part in the changes; and the slow mutation of our in-

stincts and propensities, under the ‘ unimaginable touch
198 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
of time’ has an enormous influence. Moreover, all these influences may work subconsciously or half unconsciously.’ And when you get a Subject in whom the subconscious life — of which I must speak more fully soon — is largely developed, and in whom motives habitually ripen in si- lence, you get a case.of which you can never give a full account, and in which, both to the Subject and the onlookers, there may appear an element of marvel. Emo- tional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody.” Hope, happiness, security, resolve, emotions characteristic of conversion, can be equally explosive. And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them. In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion,
Professor Starbuck of California has shown by a statis-
1 Jouffroy is an example : “ Down this slope it was that my intelligence had glided, and little by little it had got far from its first faith. But this melancholy revolution had not taken place in the broad daylight of my con- sciousness ; too many scruples, too many guides and sacred affections had made it dreadful to me, so that I was far from avowing to myself the pro- gress it had made. It had gone on in silence, by an involuntary elabora- tion of which I was not the accomplice ; and although I had in reality long ceased. to be a Christian, yet, in the innocence of my intention, I should have shuddered to suspect it, and thought it calumny had I been accused of such a falling away.” Then follows Jouffroy’s account of his counter-conversion, quoted above on p. 176.
2 One hardly needs examples ; but for love, see p. 179, note ; for fear, p- 162 ; for remorse, see Othello after the murder ; for anger, see Lear after Cordelia’s first speech to him ; for resolve, see p. 178 (J. Foster case). Here is a pathological case in which guilt was the feeling that suddenly exploded: “ One night I was seized on entering bed with a rigor, such as Swedenborg describes as coming over him with a sense of holiness, but over me with a. sense of guilt. During that whole night I lay under the influence of the rigor, and from its inception I felt that I was under the curse of God. I have never done one act of duty in my life —sins against God and man, begin ning as far as my memory goes back —a wildcat in human shape.”
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tical inquiry how closely parallel in its manifestations the ordinary ‘conversion’ which oecurs in young people brought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a larger spiritual life which is a normal phase of adolescence in every class of human beings. The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and seventeen. The symptoms are the same,— sense of incompleteness and imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense of sin; anxiety about the hereafter; distress over doubts, and the like. And the result is the same, —a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence in self gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider outlook. In spontaneous religious awakening, apart from revivalistic examples, and in the ordinary storm and stress and moulting-time of adolescence, we also may meet with mystical experiences, astonishing the subjects by their suddenness, just as in revivalistic conversion. The analogy, in fact, is complete; and Starbuck’s con- clusion as to these ordinary youthful conversions would seem to be the only sound one: Conversion is in its' essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity. ;
“Theology,” says Dr. Starbuck, “ takes the adolescent tendencies and builds upon them; it sees that the essen- tial thing in adolescent growth is bringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity and personal insight. It accordingly brings those means to bear which will intensify the normal tendencies. It shortens up the period of duration of storm and stress.” The conversion phenomena of ‘conviction of sin’ last, by this investiga- - tor’s statistics, about one fifth as long as the periods of adolescent storm and stress phenomena of which he also got statistics, but they are very much more intense.
200 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Bodily accompaniments, loss of sleep and appetite, for example, are much more frequent in them. ‘The essen: tial distinction appears to be that conversion intensifies
but shortens the period by bringing the person to a definite crisis.” * re et
The conversions which Dr. Starbuck here has in mind are of course mainly those of very commonplace persons, kept true to a pre-appointed type by instruction, appeal, and example. The particular form which they affect is the result of suggestion and imitation.? If they went through their growth-crisis in other faiths and other countries, although the essence of the change would be the same (since it is one in the main so inevitable), its accidents would be different. In Catholic lands, for ex- ample, and in our own Episcopalian sects, no such anxiety and conviction of sin is usual as in sects that encourage revivals. The sacraments being more relied on in these more strictly ecclesiastical bodies, the individual’s per- sonal acceptance of salvation needs less to be accentuated and led up to.
1 &. D. STARBUGE: The Psychology of Religion, pp. 224, 262.
2 Noone understands this better than Jonathan Edwards understood it already. Conversion narratives of the more commonplace sort must alwaye be taken with the allowances which he suggests: “ A rule received and es- tablished: by common consent has a very great, though to many persons an insensible influence in forming their notions of the process of their own experience. I know very well how they proceed as to this matter, for I have had frequent opportunities of observing their conduct. Very often their experience at first appears like a confused chaos, but then those parts are selected which bear the nearest resemblance to such particular steps as are insisted on ; and these are dwelt upon in their thoughts, and spoken of from time to time, till they grow more and more conspicuous in their view, avd other parts which are neglected grow more and more obscure. Thus what they have experienced is insensibly strained, so as to bring it to an exact conformity to the scheme already established in their minds. And it becomes natural also for ministers, who have to deal with those who insist upon distinctness and clearness of method, to do so too.” Treatise on Religious Affections.
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But every imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I propose that for the future we keep as close as may be to the more first-hand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to be found in , sporadic adult cases.
Professor Leuba, in a valuable article on the psycho- logy of conversion,’ subordinates the theological aspect of the religious life almost entirely to its moral aspect. The religious sense he defines as “the feeling of un- wholeness, of moral imperfection, of sin, to use the tech- nical word, accompanied by the yearning after the peace of unity.” “The word ‘religion,’”’ he says, “is getting more and more to signify the conglomerate of desires and emotions springing from the sense of sin and its release’; and he gives a large number of examples, in which the sin ranges from drunkenness to spiritual pride, to show that the sense of it may beset one and crave relief as urgently as does the anguish of the sickened flesh or any form of physical misery.
Undoubtedly this conception covers an immense num- ber of cases. A good one to use as an example is that of Mr. S. H. Hadley, who after his conversion became an active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New York. His experience runs as follows : —
“One Tuesday evening I sat in a saloon in Harlem, a home- less, friendless, dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold every- thing that would bring a drink. I could not sleep unless I was — dead drunk. I had not eaten for days, and for four nights pre- ceding I had suffered with delirium tremens, or the horrors, from midnight till morning. I had often said, ‘I will never be atramp. I will never be cornered, for when that time comes, if ever it comes, I will find a home in the bottom of the river.’ - But the Lord so ordered it that when that time did come I was
1 Studies in the ‘Psychology of Religious Phenomena, American Journal of a vii. 309 (1896).
202 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
not able to walk one quarter of the way to the river. As I sat there thinking, I seemed to feel some great and mighty pre- sence. I did not know then what it was. I did learn after- wards that it was Jesus, the sinner’s friend. I walked up to the bar and pounded it with my fist till I made the glasses rattle. Those who stood by drinking looked on with scornful curiosity. I said I would never take another drink, if I died on the street, and really I felt as though that would happen before morning. Something said, ‘If you want to keep this promise, go and have yourself locked up.’ I went to the near- est station-house and had myself locked up.
“‘] was placed in a narrow cell, and it seemed as though all the demons that could find room came in that place with me. This was not all the company I had, either. No, praise the Lord; that dear Spirit that came to me in the saloon was present, and said, Pray. I did pray, and though I did not feel any great help, I kept on praying. As soon as I was able to leave my cell I was taken to the police court and remanded back to the cell. I was finally released, and found my way to my brother’s house, where every care was given me. While lying in bed the admonishing Spirit never left me, and when I arose the following Sabbath morning I felt that day would decide my fate, and toward evening it came into my head to go to Jerry M’Auley’s Mission. I went. The house was packed, and with great difficulty I made my way to the space near the platform. There I saw the apostle to the drunkard and the outcast —that man of God, Jerry M’Auley. He rose, and amid deep silence told his experience. There was a sincerity about this man that carried conviction with it, and I found my- self saying, ‘I wonder if God can save me?’ I listened to the testimony of twenty-five or thirty persons, every one of whom had been saved from rum, and I made up my mind that I would be saved or die right there. When the invitation was given, I knelt down with a crowd of drunkards. Jerry made the first prayer. Then Mrs. M’Auley prayed fervently for us. Oh, what a conflict was going on for my poor soul! A blessed whisper said, ‘Come’; the devil said, ‘ Be careful.’ I halted but a moment, and then, with a breaking heart, I said, ‘ Dear
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Jesus, can you help me?’ Never with mortal tongue can 1 describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of resting on Jesus! I felt that Christ with all his brightness and power had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had passed away and all things had become new.
“From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey, and I have never seen money enough to make me take one. I promised God that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong drink, I would work for him all my life. He has done his part, and I have been trying to do mine.” !
Dr. Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinal theology in such an experience, which starts with the absolute need of a higher helper, and ends with the sense that he has helped us. He gives other cases of drunk- ards’ conversions which are purely ethical, containing, as recorded, no theological beliefs whatever. John B. Gough’s case, for instance, is practically, says Dr. Leuba, the conversion of an atheist — neither God nor Jesus being mentioned.? But in spite of the importance of this type of regeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment, this writer surely makes it too exclusive. It corresponds to the subjectively centred form of morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But we saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of melancholy also, in which the lack of rational
1 T have abridged Mr. Hadley’s account. For other conversions of drunk- ards, see his pamphlet, Rescue Mission Work, published at the Old Jerry M’Auley Water Street Mission, New York city. A striking collection of eases also appears in the appendix to Professor Leuba’s article.
2 A restaurant waiter served provisionally as Gough’s ‘ Saviour.’ General
. Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, considers that the first vital step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel that some decent human being cares enough for them to take an interest in the question whether they are to rise or sink.
204 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
meaning of the universe, and of life anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon one— you remember Tolstoy’s case.! So there are distinct elements in conversion, and their relations to individual lives deserve to be discriminated.’
Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the centre of their spirit- ual energy. They may be excellent persons, servants of God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They are either incapable of imagining the invisible ; or else, in the language of devotion, they are life-long subjects of ‘barrenness’ and ‘ dryness.’ Such inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intel- lectual in its origin. Their religious faculties may be checked in their natural tendency to expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic and materialistic beliefs, for example, within which so many good souls, who in former times would have freely indulged their religious propensities, find themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or the agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, under which so many of us to-day lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In many persons such inhibitions are never overcome. To the end of their days they refuse to believe, their personal energy never gets to its religious centre, and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity.
In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men anesthetic on the religious side, deficient in that
1 The crisis of upathetic melancholy — no use in life — into which J. S. Mill records that he fell, and from which he emerged by the reading of Marmontel’s Memoirs (Heaven save the mark !) and Wordsworth’s poetry, is another intellectual and general metaphysical case. See Mill’s Autobio- graphy, New York, 1873, pp. 141, 148.
2 Starbuck, in addition to ‘escape from sin,’ discriminates ‘spiritual illumination’ as a distinct type of conversion experience. Psychology of Religion, p. 85.
Sa,
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eategory of sensibility. Just as a bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain to the reckless
“animal spirits’ enjoyed by those of sanguine tempera-
ment; so the nature which is spiritually barren may admire and envy faith in others, but can never compass the enthusiasm and peace which those who are tempera- mentally qualified for faith enjoy. All this may, however, turn out eventually to have been a matter of temporary inhibition. Even late in life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the man’s hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling. Such cases more than any others suggest the idea that sudden conversion is by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not imagine ourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes.
