d\nis their special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be\nfour stages recognized in dhy\u00e2na. The first stage comes through\nconcentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes desire, but not\ndiscernment or judgment: it is still intellectual. In the second stage the\nintellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity remains.\nIn the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins,\nalong with memory and self\u2010consciousness. In the fourth stage the\nindifference, memory, and self\u2010consciousness are perfected. [Just what\n\u201cmemory\u201d and \u201cself\u2010consciousness\u201d mean in this connection is doubtful.\nThey cannot be the faculties familiar to us in the lower life.] Higher\nstages still of contemplation are mentioned\u2014a region where there exists\nnothing, and where the meditator says: \u201cThere exists absolutely nothing,\u201d\nand stops. Then he reaches another region where he says: \u201cThere are\nneither ideas nor absence of ideas,\u201d and stops again. Then another region\nwhere, \u201chaving reached the end of both idea and perception, he stops\nfinally.\u201d This would seem to be, not yet Nirv\u00e2na, but as close an approach\nto it as this life affords.(245)\n\nIn the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are the\npossessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia\nfrom the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the\nhot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that\nSufism must have been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. We\nChristians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to\nthose initiated. To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds,\nI will quote a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject.\n\nAl\u2010Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, who flourished in the\neleventh century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors of the Moslem\nchurch, has left us one of the few autobiographies to be found outside of\nChristian literature. Strange that a species of book so abundant among\nourselves should be so little represented elsewhere\u2014the absence of\nstrictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely\nliterary student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness\nof religions other than the Christian.\n\nM. Schm\u00f6lders has translated a part of Al\u2010Ghazzali\u2019s autobiography into\nFrench:(246)\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThe Science of the Sufis,\u201d says the Moslem author, \u201caims at\n    detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it\n    for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory\n    being more easy for me than practice, I read [certain books] until\n    I understood all that can be learned by study and hearsay. Then I\n    recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is\n    just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the\n    transformation of the soul. How great, for example, is the\n    difference between knowing the definitions of health, of satiety,\n    with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or\n    filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists,\u2014as\n    being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the\n    stomach,\u2014and _being_ drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken\n    man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it\n    interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the\n    physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness\n    consists, and what are its predisposing conditions. Similarly\n    there is a difference between knowing the nature of abstinence,\n    and _being_ abstinent or having one\u2019s soul detached from the\n    world.\u2014Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but\n    what was left could be learned neither by study nor through the\n    ears, but solely by giving one\u2019s self up to ecstasy and leading a\n    pious life.\n\n    \u201cReflecting on my situation, I found myself tied down by a\n    multitude of bonds\u2014temptations on every side. Considering my\n    teaching, I found it was impure before God. I saw myself\n    struggling with all my might to achieve glory and to spread my\n    name. [Here follows an account of his six months\u2019 hesitation to\n    break away from the conditions of his life at Bagdad, at the end\n    of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.] Then,\n    feeling my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own will,\n    I repaired to God like a man in distress who has no more\n    resources. He answered, as he answers the wretch who invokes him.\n    My heart no longer felt any difficulty in renouncing glory,\n    wealth, and my children. So I quitted Bagdad, and reserving from\n    my fortune only what was indispensable for my subsistence, I\n    distributed the rest. I went to Syria, where I remained about two\n    years, with no other occupation than living in retreat and\n    solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training\n    myself to purify my soul, to make my character perfect, to prepare\n    my heart for meditating on God\u2014all according to the methods of the\n    Sufis, as I had read of them.\n\n    \u201cThis retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude, and to\n    complete the purification of my heart and fit it for meditation.\n    But the vicissitudes of the times, the affairs of the family, the\n    need of subsistence, changed in some respects my primitive\n    resolve, and interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life.\n    I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy, save in a few\n    single hours; nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining this\n    state. Every time that the accidents led me astray, I sought to\n    return; and in this situation I spent ten years. During this\n    solitary state things were revealed to me which it is impossible\n    either to describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that\n    the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path of God. Both in their\n    acts and in their inaction, whether internal or external, they are\n    illumined by the light which proceeds from the prophetic source.\n    The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of\n    all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life\n    consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul,\n    and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up\n    entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi\n    life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God. The\n    intuitions and all that precede are, so to speak, only the\n    threshold for those who enter. From the beginning, revelations\n    take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before them,\n    whilst wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets. They\n    hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport\n    rises from the perception of forms and figures to a degree which\n    escapes all expression, and which no man may seek to give an\n    account of without his words involving sin.\n\n    \u201cWhoever has had no experience of the transport knows of the true\n    nature of prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be\n    sure of its existence, both by experience and by what he hears the\n    Sufis say. As there are men endowed only with the sensitive\n    faculty who reject what is offered them in the way of objects of\n    the pure understanding, so there are intellectual men who reject\n    and avoid the things perceived by the prophetic faculty. A blind\n    man can understand nothing of colors save what he has learned by\n    narration and hearsay. Yet God has brought prophetism near to men\n    in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principal\n    characters. This state is sleep. If you were to tell a man who was\n    himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are\n    people who at times swoon away so as to resemble dead men, and who\n    [in dreams] yet perceive things that are hidden, he would deny it\n    [and give his reasons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be\n    refuted by actual experience. Wherefore, just as the understanding\n    is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discern various\n    intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the\n    prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden\n    things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief\n    properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the\n    transport, by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is\n    endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and\n    which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you\n    know their true nature, since one knows only what one can\n    comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of\n    the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the\n    objects with one\u2019s hand.\u201d(247)\n\n\nThis incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism.\nMystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no\none else. In this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledge given to us\nin sensations more than that given by conceptual thought. Thought, with\nits remoteness and abstractness, has often enough in the history of\nphilosophy been contrasted unfavorably with sensation. It is a commonplace\nof metaphysics that God\u2019s knowledge cannot be discursive but must be\nintuitive, that is, must be constructed more after the pattern of what in\nourselves is called immediate feeling, than after that of proposition and\njudgment. But _our_ immediate feelings have no content but what the five\nsenses supply; and we have seen and shall see again that mystics may\nemphatically deny that the senses play any part in the very highest type\nof knowledge which their transports yield.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIn the Christian church there have always been mystics. Although many of\nthem have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes\nof the authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as\nprecedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based upon\nthem, in which everything legitimate finds its place.(248) The basis of\nthe system is \u201corison\u201d or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul\ntowards God. Through the practice of orison the higher levels of mystical\nexperience may be attained. It is odd that Protestantism, especially\nevangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything\nmethodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant\nmystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It\nhas been left to our mind\u2010curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into\nour religious life.\n\nThe first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind\u2019s detachment from\nouter sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal\nthings. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius\u2019s Spiritual Exercises recommend the\ndisciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts to imagine\nholy scenes. The acme of this kind of discipline would be a semi\u2010\nhallucinatory mono\u2010ideism\u2014an imaginary figure of Christ, for example,\ncoming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether\nliteral or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism.(249) But in\ncertain cases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest\nraptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then\ninsusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous\nas to this. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of\nthem, thus describes the condition called the \u201cunion of love,\u201d which, he\nsays, is reached by \u201cdark contemplation.\u201d In this the Deity compenetrates\nthe soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cfinds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the\n    sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling\n    with which she is filled.... We receive this mystical knowledge of\n    God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the\n    sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other\n    circumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and\n    the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor\n    impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness,\n    although the mysterious and sweet\u2010tasting wisdom comes home so\n    clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing a\n    certain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can\n    understand it, use and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it,\n    nor communicate any idea of it, even though all the while it be a\n    mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness\n    when it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarity of the\n    divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and\n    supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both\n    inner and outer, and impose silence upon them.... The soul then\n    feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which no\n    created thing has access, in an immense and boundless desert,\n    desert the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this\n    abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the\n    well\u2010springs of the comprehension of love, ... and recognizes,\n    however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how\n    utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek\n    to discourse of divine things by their means.\u201d(250)\n\n\nI cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian\nmystical life.(251) Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and\nmoreover, I confess that the subdivisions and names which we find in the\nCatholic books seem to me to represent nothing objectively distinct. So\nmany men, so many minds: I imagine that these experiences can be as\ninfinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals.\n\nThe cognitive aspects of them, their value in the way of revelation, is\nwhat we are directly concerned with, and it is easy to show by citation\nhow strong an impression they leave of being revelations of new depths of\ntruth. Saint Teresa is the expert of experts in describing such\nconditions, so I will turn immediately to what she says of one of the\nhighest of them, the \u201corison of union.\u201d\n\n\n    \u201cIn the orison of union,\u201d says Saint Teresa, \u201cthe soul is fully\n    awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this\n    world and in respect of herself. During the short time the union\n    lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if\n    she would, she could not think of any single thing. Thus she needs\n    to employ no artifice in order to arrest the use of her\n    understanding: it remains so stricken with inactivity that she\n    neither knows what she loves, nor in what manner she loves, nor\n    what she wills. In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the\n    world and lives solely in God.... I do not even know whether in\n    this state she has enough life left to breathe. It seems to me she\n    has not; or at least that if she does breathe, she is unaware of\n    it. Her intellect would fain understand something of what is going\n    on within her, but it has so little force now that it can act in\n    no way whatsoever. So a person who falls into a deep faint appears\n    as if dead....\n\n    \u201cThus does God, when he raises a soul to union with himself,\n    suspend the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees,\n    hears, nor understands, so long as she is united with God. But\n    this time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is.\n    God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a\n    way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for\n    her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth\n    remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years\n    should pass without the condition returning, she can neither\n    forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you,\n    nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can see and\n    understand that she has been in God, since during the union she\n    has neither sight nor understanding, I reply that she does not see\n    it then, but that she sees it clearly later, after she has\n    returned to herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which\n    abides with her and which God alone can give her. I knew a person\n    who was ignorant of the truth that God\u2019s mode of being in\n    everything must be either by presence, by power, or by essence,\n    but who, after having received the grace of which I am speaking,\n    believed this truth in the most unshakable manner. So much so\n    that, having consulted a half\u2010learned man who was as ignorant on\n    this point as she had been before she was enlightened, when he\n    replied that God is in us only by \u2018grace,\u2019 she disbelieved his\n    reply, so sure she was of the true answer; and when she came to\n    ask wiser doctors, they confirmed her in her belief, which much\n    consoled her....\n\n    \u201cBut how, you will repeat, _can_ one have such certainty in\n    respect to what one does not see? This question, I am powerless to\n    answer. These are secrets of God\u2019s omnipotence which it does not\n    appertain to me to penetrate. All that I know is that I tell the\n    truth; and I shall never believe that any soul who does not\n    possess this certainty has ever been really united to God.\u201d(252)\n\n\nThe kinds of truth communicable in mystical ways, whether these be\nsensible or supersensible, are various. Some of them relate to this\nworld,\u2014visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden\nunderstanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events, for example; but\nthe most important revelations are theological or metaphysical.\n\n\n    \u201cSaint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynez that a single\n    hour of meditation at Manresa had taught him more truths about\n    heavenly things than all the teachings of all the doctors put\n    together could have taught him.... One day in orison, on the steps\n    of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner\n    the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world. On another\n    occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and\n    it was given him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to\n    the weak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery\n    of the holy Trinity. This last vision flooded his heart with such\n    sweetness, that the mere memory of it in after times made him shed\n    abundant tears.\u201d(253)\n\n    Similarly with Saint Teresa. \u201cOne day, being in orison,\u201d she\n    writes, \u201cit was granted me to perceive in one instant how all\n    things are seen and contained in God. I did not perceive them in\n    their proper form, and nevertheless the view I had of them was of\n    a sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly impressed upon my\n    soul. It is one of the most signal of all the graces which the\n    Lord has granted me.... The view was so subtile and delicate that\n    the understanding cannot grasp it.\u201d(254)\n\n\nShe goes on to tell how it was as if the Deity were an enormous and\nsovereignly limpid diamond, in which all our actions were contained in\nsuch a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never before. On\nanother day, she relates, while she was reciting the Athanasian Creed,\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cOur Lord made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be\n    in three Persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as\n    extremely surprised as I was comforted, ... and now, when I think\n    of the holy Trinity, or hear It spoken of, I understand how the\n    three adorable Persons form only one God and I experience an\n    unspeakable happiness.\u201d\n\n\nOn still another occasion, it was given to Saint Teresa to see and\nunderstand in what wise the Mother of God had been assumed into her place\nin Heaven.(255)\n\nThe deliciousness of some of these states seems to be beyond anything\nknown in ordinary consciousness. It evidently involves organic\nsensibilities, for it is spoken of as something too extreme to be borne,\nand as verging on bodily pain.(256) But it is too subtle and piercing a\ndelight for ordinary words to denote. God\u2019s touches, the wounds of his\nspear, references to ebriety and to nuptial union have to figure in the\nphraseology by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses both swoon\naway in these highest states of ecstasy. \u201cIf our understanding\ncomprehends,\u201d says Saint Teresa, \u201cit is in a mode which remains unknown to\nit, and it can understand nothing of what it comprehends. For my own part,\nI do not believe that it does comprehend, because, as I said, it does not\nunderstand itself to do so. I confess that it is all a mystery in which I\nam lost.\u201d(257) In the condition called _raptus_ or ravishment by\ntheologians, breathing and circulation are so depressed that it is a\nquestion among the doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarily\ndissevered from the body. One must read Saint Teresa\u2019s descriptions and\nthe very exact distinctions which she makes, to persuade one\u2019s self that\none is dealing, not with imaginary experiences, but with phenomena which,\nhowever rare, follow perfectly definite psychological types.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nTo the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and\nimitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a\ncorporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological\nconditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that\nfact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness\nwhich they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must\nnot content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into\ntheir fruits for life.\n\nTheir fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction, for one thing,\nseems not to have been altogether absent as a result. You may remember the\nhelplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary Alacoque.\nMany other ecstatics would have perished but for the care taken of them by\nadmiring followers. The \u201cother\u2010worldliness\u201d encouraged by the mystical\nconsciousness makes this over\u2010abstraction from practical life peculiarly\nliable to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally passive and\nthe intellect feeble; but in natively strong minds and characters we find\nquite opposite results. The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit\nof ecstasy as far as it has often been carried, appear for the most part\nto have shown indomitable spirit and energy, and all the more so for the\ntrances in which they indulged.\n\nSaint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one of\nthe most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived. Saint John of\nthe Cross, writing of the intuitions and \u201ctouches\u201d by which God reaches\nthe substance of the soul, tells us that\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThey enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be\n    sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which\n    the soul during its whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and\n    to leave it adorned with virtues and loaded with supernatural\n    gifts. A single one of these intoxicating consolations may reward\n    it for all the labors undergone in its life\u2014even were they\n    numberless. Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an\n    impassioned desire to suffer for its God, the soul then is seized\n    with a strange torment\u2014that of not being allowed to suffer\n    enough.\u201d(258)\n\n\nSaint Teresa is as emphatic, and much more detailed. You may perhaps\nremember a passage I quoted from her in my first lecture.(259) There are\nmany similar pages in her autobiography. Where in literature is a more\nevidently veracious account of the formation of a new centre of spiritual\nenergy, than is given in her description of the effects of certain\necstasies which in departing leave the soul upon a higher level of\nemotional excitement?\n\n\n    \u201cOften, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the\n    ecstasy, the soul emerges from it full of health and admirably\n    disposed for action ... as if God had willed that the body itself,\n    already obedient to the soul\u2019s desires, should share in the soul\u2019s\n    happiness.... The soul after such a favor is animated with a\n    degree of courage so great that if at that moment its body should\n    be torn to pieces for the cause of God, it would feel nothing but\n    the liveliest comfort. Then it is that promises and heroic\n    resolutions spring up in profusion in us, soaring desires, horror\n    of the world, and the clear perception of our proper\n    nothingness.... What empire is comparable to that of a soul who,\n    from this sublime summit to which God has raised her, sees all the\n    things of earth beneath her feet, and is captivated by no one of\n    them? How ashamed she is of her former attachments! How amazed at\n    her blindness! What lively pity she feels for those whom she\n    recognizes still shrouded in the darkness!... She groans at having\n    ever been sensitive to points of honor, at the illusion that made\n    her ever see as honor what the world calls by that name. Now she\n    sees in this name nothing more than an immense lie of which the\n    world remains a victim. She discovers, in the new light from\n    above, that in genuine honor there is nothing spurious, that to be\n    faithful to this honor is to give our respect to what deserves to\n    be respected really, and to consider as nothing, or as less than\n    nothing, whatsoever perishes and is not agreeable to God.... She\n    laughs when she sees grave persons, persons of orison, caring for\n    points of honor for which she now feels profoundest contempt. It\n    is suitable to the dignity of their rank to act thus, they\n    pretend, and it makes them more useful to others. But she knows\n    that in despising the dignity of their rank for the pure love of\n    God they would do more good in a single day than they would effect\n    in ten years by preserving it.... She laughs at herself that there\n    should ever have been a time in her life when she made any case of\n    money, when she ever desired it.... Oh! if human beings might only\n    agree together to regard it as so much useless mud, what harmony\n    would then reign in the world! With what friendship we would all\n    treat each other if our interest in honor and in money could but\n    disappear from earth! For my own part, I feel as if it would be a\n    remedy for all our ills.\u201d(260)\n\n\nMystical conditions may, therefore, render the soul more energetic in the\nlines which their inspiration favors. But this could be reckoned an\nadvantage only in case the inspiration were a true one. If the inspiration\nwere erroneous, the energy would be all the more mistaken and misbegotten.\nSo we stand once more before that problem of truth which confronted us at\nthe end of the lectures on saintliness. You will remember that we turned\nto mysticism precisely to get some light on truth. Do mystical states\nestablish the truth of those theological affections in which the saintly\nlife has its root?\n\nIn spite of their repudiation of articulate self\u2010description, mystical\nstates in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible\nto give the outcome of the majority of them in terms that point in\ndefinite philosophical directions. One of these directions is optimism,\nand the other is monism. We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary\nconsciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a\nvastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them\nas reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes\u2010function more than\nto the no\u2010function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and\npeacefully closes the account. Their very denial of every adjective you\nmay propose as applicable to the ultimate truth,\u2014He, the Self, the Atman,\nis to be described by \u201cNo! no!\u201d only, say the Upanishads,(261)\u2014though it\nseems on the surface to be a no\u2010function, is a denial made on behalf of a\ndeeper yes. Whoso calls the Absolute anything in particular, or says that\nit is _this_, seems implicitly to shut it off from being _that_\u2014it is as\nif he lessened it. So we deny the \u201cthis,\u201d negating the negation which it\nseems to us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmative attitude\nby which we are possessed. The fountain\u2010head of Christian mysticism is\nDionysius the Areopagite. He describes the absolute truth by negatives\nexclusively.\n\n\n    \u201cThe cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it\n    imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence; nor is it reason\n    or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither\n    number, nor order, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality,\n    nor inequality, nor similarity, nor dissimilarity. It neither\n    stands, nor moves, nor rests.... It is neither essence, nor\n    eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to\n    it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or\n    wisdom; not one; not unity; not divinity or goodness; nor even\n    spirit as we know it,\u201d etc., _ad libitum_.(262)\n\n\nBut these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because the truth\nfalls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is above\nthem. It is _super_\u2010lucent, _super_\u2010splendent, _super_\u2010essential,\n_super_\u2010sublime, _super_ everything that can be named. Like Hegel in his\nlogic, mystics journey towards the positive pole of truth only by the\n\u201cMethode der Absoluten Negativit\u00e4t.\u201d(263)\n\nThus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings.\nAs when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, \u201cwhere never was\nseen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no\none at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in\nitself.\u201d(264) As when Boehme writes of the Primal Love, that \u201cit may fitly\nbe compared to Nothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as nothing\nwith respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not comprehensible by any\nof them. And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore free from\nall things, and is that only good, which a man cannot express or utter\nwhat it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared, to express it\nby.\u201d(265) Or as when Angelus Silesius sings:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cGott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn r\u00fchrt kein Nun noch Hier;\n    Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst, je mehr entwind er dir.\u201d(266)\n\n\nTo this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as a mode of\npassage towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the\nsubtlest of moral counterparts in the sphere of the personal will. Since\ndenial of the finite self and its wants, since asceticism of some sort, is\nfound in religious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and\nmore blessed life, this moral mystery intertwines and combines with the\nintellectual mystery in all mystical writings.\n\n\n    \u201cLove,\u201d continues Behmen, is Nothing, for \u201cwhen thou art gone\n    forth wholly from the Creature and from that which is visible, and\n    art become Nothing to all that is Nature and Creature, then thou\n    art in that eternal One, which is God himself, and then thou shalt\n    feel within thee the highest virtue of Love.... The treasure of\n    treasures for the soul is where she goeth out of the Somewhat into\n    that Nothing out of which all things may be made. The soul here\n    saith, _I have nothing_, for I am utterly stripped and naked; _I\n    can do nothing_, for I have no manner of power, but am as water\n    poured out; _I am nothing_, for all that I am is no more than an\n    image of Being, and only God is to me I AM; and so, sitting down\n    in my own Nothingness, I give glory to the eternal Being, and\n    _will nothing_ of myself, that so God may will all in me, being\n    unto me my God and all things.\u201d(267)\n\n\nIn Paul\u2019s language, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. Only when\nI become as nothing can God enter in and no difference between his life\nand mine remain outstanding.(268)\n\nThis overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the\nAbsolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become\none with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the\neverlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by\ndifferences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in\nChristian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so\nthat there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought\nto make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the\nmystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native\nland. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech\nantedates languages, and they do not grow old.(269)\n\n\u201cThat art Thou!\u201d say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: \u201cNot a part,\nnot a mode of That, but identically That, that absolute Spirit of the\nWorld.\u201d \u201cAs pure water poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O\nGautama, is the Self of a thinker who knows. Water in water, fire in fire,\nether in ether, no one can distinguish them; likewise a man whose mind has\nentered into the Self.\u201d(270) \u201c \u2018Every man,\u2019 says the Sufi Gulshan\u2010R\u00e2z,\n\u2018whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that\nthere is no being save only One.... In his divine majesty the _me_, the\n_we_, the _thou_, are not found, for in the One there can be no\ndistinction. Every being who is annulled and entirely separated from\nhimself, hears resound outside of him this voice and this echo: _I am\nGod_: he has an eternal way of existing, and is no longer subject to\ndeath.\u2019 \u201d(271) In the vision of God, says Plotinus, \u201cwhat sees is not our\nreason, but something prior and superior to our reason.... He who thus\nsees does not properly see, does not distinguish or imagine two things. He\nchanges, he ceases to be himself, preserves nothing of himself. Absorbed\nin God, he makes but one with him, like a centre of a circle coinciding\nwith another centre.\u201d(272) \u201cHere,\u201d writes Suso, \u201cthe spirit dies, and yet\nis all alive in the marvels of the Godhead ... and is lost in the\nstillness of the glorious dazzling obscurity and of the naked simple\nunity. It is in this modeless _where_ that the highest bliss is to be\nfound.\u201d(273) \u201cIch bin so gross als Gott,\u201d sings Angelus Silesius again,\n\u201cEr ist als ich so klein; Er kann nicht \u00fcber mich, ich unter ihm nicht\nsein.\u201d(274)\n\nIn mystical literature such self\u2010contradictory phrases as \u201cdazzling\nobscurity,\u201d \u201cwhispering silence,\u201d \u201cteeming desert,\u201d are continually met\nwith. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the\nelement through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many\nmystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions.\n\n\n    \u201cHe who would hear the voice of Nada, \u2018the Soundless Sound,\u2019 and\n    comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dh\u00e2ran\u00e2.... When to\n    himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he\n    sees in dreams; when he has ceased to hear the many, he may\n    discern the ONE\u2014the inner sound which kills the outer.... For then\n    the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear\n    will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE.... And now thy _Self_ is lost\n    in SELF, _thyself_ unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which\n    thou first didst radiate.... Behold! thou hast become the Light,\n    thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou\n    art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that\n    resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin\n    exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. _Om tat\n    Sat._\u201d(275)\n\n\nThese words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably\nstir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music\ngives us ontological messages which non\u2010musical criticism is unable to\ncontradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There\nis a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom\nmingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the\ninfinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon\nour shores.\n\n\n    \u201cHere begins the sea that ends not till the world\u2019s end. Where we\n                stand,\n    Could we know the next high sea\u2010mark set beyond these waves that\n                gleam,\n    We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man hath\n                scanned....\n    Ah, but here man\u2019s heart leaps, yearning towards the gloom with\n                venturous glee,\n    From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the\n                sea.\u201d(276)\n\n\nThat doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our\n\u201cimmortality,\u201d if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already\nnow and here, which we find so often expressed to\u2010day in certain\nphilosophic circles, finds its support in a \u201chear, hear!\u201d or an \u201camen,\u201d\nwhich floats up from that mysteriously deeper level.(277) We recognize the\npasswords to the mystical region as we hear them, but we cannot use them\nourselves; it alone has the keeping of \u201cthe password primeval.\u201d(278)\n\nI have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly\nas I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the mystic range\nof consciousness. _It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at\nleast the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti\u2010naturalistic, and harmonizes\nbest with twice\u2010bornness and so\u2010called other\u2010worldly states of mind._\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nMy next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Does\nit furnish any _warrant for the truth_ of the twice\u2010bornness and\nsupernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to\nthis question as concisely as I can.\n\nIn brief my answer is this,\u2014and I will divide it into three parts:\u2014\n\n(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right\nto be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.\n\n(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those\nwho stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.\n\n(3) They break down the authority of the non\u2010mystical or rationalistic\nconsciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They\nshow it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the\npossibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us\nvitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.\n\nI will take up these points one by one.\n\n\n\n\n1.\n\n\nAs a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well\u2010pronounced\nand emphatic sort _are_ usually authoritative over those who have\nthem.(279) They have been \u201cthere,\u201d and know. It is vain for rationalism to\ngrumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be\na force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order\nhim to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse,\nbut we cannot change his mind\u2014we commonly attach it only the more\nstubbornly to its beliefs.(280) It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter\nof fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our\nown more \u201crational\u201d beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in\nnature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have\nassured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as\ndirect perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever\nwere for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in\nabeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological\nquality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression,\u2014that is, they are\nface to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.\n\nThe mystic is, in short, _invulnerable_, and must be left, whether we\nrelish it or not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says\nTolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith\u2010state and mystic state are\npractically convertible terms.\n\n\n\n\n2.\n\n\nBut I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought\nto accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are\nourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they can\never ask of us in this life is to admit that they establish a presumption.\nThey form a consensus and have an unequivocal outcome; and it would be\nodd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experience should\nprove to be altogether wrong. At bottom, however, this would only be an\nappeal to numbers, like the appeal of rationalism the other way; and the\nappeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for\n\u201csuggestive,\u201d not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to\ndo so suits our life.\n\nBut even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far from being\nstrong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic, etc.,\nI am afraid I over\u2010simplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons,\nand to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic\nreligious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a \u201cprivileged\ncase.\u201d It is an _extract_, kept true to type by the selection of the\nfittest specimens and their preservation in \u201cschools.\u201d It is carved out\nfrom a much larger mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as\nreligious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the\nsupposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious\nmysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools,\nis much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and\nantinomianly self\u2010indulgent within the Christian church.(281) It is\ndualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it\npantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists.\nThey are with few exceptions non\u2010metaphysical minds, for whom \u201cthe\ncategory of personality\u201d is absolute. The \u201cunion\u201d of man with God is for\nthem much more like an occasional miracle than like an original\nidentity.(282) How different again, apart from the happiness common to\nall, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard\nJefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively\nChristian sort.(283) The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement,\nunion, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of\nits own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material\nfurnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only\nthey can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood.\nWe have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in\nfavor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the\nabsolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world. It\nis only relatively in favor of all these things\u2014it passes out of common\nhuman consciousness in the direction in which they lie.\n\nSo much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for\nreligious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no\naccumulated traditions except those which the text\u2010books on insanity\nsupply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant cases in which\n\u201cmystical ideas\u201d are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or\ndeluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they\nsometimes call it, we may have a _diabolical_ mysticism, a sort of\nreligious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable\nimportance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with\nnew meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the\nsame controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is\npessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are\ndreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the\npoint of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and\nthese lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great\nsubliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit\nthe existence, but of which so little is really known. That region\ncontains every kind of matter: \u201cseraph and snake\u201d abide there side by\nside. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be\nsifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total\ncontext of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense.\nIts value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not\nmystics ourselves.\n\nOnce more, then, I repeat that non\u2010mystics are under no obligation to\nacknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by\ntheir intrinsic nature.(284)\n\n\n\n\n3.\n\n\nYet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely\noverthrows the pretension of non\u2010mystical states to be the sole and\nultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states\nmerely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of\nconsciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition,\ngifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us\nfall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active\nlife. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that\nour senses have immediately seized.(285) It is the rationalistic critic\nrather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials\nhave no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new\nmeaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more\nenveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether\nmystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows\nthrough which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive\nworld. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical\nwindows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider\nworld would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of\nthis world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal\nregions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and\nits counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider\nworld all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and\nsubordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary\nnaturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet\nthe counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing\nwith it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in\nour approach to the final fullness of the truth.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIn this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states\nindeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But\nthe higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious\nsentiments even of non\u2010mystical men incline. They tell of the supremacy of\nthe ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us\n_hypotheses_, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as\nthinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to\nwhich they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be\nafter all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.\n\n\u201cOh, the little more, and how much it is; and the little less, and what\nworlds away!\u201d It may be that possibility and permission of this sort are\nall that the religious consciousness requires to live on. In my last\nlecture I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case.\nMeanwhile, however, I am sure that for many of my readers this diet is too\nslender. If supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are true, you\nthink, then not so much permission, as compulsion to believe, ought to be\nfound. Philosophy has always professed to prove religious truth by\ncoercive argument; and the construction of philosophies of this kind has\nalways been one favorite function of the religious life, if we use this\nterm in the large historic sense. But religious philosophy is an enormous\nsubject, and in my next lecture I can only give that brief glance at it\nwhich my limits will allow.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURE XVIII. PHILOSOPHY.\n\n\nThe subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is the\nsense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We turned\nfirst to mysticism for an answer, and found that although mysticism is\nentirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too private (and also too\nvarious) in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority. But\nphilosophy publishes results which claim to be universally valid if they\nare valid at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can\nphilosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man\u2019s sense of\nthe divine?\n\nI imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at\nthe goal to which I am tending. I have undermined the authority of\nmysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek to\ndiscredit that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is\nnothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on\nthat vivid sense of the reality of things unseen of which in my second\nlecture and in the lecture on Mysticism I gave so many examples. It is\nessentially private and individualistic; it always exceeds our powers of\nformulation; and although attempts to pour its contents into a philosophic\nmould will probably always go on, men being what they are, yet these\nattempts are always secondary processes which in no way add to the\nauthority, or warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they\nderive their own stimulus and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may\nthemselves possess. In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend\nfeeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and\nunreflective, and to dissuade you from the hope of any Theology worthy of\nthe name.\n\nTo a certain extent I have to admit that you guess rightly. I do believe\nthat feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and\ntheological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text\ninto another tongue. But all such statements are misleading from their\nbrevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly\nwhat I mean.