Now there are two forms of mental occurrence in human beings, which lead to a striking difference in the conversion process, a difference to which Professor Star- buck has called attention. You know how it is when you try to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help
- the recall by working for it, by mentally running over
the places, persons, and things with which the word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name were jammed, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says, as carelessly as if it had
- never been invited. Some hidden process was started in
you by the effort, which went on after the.effort ceased, and made the result come as if it came spontaneously.
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A certain music teacher, says Dr. Starbuck, says to her pupils after the thing to be done has-been clearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted: “Stop trying and it will do itself!” ?
There is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntary and unconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished ; and we find both ways exempli- fied in the history of conversion, giving us two types, which Starbuck calls the volitional type and the type by self-surrender respectively.
In the volitional type the regenerative change is usu- ally gradual, and consists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral and spiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at which the move- ment forward seems much more rapid. This psychologi- cal fact is abundantly illustrated by Dr. Starbuck. Our education in any practical accomplishment proceeds ap- parently by jerks and starts, just as the growth of our physical bodies does.
“ An athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an under- standing of the fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as the convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on engaging in the sport, there may come a day when all at once the game plays itself through him — when he loses himself in some great contest. In the same way, a musi- cian may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure in the tech- nique of the art entirely falls away, and in some moment of inspiration he becomes the instrument through which music flows. The writer has chanced to hear two different married persons, both of whose wedded lives had been beautiful from the beginning, relate that not until a year or more after mar- riage did they awake to the full blessedness of married life. So it is with the religious experience of these persons we are | studying.” 2
1 Psychology of Religion, p. 117.
2 Psychology of Religion, p. 385. Compare, also, pp. 137-144 and 262,
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We shall erelong hear still more remarkable illustra- tions of subconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which we suddenly grow conscious. Sir Wil- liam Hamilton and Professor Laycock of Edinburgh were among the first to call attention to this class of effects ; but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the term ‘ unconscious cerebration,’ which has since then been a popular phrase of explanation. The facts are now known to us far more extensively than he could know them, and the adjective ‘ unconscious,’ being for many of them almost certainly a misnomer, is better replaced by the vaguer term ‘ subconscious’ or ‘ subliminal.’ |
Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give examples,’ but they are as a rule less interesting
1 For instance, C. G. Finney italicizes the volitional element : “Just at this point the whole question of Gospel salvation opened to my mind na manner most marvelous to me at the time. I think I then saw, as clearly as I ever have in my life, the reality and fullness of the atonement of Christ. Gospel salvation seemed to me to be an offer of something to be accepted, and all that was necessary on my part was to get my own consent to give up my sins and accept Christ. After this distinct revelation had stood for some little time before my mind, the question seemed to be put, ‘ Will you accept it now, to-day?’ I replied, ‘Yes; I will accept it to-day, or I will die in the attempt !’” He then went into the woods, where he describes his struggles. He could not pray, his heart was hardened in its pride. “I then reproached myself for having promised to give my heart to God before I left the woods. When I came to try, I found I could not... . My inward soul hung back, and there was no going out of my heart to God. The thought was pressing me, of the rashness of my promise that I would give my heart to God that day, or die in the attempt. It seemed to me as if that was binding on my soul ; and yet I was going to break my vow. A great sinking and discouragement came over me, and I felt almost too weak to stand upon my knees. Just at this moment I again thought I heard some one ap- proach me, and I opened my eyes to see whether it wereso. But right there the revelation of my pride of heart, as the great difficulty that stood in the way, was distinctly shown to me. An overwhelming sense of my wicked- ness in being ashamed to have a human being see me on my knees before ’ God took such powerful possession of me, that I cried at the top of my voice, and exclaimed that I would not leave that place if all the men on earth and all the devils in heil surrounded me. * What!’ I said, ‘ such a degraded sinner
208 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
than those of the self-surrender type, in which the sub: conscious effects are more abundant and often startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter, the more so because the difference between the two types is after all not radi- cal. Even in the most voluntarily built-up sort of regen- eration there are passages of partial self-surrender inter- posed ; and in the great majority of all cases, when the will has done its uttermost towards bringing one close to the complete unification aspired after, it seems that the very last step must be left to other forces and performed without the help of its activity. In other words, self- surrender becomes then indispensable. “The personal will,” says Dr. Starbuck, “must be given up. In many cases relief persistently refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or to make an effort in the direction he desires to go.”
“T had said I would not give up; but when my will was broken, it was all over,” writes one of Starbuck’s correspond- ents. — Another says: “I simply said: ‘ Lord, I have done all I can; I leave the whole matter with.Thee;’ and immediately there came to me a great peace.” — Another: “ All at once it occurred to me that I might be saved, too, if I would stop try- ing to do it all myself, and follow Jesus: somehow I lost my load.”” — Another: “I finally ceased to resist, and gave myself up, though it wasa hard struggle. Gradually the feeling came over me that I had done my part, and God was willing to do his.” 1 — “ Lord, Thy will be done; damn or save!” cries John Nelson,? exhausted with the anxious struggle to escape damna- tion; and at that moment his soul was filled with peace.
as I am, on my knees confessing my sins to the great and holy God; and ashamed to have any human being, and a sinner like myself, find me on my knees endeavoring to make my peace with my offended God!’ The sin appeared awful, infinite. It brokeme down before the Lord.” Memoirs, pp. 14-16, abridged.
1 SrarBuck : Op. cit., pp. 91, 114.
? Extracts from the Journal of Mr. John Nelson, London, no date, p. 24
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Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account — so far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all— of the reasons why self-surrender at the last moment should be so indispensable. To begin with, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion : first, the present incompleteness or wrong- ness, the ‘sin’ which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compass. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrong ness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the ‘sin’ almost ex- clusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is “q@ process of struggling away from sin rather than of string towards righteousness.” * A man’s conscious wit and will, so far as they strain towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately ima- gined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic ripen- ing within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose sub- conscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement; and the rearrangement to- wards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines. It may consequently be ac- tually interfered with (jammed, as it were, like the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it), by his voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction.
Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he says that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably
1 STARBUCK, p. 64.
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the better self in posse which directs the operation. In: stead of being clumsily and vaguely aimed at from with: out, it is then itself the organizing centre. What then must the person do? “ He must relax,” says Dr. Star- buck, — “ that is, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, which has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own way the work it has begun. ... The act of yielding, in this point of view, is giving one’s self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new personality, and living, from within, the truth of it which had before been viewed objectively.” *
“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity ” is the theo- logical way of putting this fact of the need of self-sur- render; whilst the physiological way of stating it would be, “ Let one do all in one’s power, and one’s nervous system will do the rest.” Both statements acknowledge the same fact.’
To state it in terms of our own symbolism: When the new centre of personal energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to open into flower, ‘hands off’ is the only word for us, it must burst forth unaided !
We have used the vague and abstract language of psy- chology. But since, in any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why self-surrender has been and always must be re- garded as the vital turning-point of the religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole development of Christianity im inwardnesg
1 STARBUCK, p. 115. 2 STARBUCK, p. 113.
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has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-surrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism ; from that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical Christianity altogether, to pure ‘liberalism’ or tran- scendental idealism, whether or not of the mind-cure type, taking in the medieval mystics, the quietists, the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal pleas or propitiatory machinery.
Psychology and religion are thus in perfect wasnieely up to this point, since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious individual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology, defin- ing these forces as ‘ subconscious,’ and speaking of their effects as due to ‘ incubation,’ or ‘ cerebration,’ implies that they do not transcend the individual’s personality ; and herein she diverges from Christian theology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of the Deity. I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence final, but leave the question for a while in abeyance — continued inquiry may enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord.
Revert, then, for a moment more to the psychology of self-surrender.
When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent in to his sin and want and incom- pleteness, and consequently inconsolable, and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that he must stop his worry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety, you seem to him to come with pure absurdities. The
212 $THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
only positive consciousness he has tells him that all is nof well, and the better way you offer sounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert cold-blooded falsehoods. ‘The will to believe’ cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us of its opposite. The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation.
There are only two ways in which it is possible to get rid of anger, worry, fear, despair, or other undesirable affections. One is that an opposite affection should over- poweringly break over us, and the other is by getting so exhausted with the struggle that we have to stop, —so we drop down, give up, and don’t care any longer. Our emotional brain-centres strike work, and we lapse into a temporary apathy. Now there is documentary proof that this state of temporary exhaustion not infrequently forms part of the conversion crisis. So long as the egoistic worry of the sick soul guards the door, the expansive confidence of the soul of faith gains no presence. But let the former faint away, even but for a moment, and the latter can profit by the opportunity, and, having once acquired possession, may retainit. Carlyle’s Teufelsdréckh passes from the everlasting No to the everlasting Yes through a ‘Centre of Indifference.’
Let me give you a good illustration of this feature in the conversion process. That genuine saint, David Brainerd, describes his own crisis in the following words : —
“One morning, while I was walking in a solitary place as usual, I at once saw that all my contrivances and projects to effect or procure deliverance and salvation for myself were utterly in
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vain; I was brought quite to a stand, as finding myself totally lost. I saw that it was forever impossible for me to do anything towards helping or delivering myself, that I had made all the pleas I ever could have made to all eternity; and that all my pleas were vain, for I saw that self-interest had led me to pray, and that I had never once prayed from any respect to the glory of God. I saw that there was no necessary connection between my prayers and the bestowment of divine mercy; that they laid not the least obligation upon God to bestow his grace upon me; and that there was no more virtue or goodness in them than there would be in my paddling with my hand in the water. I saw that I had been heaping up my devotions before God, fasting, praying, etc., pretending, and indeed really thinking sometimes that I was aiming at the glory of God; whereas I never once truly intended it, but only my own happiness. I saw that as I had never done anything for God, I had no claim on anything from him but perdition, on account of my hypoc- risy and mockery. When I saw evidently that I had regard to nothing but self-interest, then my duties appeared a vile mockery and a continual course of lies, for the whole was no- thing but self-worship, and an horrid abuse of God.
“TI continued, as I remember, in this state of mind, from Friday morning till the Sabbath evening following (July 12, 1739), when I was walking again in the same solitary place. Here, in a mournful melancholy state J was attempting to pray ; but found no heart to engage in that or any other duty ; my former concern, exercise, and religious affections were now gone. I thought that the Spirit of God had quite left me ; but still was not distressed ; yet disconsolate, as if there was nothing in heaven or earth could make me happy. Having been thus endeavoring to pray-—though, as I thought, very stupid and senseless — for near half an hour; then, as I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, nor any imagination of a body of light, but it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never had before, nor anything which had the least resemblance to it. Ihad no particular apprehension of any one person in
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the Trinity, either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost; but it appeared to be Divine glory. My soul rejoiced with joy un- speakable, to see such a God, such a glorious Divine Being; and I was inwardly pleased and satisfied that he should be God over all for ever and ever. My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency of God that I was even swallowed up in him; at least to that degree that I had neo thought about my own salvation, and scarce reflected that there was such a creature as myself. I continued in this state of inward joy, peace, and astonishing, till near dark without any sensible abatement; and then began to think and examine what I had seen; and felt sweetly composed in my mind all the even- ing following. I felt myself in a new world, and everything about me appeared with a different aspect from what it was wont todo. At this time, the way of salvation opened to me with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that I wondered I should ever think of any other way of salvation ; was amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances, and complied with this lovely, blessed, and excellent way before. Tf I could have been saved by my own duties or any other way that I had formerly contrived, my whole soul would now have refused it. I wondered that all the world did not see and com- ply with this way of salvation, entirely by the righteousness of Christ.”’ +
I have italicized the passage which records the exhaus- tion of the anxious emotion hitherto habitual. In a large proportion, perhaps the majority, of reports, the writers speak as if the exhaustion of the lower and the entrance of the higher emotion were simultaneous,” yet
1 Epwarp’s and Dwicent’s Life of Brainerd, New Haven, 1822, pp. 45- 47, abridged.
? Deseribing the whole phenomenon as a change of equilibrium, we might say that the movement of new psychic energies towards the personal centre and the recession of old ones towards the margin (or the rising of some ob- jects above, and the sinking of others below the conscious threshold) were only two ways of describing an indivisible event. Doubtless this is often absolutely true, and Starbuck is right when he says that ‘ self-surrender’ and ‘new determination,’ though seeming at first sight to be such different
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often again they speak as if the higher actively drove the lower out. This is undoubtedly true in a great many instances, as we shall presently see. But often there seems little doubt that both conditions — subconscious ripening of the one affection and exhaustion of the other —must simultaneously have conspired, in order to pro- duce the result.
T. W. B., a convert of Nettleton’s, being brought to an acute paroxysm of conviction of sin, ate nothing all day, locked him. self in his room in the evening in complete despair, crying aloud, ‘“‘ How long, O Lord, how long?” “ After repeating this and similar language,” he says, “several times, J seemed to sink away into a state of insensibility. When I came to myself again I was on my knees, praying not for myself but for others. I felt submission to the will of God, willing that he should do with me as should seem good in his sight. My concern seemed all lost in concern for others.” !
Our great American revivalist Finney writes: “I said to myself: ‘ What is this? I must have grieved the Holy Ghost — entirely away. I have lost all my conviction. I have not a particle of concern about my soul; and it must be that the Spirit has left me.’ ‘Why!’ thought I, ‘I never was so far from being concerned about my own salvation in my life.’ ... I tried to recall my convictions, to get back again the load of sin under which I had been laboring. I tried in vain to make myself anxious. I was so quiet and peaceful that I tried to feel concerned about that, lest it should be the result of my having grieved the Spirit away.”2
But beyond all question there are persons in whom, quite independently of any exhaustion in the Subject’s capacity for feeling, or even in the absence of any acute
experiences, are “really the same thing. Self-surrender sees the change in terms of the old self ; determination sees it in terms of the new.’ Op. ‘cit., p. 160. 1 A. A. Bonar: Nettleton and his Labors, Edinburgh, 1854, p. 261. 2 Cuarixs G. Finney: Memoirs written by Himself, 1876, pp. 17, 18,
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previous feeling, the higher condition, having reachea the due degree of energy, bursts through all barriers and sweeps in like a sudden flood. These are the most strik- ing and memorable cases, the cases of instantaneous con- version to which the conception of divine grace has been most peculiarly attached. I have given one of them at length — the case of Mr. Bradley. But I had better re- serve the other cases and my comments on the rest of the subject for the following lecture.
LECTURE X
CONVERSION — Concluded
e
sb this lecture we have to finish the subject of Conver sion, considering at first those striking instantaneous instances of which Saint Paul’s is the most eminent, and in which, often amid tremendous emotional excitement or perturbation of the senses, a complete division is estab- lished in the twinkling of an eye between the old life and the new. Conversion of this type is an important phase of religious experience, owing to the part which it has played_in Protestant theology, and it behooves us to study it conscientiously on that account. —
I think I had better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a gen- eralization than just so far as one’s previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in. I will go back, then, to the case of our friend Henry Alline, and quote his report of the 26th of March, 1775, on which his poor divided mind became unified for good.
“ As I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamenting my miserable lost and undone condition, and almost ready to sink under my burden, I thought I was in such a miserable case as never any man was before. I returned to the house, ‘and when I got to the door, just as I was stepping off the threshold, the following impressions came into my mind like a powerful but small still voice. You have been seeking, pray:
218 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
ing, reforming, laboring, reading, hearing, and meditating, and what have you done by it towards your salvation? Are you any nearer to conversion now than when you first began? Are you any more prepared for heaven, or fitter to appear before the impartial bar of God, than when you first began to seek?
“ It brought such conviction on me that I was obliged to say that I did not think I was one step nearer than at first, but as much condemned, as much exposed, and as miserable as before. I cried out within myself, O Lord God, I am lost, and if thou, O Lord, dost not find out some new way, I know nothing of, I shall never be saved, for the ways and methods I have pre- scribed to myself have all failed me, and I am willing they should fail. O Lord, have merey! O Lord, have mercy!
‘“‘ These discoveries continued until I went into the house and sat down. After I sat down, being all in confusion, like a drowning man that was just giving up to sink, and almost in an agony, I turned very suddenly round in my chair, and see- ing part of an old Bible lying in one of the chairs, I caught hold of it in great haste ; and opening it without any premedi- tation, cast my eyes on the 38th Psalm, which was the first time I ever saw the word of God: it took hold of me with such power that it seemed to go through my whole soul, so that it seemed as if God was praying in, with, and for me. About this time my father called the family to attend prayers; I at- tended, but paid no regard to what he said in his prayer, but continued praying in those words of the Psalm. Oh, help me, help me! cried I, thou Redeemer of souls, and save me, or J am gone forever ; thou canst this night, if thou pleasest, with one drop of thy blood atone for my sins, and appease the wrath of an angry God. At that instant of time when I gave all up to him to do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule over me at his pleasure, redeeming love broke into my soul with repeated scriptures, with such power that my whole soul seemed to be melted down with love ; the burden of guilt and condemnation was gone, darkness was expelled, my heart humbled and filled with gratitude, and my whole soul, that was a few minutes ago groaning under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown God for help, was now filled with
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immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith, freed from the chains of death and darkness, and crying out, My Lord and my God ; thou art my rock and my fortress, my shield and my high tower, my life, my joy, my present and my everlasting por- tion. Looking up, I thought I saw that same light [he had on more than one previous oceasion seen subjectively a bright blaze of light], though it appeared different; and as soon as I saw it, the design was opened to me, according to his promise, and I was obliged to cry out: Enough, enough, O blessed God! The work of conversion, the change, and the manifestations of it are no more disputable than that light which I see, or anything that ever I saw.
**In the midst of all my joys, in less than half an hour after my soul was set at liberty, the Lord discovered to me my la- bor in the ministry and call to preach the gospel. I cried out, Amen, Lord, I’ll go; send me, send me. I spent the greatest part of the night in ecstasies of joy, praising and adoring the Ancient of Days for his free and unbounded grace. After I had been so long in this transport and heavenly frame that my nature seemed to require sleep, I thought to close my eyes for a few moments; then the devil stepped in, and told me that if I went to sleep, I should lose it all, and when I should awake in the morning I would find it to be nothing but a fancy and delusion. I immediately cried out, O Lord God, if I am deceived, undeceive me.
“I then closed my eyes for a few minutes, and seemed to be refreshed with sleep; and when I awoke, the first inquiry was, Where is my God? And in an instant of time, my soul seemed awake in and with God, and surrounded by the arms of ever- lasting love. About sunrise I arose with joy to relate to my parents what God had done for my soul, and declared to them the miracle of God’s unbounded grace. I took a Bible to show them the words that were impressed by God on my soul the evening before; but when I came to open the Bible, it appeared all new to me.
_ Iso longed to be useful in the cause of Christ, in preach- ing the gospel, that it seemed as if I could not rest any longer, but go I must and tell the wonders of redeeming love. I lost
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all taste for carnal pleasures, and carnal company, and was enabled to forsake them.” }
Young Mr. Alline, after the briefest of delays, and with no book-learning but his Bible, and no teaching save that of his own experience, became a Christian min- ister, and thenceforward his life was fit to rank, for its austerity and single-mindedness, with that of the most devoted saints. But happy as he became in his strenu- ous way, he never got his taste for even the most inno- cent carnal pleasures back. We must class him, like Bunyan and Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron of melancholy left a permanent imprint. His re- demption was into another universe than this mere nat- ural world, and life remained for him asad and patient trial. Years later we can find him making such an entry — as this in his diary: “ On Wednesday the 12th I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding carnal mirth.”
The next case I will give is that of a correspond- ent of Professor Leuba, printed in the latter’s article, already cited, in vol. vi. of the American Journal of Psychology. ‘This subject was an Oxford graduate, the son of a clergyman, and the story resembles in many points the classic case of Colonel Gardiner, which every- body may be supposed to know. _ Here it is, somewhat abridged : —
“ Between the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I never darkened the door of my father’s church, although I lived with him for eight years, making what money I wanted by journalism, and spending it in high carousal with any one who would sit with me and drink it away. So 1 lived, sometimes drunk for a week together, and then a terrible repentance, and would not touch a drop for a whole month.
1 Life and Journals, Boston, 1806, pp. 31-40, abridged.
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“In all this period, that is, up to thirty-three years of age, I never had a desire to reform on religious grounds. But all my pangs were due to some terrible remorse I used to feel after a heavy carousal, the remorse taking the shape of regret after my folly in wasting my life in such a way — a man of superior talents and education. This terrible remorse turned me gray in one night, and whenever it came upon me I was perceptibly grayer the next morning. What I suffered in this way is be- yond the expression of words. It was hell-fire in all its most dreadful tortures. Often did I vow that if I got over ‘ this time’ I would reform. Alas, in about three days I fully recov- ered, and wasas happy as ever. So it went on for years, but, with a physique like a rhinoceros, I always recovered, and as long as I let drink alone, no man was as capable of enjoying life as I was.
“ T was converted in my own bedroom in my father’s rectory house at precisely three o’clock in the afternoon of a hot July day (July 13, 1886). I was in perfect health, having been off from the drink for nearly a month. I was in no way troubled about my soul. In fact, God was not in my thoughts that day. A young lady friend sent me a copy of Professor Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World, asking me my opinion of it as a literary work only. Being proud of my critical talents and wishing to enhance myself in my new friend’s esteem, I took the book to my bedroom for quiet, intending to give it a thorough study, and then write her what 1 thought of it. It was here that God met me face to face, and I shall never fore get the meeting. ‘He that hath the Son hath life eternal. he that hath not the Son hath not life.’ I had read this scores of times before, but this made all the difference. I was now in God’s presence and my attention was absolutely ‘ sol- dered’ on to this verse, and I was not allowed to proceed with the book till I had fairly considered what these words really involved. Only then was I allowed to proceed, feeling all the while that there was another being in my bedroom, though not seen by me. The stillness was very marvelous, and I felt supremely happy. It was most unquestionably shown me, in one second of time, that I had never touched the Eternal: and
222 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
that if I died then, I must inevitably be lost. I was undone. I knew it as well as I now know I am saved. The Spirit of God showed it me in ineffable love; there was no terror in it; I felt God’s love so powerfully upon me that only a mighty sor- row crept over me that I had lost all through my own folly; and what was I todo? What could Ido? I did not repent even; God never asked me to repent. All I felt was ‘I am undone,’ and God cannot help it, although he loves me. No fault on the part of the Almighty. All the time I was supremely happy: I felt like a little child before his father. I had done wrong, but my Father did not scold me, but loved me most wondrously. Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to a cer- tainty, and being naturally of a brave disposition I did not quail under it, but deep sorrow for the past, mixed with regret for what I had lost, took hold upon me, and my soul thrilled within me to think it was all over. Then there crept in upon me so gently, so lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it after all? The old, old story over again, told in the simplest way: ‘ There is no name under heaven whereby ye can be saved except that of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ No words were spoken to me; my soul seemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from that hour to this, nearly nine years now, there has never been in my life one doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father both worked upon me that after- noon in July, both differently, and both in the most perfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced there and then in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in less than twenty-four hours.