\n\nWhen I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a\nworld in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any\nphilosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate\nintellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness\nand need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other,\nwould ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess.\nMen would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and\ncriticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done. In\nthe science they would have left a certain amount of \u201cpsychical research,\u201d\neven as they now will probably have to re\u2010admit a certain amount. But\nhigh\u2010flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic\ntheology, these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no\nneed of commerce with such deities. These speculations must, it seems to\nme, be classed as over\u2010beliefs, buildings\u2010out performed by the intellect\ninto directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint.\n\nBut even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by\nfeeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which\nfeeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an\naccount of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas,\ndeclines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they\nshould even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the\nopposite attitude. Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox\nwhatever territory she touches. To find an escape from obscure and wayward\npersonal persuasion to truth objectively valid for all thinking men has\never been the intellect\u2019s most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from\nunwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way\nto its deliverances, has been reason\u2019s task.\n\nI believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this\ntask.(286) We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect\nfrom participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing with\nourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal\nideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted\ncongruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits. The\nphilosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us.\nMoreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so\nwe have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal formulas.\nConceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion;\nand as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the\ncriticisms of one man\u2019s constructions by another, philosophy will always\nhave much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very\nlectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now\nonwards) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious\nexperience some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which\neverybody may agree.\n\nReligious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably\nengenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical\ntheologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of\nanother. Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have become\npossible, alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by which the\ncommerce between creeds used exclusively to be carried on. We have the\nbeginnings of a \u201cScience of Religions,\u201d so\u2010called; and if these lectures\ncould ever be accounted a crumb\u2010like contribution to such a science, I\nshould be made very happy.\n\nBut all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive or\ncomparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their\nsubject\u2010matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations,\noperations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not\nco\u00f6rdinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pretends to be\nsomething altogether different from this. It assumes to construct\nreligious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of\nlogical reason drawing rigorous inference from non\u2010subjective facts. It\ncalls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute, as\nthe case may be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches\nthem in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity.\n\nWarranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls. All\u2010\ninclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous,\ntrue;\u2014what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system would offer\nto spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of\nsensible things? Accordingly, we find inculcated in the theological\nschools of to\u2010day, almost as much as in those of the fore\u2010time, a disdain\nfor merely possible or probable truth, and of results that only private\nassurance can grasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain.\nPrincipal John Caird, for example, writes as follows in his Introduction\nto the Philosophy of Religion:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cReligion must indeed be a thing of the heart; but in order to\n    elevate it from the region of subjective caprice and waywardness,\n    and to distinguish between that which is true and false in\n    religion, we must appeal to an objective standard. That which\n    enters the heart must first be discerned by the intelligence to be\n    _true_. It must be seen as having in its own nature a _right_ to\n    dominate feeling, and as constituting the principle by which\n    feeling must be judged.(287) In estimating the religious character\n    of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is, not how\n    they feel, but what they think and believe\u2014not whether their\n    religion is one which manifests itself in emotions, more or less\n    vehement and enthusiastic, but what are the _conceptions_ of God\n    and divine things by which these emotions are called forth.\n    Feeling is necessary in religion, but it is by the _content_ or\n    intelligent basis of a religion, and not by feeling, that its\n    character and worth are to be determined.\u201d(288)\n\n\nCardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, gives more\nemphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment.(289) Theology, he\nsays, is a science in the strictest sense of the word. I will tell you, he\nsays, what it is not\u2014not \u201cphysical evidences\u201d for God, not \u201cnatural\nreligion,\u201d for these are but vague subjective interpretations:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cIf,\u201d he continues, \u201cthe Supreme Being is powerful or skillful,\n    just so far as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows\n    skill, if his moral law is to be ascertained simply by the\n    physical processes of the animal frame, or his will gathered from\n    the immediate issues of human affairs, if his Essence is just as\n    high and deep and broad as the universe and no more; if this be\n    the fact, then will I confess that there is no specific science\n    about God, that theology is but a name, and a protest in its\n    behalf an hypocrisy. Then, pious as it is to think of Him, while\n    the pageant of experiment or abstract reasoning passes by, still\n    such piety is nothing more than a poetry of thought, or an\n    ornament of language, a certain view taken of Nature which one man\n    has and another has not, which gifted minds strike out, which\n    others see to be admirable and ingenious, and which all would be\n    the better for adopting. It is but the theology of Nature, just as\n    we talk of the _philosophy_ or the _romance_ of history, or the\n    _poetry_ of childhood, or the picturesque or the sentimental or\n    the humorous, or any other abstract quality which the genius or\n    the caprice of the individual, or the fashion of the day, or the\n    consent of the world, recognizes in any set of objects which are\n    subjected to its contemplation. I do not see much difference\n    between avowing that there is no God, and implying that nothing\n    definite can be known for certain about Him.\u201d\n\n    What I mean by Theology, continues Newman, is none of these\n    things: \u201cI simply mean the _Science of God_, or the truths we know\n    about God, put into a system, just as we have a science of the\n    stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call\n    it geology.\u201d\n\n\nIn both these extracts we have the issue clearly set before us: Feeling\nvalid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally.\nThe test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology based on pure reason\nmust in point of fact convince men universally. If it did not, wherein\nwould its superiority consist? If it only formed sects and schools, even\nas sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its programme\nof freeing us from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly\ndefinite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion\non universal reason simplifies my procedure to\u2010day. I need not discredit\nphilosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I\nshow that as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be\n\u201cobjectively\u201d convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not\nbanish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does. I\nbelieve, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of\ndivinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or\nin politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our\npassions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds\narguments for our conviction, for indeed it _has_ to find them. It\namplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and\nplausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.(290)\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nLend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older\nsystematic theology. You find them in both Protestant and Catholic\nmanuals, best of all in the innumerable text\u2010books published since Pope\nLeo\u2019s Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas. I glance first at\nthe arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes God\u2019s existence,\nafter that at those by which it establishes his nature.(291)\n\nThe arguments for God\u2019s existence have stood for hundreds of years with\nthe waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally\ndiscrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and\nsurely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God\nalready whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are\natheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The\n\u201ccosmological\u201d one, so\u2010called, reasons from the contingence of the world\nto a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself\ncontains. The \u201cargument from design\u201d reasons, from the fact that Nature\u2019s\nlaws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted to each other,\nthat this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The \u201cmoral argument\u201d\nis that the moral law presupposes a lawgiver. The \u201cargument _ex consensu\ngentium_\u201d is that the belief in God is so widespread as to be grounded in\nthe rational nature of man, and should therefore carry authority with it.\n\nAs I just said, I will not discuss these arguments technically. The bare\nfact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or\nto neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as\nreligion\u2019s all\u2010sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would\nbe in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed\ntoo obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of\ntheology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have\nrevolutionized it. Conceived as we now conceive them, as so many fortunate\nescapes from almost limitless processes of destruction, the benevolent\nadaptations which we find in Nature suggest a deity very different from\nthe one who figured in the earlier versions of the argument.(292)\n\nThe fact is that these arguments do but follow the combined suggestions of\nthe facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They only\ncorroborate our pre\u2010existent partialities.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIf philosophy can do so little to establish God\u2019s existence, how stands it\nwith her efforts to define his attributes? It is worth while to look at\nthe attempts of systematic theology in this direction.\n\n\n    Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says, he\n    differs from all his creatures in possessing existence _a se_.\n    From this \u201ca\u2010se\u2010ity\u201d on God\u2019s part, theology deduces by mere logic\n    most of his other perfections. For instance, he must be both\n    _necessary_ and _absolute_, cannot not be, and cannot in any way\n    be determined by anything else. This makes Him absolutely\n    unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for\n    limitation is non\u2010being; and God is being itself. This\n    unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect. Moreover, God is\n    _One_, and _Only_, for the infinitely perfect can admit no peer.\n    He is _Spiritual_, for were He composed of physical parts, some\n    other power would have to combine them into the total, and his\n    aseity would thus be contradicted. He is therefore both simple and\n    non\u2010physical in nature. He is _simple metaphysically_ also, that\n    is to say, his nature and his existence cannot be distinct, as\n    they are in finite substances which share their formal natures\n    with one another, and are individual only in their material\n    aspect. Since God is one and only, his _essentia_ and his _esse_\n    must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all\n    those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things,\n    between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being\n    and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it is true,\n    of God\u2019s powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations\n    are only \u201cvirtual,\u201d and made from the human point of view. In God\n    all these points of view fall into an absolute identity of being.\n\n    This absence of all potentiality in God obliges Him to be\n    _immutable_. He is actuality, through and through. Were there\n    anything potential about Him, He would either lose or gain by its\n    actualization, and either loss or gain would contradict his\n    perfection. He cannot, therefore, change. Furthermore, He is\n    _immense_, _boundless_; for could He be outlined in space, He\n    would be composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility.\n    He is therefore _omnipresent_, indivisibly there, at every point\n    of space. He is similarly wholly present at every point of\n    time,\u2014in other words _eternal_. For if He began in time, He would\n    need a prior cause, and that would contradict his aseity. If He\n    ended, it would contradict his necessity. If He went through any\n    succession, it would contradict his immutability.\n\n    He has _intelligence_ and _will_ and every other creature\u2010\n    perfection, for _we_ have them, and _effectus nequit superare\n    causam_. In Him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in\n    act, and their _object_, since God can be bounded by naught that\n    is external, can primarily be nothing else than God himself. He\n    knows himself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and wills\n    himself with an infinite self\u2010pleasure.(293) Since He must of\n    logical necessity thus love and will himself, He cannot be called\n    \u201cfree\u201d _ad intra_, with the freedom of contrarieties that\n    characterizes finite creatures. _Ad extra_, however, or with\n    respect to his creation, God is free. He cannot _need_ to create,\n    being perfect in being and in happiness already. He _wills_ to\n    create, then, by an absolute freedom.\n\n    Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and\n    freedom, God is a _person_; and a _living_ person also, for He is\n    both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this\n    distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely\n    _self\u2010sufficient_: his _self\u2010knowledge_ and _self\u2010love_ are both\n    of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions\n    to perfect them.\n\n    He is _omniscient_, for in knowing himself as Cause He knows all\n    creature things and events by implication. His knowledge is\n    _previsive_, for He is present to all time. Even our free acts are\n    known beforehand to Him, for otherwise his wisdom would admit of\n    successive moments of enrichment, and this would contradict his\n    immutability. He is _omnipotent_ for everything that does not\n    involve logical contradiction. He can make _being_\u2014in other words\n    his power includes _creation_. If what He creates were made of his\n    own substance, it would have to be infinite in essence, as that\n    substance is; but it is finite; so it must be non\u2010divine in\n    substance. If it were made of a substance, an eternally existing\n    matter, for example, which God found there to his hand, and to\n    which He simply gave its form, that would contradict God\u2019s\n    definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of something\n    caused already. The things he creates, then, He creates _ex\n    nihilo_, and gives them absolute being as so many finite\n    substances additional to himself. The forms which he imprints upon\n    them have their prototypes in his ideas. But as in God there is no\n    such thing as multiplicity, and as these ideas for us are\n    manifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they are in God and the\n    way in which our minds externally imitate them. We must attribute\n    them to Him only in a _terminative_ sense, as differing aspects,\n    from the finite point of view, of his unique essence.\n\n    God of course is holy, good, and just. He can do no evil, for He\n    is positive being\u2019s fullness, and evil is negation. It is true\n    that He has created physical evil in places, but only as a means\n    of wider good, for _bonum totius pr\u00e6eminet bonum partis_. Moral\n    evil He cannot will, either as end or means, for that would\n    contradict his holiness. By creating free beings He _permits_ it\n    only, neither his justice nor his goodness obliging Him to prevent\n    the recipients of freedom from misusing the gift.\n\n    As regards God\u2019s purpose in creating, primarily it can only have\n    been to exercise his absolute freedom by the manifestation to\n    others of his glory. From this it follows that the others must be\n    rational beings, capable in the first place of knowledge, love,\n    and honor, and in the second place of happiness, for the knowledge\n    and love of God is the mainspring of felicity. In so far forth one\n    may say that God\u2019s secondary purpose in creating is _love_.\n\n\nI will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations\nfarther, into the mysteries of God\u2019s Trinity, for example. What I have\ngiven will serve as a specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology of\nboth Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled with enthusiasm at God\u2019s\nlist of perfections, continues the passage which I began to quote to you\nby a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly\nrefrain from adding them, in spite of the inroad they would make upon our\ntime.(294) He first enumerates God\u2019s attributes sonorously, then\ncelebrates his ownership of everything in earth and Heaven, and the\ndependence of all that happens upon his permissive will. He gives us\nscholastic philosophy \u201ctouched with emotion,\u201d and every philosophy should\nbe touched with emotion to be rightly understood. Emotionally, then,\ndogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of Newman\u2019s. It\nwill aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this point\nI make a short digression.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nWhat God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The Continental\nschools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man\u2019s\nthinking is organically connected with his conduct. It seems to me to be\nthe chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic\nconnection in view. The guiding principle of British philosophy has in\nfact been that every difference must _make_ a difference, every\ntheoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that\nthe best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining\nwhat practical difference would result from one alternative or the other\nbeing true. What is the particular truth in question _known as_? In what\nfacts does it result? What is its cash\u2010value in terms of particular\nexperience? This is the characteristic English way of taking up a\nquestion. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of\npersonal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular\nmemories, says he. That is the only concretely verifiable part of its\nsignificance. All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness\nof the spiritual substance on which it is based, are therefore void of\nintelligible meaning; and propositions touching such ideas may be\nindifferently affirmed or denied. So Berkeley with his \u201cmatter.\u201d The cash\u2010\nvalue of matter is our physical sensations. That is what it is known as,\nall that we concretely verify of its conception. That, therefore, is the\nwhole meaning of the term \u201cmatter\u201d\u2014any other pretended meaning is mere\nwind of words. Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as\nhabitual antecedence, and as tendency on our part to look for something\ndefinite to come. Apart from this practical meaning it has no significance\nwhatever, and books about it may be committed to the flames, says Hume.\nDugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, James Mill, John Mill, and Professor\nBain, have followed more or less consistently the same method; and\nShadworth Hodgson has used the principle with full explicitness. When all\nis said and done, it was English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who\nintroduced \u201cthe critical method\u201d into philosophy, the one method fitted to\nmake philosophy a study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can\npossibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make\nan appreciable difference to us in action? And what could it matter, if\nall propositions were practically indifferent, which of them we should\nagree to call true or which false?\n\nAn American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders\nPeirce, has rendered thought a service by disentangling from the\nparticulars of its application the principle by which these men were\ninstinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to\nit a Greek name. He calls it the principle of _pragmatism_, and he defends\nit somewhat as follows:(295)\u2014\n\nThought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of\nbelief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has\nfound its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely\nbegin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of\nthinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If there were\nany part of a thought that made no difference in the thought\u2019s practical\nconsequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought\u2019s\nsignificance. To develop a thought\u2019s meaning we need therefore only\ndetermine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its\nsole significance; and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought\u2010\ndistinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in\nanything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect\nclearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what\nsensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and\nwhat conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true. Our\nconception of these practical consequences is for us the whole of our\nconception of the object, so far as that conception has positive\nsignificance at all.\n\nThis is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. Such a\nprinciple will help us on this occasion to decide, among the various\nattributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God\u2019s perfections,\nwhether some be not far less significant than others.\n\nIf, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God\u2019s metaphysical\nattributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral\nattributes, I think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to\nbelieve them, we still should have to confess them to be destitute of all\nintelligible significance. Take God\u2019s aseity, for example; or his\nnecessariness; his immateriality; his \u201csimplicity\u201d or superiority to the\nkind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite beings, his\nindivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity,\nsubstance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his\nrepudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his\n\u201cpersonality,\u201d apart from the moral qualities which it may comport; his\nrelations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self\u2010sufficiency,\nself\u2010love, and absolute felicity in himself:\u2014candidly speaking, how do\nsuch qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? And if\nthey severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what\nvital difference can it possibly make to a man\u2019s religion whether they be\ntrue or false?\n\nFor my own part, although I dislike to say aught that may grate upon\ntender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these\nattributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of the\nsmallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should be\ntrue. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the\nbetter to God\u2019s simplicity? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior,\nto know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middle of\nthe century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out\u2010of\u2010\ndoor adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field\u2010observers\nof living animals\u2019 habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the\n\u201ccloset\u2010naturalists,\u201d as he called them, the collectors and classifiers,\nand handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to think\nthat a closet\u2010naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun.\nBut surely the systematic theologians are the closet\u2010naturalists of the\ndeity, even in Captain Mayne Reid\u2019s sense. What is their deduction of\nmetaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic\ndictionary\u2010adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs,\nsomething that might be worked out from the mere word \u201cGod\u201d by one of\nthose logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has\ncontrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of\nthe serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians\u2019 hands, they are\nonly a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms;\nverbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that\nof life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent.\nDid such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our\nknowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to\nflourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from\nthis world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract\ndefinitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something\ndifferent from faculties of theology and their professors. All these\nthings are after\u2010effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of\nvital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so\nmany instances, renewing themselves _in s\u00e6cula s\u00e6culorum_ in the lives of\nhumble private men.\n\nSo much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of\npractical religion, the metaphysical monster which they offer to our\nworship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nWhat shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically, they\nstand on an entirely different footing. They positively determine fear and\nhope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life. It needs\nbut a glance at them to show how great is their significance.\n\nGod\u2019s holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing but the\ngood. Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph. Being omniscient, he\ncan see us in the dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he sees.\nBeing loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable, we can count on him\nsecurely. These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is\nhighly important that we should be informed concerning them. That God\u2019s\npurpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an\nattribute which has definite relations to our practical life. Among other\nthings it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian\ncountries. If dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a\nGod with characters like these exists, she may well claim to give a solid\nbasis to religious sentiment. But verily, how stands it with her\narguments?\n\nIt stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not\nonly do post\u2010Kantian idealists reject them root and branch, but it is a\nplain historic fact that they never have converted any one who has found\nin the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced it, reasons for\ndoubting that a good God can have framed it. To prove God\u2019s goodness by\nthe scholastic argument that there is no non\u2010being in his essence would\nsound to such a witness simply silly.\n\nNo! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and\ndefinitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to\nthe deity: \u201cI will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by\nthe hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee.\u201d An intellect\nperplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence\u2014such is the\nsituation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but\nwho remains religious still.(296)\n\nWe must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good\u2010by to dogmatic theology.\nIn all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant. Modern idealism,\nI repeat, has said good\u2010by to this theology forever. Can modern idealism\ngive faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self for\nwitness?\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe basis of modern idealism is Kant\u2019s doctrine of the Transcendental Ego\nof Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that\nthe consciousness \u201cI think them\u201d must (potentially or actually) accompany\nall our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the \u201cI\u201d in question\nhad remained for them identified with the personal individual. Kant\nabstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all\nhis categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental Ego had no\ntheological implications.\n\nIt was reserved for his successors to convert Kant\u2019s notion of\n_Bewusstsein \u00fcberhaupt_, or abstract consciousness, into an infinite\nconcrete self\u2010consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in which\nour sundry personal self\u2010consciousnesses have their being. It would lead\nme into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation\nwas in point of fact effected. Suffice it to say that in the Hegelian\nschool, which to\u2010day so deeply influences both British and American\nthinking, two principles have borne the brunt of the operation.\n\nThe first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never\ngives us more than a post\u2010mortem dissection of _disjecta membra_, and that\nthe fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that\nevery object which our thought may propose to itself involves the notion\nof some other object which seems at first to negate the first one.\n\nThe second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already\nvirtually to be beyond it. The mere asking of a question or expression of\na dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already\nimminent; the finite, realized as such, is already the infinite _in\nposse_.\n\nApplying these principles, we seem to get a propulsive force into our\nlogic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark self\u2010identity in each\nthing never attains to. The objects of our thought now _act_ within our\nthought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and\ndevelop. They introduce something other than themselves along with them;\nand this other, at first only ideal or potential, presently proves itself\nalso to be actual. It supersedes the thing at first supposed, and both\nverifies and corrects it, in developing the fullness of its meaning.\n\nThe program is excellent; the universe _is_ a place where things are\nfollowed by other things that both correct and fulfill them; and a logic\nwhich gave us something like this movement of fact would express truth far\nbetter than the traditional school\u2010logic, which never gets of its own\naccord from anything to anything else, and registers only predictions and\nsubsumptions, or static resemblances and differences. Nothing could be\nmore unlike the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic.\nLet me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish\ntranscendentalist whom I have already named.\n\n\n    \u201cHow are we to conceive,\u201d Principal Caird writes, \u201cof the reality\n    in which all intelligence rests?\u201d He replies: \u201cTwo things may\n    without difficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an\n    absolute Spirit, and conversely that it is only in communion with\n    this absolute Spirit or Intelligence that the finite Spirit can\n    realize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest movement of human\n    intelligence would be arrested, if it did not presuppose the\n    absolute reality of intelligence, of thought itself. Doubt or\n    denial themselves presuppose and indirectly affirm it. When I\n    pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be\n    relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or to\n    the thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of\n    all individual minds as such I can abstract; I can think them\n    away. But that which I cannot think away is thought or self\u2010\n    consciousness itself, in its independence and absoluteness, or, in\n    other words, an Absolute Thought or Self\u2010Consciousness.\u201d\n\n\nHere, you see, Principal Caird makes the transition which Kant did not\nmake: he converts the omnipresence of consciousness in general as a\ncondition of \u201ctruth\u201d being anywhere possible, into an omnipresent\nuniversal consciousness, which he identifies with God in his concreteness.\nHe next proceeds to use the principle that to acknowledge your limits is\nin essence to be beyond them; and makes the transition to the religious\nexperience of individuals in the following words:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cIf [Man] were only a creature of transient sensations and\n    impulses, of an ever coming and going succession of intuitions,\n    fancies, feelings, then nothing could ever have for him the\n    character of objective truth or reality. But it is the prerogative\n    of man\u2019s spiritual nature that he can yield himself up to a\n    thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own. As a\n    thinking, self\u2010conscious being, indeed, he may be said, by his\n    very nature, to live in the atmosphere of the Universal Life. As a\n    thinking being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my\n    consciousness every movement of self\u2010assertion, every notion and\n    opinion that is merely mine, every desire that belongs to me as\n    this particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought\n    that is universal\u2014in one word, to live no more my own life, but\n    let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and\n    Eternal life of spirit. And yet it is just in this renunciation of\n    self that I truly gain myself, or realize the highest\n    possibilities of my own nature. For whilst in one sense we give up\n    self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that\n    to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self.\n    The life of absolute reason is not a life that is foreign to us.\u201d\n\n\nNevertheless, Principal Caird goes on to say, so far as we are able\noutwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it offers remains incomplete.\nWhatever we may be _in posse_, the very best of us _in actu_ falls very\nshort of being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and self\u2010\nsacrifice even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves.\nThey do not quite identify it with the Infinite. Man\u2019s ideal destiny,\ninfinite in abstract logic, might thus seem in practice forever\nunrealizable.\n\n\n    \u201cIs there, then,\u201d our author continues, \u201cno solution of the\n    contradiction between the ideal and the actual? We answer, There\n    is such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond\n    the sphere of morality into that of religion. It may be said to be\n    the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with\n    morality, that it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipation\n    into realization; that instead of leaving man in the interminable\n    pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of\n    a divine or infinite life. Whether we view religion from the human\n    side or the divine\u2014as the surrender of the soul to God, or as the\n    life of God in the soul\u2014in either aspect it is of its very essence\n    that the Infinite has ceased to be a far\u2010off vision, and has\n    become a present reality. The very first pulsation of the\n    spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its significance, is the\n    indication that the division between the Spirit and its object has\n    vanished, that the ideal has become real, that the finite has\n    reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and life of\n    the Infinite.\n\n    \u201cOneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the\n    future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth\n    in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the\n    struggle. In that act which constitutes the beginning of the\n    religious life\u2014call it faith, or trust, or self\u2010surrender, or by\n    whatever name you will\u2014there is involved the identification of the\n    finite with a life which is eternally realized. It is true indeed\n    that the religious life is progressive; but understood in the\n    light of the foregoing idea, religious progress is not progress\n    _towards_, but _within_ the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the\n    vain attempt by endless finite additions or increments to become\n    possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor, by the\n    constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that\n    infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession. The\n    whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but\n    it is given implicitly. The position of the man who has entered on\n    the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not\n    really belong to him: they are excrescences which have no organic\n    relation to his true nature: they are already virtually, as they\n    will be actually, suppressed and annulled, and in the very process\n    of being annulled they become the means of spiritual progress.\n    Though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict, [yet] in\n    that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the struggle is\n    over, the victory already achieved. It is not a finite but an\n    infinite life which the spirit lives. Every pulse\u2010beat of its\n    [existence] is the expression and realization of the life of\n    God.\u201d(297)\n\n\nYou will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of the\nreligious consciousness could be better than these words of your lamented\npreacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture of those crises\nof conversion of which we have been hearing; they utter what the mystic\nfelt but was unable to communicate; and the saint, in hearing them,\nrecognizes his own experience. It is indeed gratifying to find the content\nof religion reported so unanimously. But when all is said and done, has\nPrincipal Caird\u2014and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of\nthinking\u2014transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of\nthe individual, and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason?\nHas he made religion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from\na private faith into a public certainty? Has he rescued its affirmations\nfrom obscurity and mystery?\n\nI believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply\nreaffirmed the individual\u2019s experiences in a more generalized vocabulary.\nAnd again, I can be excused from proving technically that the\ntranscendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can\npoint to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously\ndisposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. The whole of\nGermany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelian argumentation.\nAs for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Fraser\u2019s and Professor\nPringle\u2010Pattison\u2019s memorable criticisms, with which so many of you are\nfamiliar.(298) Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as\nobjectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be, could it\npossibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive?\n\nWhat religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a fact of\nexperience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it\nand ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite\nperceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet, surely\nabstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are in need of.\nConceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret them; but\nthey do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality.\nThere is always a _plus_, a _thisness_, which feeling alone can answer\nfor. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function, unable to\nwarrant faith\u2019s veracity, and so I revert to the thesis which I announced\nat the beginning of this lecture.\n\nIn all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to\ndemonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances\nof direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIt would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this\nnegative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she\n_can_ do for religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for\ncriticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology into\nscience of religions, she can make herself enormously useful.\n\nThe spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels\nin ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions.\nPhilosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from\nthese definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove\nhistoric incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious\nconstructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also\neliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or\nincongruous.\n\nSifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum of\nconceptions that at least are possible. With these she can deal as\n_hypotheses_, testing them in all the manners, whether negative or\npositive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their\nnumber, as some are found more open to objection. She can perhaps become\nthe champion of one which she picks out as being the most closely verified\nor verifiable. She can refine upon the definition of this hypothesis,\ndistinguishing between what is innocent over\u2010belief and symbolism in the\nexpression of it, and what is to be literally taken. As a result, she can\noffer mediation between different believers, and help to bring about\nconsensus of opinion. She can do this the more successfully, the better\nshe discriminates the common and essential from the individual and local\nelements of the religious beliefs which she compares.\n\nI do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not\neventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a\nphysical science. Even the personally non\u2010religious might accept its\nconclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of\noptics\u2014it might appear as foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of\noptics has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified\nlater, by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions\nwould depend for its original material on facts of personal experience,\nand would have to square itself with personal experience through all its\ncritical reconstructions. It could never get away from concrete life, or\nwork in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every\nscience confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that\nits formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words, but truth\nand fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.\nThere is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers\nand twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too\nlate. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his\nvolley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession\ncondemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and\nirrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic\nphotographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion,\nthe vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas\nare true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.\n\nIn my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of\nreligious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last\none, I will try my own hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which\nit is a witness.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURE XIX. OTHER CHARACTERISTICS.\n\n\nWe have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism and\nphilosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion, its uses to the\nindividual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the\nworld, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the\nempirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though the\nqualification \u201con the whole\u201d may always have to be added. In this lecture\nwe must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the\nreligious consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic\nelements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general\nreview and draw our independent conclusions.\n\nThe first point I will speak of is the part which the \u00e6sthetic life plays\nin determining one\u2019s choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago,\ninvoluntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need\nformulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too\ncontemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list\nof attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to\nconsider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them(299) puts\nus on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral\nservice, he shows how high is their \u00e6sthetic value. It enriches our bare\npiety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it\nenriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes\nand stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our\ndevotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may\nsound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like\nNewman\u2019s(300) grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of\nthat of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols.\n\nAmong the buildings\u2010out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges\nin, the \u00e6sthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing\nof ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to\nput in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of\ncertain \u00e6sthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although\nsome persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for\nothers _richness_ is the supreme imaginative requirement.(301) When one\u2019s\nmind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve\nthe purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional and\ncomplex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with\nauthority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for\nadjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the\nGodhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then\nas if in presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture;\none hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific\nvibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a noble\ncomplexity, in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way to\njar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is\ninsignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place,\nhow flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of\nthose isolated religious lives whose boast it is that \u201cman in the bush\nwith God may meet.\u201d(302) What a pulverization and leveling of what a\ngloriously piled\u2010up structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives\nof dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse\nfor a palace.\n\nIt is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient\nempires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one\ngives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the\ngold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up\nwith a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it\nmay be, from a \u201chome\u201d upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting\u2010room and a\nBible on its centre\u2010table. It pauperizes the monarchical imagination!\n\nThe strength of these \u00e6sthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible,\nit seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual\nprofundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in\nmaking many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter\noffers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many\ncells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its\nmultiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to\nCatholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to\nthe Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the\nantiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance\nare, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they\nare childish in the pleasing sense of \u201cchildlike\u201d\u2014innocent and amiable,\nand worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition\nof the dear people\u2019s intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they\nare childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out\ntheir delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at\nhis literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some\nhard\u2010eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand\neach other\u2014their centres of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous\ntruth and human nature\u2019s intricacies are always in need of a mutual\ninterpreter.