“ But a time of trouble was yet to come. The day after my conversion I went into the hay-field to lend a hand with the harvest, and not having made any promise to God to ab- stain or drink in moderation only, I took too much and came home drunk. My poor sister was heart-broken; and I felt ashamed of myself and got to my bedroom at once, where she followed me, weeping copiously. She said I had been con- verted and fallen away instantly. But although I was quite © full of drink (not muddled, however), I knew that God’s work begun in me was not going to be wasted. About midday I
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made on my knees the first prayer before God for twenty years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for I would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I com- mitted myself to him in the profoundest belief that my individ- uality was going to be destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was willing. In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe: after being a regular smoker from my twelfth year the desire for it went at once, and has never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptation since conversion, God seemingly having shut out Satan from that course with me. He gets a free hand in other ways, but never on sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all ownership in my own life, he has guided me in a thousand ways, and has opened my path in a way almost incredible to those who do not enjoy the bless- ing of a truly surrendered life.”
So much for our graduate of Oxford, in whom you notice the complete abolition of an ancient appetite as one of the conversion’s fruits.
The most curious record of sudden conversion with which I am acquainted is that of M. Alphonse Ratis- bonne, a freethinking French Jew, to Catholicism, at Rome in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend, written a few months later, the convert gives a palpitating account of the circumstances.’ The predisposing conditions appear to have been slight. He had an elder brother who had been converted and was a Catholic priest. He was him- self irreligious, and nourished an antipathy to the apos: tate brother and generally to his ‘cloth.’ Finding him- self at Rome in his twenty-ninth year, he fell in with a
1 My quotations are made from an Italian translation of this letter in the Biografia del Sig. M. A. Ratisbonne, Ferrara, 1843, which I have to thank Monsignore D. O’Connell of Rome for bringing to my notice. I abridge the original.
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French gentleman who tried to make a proselyte of him,
but who succeeded no farther after two or three conversa- tions than to get him to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal round his neck, and to accept and read a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin. M. Ratisbonne represents “zis own part in the conversations as having been of a light and chaffing order; but he notes the fact that for some days he was unable to banish the words of the prayer from his mind, and that the night before the crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in the imagery of which a black cross with no Christ upon it figured. Nevertheless, until noon of the next day he was free in mind and spent the time in trivial conversations. I now give his own words.
“ Tf at this time any one had accosted me, saying: ‘ Alphonse, in a quarter of an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God and Saviour; you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the ground in a humble church; you shall be smiting your breast at the foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your life for the Catholic faith; you shall re- nounce the world and its pomps and pleasures ; renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if need be, your betrothed; the affec- tions of your family, the esteem of your friends, and your attach- ment to the Jewish people; you shall have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his cross till death ;’ — if, I say, a prophet had come to me with such a prediction, I should have judged that only one person could be more mad than he, — whosoever, namely, might believe in the possibility of such senseless folly becoming true. And yet that folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.
“Coming out of the café I met the carriage of Monsieur B. [the proselyting friend]. He stopped and invited me in for a drive, but first asked me to wait for a few minutes whilst he attended to some duty at the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of waiting in the carriage, I entered the church myself to look at it. The church of San Andrea was poor, small, and
, CONVERSION 225
empty; I believe that I found myself there almost alone. No work of art attracted my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its interior without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only remember an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning before me as'I mused. Ia an instant the dog had disappeared, the whole church had van-: ished, I no longer saw anything, . . or more truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone.
‘“‘ Heavens, how can I speak of it? Oh no! human words cannot attain to expressing the inexpressible. Any description, however sublime it might be, could be but a profanation of the unspeakable truth.
“J was there prostrate on the ground, bathed in my tears. with my heart beside itself, when M. B. called me back to life, I could not reply to the questions which followed from him one upon the other. But finally I took the medal which I had on my breast, and with all the effusion of my soul I kissed the image of the Virgin, radiant with grace, which it bore. Oh, indeed, it was She! It was indeed She! [What he had seen had been a vision of the Virgin. |
“IT did not know where I was: I did not know whether I was Alphonse or another. I only felt myself changed and be- lieved myself another me; I looked for myself in myself and did not find myself. In the bottom of my soul I felt an explo- sion of the most ardent joy; I could not speak ; I had no wish to reveal what had happened. But I felt something solemn and sacred within me which made me ask for a priest. I was fed to one; and there, alone, after he had given me the positive order, I spoke as best I could, kneeling, and with my heart still trembling. I could give no account to myself of the truth of which I had acquired a knowledge and a faith. All that I can say is that in an instant the bandage had fallen from my eyes; and not one bandage only, but the whole manifold of bandages in which I had been brought up. One after another they rapidly disappeared, even as the mud and ice disappear under the rays of the burning sun.
“IT came out as from a sepulchre, from an abyss of darkness ; and I was living, perfectly living. But I wept, for at the bot
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tom of that gulf I saw the extreme of misery from which I had been saved by an infinite mercy ; and I shuddered at the sight of my iniquities, stupefied, melted, overwhelmed with wonder and with gratitude. You may ask me how I came to this new insight, for truly 1 had never opened a book of religion nor »ven read a single page of the Bible, and the dogma of original sin is either entirely denied or forgotten by the Hebrews of to-day, so that I had’ thought so little about it that I doubt whether I ever knew its name. But how came I, then, to this perception of it? I can answer nothing save this, that on en- tering that church I was in darkness altogether, and on com- ing out of it I saw the fullness of the light. I can explain the change no better than by the simile of a profound sleep or the analogy of one born blind who should suddenly open his eyes to the day. He sees, but cannot define the light which bathes him and by means of which he sees the objects which excite his wonder. If we cannot explain physical light, how can we ex- plain the light which is the truth itself? And I think I remain within the limits of veracity when I say that without having any knowledge of the letter of religious doctrine, I now intuitively perceived its sense and spirit. Better than if I saw them, I felt those hidden things ; I felt them by the inexplicable effects they produced in me. It all happened in my interior mind; and those impressions, more rapid than thought, shook my soul, revolved and turned it, as it were, in another direction, towards other aims, by other paths. I express myself badly. But do you wish, Lord, that I should inclose in poor and barren words sentiments which the heart alone ean understand ?”
I might multiply cases almost indefinitely, but these will suffice to show you how real, definite, and memo: rable an event a sudden conversion may be to him whe has the experience. Throughout the height of it he un- doubtedly seems to himself a passive spectator or under- goer of an astounding process performed upon him from above. There is too much evidence of this for any doubt of it to be possible. Theology, combining this fact with the doctrines of election and grace, has concluded that
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the spirit of God is with us at these dramatic moments in a peculiarly miraculous way, unlike what happens at any other juncture of our lives. At that moment, it be- lieves, an absolutely new nature is breathed into us, and we become partakers of the very substance of the Deity.
That the conversion should be instantaneous seems called for on this view, and the Moravian Protestants ap- pear to have been the first to see this logical consequence. The Methodists soon followed suit, practically if not dog- matically, and a short time ere his death, John Wesley wrote : —
“In London alone I found 652 members of our Society who were exceeding clear in their experience, and whose testimony I could see no reason to doubt. And every one of these (with- out a single exception) has declared that his deliverance from sin was instantaneous; that the change was wrought in a mo- ment. Had half of these, or one third, or one in twenty, de- clared it was gradually wrought in them, I should have believed this, with regard to them, and thought that some were gradually sanctified and some instantaneously. But as I have not found, in so long a space of time, a single person speaking thus, I can- not but believe that sanctification is commonly, if not always, an instantaneous work.” Tyerman’s Life of Wesley, i. 468.
All this while the more usual sects of Protestantism have set no such store by instantaneous conversion. For them as for the Catholic Church, Christ’s blood, the sacraments, and the individual’s ordinary religious duties are practically supposed to suffice to his salvation, even though no acute crisis of self-despair and surrender fol- lowed by relief should be experienced. For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there have been a crisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, not effectively received, and _ Christ’s sacrifice in so far forth is incomplete. Methodism surely here follows, if not the healthier-minded, yet on
228 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
the whole the profounder spiritual instinct. The indi- vidual models which it has set up as typical and worthy of imitation are not only the more interesting dramatically, but psychologically they have been the more complete.
In the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain and America we have, so to speak, the codified and stereo- typed procedure to which this way of thinking has led. In spite of the unquestionable fact that saints of the once-born type exist, that there may be a gradual growth in holiness without a cataclysm; in spite of the obvious leakage (as one may say) of much mere natural goodness into the scheme of salvation; revivalism has always as- sumed that only its own type of religious experience can be perfect; you must first be nailed on the cross of natural despair and agony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be miraculously released.
It is natural that those who personally have traversed such an experience should carry away a feeling of its being a miracle rather than a natural process. Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visions witnessed ; auto- matic motor phenomena occur ; and it always seems, after the surrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. More- over the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant as well to warrant one’s belief in a radically new substantial nature.
“ Conversion,” writes the New England Puritan, Joseph Al-. leine, “is not the putting in a patch of holiness; but with the true convert holiness is woven into all his powers, principles, and practice. The sincere Christian is quite a new fabric, from the foundation to the top-stone. He is a new man, a new creature.”
And Jonathan Edwards says in the same strain: “Those gracious influences which are the effects of the Spirit of God
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are altogether supernatural — are quite different from anything that unregenerate men experience. They are what no improve- ment, or composition of natural qualifications or principles will ever produce ; because they not only differ from what is natu- ral, and from everything that natural men experience in degree and circumstances, but also in kind, and are of a nature far more excellent. From hence it follows that in gracious affec- tions there are [also] new perceptions and sensations entirely different in their nature and kind from anything experienced by the [same] saints before they were sanctified. . .°. The con- ceptions which the saints have of the loveliness of God, and that kind of delight which they experience in it, are quite pe- culiar, and entirely different from anything which a natural man can possess, or of which he can form any proper notion.”
And that such a glorious transformation as this ought of necessity to be preceded by despair is shown by Ed- wards in another passage.
“Surely it cannot be unreasonable,” he says, “ that before God delivers us from a state of sin and liability to everlast- ing woe, he should give us some considerable sense of the evil from which he delivers us, in order that we may know and feel the importance of salvation, and be enabled to appreciate the value of what God is pleased to do for us. As those who are saved are successively in two extremely different states — first in a state of condemnation and then in a state of justification and blessedness — and as God, in the salvation of men, deals with them as rational and intelligent creatures, it appears agreeable to this wisdom, that those who are saved should be made sensible of their Being, in those two different states. In the first place, that they should be made sensible of their state of condemnation ; and afterwards, of their state of deliverance and happiness.”