(303) So much for the \u00e6sthetic diversities in the religious\nconsciousness.\n\nIn most books on religion, three things are represented as its most\nessential elements. These are Sacrifice, Confession, and Prayer. I must\nsay a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly. First of\nSacrifice.\n\nSacrifices to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship; but, as cults have\ngrown refined, burnt offerings and the blood of he\u2010goats have been\nsuperseded by sacrifices more spiritual in their nature. Judaism, Islam,\nand Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice; so does Christianity,\nsave in so far as the notion is preserved in transfigured form in the\nmystery of Christ\u2019s atonement. These religions substitute offerings of the\nheart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vain oblations. In\nthe ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity\nencourage we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some\nsort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its\nsignificance as symbolic of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is\ntaken strenuously, calls for.(304) But, as I said my say about those, and\nas these lectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions\nof derivation, I will pass from the subject of Sacrifice altogether and\nturn to that of Confession.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nIn regard to Confession I will also be most brief, saying my word about it\npsychologically, not historically. Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice,\nit corresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part\nof the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one\u2019s\nself in need of, in order to be in right relations to one\u2019s deity. For him\nwho confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has\nexteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at\nleast no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue\u2014he lives\nat least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of\nconfession in Anglo\u2010Saxon communities is a little hard to account for.\nReaction against popery is of course the historic explanation, for in\npopery confession went with penances and absolution, and other\ninadmissible practices. But on the side of the sinner himself it seems as\nif the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of\nits satisfaction. One would think that in more men the shell of secrecy\nwould have had to open, the pent\u2010in abscess to burst and gain relief, even\nthough the ear that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic\nchurch, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricular\nconfession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We\nEnglish\u2010speaking Protestants, in the general self\u2010reliance and\nunsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take God alone\ninto our confidence.(305)\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe next topic on which I must comment is Prayer,\u2014and this time it must be\nless briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especially\nagainst prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As\nregards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to\nstand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to\nrecovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a\nnormal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be\ndeleterious. The case of the weather is different. Notwithstanding the\nrecency of the opposite belief,(306) every one now knows that droughts and\nstorms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot\navert them. But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if\nwe take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward\ncommunion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can\neasily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.\n\nPrayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.\n\u201cReligion,\u201d says a liberal French theologian, \u201cis an intercourse, a\nconscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress with\nthe mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which\nits fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized by prayer.\nPrayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer\nthat distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or\nneighboring phenomena as purely moral or \u00e6sthetic sentiment. Religion is\nnothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save\nitself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act\nis prayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere\nrepetition of certain sacred formul\u00e6, but the very movement itself of the\nsoul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious\npower of which it feels the presence,\u2014it may be even before it has a name\nby which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no\nreligion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the\nsoul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living\nreligion. One sees from this why \u2018natural religion,\u2019 so\u2010called, is not\nproperly a religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in\nmutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no\ninterchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom\nthis pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of\nrationalism, of critical investigations, it never was anything but an\nabstraction. An artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner\nhardly one of the characters proper to religion.\u201d(307)\n\nIt seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of\nM. Sabatier\u2019s contention. The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner\nfact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has\nshown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the\nconsciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves\nand higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This\nintercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it\nbe not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be\nreally transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for\nits having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense\nthat _something is transacting_, is of course a feeling of what is\nillusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as\ncontaining elements of delusion,\u2014these undoubtedly everywhere exist,\u2014but\nas being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists\nhave always said it was. At most there might remain, when the direct\nexperiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential\nbelief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But\nthis way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be to\npersons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators\u2019 part at\na play, whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem\nourselves to be actors, and not in a play, but in a very serious reality.\n\nThe genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the\nquestion whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The\nconviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is\nthe very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great\ndifferences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been\nsupposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened man can\nnowadays believe in. It may well prove that the sphere of influence in\nprayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is\nonly the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer\u2019s\neffects may come to be limited by criticism, religion, in the vital sense\nin which these lectures study it, must stand or fall by the persuasion\nthat effects of some sort genuinely do occur. Through prayer, religion\ninsists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about:\nenergy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and\noperates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of\nfacts.\n\nThis postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late\nFrederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it. It shows\nhow independent the prayer\u2010instinct is of usual doctrinal complications.\nMr. Myers writes:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cI am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have\n    rather strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the\n    facts. There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that\n    universe is in actual relation with the material. From the\n    spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the material;\n    the energy which makes the life of each individual spirit. Our\n    spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this energy, and\n    the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, much as the\n    vigor of our absorption of material nutriment changes from hour to\n    hour.\n\n    \u201cI call these \u2018facts\u2019 because I think that some scheme of this\n    kind is the only one consistent with our actual evidence; too\n    complex to summarize here. How, then, should we _act_ on these\n    facts? Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life\n    as possible, and we must place our minds in any attitude which\n    experience shows to be favorable to such indrawal. _Prayer_ is the\n    general name for that attitude of open and earnest expectancy. If\n    we then ask to _whom_ to pray, the answer (strangely enough) must\n    be that _that_ does not much matter. The prayer is not indeed a\n    purely subjective thing;\u2014it means a real increase in intensity of\n    absorption of spiritual power or grace;\u2014but we do not know enough\n    of what takes place in the spiritual world to know how the prayer\n    operates;\u2014_who_ is cognizant of it, or through what channel the\n    grace is given. Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any\n    rate the highest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge.\n    But it would be rash to say that Christ himself _hears us_; while\n    to say that _God_ hears us is merely to restate the first\n    principle,\u2014that grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world.\u201d\n\n\nLet us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that\npower is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions,\nif we have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confine itself to\nthe description of phenomena; and as a concrete example of an extreme\nsort, of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take\na case with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George M\u00fcller of\nBristol, who died in 1898. M\u00fcller\u2019s prayers were of the crassest\npetitional order. Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible\npromises in literal sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his\nown worldly foresight, but by the Lord\u2019s hand. He had an extraordinarily\nactive and successful career, among the fruits of which were the\ndistribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text, in\ndifferent languages; the equipment of several hundred missionaries; the\ncirculation of more than a hundred and eleven million of scriptural books,\npamphlets, and tracts; the building of five large orphanages, and the\nkeeping and educating of thousands of orphans; finally, the establishment\nof schools in which over a hundred and twenty\u2010one thousand youthful and\nadult pupils were taught. In the course of this work Mr. M\u00fcller received\nand administered nearly a million and a half of pounds sterling, and\ntraveled over two hundred thousand miles of sea and land.(308) During the\nsixty\u2010eight years of his ministry, he never owned any property except his\nclothes and furniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at the age of\neighty\u2010six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds.\n\n\n    His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not\n    to acquaint other people with the details of his temporary\n    necessities. For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to\n    the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always\n    answered if one have trust enough. \u201cWhen I lose such a thing as a\n    key,\u201d he writes, \u201cI ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look\n    for an answer to my prayer; when a person with whom I have made an\n    appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I\n    begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to\n    hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do not\n    understand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the\n    Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct me,\n    and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time when, and\n    the manner how it should be; when I am going to minister in the\n    Word, I seek help from the Lord, and ... am not cast down, but of\n    good cheer because I look for his assistance.\u201d\n\n    M\u00fcller\u2019s custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week.\n    \u201cAs the Lord deals out to us by the day, ... the week\u2019s payment\n    might become due and we have no money to meet it; and thus those\n    with whom we deal might be inconvenienced by us, and we be found\n    acting against the commandment of the Lord: \u2018Owe no man anything.\u2019\n    From this day and henceforward whilst the Lord gives to us our\n    supplies by the day, we purpose to pay at once for every article\n    as it is purchased, and never to buy anything except we can pay\n    for it at once, however much it may seem to be needed, and however\n    much those with whom we deal may wish to be paid only by the\n    week.\u201d\n\n    The articles needed of which M\u00fcller speaks were the food, fuel,\n    etc., of his orphanages. Somehow, near as they often come to going\n    without a meal, they hardly ever seem actually to have done so.\n    \u201cGreater and more manifest nearness of the Lord\u2019s presence I have\n    never had than when after breakfast there were no means for dinner\n    for more than a hundred persons; or when after dinner there were\n    no means for the tea, and yet the Lord provided the tea; and all\n    this without one single human being having been informed about our\n    need.... Through Grace my mind is so fully assured of the\n    faithfulness of the Lord, that in the midst of the greatest need,\n    I am enabled in peace to go about my other work. Indeed, did not\n    the Lord give me this, which is the result of trusting in him, I\n    should scarcely be able to work at all; for it is now\n    comparatively a rare thing that a day comes when I am not in need\n    for one or another part of the work.\u201d(309)\n\n    In building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, M\u00fcller\n    affirms that his prime motive was \u201cto have something to point to\n    as a visible proof that our God and Father is the same faithful\n    God that he ever was,\u2014as willing as ever to prove himself the\n    living God, in our day as formerly, to all that put their trust in\n    him.\u201d(310) For this reason he refused to borrow money for any of\n    his enterprises. \u201cHow does it work when we thus anticipate God by\n    going our own way? We certainly weaken faith instead of increasing\n    it; and each time we work thus a deliverance of our own we find it\n    more and more difficult to trust in God, till at last we give way\n    entirely to our natural fallen reason and unbelief prevails. How\n    different if one is enabled to wait God\u2019s own time, and to look\n    alone to him for help and deliverance! When at last help comes,\n    after many seasons of prayer it may be, how sweet it is, and what\n    a present recompense! Dear Christian reader, if you have never\n    walked in this path of obedience before, do so now, and you will\n    then know experimentally the sweetness of the joy which results\n    from it.\u201d(311)\n\n    When the supplies came in but slowly, M\u00fcller always considered\n    that this was for the trial of his faith and patience. When his\n    faith and patience had been sufficiently tried, the Lord would\n    send more means. \u201cAnd thus it has proved,\u201d\u2014I quote from his\n    diary,\u2014\u201cfor to\u2010day was given me the sum of 2050 pounds, of which\n    2000 are for the building fund [of a certain house], and 50 for\n    present necessities. It is impossible to describe my joy in God\n    when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor\n    surprised; for I _look out_ for answers to my prayers. _I believe\n    that God hears me._ Yet my heart was so full of joy that I could\n    only _sit_ before God, and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel vii.\n    At last I cast myself flat down upon my face and burst forth in\n    thanksgiving to God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for\n    his blessed service.\u201d(312)\n\n\nGeorge M\u00fcller\u2019s is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more\nso than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man\u2019s intellectual horizon.\nHis God was, as he often said, his business partner. He seems to have been\nfor M\u00fcller little more than a sort of supernatural clergyman interested in\nthe congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his saints,\nand in the orphanages and other enterprises, but unpossessed of any of\nthose vaster and wilder and more ideal attributes with which the human\nimagination elsewhere has invested him. M\u00fcller, in short, was absolutely\nunphilosophical. His intensely private and practical conception of his\nrelations with the Deity continued the traditions of the most primitive\nhuman thought.(313) When we compare a mind like his with such a mind as,\nfor example, Emerson\u2019s or Phillips Brooks\u2019s, we see the range which the\nreligions consciousness covers.\n\nThere is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional prayer.\nThe evangelical journals are filled with such answers, and books are\ndevoted to the subject,(314) but for us M\u00fcller\u2019s case will suffice.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nA less sturdy beggar\u2010like fashion of leading the prayerful life is\nfollowed by innumerable other Christians. Persistence in leaning on the\nAlmighty for support and guidance will, such persons say, bring with it\nproofs, palpable but much more subtle, of his presence and active\ninfluence. The following description of a \u201cled\u201d life, by a German writer\nwhom I have already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians\nin every country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One\nfinds in this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty,\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThat books and words (and sometimes people) come to one\u2019s\n    cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them; that\n    one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining\n    ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray, until\n    the peril is past\u2014this being especially the case with temptations\n    to vanity and sensuality; that paths on which one ought not to\n    wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns; but that on the\n    other side great obstacles are suddenly removed; that when the\n    time has come for something, one suddenly receives a courage that\n    formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter that until then\n    was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents, yea, even pieces of\n    knowledge and insight, in one\u2019s self, of which it is impossible to\n    say whence they come; finally, that persons help us or decline to\n    help us, favor us or refuse us, as if they had to do so against\n    their will, so that often those indifferent or even unfriendly to\n    us yield us the greatest service and furtherance. (God takes often\n    their worldly goods, from those whom he leads, at just the right\n    moment, when they threaten to impede the effort after higher\n    interests.)\n\n    \u201cBesides all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which\n    it is not easy to give account. There is no doubt whatever that\n    now one walks continually through \u2018open doors\u2019 and on the easiest\n    roads, with as little care and trouble as it is possible to\n    imagine.\n\n    \u201cFurthermore one finds one\u2019s self settling one\u2019s affairs neither\n    too early nor too late, whereas they were wont to be spoiled by\n    untimeliness, even when the preparations had been well laid. In\n    addition to this, one does them with perfect tranquillity of mind,\n    almost as if they were matters of no consequence, like errands\n    done by us for another person, in which case we usually act more\n    calmly than when we act in our own concerns. Again, one finds that\n    one can _wait_ for everything patiently, and that is one of life\u2019s\n    great arts. One finds also that each thing comes duly, one thing\n    after the other, so that one gains time to make one\u2019s footing sure\n    before advancing farther. And then everything occurs to us at the\n    right moment, just what we ought to do, etc., and often in a very\n    striking way, just as if a third person were keeping watch over\n    those things which we are in easy danger of forgetting.\n\n    \u201cOften, too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer or\n    ask for what is needed, and what we should never have had the\n    courage or resolution to undertake of our own accord.\n\n    \u201cThrough all these experiences one finds that one is kindly and\n    tolerant of other people, even of such as are repulsive,\n    negligent, or ill\u2010willed, for they also are instruments of good in\n    God\u2019s hand, and often most efficient ones. Without these thoughts\n    it would be hard for even the best of us always to keep our\n    equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine guidance, one\n    sees many a thing in life quite differently from what would\n    otherwise be possible.\n\n    \u201cAll these are things that every human being _knows_, who has had\n    experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could\n    be brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are\n    unable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of\n    its own accord.\u201d(315)\n\n\nSuch accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is, not that\nparticular events are tempered more towardly to us by a superintending\nprovidence, as a reward for our reliance, but that by cultivating the\ncontinuous sense of our connection with the power that made things as they\nare, we are tempered more towardly for their reception. The outward face\nof nature need not alter, but the expressions of meaning in it alter. It\nwas dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on\na person without love, or upon the same person with love. In the latter\ncase intercourse springs into new vitality. So when one\u2019s affections keep\nin touch with the divinity of the world\u2019s authorship, fear and egotism\nfall away; and in the equanimity that follows, one finds in the hours, as\nthey succeed each other, a series of purely benignant opportunities. It is\nas if all doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed. We meet a new\nworld when we meet the old world in the spirit which this kind of prayer\ninfuses.\n\nSuch a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.(316) It is that\nof mind\u2010curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the so\u2010called \u201cliberal\u201d\nChristians. As an expression of it, I will quote a page from one of\nMartineau\u2019s sermons:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cThe universe, open to the eye to\u2010day, looks as it did a thousand\n    years ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty\n    with which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and\n    gardens of the world. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we\n    cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the\n    margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the\n    day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret\n    grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and\n    solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should\n    discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the\n    moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of\n    greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed\n    us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far\n    spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God\u2019s hand\n    is, _there_ is miracle: and it is simply an indevoutness which\n    imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of\n    God. The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our\n    eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High\n    is never tired, than the strange things which he does not love\n    well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath\n    the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the\n    Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which\n    Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise. It is no outward change,\n    no shifting in time or place; but only the loving meditation of\n    the pure in heart, that can reawaken the Eternal from the sleep\n    within our souls: that can render him a reality again, and\n    reassert for him once more his ancient name of \u2018the Living\n    God.\u2019 \u201d(317)\n\n\nWhen we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read in\ncommon matters superior expressions of meaning. The deadness with which\ncustom invests the familiar vanishes, and existence as a whole appears\ntransfigured. The state of a mind thus awakened from torpor is well\nexpressed in these words, which I take from a friend\u2019s letter:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cIf we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and bounties\n    we are privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their number (so\n    great that we can imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time\n    even to begin to review the things we may imagine _we have not_).\n    We sum them and realize that _we are actually killed with God\u2019s\n    kindness_; that we are surrounded by bounties upon bounties,\n    without which all would fall. Should we not love it; should we not\n    feel buoyed up by the Eternal Arms?\u201d\n\n\nSometimes this realization that facts are of divine sending, instead of\nbeing habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience. Father Gratry gives\nthis instance from his youthful melancholy period:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cOne day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with\n    something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor\n    drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked\n    behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a holiday.\n    His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment at\n    least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for fault\u2010\n    finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit,\n    better time or measure, more clearness or richness, than were in\n    this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction.\n    I was enchanted and consoled; the perfection of this wretched act\n    did me good. Good is at least possible, I said, since the ideal\n    can thus sometimes get embodied.\u201d(318)\n\n\nIn S\u00e9nancour\u2019s novel of Obermann a similar transient lifting of the veil\nis recorded. In Paris streets, on a March day, he comes across a flower in\nbloom, a jonquil:\n\n\n    \u201cIt was the strongest expression of desire: it was the first\n    perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man.\n    This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world,\n    arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so\n    instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of\n    relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless\n    beauty.... I shall never inclose in a conception this power, this\n    immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will\n    contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which,\n    it seems, nature has not made actual.\u201d(319)\n\n\nWe heard in previous lectures of the vivified face of the world as it may\nappear to converts after their awakening.(320) As a rule, religious\npersons generally assume that whatever natural facts connect themselves in\nany way with their destiny are significant of the divine purposes with\nthem. Through prayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to\nthem, and if it be \u201ctrial,\u201d strength to endure the trial is given. Thus at\nall stages of the prayerful life we find the persuasion that in the\nprocess of communion energy from on high flows in to meet demand, and\nbecomes operative within the phenomenal world. So long as this\noperativeness is admitted to be real, it makes no essential difference\nwhether its immediate effects be subjective or objective. The fundamental\nreligious point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, which otherwise would\nslumber, does become active, and spiritual work of some kind is effected\nreally.\n\nSo much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion. As\nthe core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to touch upon\nis the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with\nthe subconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my\nopening lecture(321) about the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament\nin religious biography. You will in point of fact hardly find a religious\nleader of any kind in whose life there is no record of automatisms. I\nspeak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose followers regard\nautomatic utterance and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration, I\nspeak of leaders of thought and subjects of intellectualized experience.\nSaint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as\nwas the importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of Christian\nsaints and heresiarchs, including the greatest, the Bernards, the Loyolas,\nthe Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, rapt\nconditions, guiding impressions, and \u201copenings.\u201d They had these things,\nbecause they had exalted sensibility, and to such things persons of\nexalted sensibility are liable. In such liability there lie, however,\nconsequences for theology. Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms\ncorroborate them. Incursions from beyond the transmarginal region have a\npeculiar power to increase conviction. The inchoate sense of presence is\ninfinitely stronger than conception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom\nequal to the evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear\ntheir Saviour reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatisms, though\nrarer, are, if possible, even more convincing than sensations. The\nsubjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their\nwill. The evidence is dynamic; the God or spirit moves the very organs of\ntheir body.(322)\n\nThe great field for this sense of being the instrument of a higher power\nis of course \u201cinspiration.\u201d It is easy to discriminate between the\nreligious leaders who have been habitually subject to inspiration and\nthose who have not. In the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint\nPaul (apart from his gift of tongues), of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of\nLuther, of Wesley, automatic or semi\u2010automatic composition appears to have\nbeen only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets, on the contrary, in\nMohammed, in some of the Alexandrians, in many minor Catholic saints, in\nFox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to have been frequent,\nsometimes habitual. We have distinct professions of being under the\ndirection of a foreign power, and serving as its mouthpiece. As regards\nthe Hebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an author who has made a\ncareful study of them, to see\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cHow, one after another, the same features are reproduced in the\n    prophetic books. The process is always extremely different from\n    what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into\n    spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own genius. There\n    is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his finger, so\n    to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always comes in the\n    form of an overpowering force from without, against which he\n    struggles, but in vain. Listen, for instance, [to] the opening of\n    the book of Jeremiah. Read through in like manner the first two\n    chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel.\n\n    \u201cIt is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the\n    prophet passes through a crisis which is clearly not self\u2010caused.\n    Scattered all through the prophetic writings are expressions which\n    speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the\n    prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time,\n    constraining his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a\n    higher meaning than their own. For instance, this of Isaiah\u2019s:\n    \u2018The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand,\u2019\u2014an emphatic phrase\n    which denotes the overmastering nature of the impulse,\u2014\u2018and\n    instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people.\u2019\n    ... Or passages like this from Ezekiel: \u2018The hand of the Lord God\n    fell upon me,\u2019 \u2018The hand of the Lord was strong upon me.\u2019 The one\n    standing characteristic of the prophet is that he speaks with the\n    authority of Jehovah himself. Hence it is that the prophets one\n    and all preface their addresses so confidently, \u2018The Word of the\n    Lord,\u2019 or \u2018Thus saith the Lord.\u2019 They have even the audacity to\n    speak in the first person, as if Jehovah himself were speaking. As\n    in Isaiah: \u2018Hearken unto me, O Jacob, and Israel my called; I am\n    He, I am the First, I also am the last,\u2019\u2014and so on. The\n    personality of the prophet sinks entirely into the background; he\n    feels himself for the time being the mouthpiece of the\n    Almighty.\u201d(323)\n\n    \u201cWe need to remember that prophecy was a profession, and that the\n    prophets formed a professional class. There were schools of the\n    prophets, in which the gift was regularly cultivated. A group of\n    young men would gather round some commanding figure\u2014a Samuel or an\n    Elisha\u2014and would not only record or spread the knowledge of his\n    sayings and doings, but seek to catch themselves something of his\n    inspiration. It seems that music played its part in their\n    exercises.... It is perfectly clear that by no means all of these\n    Sons of the prophets ever succeeded in acquiring more than a very\n    small share in the gift which they sought. It was clearly possible\n    to \u2018counterfeit\u2019 prophecy. Sometimes this was done\n    deliberately.... But it by no means follows that in all cases\n    where a false message was given, the giver of it was altogether\n    conscious of what he was doing.\u201d(324)\n\n\nHere, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of Alexandria\ndescribes his inspiration:\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cSometimes, when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly\n    become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me,\n    and implanted in me from on high; so that through the influence of\n    divine inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have known\n    neither the place in which I was, nor those who were present, nor\n    myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was writing; for then I\n    have been conscious of a richness of interpretation, an enjoyment\n    of light, a most penetrating insight, a most manifest energy in\n    all that was to be done; having such effect on my mind as the\n    clearest ocular demonstration would have on the eyes.\u201d(325)\n\n\nIf we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed\u2019s revelations all came from the\nsubconscious sphere. To the question in what way he got them,\u2014\n\n\n    \u201cMohammed is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a knell\n    as from a bell, and that this had the strongest effect on him; and\n    when the angel went away, he had received the revelation.\n    Sometimes again he held converse with the angel as with a man, so\n    as easily to understand his words. The later authorities, however,\n    ... distinguish still other kinds. In the Itg\u00e2n (103) the\n    following are enumerated: 1, revelations with sound of bell, 2, by\n    inspiration of the holy spirit in M.\u2019s heart, 3, by Gabriel in\n    human form, 4, by God immediately, either when awake (as in his\n    journey to heaven) or in dream.... In Almaw\u00e2hib alladun\u00eeya the\n    kinds are thus given: 1, Dream, 2, Inspiration of Gabriel in the\n    Prophet\u2019s heart, 3, Gabriel taking Dahya\u2019s form, 4, with the bell\u2010\n    sound, etc., 5, Gabriel in propri\u00e2 person\u00e2 (only twice), 6,\n    revelation in heaven, 7, God appearing in person, but veiled, 8,\n    God revealing himself immediately without veil. Others add two\n    other stages, namely: 1, Gabriel in the form of still another man,\n    2, God showing himself personally in dream.\u201d(326)\n\n\nIn none of these cases is the revelation distinctly motor. In the case of\nJoseph Smith (who had prophetic revelations innumerable in addition to the\nrevealed translation of the gold plates which resulted in the Book of\nMormon), although there may have been a motor element, the inspiration\nseems to have been predominantly sensorial. He began his translation by\nthe aid of the \u201cpeep\u2010stones\u201d which he found, or thought or said that he\nfound, with the gold plates,\u2014apparently a case of \u201ccrystal gazing.\u201d For\nsome of the other revelations he used the peep\u2010stones, but seems generally\nto have asked the Lord for more direct instruction.(327)\n\nOther revelations are described as \u201copenings\u201d\u2014Fox\u2019s, for example, were\nevidently of the kind known in spiritistic circles of to\u2010day as\n\u201cimpressions.\u201d As all effective initiators of change must needs live to\nsome degree upon this psychopathic level of sudden perception or\nconviction of new truth, or of impulse to action so obsessive that it must\nbe worked off, I will say nothing more about so very common a phenomenon.\n\nWhen, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration, we take religious\nmysticism into the account, when we recall the striking and sudden\nunifications of a discordant self which we saw in conversion, and when we\nreview the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity, and self\u2010severity\nmet with in saintliness, we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in\nreligion we have a department of human nature with unusually close\nrelations to the trans\u2010marginal or subliminal region. If the word\n\u201csubliminal\u201d is offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychical\nresearch or other aberrations, call it by any other name you please, to\ndistinguish it from the level of full sunlit consciousness. Call this\nlatter the A\u2010region of personality, if you care to, and call the other the\nB\u2010region. The B\u2010region, then, is obviously the larger part of each of us,\nfor it is the abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of\neverything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example,\nsuch things as all our momentarily inactive memories, and it harbors the\nsprings of all our obscurely motived passions, impulses, likes, dislikes,\nand prejudices. Our intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions,\npersuasions, convictions, and in general all our non\u2010rational operations,\ncome from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may\nreturn to it. In it arise whatever mystical experiences we may have, and\nour automatisms, sensory or motor; our life in hypnotic and \u201chypnoid\u201d\nconditions, if we are subjects to such conditions; our delusions, fixed\nideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; our supra\u2010\nnormal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It\nis also the fountain\u2010head of much that feeds our religion. In persons deep\nin the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen,\u2014and this is my\nconclusion,\u2014the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any\nrate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had\nemphatic influence in shaping religious history.\n\nWith this conclusion I turn back and close the circle which I opened in my\nfirst lecture, terminating thus the review which I then announced of inner\nreligious phenomena as we find them in developed and articulate human\nindividuals. I might easily, if the time allowed, multiply both my\ndocuments and my discriminations, but a broad treatment is, I believe, in\nitself better, and the most important characteristics of the subject lie,\nI think, before us already. In the next lecture, which is also the last\none, we must try to draw the critical conclusions which so much material\nmay suggest.\n\n\n\n\n\nLECTURE XX. CONCLUSIONS.\n\n\nThe material of our study of human nature is now spread before us; and in\nthis parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw our\ntheoretical and practical conclusions. In my first lecture, defending the\nempirical method, I foretold that whatever conclusions we might come to\ncould be reached by spiritual judgments only, appreciations of the\nsignificance for life of religion, taken \u201con the whole.\u201d Our conclusions\ncannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions would be, but I will formulate\nthem, when the time comes, as sharply as I can.\n\nSumming up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the\nreligious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs:\u2014\n\n1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which\nit draws its chief significance;\n\n2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true\nend;\n\n3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof\u2014be that spirit\n\u201cGod\u201d or \u201claw\u201d\u2014is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual\nenergy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within\nthe phenomenal world.\n\nReligion includes also the following psychological characteristics:\u2014\n\n4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form\neither of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism.\n\n5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to\nothers, a preponderance of loving affections.\n\nIn illustrating these characteristics by documents, we have been literally\nbathed in sentiment. In re\u2010reading my manuscript, I am almost appalled at\nthe amount of emotionality which I find in it. After so much of this, we\ncan afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the work that\nlies before us.\n\nThe sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence of the fact\nthat I sought them among the extravagances of the subject. If any of you\nare enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are,\nnevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt my\nselection to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might\nhave stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer\nexamples as yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets of\nany science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be\neccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine what they\ntell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment\nindependently. Even so with religion. We who have pursued such radical\nexpressions of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as\nauthentically as any one can know them who learns them from another; and\nwe have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical question:\nwhat are the dangers in this element of life? and in what proportion may\nit need to be restrained by other elements, to give the proper balance?\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nBut this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately and\nget it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us.(328)\nOught it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other\nelements should be identical? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the\nlives of all men should show identical religious elements? In other words,\nis the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds\nregrettable?\n\nTo these questions I answer \u201cNo\u201d emphatically. And my reason is that I do\nnot see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and\nwith such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly\nthe same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical\ndifficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions.\nEach, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of\nfact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us\nmust soften himself, another must harden himself; one must yield a point,\nanother must stand firm,\u2014in order the better to defend the position\nassigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced\nto be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer.\nThe divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities,\nby being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find\nworthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature\u2019s total\nmessage, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. So\na \u201cgod of battles\u201d must be allowed to be the god for one kind of person, a\ngod of peace and heaven and home, the god for another. We must frankly\nrecognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not\ninterchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous,\ndestruction of the self must be an element of our religion; why need it be\none if we are good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls,\nwe require a religion of deliverance; but why think so much of\ndeliverance, if we are healthy\u2010minded?(329) Unquestionably, some men have\nthe completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the\nsocial world; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whate\u2019er it\nbe, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nBut, you may now ask, would not this one\u2010sidedness be cured if we should\nall espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In answering\nthis question I must open again the general relations of the theoretic to\nthe active life.\n\nKnowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al\u2010\nGhazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism,\u2014that to understand the\ncauses of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be\ndrunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and\nelements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified,\nby their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be\nconsidered true; and yet the best man at this science might be the man who\nfound it hardest to be personally devout. _Tout savoir c\u2019est tout\npardonner._ The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many persons as an\nexample of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a\ndilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one\u2019s living\nfaith.(330) If religion be a function by which either God\u2019s cause or man\u2019s\ncause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however\nnarrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however\nmuch. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place\nin life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.\n\nFor this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent for\nliving religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a\nscience, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic\nattitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by\nactive faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions\nconstituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all the\nnecessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence the\nsame conclusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced. Suppose that\nshe agrees that religion, wherever it is an active thing, involves a\nbelief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerful communion\nwith them,(331) work is done, and something real comes to pass. She has\nnow to exert her critical activity, and to decide how far, in the light of\nother sciences and in that of general philosophy, such beliefs can be\nconsidered _true_.\n\nDogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not only are the other\nsciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, but in their\npresent state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know\nnothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical\ncommerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which general\nphilosophy inclines. The scientist, so\u2010called, is, during his scientific\nhours at least, so materialistic that one may well say that on the whole\nthe influence of science goes against the notion that religion should be\nrecognized at all. And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within the\nvery science of religions itself. The cultivator of this science has to\nbecome acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a\npresumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious\nprobably is false. In the \u201cprayerful communion\u201d of savages with such\nmumbo\u2010jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what\ngenuine spiritual work\u2014even though it were work relative only to their\ndark savage obligations\u2014can possibly be done.\n\nThe consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as\nlikely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the\nessence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air about us that\nreligion is probably only an anachronism, a case of \u201csurvival,\u201d an\natavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its more\nenlightened examples has outgrown; and this notion our religious\nanthropologists at present do little to counteract.\n\nThis view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it with\nsome explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the\n\u201cSurvival theory,\u201d for brevity\u2019s sake.\n\nThe pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves,\nis the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny.\nReligion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human\negotism. The gods believed in\u2014whether by crude savages or by men\ndisciplined intellectually\u2014agree with each other in recognizing personal\ncalls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this\nbeing, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To\u2010day, quite\nas much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that\nthe divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.\n\nScience, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal\npoint of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws\nindifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs\nher theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates.\nThough the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist\nin his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that\nfor Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament\nshoweth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now\nas but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the\nheavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds\nwhere no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will\ncount but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of\nchance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies\nto the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the\npresent temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of\nthe cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular\nscale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing,\nachieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one\ndistinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a\nsympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now\nfollows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology\nwhich satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite\ngrotesque,(332) representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest\nthings of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom\nscience recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who\ndoes a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his\nprocesses to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which\ncoats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of\nthe wind and water. Our private selves are like those\nbubbles,\u2014epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them;\ntheir destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world\u2019s\nirremediable currents of events.\n\nYou see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat religion as a\nmere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the\nmost primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them\nand get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, the one\ngreat object in our dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors,\ndreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock\u2010and\u2010bull stories were\ninextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date such\ndistinctions as those between what has been verified and what is only\nconjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects of existence,\nwere hardly suspected or conceived. Whatever you imagined in a lively\nmanner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and\nwhatever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet\nbeen contradicted, most things were taken into the mind from the point of\nview of their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself\nexclusively to the \u00e6sthetic and dramatic aspects of events.(333)\n\nHow indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, for explanation\nand prevision, of those mathematical and mechanical modes of conception\nwhich science uses, was a result that could not possibly have been\nexpected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction, position, what\nthin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the richer animistic aspects\nof Nature, the peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena\npicturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first singled out\nand followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge\nof Nature\u2019s life? Well, it is still in these richer animistic and dramatic\naspects that religion delights to dwell. It is the terror and beauty of\nphenomena, the \u201cpromise\u201d of the dawn and of the rainbow, the \u201cvoice\u201d of\nthe thunder, the \u201cgentleness\u201d of the summer rain, the \u201csublimity\u201d of the\nstars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the\nreligious mind still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore,\nthe devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields\nhe still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in reply\nto his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with\nsecurity and peace.\n\nPure anachronism! says the survival\u2010theory;\u2014anachronism for which\ndeanthropomorphization of the imagination is the remedy required. The less\nwe mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell in universal and\nimpersonal terms, the truer heirs of Science we become.\n\nIn spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific attitude\nmakes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it to be shallow, and\nI can now state my reason in comparatively few words. That reason is that,\nso long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the\nsymbols of reality, but _as soon as we deal with private and personal\nphenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the\nterm_. I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an\nobjective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably\nmore extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or\nsuppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given\ntime we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner \u201cstate\u201d in\nwhich the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous,\u2014the\ncosmic times and spaces, for example,\u2014whereas the inner state may be the\nmost fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far\nas the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose\nexistence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while\nthe inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our\nexperience are one. A conscious field _plus_ its object as felt or thought\nof _plus_ an attitude towards the object _plus_ the sense of a self to\nwhom the attitude belongs\u2014such a concrete bit of personal experience may\nbe a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not\na mere abstract element of experience, such as the \u201cobject\u201d is when taken\nall alone. It is a _full_ fact, even though it be an insignificant fact;\nit is of the _kind_ to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the\nmotor currents of the world run through the like of it; it is on the line\nconnecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling which\neach one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately\nfeels it rolling out on fortune\u2019s wheel may be disparaged for its egotism,\nmay be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up\nthe measure of our concrete actuality, and any would\u2010be existent that\nshould lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality\nonly half made up.(334)\n\nIf this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic\nelements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs\nsolely through the egotistic places,\u2014they are strung upon it like so many\nbeads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the\nindividual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out\nfrom the description\u2014they being as describable as anything else\u2014would be\nsomething like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a\nsolid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual\u2019s religion may\nbe egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may\nbe narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow\nand abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on\ntaking no account of anything private at all.\n\nA bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word \u201craisin,\u201d\nwith one real egg instead of the word \u201cegg,\u201d might be an inadequate meal,\nbut it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of the\nsurvival\u2010theory that we ought to stick to non\u2010personal elements\nexclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with\nreading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however\nparticular questions connected with our individual destinies may be\nanswered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and\nliving in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become\nprofound. But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly\nrepudiate the survival\u2010theory of religion, as being founded on an\negregious mistake. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many\nerrors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should\ntherefore leave off being religious at all.(335) By being religious we\nestablish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points\nat which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our\nprivate destiny, after all.\n\nYou see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures,\nand why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in\nreligion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded\nin feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of\ncharacter, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in\nthe making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is\nactually done.(336) Compared with this world of living individualized\nfeelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect\ncontemplates is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or\nkinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension,\nthe movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture\nof an express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I\nhave heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?(337)\n\nLet us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herself with personal\ndestinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities\nwhich we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history. The\nnext thing to decide is what she reveals about those destinies, or whether\nindeed she reveals anything distinct enough to be considered a general\nmessage to mankind. We have done as you see, with our preliminaries, and\nour final summing up can now begin.\n\nI am well aware that after all the palpitating documents which I have\nquoted, and all the perspectives of emotion\u2010inspiring institution and\nbelief that my previous lectures have opened, the dry analysis to which I\nnow advance may appear to many of you like an anti\u2010climax, a tapering\u2010off\nand flattening out of the subject, instead of a crescendo of interest and\nresult. I said awhile ago that the religious attitude of Protestants\nappears poverty\u2010stricken to the Catholic imagination. Still more poverty\u2010\nstricken, I fear, may my final summing up of the subject appear at first\nto some of you. On which account I pray you now to bear this point in\nmind, that in the present part of it I am expressly trying to reduce\nreligion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free from\nindividualistic excrescences, which all religions contain as their\nnucleus, and on which it may be hoped that all religious persons may\nagree. That established, we should have a result which might be small, but\nwould at least be solid; and on it and round it the ruddier additional\nbeliefs on which the different individuals make their venture might be\ngrafted, and flourish as richly as you please. I shall add my own over\u2010\nbelief (which will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a\ncritical philosopher), and you will, I hope, also add your over\u2010beliefs,\nand we shall soon be in the varied world of concrete religious\nconstructions once more. For the moment, let me dryly pursue the analytic\npart of the task.\n\nBoth thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct\nmay be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the\nwhole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have\nprevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the\nother are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist\nsaints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories\nwhich Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you\nwish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct\nas being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that\nthe short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business,\nwhile the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop\u2010lines which\nmay be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united\ninto one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs\nwith an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life\nto go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to\ndraw from the phenomena we have passed in review.\n\nThe next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychological order\ndo they belong?\n\nThe resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls a \u201csthenic\u201d\naffection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, \u201cdynamogenic\u201d order\nwhich, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture,\nbut especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we have\nseen how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts\nendurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and\nglory to the common objects of life.(338) The name of \u201cfaith\u2010state,\u201d by\nwhich Professor Leuba designates it, is a good one.(339) It is a\nbiological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely\naccurate in classing faith among the forces _by which men live_.(340) The\ntotal absence of it, anhedonia,(341) means collapse.\n\nThe faith\u2010state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content. We saw\nexamples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine presence, or in\nsuch mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described.(342) It may be a mere vague\nenthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that\ngreat and wondrous things are in the air.(343)\n\nWhen, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith\u2010\nstate, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief,(344) and this explains\nthe passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest\ndetails of their so widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith\u2010state\ntogether, as forming \u201creligions,\u201d and treating these as purely subjective\nphenomena, without regard to the question of their \u201ctruth,\u201d we are\nobliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and\nendurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions\nof mankind. Their stimulant and an\u00e6sthetic effect is so great that\nProfessor Leuba, in a recent article,(345) goes so far as to say that so\nlong as men can _use_ their God, they care very little who he is, or even\nwhether he is at all. \u201cThe truth of the matter can be put,\u201d says Leuba,\n\u201cin this way: _God is not known, he is not understood; he is\nused_\u2014sometimes as meat\u2010purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as\nfriend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the\nreligious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist?\nHow does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God,\nbut life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the\nlast analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every\nlevel of development, is the religious impulse.\u201d(346)\n\nAt this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be considered\nvindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem\nthat she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a\npermanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content,\nand whether, if she have any, it be true or false.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nWe must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility,\nand make inquiry into the intellectual content itself.\n\nFirst, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common\nnucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously?\n\nAnd second, ought we to consider the testimony true?\n\nI will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the\naffirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do\nindeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in\nwhich religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts:\u2014\n\n1. An uneasiness; and\n\n2. Its solution.\n\n1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is\n_something wrong about us_ as we naturally stand.\n\n2. The solution is a sense that _we are saved from the wrongness_ by\nmaking proper connection with the higher powers.\n\nIn those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness\ntakes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think\nwe shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds\nif we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like\nthese:\u2014\n\nThe individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it,\nis to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch\nwith something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part\nthere is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most\nhelpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no\nmeans obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or\nsalvation) arrives,(347) the man identifies his real being with the\ngerminal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. _He\nbecomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous\nwith a _MORE_ of the same quality, which is operative in the universe\noutside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a\nfashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone\nto pieces in the wreck._\n\nIt seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in these\nvery simple general terms.(348) They allow for the divided self and the\nstruggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of\nthe lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping\npower and yet account for our sense of union with it;(349) and they fully\njustify our feelings of security and joy. There is probably no\nautobiographic document, among all those which I have quoted, to which the\ndescription will not well apply. One need only add such specific details\nas will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments,\nand one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their\nindividual forms.\n\nSo far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only\npsychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological\nworth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has\nthem, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux\nwhere the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but\nhis subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite of\nthe effects produced. I now turn to my second question: What is the\nobjective \u201ctruth\u201d of their content?(350)\n\nThe part of the content concerning which the question of truth most\npertinently arises is that \u201cMORE of the same quality\u201d with which our own\nhigher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working\nrelation. Is such a \u201cmore\u201d merely our own notion, or does it really exist?\nIf so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And in\nwhat form should we conceive of that \u201cunion\u201d with it of which religious\ngeniuses are so convinced?\n\nIt is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform\ntheir theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light. They\nall agree that the \u201cmore\u201d really exists; though some of them hold it to\nexist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied\nto conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal\nstructure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as\nexists, and that something really is effected for the better when you\nthrow your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experience of\n\u201cunion\u201d with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly.\nOver this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and\ngrace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism,\ncarry on inveterate disputes.\n\nAt the end of my lecture on Philosophy(351) I held out the notion that an\nimpartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their\ndiscrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate in\nterms to which physical science need not object. This, I said, she might\nadopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general\nbelief. I also said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own\nhand at framing such an hypothesis.\n\nThe time has now come for this attempt. Who says \u201chypothesis\u201d renounces\nthe ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is,\naccordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your\nscientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse\nto welcome it as true.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe \u201cmore,\u201d as we called it, and the meaning of our \u201cunion\u201d with it, form\nthe nucleus of our inquiry. Into what definite description can these words\nbe translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never\ndo for us to place ourselves offhand at the position of a particular\ntheology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to\ndefine the \u201cmore\u201d as Jehovah, and the \u201cunion\u201d as his imputation to us of\nthe righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and,\nfrom our present standpoint at least, would be an over\u2010belief.\n\nWe must begin by using less particularized terms; and, since one of the\nduties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with\nthe rest of science, we shall do well to seek first of all a way of\ndescribing the \u201cmore,\u201d which psychologists may also recognize as real. The\n_subconscious self_ is nowadays a well\u2010accredited psychological entity;\nand I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required.\nApart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally\nmore life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The\nexploration of the transmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously\nundertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal\nConsciousness(352) is as true as when it was first written: \u201cEach of us is\nin reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows\u2014an\nindividuality which can never express itself completely through any\ncorporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but\nthere is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it\nseems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.\u201d(353) Much\nof the content of this larger background against which our conscious being\nstands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jingles,\ninhibitive timidities, \u201cdissolutive\u201d phenomena of various sorts, as Myers\ncalls them, enter into it for a large part. But in it many of the\nperformances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study of\nconversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how\nstriking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life.\n\nLet me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its\n_farther_ side, the \u201cmore\u201d with which in religious experience we feel\nourselves connected is on its _hither_ side the subconscious continuation\nof our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact\nas our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with \u201cscience\u201d which the\nordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian\u2019s contention\nthat the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it\nis one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to\ntake on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external\ncontrol. In the religious life the control is felt as \u201chigher\u201d; but since\non our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden\nmind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is\na sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true.\n\nThis doorway into the subject seems to me the best one for a science of\nreligions, for it mediates between a number of different points of view.\nYet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves as soon as\nwe step through it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness\ncarries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over\u2010beliefs\nbegin: here mysticism and the conversion\u2010rapture and Vedantism and\ntranscendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations(354) and\ntell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always\none with God and identical with the soul of the world.(355) Here the\nprophets of all the different religions come with their visions, voices,\nraptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenticate his own\npeculiar faith.\n\nThose of us who are not personally favored with such specific revelations\nmust stand outside of them altogether and, for the present at least,\ndecide that, since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines,\nthey neutralize one another and leave no fixed result. If we follow any\none of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and embrace monistic\npantheism on non\u2010mystical grounds, we do so in the exercise of our\nindividual freedom, and build out our religion in the way most congruous\nwith our personal susceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities\nintellectual ones play a decisive part. Although the religious question is\nprimarily a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union\nwhich opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiritual excitement in which\nthe gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in an individual\nuntil certain particular intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say,\ncome home to him, are touched.(356) These ideas will thus be essential to\nthat individual\u2019s religion;\u2014which is as much as to say that over\u2010beliefs\nin various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should\ntreat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not\nintolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting\nand valuable things about a man are usually his over\u2010beliefs.\n\nDisregarding the over\u2010beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common\nand generic, we have in _the fact that the conscious person is continuous\nwith a wider self through which saving experiences come_,(357) a positive\ncontent of religious experience which, it seems to me, _is literally and\nobjectively true as far as it goes_. If I now proceed to state my own\nhypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality,\nI shall be offering my own over\u2010belief\u2014though I know it will appear a\nsorry under\u2010belief to some of you\u2014for which I can only bespeak the same\nindulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours.\n\n                  \u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\u2010\n\nThe further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether\nother dimension of existence from the sensible and merely \u201cunderstandable\u201d\nworld. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever\nyou choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and\nmost of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way\nfor which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more\nintimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we\nbelong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the\nunseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in\nthis world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite\npersonality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way\nof conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.(358)\nBut that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a\nreality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling\nthe unseen or mystical world unreal.\n\nGod is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the\nsupreme reality, so I will call this higher part of the universe by the\nname of God.(359) We and God have business with each other; and in opening\nourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe,\nat those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn\ngenuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us\nfulfills or evades God\u2019s demands. As far as this goes I probably have you\nwith me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call the\ninstinctive belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects.\n\nThe real effects in question, so far as I have as yet admitted them, are\nexerted on the personal centres of energy of the various subjects, but the\nspontaneous faith of most of the subjects is that they embrace a wider\nsphere than this. Most religious men believe (or \u201cknow,\u201d if they be\nmystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of beings\nto whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is a\nsense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are _all_ saved, in spite\nof the gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God\u2019s\nexistence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently\npreserved. This world may indeed, as science assures us, some day burn up\nor freeze; but if it is part of his order, the old ideals are sure to be\nbrought elsewhere to fruition, so that where God is, tragedy is only\nprovisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the\nabsolutely final things. Only when this farther step of faith concerning\nGod is taken, and remote objective consequences are predicted, does\nreligion, as it seems to me, get wholly free from the first immediate\nsubjective experience, and bring a _real hypothesis_ into play. A good\nhypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the\nphenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not\nprolific enough. God, meaning only what enters into the religious man\u2019s\nexperience of union, falls short of being an hypothesis of this more\nuseful order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to\njustify the subject\u2019s absolute confidence and peace.\n\nThat the God with whom, starting from the hither side of our own extra\u2010\nmarginal self, we come at its remoter margin into commerce should be the\nabsolute world\u2010ruler, is of course a very considerable over\u2010belief. Over\u2010\nbelief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one\u2019s religion.\nMost of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the\nphilosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to\nsay that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere\nillumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like\nlove, which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that, as we have\nseen abundantly. But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new\n_facts_ as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the\nmaterialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have,\nover and above the altered expression, _a natural constitution_ different\nat some point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be\nsuch that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must\nbe required.\n\nThis thoroughly \u201cpragmatic\u201d view of religion has usually been taken as a\nmatter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles\ninto the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave.\nIt is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding\nany concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling\nit the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it\nstands.\n\nI believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It\ngives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must\nclaim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more\ncharacteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of\nenergy in the faith\u2010state and the prayer\u2010state, I know not. But the over\u2010\nbelief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist.\nThe whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our\npresent consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that\nexist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a\nmeaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences\nand those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at\ncertain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my\npoor measure to this over\u2010belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and\ntrue. I _can_, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist\u2019s\nattitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of\nscientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear\nthat inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the\nword \u201cbosh!\u201d Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name,\nand the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively,\ninvincibly urges me beyond the narrow \u201cscientific\u201d bounds. Assuredly, the\nreal world is of a different temperament,\u2014more intricately built than\nphysical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both\nhold me to the over\u2010belief which I express. Who knows whether the\nfaithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over\u2010beliefs may\nnot actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own\ngreater tasks?\n\n\n\n\n\nPOSTSCRIPT.\n\n\nIn writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much at simplification\nthat I fear that my general philosophic position received so scant a\nstatement as hardly to be intelligible to some of my readers. I therefore\nadd this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy but\nlittle the defect. In a later work I may be enabled to state my position\nmore amply and consequently more clearly.\n\nOriginality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the\nattitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature\nlong ago, and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a\nfamiliar head. If one should make a division of all thinkers into\nnaturalists and supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to go, along\nwith most philosophers, into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a\ncrasser and a more refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined\ndivision that most philosophers at the present day belong. If not regular\ntranscendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough\nto bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of\nphenomenal events. Refined supernaturalism is universalistic\nsupernaturalism; for the \u201ccrasser\u201d variety \u201cpiecemeal\u201d supernaturalism\nwould perhaps be the better name. It went with that older theology which\nto\u2010day is supposed to reign only among uneducated people, or to be found\namong the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant is thought to\nhave displaced. It admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no\nintellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together\nby interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that\ncausally determine the real world\u2019s details. In this the refined\nsupernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence.\nFor them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never\nbursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world,\nfor them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is\na point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different \u201c\u2010ology,\u201d\nand inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which\nexistential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of\nexperience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of\nnature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in\nresponse to prayer, are bound to think it must.\n\nNotwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or\nscholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the\nIdeal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here\nbelow, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the\npiecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it\nseems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physical\nscience at their face\u2010value, and leaves the laws of life just as\nnaturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are\nbad. It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments\nwhich may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the\nexistence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of\ntaking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to\nevaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to\nbelieve that principles can exist which make no difference in facts.(360)\nBut all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the question\nof God\u2019s existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars\nwhich that existence may be expected to entail. That no concrete\nparticular of experience should alter its complexion in consequence of a\nGod being there seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the\nthesis to which (implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to\ncling. It is only with experience _en bloc_, it says, that the Absolute\nmaintains relations. It condescends to no transactions of detail.\n\nI am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order\nthe better to describe my general point of view; but as I apprehend the\nBuddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that. All\nsupernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law;\nbut for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally so far as\nit remains unweakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics, the word\n\u201cjudgment\u201d here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic\nappreciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it\ncarries, on the contrary, _execution_ with it, is _in __ rebus_ as well as\n_post rem_, and operates \u201ccausally\u201d as partial factor in the total fact.\nThe universe becomes a gnosticism(361) pure and simple on any other terms.\nBut this view that judgment and execution go together is that of the\ncrasser supernaturalist way of thinking, so the present volume must on the\nwhole be classed with the other expressions of that creed.\n\nI state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought in\nacademic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his\nback against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and\nlocked. In spite of its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual\ntastes, I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism\nand a complete discussion of all its metaphysical bearings will show it to\nbe the hypothesis by which the largest number of legitimate requirements\nare met. That of course would be a program for other books than this; what\nI now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic reader the place where\nI belong.\n\nIf asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God\u2019s\nexistence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no\nhypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of \u201cprayerful communion,\u201d\nespecially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region\ntake part in it, immediately suggests. The appearance is that in this\nphenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in\nanother sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our\ncentre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable\nin other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our\nevery\u2010day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are\nintermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness\nof the \u201csubliminal\u201d door, we have the elements of a theory to which the\nphenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the\nimportance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so\nnaturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it would seem as\nthough transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects\nwithin the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs.\n\nThe difference in natural \u201cfact\u201d which most of us would assign as the\nfirst difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I\nimagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the great\nmajority of our own race _means_ immortality, and nothing else. God is the\nproducer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written\ndown as an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing in my\nlectures about immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a\nsecondary point. If our ideals are only cared for in \u201ceternity,\u201d I do not\nsee why we might not be willing to resign their care to other hands than\nours. Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves,\nand in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them\nnoble, I know not how to decide. It seems to me that it is eminently a\ncase for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove\n\u201cspirit\u2010return,\u201d though I have the highest respect for the patient labors\nof Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their\nfavorable conclusions. I consequently leave the matter open, with this\nbrief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why\nimmortality got no mention in the body of this book.\n\nThe ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the \u201cGod\u201d of\nordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with\ncertain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on\nphilosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of\ncourse to be \u201cone and only\u201d and to be \u201cinfinite\u201d; and the notion of many\nfinite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider,\nand still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual\nclearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have\nstudied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist\nbelief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can\nexperience union with _something_ larger than ourselves and in that union\nfind our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and\nmysticism with its monoideistic bent, both \u201cpass to the limit\u201d and\nidentify the something with a unique God who is the all\u2010inclusive soul of\nthe world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the\nexample which they set.\n\nMeanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me\nsufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion\ncontinuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him\nand to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be\nboth other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do,\nif only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be\ninfinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a\nlarger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but\nthe mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a\ncollection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no\nabsolute unity realized in it at all.(362) Thus would a sort of polytheism\nreturn upon us\u2014a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my\nonly aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience\nclearly within its proper bounds. [Compare p. 132 above.]\n\nUpholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by\nthe way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so\nstill to\u2010day) that unless there be one all\u2010inclusive God, our guarantee of\nsecurity is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only,\n_all_ is saved. If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some\nportion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our\nreligious consolation would thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what\nwas said on pages 131\u2010133, about the possibility of there being portions\nof the universe that may irretrievably be lost. Common sense is less\nsweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be,\nand can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly\nlost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the\nworld conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part.\nPartial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when\ntaken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details.\nSome men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved\nremnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that\ntheir cause will prevail\u2014all of us are willing, whenever our activity\u2010\nexcitement rises sufficiently high. I think, in fact, that a final\nphilosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis\nmore seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it. For\npractical life at any rate, the _chance_ of salvation is enough. No fact\nin human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a\nchance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney\nsays, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of\nwhich the keynote is hope.(363) But all these statements are\nunsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to\nreturn to the same questions in another book.\n\n\n\n\n\nINDEX.\n\n\nAbsolute, oneness with the, 419.\n\nAbstractness of religious objects, 53.\n\nACHILLES, 86.\n\nACKERMANN, MADAME, 63.\n\nAdaptation to environment, of things, 438;\n  of saints, 374\u2010377.\n\n\u00c6sthetic elements in religions, 460.\n\nAlacoque, 310, 344, 413.\n\nAlcohol, 387.\n\nAL\u2010GHAZZALI, 402.\n\nALI, 341.\n\nALLEINE, 228.\n\nALLINE, 159, 217.\n\nAlternations of personality, 193.\n\nALVAREZ DE PAZ, 116.\n\nAMIEL, 394.\n\nAn\u00e6sthesia, 288.\n\nAn\u00e6sthetic revelation, 387\u2010393.\n\nANGELUS SILESIUS, 417.\n\nAnger, 181, 264.\n\n\u201cAnhedonia,\u201d 145.\n\nAristocratic type, 371.\n\nARISTOTLE, 495.\n\nArs, le Cur\u00e9 d\u2019, 302.\n\nAsceticism, 273, 296\u2010310, 360\u2010365.\n\nAseity, God\u2019s, 439, 445.\n\nAtman, 400.\n\nAttributes of God, 440;\n  their \u00e6sthetic use, 458.\n\nAUGUSTINE, SAINT, 171, 361, 496.\n\nAURELIUS, see MARCUS.\n\nAutomatic writing, 62, 478.\n\nAutomatisms, 234, 250, 478\u2010483.\n\nBALDWIN, 347, 503.\n\nBASHKIRTSEFF, 83.\n\nBEECHER, 256.\n\nBEHMEN, see BOEHME.\n\nBelief, due to non\u2010rationalistic impulses, 73.\n\nBESANT, MRS., 23, 168.\n\nBhagavad\u2010Gita, 361.\n\nBLAVATSKY, MADAM, 421.\n\nBLOOD, 389.\n\nBLUMHARDT, 113.\n\nBOEHME, 410, 417, 418.\n\nBOOTH, 203.\n\nBOUGAUD, 344.\n\nBOURGET, 263.\n\nBOURIGNON, 321.\n\nBOWNE, 502.\n\nBRAINERD, 212, 253.\n\nBRAY, 249, 256, 290.\n\nBROOKS, 512.\n\nBROWNELL, 515.\n\nBUCKE, 398.\n\nBuddhism, 31, 34, 522.\n\nBuddhist mysticism, 401.\n\nBULLEN, 287.\n\nBUNYAN, 157, 160.\n\nBUTTERWORTH, 411.\n\nCAIRD, EDWARD, 106.\n\nCAIRD, J., on feeling in religion, 434;\n  on absolute self, 450;\n  he does not prove, but reaffirms, religion\u2019s dicta, 453.\n\nCALL, 289.\n\nCARLYLE, 41, 300.\n\nCARPENTER, 319.\n\nCatharine, Saint, of Genoa, 289.\n\nCatholicism and Protestantism compared, 114, 227, 336, 461.\n\nCausality of God, 517, 522.\n\nCause, 502.\n\nCENNICK, 301.\n\nCentres of personal energy, 196, 267, 523.\n\nCerebration, unconscious, 207.\n\nChance, 526.\n\nCHANNING, 300, 488.\n\nCHAPMAN, 324.\n\nCharacter, cause of its alterations, 193;\n  scheme of its differences of type, 197, 214.\n\nCauses of its diversity, 261;\n  balance of, 340.\n\nCharity, 274, 278, 310, 355.\n\nChastity, 310.\n\nChiefs of tribes, 371.\n\nChristian Science, 106.\n\nChrist\u2019s atonement, 129, 245.\n\nChurches, 335, 460.\n\nCLARK, 389.\n\nCLISSOLD, 481.\n\nCOE, 240.\n\nConduct, perfect, 355.\n\nConfession, 462.\n\nConsciousness, fields of, 231;\n  subliminal, 233.\n\nConsistency, 296.\n\nConversion, to avarice, 178.\n\nConversion, Fletcher\u2019s, 181;\n  Tolstoy\u2019s, 184;\n  Bunyan\u2019s, 186;\n  in general, Lectures IX and X, passim;\n  Bradley\u2019s, 189;\n  compared with natural moral growth, 199;\n  Hadley\u2019s, 201;\n  two types of, 205 ff.;\n  Brainerd\u2019s, 212;\n  Alline\u2019s, 217;\n  Oxford graduate\u2019s, 221;\n  Ratisbonne\u2019s, 223;\n  instantaneous, 227;\n  is it a natural phenomenon? 230;\n  subliminal action involved, in sudden cases, 236, 240;\n  fruits of, 237;\n  its momentousness, 239;\n  may be supernatural, 242;\n  its concomitants:\n    sense of higher control, 244,\n    happiness, 248,\n    automatisms, 250,\n    luminous phenomena, 251;\n  its degree of permanence, 256.\n\nCosmic consciousness, 398.\n\nCounter\u2010conversion, 176.\n\nCourage, 265, 287.\n\nCrankiness, see Psychopathy.\n\nCRICHTON\u2010BROWNE, 384, 386.\n\nCriminal character, 263.\n\nCriteria of value of spiritual affections, 18.\n\nCRUMP, 239.\n\nCure of bad habits, 270.\n\nDAUDET, 167.\n\nDeath, 139, 364.\n\nDERHAM, 493.\n\nDesign, argument from, 438, 492 ff.\n\nDevoutness, 340.\n\nDIONYSIUS AREOPAGITICUS, 416.\n\nDisease, 99, 113.\n\nDisorder in contents of world, 438.\n\nDivided Self, Lecture VIII, passim;\n  Cases of:\n    Saint Augustine, 172,\n    H. Alline, 173.\n\nDivine, the, 31.\n\nDog, 281.\n\nDogmatism, 326, 333.\n\nDOWIE, 113.\n\nDRESSER, H. W., 96, 99, 289, 516.\n\nDrink, 268.\n\nDrummer, 476.\n\nDRUMMOND, 262.\n\nDrunkenness, 387, 403, 488.\n\n\u201cDryness,\u201d 204.\n\nDUMAS, 279.\n\nDyes, on clothing, 294.\n\nEarnestness, 264.\n\nEcclesiastical spirit, the, 335, 338.\n\nECKHART, 417.\n\nEDDY, 106.\n\nEDWARDS, JONATHAN, 20, 114, 200, 229, 238, 239, 248, 330.\n\nEDWARDS, MRS. J., 276, 280.\n\nEffects of religious states, 21.\n\nEffeminacy, 365.\n\nEgo of Apperception, 449.\n\nELLIS, HAVELOCK, 418.\n\nELWOOD, 292.\n\nEMERSON, 32, 56, 167, 205, 239, 330.\n\nEmotion, as alterer of life\u2019s value, 150;\n  of the character, 195, 261 ff., 279.\n\nEmpirical method, 18, 327 ff., 443.\n\nEnemies, love your, 278, 283.\n\nEnergy, personal, 196;\n  mystical states increase it, 414.\n\nEnvironment, 356, 374.\n\nEpictetus, 474.\n\nEpicureans, 143.\n\nEquanimity, 284.\n\nEther, mystical effects of, 392.\n\nEvil, ignored by healthy\u2010mindedness, 88, 106, 131;\n  due to _things_ or to the _Self_, 134;\n  its reality, 163.\n\nEvolutionist optimism, 91.\n\nExcesses of piety, 340.