Such quotations express sufficiently well for our pur- pose the doctrinal interpretation of these changes. What- ever part suggestion and imitation may have played in producing them in men and women in excited assemblies,
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they have at any rate been in countless individual in: stances an original and unborrowed experience. Were we writing the story of the mind from the purely natural- history point of view, with no religious interest whatever, we should still have to write down man’s liability to sud- den and complete conversion as one of his most curious peculiarities.
What, now, must we ourselves think of this question ? Ts an instantaneous conversion a miracle in which God is present as he is present in no change of heart less strik- ingly abrupt? Are there two classes of human beings, even among the apparently regenerate, of which the one class really partakes of Christ’s nature while the other merely seems to do so? Or, on the contrary, may the whole phenomenon of regeneration, even in these star- tling instantaneous examples, possibly be a strictly natural process, divine in its fruits, of course, but in one case more and in another less so, and neither more nor less di- vine in its mere causation and mechanism than any other process, high or low, of man’s interior life ?
Before proceeding to answer this question, I must ask you to listen to some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained the shifting of men’s centres of personal energy within them and the lighting up of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomena as partly due to explicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but as due largely also to the subconscious incu- bation and maturing of motives deposited by the experi- ences of life. When ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into flower. I have now to speak of the subconscious — region, in which such processes of flowering may occur, in a somewhat less vague way. I only regret that my limits of time here force me to be so short.
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The expression ‘field of consciousness’ has but re- cently come into vogue in the psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental life which figured most was the single ‘idea,’ supposed to be a definitely out- lined thing. But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or. field of objects present to the thought at any time; and, second, to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness.
As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest, around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot beyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which we seem rather to be about to perceive than to per- ceive actually. At other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted.
Different individuals present constitutional differences in this matter of width of field. Your great organizing geniuses are men with habitually vast fields of mental vision, in which a whole programme of future operations will appear dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ahead into definite directions of advance. In common people there is never this magnificent inclusive view of a topic. They stumble along, feeling their way, as it were, from point to point, and often stop entirely. In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the
232 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
present narrowed: down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
The important fact which this ‘field’ formula com- memorates is the indetermination of the margin. Inat- tentively realized as is the matter which the margin con- tains, itis nevertheless there, and helps both to guide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our at- tention. It lies around us like a ‘ magnetic field,’ inside of which our centre of energy turns like a compass-needle, as the present phase of consciousness alters into its suc- cessor. Our whole past store of memories floats beyond this margin, ready at a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residual powers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute our empirical self stretches continuously be- yond it. So vaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actual and what is only potential at any moment of our conscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain mental elements whether we are conscious of them or not.
The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal, inattentive or at- tentive, is there in the ‘field’ of the moment, all dim and impossible to assign as the latter’s outline may be; and, second, that what is absolutely extra-marginal is abso- lutely non-existent, and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all.
And having reached this point, I must now ask you to recall what I said in my last lecture about the subcon- scious life. I said, as you may recollect, that. those who first laid stress upon these phenomena could not know the facts as we now know them. My first duty now is te tell you what I meant by such a statement.
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I cannot but think that the most important step for- ward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call this the most important step forward because, unlike the other advances which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected pe- culiarity in the constitution of human nature. No other step forward which psychology has made can proffer any such claim as this.
In particular this discovery of a consciousness existing beyond the field, or subliminally as Mr. Myers terms it, casts light on many phenomena of religious biography. That is why I have to advert to it now, although it is naturally impossible for me in this place to give you any account of the evidence on which the admission of such a consciousness is based. You will find it set forth in many recent books, Binet’s Alterations of Personality * being perhaps as good a one as any to recommend.
The human material on which the demonstration has been made has so far been rather limited and, in part at least, eccentric, consisting of unusually suggestible hyp- notic subjects, and of hysteric patients. Yet the elemen- tary mechanisms of our life are presumably so uniform . that what is shown to be true ina marked degree of some persons is probably true in some degree of -all, and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily high degree.
1 Published in the International Scientific Series.
234 ‘THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
The most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultra-marginal life of this sort is that one’s ordinary fields of consciousness are liable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess the source, and which, therefore, take for him the form of unaccount- able impulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even of hallucinations of sight or hearing. The impulses may take the direction of automatic speech or writing, the meaning of which the subject himself may not understand even while he utters it; and generalizing this phenomenon, Mr. Myers has given the name of au- tomatism, sensory or motor, emotional or intellectual, to this whole sphere of effects, due to ‘uprushes’ into the ordinary consciousness of energies originating in the sub- liminal parts of the mind.
The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenom- enon of post-hypnotic suggestion, so-called. You give to a hypnotized subject, adequately susceptible, an order to perform some designated act— usual or eccentric, it makes no differerice — after he wakes from his hypnotic sleep. Punctually, when the signal comes or the time elapses upon which you have told him that the act must ensue, he performs it ; — but in so doing he has no recol- lection of your suggestion, and he always trumps up an improvised pretext for his behavior if the act be of an eccentric kind. It may even be suggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear a voice at a certain interval after waking, and when the time comes the vision is seen or the voice heard, with no inkling on the subject’s part of its source. In the wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of underground life, in the shape of memories of a painful sort which lead a
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parasitic existence, buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness, and making irruptions thereinto with hallu- cinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion, and the whole procession of symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of mind. Alter or abolish by sug- gestion these subconscious memories, and the patient im- mediately gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr. Myers’s sense of the word. These clinical records sound like fairy-tales when one first reads them, yet it is impossible to doubt their accuracy ; and, the path having been once opened by these first observers, similar obser- vations have been made elsewhere. They throw, as I said, a wholly new light upon our natural constitution. And it seems to me that they make a farther step inev- itable. Interpreting the unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me that hereafter, wherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it motor impulses, or obsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or delusion, or hallucination, we are bound first of all to make search whether it be not an explosion, into the fields of ordinary consciousness, of ideas elaborated outside of those fields in subliminal regions of the mind. We should look, therefore, for its source in the Subject’s sub- conscious life. In the hypnotic cases, we ourselves create the source by our suggestion, so we know it directly. In the hysteric cases, the lost memories which are the source have to be extracted from the patient’s Subliminal by a number of ingenious methods, for an account of which you must consult the books. In other pathological cases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathic obsessions, _ the source is yet to seek, but by analogy it also should be in subliminal regions which improvements in our methods may yet conceivably put on tap. There lies the mechanism logically to be assumed, — but the assumption
236 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
involves a vast program of work to be done in the way of verification, in which the religious experiences of man must play their part.’
And thus I return to our own specific subject of in- stantaneous conversions. You remember the cases of Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and the graduate of Oxford converted at three in the afternoon. Similar occurrences abound, some with and some without luminous visions, all with a sense of astonished happiness, and of being wrought on by a higher control. If, abstracting alto- gether from the question of their value for the future spiritual life of the individual, we take them on their psy-
1 The reader will here please notice that in my exclusive reliance in the last lecture on the subconscious ‘incubation’ of motives deposited by a growing experience, I followed the method of employing accepted princi- ples of explanation as far asone can. The subliminal region, whatever else it may be, is at any rate a place now admitted by psychologists to exist for the accumulation of vestiges of sensible experience (whether inattentively or attentively registered), and for their elaboration according to ordinary psychological or logical laws into results that end by attaining such a ‘ten- sion’ that they may at times enter consciousness with something like a burst. It thus is ‘scientific’ to interpret all otherwise unaccountable invasive altera- tions of consciousness as results of the tension of subliminal memories reach- ing the bursting-point. But candor obliges me to confess that there are occasional bursts into consciousness of results of which it is not easy to demonstrate any prolonged subconscious incubatiou. Some of the cases I used to illustrate the sense of presence of the unseen in Lecture III were of this order (compare pages 59, 61, 62, 67) ; and we shall see other experiences of the kind when we come to the subject of mysticism. The case of Mr. Bradley, that of M. Ratisbonne, possibly that of Colonel Gardiner, possibly that of Saint Paul, might not be so easily explained in this simple way. The result, then, would have to be ascribed either to a merely physiological nerve storm, a ‘discharging lesion’ like that of epilepsy; or, in case it were useful and rational, as in the two latter cases named, to some more mystical or theological hypothesis. I make this remark in order that the reader may realize that the subject is really complex. But I shall keep — myself as far as possible at present to the more ‘scientific’ view; and only as the plot thickens in subsequent lectures shall I consider the question of its absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all the facts. That subconscious incubation explains 2 great number of them, there can be no doubt.
CONVERSION 237
chological side exclusively, so many peculiarities in them remind us of what we find outside of conversion that we are tempted to class them along with other automatisms, and to suspect that what makes the difference between a sudden and a gradual convert is not necessarily the pre- sence of divine miracle in the case of one and of some- thing less divine in that of the other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity, the fact, namely, that: in the re- cipient of the more instantaneous grace we have one of those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in which mental work can go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly upsetting the equilib- rium of the primary consciousness, may come.
I do not see why Methodists need object to such a view. Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the no- tion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology ; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.
Well, how is it with these fruits? If we except the class of preéminent saints of whom the names illumine history, and consider only the usual run of ‘ saints,’ the shopkeeping church-members and ordinary youthful or middle-aged recipients of instantaneous conversion, whether at revivals or in the spontaneous course of meth- odistic growth, you will probably agree that no splendor worthy of a wholly supernatural creature fulgurates from
238 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
them, or sets them apart from the mortals who have never experienced that favor. Were it true that a suddenly converted man as such is, as Edwards says,’ of an en- tirely different kind from a natural man, partaking as he does directly of Christ’s substance, there surely ought to be some exquisite class-mark, some distinctive radiance attaching even to the-lowliest specimen of this genus, to which no one of us could remain insensible, and which, so far as it went, would prove him more excellent than ever the most highly gifted among mere natural men. But notoriously there is no such radiance. Converted men as a class are indistinguishable from natural men; some natural men even excel some converted men in their fruits; and no one ignorant of doctrinal theology could guess by mere every-day inspection of the ‘acci- dents’ of the two groups of persons before him, that their substance differed as much as divine differs from human substance.
The believers in the non-natural character of sudden conversion have had practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class-mark distinctive of all true converts. The super-normal incidents, such as voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of sud- denly presented scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be counter- feited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be ad-
1 Edwards says elsewhere : “I am bold to say that the.work of Godin | the conversion of one soul, considered together with the source, foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit, end, and eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material unk verse.”
CONVERSION 239
mitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity altogether.
Throughout Jonathan Hdwards’s admirably rich and delicate description of the supernaturally infused condi- tion, in his Treatise on Religious Affections, there is not one decisive trait, not one mark, that unmistakably parts it off from what may possibly be only an exceptionally high degree of natural goodness. In fact, one could hardly read a clearer argument than this book unwit- tingly offers in favor of the thesis that no chasm exists between the orders of human excellence, but that here as elsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, and gen- eration and regeneration are matters of degree.