\n\nExcitement, its effects, 195, 266, 279, 325.\n\nExperience, religious, the essence of, 508.\n\nExtravagances of piety, 339, 486.\n\nExtreme cases, why we take them, 486.\n\nFailure, 139.\n\nFaith, 246, 506.\n\nFaith\u2010state, 505.\n\nFanaticism, 338 ff.\n\nFear, 98, 159, 161, 263, 275.\n\nFeeling deeper than intellect in religion, 431.\n\nFIELDING, 436.\n\nFINNEY, 207, 215.\n\nFLETCHER, 98, 181.\n\nFLOURNOY, 67, 514.\n\nFlower, 476.\n\nFOSTER, 178, 383.\n\nFOX, GEORGE, 7, 291, 335, 411.\n\nFRANCIS, SAINT, D\u2019ASSISI, 319.\n\nFRANCIS, SAINT, DE SALES, 11.\n\nFRASER, 454.\n\nFruits, of conversion, 237;\n  of religion, 327;\n  of Saintliness, 357.\n\nFULLER, 41.\n\nGAMOND, 288.\n\nGARDINER, 269.\n\nGenius and insanity, 16.\n\nGeniuses, see Religious leaders.\n\nGentleman, character of the, 317, 371.\n\nGERTRUDE, SAINT, 345.\n\n\u201cGifts,\u201d 151.\n\nGlory of God, 342.\n\nGOD, 31;\n  sense of his presence, 66\u201072, 272, 275 ff.;\n  historic changes in idea of him, 74, 328 ff., 493;\n  mind\u2010curer\u2019s idea of him, 101;\n  his honor, 342;\n  described by negatives, 417;\n  his attributes, scholastic proof of, 439;\n  the metaphysical ones are for us meaningless, 445;\n  the moral ones are ill\u2010deduced, 447;\n  he is not a mere inference, 502;\n  is _used_, not known, 506;\n  his existence must make a difference among phenomena, 517, 522;\n  his relation to the subconscious region, 242, 515;\n  his tasks, 519;\n  may be finite and plural, 525.\n\nGODDARD, 96.\n\nGOERRES, 407.\n\nGOETHE, 137.\n\nGOUGH, 203.\n\nGOURDON, 171.\n\n\u201cGrace,\u201d the operation of, 226;\n  the state of, 260.\n\nGRATRY, 146, 476, 506.\n\nGreeks, their pessimism, 86, 142.\n\nGuidance, 472.\n\nGURNEY, 527.\n\nGUYON, 276, 286.\n\nHADLEY, 201, 268.\n\nHALE, 82.\n\nHAMON, 367.\n\nHappiness, 47\u201049, 79, 248, 279.\n\nHARNACK, 100.\n\nHealthy\u2010mindedness, Lectures IV and V, passim;\n  its philosophy of evil, 131;\n  compared with morbid\u2010mindedness, 162, 488.\n\nHeart, softening of, 267.\n\nHEGEL, 389, 449, 454.\n\nHELMONT, VAN, 497.\n\nHeroism, 364, 488, note.\n\nHeterogeneous personality, 169, 193.\n\nHigher criticism, 4.\n\nHILTY, 79, 275, 472.\n\nHODGSON, R., 524.\n\nHOMER, 86.\n\nHUGO, 171.\n\nHypocrisy, 338.\n\nHypothesis, what make a useful one, 517.\n\nHYSLOP, 524.\n\nIGNATIUS LOYOLA, 313, 406, 410.\n\nIllness, 113.\n\n\u201cImitation of Christ,\u201d the, 44.\n\nImmortality, 524.\n\nImpulses, 261.\n\nIndividuality, 501.\n\nInhibitions, 261 ff.\n\nInsane melancholy and religion, 144.\n\nInsanity and genius, 16;\n  and happiness, 279.\n\nInstitutional religion, 335.\n\nIntellect a secondary force in religion, 431, 514.\n\nIntellectual weakness of some saints, 370.\n\nIntolerance, 342.\n\nIrascibility, 264.\n\nJESUS, HARNACK on, 100.\n\nJOB, 76, 448.\n\nJOHN, SAINT, OF THE CROSS, 304, 407, 413.\n\nJOHNSTON, 258.\n\nJONQUIL, 476.\n\nJORDAN, 347.\n\nJOUFFROY, 176, 198.\n\nJudgments, existential and spiritual, 4.\n\nKANT, 54, 448.\n\nKarma, 522.\n\nKELLNER, 401.\n\nKindliness, see Charity.\n\nKINGSLEY, 385.\n\nLAGNEAU, 285.\n\nLeaders, see Religious leaders.\n\nLeaders, of tribes, 371.\n\nLEJEUNE, 113, 312.\n\nLESSING, 318.\n\nLEUBA, 201, 203, 220, 246, 506.\n\nLife, its significance, 151.\n\nLife, the subconscious, 207, 209.\n\nLOCKER\u2010LAMPSON, 39.\n\nLogic, Hegelian, 449.\n\nLouis, Saint, of Gonzaga, 350.\n\nLove, see Charity.\n\nLove, cases of falling out of, 179.\n\nLove of God, 276.\n\nLove your enemies, 278, 283.\n\nLOWELL, 65.\n\nLoyalty, to God, 342.\n\nLUTFULLAH, 164.\n\nLUTHER, 128, 137, 244, 330, 348, 382.\n\nLutheran self\u2010despair, 108, 211.\n\nLuxury, 365.\n\nLYCAON, 86.\n\nLyre, 267.\n\nMahomet, 171.\n  See MOHAMMED.\n\nMARCUS AURELIUS, 42, 44, 474.\n\nMARGARET MARY, see ALACOQUE.\n\nMargin of consciousness, 232.\n\nMARSHALL, 503.\n\nMARTINEAU, 475.\n\nMATHER, 303.\n\nMAUDSLEY, 19.\n\nMeaning of life, 151.\n\nMedical criticism of religion, 413.\n\nMedical materialism, 10 ff.\n\nMelancholy, 145, 279;\n  Lectures V and VI, passim;\n  cases of, 148, 149, 157, 159, 198.\n\nMelting moods, 267.\n\nMethod of judging value of religion, 18, 327.\n\nMethodism, 227, 237.\n\nMEYSENBUG, 395.\n\nMilitarism, 365\u2010367.\n\nMilitary type of character, 371.\n\nMILL, 204.\n\nMind\u2010cure, its sources and history, 94\u201097;\n  its opinion of fear, 98;\n  cases of, 102\u2010105, 120, 123;\n  its message, 108;\n  its methods, 112\u2010123;\n  it uses verification, 120\u2010124;\n  its philosophy of evil, 131.\n\nMiraculous character of conversion, 227.\n\nMOHAMMED, 341, 481.\n\nMOLINOS, 130.\n\nMOLTKE, VON, 264, 367.\n\nMonasteries, 296.\n\nMonism, 416.\n\nMorbidness compared with healthy\u2010mindedness, 488.\n  See, also, Melancholy.\n\nMormon revelations, 482.\n\nMortification, see Asceticism.\n\nMUIR, 482.\n\nMULFORD, 497.\n\nM\u00dcLLER, 468.\n\nMURISIER, 349.\n\nMYERS, 233, 234, 466, 511, 524.\n\nMystic states, their effects, 21, 414.\n\nMystical experiences, 66.\n\nMysticism, Lectures XVI and XVII, passim;\n  its marks, 380;\n  its theoretic results, 416, 422, 428;\n  it cannot warrant truth, 422;\n  its results, 425;\n  its relation to the sense of union, 509.\n\nMystical region of experience, 515.\n\nNatural theology, 492.\n\nNaturalism, 141, 167.\n\nNature, scientific view of, 491.\n\nNegative accounts of deity, 417.\n\nNELSON, 208, 423.\n\nNETTLETON, 215.\n\nNEWMAN, F. W., 80.\n\nNEWMAN, J. H., on dogmatic theology, 434, 442;\n  his type of imagination, 459.\n\nNIETZSCHE, 371, 372.\n\nNitrous oxide, its mystical effects, 387.\n\nNo\u2010function, 261\u2010263, 299, 387, 416.\n\nNon\u2010resistance, 281, 358, 376.\n\nObedience, 310.\n\nOBERMANN, 476.\n\nO\u2019CONNELL, 257.\n\nOmit, 296.\n\n\u201cOnce\u2010born\u201d type, 80, 166, 363, 488.\n\nOneness with God, see Union.\n\nOptimism, systematic, 88;\n  and evolutionism, 91;\n  it may be shallow, 364.\n\nOrderliness of world, 438.\n\nOrganism determines all mental states whatsoever, 14.\n\nOrigin of mental states no criterion of their value, 14 ff.\n\nOrison, 406.\n\nOver\u2010beliefs, 513;\n  the author\u2019s, 515.\n\nOver\u2010soul, 516.\n\nOxford, graduate of, 220, 268.\n\nPagan feeling, 86.\n\nPantheism, 131, 416.\n\nPARKER, 83.\n\nPASCAL, 286.\n\nPATON, 359.\n\nPAUL, SAINT, 171, 357.\n\nPEEK, 253.\n\nPEIRCE, 444.\n\nPenny, 323.\n\nPERREYVE, 505.\n\nPersecutions, 338, 342.\n\nPersonality, explained away by science, 119, 491;\n  heterogeneous, 169;\n  alterations of, 193, 210 ff.;\n  is reality, 499. See Character.\n\nPETER, SAINT, OF ALCANTARA, 360.\n\nPHILO, 481.\n\nPhilosophy, Lecture XVIII, passim;\n  must coerce assent, 433;\n  scholastic, 439;\n  idealistic, 448;\n  unable to give a theoretic warrant to faith, 455;\n  its true office in religion, 455.\n\nPhotisms, 251.\n\nPiety, 339 ff.\n\nPluralism, 131.\n\nPolytheism, 131, 526.\n\nPoverty, 315, 367.\n\n\u201cPragmatism,\u201d 444, 519, 522\u2010524.\n\nPrayer, 463;\n  its definition, 464;\n  its essence, 465;\n  petitional, 467;\n  its effects, 474\u2010477, 523.\n\n\u201cPresence,\u201d sense of, 58\u201063.\n\nPresence of God, 66\u201072, 272, 275 ff., 396, 418.\n\nPresence of God, the practice of, 116.\n\nPrimitive human thought, 495.\n\nPRINGLE\u2010PATTISON, 454.\n\nProphets, the Hebrew, 479.\n\nProtestant theology, 244.\n\nProtestantism and Catholicism, 114, 227, 330, 461.\n\nProvidential leading, 472.\n\nPsychopathy and religion, 22 ff.\n\nPUFFER, 394.\n\nPurity, 274, 290, 348.\n\nQuakers, 7, 291.\n\nRAMAKRISHNA, 361, 365.\n\nRationalism, 73, 74;\n  its authority overthrown by mysticism, 428.\n\nRATISBONNE, 223, 257.\n\nReality of unseen objects, Lecture III, passim.\n\nR\u00c9C\u00c9JAC, 407, 509.\n\n\u201cRecollection,\u201d 116, 289.\n\nRedemption, 157.\n\nReformation of character, 320.\n\nRegeneration, see Conversion;\n  by relaxation, 111.\n\nREID, 446.\n\nRelaxation, salvation by, 110.\n  See Surrender.\n\nReligion, to be tested by fruits, not by origin, 10 ff., 331;\n  its definition, 26, 31;\n  is solemn, 37;\n  compared with Stoicism, 41;\n  its unique function, 51;\n  abstractness of its objects, 54;\n  differs according to temperament, 75, 135, 333,\n    and ought to differ, 487;\n  considered to be a \u201csurvival,\u201d 118, 490, 498;\n  its relations to melancholy, 145;\n  worldly passions may combine with it, 337;\n  its essential characters, 369, 485;\n  its relation to prayer, 463\u2010466;\n  asserts a fact, not a theory, 489;\n  its truth, 377;\n  more than science, it holds by concrete reality, 500;\n  attempts to evaporate it into philosophy, 502;\n  it is concerned with personal destinies, 491, 503;\n    with feeling and conduct, 504;\n  is a sthenic affection, 505;\n  is for life, not for knowledge, 506;\n  its essential contents, 508;\n  it postulates issues of fact, 518.\n\nReligious emotion, 279.\n\nReligious leaders, often nervously unstable, 6 ff., 30;\n  their loneliness, 335.\n\n\u201cReligious sentiment,\u201d 27.\n\nRENAN, 37.\n\nRenunciations, 349.\n\nRepentance, 127.\n\nResignation, 286.\n\nRevelation, the an\u00e6sthetic, 387\u2010393.\n\nRevelations, see Automatisms.\n\nRevelations, in Mormon Church, 482.\n\nRevivalism, 228.\n\nRIBET, 407.\n\nRIBOT, 145, 502.\n\nRODRIGUEZ, 313, 314, 317.\n\nROYCE, 454.\n\nRUTHERFORD, MARK, 76.\n\nSABATIER, A., 464.\n\nSacrifice, 303, 462.\n\nSAINT\u2010PIERRE, 83.\n\nSAINTE\u2010BEUVE, 260, 315.\n\nSaintliness, Sainte\u2010Beuve on, 260;\n  its characteristics, 272, 370;\n  criticism of, 326 ff.\n\nSaintly conduct, 356\u2010377.\n\nSaints, dislike of natural man for, 371.\n\nSalvation, 526.\n\nSANDAYS, 480.\n\nSATAN, in picture, 50.\n\nSCHEFFLER, 417.\n\nScholastic arguments for God, 437.\n\nScience, ignores personality and teleology, 491;\n  her \u201cfacts,\u201d 500, 501.\n\n\u201cScience of Religions,\u201d 433, 455, 456, 488\u2010490.\n\nScientific conceptions, their late adoption, 496.\n\nSecond\u2010birth, 157, 165, 166.\n\nSEELEY, 77.\n\nSelf of the world, 449.\n\nSelf\u2010despair, 110, 129, 208.\n\nSelf\u2010surrender, 110, 208.\n\nS\u00c9NANCOUR, 476.\n\nSETH, 454.\n\nSexual temptation, 269.\n\nSexuality as cause of religion, 10, 11.\n\n\u201cShrew,\u201d 347.\n\nSickness, 113.\n\nSick souls, Lectures V and VI, passim.\n\nSIGHELE, 263.\n\nSin, 209.\n\nSinners, Christ died for, 129.\n\nSkepticism, 332 ff.\n\nSKOBELEFF, 265.\n\nSMITH, JOSEPH, 482.\n\nSoftening of the heart, 267.\n\nSolemnity, 37, 48.\n\nSoul, 195.\n\nSoul, strength of, 273.\n\nSPENCER, 355, 374.\n\nSPINOZA, 9, 127.\n\nSpiritism, 514.\n\nSpirit\u2010return, 524.\n\nSpiritual judgments, 4.\n\nSpiritual states, tests of their value, 18.\n\nSTARBUCK, 198, 199, 204, 206, 208\u2010210, 249, 253, 258, 268, 276, 323, 353,\n            394.\n\nSTEVENSON, 138, 296.\n\nStoicism, 42\u201045, 143.\n\nStrange appearance of world, 151.\n\nStrength of soul, 273.\n\nSubconscious action in conversion, 236, 242.\n\nSubconscious life, 115, 207, 209, 233, 236, 270, 483.\n\nSubconscious Self, as intermediary between the Self and God, 511.\n\nSubliminal, see Subconscious.\n\nSufis, 402, 420.\n\nSuggestion, 112, 234.\n\nSuicide, 147.\n\nSupernaturalism its two kinds, 520;\n  criticism of universalistic, 521.\n\nSupernatural world, 518.\n\nSurrender, salvation by, 110, 208, 211.\n\nSurvival\u2010theory of religion, 490, 498, 500.\n\nSUSO, 306, 349.\n\nSWINBURNE, 421.\n\nSYMONDS, 385, 390.\n\nSympathetic magic, 496.\n\nSympathy, see Charity.\n\nSystems, philosophic, 433.\n\nTaine, 9.\n\nTAYLOR, 246.\n\nTenderness, see Charity.\n\nTENNYSON, 383, 384.\n\nTERESA, SAINT, 20, 346, 360, 408, 411, 412, 414.\n\nTheologia Germanica, 43.\n\nTheologians, systematic, 446.\n\n\u201cTheopathy,\u201d 343.\n\nTHOREAU, 275.\n\nThreshold, 135.\n\nTiger, 164, 262.\n\nTobacco, 270, 290.\n\nTOLSTOY, 149, 178, 184.\n\nTOWIANSKI, 281.\n\nTragedy of life, 363.\n\nTranquillity, 285.\n\nTranscendentalism criticised, 522.\n\nTranscendentalists, 516.\n\nTREVOR, 396.\n\nTRINE, 101, 394.\n\nTruth of religion, how to be tested, 377;\n  what it is, 509;\n  mystical perception of, 380, 410.\n\n\u201cTwice\u2010born,\u201d type, 166, 363, 488.\n\nTYNDALL, 299.\n\n\u201cUnconscious cerebration,\u201d 207.\n\nUnification of Self, 183, 349.\n\n\u201cUNION MORALE,\u201d 272.\n\nUnion with God, 408, 418, 425, 451, 509 ff.\n  See lectures on Conversion, passim.\n\nUnity of universe, 131.\n\nUnreality, sense of, 63.\n\nUnseen realities, Lecture III, passim.\n\nUpanishads, 419.\n\nUPHAM, 289.\n\nUtopias, 360.\n\nVACHEROT, 502.\n\nValue of spiritual affections, how tested, 18.\n\nVAMB\u00c9RY, 341.\n\nVedantism, 400, 419, 513, 522.\n\nVeracity, 7, 291 ff.\n\nVIVEKANANDA, 513.\n\nVOLTAIRE, 38.\n\nVOYSEY, 275.\n\nWar, 365\u2010367.\n\nWealth\u2010worship, 365.\n\nWEAVER, 281.\n\nWESLEY, 227.\n\nWesleyan self\u2010despair, 108, 211.\n\nWHITEFIELD, 318.\n\nWHITMAN, 84, 395, 396, 506.\n\nWOLFF, 492, 493.\n\nWOOD, HENRY, 96, 99, 117.\n\nWorld, soul of the, 449.\n\nWorry, 98, 181.\n\nYes\u2010function, 261\u2010263, 299, 387.\n\nYoga, 400.\n\nYOUNG, 256.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFOOTNOTES\n\n\n    1 As with many ideas that float in the air of one\u2019s time, this notion\n      shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only\n      partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are\n      less instructive than this re\u2010interpretation of religion as\n      perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often\n      employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation may be\n      best understood by remembering that its _fons et origo_ was Luther\u2019s\n      wish to marry a nun:\u2014the effects are infinitely wider than the\n      alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true\n      that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are\n      undisguisedly amatory\u2014e.g., sex\u2010deities and obscene rites in\n      polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few\n      Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an\n      aberration of the digestive function, and prove one\u2019s point by the\n      worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some\n      other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself\n      in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism\n      gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to\n      expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as\n      common in religious literature as is language drawn from the sexual\n      life. We \u201chunger and thirst\u201d after righteousness; we \u201cfind the Lord\n      a sweet savor;\u201d we \u201ctaste and see that he is good.\u201d \u201cSpiritual milk\n      for American babes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments,\u201d is a\n      sub\u2010title of the once famous New England Primer, and Christian\n      devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from\n      the point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe.\n\n      Saint Fran\u00e7ois de Sales, for instance, thus describes the \u201corison of\n      quietude\u201d: \u201cIn this state the soul is like a little child still at\n      the breast, whose mother, to caress him whilst he is still in her\n      arms, makes her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving\n      his lips. So it is here.... Our Lord desires that our will should be\n      satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majesty pours into our\n      mouth, and that we should relish the sweetness without even knowing\n      that it cometh from the Lord.\u201d And again: \u201cConsider the little\n      infants, united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothers,\n      you will see that from time to time they press themselves closer by\n      little starts to which the pleasure of sucking prompts them. Even\n      so, during its orison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makes\n      attempts at closer union by movements during which it presses closer\n      upon the divine sweetness.\u201d Chemin de la Perfection, ch. xxxi.;\n      Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i.\n\n      In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion\n      of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of\n      respiratory oppression: \u201cHide not thine ear at my breathing; my\n      groaning is not hid from thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth\n      me; my bones are hot with my roaring all the night long; as the hart\n      panteth after the water\u2010brooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my\n      God.\u201d _God\u2019s Breath in Man_ is the title of the chief work of our\n      best known American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris); and in certain non\u2010\n      Christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline\n      consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration.\n\n      These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in\n      favor of the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will\n      then say that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere. The\n      two main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion,\n      they will say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and\n      therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which\n      the retort again is easy. Even were the asserted synchrony\n      unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not only the\n      sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during\n      adolescence. One might then as well set up the thesis that the\n      interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and\n      sociology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that\n      in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual\n      instinct:\u2014but that would be too absurd. Moreover, if the argument\n      from synchrony is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that\n      the religious age _par excellence_ would seem to be old age, when\n      the uproar of the sexual life is past?\n\n      The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end\n      look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The\n      moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the\n      main from the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about\n      the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and\n      acts impelled to. Any _general_ assimilation is simply impossible:\n      what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast. If now\n      the defenders of the sex\u2010theory say that this makes no difference to\n      their thesis; that without the chemical contributions which the sex\u2010\n      organs make to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to\n      carry on religious activities, this final proposition may be true or\n      not true; but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive: we\n      can deduce no consequences from it which help us to interpret\n      religion\u2019s meaning or value. In this sense the religious life\n      depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys\n      as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its point\n      in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the dependence,\n      _somehow_, of the mind upon the body.\n\n    2 For a first\u2010rate example of medical\u2010materialist reasoning, see an\n      article on \u201cles Vari\u00e9t\u00e9s du Type d\u00e9vot,\u201d by Dr. Binet\u2010Sangl\u00e9, in the\n      Revue de l\u2019Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.\n\n    3 J. F. NISBET: The Insanity of Genius, 3d ed., London, 1893, pp. xvi,\n      xxiv.\n\n    4 MAX NORDAU, in his bulky book entitled _Degeneration_.\n\n    5 H. MAUDSLEY: Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886, pp.\n      257, 256.\n\n    6 Autobiography, ch. xxviii.\n\n    7 Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems to\n      consist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty\n      of association by similarity.\n\n    8 I may refer to a criticism of the insanity theory of genius in the\n      Psychological Review, ii. 287 (1895).\n\n    9 I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and\n      admirable remarks on the futility of all these definitions of\n      religion, in an article by Professor Leuba, published in the Monist\n      for January, 1901, after my own text was written.\n\n   10 Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged).\n\n   11 Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.\n\n   12 Feuilles d\u00e9tach\u00e9es, pp. 394\u2010398 (abridged).\n\n   13 Op. cit., pp. 314, 313.\n\n   14 Book V., ch. x. (abridged).\n\n   15 Book V., ch. ix. (abridged).\n\n   16 Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth\u2019s translation.\n\n   17 Book IV., \u00a7 23.\n\n   18 Benham\u2019s translation: Book III., chaps. xv., lix. Compare Mary Moody\n      Emerson: \u201cLet me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest, the\n      loneliest sufferer, with one proviso,\u2014that I know it is His agency.\n      I will love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of\n      mine.\u201d R. W. EMERSON: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188.\n\n   19 Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in\n      whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are\n      religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they\n      are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish,\n      without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its\n      typical _differentia_.\n\n   20 The New Spirit, p. 232.\n\n   21 I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and\n      friend, Charles Carroll Everett.\n\n   22 Example: \u201cI have had much comfort lately in meditating on the\n      passages which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his\n      distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject that\n      requires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one\n      so much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead,\n      and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit\n      in its effect on us.\u201d AUGUSTUS HARE: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare\n      to Lucy H. Hare.\n\n   23 Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.\n\n   24 Example: \u201cNature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she\n      shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman\n      weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is.\u201d\n      B. de St. Pierre.\n\n   25 Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26.\n\n   26 E. GURNEY: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384.\n\n   27 Pens\u00e9es d\u2019un Solitaire, p. 66.\n\n   28 Letters of Lowell, i. 75.\n\n   29 I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy\u2019s permission, from his rich\n      collection of psychological documents.\n\n   30 Mark Rutherford\u2019s Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198.\n\n   31 In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d edition,\n      Boston, 1886, pp. 91, 122.\n\n   32 C. HILTY: Gl\u00fcck, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.\n\n   33 The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89,\n      91.\n\n   34 I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that\n      she \u201ccould always cuddle up to God.\u201d\n\n   35 JOHN WEISS: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.\n\n   36 STARBUCK: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306.\n\n   37 \u201cI know not to what physical laws philosophers will some day refer\n      the feelings of melancholy. For myself, I find that they are the\n      most voluptuous of all sensations,\u201d writes Saint Pierre, and\n      accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on Nature to\n      the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines de la\n      Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude\u2014each of them more optimistic than\n      the last.\n\n      This finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adolescence.\n      The truth\u2010telling Marie Bashkirtseff expresses it well:\u2014\n\n      \u201cIn this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don\u2019t\n      condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you\n      believe it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my\n      grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being\n      exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and\n      I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It would be\n      cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating. I cry, I grieve,\n      and at the same time I am pleased\u2014no, not exactly that\u2014I know not\n      how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I find\n      everything agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for\n      happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable. It is not I who\n      undergo all this\u2014my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me\n      which is above me is glad of it all.\u201d Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff,\n      i. 67.\n\n   38 R. M. BUCKE: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182\u2010186, abridged.\n\n   39 I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published\n      monthly at Philadelphia.\n\n   40 Song of Myself, 32.\n\n   41 Iliad, XXI., E. Myers\u2019s translation.\n\n   42 \u201cGod is afraid of me!\u201d remarked such a titanic\u2010optimistic friend in\n      my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and\n      cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian\n      education in humility still rankled in his breast.\n\n   43 \u201cAs I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered\n      child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity,\n      to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim,\n      obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and\n      orgiastic\u2014or m\u00e6nadic\u2014foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit\n      reconciles me.\u201d R. L. STEVENSON: Letters, ii. 355.\n\n   44 \u201cCautionary Verses for Children\u201d: this title of a much used work,\n      published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of\n      evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the\n      idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel\n      freedom. Mind\u2010cure might be briefly called a reaction against all\n      that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of\n      our century in the evangelical circles of England and America.\n\n   45 I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. Henry Wood, especially the\n      former. Mr. Dresser\u2019s works are published by G. P. Putnam\u2019s Sons,\n      New York and London; Mr. Wood\u2019s by Lee & Shepard, Boston.\n\n   46 Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another reporter,\n      Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Clark University, whose thesis on \u201cthe Effects\n      of Mind on Body as evidenced by Faith Cures\u201d is published in the\n      American Journal of Psychology for 1899 (vol. x.). This critic,\n      after a wide study of the facts, concludes that the cures by mind\u2010\n      cure exist, but are in no respect different from those now\n      officially recognized in medicine as cures by suggestion; and the\n      end of his essay contains an interesting physiological speculation\n      as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of the\n      reprint). As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself,\n      Dr. Goddard writes: \u201cIn spite of the severe criticism we have made\n      of reports of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material,\n      showing a powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are\n      of diseases that have been diagnosed and treated by the best\n      physicians of the country, or which prominent hospitals have tried\n      their hand at curing, but without success. People of culture and\n      education have been treated by this method with satisfactory\n      results. Diseases of long standing have been ameliorated, and even\n      cured.... We have traced the mental element through primitive\n      medicine and folk\u2010medicine of to\u2010day, patent medicine, and\n      witchcraft. We are convinced that it is impossible to account for\n      the existence of these practices, if they did not cure disease, and\n      that if they cured disease, it must have been the mental element\n      that was effective. The same argument applies to those modern\n      schools of mental therapeutics\u2014Divine Healing and Christian Science.\n      It is hardly conceivable that the large body of intelligent people\n      who comprise the body known distinctively as Mental Scientists\n      should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is\n      not a thing of a day; it is not confined to a few; it is not local.\n      It is true that many failures are recorded, but that only adds to\n      the argument. There must be many and striking successes to\n      counterbalance the failures, otherwise the failures would have ended\n      the delusion.... Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental\n      Science do not, and never can in the very nature of things, cure all\n      diseases; nevertheless, the practical applications of the general\n      principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent\n      disease.... We do find sufficient evidence to convince us that the\n      proper reform in mental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of\n      ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch; would even delay the\n      approach of death to many a victim beyond the power of absolute\n      cure, and the faithful adherence to a truer philosophy of life will\n      keep many a man well, and give the doctor time to devote to\n      alleviating ills that are unpreventable\u201d (pp. 33, 34 of reprint).\n\n   47 HORACE FLETCHER: Happiness as found in Forethought _minus_\n      Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii. Chicago and New York, Stone,\n      1897, pp. 21\u201025, abridged.\n\n   48 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38.\n\n   49 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, Boston,\n      1899, p. 54.\n\n   50 Whether it differs so much from Christ\u2019s own notion is for the\n      exegetists to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about evil\n      and disease much as our mind\u2010curers do. \u201cWhat is the answer which\n      Jesus sends to John the Baptist?\u201d asks Harnack, and says it is this:\n      \u201c \u2018The blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and\n      the deaf hear, the dead rise up, and the gospel is preached to the\n      poor.\u2019 That is the \u2018coming of the kingdom,\u2019 or rather in these\n      saving works the kingdom is already there. By the overcoming and\n      removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by these actual effects\n      John is to see that the new time has arrived. The casting out of\n      devils is only a part of this work of redemption, _but Jesus points\n      to that as the sense and seal of his mission_. Thus to the wretched,\n      sick, and poor did he address himself, but not as a moralist, and\n      without a trace of sentimentalism. He never makes groups and\n      departments of the ills; he never spends time in asking whether the\n      sick one \u2018deserves\u2019 to be cured; and it never occurs to him to\n      sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness\n      is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has a healthy use. No, he\n      calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, all\n      wretchedness, is for him something dreadful; it is of the great\n      kingdom of Satan; but he feels the power of the Saviour within him.\n      He knows that advance is possible only when weakness is overcome,\n      when sickness is made well.\u201d Das Wesen des Christenthums, 1900, p.\n      39.\n\n   51 R. W. TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N. Y., 1899.\n      I have strung scattered passages together.\n\n   52 The Cairds, for example. In EDWARD CAIRD\u2019S Glasgow Lectures of\n      1890\u201092 passages like this abound:\u2014\n\n      \u201cThe declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that\n      \u2018the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand,\u2019\n      passes with scarce a break into the announcement that \u2018the kingdom\n      of God is among you\u2019; and the importance of this announcement is\n      asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak, a difference _in\n      kind_ between the greatest saints and prophets who lived under the\n      previous reign of division, and \u2018the least in the kingdom of\n      heaven.\u2019 The highest ideal is brought close to men and declared to\n      be within their reach, they are called on to be \u2018perfect as their\n      Father in heaven is perfect.\u2019 The sense of alienation and distance\n      from God which had grown upon the pious in Israel just in proportion\n      as they had learned to look upon Him as no mere national divinity,\n      but as a God of justice who would punish Israel for its sin as\n      certainly as Edom or Moab, is declared to be no longer in place; and\n      the typical form of Christian prayer points to the abolition of the\n      contrast between this world and the next which through all the\n      history of the Jews had continually been growing wider: \u2018As in\n      heaven, so on earth.\u2019 The sense of the division of man from God, as\n      a finite being from the Infinite, as weak and sinful from the\n      Omnipotent Goodness, is not indeed lost; but it can no longer\n      overpower the consciousness of oneness. The terms \u2018Son\u2019 and \u2018Father\u2019\n      at once state the opposition and mark its limit. They show that it\n      is not an absolute opposition, but one which presupposes an\n      indestructible principle of unity, that can and must become a\n      principle of reconciliation.\u201d The Evolution of Religion, ii. pp.\n      146, 147.\n\n   53 It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which\n      assumes more and more the form of mind\u2010cure experience and academic\n      philosophy mutually impregnating each other, will score the\n      practical triumphs of the less critical and rational sects.\n\n   54 The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new\n      nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up.\n      The pantheistic explanation (which is that of most mind\u2010curers) is\n      by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or\n      greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own\n      \u201csubconscious\u201d self), the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust\n      and anxiety are removed. The medico\u2010materialistic explanation is\n      that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left\n      to act automatically by the shunting\u2010out of physiologically (though\n      in this instance not spiritually) \u201chigher\u201d ones which, seeking to\n      regulate, only succeed in inhibiting results.\u2014Whether this third\n      explanation might, in a psycho\u2010physical account of the universe, be\n      combined with either of the others may be left an open question\n      here.\n\n   55 Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard\n      sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either\n      as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising\n      virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning \u201cmerit.\u201d \u201cIllness,\u201d\n      says a good Catholic writer (P. LEJEUNE: Introd. \u00e0 la Vie Mystique,\n      1899, p. 218), \u201cis the most excellent of corporeal mortifications,\n      the mortification which one has not one\u2019s self chosen, which is\n      imposed directly by God, and is the direct expression of his will.\n      \u2018If other mortifications are of silver,\u2019 Mgr. Gay says, \u2018this one is\n      of gold; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of\n      original sin, still on its greater side, as coming (like all that\n      happens) from the providence of God, it is of divine manufacture.\n      And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is!... I do not\n      hesitate to say that patience in a long illness is mortification\u2019s\n      very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified\n      souls.\u2019 \u201d According to this view, disease should in any case be\n      submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even\n      be blasphemous to wish it away.\n\n      Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special\n      miracle have at all times been recognized within the church\u2019s pale,\n      almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It\n      was one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to\n      be possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession\n      and conversion on the patient\u2019s part, and prayer on the priest\u2019s,\n      was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh.\n      Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly\n      thirty years. Blumhardt\u2019s Life by Z\u00fcndel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887)\n      gives in chapters ix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of\n      his healing activity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine\n      interposition. Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non\u2010\n      fanatical character, and in this part of his work followed no\n      previous model. In Chicago to\u2010day we have the case of Dr. J. A.\n      Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly \u201cLeaves of Healing\u201d\n      were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who,\n      although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as\n      \u201cdiabolical counterfeits\u201d of his own exclusively \u201cDivine Healing,\u201d\n      must on the whole be counted into the mind\u2010cure movement. In mind\u2010\n      cure circles the fundamental article of faith is that disease should\n      never be accepted. It is wholly of the pit. God wants us to be\n      absolutely healthy, and we should not tolerate ourselves on any\n      lower terms.\n\n   56 Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quote these\n      words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see\n      that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members.\n\n   57 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46.\n\n   58 DRESSER: Living by the Spirit, 58.\n\n   59 DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 33.\n\n   60 TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214.\n\n   61 TRINE: p. 117.\n\n   62 Quoted by LEJEUNE: Introd. \u00e0 la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66.\n\n   63 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70\n      (abridged).\n\n   64 See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by\n      friends.\n\n   65 Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally\n      into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they\n      must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are\n      questions that only the future can answer. What is certain now is\n      the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to\n      some part of the world\u2019s truth, each verified in some degree, each\n      leaving out some part of real experience.\n\n   66 Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x.\n\n   67 Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510\u2010514 (abridged).\n\n   68 MOLINOS: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii. (abridged).\n\n   69 I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind\u2010cure\n      writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their\n      attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be\n      logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher\n      Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence,\n      namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite\n      sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a\n      part, if only it be the most ideal part.\n\n   70 Cf. J. MILSAND: Luther et le Serf\u2010Arbitre, 1884, _passim_.\n\n   71 He adds with characteristic healthy\u2010mindedness: \u201cOur business is to\n      continue to fail in good spirits.\u201d\n\n   72 The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal\n      against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the\n      opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a\n      residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told\n      off\u2014our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of\n      a better self _in posse_ at least. But the world deals with us _in\n      actu_ and not _in posse_: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed\n      at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All\u2010\n      knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who\n      is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy: only by\n      an All\u2010knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very\n      definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life.\n\n   73 E.g., Iliad, XVII. 446: \u201cNothing then is more wretched anywhere than\n      man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth.\u201d\n\n   74 E.g., Theognis, 425\u2010428: \u201cBest of all for all things upon earth is\n      it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun; next best\n      to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades.\u201d See also the\n      almost identical passage in \u0152dipus in Colonus, 1225.\u2014The Anthology\n      is full of pessimistic utterances: \u201cNaked came I upon the earth,\n      naked I go below the ground\u2014why then do I vainly toil when I see the\n      end naked before me?\u201d\u2014\u201cHow did I come to be? Whence am I? Wherefore\n      did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know?\n      Being naught I came to life: once more shall I be what I was.\n      Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of mortals.\u201d\u2014\u201cFor death we\n      are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly\n      butchered.\u201d\n\n      The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern\n      variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the\n      pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of\n      sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for\n      pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic\n      literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor\n      key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of\n      lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as\n      this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved\n      for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the\n      Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the\n      same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic.\n\n   75 For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post\n      brings me some aphorisms from a worldly\u2010wise old friend in\n      Heidelberg which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of\n      Epicureanism: \u201cBy the word \u2018happiness\u2019 every human being understands\n      something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds.\n      The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more\n      definite term _contentment_. What education should chiefly aim at is\n      to save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring\n      condition, but by no means an indispensable one, of contentment.\n      Woman\u2019s heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which\n      she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But the\n      wise man will always prefer work chosen by himself.\u201d\n\n   76 RIBOT: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54.\n\n   77 A. GRATRY: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119\u2010121, abridged.\n      Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate\n      with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide\n      supply such examples as the following:\u2014\n\n      An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, and\n      leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her parents\n      she writes:\u2014\n\n      \u201cLife is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than\n      life, and that is death. So good\u2010by forever, my dear parents. It is\n      nobody\u2019s fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to\n      fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some\n      day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has\n      come.... It is a wonder I have put this off so long, but I thought\n      perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all thought out of my head.\u201d\n      To her brother she writes: \u201cGood\u2010by forever, my own dearest brother.\n      By the time you get this I shall be gone forever. I know, dear love,\n      there is no forgiveness for what I am going to do.... I am tired of\n      living, so am willing to die.... Life may be sweet to some, but\n      death to me is sweeter.\u201d S. A. K. STRAHAN: Suicide and Insanity, 2d\n      edition, London, 1894, p. 131.\n\n   78 ROUBINOVITCH ET TOULOUSE: La M\u00e9lancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged.\n\n   79 I cull these examples from the work of G. DUMAS: La Tristesse et la\n      Joie, 1900.\n\n   80 My extracts are from the French translation by \u201cZONIA.\u201d In abridging\n      I have taken the liberty of transposing one passage.\n\n   81 Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I have printed a number of\n      detached passages continuously.\n\n   82 The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston, 1806, pp.\n      25, 26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr.\n      Benjamin Rand.\n\n   83 Compare Bunyan: \u201cThere was I struck into a very great trembling,\n      insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very\n      body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the\n      dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned\n      that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging\n      and heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was,\n      especially at some times, as if my breast\u2010bone would have split\n      asunder.... Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden\n      that was upon me; which burden also did so oppress me that I could\n      neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet.\u201d\n\n   84 For another case of fear equally sudden, see HENRY JAMES: Society\n      the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 ff.\n\n   85 Example: \u201cIt was about eleven o\u2019clock at night ... but I strolled on\n      still with the people.... Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a\n      crackling was heard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in\n      an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one\n      of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling\n      of an eye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor\n      victim\u2019s bones in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, \u2018Ho hai!\u2019\n      involuntarily re\u00ebchoed by all of us, was over in three seconds; and\n      then I know not what happened till I returned to my senses, when I\n      found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if prepared\n      to be devoured by our enemy, the sovereign of the forest. I find my\n      pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our\n      limbs stiffened, our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat\n      violently, and only a whisper of the same \u2018Ho hai!\u2019 was heard from\n      us. In this state we crept on all fours for some distance back, and\n      then ran for life with the speed of an Arab horse for about half an\n      hour, and fortunately happened to come to a small village.... After\n      this every one of us was attacked with fever, attended with\n      shivering, in which deplorable state we remained till\n      morning.\u201d\u2014Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohammedan Gentleman,\n      Leipzig, 1857, p. 112.\n\n   86 E.g., \u201cOur young people are diseased with the theological problems\n      of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These\n      never presented a practical difficulty to any man\u2014never darkened\n      across any man\u2019s road, who did not go out of his way to seek them.\n      These are the soul\u2019s mumps, and measles, and whooping\u2010coughs,\u201d etc.\n      EMERSON: \u201cSpiritual Laws.\u201d\n\n   87 Notes sur la Vie, p. 1.\n\n   88 See, for example, F. Paulhan, in his book Les Caract\u00e8res, 1894, who\n      contrasts les Equilibr\u00e9s, les Unifi\u00e9s, with les Inquiets, les\n      Contrariants, les Incoh\u00e9rents, les Emiett\u00e9s, as so many diverse\n      psychic types.\n\n   89 ANNIE BESANT: an Autobiography, p. 82.\n\n   90 SMITH BAKER, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September,\n      1893.\n\n   91 LOUIS GOURDON (Essai sur la Conversion de Saint Augustine, Paris,\n      Fischbacher, 1900) has shown by an analysis of Augustine\u2019s writings\n      immediately after the date of his conversion (A. D. 386) that the\n      account he gives in the Confessions is premature. The crisis in the\n      garden marked a definitive conversion from his former life, but it\n      was to the neo\u2010platonic spiritualism and only a halfway stage toward\n      Christianity. The latter he appears not fully and radically to have\n      embraced until four years more had passed.\n\n   92 Confessions, Book VIII., chaps. v., vii., xi., abridged.\n\n   93 TH. JOUFFROY: Nouveaux M\u00e9langes philosophiques, 2me \u00e9dition, p. 83.\n      I add two other cases of counter\u2010conversion dating from a certain\n      moment. The first is from Professor Starbuck\u2019s manuscript\n      collection, and the narrator is a woman.\n\n      \u201cAway down in the bottom of my heart, I believe I was always more or\n      less skeptical about \u2018God;\u2019 skepticism grew as an undercurrent, all\n      through my early youth, but it was controlled and covered by the\n      emotional elements in my religious growth. When I was sixteen I\n      joined the church and was asked if I loved God. I replied \u2018Yes,\u2019 as\n      was customary and expected. But instantly with a flash something\n      spoke within me, \u2018No, you do not.\u2019 I was haunted for a long time\n      with shame and remorse for my falsehood and for my wickedness in not\n      loving God, mingled with fear that there might be an avenging God\n      who would punish me in some terrible way.... At nineteen, I had an\n      attack of tonsilitis. Before I had quite recovered, I heard told a\n      story of a brute who had kicked his wife downstairs, and then\n      continued the operation until she became insensible. I felt the\n      horror of the thing keenly. Instantly this thought flashed through\n      my mind: \u2018I have no use for a God who permits such things.\u2019 This\n      experience was followed by months of stoical indifference to the God\n      of my previous life, mingled with feelings of positive dislike and a\n      somewhat proud defiance of him. I still thought there might be a\n      God. If so he would probably damn me, but I should have to stand it.\n      I felt very little fear and no desire to propitiate him. I have\n      never had any personal relations with him since this painful\n      experience.\u201d\n\n      The second case exemplifies how small an additional stimulus will\n      overthrow the mind into a new state of equilibrium when the process\n      of preparation and incubation has proceeded far enough. It is like\n      the proverbial last straw added to the camel\u2019s burden, or that touch\n      of a needle which makes the salt in a supersaturated fluid suddenly\n      begin to crystallize out.\n\n      Tolstoy writes: \u201cS., a frank and intelligent man, told me as follows\n      how he ceased to believe:\u2014\n\n      \u201cHe was twenty\u2010six years old when one day on a hunting expedition,\n      the time for sleep having come, he set himself to pray according to\n      the custom he had held from childhood.\n\n      \u201cHis brother, who was hunting with him, lay upon the hay and looked\n      at him. When S. had finished his prayer and was turning to sleep,\n      the brother said, \u2018Do you still keep up that thing?\u2019 Nothing more\n      was said. But since that day, now more than thirty years ago, S. has\n      never prayed again; he never takes communion, and does not go to\n      church. All this, not because he became acquainted with convictions\n      of his brother which he then and there adopted; not because he made\n      any new resolution in his soul, but merely because the words spoken\n      by his brother were like the light push of a finger against a\n      leaning wall already about to tumble by its own weight. These words\n      but showed him that the place wherein he supposed religion dwelt in\n      him had long been empty, and that the sentences he uttered, the\n      crosses and bows which he made during his prayer, were actions with\n      no inner sense. Having once seized their absurdity, he could no\n      longer keep them up.\u201d My Confession, p. 8.\n\n   94 Op. cit., Letter III., abridged.\n\n      I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession,\n      and which represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent\n      sort of conversion, if the opposite of \u201cfalling in love,\u201d falling\n      out of love, may be so termed. Falling in love also conforms\n      frequently to this type, a latent process of unconscious preparation\n      often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is\n      irretrievably done. The free and easy tone in this narrative gives\n      it a sincerity that speaks for itself.\n\n      \u201cFor two years of this time I went through a very bad experience,\n      which almost drove me mad. I had fallen violently in love with a\n      girl who, young as she was, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As\n      I look back on her now, I hate her, and wonder how I could ever have\n      fallen so low as to be worked upon to such an extent by her\n      attractions. Nevertheless, I fell into a regular fever, could think\n      of nothing else; whenever I was alone, I pictured her attractions,\n      and spent most of the time when I should have been working, in\n      recalling our previous interviews, and imagining future\n      conversations. She was very pretty, good humored, and jolly to the\n      last degree, and intensely pleased with my admiration. Would give me\n      no decided answer yes or no, and the queer thing about it was that\n      whilst pursuing her for her hand, I secretly knew all along that she\n      was unfit to be a wife for me, and that she never would say yes.\n      Although for a year we took our meals at the same boarding\u2010house, so\n      that I saw her continually and familiarly, our closer relations had\n      to be largely on the sly, and this fact, together with my jealousy\n      of another one of her male admirers, and my own conscience despising\n      me for my uncontrollable weakness, made me so nervous and sleepless\n      that I really thought I should become insane. I understand well\n      those young men murdering their sweethearts, which appear so often\n      in the papers. Nevertheless I did love her passionately, and in some\n      ways she did deserve it.\n\n      \u201cThe queer thing was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all\n      stopped. I was going to my work after breakfast one morning,\n      thinking as usual of her and of my misery, when, just as if some\n      outside power laid hold of me, I found myself turning round and\n      almost running to my room, where I immediately got out all the\n      relics of her which I possessed, including some hair, all her notes\n      and letters, and ambrotypes on glass. The former I made a fire of,\n      the latter I actually crushed beneath my heel, in a sort of fierce\n      joy of revenge and punishment. I now loathed and despised her\n      altogether, and as for myself I felt as if a load of disease had\n      suddenly been removed from me. That was the end. I never spoke to\n      her or wrote to her again in all the subsequent years, and I have\n      never had a single moment of loving thought towards one who for so\n      many months entirely filled my heart. In fact, I have always rather\n      hated her memory, though now I can see that I had gone unnecessarily\n      far in that direction. At any rate, from that happy morning onward I\n      regained possession of my own proper soul, and have never since\n      fallen into any similar trap.\u201d\n\n      This seems to me an unusually clear example of two different levels\n      of personality, inconsistent in their dictates, yet so well balanced\n      against each other as for a long time to fill the life with discord\n      and dissatisfaction. At last, not gradually, but in a sudden crisis,\n      the unstable equilibrium is resolved, and this happens so\n      unexpectedly that it is as if, to use the writer\u2019s words, \u201csome\n      outside power laid hold.\u201d\n\n      Professor Starbuck gives an analogous case, and a converse case of\n      hatred suddenly turning into love, in his Psychology of Religion, p.\n      141. Compare the other highly curious instances which he gives on\n      pp. 137\u2010144, of sudden non\u2010religious alterations of habit or\n      character. He seems right in conceiving all such sudden changes as\n      results of special cerebral functions unconsciously developing until\n      they are ready to play a controlling part, when they make irruption\n      into the conscious life. When we treat of sudden \u201cconversion,\u201d I\n      shall make as much use as I can of this hypothesis of subconscious\n      incubation.\n\n   95 H. FLETCHER: Menticulture, or the A\u2010B\u2010C of True Living, New York and\n      Chicago, 1899, pp. 26\u201036, abridged.\n\n   96 I have considerably abridged Tolstoy\u2019s words in my translation.\n\n   97 In my quotations from Bunyan I have omitted certain intervening\n      portions of the text.\n\n   98 A sketch of the life of Stephen H. Bradley, from the age of five to\n      twenty\u2010four years, including his remarkable experience of the power\n      of the Holy Spirit on the second evening of November, 1829. Madison,\n      Connecticut, 1830.\n\n   99 Jouffroy is an example: \u201cDown this slope it was that my intelligence\n      had glided, and little by little it had got far from its first\n      faith. But this melancholy revolution had not taken place in the\n      broad daylight of my consciousness; too many scruples, too many\n      guides and sacred affections had made it dreadful to me, so that I\n      was far from avowing to myself the progress it had made. It had gone\n      on in silence, by an involuntary elaboration of which I was not the\n      accomplice; and although I had in reality long ceased to be a\n      Christian, yet, in the innocence of my intention, I should have\n      shuddered to suspect it, and thought it calumny had I been accused\n      of such a falling away.\u201d Then follows Jouffroy\u2019s account of his\n      counter\u2010conversion, quoted above on p. 176.\n\n  100 One hardly needs examples; but for love, see p. 179, note; for fear,\n      p. 162; for remorse, see Othello after the murder; for anger, see\n      Lear after Cordelia\u2019s first speech to him; for resolve, see p. 178\n      (J. Foster case). Here is a pathological case in which _guilt_ was\n      the feeling that suddenly exploded: \u201cOne night I was seized on\n      entering bed with a rigor, such as Swedenborg describes as coming\n      over him with a sense of holiness, but over me with a sense of\n      _guilt_. During that whole night I lay under the influence of the\n      rigor, and from its inception I felt that I was under the curse of\n      God. I have never done one act of duty in my life\u2014sins against God\n      and man, beginning as far as my memory goes back\u2014a wildcat in human\n      shape.\u201d\n\n  101 E. D. STARBUCK: The Psychology of Religion, pp. 224, 262.\n\n  102 No one understands this better than Jonathan Edwards understood it\n      already. Conversion narratives of the more commonplace sort must\n      always be taken with the allowances which he suggests: \u201cA rule\n      received and established by common consent has a very great, though\n      to many persons an insensible influence in forming their notions of\n      the process of their own experience. I know very well how they\n      proceed as to this matter, for I have had frequent opportunities of\n      observing their conduct. Very often their experience at first\n      appears like a confused chaos, but then those parts are selected\n      which bear the nearest resemblance to such particular steps as are\n      insisted on; and these are dwelt upon in their thoughts, and spoken\n      of from time to time, till they grow more and more conspicuous in\n      their view, and other parts which are neglected grow more and more\n      obscure. Thus what they have experienced is insensibly strained, so\n      as to bring it to an exact conformity to the scheme already\n      established in their minds. And it becomes natural also for\n      ministers, who have to deal with those who insist upon distinctness\n      and clearness of method, to do so too.\u201d Treatise on Religious\n      Affections.\n\n  103 Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena, American Journal\n      of Psychology, vii. 309 (1896).\n\n  104 I have abridged Mr. Hadley\u2019s account. For other conversions of\n      drunkards, see his pamphlet, Rescue Mission Work, published at the\n      Old Jerry M\u2019Auley Water Street Mission, New York city. A striking\n      collection of cases also appears in the appendix to Professor\n      Leuba\u2019s article.\n\n  105 A restaurant waiter served provisionally as Gough\u2019s \u201cSaviour.\u201d\n      General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, considers that the\n      first vital step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel\n      that some decent human being cares enough for them to take an\n      interest in the question whether they are to rise or sink.\n\n  106 The crisis of apathetic melancholy\u2014no use in life\u2014into which J. S.\n      Mill records that he fell, and from which he emerged by the reading\n      of Marmontel\u2019s Memoirs (Heaven save the mark!) and Wordsworth\u2019s\n      poetry, is another intellectual and general metaphysical case. See\n      Mill\u2019s Autobiography, New York, 1873, pp. 141, 148.\n\n  107 Starbuck, in addition to \u201cescape from sin,\u201d discriminates \u201cspiritual\n      illumination\u201d as a distinct type of conversion experience.\n      Psychology of Religion, p. 85.\n\n  108 Psychology of Religion, p. 117.\n\n  109 Psychology of Religion, p. 385. Compare, also, pp. 137\u2010144 and 262.\n\n  110 For instance, C. G. Finney italicizes the volitional element: \u201cJust\n      at this point the whole question of Gospel salvation opened to my\n      mind in a manner most marvelous to me at the time. I think I then\n      saw, as clearly as I ever have in my life, the reality and fullness\n      of the atonement of Christ. Gospel salvation seemed to me to be an\n      offer of something to be accepted, and all that was necessary on my\n      part was to get my own consent to give up my sins and accept Christ.\n      After this distinct revelation had stood for some little time before\n      my mind, the question seemed to be put, \u2018Will you accept it now, to\u2010\n      day?\u2019 I replied, \u2018Yes; _I will accept it to\u2010day, or I will die in\n      the attempt!_\u2019 \u201d He then went into the woods, where he describes his\n      struggles. He could not pray, his heart was hardened in its pride.\n      \u201cI then reproached myself for having promised to give my heart to\n      God before I left the woods. When I came to try, I found I could\n      not.... My inward soul hung back, and there was no going out of my\n      heart to God. The thought was pressing me, of the rashness of my\n      promise that I would give my heart to God that day, or die in the\n      attempt. It seemed to me as if that was binding on my soul; and yet\n      I was going to break my vow. A great sinking and discouragement came\n      over me, and I felt almost too weak to stand upon my knees. Just at\n      this moment I again thought I heard some one approach me, and I\n      opened my eyes to see whether it were so. But right there the\n      revelation of my pride of heart, as the great difficulty that stood\n      in the way, was distinctly shown to me. An overwhelming sense of my\n      wickedness in being ashamed to have a human being see me on my knees\n      before God took such powerful possession of me, that I _cried at the\n      top of my voice, and exclaimed that I would not leave that place if\n      all the men on earth and all the devils in hell surrounded me_.\n      \u2018What!\u2019 I said, \u2018such a degraded sinner as I am, on my knees\n      confessing my sins to the great and holy God; and ashamed to have\n      any human being, and a sinner like myself, find me on my knees\n      endeavoring to make my peace with my offended God!\u2019 The sin appeared\n      awful, infinite. It broke me down before the Lord.\u201d Memoirs, pp.\n      14\u201016, abridged.\n\n  111 STARBUCK: Op. cit., pp. 91, 114.\n\n  112 Extracts from the Journal of Mr. John Nelson, London, no date, p.\n      24.\n\n  113 STARBUCK, p. 64.\n\n  114 STARBUCK, p. 115.\n\n  115 STARBUCK, p. 113.\n\n  116 EDWARD\u2019S and DWIGHT\u2019S Life of Brainerd, New Haven, 1822, pp. 45\u201047,\n      abridged.\n\n  117 Describing the whole phenomenon as a change of equilibrium, we might\n      say that the movement of new psychic energies towards the personal\n      centre and the recession of old ones towards the margin (or the\n      rising of some objects above, and the sinking of others below the\n      conscious threshold) were only two ways of describing an indivisible\n      event. Doubtless this is often absolutely true, and Starbuck is\n      right when he says that \u201cself\u2010surrender\u201d and \u201cnew determination,\u201d\n      though seeming at first sight to be such different experiences, are\n      \u201creally the same thing. Self\u2010surrender sees the change in terms of\n      the old self; determination sees it in terms of the new.\u201d Op. cit.,\n      p. 160.\n\n  118 A. A. BONAR: Nettleton and his Labors, Edinburgh, 1854, p. 261.\n\n  119 CHARLES G. FINNEY: Memoirs written by Himself, 1876, pp. 17, 18.\n\n  120 Life and Journals, Boston, 1806, pp. 31\u201040, abridged.\n\n  121 My quotations are made from an Italian translation of this letter in\n      the Biografia del Sig. M. A. Ratisbonne, Ferrara, 1843, which I have\n      to thank Monsignore D. O\u2019Connell of Rome for bringing to my notice.\n      I abridge the original.\n\n  122 Published in the International Scientific Series.\n\n  123 The reader will here please notice that in my exclusive reliance in\n      the last lecture on the subconscious \u201cincubation\u201d of motives\n      deposited by a growing experience, I followed the method of\n      employing accepted principles of explanation as far as one can. The\n      subliminal region, whatever else it may be, is at any rate a place\n      now admitted by psychologists to exist for the accumulation of\n      vestiges of sensible experience (whether inattentively or\n      attentively registered), and for their elaboration according to\n      ordinary psychological or logical laws into results that end by\n      attaining such a \u201ctension\u201d that they may at times enter\n      consciousness with something like a burst. It thus is \u201cscientific\u201d\n      to interpret all otherwise unaccountable invasive alterations of\n      consciousness as results of the tension of subliminal memories\n      reaching the bursting\u2010point. But candor obliges me to confess that\n      there are occasional bursts into consciousness of results of which\n      it is not easy to demonstrate any prolonged subconscious incubation.\n      Some of the cases I used to illustrate the sense of presence of the\n      unseen in Lecture III were of this order (compare pages 59, 61, 62,\n      67); and we shall see other experiences of the kind when we come to\n      the subject of mysticism. The case of Mr. Bradley, that of M.\n      Ratisbonne, possibly that of Colonel Gardiner, possibly that of\n      Saint Paul, might not be so easily explained in this simple way. The\n      result, then, would have to be ascribed either to a merely\n      physiological nerve storm, a \u201cdischarging lesion\u201d like that of\n      epilepsy; or, in case it were useful and rational, as in the two\n      latter cases named, to some more mystical or theological hypothesis.\n      I make this remark in order that the reader may realize that the\n      subject is really complex. But I shall keep myself as far as\n      possible at present to the more \u201cscientific\u201d view; and only as the\n      plot thickens in subsequent lectures shall I consider the question\n      of its absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all the facts. That\n      subconscious incubation explains a great number of them, there can\n      be no doubt.\n\n  124 Edwards says elsewhere: \u201cI am bold to say that the work of God in\n      the conversion of one soul, considered together with the source,\n      foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit, end, and\n      eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the\n      creation of the whole material universe.\u201d\n\n  125 Emerson writes: \u201cWhen we see a soul whose acts are regal, graceful,\n      and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and\n      are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say: Crump is a better\n      man, with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.\u201d True\n      enough. Yet Crump may really be the better _Crump_, for his inner\n      discords and second birth; and your once\u2010born \u201cregal\u201d character,\n      though indeed always better than poor Crump, may fall far short of\n      what he individually might be had he only some Crump\u2010like capacity\n      for compunction over his own peculiar diabolisms, graceful and\n      pleasant and invariably gentlemanly as these may be.\n\n  126 In his book, The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900.\n\n  127 Op. cit., p. 112.\n\n  128 Op. cit., p. 144.\n\n  129 I piece together a quotation made by W. Monod, in his book La Vie,\n      and a letter printed in the work: Adolphe Monod: I., Souvenirs de sa\n      Vie, 1885, p. 433.\n\n  130 Commentary on Galatians, ch. iii. verse 19, and ch. ii. verse 20,\n      abridged.\n\n  131 In some conversions, both steps are distinct; in this one, for\n      example:\u2014\n\n      \u201cWhilst I was reading the evangelical treatise, I was soon struck by\n      an expression: \u2018the finished work of Christ.\u2019 \u2018Why,\u2019 I asked of\n      myself, \u2018does the author use these terms? Why does he not say \u201cthe\n      atoning work\u201d?\u2019 Then these words, \u2018It is finished,\u2019 presented\n      themselves to my mind. \u2018What is it that is finished?\u2019 I asked, and\n      in an instant my mind replied: \u2018A perfect expiation for sin; entire\n      satisfaction has been given; the debt has been paid by the\n      Substitute. Christ has died for our sins; not for ours only, but for\n      those of all men. If, then, the entire work is finished, all the\n      debt paid, what remains for me to do?\u2019 In another instant the light\n      was shed through my mind by the Holy Ghost, and the joyous\n      conviction was given me that nothing more was to be done, save to\n      fall on my knees, to accept this Saviour and his love, to praise God\n      forever.\u201d Autobiography of Hudson Taylor. I translate back into\n      English from the French translation of Challand (Geneva, no date),\n      the original not being accessible.\n\n  132 Tolstoy\u2019s case was a good comment on those words. There was almost\n      no theology in his conversion. His faith\u2010state was the sense come\n      back that life was infinite in its moral significance.\n\n  133 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345\u2010347, abridged.\n\n  134 Above, p. 152.\n\n  135 DWIGHT: Life of Edwards, New York, 1830, p. 61, abridged.\n\n  136 W. F. BOURNE: The King\u2019s Son, a Memoir of Billy Bray, London,\n      Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887, p. 9.\n\n  137 Consult WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE: Lectures on Revivals of Religion, New\n      York, 1832, in the long Appendix to which the opinions of a large\n      number of ministers are given.\n\n  138 Memoirs, p. 34.\n\n  139 These reports of sensorial photism shade off into what are evidently\n      only metaphorical accounts of the sense of new spiritual\n      illumination, as, for instance, in Brainerd\u2019s statement: \u201cAs I was\n      walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the\n      apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, for\n      I saw no such thing, nor any imagination of a body of light in the\n      third heavens, or anything of that nature, but it was a new inward\n      apprehension or view that I had of God.\u201d\n\n      In a case like this next one from Starbuck\u2019s manuscript collection,\n      the lighting up of the darkness is probably also metaphorical:\u2014\n\n      \u201cOne Sunday night, I resolved that when I got home to the ranch\n      where I was working, I would offer myself with my faculties and all\n      to God to be used only by and for him.... It was raining and the\n      roads were muddy; but this desire grew so strong that I kneeled down\n      by the side of the road and told God all about it, intending then to\n      get up and go on. Such a thing as any special answer to my prayer\n      never entered my mind, having been converted by faith, but still\n      being most undoubtedly saved. Well, while I was praying, I remember\n      holding out my hands to God and telling him they should work for\n      him, my feet walk for him, my tongue speak for him, etc., etc., if\n      he would only use me as his instrument and give me a satisfying\n      experience\u2014when suddenly the darkness of the night seemed lit up\u2014I\n      felt, realized, knew, that God heard and answered my prayer. Deep\n      happiness came over me; I felt I was accepted into the inner circle\n      of God\u2019s loved ones.\u201d\n\n      In the following case also the flash of light is metaphorical:\u2014\n\n      \u201cA prayer meeting had been called for at close of evening service.\n      The minister supposed me impressed by his discourse (a mistake\u2014he\n      was dull). He came and, placing his hand upon my shoulder, said: \u2018Do\n      you not want to give your heart to God?\u2019 I replied in the\n      affirmative. Then said he, \u2018Come to the front seat.\u2019 They sang and\n      prayed and talked with me. I experienced nothing but unaccountable\n      wretchedness. They declared that the reason why I did not \u2018obtain\n      peace\u2019 was because I was not willing to give up all to God. After\n      about two hours the minister said we would go home. As usual, on\n      retiring, I prayed. In great distress, I at this time simply said,\n      \u2018Lord, I have done all I can, I leave the whole matter with thee.\u2019\n      Immediately, like a flash of light, there came to me a great peace,\n      and I arose and went into my parents\u2019 bedroom and said, \u2018I do feel\n      so wonderfully happy.\u2019 This I regard as the hour of conversion. It\n      was the hour in which I became assured of divine acceptance and\n      favor. So far as my life was concerned, it made little immediate\n      change.\u201d\n\n  140 I add in a note a few more records:\u2014\n\n      \u201cOne morning, being in deep distress, fearing every moment I should\n      drop into hell, I was constrained to cry in earnest for mercy, and\n      the Lord came to my relief, and delivered my soul from the burden\n      and guilt of sin. My whole frame was in a tremor from head to foot,\n      and my soul enjoyed sweet peace. The pleasure I then felt was\n      indescribable. The happiness lasted about three days, during which\n      time I never spoke to any person about my feelings.\u201d Autobiography\n      of DAN YOUNG, edited by W. P. STRICKLAND, New York, 1860.\n\n      \u201cIn an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God\u2019s taking care\n      of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world\n      was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and\n      began to cry and laugh.\u201d H. W. BEECHER, quoted by LEUBA.\n\n      \u201cMy tears of sorrow changed to joy, and I lay there praising God in\n      such ecstasy of joy as only the soul who experiences it can\n      realize.\u201d\u2014\u201cI cannot express how I felt. It was as if I had been in a\n      dark dungeon and lifted into the light of the sun. I shouted and I\n      sang praise unto him who loved me and washed me from my sins. I was\n      forced to retire into a secret place, for the tears did flow, and I\n      did not wish my shopmates to see me, and yet I could not keep it a\n      secret.\u201d\u2014\u201cI experienced joy almost to weeping.\u201d\u2014\u201cI felt my face must\n      have shone like that of Moses. I had a general feeling of buoyancy.\n      It was the greatest joy it was ever my lot to experience.\u201d\u2014\u201cI wept\n      and laughed alternately. I was as light as if walking on air. I felt\n      as if I had gained greater peace and happiness than I had ever\n      expected to experience.\u201d STARBUCK\u2019S correspondents.\n\n  141 Psychology of Religion, pp. 360, 357.\n\n  142 SAINTE\u2010BEUVE: Port\u2010Royal, vol. i. pp. 95 and 106, abridged.\n\n  143 \u201c \u2018Love would not be love,\u2019 says Bourget, \u2018unless it could carry one\n      to crime.\u2019 And so one may say that no passion would be a veritable\n      passion unless it could carry one to crime.\u201d (SIGHELE: Psychologie\n      des Sectes, p. 136.) In other words, great passions annul the\n      ordinary inhibitions set by \u201cconscience.\u201d And conversely, of all the\n      criminal human beings, the false, cowardly, sensual, or cruel\n      persons who actually live, there is perhaps not one whose criminal\n      impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the presence of\n      some other emotion to which his character is also potentially\n      liable, provided that other emotion be only made intense enough.\n      Fear is usually the most available emotion for this result in this\n      particular class of persons. It stands for conscience, and may here\n      be classed appropriately as a \u201chigher affection.\u201d If we are soon to\n      die, or if we believe a day of judgment to be near at hand, how\n      quickly do we put our moral house in order\u2014we do not see how sin can\n      evermore exert temptation over us! Old\u2010fashioned hell\u2010fire\n      Christianity well knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent\n      in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion value.\n\n  144 Example: Benjamin Constant was often marveled at as an extraordinary\n      instance of superior intelligence with inferior character. He writes\n      (Journal, Paris, 1895, p. 56), \u201cI am tossed and dragged about by my\n      miserable weakness. Never was anything so ridiculous as my\n      indecision. Now marriage, now solitude; now Germany, now France,\n      hesitation upon hesitation, and all because at bottom I am _unable\n      to give up anything_.\u201d He can\u2019t \u201cget mad\u201d at any of his\n      alternatives; and the career of a man beset by such an all\u2010round\n      amiability is hopeless.\n\n  145 The great thing which the higher excitabilities give is _courage_;\n      and the addition or subtraction of a certain amount of this quality\n      makes a different man, a different life. Various excitements let the\n      courage loose. Trustful hope will do it; inspiring example will do\n      it; love will do it; wrath will do it. In some people it is natively\n      so high that the mere touch of danger does it, though danger is for\n      most men the great inhibitor of action. \u201cLove of adventure\u201d becomes\n      in such persons a ruling passion. \u201cI believe,\u201d says General\n      Skobeleff, \u201cthat my bravery is simply the passion and at the same\n      time the contempt of danger. The risk of life fills me with an\n      exaggerated rapture. The fewer there are to share it, the more I\n      like it. The participation of my body in the event is required to\n      furnish me an adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears\n      to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger\n      into which I can throw myself headforemost, attracts me, moves me,\n      intoxicates me. I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run\n      after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop. Were\n      it always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure. When I\n      throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it, my heart\n      palpitates with the uncertainty; I could wish at once to have it\n      appear and yet to delay. A sort of painful and delicious shiver\n      shakes me; my entire nature runs to meet the peril with an impetus\n      that my will would in vain try to resist.\u201d (JULIETTE ADAM: Le\n      G\u00e9n\u00e9ral Skobeleff, Nouvelle Revue, 1886, abridged.) Skobeleff seems\n      to have been a cruel egoist; but the disinterested Garibaldi, if one\n      may judge by his \u201cMemorie,\u201d lived in an unflagging emotion of\n      similar danger\u2010seeking excitement.\n\n  146 See the case on p. 70, above, where the writer describes his\n      experiences of communion with the Divine as consisting \u201cmerely in\n      the _temporary obliteration of the conventionalities_ which usually\n      cover my life.\u201d\n\n  147 Above, p. 201. \u201cThe only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is\n      religiomania,\u201d is a saying I have heard quoted from some medical\n      man.\n\n  148 Doddridge\u2019s Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious Tract\n      Society, pp. 23\u201032.\n\n  149 Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck\u2019s book, in which a\n      \u201csensory automatism\u201d brought about quickly what prayers and resolves\n      had been unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:\u2014\n\n      \u201cWhen I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was\n      on me, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God\n      to quit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was\n      fifty\u2010three, as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to\n      me. I did not hear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of\n      double think. It said, \u2018Louisa, lay down smoking.\u2019 At once I\n      replied, \u2018Will you take the desire away?\u2019 But it only kept saying:\n      \u2018Louisa, lay down smoking.\u2019 Then I got up, laid my pipe on the\n      mantel\u2010shelf, and never smoked again or had any desire to. The\n      desire was gone as though I had never known it or touched tobacco.\n      The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gave me the\n      least wish to touch it again.\u201d The Psychology of Religion, p. 142.\n\n  150 Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old\n      influences physiologically, as a cutting off of the connection\n      between higher and lower cerebral centres. \u201cThis condition,\u201d he\n      says, \u201cin which the association\u2010centres connected with the spiritual\n      life are cut off from the lower, is often reflected in the way\n      correspondents describe their experiences.... For example:\n      \u2018Temptations from without still assail me, but there is nothing\n      _within_ to respond to them.\u2019 The ego [here] is wholly identified\n      with the higher centres, whose quality of feeling is that of\n      withinness. Another of the respondents says: \u2018Since then, although\n      Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of brass around me, so\n      that his darts cannot touch me.\u2019 \u201d\u2014Unquestionably, functional\n      exclusions of this sort must occur in the cerebral organ. But on the\n      side accessible to introspection, their causal condition is nothing\n      but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so high and\n      strong as to be sovereign; and it must be frankly confessed that we\n      do not know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one\n      person and not in another. We can only give our imagination a\n      certain delusive help by mechanical analogies.\n\n      If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its\n      different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many\u2010sided\n      solid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might\n      liken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body.\n      As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in which it lies\n      on surface A, for instance, it will linger for a time unstably\n      halfway up, and if the lever cease to urge it, it will tumble back\n      or \u201crelapse\u201d under the continued pull of gravity. But if at last it\n      rotate far enough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond surface A\n      altogether, the body will fall over, on surface B, say, and abide\n      there permanently. The pulls of gravity towards A have vanished, and\n      may now be disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune against\n      farther attraction from their direction.\n\n      In this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional\n      influences making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to\n      the ancient drawbacks and inhibitions. So long as the emotional\n      influence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes it\n      produces are unstable, and the man relapses into his original\n      attitude. But when a certain intensity is attained by the new\n      emotion, a critical point is passed, and there then ensues an\n      irreversible revolution, equivalent to the production of a new\n      nature.\n\n  151 I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of \u201csanctimoniousness\u201d\n      which sometimes clings to it, because no other word suggests as well\n      the exact combination of affections which the text goes on to\n      describe.\n\n  152 \u201cIt will be found,\u201d says Dr. W. R. INGE (in his lectures on\n      Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 326), \u201cthat men of pre\u00ebminent\n      saintliness agree very closely in what they tell us. They tell us\n      that they have arrived at an unshakable conviction, not based on\n      inference but on immediate experience, that God is a spirit with\n      whom the human spirit can hold intercourse; that in him meet all\n      that they can imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can\n      see his footprints everywhere in nature, and feel his presence\n      within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as\n      they come to themselves they come to him. They tell us what\n      separates us from him and from happiness is, first, self\u2010seeking in\n      all its forms; and, secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that\n      these are the ways of darkness and death, which hide from us the\n      face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light,\n      which shineth more and more unto the perfect day.\u201d\n\n  153 The \u201centhusiasm of humanity\u201d may lead to a life which coalesces in\n      many respects with that of Christian saintliness. Take the following\n      rules proposed to members of the Union pour l\u2019Action morale, in the\n      Bulletin de l\u2019Union, April 1\u201015, 1894. See, also, Revue Bleue,\n      August 13, 1892.\n\n      \u201cWe would make known in our own persons the usefulness of rule, of\n      discipline, of resignation and renunciation; we would teach the\n      necessary perpetuity of suffering, and explain the creative part\n      which it plays. We would wage war upon false optimism; on the base\n      hope of happiness coming to us ready made; on the notion of a\n      salvation by knowledge alone, or by material civilization alone,\n      vain symbol as this is of civilization, precarious external\n      arrangement, ill\u2010fitted to replace the intimate union and consent of\n      souls. We would wage war also on bad morals, whether in public or in\n      private life; on luxury, fastidiousness, and over\u2010refinement; on all\n      that tends to increase the painful, immoral, and anti\u2010social\n      multiplication of our wants; on all that excites envy and dislike in\n      the soul of the common people, and confirms the notion that the\n      chief end of life is freedom to enjoy. We would preach by our\n      example the respect of superiors and equals, the respect of all men;\n      affectionate simplicity in our relations with inferiors and\n      insignificant persons; indulgence where our own claims only are\n      concerned, but firmness in our demands where they relate to duties\n      towards others or towards the public.\n\n      \u201cFor the common people are what we help them to become; their vices\n      are our vices, gazed upon, envied, and imitated; and if they come\n      back with all their weight upon us, it is but just.\u201d\n\n  154 Above, pp. 248 ff.\n\n  155 H. THOREAU: Walden, Riverside edition, p. 206, abridged.\n\n  156 C. H. HILTY: Gl\u00fcck, vol. i. p. 85.\n\n  157 The Mystery of Pain and Death, London, 1892, p. 258.\n\n  158 Compare Madame Guyon: \u201cIt was my practice to arise at midnight for\n      purposes of devotion.... It seemed to me that God came at the\n      precise time and woke me from sleep in order that I might enjoy him.\n      When I was out of health or greatly fatigued, he did not awake me,\n      but at such times I felt, even in my sleep, a singular possession of\n      God. He loved me so much that he seemed to pervade my being, at a\n      time when I could be only imperfectly conscious of his presence. My\n      sleep is sometimes broken,\u2014a sort of half sleep; but my soul seems\n      to be awake enough to know God, when it is hardly capable of knowing\n      anything else.\u201d T. C. UPHAM: The Life and Religious Experiences of\n      Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, vol. i. p. 260.\n\n  159 I have considerably abridged the words of the original, which is\n      given in EDWARDS\u2019S Narrative of the Revival in New England.\n\n  160 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, 1894, p. 125.\n\n  161 Paris, 1900.\n\n  162 Page 130.\n\n  163 Page 167.\n\n  164 Op. cit., p. 127.\n\n  165 The barrier between men and animals also. We read of Towianski, an\n      eminent Polish patriot and mystic, that \u201cone day one of his friends\n      met him in the rain, caressing a big dog which was jumping upon him\n      and covering him horribly with mud. On being asked why he permitted\n      the animal thus to dirty his clothes, Towianski replied: \u2018This dog,\n      whom I am now meeting for the first time, has shown a great fellow\u2010\n      feeling for me, and a great joy in my recognition and acceptance of\n      his greetings. Were I to drive him off, I should wound his feelings\n      and do him a moral injury. It would be an offense not only to him,\n      but to all the spirits of the other world who are on the same level\n      with him. The damage which he does to my coat is as nothing in\n      comparison with the wrong which I should inflict upon him, in case I\n      were to remain indifferent to the manifestations of his friendship.\n      We ought,\u2019 he added, \u2018both to lighten the condition of animals,\n      whenever we can, and at the same time to facilitate in ourselves\n      that union of the world of all spirits, which the sacrifice of\n      Christ has made possible.\u2019 \u201d Andr\u00e9 Towianski, Traduction de\n      l\u2019Italien, Turin, 1897 (privately printed). I owe my knowledge of\n      this book and of Towianski to my friend Professor W. Lutoslawski,\n      author of \u201cPlato\u2019s Logic.\u201d\n\n  166 J. PATTERSON\u2019S Life of Richard Weaver, pp. 66\u201068, abridged.\n\n  167 As where the future Buddha, incarnated as a hare, jumps into the\n      fire to cook himself for a meal for a beggar\u2014having previously\n      shaken himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur\n      should perish with him.\n\n  168 Bulletin de l\u2019Union pour l\u2019Action Morale, September, 1894.\n\n  169 B. PASCAL: Pri\u00e8res pour les Maladies, \u00a7\u00a7 xiii., xiv., abridged.\n\n  170 From THOMAS C. UPHAM\u2019S Life and Religious Opinions and Experiences\n      of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, ii. 48, i. 141, 413,\n      abridged.\n\n  171 Op. cit., London, 1901, p. 130.\n\n  172 CLAPAR\u00c8DE et GOTY: Deux H\u00e9roines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, p. 112.\n\n  173 Compare these three different statements of it: A. P. CALL: As a\n      Matter of Course, Boston, 1894; H. W. DRESSER: Living by the Spirit,\n      New York and London, 1900; H. W. SMITH: The Christian\u2019s Secret of a\n      Happy Life, published by the Willard Tract Repository, and now in\n      thousands of hands.\n\n  174 T. C. UPHAM: Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, 3d ed., New York,\n      1864, pp. 158, 172\u2010174.\n\n  175 The History of THOMAS ELWOOD, written by Himself, London, 1885, pp.\n      32\u201034.\n\n  176 Memoirs of W.E. Channing, Boston, 1840, i. 196.\n\n  177 L. TYERMAN: The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, i. 274.\n\n  178 A. MOUNIN: Le Cur\u00e9 d\u2019Ars, Vie de M. J. B. M. Vianney, 1864, p. 545,\n      abridged.\n\n  179 B. WENDELL: Cotton Mather, New York, no date, p. 198.\n\n  180 That of the earlier Jesuit, RODRIGUEZ, which has been translated\n      into all languages, is one of the best known. A convenient modern\n      manual, very well put together, is L\u2019Asc\u00e9tique Chr\u00e9tienne, by M. J.\n      RIBET, Paris, Poussielgue, nouvelle \u00e9dition, 1898.\n\n  181 SAINT JEAN DE LA CROIX, Vie et \u0152uvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99,\n      abridged.\n\n  182 \u201cInsects,\u201d i.e. lice, were an unfailing token of medi\u00e6val sainthood.\n      We read of Francis of Assisi\u2019s sheepskin that \u201coften a companion of\n      the saint would take it to the fire to clean and _dispediculate_ it,\n      doing so, as he said, because the seraphic father himself was no\n      enemy of _pedocchi_, but on the contrary kept them on him (le\n      portava adosso), and held it for an honor and a glory to wear these\n      celestial pearls in his habit.\u201d Quoted by P. SABATIER: Speculum\n      Perfectionis, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 231, note.\n\n  183 The Life of the Blessed HENRY SUSO, by Himself, translated by T. F.\n      KNOX, London, 1865, pp. 56\u201080, abridged.\n\n  184 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp.\n      265, 171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387.\n\n  185 LEJEUNE: Introduction \u00e0 la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaust\n      simile goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola.\n\n  186 ALFONSO RODRIGUEZ, S. J.: Pratique de la Perfection Chr\u00e9tienne, Part\n      iii., Treatise v., ch. x.\n\n  187 Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translated into French by\n      BOUIX, Paris, 1870.\n\n  188 BARTOLI\u2010MICHEL, ii. 13.\n\n  189 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi.\n\n  190 SAINTE\u2010BEUVE: Histoire de Port Royal, i. 346.\n\n  191 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise iii., chaps. vi., vii.\n\n  192 R. PHILIP: The Life and Times of George Whitefield, London, 1842, p.\n      366.\n\n  193 EDWARD CARPENTER: Towards Democracy, p. 362, abridged.\n\n  194 Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. SABATIER, Paris, 1898, pp. 10, 13.\n\n  195 An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, London, 1699, pp. 269, 270,\n      abridged.\n\n      Another example from Starbuck\u2019s MS. collection:\u2014\n\n      \u201cAt a meeting held at six the next morning, I heard a man relate his\n      experience. He said: The Lord asked him if he would confess Christ\n      among the quarrymen with whom he worked, and he said he would. Then\n      he asked him if he would give up to be used of the Lord the four\n      hundred dollars he had laid up, and he said he would, and thus the\n      Lord saved him. The thought came to me at once that I had never made\n      a real consecration either of myself or of my property to the Lord,\n      but had always tried to serve the Lord in _my_ way. Now the Lord\n      asked me if I would serve him in _his_ way, and go out alone and\n      penniless if he so ordered. The question was pressed home, and I\n      must decide: To forsake all and have him, or have all and lose him!\n      I soon decided to take him; and the blessed assurance came, that he\n      had taken me for his own, and my joy was full. I returned home from\n      the meeting with feelings as simple as a child. I thought all would\n      be glad to hear of the joy of the Lord that possessed me, and so I\n      began to tell the simple story. But to my great surprise, the\n      pastors (for I attended meetings in three churches) opposed the\n      experience and said it was fanaticism, and one told the members of\n      his church to shun those that professed it, and I soon found that my\n      foes were those of my own household.\u201d\n\n  196 J. J. CHAPMAN, in the Political Nursery, vol. iv. p. 4, April, 1900,\n      abridged.\n\n  197 GEORGE FOX: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59\u201061, abridged.\n\n  198 Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint\n      Francis to Christ\u2019s wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ\u2019s\n      childhood; Saint Bernard to his humanity; Saint Teresa to Saint\n      Joseph, etc. The Shi\u2010ite Mohammedans venerate Ali, the Prophet\u2019s\n      son\u2010in\u2010law, instead of Abu\u2010bekr, his brother\u2010in\u2010law. Vamb\u00e9ry\n      describes a dervish whom he met in Persia, \u201cwho had solemnly vowed,\n      thirty years before, that he would never employ his organs of speech\n      otherwise but in uttering, everlastingly, the name of his favorite,\n      _Ali, Ali_. He thus wished to signify to the world that he was the\n      most devoted partisan of that Ali who had been dead a thousand\n      years. In his own home, speaking with his wife, children, and\n      friends, no other word but \u2018Ali!\u2019 ever passed his lips. If he wanted\n      food or drink or anything else, he expressed his wants still by\n      repeating \u2018Ali!\u2019 Begging or buying at the bazaar, it was always\n      \u2018Ali!\u2019 Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on his\n      monotonous \u2018Ali!\u2019 Latterly his zeal assumed such tremendous\n      proportions that, like a madman, he would race, the whole day, up\n      and down the streets of the town, throwing his stick high up into\n      the air, and shriek out, all the while, at the top of his voice,\n      \u2018Ali!\u2019 This dervish was venerated by everybody as a saint, and\n      received everywhere with the greatest distinction.\u201d ARMINIUS\n      VAMB\u00c9RY, his Life and Adventures, written by Himself, London, 1889,\n      p. 69. On the anniversary of the death of Hussein, Ali\u2019s son, the\n      Shi\u2010ite Moslems still make the air resound with cries of his name\n      and Ali\u2019s.\n\n  199 Compare H. C. WARREN: Buddhism in Translation, Cambridge, U. S.,\n      1898, passim.\n\n  200 Compare J. L. MERRICK: The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as\n      contained in the Sheeah traditions of the Hyat\u2010ul\u2010Kuloob, Boston,\n      1850, passim.\n\n  201 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, p.\n      145.\n\n  202 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp.\n      365, 241.\n\n  203 BOUGAUD: Op. cit., p. 267.\n\n  204 Examples: \u201cSuffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory of\n      God, to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in\n      her mouth, when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her\n      lovingly, and to find comfort Himself in these odors. After having\n      gently breathed them in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to\n      the Saints, as if contented with what He had done: \u2018See the new\n      present which my betrothed has given Me!\u2019\n\n      \u201cOne day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sung the words,\n      \u2018_Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus_.\u2019 The Son of God leaning towards her\n      like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to\n      her at the second Sanctus: \u2018In this _Sanctus_ addressed to my\n      person, receive with this kiss all the sanctity of my divinity and\n      of my humanity, and let it be to thee a sufficient preparation for\n      approaching the communion table.