All which denial of two objective classes of human beings separated by a chasm must not leave us blind to the extraordinary momentousness of the fact of his con- version to the individual himself who gets converted. There are higher and lower limits of possibility set to each personal life. If a flood but goes above one’s head, its absolute elevation becomes a matter of small impor- tance ; and when we touch our own upper limit and live in our own highest centre of energy, we may call our- selves saved, no matter how much higher some one else’s centre may be. A small man’s salvation will always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts for him, and we should remember this when the fruits of our ordi- nary evangelicism look discouraging. Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of these spiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, might have been, if such poor grace as they have received had never touched them at all ?*
1 Emerson writes : “When we see a soul whose acts are regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say : Crump is a better man, with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.” True enough. Yet Crump
240 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class standing for a grade of spiritual excellence, I be-. lieve we shall find natural men and converts both sud- den and gradual in all the classes. The forms which regenerative change effects have, then, no general spirit- ual significance, but only a psychological significance. We have seen how Starbuck’s laborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinary spiritual growth. Another American psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe,’ has analyzed the cases of seventy-seven converts or ex-can- didates for conversion, known to him, and the results strikingly confirm the view that sudden conversion is connected with the possession of an active subliminal self. Examining his subjects with reference to their hypnotic sensibility and to such automatisms as hypnagogic hallu- cinations, odd impulses, religious dreams about the time of their conversion, ete., he found these relatively much more frequent in the group of converts whose transforma- tion had been ‘ striking,’ ‘ striking’ transformation being defined as a change which, though not necessarily in- stantaneous, seems to the subject of it to be distinctly different from a process of growth, however rapid.” ? Candidates for conversion at revivals are, as you know, often disappointed: they experience nothing striking. Professor Coe had a number of persons of this class among his seventy-seven subjects, and they almost all, when tested by hypnotism, proved to belong to a subclass which he
may really be the better Crump, for his inner discords and second birth ; and your once-born ‘regal’ character, though indeed always better than poor Crump, may fall far short of what he individually might be had he only some Crump-like capacity for compunction over his own peculiar diabolisms, graceful and pleasant and invariably gentlemanly as these may be.
1 In his book, The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900.
2 Op. cit., p. 112.
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calls ‘ spontaneous,’ that is, fertile in self-suggestions, as distinguished from a ‘ passive’ subclass, to which most of the subjects of striking transformation belonged. His inference is that self-suggestion of impossibility had pre- vented the influence upon these persons of an environ- ment which, on the more ‘passive’ subjects, had easily brought forth the effects they looked for. Sharp distinc- tions are difficult in these regions, and Professor Coe’s numbers are small. But his methods were careful, and the results tally with what one might expect; and they seem, on the whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which is that if you should expose to a converting influ- ence a subject in whom three factors unite: first, pro- nounced emotional sensibility ; second, tendency to auto- matisms ; and third, suggestibility of the passive type ; you might then safely predict the result : there would be a sudden conversion, a transformation of the striking kind.
Does this temperamental origin diminish the signifi- cance of the sudden conversion when it has occurred ? Not in the least, as Professor Coe well says; for “ the ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychologi- eal, nothing definable in terms of how i¢ happens, but something ethical, definable only in terms of what is attained.” *
As we proceed farther in our inquiry we shall see that what is attained is often an altogether new level of spir- itual vitality, a relatively heroic level, in which impos- sible things have become possible, and new energies and endurances are shown. The personality is changed, the man is born anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the particular shape to his metamorphosis. ‘Sanctification’ is the technical name of this result ; and erelong examples of it shall be brought
1 Op. cit., p. 144.
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before you. In this lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on the assurance and peace which fill the hour of change itself.
One word more, though, before proceeding to that point, lest the final purpose of my explanation of sudden- ness by subliminal activity be misunderstood. I do in- deed believe that if the Subject have no liability to such subconscious activity, or if his conscious fields have a hard rind of a margin that resists incursions from be= yond it, his conversion must be gradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growth into new habits. His possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or pervious margin, is thus a conditio sine qua non of the Subject’s becoming converted in the instantaneous way. Butif you, being orthodox Christians, ask me as a psychologist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a subliminal self does not exclude the notion of the direct presence of the Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist I do not see why it neces- sarily should. The lower manifestations of the Sub- liminal, indeed, fall within the resources of the personal subject: his ordinary sense-material, inattentively taken in and subconsciously remembered and combined, will account for all his usual automatisms. But just as our primary wide-awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of things material, so it is logically con- ceivable that if there be higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might close a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.
Thus that perception of external control which is so
CONVERSION 243
essential a feature in conversion might, in some cases at any rate, be interpreted as the orthodox interpret it: forces transcending the finite individual might impress him, on condition of his being what we may call a sub- liminal human specimen. But in any case the value of these forces would have to be determined by their effects, and the mere fact of their transcendency would of itself establish no presumption that they were more divine than diabolical.
I confess that this is the way in which I should rather see the topic left lying in your minds until I come to a much later lecture, when I hope once more to gather these dropped threads together into more definitive con- clusions. The notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not at this pomt of our inquiry to be held to exclude all notion of a higher penetration. If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get access to us
only through the subliminal door. (See below, p. 515 ff.)
Let us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the hour of the conversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this sense of higher control. It is not always, but it is very often present. We saw examples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. The need of such a higher controlling agency is well expressed in the short reference which the eminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makes to the crisis of his own con- version. It was at Naples in his early manhood, in the summer of 1827.
“‘ My sadness,” he says, “ was without limit, and having got entire possession of me, it filled my life from the most indiffer- ent external acts to the most. secret thoughts, and corrupted at their source my feelings, my judgment, and my happiness. It was then that I saw that to expect to put a stop to this disorder
244 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
by my reason and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be to act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of the other equally blind one. I had then no resource save in some influence from without. I re- membered the promise of the Holy Ghost ; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of the rest of nature. Re- nouncing then all merit, all strength, abandoning all my per- sonal resources, and acknowledging no other title to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw myself on my knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life. From this day onwards a new interior life began for me: not that my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost its sting. Hope had entered into my heart, and once entered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little by little did the rest.” 1
It is needless to remind you once more of the admira- ble congruity of Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such experiences. In the ex- treme of melancholy the self that consciously is can do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and with- out resource, and no works it can accomplish will avail. Redemption from such subjective conditions must be a free gift or nothing, and grace through Chae, s accom= plished sacrifice is such a gift.
“God,” says Luther, “is the God of the humble, the miser- able, the oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to nothing; and his nature is to give sight to the
1 T piece together a quotation made by W. Monod, in his book la Vie, and a letter printed in the work : Adolphe Monod: I., Souvenirs de sa Vie, 1885, p. 433.
CONVERSION 245
blind, to comfort the broken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man’s own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come to his own natural and proper work, Therefore God must take this maul in hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence, that she may so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned. But-here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and cast down, he is so little able to raise himself up again and say, ‘Now I am bruised and afflicted enough; now is the time of grace; now is the time to hear Christ.’ The foolishness of man’s heart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself more laws to satisfy his conscience. ‘If I live,’ saith he, ‘I will amend my life: I will do this, I will do that.’ But here, except thou do the quite contrary, except thou send Moses away with his law, and in these terrors and this anguish lay hold upon Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl, thy shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works, thy merits? what shall all these do? what shall the law of Moses avail? If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits could have loved the Son of God, and so come to him, what needed he to deliver himself for me? If I, being a wretch and damned sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son of God to be given? But because there was no other price, therefore he delivered neither sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but even God himself, entirely and wholly ‘for me,’ even ‘for me,’ I say, a miserable, wretched sinner. Now, therefore, I take comfort and apply this to myse/f. And this manner of applying is the very true force and power of faith. For he died not to justify the righteous, but the un-righteous, and to make them the children of God.” 4
That is, the more literally lost you are, the more liter- ally you are the very being whom Christ’s sacrifice has already saved. Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine,
1 Commentary on Galatians, ch. iii. verse 19, and ch. ii. verse 20, abridged.
246 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as this message from Luther’s personal experience. As Protestants are not all sick souls, of course reliance on what Luther ex- ults in calling the dung of one’s merits, the filthy pud- dle of one’s own righteousness, has come to the front again in their religion ; but the adequacy of his view of Christianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure is shown by its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and quickening thing.
Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luther meant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually conceived of. But this is only one part of Luther’s faith, the other part being far more vital. This other part is something not intellectual but immediate and intuitive, the assurance, namely, that I, this individual I, just as I stand, without one plea, etc., am saved now and forever.
Professor Leuba is undoubtedly right in contending that the conceptual belief about Christ’s work, although so often efficacious and antecedent, is really accessory and non-essential, and that the ‘joyous conviction’ can also
1 In some conversions, both steps are distinct ; in this one, for exam- ple : —
“ Whilst I was reading the evangelical treatise, I was soon struck by an expression : ‘the finished work of Christ.’ ‘Why,’ I asked of myself, ‘ does the author use these terms? Why does he not say “the atoning work” ?’ Then these words, ‘ It is finished,’ presented themselves to my mind. ‘ What is it that is finished ?’ I asked, and in an instant my mind replied : ‘A per- fect expiation for sin; entire satisfaction has been given; the debt has been paid by the Substitute. Christ has died for our sins; not for ours only, but for those of all men. If, then, the entire work is finished, all the debt paid, what remains for me todo?’ In another instant the light was shed through my mind by the Holy Ghost, and the joyous conviction was given me that nothing more was to be done, save to fall on my knees, to accept this Saviour and his love, to praise God forever.” Autobiogra- — phy of Hudson Taylor. I translate back into English from the French
translation of Challand (Geneva, no date), the original not being acces sible.
_ CONVERSION 241
come by far other channels than this conception. It is to the joyous conviction itself, the assurance that all is well with one, that he would give the name of faith par eacellence.
“When the sense of estrangement,” he writes, “fencing man about in a narrowly limited ego, breaks down, the individ- ual finds himself ‘at one with all creation.’ He lives in the universal life; he and man, he and nature, he and ,God, are one. That state of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement of moral unity, is the Paith- state. Various dogmatic beliefs suddenly, on the advent of the faith-state, acquire a character of certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is irrelevant. But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state, it is a gross error to imagine that the chief practical value of the faith- state is its power to stamp with the seal of reality certain par- ticular theological conceptions! On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the psychic correlate of a biolo- gical growth reducing contending desires to one direction ; a growth which expresses itself in new affective states and new reactions ; in larger, nobler, more Christ-like activities. The ground of the specific assurance in religious dogmas is then an affective experience. The objects of faith may even be prepos- terous; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude. The more startling the af- fective experience, the less explicable it seems, the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated notions.” 2
The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith-state, can be easily enu- merated, though it is probably difficult to realize their
1 Tolstoy’s case was a good comment on those words. There was almost no theology in his conversion. His faith-state was the sense come back that life was infinite in its moral significance.
2 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345-347, abridged.
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intensity, unless. one have been through the experience one’s self.
The central one is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the har- mony, the willingness to be, even though the outer con- ditions should remain the same. The certainty of God’s
‘orace, of ‘justification,’ ‘ salvation,’ is an objective be- lief that usually accompanies the change in Christians; but this may be entirely lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same— you will recollect the case of the Oxford graduate: and many might be given where the assurance of personal salvation was only a later result. A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state of mind.
The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The mysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says; and often, nay usually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words. But these more intellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat of mysticism.
A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objec- tive change which the world often appears to undergo. ‘An appearance of newness beautifies every object,’ the precise opposite of that other sort of newness, that dread- ful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world, which is experienced by melancholy patients, and of which you may recall my relating some examples.’ This sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without is one of the commonest entries in conversion records, Jonathan Edwards thus describes it in himself : —
“After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inwarg sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered ; there
1 Above, p. 152.
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seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. (God’s excellency, his wis- dom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and light- ning ; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm rising ; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me.” ?