\u2019 And the next following Sunday,\n      while she was thanking God for this favor, behold the Son of God,\n      more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in His arms as if\n      He were proud of her, and presents her to God the Father, in that\n      perfection of sanctity with which He had dowered her. And the Father\n      took such delight in this soul thus presented by His only Son, that,\n      as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gave her, and the Holy\n      Ghost gave her also, the Sanctity attributed to each by His own\n      _Sanctus_\u2014and thus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of\n      the blessing of _Sanctity_, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by\n      Wisdom, and by Love.\u201d R\u00e9v\u00e9lations de Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898,\n      i. 44, 186.\n\n  205 FURNEAUX JORDAN: Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition.\n      Later editions change the nomenclature.\n\n  206 As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M.\n      BALDWIN\u2019S little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.\n\n  207 On this subject I refer to the work of M. MURISIER (Les Maladies du\n      Sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the\n      mainspring of the whole religious life. But _all_ strongly ideal\n      interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to\n      subordinate everything to themselves. One would infer from M.\n      Murisier\u2019s pages that this formal condition was peculiarly\n      characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost\n      neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the\n      present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of\n      material content which is characteristic, and which is more\n      important by far than any general psychological form. In spite of\n      this criticism, I find M. Murisier\u2019s book highly instructive.\n\n  208 Example: \u201cAt the first beginning of the Servitor\u2019s [Suso\u2019s] interior\n      life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he\n      marked out for himself, in thought, three circles, within which he\n      shut himself up, as in a spiritual intrenchment. The first circle\n      was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he was within this\n      circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second circle\n      was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and\n      outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for\n      him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside these\n      circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild\n      animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and\n      therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness.\u201d The Life of\n      the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by KNOX, London,\n      1865, p. 168.\n\n  209 Vie des premi\u00e8res Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congr\u00e9gation de St.\n      Dominique, \u00e0 Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129.\n\n  210 MESCHLER\u2019S Life of Saint Louis of Gonzaga, French translation by\n      LEBR\u00c9QUIER, 1891; p. 40.\n\n  211 In his boyish note\u2010book he praises the monastic life for its freedom\n      from sin, and for the imperishable treasures, which it enables us to\n      store up, \u201cof merit in God\u2019s eyes which makes of Him our debtor for\n      all Eternity.\u201d Loc. cit., p. 62.\n\n  212 Mademoiselle Mori, a novel quoted in HARE\u2019S Walks in Rome, 1900, i.\n      55.\n\n      I cannot resist the temptation to quote from Starbuck\u2019s book, p.\n      388, another case of purification by elimination. It runs as\n      follows:\u2014\n\n      \u201cThe signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of\n      frequent occurrence. They get out of tune with other people; often\n      they will have nothing to do with churches, which they regard as\n      worldly; they become hypercritical towards others; they grow\n      careless of their social, political, and financial obligations. As\n      an instance of this type may be mentioned a woman of sixty\u2010eight of\n      whom the writer made a special study. She had been a member of one\n      of the most active and progressive churches in a busy part of a\n      large city. Her pastor described her as having reached the\n      censorious stage. She had grown more and more out of sympathy with\n      the church; her connection with it finally consisted simply in\n      attendance at prayer\u2010meeting, at which her only message was that of\n      reproof and condemnation of the others for living on a low plane. At\n      last she withdrew from fellowship with any church. The writer found\n      her living alone in a little room on the top story of a cheap\n      boarding\u2010house, quite out of touch with all human relations, but\n      apparently happy in the enjoyment of her own spiritual blessings.\n      Her time was occupied in writing booklets on sanctification\u2014page\n      after page of dreamy rhapsody. She proved to be one of a small group\n      of persons who claim that entire salvation involves three steps\n      instead of two; not only must there be conversion and\n      sanctification, but a third, which they call \u2018crucifixion\u2019 or\n      \u2018perfect redemption,\u2019 and which seems to bear the same relation to\n      sanctification that this bears to conversion. She related how the\n      Spirit had said to her, \u2018Stop going to church. Stop going to\n      holiness meetings. Go to your own room and I will teach you.\u2019 She\n      professes to care nothing for colleges, or preachers, or churches,\n      but only cares to listen to what God says to her. Her description of\n      her experience seemed entirely consistent; she is happy and\n      contented, and her life is entirely satisfactory to herself. While\n      listening to her own story, one was tempted to forget that it was\n      from the life of a person who could not live by it in conjunction\n      with her fellows.\u201d\n\n  213 The best missionary lives abound in the victorious combination of\n      non\u2010resistance with personal authority. John G. Paton, for example,\n      in the New Hebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals, preserves a\n      charmed life by dint of it. When it comes to the point, no one ever\n      dares actually to strike him. Native converts, inspired by him,\n      showed analogous virtue. \u201cOne of our chiefs, full of the Christ\u2010\n      kindled desire to seek and to save, sent a message to an inland\n      chief, that he and four attendants would come on Sabbath and tell\n      them the gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came back sternly\n      forbidding their visit, and threatening with death any Christian\n      that approached their village. Our chief sent in response a loving\n      message, telling them that Jehovah had taught the Christians to\n      return good for evil, and that they would come unarmed to tell them\n      the story of how the Son of God came into the world and died in\n      order to bless and save his enemies. The heathen chief sent back a\n      stern and prompt reply once more: \u2018If you come, you will be killed.\u2019\n      On Sabbath morn the Christian chief and his four companions were met\n      outside the village by the heathen chief, who implored and\n      threatened them once more. But the former said:\u2014\n\n      \u201c \u2018We come to you without weapons of war! We come only to tell you\n      about Jesus. We believe that He will protect us to\u2010day.\u2019\n\n      \u201cAs they pressed steadily forward towards the village, spears began\n      to be thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except one\n      dexterous warriors; and others they literally received with their\n      bare hands, and turned them aside in an incredible manner. The\n      heathen, apparently thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them\n      without weapons of war, and not even flinging back their own spears\n      which they had caught, after having thrown what the old chief called\n      \u2018a shower of spears,\u2019 desisted from mere surprise. Our Christian\n      chief called out, as he and his companions drew up in the midst of\n      them on the village public ground:\u2014\n\n      \u201c \u2018Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once\n      we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we\n      come, not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our\n      dark hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other\n      weapons of war, and to hear what we can tell you about the love of\n      God, our great Father, the only living God.\u2019\n\n      \u201cThe heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on\n      these Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened\n      for the first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We\n      lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of\n      Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas,\n      amongst all those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on\n      the part of converts cannot be recited.\u201d JOHN G. PATON, Missionary\n      to the New Hebrides, An Autobiography, second part, London, 1890, p.\n      243.\n\n  214 Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French\n      translation, p. 333), \u201chad passed forty years without ever sleeping\n      more than an hour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this\n      was the one that had cost him the most. To compass it, he kept\n      always on his knees or on his feet. The little sleep he allowed\n      nature to take was snatched in a sitting posture, his head leaning\n      against a piece of wood fixed in the wall. Even had he wished to lie\n      down, it would have been impossible, because his cell was only four\n      feet and a half long. In the course of all these years he never\n      raised his hood, no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain\u2019s\n      strength. He never put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse\n      sackcloth, with nothing else upon his skin. This garment was as\n      scant as possible, and over it a little cloak of the same stuff.\n      When the cold was great he took off the cloak and opened for a while\n      the door and little window of his cell. Then he closed them and\n      resumed the mantle,\u2014his way, as he told us, of warming himself, and\n      making his body feel a better temperature. It was a frequent thing\n      with him to eat once only in three days; and when I expressed my\n      surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired the\n      habit. One of his companions has assured me that he has gone\n      sometimes eight days without food.... His poverty was extreme; and\n      his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he\n      had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any\n      of the monks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he\n      never raised his eyes, and only found his way about by following the\n      others. He showed this same modesty on public highways. He spent\n      many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed\n      to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent to him\n      whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first\n      came to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed\n      of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this\n      sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke unless he was\n      questioned, but his intellectual right\u2010mindedness and grace gave to\n      all his words an irresistible charm.\u201d\n\n  215 F. MAX M\u00dcLLER: Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 180.\n\n  216 OLDENBERG: Buddha; translated by W. HOEY, London, 1882, p. 127.\n\n  217 \u201cThe vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint\n      as regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away.\u201d Ramakrishna,\n      his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 172.\n\n  218 \u201cWhen a church has to be run by oysters, ice\u2010cream, and fun,\u201d I read\n      in an American religious paper, \u201cyou may be sure that it is running\n      away from Christ.\u201d Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the\n      present plight of many of our churches.\n\n  219 C. V. B. K.: Friedens\u2010 und Kriegs\u2010moral der Heere. Quoted by HAMON:\n      Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. xli.\n\n  220 Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, \u00a7 14. I have abridged,\n      and in one place transposed, a sentence.\n\n  221 We all know _daft_ saints, and they inspire a queer kind of\n      aversion. But in comparing saints with strong men we must choose\n      individuals on the same intellectual level. The under\u2010witted strong\n      man, homologous in his sphere with the under\u2010witted saint, is the\n      bully of the slums, the hooligan or rowdy. Surely on this level also\n      the saint preserves a certain superiority.\n\n  222 See above, p. 327.\n\n  223 Above, pp. 327\u2010334.\n\n  224 Newman\u2019s _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_ is another instance.\n\n  225 \u201cMesopotamia\u201d is the stock comic instance.\u2014An excellent old German\n      lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me\n      her _Sehnsucht_ that she might yet visit \u201cPhiladelphi\u0101,\u201d whose\n      wondrous name had always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster it\n      is said that \u201csingle words (as _chalcedony_), or the names of\n      ancient heroes, had a mighty fascination over him. \u2018At any time the\n      word _hermit_ was enough to transport him.\u2019 The words _woods_ and\n      _forests_ would produce the most powerful emotion.\u201d Foster\u2019s Life,\n      by RYLAND, New York, 1846, p. 3.\n\n  226 The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of\n      himself as follows:\u2014\n\n      \u201cI have never had any revelations through an\u00e6sthetics, but a kind of\n      waking trance\u2014this for lack of a better word\u2014I have frequently had,\n      quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come\n      upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all\n      at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of\n      individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away\n      into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the\n      clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words\u2014where death\n      was an almost laughable impossibility\u2014the loss of personality (if so\n      it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed\n      of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly\n      beyond words?\u201d\n\n      Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this\n      condition: \u201cBy God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It\n      is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder,\n      associated with absolute clearness of mind.\u201d Memoirs of Alfred\n      Tennyson, ii. 473.\n\n  227 The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the Cavendish Lecture,\n      on Dreamy Mental States, London, Bailli\u00e8re, 1895. They have been a\n      good deal discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example,\n      BERNARD\u2010LEROY: L\u2019Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898.\n\n  228 Charles Kingsley\u2019s Life, i. 55, quoted by INGE: Christian Mysticism,\n      London, 1899, p. 341.\n\n  229 H. F. BROWN: J. A. Symonds, a Biography, London, 1895, pp. 29\u201031,\n      abridged.\n\n  230 Crichton\u2010Browne expressly says that Symonds\u2019s \u201chighest nerve centres\n      were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental\n      states which afflicted him so grievously.\u201d Symonds was, however, a\n      perfect monster of many\u2010sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic\n      gives no objective grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save\n      that Symonds complained occasionally, as all susceptible and\n      ambitious men complain, of lassitude and uncertainty as to his\n      life\u2019s mission.\n\n  231 What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being\n      with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his\n      whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his\n      consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept\n      subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical\n      level, and the _Aufgabe_ of making it articulate was surely set to\n      Hegel\u2019s intellect by mystical feeling.\n\n  232 BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD: The An\u00e6sthetic Revelation and the Gist of\n      Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made\n      several attempts to adumbrate the an\u00e6sthetic revelation, in\n      pamphlets of rare literary distinction, privately printed and\n      distributed by himself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who\n      died young at Amherst in the \u201980\u2019s, much lamented by those who knew\n      him, was also impressed by the revelation. \u201cIn the first place,\u201d he\n      once wrote to me, \u201cMr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if\n      anything, non\u2010emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood\n      says, \u2018the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, but how,\n      the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the\n      vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at\n      stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and\n      presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late.\n      It is an _initiation of the past_.\u2019 The real secret would be the\n      formula by which the \u2018now\u2019 keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet\n      never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating?\n      The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is\n      static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer\u2014we\n      simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why are twice two\n      four? Because, in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life\n      no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is a\u2010going. But\n      the revelation adds: it goes because it is and _was_ a\u2010going. You\n      walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary\n      philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail. The more he hunts\n      the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his\n      heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is\n      already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand\n      it. But at the moment of recovery from an\u00e6sthesis, just then,\n      _before starting on life_, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my\n      heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting.\n      The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished\n      before we set out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished,\n      not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being\n      already there),\u2014which may occur vicariously in this life when we\n      cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile\n      upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we\n      are forever half a second too late\u2014that\u2019s all. \u2018You could kiss your\n      own lips, and have all the fun to yourself,\u2019 it says, if you only\n      knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay\n      there till you got round to them. Why don\u2019t you manage it somehow?\u201d\n\n      Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will at least recognize\n      the region of thought of which Mr. Clark writes, as familiar. In his\n      latest pamphlet, \u201cTennyson\u2019s Trances and the An\u00e6sthetic Revelation,\u201d\n      Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows:\u2014\n\n      \u201cThe An\u00e6sthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the\n      Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the\n      Inevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive\n      is inherent\u2014it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate,\n      nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or\n      purpose, it knows not of.\n\n      \u201cIt affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things;\n      but it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a\n      secular and intimately personal illumination of the nature and\n      motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent\u2014as if it should\n      have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof.\n\n      \u201cAlthough it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes\n      directly such a matter of course\u2014so old\u2010fashioned, and so akin to\n      proverbs, that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense\n      of safety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal. But\n      no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he\n      is realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.\n\n      \u201cRepetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it\n      could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal\n      consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its\n      occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import,\u2014with only\n      this consolatory afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth,\n      and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning,\n      or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in \u2018spiritual\n      things.\u2019\n\n      \u201cThe lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom is within. All\n      days are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of\n      eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the\n      row of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so\n      may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity\n      for which each of us stands.\n\n      \u201cThis has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my\n      first printed mention of it I declared: \u2018The world is no more the\n      alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud\u2010grimed and still\n      sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray\n      gull lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues\n      with a fearless eye.\u2019 And now, after twenty\u2010seven years of this\n      experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while\n      I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know\u2014as having\n      known\u2014the meaning of Existence: the sane centre of the universe\u2014at\n      once the wonder and the assurance of the soul\u2014for which the speech\n      of reason has as yet no name but the An\u00e6sthetic Revelation.\u201d\u2014I have\n      considerably abridged the quotation.\n\n  233 Op. cit., pp. 78\u201080, abridged. I subjoin, also abridging it, another\n      interesting an\u00e6sthetic revelation communicated to me in manuscript\n      by a friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking\n      ether for a surgical operation.\n\n      \u201cI wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I\n      remembered having heard it said that people \u2018learn through\n      suffering,\u2019 and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this\n      saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, \u2018to suffer _is_ to\n      learn.\u2019\n\n      \u201cWith that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately\n      preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was\n      most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.\n\n      \u201cA great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was\n      on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway.\n      The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people\n      close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight\n      line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short\n      conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be\n      directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his\n      own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying\n      with all his might to do was to _change his course_, to _bend_ the\n      line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he\n      wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that\n      he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my\n      hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at\n      the acutest point of this, as he passed, I _saw_. I understood for a\n      moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could\n      remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and\n      I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute\n      angle, I should have both suffered and \u2018seen\u2019 still more, and should\n      probably have died.\n\n      \u201cHe went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life\n      passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of\n      distress, and I _understood_ them. _This_ was what it had all meant,\n      _this_ was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. I\n      did not see God\u2019s purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire\n      relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a\n      man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting a\n      cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on waking, my first feeling\n      was, and it came with tears, \u2018Domine non sum digna,\u2019 for I had been\n      lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized that in\n      that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and\n      purely than I had ever done in my life before, or that I am capable\n      of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing\n      something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent\n      of my capacity for suffering.\n\n      \u201cWhile regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so\n      deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the _love_ of God,\n      nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I\n      could only just catch, saying, \u2018Knowledge and Love are One, and the\n      _measure_ is suffering\u2019\u2014I give the words as they came to me. With\n      that I came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with\n      the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be\n      called the \u2018cause\u2019 of my experience was a slight operation under\n      insufficient ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common\n      city window in a common city street. If I had to formulate a few of\n      the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as\n      follows:\u2014\n\n      \u201cThe eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness.\n      The veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;\u2014the\n      passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and\n      defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does;\u2014the\n      impossibility of discovery without its price;\u2014finally, the excess of\n      what the suffering \u2018seer\u2019 or genius pays over what his generation\n      gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to\n      save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and\n      satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the\n      lac away, dropping _one_ rupee, and says, \u2018That you may give them.\n      That you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.\u2019) I perceived\n      also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over\n      what we can demonstrate.\n\n      \u201cAnd so on!\u2014these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms; but\n      for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even\n      such words as these has been given me by an ether dream.\u201d\n\n  234 In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.\n\n  235 The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this from\n      Starbuck\u2019s manuscript collection:\u2014\n\n      \u201cI never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood\n      at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the\n      immensity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an\n      atom too small for the notice of Almighty God.\u201d\n\n      I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck\u2019s collection:\u2014\n\n      \u201cIn that time the consciousness of God\u2019s nearness came to me\n      sometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence,\n      I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the\n      moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a\n      personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of\n      something bigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one\n      with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I\n      exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all\u2014the\n      drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree\u2010trunks, and so\n      on. In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I\n      wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing\n      self in a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy\n      because that perception was not constant.\u201d The cases quoted in my\n      third lecture, pp. 66, 67, 70, are still better ones of this type.\n      In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol.\n      lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of\n      the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the\n      object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences,\n      of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the\n      constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the\n      object in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must refer the\n      reader to the highly instructive article, which seems to me to throw\n      light upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to account\n      for the rapture or the revelation\u2010value of the experience in the\n      Subject\u2019s eyes.\n\n  236 Op. cit., i. 43\u201044.\n\n  237 Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years\n      she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.\n\n  238 Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was\n      probably with him a chronic mystical perception: \u201cThere is,\u201d he\n      writes, \u201capart from mere intellect, in the make\u2010up of every superior\n      human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument,\n      frequently without what is called education (though I think it the\n      goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of\n      the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this\n      multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make\u2010believe\n      and general unsettledness, we call _the world_; a soul\u2010sight of that\n      divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of\n      things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial,\n      however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.\n      [Of] such soul\u2010sight and root\u2010centre for the mind mere optimism\n      explains only the surface.\u201d Whitman charges it against Carlyle that\n      he lacked this perception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia,\n      1882, p. 174.\n\n  239 My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged.\n\n  240 Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged.\n\n  241 Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human Mind,\n      Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.\n\n  242 Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privately printed\n      pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke\u2019s larger work, and differs\n      verbally a little from the text of the latter.\n\n  243 My quotations are from VIVEKANANDA, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The\n      completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by\n      VIHARI LALA MITRA: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta,\n      1891\u201099.\n\n  244 A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of Yoga\n      with those of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible\n      by us, says: \u201cIt makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and\n      happy men.... Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his\n      thoughts and his body, he grows into a \u2018character.\u2019 By the\n      subjection of his impulses and propensities to his will, and the\n      fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, he becomes a\n      \u2018personality\u2019 hard to influence by others, and thus almost the\n      opposite of what we usually imagine a \u2018medium\u2019 so\u2010called, or\n      \u2018psychic subject\u2019 to be.\u201d KARL KELLNER: Yoga: Eine Skizze, M\u00fcnchen,\n      1896, p. 21.\n\n  245 I follow the account in C. F. KOEPPEN: Die Religion des Buddha,\n      Berlin, 1857, i. 585 ff.\n\n  246 For a full account of him, see D. B. MACDONALD: The Life of Al\u2010\n      Ghazzali, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899,\n      vol. xx. p. 71.\n\n  247 A. SCHM\u00d6LDERS: Essai sur les \u00e9coles philosophiques chez les Arabes,\n      Paris, 1842, pp. 54\u201068, abridged.\n\n  248 G\u00d6RRES\u2019S Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So\n      does RIBET\u2019S Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more\n      methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of VALLGORNERA, 2\n      vols., Turin, 1890.\n\n  249 M. R\u00c9C\u00c9JAC, in a recent volume, makes them essential. Mysticism he\n      defines as \u201cthe tendency to draw near to the Absolute morally, _and\n      by the aid of Symbols_.\u201d See his Fondements de la Connaissance\n      mystique, Paris, 1897, p. 66. But there are unquestionably mystical\n      conditions in which sensible symbols play no part.\n\n  250 Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book ii. ch.\n      xvii., in Vie et \u0152uvres, 3me \u00e9dition, Paris, 1893, iii. 428\u2010432.\n      Chapter xi. of book ii. of Saint John\u2019s Ascent of Carmel is devoted\n      to showing the harmfulness for the mystical life of the use of\n      sensible imagery.\n\n  251 In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations,\n      verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as \u201clevitation,\u201d\n      stigmatization, and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which\n      mystics have often presented (or are believed to have presented),\n      have no essential mystical significance, for they occur with no\n      consciousness of illumination whatever, when they occur, as they\n      often do, in persons of non\u2010mystical mind. Consciousness of\n      illumination is for us the essential mark of \u201cmystical\u201d states.\n\n  252 The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, ch. i., in \u0152uvres, translated by\n      Bouix, iii. 421\u2010424.\n\n  253 BARTOLI\u2010MICHEL: Vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola, i. 34\u201036. Others have\n      had illuminations about the created world, Jacob Boehme, for\n      instance. At the age of twenty\u2010five he was \u201csurrounded by the divine\n      light, and replenished with the heavenly knowledge; insomuch as\n      going abroad into the fields to a green, at G\u00f6rlitz, he there sat\n      down, and viewing the herbs and grass of the field, in his inward\n      light he saw into their essences, use, and properties, which was\n      discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures.\u201d Of\n      a later period of experience he writes: \u201cIn one quarter of an hour I\n      saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an\n      university. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the Byss and\n      the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holy Trinity, the\n      descent and original of the world and of all creatures through the\n      divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the\n      external and visible world being of a procreation or extern birth\n      from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the\n      whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and the mutual\n      original and existence; and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb\n      of eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder at\n      it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly\n      apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with the pen.\n      For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all\n      things are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible for me to\n      explicate the same.\u201d Jacob Behmen\u2019s Theosophic Philosophy, etc., by\n      EDWARD TAYLOR, London, 1691, pp. 425, 427, abridged. So George Fox:\n      \u201cI was come up to the state of Adam in which he was before he fell.\n      The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me, how all things\n      had their names given to them, according to their nature and virtue.\n      I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practice physic for\n      the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures\n      were so opened to me by the Lord.\u201d Journal, Philadelphia, no date,\n      p. 69. Contemporary \u201cClairvoyance\u201d abounds in similar revelations.\n      Andrew Jackson Davis\u2019s cosmogonies, for example, or certain\n      experiences related in the delectable \u201cReminiscences and Memories of\n      Henry Thomas Butterworth,\u201d Lebanon, Ohio, 1886.\n\n  254 Vie, pp. 581, 582.\n\n  255 Loc. cit., p. 574.\n\n  256 Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the body has a part\n      and pure spiritual pain (Interior Castle, 6th Abode, ch. xi.). As\n      for the bodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as\n      \u201cpenetrating to the marrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures\n      affect only the surface of the senses. I think,\u201d she adds, \u201cthat\n      this is a just description, and I cannot make it better.\u201d Ibid., 5th\n      Abode, ch. i.\n\n  257 Vie, p. 198.\n\n  258 \u0152uvres, ii. 320.\n\n  259 Above, p. 21.\n\n  260 Vie, pp. 229, 200, 231\u2010233, 243.\n\n  261 M\u00dcLLER\u2019S translation, part ii. p. 180.\n\n  262 T. DAVIDSON\u2019S translation, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy,\n      1893, vol. xxii. p. 399.\n\n  263 \u201cDeus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihil vocatur.\u201d Scotus\n      Erigena, quoted by ANDREW SETH: Two Lectures on Theism, New York,\n      1897, p. 55.\n\n  264 J. ROYCE: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282.\n\n  265 Jacob Behmen\u2019s Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, translated by\n      BERNARD HOLLAND, London, 1901, p. 48.\n\n  266 Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25.\n\n  267 Op. cit., pp. 42, 74, abridged.\n\n  268 From a French book I take this mystical expression of happiness in\n      God\u2019s indwelling presence:\u2014\n\n      \u201cJesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. It is not so much\n      a habitation, an association, as a sort of fusion. Oh, new and\n      blessed life! life which becomes each day more luminous.... The wall\n      before me, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour\n      because the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall they light up a\n      conflagration of glory; the smallest speck of glass sparkles, each\n      grain of sand emits fire; even so there is a royal song of triumph\n      in my heart because the Lord is there. My days succeed each other;\n      yesterday a blue sky; to\u2010day a clouded sun; a night filled with\n      strange dreams; but as soon as the eyes open, and I regain\n      consciousness and seem to begin life again, it is always the same\n      figure before me, always the same presence filling my heart....\n      Formerly the day was dulled by the absence of the Lord. I used to\n      wake invaded by all sorts of sad impressions, and I did not find him\n      on my path. To\u2010day he is with me; and the light cloudiness which\n      covers things is not an obstacle to my communion with him. I feel\n      the pressure of his hand, I feel something else which fills me with\n      a serene joy; shall I dare to speak it out? Yes, for it is the true\n      expression of what I experience. The Holy Spirit is not merely\n      making me a visit; it is no mere dazzling apparition which may from\n      one moment to another spread its wings and leave me in my night, it\n      is a permanent habitation. He can depart only if he takes me with\n      him. More than that; he is not other than myself: he is one with me.\n      It is not a juxtaposition, it is a penetration, a profound\n      modification of my nature, a new manner of my being.\u201d Quoted from\n      the MS. \u201cof an old man\u201d by WILFRED MONOD: Il Vit: six m\u00e9ditations\n      sur le myst\u00e8re chr\u00e9tien, pp. 280\u2010283.\n\n  269 Compare M. MAETERLINCK: L\u2019Ornement des Noces spirituelles de\n      Ruysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, Introduction, p. xix.\n\n  270 Upanishads, M. M\u00dcLLER\u2019S translation, ii. 17, 334.\n\n  271 SCHM\u00d6LDERS: Op. cit., p. 210.\n\n  272 Enneads, BOUILLIER\u2019S translation, Paris, 1861, iii. 561. Compare pp.\n      473\u2010477, and vol. i. p. 27.\n\n  273 Autobiography, pp. 309, 310.\n\n  274 Op. cit., Strophe 10.\n\n  275 H. P. BLAVATSKY: The Voice of the Silence.\n\n  276 SWINBURNE: On the Verge, in \u201cA Midsummer Vacation.\u201d\n\n  277 Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399.\n\n  278 As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical\n      region and the discursive life is contained in an article on\n      Aristotle\u2019s Unmoved Mover, by F. C. S. SCHILLER, in Mind, vol. ix.,\n      1900.\n\n  279 I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the\n      books are full, where the director (but usually not the subject)\n      remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from\n      the demon.\n\n  280 Example: Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching\n      Methodism: \u201cMy soul was as a watered garden, and I could sing\n      praises to God all day long; for he turned my captivity into joy,\n      and gave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed\n      of down. Now could I say, \u2018God\u2019s service is perfect freedom,\u2019 and I\n      was carried out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the\n      same river of peace which my God gave so largely to me.\u201d Journal,\n      London, no date, p. 172.\n\n  281 RUYSBROECK, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a\n      chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. DELACROIX\u2019S book\n      (Essai sur le mysticisme sp\u00e9culatif en Allemagne au XIVme Si\u00e8cle,\n      Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A. JUNDT:\n      Les Amis de Dieu au XIVme Si\u00e8cle, Th\u00e8se de Strasbourg, 1879.\n\n  282 Compare PAUL ROUSSELOT: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch.\n      xii.\n\n  283 See CARPENTER\u2019S Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and\n      JEFFERIES\u2019S wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my\n      Heart.\n\n  284 In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration, \u201cMAX NORDAU\u201d\n      seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the\n      lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden\n      significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant\n      uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a\n      degenerate brain. These give to him who has the experience a vague\n      and vast sense of its leading further, yet they awaken no definite\n      or useful consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible\n      one for certain sorts of feeling of significance; and other\n      alienists (WERNICKE, for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie,\n      Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have explained \u201cparanoiac\u201d conditions by a\n      laming of the association\u2010organ. But the higher mystical flights,\n      with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no\n      such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to\n      ascribe them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral\n      activity correlative to which we as yet know nothing.\n\n  285 They sometimes add subjective _audita et visa_ to the facts, but as\n      these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no\n      alteration in the facts of sense.\n\n  286 Compare Professor W. WALLACE\u2019S Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and\n      Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.\n\n  287 Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.\n\n  288 Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized.\n\n  289 Discourse II. \u00a7 7.\n\n  290 As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions,\n      and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious\n      beliefs, see the striking work of H. FIELDING, The Hearts of Men,\n      London, 1902, which came into my hands after my text was written.\n      \u201cCreeds,\u201d says the author, \u201care the grammar of religion, they are to\n      religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our\n      wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never\n      proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and\n      changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow\u201d (p. 313). The\n      whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts, is little\n      more than an amplification of this text.\n\n  291 For convenience\u2019 sake, I follow the order of A. ST\u00d6CKL\u2019S Lehrbuch\n      der Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. BOEDDER\u2019S\n      Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual;\n      but an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant\n      theologians as C. HODGE: Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A.\n      H. STRONG: Systematic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.\n\n  292 It must not be forgotten that any form of _dis_order in the world\n      might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of\n      disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be\n      named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The\n      ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past\n      history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the\n      fullness of time just that particular arrangement of d\u00e9bris of\n      masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes\n      would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or\n      good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere\n      from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and\n      save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly\n      invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The\n      first is physical: Nature\u2019s forces tend of their own accord only to\n      disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture.\n      This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light\n      of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second\n      principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement\n      that for _us_ is \u201cdisorderly\u201d can possibly have been an object of\n      design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the\n      interests of anthropomorphic Theism.\n\n      When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way\n      or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize\n      them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain\n      types of arrangement, useful, \u00e6sthetic, or moral,\u2014so interested that\n      whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our\n      attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world\n      selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our\n      point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at,\n      and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly\n      arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a\n      thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by\n      eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost\n      any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then\n      say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that\n      the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our\n      dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast _plenum_ in\n      which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable\n      directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines\n      we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither\n      named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things\n      \u2019unadapted\u2019 to each other in this world than there are things\n      \u2019adapted\u2019; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with\n      regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of\n      thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our\n      memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the\n      collection of them fills our encyclop\u00e6dias. Yet all the while\n      between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects\n      that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet\n      attracted our attention.\n\n      The facts of order from which the physico\u2010theological argument\n      starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary\n      human products. So long as this is the case, although of course no\n      argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him\n      will fail to constitute a knock\u2010down proof of his existence. It will\n      be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him\n      already.\n\n  293 For the scholastics the _facultas appetendi_ embraces feeling,\n      desire, and will.\n\n  294 Op. cit., Discourse III. \u00a7 7.\n\n  295 In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science\n      Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286.\n\n  296 Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive\n      justice. But who, in the present state of theological opinion on\n      that point, will dare maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in\n      some shape is rendered certain by pure logic? Theology herself has\n      largely based this doctrine upon revelation; and, in discussing it,\n      has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas of\n      criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But the very notion\n      that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing\n      sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams and\n      rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our\n      modern imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon\n      such a basis.\n\n  297 John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London\n      and New York, 1880, pp. 243\u2010250, and 291\u2010299, much abridged.\n\n  298 A. C. FRASER: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and\n      London, 1899, especially part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.; A. SETH\n      [PRINGLE\u2010PATTISON]: Hegelianism and Personality, Ibid., 1890,\n      passim.\n\n      The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual Soul\n      of the world, with which I am acquainted, are those of my colleague,\n      Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston, 1885;\n      in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; and lately in\n      his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2\n      vols., New York and London, 1901\u201002. I doubtless seem to some of my\n      readers to evade the philosophic duty which my thesis in this\n      lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to meet Professor\n      Royce\u2019s arguments articulately. I admit the momentary evasion. In\n      the present lectures, which are cast throughout in a popular mould,\n      there seemed no room for subtle metaphysical discussion, and for\n      tactical purposes it was sufficient, the contention of philosophy\n      being what it is (namely, that religion can be transformed into a\n      universally convincing science), to point to the fact that no\n      religious philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers.\n      Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may be\n      followed by another, if I am spared to write it, in which not only\n      Professor Royce\u2019s arguments, but others for monistic absolutism\n      shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their\n      great importance calls for. At present I resign myself to lying\n      passive under the reproach of superficiality.\n\n  299 Idea of a University, Discourse III. \u00a7 7.\n\n  300 Newman\u2019s imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system\n      that he can write: \u201cFrom the age of fifteen, dogma has been the\n      fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I\n      cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion.\u201d And\n      again, speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: \u201cI\n      loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop\u2019s sight, as if it were\n      the sight of God.\u201d Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50.\n\n  301 The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical\n      importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under\n      the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and\n      must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 280 ff.).\n      For others, on the contrary, superabundance, over\u2010pressure,\n      stimulation, lots of superficial relations, are indispensable. There\n      are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their\n      debts, bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their\n      letters answered, their perplexities relieved, and their duties\n      fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes\n      with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day\n      stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with\n      ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions\u2014some of\n      us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a\n      mass of lying and sophistication.\n\n  302 In Newman\u2019s Lectures on Justification, Lecture VIII. \u00a7 6, there is a\n      splendid passage expressive of this \u00e6sthetic way of feeling the\n      Christian scheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote.\n\n  303 Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the \u201cmeek lover of\n      the good,\u201d alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own\n      sakes, with the elaborate \u201cbusiness\u201d that goes on in Catholic\n      devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more\n      complex businesses. An essentially worldly\u2010minded Catholic woman can\n      become a visitor of the sick on purely coquettish principles, with\n      her confessor and director, her \u201cmerit\u201d storing up, her patron\n      saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his\n      attention as a professional _d\u00e9vote_, her definite \u201cexercises,\u201d and\n      her definitely recognized social _pose_ in the organization.\n\n  304 Above, p. 362 ff.\n\n  305 A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work\n      by FRANK GRANGER: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii.\n\n  306 Example: \u201cThe minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in\n      Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as\n      the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, \u2018You\n      Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to\n      church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under\n      water.\u2019 \u201d R. W. EMERSON: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363.\n\n  307 AUGUSTE SABATIER: Esquisse d\u2019une Philosophie de la Religion, 2me\n      \u00e9d., 1897, pp. 24\u201026, abridged.\n\n  308 My authority for these statistics is the little work on M\u00fcller, by\n      FREDERIC G. WARNE, New York, 1898.\n\n  309 The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord\u2019s Dealings with\n      George M\u00fcller, New American edition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194,\n      219.\n\n  310 Ibid., p. 126.\n\n  311 Op. cit., p. 383, abridged.\n\n  312 Ibid., p. 323.\n\n  313 I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even\n      more primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber\u2019s\n      English Garland, vol. vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor,\n      along with an English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689,\n      set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made the other\n      five prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lyde thus describes how\n      in this feat he found his God a very present help in time of\n      trouble:\u2014\n\n      \u201cWith the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and one\n      more did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman which hung\n      about my middle hang very heavy, I said to the boy, \u2018Go round the\n      binnacle, and knock down that man that hangeth on my back.\u2019 So the\n      boy did strike him one blow on the head which made him fall.... Then\n      I looked about for a marlin spike or anything else to strike them\n      withal. But seeing nothing, I said, \u2018LORD! what shall I do?\u2019 Then\n      casting up my eye upon my left side, and seeing a marlin spike\n      hanging, I jerked my right arm and took hold, and struck the point\n      four times about a quarter of an inch deep into the skull of that\n      man that had hold of my left arm. [One of the Frenchmen then hauled\n      the marlin spike away from him.] But through GOD\u2019S wonderful\n      providence! it either fell out of his hand, or else he threw it\n      down, and at this time the Almighty GOD gave me strength enough to\n      take one man in one hand, and throw at the other\u2019s head: and looking\n      about again to see anything to strike them withal, but seeing\n      nothing, I said, \u2018LORD! what shall I do now?\u2019 And then it pleased\n      GOD to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of\n      the men had hold of my right arm, yet GOD Almighty strengthened me\n      so that I put my right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife\n      and sheath, ... put it between my legs and drew it out, and then cut\n      the man\u2019s throat with it that had his back to my breast: and he\n      immediately dropt down, and scarce ever stirred after.\u201d\u2014I have\n      slightly abridged Lyde\u2019s narrative.\n\n  314 As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the BISHOP OF RIPON and\n      others, London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to\n      Prayer, Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. HASTINGS: The Guiding Hand,\n      or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances,\n      Boston, 1898 (?).\n\n  315 C. HILTY: Gl\u00fcck, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff.\n\n  316 \u201cGood Heaven!\u201d says Epictetus, \u201cany one thing in the creation is\n      sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful\n      mind. The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from\n      milk, and wool from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not,\n      whether we dig or plough or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is\n      God, who has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground;\n      great is God, who has given us hands and instruments of digestion;\n      who has given us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These\n      things we ought forever to celebrate.... But because the most of you\n      are blind and insensible, there must be some one to fill this\n      station, and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what\n      else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a\n      nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan,\n      the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my\n      duty to praise God ... and I call on you to join the same song.\u201d\n      Works, book i. ch. xvi., CARTER\u2010HIGGINSON translation, abridged.\n\n  317 JAMES MARTINEAU: end of the sermon \u201cHelp Thou Mine Unbelief,\u201d in\n      Endeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page\n      the extract from Voysey on p. 275, above, and those from Pascal and\n      Madame Guyon on p. 286.\n\n  318 Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122.\n\n  319 Op. cit., Letter XXX.\n\n  320 Above, p. 248 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the\n      world, in Melancholiacs, p. 151.\n\n  321 Above, pp. 24, 25.\n\n  322 A friend of mine, a first\u2010rate psychologist, who is a subject of\n      graphic automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent\n      actuation in the movements of his arm, when he writes automatically,\n      is so distinct that it obliges him to abandon a psychophysical\n      theory which he had previously believed in, the theory, namely, that\n      we have no feeling of the discharge downwards of our voluntary\n      motor\u2010centres. We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or\n      the _sense of an absence_ would not be so striking as it is in these\n      experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in\n      religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statements as\n      Antonia Bourignon\u2019s, that \u201cI do nothing but lend my hand and spirit\n      to another power than mine,\u201d is shown by the context to indicate\n      inspiration rather than directly automatic writing. In some\n      eccentric sects this latter occurs. The most striking instance of it\n      is probably the bulky volume called, \u2019Oahspe, a new Bible in the\n      Words of Jehovah and his angel ambassadors,\u2019 Boston and London,\n      1891, written and illustrated automatically by DR. NEWBROUGH of New\n      York, whom I understand to be now, or to have been lately, at the\n      head of the spiritistic community of Shalam in New Mexico. The\n      latest automatically written book which has come under my notice is\n      \u201cZertoulem\u2019s Wisdom of the Ages,\u201d by GEORGE A. FULLER, Boston, 1901.\n\n  323 W. SANDAY: The Oracles of God, London, 1892, pp. 49\u201056, abridged.\n\n  324 Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses\u2019s and Isaiah\u2019s\n      commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. iii. and iv., and Isaiah,\n      chap. vi.\n\n  325 Quoted by AUGUSTUS CLISSOLD: The Prophetic Spirit in Genius and\n      Madness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg\u2019s\n      case is of course the palmary one of _audita et visa_, serving as a\n      basis of religious revelation.\n\n  326 N\u00d6LDEKE, Geschichte des Qor\u00e2ns, 1860, p. 16. Compare the fuller\n      account in Sir WILLIAM MUIR\u2019S Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch.\n      iii.\n\n  327 The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations\n      accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an\n      obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote\n      the following extract:\u2014\n\n      \u201cIt may be very interesting for you to know that the President [Mr.\n      Snow] of the Mormon Church claims to have had a number of\n      revelations very recently from heaven. To explain fully what these\n      revelations are, it is necessary to know that we, as a people,\n      believe that the Church of Jesus Christ has again been established\n      through messengers sent from heaven. This Church has at its head a\n      prophet, seer, and revelator, who gives to man God\u2019s holy will.\n      Revelation is the means through which the will of God is declared\n      directly and in fullness to man. These revelations are got through\n      dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind, by voices without\n      visional appearance, or by actual manifestations of the Holy\n      Presence before the eye. We believe that God has come in person and\n      spoken to our prophet and revelator.\u201d\n\n  328 For example, on pages 135, 163, 333, above.\n\n  329 From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the\n      morbid mind, and between the once\u2010born and the twice\u2010born types, of\n      which I spoke in earlier lectures (see pp. 162\u2010167), cease to be the\n      radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice\u2010born look down\n      upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once\u2010born as being\n      \u201cmere morality,\u201d and not properly religion. \u201cDr. Channing,\u201d an\n      orthodox minister is reported to have said, \u201cis excluded from the\n      highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his\n      character.\u201d It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the\n      twice\u2010born\u2014holding as it does more of the element of evil in\n      solution\u2014is the wider and completer. The \u201cheroic\u201d or \u201csolemn\u201d way in\n      which life comes to them is a \u201chigher synthesis\u201d into which healthy\u2010\n      mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not\n      evaded, but sublated in the higher religious cheer of these persons\n      (see pp. 47\u201052, 362\u2010365). But the final consciousness which each\n      type reaches of union with the divine has the same practical\n      significance for the individual; and individuals may well be allowed\n      to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their several\n      temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the\n      mind\u2010cure form of healthy\u2010mindedness, we found abundant examples of\n      regenerative process. The severity of the crisis in this process is\n      a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink the\n      consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short\u2010circuit and\n      get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in\n      many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual\n      as a once\u2010born or a twice\u2010born subject.\n\n  330 Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above.\n\n  331 \u201cPrayerful\u201d taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 463\n      ff.\n\n  332 How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian\n      Wolff, in whose dry\u2010as\u2010dust head all the learning of the early\n      eighteenth century was concentrated, should have preserved such a\n      baby\u2010like faith in the personal and human character of Nature as to\n      expound her operations as he did in his work on the uses of natural\n      things? This, for example, is the account he gives of the sun and\n      its utility:\u2014\n\n      \u201cWe see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable\n      conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men\n      and beasts, may inhabit its surface. Since men are the most\n      reasonable of creatures, and able to infer God\u2019s invisible being\n      from the contemplation of the world, the sun in so far forth\n      contributes to the primary purpose of creation: without it the race\n      of man could not be preserved or continued.... The sun makes\n      daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the other planets; and\n      daylight is of the utmost utility to us; for by its means we can\n      commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night\u2010time\n      would either be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without\n      our going to the expense of artificial light. The beasts of the\n      field can find food by day which they would not be able to find at\n      night. Moreover we owe it to the sunlight that we are able to see\n      everything that is on the earth\u2019s surface, not only near by, but\n      also at a distance, and to recognize both near and far things\n      according to their species, which again is of manifold use to us not\n      only in the business necessary to human life, and when we are\n      traveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of Nature, which\n      knowledge for the most part depends on observations made with the\n      help of sight, and, without the sunshine, would have been\n      impossible. If any one would rightly impress on his mind the great\n      advantages which he derives from the sun, let him imagine himself\n      living through only one month, and see how it would be with all his\n      undertakings, if it were not day but night. He would then be\n      sufficiently convinced out of his own experience, especially if he\n      had much work to carry on in the street or in the fields.... From\n      the sun we learn to recognize when it is midday, and by knowing this\n      point of time exactly, we can set our clocks right, on which account\n      astronomy owes much to the sun.... By help of the sun one can find\n      the meridian.... But the meridian is the basis of our sun\u2010dials, and\n      generally speaking, we should have no sun\u2010dials if we had no sun.\u201d\n      Vern\u00fcnftige Gedanken von den Absichten der nat\u00fcrlichen Dinge, 1782,\n      pp. 74\u201084.\n\n      Or read the account of God\u2019s beneficence in the institution of \u201cthe\n      great variety throughout the world of men\u2019s faces, voices, and\n      handwriting,\u201d given in Derham\u2019s Physico\u2010theology, a book that had\n      much vogue in the eighteenth century. \u201cHad Man\u2019s body,\u201d says Dr.\n      Derham, \u201cbeen made according to any of the Atheistical Schemes, or\n      any other Method than that of the infinite Lord of the World, this\n      wise Variety would never have been: but Men\u2019s Faces would have been\n      cast in the same, or not a very different Mould, their Organs of\n      Speech would have sounded the same or not so great a Variety of\n      Notes; and the same Structure of Muscles and Nerves would have given\n      the Hand the same Direction in Writing. And in this Case, what\n      Confusion, what Disturbance, what Mischiefs would the world\n      eternally have lain under! No Security could have been to our\n      persons; no Certainty, no Enjoyment of our Possessions; no Justice\n      between Man and Man; no Distinction between Good and Bad, between\n      Friends and Foes, between Father and Child, Husband and Wife, Male\n      or Female; but all would have been turned topsy\u2010turvy, by being\n      exposed to the Malice of the Envious and ill\u2010Natured, to the Fraud\n      and Violence of Knaves and Robbers, to the Forgeries of the crafty\n      Cheat, to the Lusts of the Effeminate and Debauched, and what not!\n      Our Courts of Justice can abundantly testify the dire Effects of\n      Mistaking Men\u2019s Faces, of counterfeiting their Hands, and forging\n      Writings. But now as the infinitely wise Creator and Ruler hath\n      ordered the Matter, every man\u2019s Face can distinguish him in the\n      Light, and his Voice in the Dark; his Hand\u2010writing can speak for him\n      though absent, and be his Witness, and secure his Contracts in\n      future Generations. A manifest as well as admirable Indication of\n      the divine Superintendence and Management.\u201d\n\n      A God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable\n      signing of bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after the heart\n      of eighteenth century Anglicanism.\n\n      I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham\u2019s \u201cVindication of God by\n      the Institution of Hills and Valleys,\u201d and Wolff\u2019s altogether\n      culinary account of the institution of Water:\u2014\n\n      \u201cThe uses,\u201d says Wolff, \u201cwhich water serves in human life are plain\n      to see and need not be described at length. Water is a universal\n      drink of man and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks\n      that are artificial, they could not do this without water. Beer is\n      brewed of water and malt, and it is the water in it which quenches\n      thirst. Wine is prepared from grapes, which could never have grown\n      without the help of water; and the same is true of those drinks\n      which in England and other places they produce from fruit....\n      Therefore since God so planned the world that men and beasts should\n      live upon it and find there everything required for their necessity\n      and convenience, he also made water as one means whereby to make the\n      earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this is all the more\n      manifest when we consider the advantages which we obtain from this\n      same water for the cleaning of our household utensils, of our\n      clothing, and of other matters.... When one goes into a grinding\u2010\n      mill one sees that the grindstone must always be kept wet and then\n      one will get a still greater idea of the use of water.\u201d\n\n      Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty,\n      discourses as follows: \u201cSome constitutions are indeed of so happy a\n      strength, and so confirmed an health, as to be indifferent to almost\n      any place or temperature of the air. But then others are so weakly\n      and feeble, as not to be able to bear one, but can live comfortably\n      in another place. With some the more subtle and finer air of the\n      hills doth best agree, who are languishing and dying in the feculent\n      and grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous air\n      of the valleys and waters. But contrariwise, others languish on the\n      hills, and grow lusty and strong in the warmer air of the valleys.\n\n      \u201cSo that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills to\n      the vales, is an admirable easement, refreshment, and great benefit\n      to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind; affording those an\n      easy and comfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably,\n      languish, and pine away.\n\n      \u201cTo this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another great\n      convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious places\n      for habitation, serving (as an eminent author wordeth it) as screens\n      to keep off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly\n      winds, and reflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams, and so\n      rendering our habitations both more comfortable and more cheerly in\n      winter.\n\n      \u201cLastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and\n      the rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and\n      lofty piles are not, as they are charged, such rude and useless\n      excrescences of our ill\u2010formed globe; but the admirable tools of\n      nature, contrived and ordered by the infinite Creator, to do one of\n      its most useful works. For, was the surface of the earth even and\n      level, and the middle parts of its islands and continents not\n      mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be\n      no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters; but,\n      instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higher\n      lands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate and\n      perhaps stink, and also drown large tracts of land.\n\n      \u201c[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler\n      they may seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of\n      the great Creator, and wisely appointed by him for the good of our\n      sublunary world.\u201d\n\n  333 Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. One\n      need only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions\n      by Aristotle, as, for example, his explanation of the power of the\n      lever to make a small weight raise a larger one. This is due,\n      according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculous character of the\n      circle and of all circular movement. The circle is both convex and\n      concave; it is made by a fixed point and a moving line, which\n      contradict each other; and whatever moves in a circle moves in\n      opposite directions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle is the most\n      \u201cnatural\u201d movement; and the long arm of the lever, moving, as it\n      does, in the larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural\n      motion, and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the\n      explanation by Herodotus of the position of the sun in winter: It\n      moves to the south because of the cold which drives it into the warm\n      parts of the heavens over Libya. Or listen to Saint Augustine\u2019s\n      speculations: \u201cWho gave to chaff such power to freeze that it\n      preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it\n      ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties of fire\n      itself, which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright, and\n      which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolors almost all\n      that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy\n      cinders?... Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal,\n      which is so brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a slight\n      pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisture rots\n      it, nor any time causes it to decay.\u201d City of God, book xxi. ch. iv.\n\n      Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and\n      unnaturalness, the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial\n      qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and\n      destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which they originally\n      fastened our attention.\n\n      If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic\n      invoked on every page. Take, for example, the famous vulnerary\n      ointment attributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety of\n      receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a\n      wild boar, or a bear; powdered earthworms, the _usnia_, or mossy\n      growth on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other\n      materials equally unpleasant\u2014the whole prepared under the planet\n      Venus if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn. Then, if a\n      splinter of wood, dipped in the patient\u2019s blood, or the bloodstained\n      weapon that wounded him, be immersed in this ointment, the wound\n      itself being tightly bound up, the latter infallibly gets well,\u2014I\n      quote now Van Helmont\u2019s account,\u2014for the blood on the weapon or\n      splinter, containing in it the spirit of the wounded man, is roused\n      to active excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there\n      results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin\u2010german,\n      the blood in the patient\u2019s body. This it does by sucking out the\n      dolorous and exotic impression from the wounded part. But to do this\n      it has to implore the aid of the bull\u2019s fat, and other portions of\n      the unguent. The reason why bull\u2019s fat is so powerful is that the\n      bull at the time of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and\n      vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a higher flame of\n      revenge about him than any other animal. And thus we have made it\n      out, says this author, that the admirable efficacy of the ointment\n      ought to be imputed, not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but\n      simply to the energy of the _posthumous character of Revenge_\n      remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat in the\n      unguent. J. B. VAN HELMONT: A Ternary of Paradoxes, translated by\n      WALTER CHARLETON, London, 1650.\u2014I much abridge the original in my\n      citations.\n\n      The author goes on to prove by the analogy of many other natural\n      facts that this sympathetic action between things at a distance is\n      the true rationale of the case. \u201cIf,\u201d he says, \u201cthe heart of a\n      horse, slain by a witch, taken out of the yet reeking carcase, be\n      impaled upon an arrow and roasted, immediately the whole witch\n      becomes tormented with the insufferable pains and cruelty of the\n      fire, which could by no means happen unless there preceded a\n      conjunction of the spirit of the witch with the spirit of the horse.\n      In the reeking and yet panting heart, the spirit of the witch is\n      kept captive, and the retreat of it prevented by the arrow\n      transfixed. Similarly hath not many a murdered carcase at the\n      coroner\u2019s inquest suffered a fresh h\u00e6morrhage or cruentation at the\n      presence of the assassin?\u2014the blood being, as in a furious fit of\n      anger, enraged and agitated by the impress of revenge conceived\n      against the murderer, at the instant of the soul\u2019s compulsive exile\n      from the body. So, if you have dropsy, gout, or jaundice, by\n      including some of your warm blood in the shell and white of an egg,\n      which, exposed to a gentle heat, and mixed with a bait of flesh, you\n      shall give to a hungry dog or hog, the disease shall instantly pass\n      from you into the animal, and leave you entirely. And similarly\n      again, if you burn some of the milk either of a cow or of a woman,\n      the gland from which it issued will dry up. A gentleman at Brussels\n      had his nose mowed off in a combat, but the celebrated surgeon\n      Tagliacozzus digged a new nose for him out of the skin of the arm of\n      a porter at Bologna. About thirteen months after his return to his\n      own country, the engrafted nose grew cold, putrefied, and in a few\n      days dropped off, and it was then discovered that the porter had\n      expired, near about the same punctilio of time. There are still at\n      Brussels eye\u2010witnesses of this occurrence,\u201d says Van Helmont; and\n      adds, \u201cI pray what is there in this of superstition or of exalted\n      imagination?\u201d\n\n      Modern mind\u2010cure literature\u2014the works of Prentice Mulford, for\n      example\u2014is full of sympathetic magic.\n\n  334 Compare Lotze\u2019s doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to the\n      notion of a thing as it is \u201cin itself\u201d is by conceiving it as it is\n      _for_ itself; i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private\n      sense of \u201cpinch\u201d or inner activity of some sort going with it.\n\n  335 Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as wholesale\n      as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV how the religious\n      conception of the universe seems to many mind\u2010curers \u2019verified\u2019 from\n      day to day by their experience of fact. \u201cExperience of fact\u201d is a\n      field with so many things in it that the sectarian scientist,\n      methodically declining, as he does, to recognize such \u201cfacts\u201d as\n      mind\u2010curers and others like them experience, otherwise than by such\n      rude heads of classification as \u201cbosh,\u201d \u201crot,\u201d \u201cfolly,\u201d certainly\n      leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious\n      interest of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality,\n      would never have succeeded in getting itself recorded at all. We\n      know this to be true already in certain cases; it may, therefore, be\n      true in others as well. Miraculous healings have always been part of\n      the supernaturalist stock in trade, and have always been dismissed\n      by the scientist as figments of the imagination. But the scientist\u2019s\n      tardy education in the facts of hypnotism has recently given him an\n      apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order, and he consequently\n      now allows that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call\n      them effects of \u201csuggestion.\u201d Even the stigmata of the cross on\n      Saint Francis\u2019s hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable.\n      Similarly, the time\u2010honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is\n      on the point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that\n      he has the name of \u201chystero\u2010demonopathy\u201d by which to apperceive it.\n      No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of occultist\n      phenomena under newly found scientist titles may proceed\u2014even\n      \u201cprophecy,\u201d even \u201clevitation,\u201d might creep into the pale.\n\n      Thus the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may not\n      necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the\n      personalism and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to\n      primitive thinking, be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The final\n      human opinion may, in short, in some manner now impossible to\n      foresee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of\n      progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this\n      were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day\n      appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than\n      the definitively triumphant position which the sectarian scientist\n      at present so confidently announces it to be.\n\n  336 Hume\u2019s criticism has banished causation from the world of physical\n      objects, and \u201cScience\u201d is absolutely satisfied to define cause in\n      terms of concomitant change\u2014read Mach, Pearson, Ostwald. The\n      \u201coriginal\u201d of the notion of causation is in our inner personal\n      experience, and only there can causes in the old\u2010fashioned sense be\n      directly observed and described.\n\n  337 When I read in a religious paper words like these: \u201cPerhaps the best\n      thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_,\u201d I\n      recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual\n      terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference,\n      however inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint\n      Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the\n      intellect\u2019s pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the\n      intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing\n      effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under\n      those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every one\n      should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian\n      Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New\n      York, 1898, 1899, 1900). See the positively expulsive purpose of\n      philosophy properly so called:\u2014\n\n      \u201cReligion,\u201d writes M. Vacherot (La Religion, Paris, 1869, pp. 313,\n      436, et passim), \u201canswers to a transient state or condition, not to\n      a permanent determination of human nature, being merely an\n      expression of that stage of the human mind which is dominated by the\n      imagination.... Christianity has but a single possible final heir to\n      its estate, and that is scientific philosophy.\u201d\n\n      In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des\n      Sentiments, p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion. He sums\n      it up in a single formula\u2014the ever\u2010growing predominance of the\n      rational intellectual element, with the gradual fading out of the\n      emotional element, this latter tending to enter into the group of\n      purely intellectual sentiments. \u201cOf religious sentiment properly so\n      called, nothing survives at last save a vague respect for the\n      unknowable _x_ which is a last relic of the fear, and a certain\n      attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love, that\n      characterized the earlier periods of religious growth. To state this\n      more simply, _religion tends to turn into religious\n      philosophy_.\u2014These are psychologically entirely different things,\n      the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas the\n      other is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great\n      inspired leader, calling into play the entire thinking and feeling\n      organism of man.\u201d\n\n      I find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion\n      lies in individuality in attempts like those of Professor Baldwin\n      (Mental Development, Social and Ethical Interpretations, ch. x.) and\n      Mr. H. R. Marshall (Instinct and Reason, chaps, viii. to xii.) to\n      make it a purely \u201cconservative social force.\u201d\n\n  338 Compare, for instance, pages 203, 219, 223, 226, 249 to 256, 275 to\n      278.\n\n  339 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345.\n\n  340 Above, p. 184.\n\n  341 Above, p. 145.\n\n  342 Above, p. 400.\n\n  343 Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: \u201cI do not know how to deal\n      with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It\n      overwhelms me; I want to _do_ something, yet I can do nothing and am\n      fit for nothing.... I would fain do _great things_.\u201d Again, after an\n      inspiring interview, he writes: \u201cI went homewards, intoxicated with\n      joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in\n      solitude, far from all men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took\n      a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking at the heavens,\n      regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily\n      back\u2014I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must\n      have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade.\u201d A.\n      GRATRY: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89.\n\n      This primacy, in the faith\u2010state, of vague expansive impulse over\n      direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman\u2019s lines (Leaves of\n      Grass, 1872, p. 190):\u2014\n\n      \u201cO to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs,\n      as the trees and animals do....\n      Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still\n      urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,\n      Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell\u2019d and defeated.\u201d\n\n      This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by\n      its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production,\n      would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths.\n      Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country\u2019s expansive\n      destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source\n      in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the\n      exceedingness of the possible over the real.\n\n  344 Compare LEUBA: Loc. cit., pp. 346\u2010349.\n\n  345 The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536,\n      July, 1901.\n\n  346 Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer\u2019s\n      extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily\n      seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what\n      W. BENDER says (in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38):\n      \u201cNot the question about God, and not the inquiry into the origin and\n      purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man. All\n      religious views of life are anthropocentric.\u201d \u201cReligion is that\n      activity of the human impulse towards self\u2010preservation by means of\n      which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through\n      against the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely\n      towards the world\u2019s ordering and governing powers when the limits of\n      his own strength are reached.\u201d The whole book is little more than a\n      development of these words.\n\n  347 Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others\n      gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life.\n\n  348 The practical difficulties are: 1, to \u201crealize the reality\u201d of one\u2019s\n      higher part; 2, to identify one\u2019s self with it exclusively; and 3,\n      to identify it with all the rest of ideal being.\n\n  349 \u201cWhen mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness\n      possessed by the sense of a being at once _excessive_ and\n      _identical_ with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough\n      to be me. The \u2018objectivity\u2019 of it ought in that case to be called\n      _excessivity_, rather, or exceedingness.\u201d R\u00c9C\u00c9JAC: Essai sur les\n      fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46.\n\n  350 The word \u201ctruth\u201d is here taken to mean something additional to bare\n      value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe\n      that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true.\n\n  351 Above, p. 455.\n\n  352 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii. p. 305.\n      For a full statement of Mr. Myers\u2019s views, I may refer to his\n      posthumous work, \u201cHuman Personality in the Light of Recent\n      Research,\u201d which is already announced by Messrs. Longmans, Green &\n      Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first time proposed as a\n      general psychological problem the exploration of the subliminal\n      region of consciousness throughout its whole extent, and made the\n      first methodical steps in its topography by treating as a natural\n      series a mass of subliminal facts hitherto considered only as\n      curious isolated facts, and subjecting them to a systematized\n      nomenclature. How important this exploration will prove, future work\n      upon the path which Myers has opened can alone show. Compare my\n      paper: \u201cFrederic Myers\u2019s Services to Psychology,\u201d in the said\n      Proceedings, part xlii., May, 1901.\n\n  353 Compare the inventory given above on pp. 483\u20104, and also what is\n      said of the subconscious self on pp. 233\u2010236, 240\u2010242.\n\n  354 Compare above, pp. 419 ff.\n\n  355 One more expression of this belief, to increase the reader\u2019s\n      familiarity with the notion of it:\u2014\n\n      \u201cIf this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and you\n      come in and begin to weep and wail, \u2018Oh, the darkness,\u2019 will the\n      darkness vanish? Bring the light in, strike a match, and light comes\n      in a moment. So what good will it do you to think all your lives,\n      \u2018Oh, I have done evil, I have made many mistakes\u2019? It requires no\n      ghost to tell us that. Bring in the light, and the evil goes in a\n      moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up yourselves, the\n      effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one\n      whom you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state\n      that even when we see the vilest of human beings we can see the God\n      within, and instead of condemning, say, \u2018Rise, thou effulgent One,\n      rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless,\n      rise almighty, and manifest your nature.\u2019 ... This is the highest\n      prayer that the Advaita teaches. This is the one prayer: remembering\n      our nature.\u201d ... \u201cWhy does man go out to look for a God?... It is\n      your own heart beating, and you did not know, you were mistaking it\n      for something external. He, nearest of the near, my own self, the\n      reality of my own life, my body and my soul.\u2014I am Thee and Thou art\n      Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become\n      pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that\n      already. Every good thought which you think or act upon is simply\n      tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God\n      behind, manifests itself\u2014the eternal Subject of everything, the\n      eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it\n      were, a lower step, a degradation. We are It already; how to know\n      It?\u201d SWAMI VIVEKANANDA: Addresses, No. XII., Practical Vedanta, part\n      iv. pp. 172, 174, London, 1897; and Lectures, The Real and the\n      Apparent Man, p. 24, abridged.\n\n  356 For instance, here is a case where a person exposed from her birth\n      to Christian ideas had to wait till they came to her clad in\n      spiritistic formulas before the saving experience set in:\u2014\n\n      \u201cFor myself I can say that spiritualism has saved me. It was\n      revealed to me at a critical moment of my life, and without it I\n      don\u2019t know what I should have done. It has taught me to detach\n      myself from worldly things and to place my hope in things to come.\n      Through it I have learned to see in all men, even in those most\n      criminal, even in those from whom I have most suffered, undeveloped\n      brothers to whom I owed assistance, love, and forgiveness. I have\n      learned that I must lose my temper over nothing, despise no one, and\n      pray for all. Most of all I have learned to pray! And although I\n      have still much to learn in this domain, prayer ever brings me more\n      strength, consolation, and comfort. I feel more than ever that I\n      have only made a few steps on the long road of progress; but I look\n      at its length without dismay, for I have confidence that the day\n      will come when all my efforts shall be rewarded. So Spiritualism has\n      a great place in my life, indeed it holds the first place there.\u201d\n      Flournoy Collection.\n\n  357 \u201cThe influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter,\n      is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of\n      electro\u2010magnetism.\u201d W. C. BROWNELL, Scribner\u2019s Magazine, vol. xxx.\n      p. 112.\n\n  358 That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called prayer,\n      is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly\n      in the preceding lectures. I append another concrete example to\n      reinforce the impression on the reader\u2019s mind:\u2014\n\n      \u201cMan can learn to transcend these limitations [of finite thought]\n      and draw power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence is known\n      through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act\n      of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi\u2010conscious\n      experience. It is not an ecstasy; it is not a trance. It is not\n      super\u2010consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self\u2010\n      hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational,\n      common\u2010sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense\u2010\n      perception to the phenomena of seership, from the thought of self to\n      a distinctively higher realm.... For example, if the lower self be\n      nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be\n      calm. This is not done by a word simply. Again I say, it is not\n      hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of\n      peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The\n      power can be as surely used as the sun\u2019s rays can be focused and\n      made to do work, to set fire to wood.\u201d The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp.\n      4, 6, Boston, August, 1901.\n\n  359 Transcendentalists are fond of the term \u201cOver\u2010soul,\u201d but as a rule\n      they use it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of\n      communion. \u201cGod\u201d is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion,\n      and that is the aspect which I wish to emphasize.\n\n  360 Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world\n      makes _this_ difference, that facts _exist_. We owe it to the\n      Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. \u201cA world\u201d of\n      fact!\u2014that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest\n      unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds\n      work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in\n      at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal\n      affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all\n      the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too\n      late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world\n      absolutely, before this world was born. It is strange, I have heard\n      a friend say, to see this blind corner into which Christian thought\n      has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no particular\n      weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is\n      on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd\n      evolution from the God of David\u2019s psalms!\n\n  361 See my Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897,\n      p. 165.\n\n  362 Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture On Human\n      Immortality, Boston and London, 1899.\n\n  363 Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148, 149.","title":"The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature","tradition":"scripture-revelation","translated_text":null,"word_count":186374}