Billy Bray, an excellent little illiterate English evan- gelist, records his sense of newness thus : —
“T said to the Lord: ‘Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive, they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened, and I have faith to believe it.’ In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I cannot express what I felt. I shouted for joy. I praised God with my whole heart. . .. I think this was in November, 1823, but.what day of the month I do not know. I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world. I spent the greater part of my time in praising the Lord.” 2
Starbuck and Leuba both illustrate this sense of new- ness by quotations. I take the two following from Star- buck’s manuscript collection. One, a woman, says : —
“ T was taken to a camp-meeting, mother and religious friends seeking and praying for my conversion. My emotional nature was stirred to its depths ; confessions of depravity and pleading with God for salvation from sin made me oblivious of all sur- roundings. I plead for mercy, and had a vivid realization of forgiveness and renewal of my nature. When rising from my knees I exclaimed, ‘Old things have passed away, all things
1 Dwicut: Life of Edwards, New York, 1830, p. 61, abridged. 2 W. F. Bourne: The King’s Son, a Memoir of Billy Bray, London, Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887, p. 9.
250 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
have become new.’ It was like entering another world, a new state of existence. Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material ob- ject in the universe, the woods were vocal with heavenly music ; my soul exulted in the love of God, and I wanted everybody to share in my joy.”
The next case is that of a man: —
“‘T know not how I got back into the encampment, but found myself staggering up to Rev. ’s Holiness tent — and as it was full of seekers and a terrible noise inside, some groaning, some laughing, and some shouting, and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, I fell on my face by a bench, and tried to pray, and every time I would call on God, something like a man’s hand would strangle me by choking. I don’t know whether there were any one around or near me or not. I thought I should surely die if I did not get help, but just as often as I would pray, that unseen hand was felt on my throat and my breath squeezed off. Finally something said: ‘ Venture on the atone- ment, for you will die anyway if you don’t.’ So I made one final struggle to call on God for mercy, with the same choking and strangling, determined to finish the sentence of prayer for Mercy, if I did strangle and die, and the last I remember that time was falling back on the ground with the same unseen hand on my throat. I don’t know how long I lay there or what was going on. None of my folks were present. When I came to myself, there were a crowd around me praising God. The very heavens seemed to open and pour down rays of light and glory. Not for a moment only, but all day and night, floods of light and glory seemed to pour through my soul, and oh, how I was changed, and everything became new. My horses and hogs and even everybody seemed changed.”
This man’s case introduces the feature of automatisms, which in suggestible subjects have been so startling a feature at revivals since, in Edwards’s, Wesley’s, and Whitfield’s time, these became a regular means of gospel propagation. They were at first supposed to be semi
CONVERSION 251
miraculous proofs of ‘ power’ on the part of the Holy Ghost; but great divergence of opinion quickly arose concerning them. Hdwards, in his Thoughts on the Re- vival of Religion .in New England, has to defend them against their eritics; and their value has long been mat- ter of debate even within the revivalistic denominations. They undoubtedly have no essential spiritual significance, and although their presence makes his conversion more memorable to the convert, it has never been proved that converts who show them are more persevering or fertile in good fruits than those whose change of heart has had less violent accompaniments. On the whole, uncon- sciousness, convulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utter- ances, and suffocation, must be simply ascribed to the subject’s having a large subliminal region, involving nervous instability. This is often the subject’s own view of the matter afterwards. One of Starbuck’s correspond- ents writes, for instance : — :
“T have been through the experience which is known as con- version. My explanation of it is this: the subject works his emotions up to the breaking point, at the same time resisting their physical manifestations, such as quickened pulse, etc., and then suddenly lets them have their full sway over his body. The relief is something wonderful, and the pleasurable effects of the emotions are experienced to the highest degree.”
There is one form of sensory automatism which possi- bly deserves special notice on account of its frequency. I refer to hallucinatory or pseudo-hallucinatory luminous phenomena, photisms, to use the term of the psycholo- gists. Saint Paul’s blinding heavenly vision seems to
have been a phenomen of this sort ; so does Constantine’s
1 Consult Wit1am B. Sprague: Lectures on Revivals of Religion, New York, 1832, in the long Appendix to which the opinions of a large number ef ministers are given.
252 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
cross in the sky. The last case but one which I quoted mentions floods of light and glory. Henry Alline men- tions a light, about whose externality he seems uncertain. Colonel Gardiner sees a blazing light. President Finney writes : — |
“ Allat once the glory of God shone upon and round about me in a manner almost marvelous. . . . A light perfectly inef- fable shone in my soul, that almost prostrated meon the ground. . . . This light seemed like the brightness of the sun in every direction. It was too intense for the eyes. ... 1 think I knew something then, by actual experience, of that light that pros- trated Paul on the way to Damascus. It was surely a light such as I could not have endured long.” }
Such reports of photisms are indeed far from uncom- mon. Here is another from Starbuck’s collection, where the light appeared evidently external: —
“T had attended a series of revival services for about two weeks off and on. Had been invited to the altar several times, all the time becoming more deeply impressed, when finally I decided I must do this, or I should be lost. Realization of conversion was very vivid, like a ton’s weight being lifted from my heart; a strange light which seemed to light up the whole room (for it was dark) ; a conscious supreme bliss which caused me to repeat ‘Glory to God’ for a long time. Decided to be God’s child for life, and to give up my pet ambition, wealth and social position. My former habits of life hindered my growth somewhat, but I set about overcoming these systematically, and in one year my whole nature was changed, i. e., my ambitions were of a different order.”
Here is another one of Starbuck’s cases, involving a luminous element : —
“T had been clearly converted twenty-three years before, or rather reclaimed. My experience in regeneration was then elear and spiritual, and I had not backslidden. But I expe
1 Memoirs, p. 34.
CONVERSION 253
rienced entire sanctification on the 15th day of March, 1893, about eleven o’clock in the morning. The particular accom- paniments of the experience were entirely unexpected. I was quietly sitting at home singing selections out of Pentecostal Hymns. Suddenly there seemed to be a something sweeping into me and inflating my entire being — such a sensation as I had never experienced before. When this experience came, I seemed to be conducted around a large, capacious, well-lighted room. As I walked with my invisible conductor and looked around, a clear thought was coined in my mind, ‘ They are not here, they are gone.’ As soon as the thought was definitely formed in my mind, though no word was spoken, the Holy Spirit impressed me that I was surveying my own soul. Then, for the first time in all my life, did I know that I was cleansed from all sin, and filled with the fullness of God.”
Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the lumi- nous affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds called mescal by the Mexicans : —
“ When I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of God appeared in all his visible creation. I well re- member we reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may so express it, in the glory of God.” }
1 These reports of sensorial photism shade off into what are evidently only metaphorical accounts of the sense of new spiritual illumination, as, for instance, in Brainerd’s statement : “As I was walking in a thick grove, un- speakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, for I saw no such thing, nor any imaginatioa of a body of light in the third heavens, or anything of that nature, but it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God.”
In a case like this next one from Starbuck’s manuscript collection, the lighting up of the darkness is probably also metaphorical : —
* One Sunday night, I resolved that when I got home to the ranch where I was working, I would offer myself with my faculties and all to God to be used only by and for him. . . . It was raining and the roads were muddy ; but this desire grew so strong that I kneeled down by the side of the road and told God all about it, intending then to get up and go on. Such a thing as any special answer to my prayer never entered my mind, having
254 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
The most characteristic of all the elements of the con: version crisis, and the last one of which I shall speak, is the ecstasy of happiness produced. We have already heard several accounts of it, but I will add a couple more. President Finney’s is so vivid that I give it at
length : —
** All my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; and the ut- terance of my heart was, ‘I want to pour my whole soul out to God.’ The rising of my soul was so great that I rushed into the back room of the front office, to pray. There was no fire and no light in the room; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly light. As I went in and shut the door after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. Tt did not occur to me then, nor did it for some time afterwards, that it was wholly a mental state. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him as I would see any other man. He said nothing, but looked at me in such a manner as to break me
been converted by faith, but still being most undoubtedly saved. Well, while I was praying, I remember holding out my hands to God and telling him they should work for him, my feet walk for him, my tongue speak for him, etc., etc., if he would only use me as his instrument and give me a satisfy- ing experience — when suddenly the darkness of the night seemed lit up — I felt, realized, knew, that God heard and answered my prayer. Deep hap- piness came over me ; I felt I was accepted into the inner circle of God’s loved ones.”’
In the following case also the flash of light is metaphorical : —
‘© A prayer meeting had been called for at close of evening service. The minister supposed me impressed by his discourse (a mistake — he was dull). He came and, placing his hand upon my shoulder, said: ‘Do you not want to give your heart toGod ?’ I replied in the affirmative. Then said he, ‘Come to the front seat.’ They sang and prayed and talked with me. I experienced nothing but unaccountable wretchedness. They declared that the reason why I did not ‘ obtain peace’ was because I was not willing to give up.all to God. After about two hours the minister said we would go home. As usual, on retiring, I prayed. In great distress, I at this time simply said, ‘Lord, I have done all I can, I leave the whole matter with thee.’ Immediately, like a flash of light, there came to me a great peace, . and I arose and went into my parents’ bedroom and said, ‘I do feel so won- derfully happy.’ This I regard as the hour of conversion. It was the hour in which I became assured of divine acceptance and favor. So far ag my life was concerned, it made little immediate change.”
CONVERSION 255
- right down at his feet. I have always since regarded this as a most remarkable state of mind; for it seemed to me a reality that he stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance. It seemed to me that I bathed his feet with my tears; and yet I had no distinct impression that I touched him, that I recollect. I must have continued in this state for a good while; but my mind was too much absorbed with the interview to recollect anything that I said. But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to break off from the interview, I returned to the front office, and found that the fire that I had made of large wood was nearly burned out. But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any expectation of it, without ever hav- ing the thought in my mind that there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the Holy Spirit de- scended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings.
*‘No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say I literally bellowed out the un- utterable gushings of my heart. These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the other, until I recollect I cried out, ‘I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.’ I said, ‘ Lord, I cannot bear any more; ’ yet [had no fear of death.
*“* How long I continued in this state, with this baptism con- tinuing to roll over me and go through me, I do not know. - But I know it was late in the evening when a member of my choir — for I was the leader of the choir — came into the office to see me. He was a member of the church. He found me
256 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
in this state of loud weeping, and said to me, ‘Mr. Finney, what ails you?’ I could make him no answer for some time. He then said,‘ Are you in pain?’ I gathered myself up as pest I could, and replied, ‘No, but so happy that I cannot live.’ ”
I just now quoted Billy Bray ; I cannot do better than give his own brief account of his post-conversion feel- ings : — ;
“T can’t help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift up one foot, and it seems to say ‘Glory’; and J lift up the other, and it seems to say ‘Amen’; and so they keep up like that all the time I am walking.” }
One word, before I close this lecture, on the question of the transiency or permanence of these abrupt conver- sions. Some of you, I feel sure, knowing that numerous
1 [ add in a note a few more records : —
“One morning, being in deep distress, fearing every moment I should drop into hell, I was constrained to cry in earnest for mercy, and the Lord came to my relief, and delivered my soul from the burden and guilt of sin, My whole frame ‘was in a tremor from head to foot, and my soul enjoyed sweet peace. The pleasure I then felt was indescribable. The happiness lasted about three days, during which time I never spoke to any person about my feelings.” Autobiography of Dan Youne, edited by W. P. STRICKLAND, New York, 1860.
“In an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God’s taking care of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to ery and laugh.” H. W. BEEcuEr, quoted by LnuBa.
“ My tears of sorrow changed to joy, and I lay there praising God in such ecstasy of joy as only the soul who experiences it can realize.” — “T cannot express how I felt. It was as if I had been in a dark dungeon and lifted into the light of the sun. I shouted and I sang praise unto him who loved me and washed me from my sins. I was forced to retire into a secret place, for the tears did flow, and I did not wish my shopmates to see me, and yet I could not keep ft a secret.” — ‘I experienced joy almost to weeping.” —“TI felt my face must have shone like that of Moses. 1 had a general feeling of buoyancy. It was the greatest joy it was ever my lot to experience.” — “I wept and laughed alternately. I was as light as if walking on air. I felt as if I had gained greater peace and happiness than I had ever expected to experience.” STARBUCK’s correspondents.
CONVERSION 257
backslidings and relapses take place, make of these their apperceiving mass for interpreting the whole subject, and dismiss it with a pitying smile at so much ‘ hysterics.’ Psychologically, as well as religiously, however, this is shallow. It misses the point of serious interest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality of these shiftings of character to higher levels. Men lapse from every level — we need no statistics to tell us that. Love is, for instance, well known not to be irrevocable, yet, constant or inconstant, it reveals new flights and reaches of ideality while it lasts. These revelations form its significance to men and women, whatever be its dura- tion. So with the conversion experience: that it should for even a short time show a human being what the high- water mark of his spiritual capacity is, this is what con- stitutes its importance, — an importance which backslid- ing cannot diminish, although persistence might increase it. Asa matter of fact, all the more striking instances of conversion, all those, for instance, which | have quoted, have been permanent. The case of which there might be most doubt, on account of its suggesting so strongly an epileptoid seizure, was the case of M. Ratisbonne. Yet I am informed that Ratisbonne’s whole future was shaped by those few minutes. He gave up his project of marriage, became a priest, founded at Jerusalem, where he went to dwell, a mission of nuns for the conversion of the Jews, showed no tendency to use for egotistic pur- poses the notoriety given him by the peculiar circum- stances of his conversion, — which, for the rest, he could seldom refer to without tears, — and in short remained an exemplary son of the Church until he died, late in the 80's, if I remember rightly.
The only statistics I know of, on the subject of the duration of conversions, are those collected for Professor
258 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Starbuck by Miss Johnston. They embrace only a hun- dred persons, evangelical church-members, more than half being Methodists. According to the statement of the subjects themselves, there had been backsliding of some sort in nearly all the cases, 93 per cent. of the wo- men, 77 per cent. of the men. Discussing the returns more minutely, Starbuck finds that only 6 per cent. are relapses from the religious faith which the conversion confirmed, and that the backsliding complained of is in most only a fluctuation in the ardor of sentiment. Only six of the hundred cases report a change of faith. Star- buck’s conclusion is that the effect of conversion is to bring with it “a changed attitude towards life, which is fairly constant and permanent, although the feelings fluctuate. . .. In other words, the persons who have passed through conversion, having once taken a stand for the religious life, tend to feel themselves identified with it, no matter how much their religious enthusiasm declines.” ? f
1 Psychology of Religion, pp. 360, 357.
LECTURES XI, XII, AND XIII SAINTLINESS
HE last lecture left us im a state of expectancy. What may the practical fruits for life have been, of such movingly happy conversions as those we heard of ? With this question the really important part of our task opens, for you remember that we began all this empiri- cal inquiry not merely to open a curious chapter in the natural history of human consciousness, but rather \ to attain a spiritual judgment as to the total value and — positive meaning of all the religious t trouble and happi- | ness which we have seen. We must, therefore, first ) describe the fi fruits of the religious life, : Pome ‘then we must’, I} judge them. | This divides our inquiry into two distinct parts. Let us without further preamble proceed to the descriptive task.
It ought to be the pleasantest portion of our business in these lectures. Some small pieces of it, it is true, may be painful, or may show human nature in a pathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant, because the best fruits of religious experience are the best things - ‘that. his- tory has to show. ‘They have always been esteemed so ; here if anywhere is the genuinely strenuous life; and to call to mind a succession of such examples as I have lately had to wander through, though it has been only in the reading of them, is to ) feel encouraged 2 and uplifted and ached; in better moral alr.
~ The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience,\ bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread | i
NAAM tte Aan SA eh Ta ANAT mA
260 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
themselves have been flown for religious ideals. I can do no better than quote, as to this, some remarks which Sainte-Beuve in his History of Port-Royal makes on the results of conversion or the state of grace.
“Even from the purely human point of view,” Sainte- Beuve says, “the phenomenon of grace must still appear sufficiently extraordinary, eminent, and rare, both in its nature and in its effects, to deserve a closer study. For the soul arrives thereby at_a_ certain fixed and invincible state, a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of | which the greatest deeds which it ever performs are exe- cuted. Through all the different forms of communion, and all the diversity of the means which help to produce this state, whether it be reached by a jubilee, by a gen- eral confession, by a solitary prayer and effusion, what- ever in short be the place and the occasion, it is easy to recognize that it is fundamentally one state in spirit and in fruits. Penetrate a little beneath the diversity of cir- cumstances, and it becomes evident that in Christians of different epochs it is always one and the same modifi- cation by which they are affected: there is veritably a single fundamental and _ identical spirit of piety and charity, common to those who have received grace ; an inner staté which before all things is one of love and humility, of infinite confidence in God, and of severity for one’s self, accompanied with tenderness for others. The fruits peculiar to this condition of the soul have the same savor in all, under distant suns and in different surroundings, in Saint Teresa of Avila just as in any Moravian brother of Herrnhut.”
Sainte-Beuve has here only the more eminent instances of regeneration in mind, and these are of course the instructive ones for us also to consider. These devotees
1 SatnTE-BEUvE : Port-Royal, vol. i. pp. 95 and 106, abridged.
SAINTLINESS 261
have often laid their course so differently from other men that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted to call them monstrous aberrations from the path _ of nature. I begin, therefore, by asking a general psycho-) / logical question as to what the inner conditions are which
may make one human character differ so extremely from | another.
I reply at once that where the character, as something \
distinguished “from. the intellect, is concerned, the causes |
of human ‘diversity lie chiefly i in_our differing. suscepti-
bilities of emotional excitement, and i in the different im- |
} i | )
pulses ¢ and inhabitions. which these bring 3 in their train. |
Let me make this more clear. Speaking generally, our moral and practical attitude, at any given time, is always a resultant of two sets of,
forces within us, impulses pushing = us one way and ob- x
me ga
structions and inhibitions holding us back. “Yes! yes!” say the impulses ; “No! no!” say the inhibitions. Few people who have not expressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pres- sure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of ajar. The influence is so incessant that it becomes subconscious. All of you, for example, sit here with a certain constraint at this moment, and entirely without express consciousness of the fact, because of the influ- ence of the occasion. If left alone in the room, each of you would probably involuntarily rearrange himself, and make his attitude more ‘free and easy.’ But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any great emo- tional excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy ap- pear in the street with his face covered with shaving- lather because a house across the way was on fire; and a woman will run among strangers in her nightgown if
) j : : i
262 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
it be a question of saving her baby’s life or her own. Take a self-indulgent woman’s life in general. She will yield to every inhibition set by her disagreeable sensa- tions, lie late in bed, live upon tea or bromides, keep indoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds her obe- dient to its‘no.” But make a mother of her, and what have you? Possessed by maternal excitement, she now confronts wakefulness, weariness, and toil without an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The in- hibitive power of pain over her is extinguished wherever the baby’s interests are at stake. The inconveniences which this creature occasions have become, as James Hin- ton says, the glowing heart of a great joy, and indeed are now the very conditions whereby the joy becomes most deep.
This is an example of what you have already heard of as the ‘ expulsive power of a higher affection.’ But be the affection high or low, it makes no difference, so long as the excitement it brings be strong enough. In one of Henry Drummond’s discourses he tells of an inundation in India where an eminence with a bungalow upon it remained unsubmerged, and became the refuge of a number of wild animals and reptiles in addition to the human beings who were there. At a certain moment a royal Bengal tiger appeared swimming towards it, reached it, and lay panting like a dog upon the ground in the midst of the people, still possessed by such an agony of terror that one of the Englishmen could calmly step up with a rifle and blow out its brains. The tiger’s habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled by the emotion of fear, which became sovereign, and formed a new centre for his — character.
: Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many ‘contrary ones are mixed together. In that case one hears
- SAINTLINESS 263
both ‘yeses’ and ‘noes,’ and the ‘ will’ is called on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier, for example, with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his fears im- pelling him to run, and his propensities to imitation push- ing him towards various courses if his comrades offer various examples. His person becomes the seat of a mass | of interferences; and he may for a time simply waver, because no one emotion prevails. There is a pitch of intensity, though, which, if any emotion reach it, en- thrones that one as alone effective and sweeps its antag- onists and all their inhibitions away. The fury of his comrades’ charge, once entered on, will give this pitch of courage to the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of fear. In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grow natural because the inhibitions are annulled. Their ‘no! no!’ not only is not heard, it does not exist. Obstacles are then like tissue-paper hoops to the circus rider — no impediment; the flood is higher than the dam they make. “Lass sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig sind!” cries the grenadier, frantic over his Emperor’s capture, when his wife and babes are suggested ; and men pent into a burning theatre have been known to cut their way through the crowd with knives.’
1 «6 ¢Love would not be love,’ says Bourget, ‘ unless it could carry one to crime.’ And so one may say that no passion would be a veritable passion unless it could carry one to crime.” (SIGHELE: Psychologie des Sectes, p- 136.) In other words, great passions annul the ordinary inhibitions set by ‘eonscience.” And conversely, of all the criminal human beings, the false, cowardly, sensual, or cruel persons who actually live, there is perhaps not one whose criminal impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the presence of some other emotion to which his character is also potentially liable, provided that other emotion be only made intense enough. Fear is usually the most available emotion for this result in this particular class of persons. It stands for conscience, and may here be classed appropriately as a ‘higher affection.’? If we are soon to die, or if we believe a day of judg- ment to be near at hand, how quickly do we put our moral house in order ~— we do not see how sin can evermore exert temptation over us! Old
264 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly im- portant in the composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility, suscepti- bility to wrath, the fighting temper ; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnest- ness, severity of character. Harnestness means willing: ness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one’s self — it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresist- ibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, de- struction pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-rooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we take a stern joy in the astrin- gency and desolation; and what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the inaptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one’s own inferior self and its Bet softnesses must often be the anges and the victims.’
fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion value.
1 Example: Benjamin Constant was often marveled at as an extraordi- nary instance of superior intelligence with inferior character. He writes (Journal, Paris, 1895, p. 56), “I am tossed and dragged about by my miser- able weakness. Never was anything so ridiculous as my indecision. Now marriage, now solitude ; now Germany, now France, hesitation upon hesita- tion, and all because at bottom I am unable to give up anything.” He can’t ‘get mad’ at any of his alternatives; and the career of a man beset by such an all-round amiability is hopeless.
SAINTLINESS 268
So far I have spoken of temporary alterations produced by shifting excitements in the same person. But the rela- tively fixed differences of character of different persons are explained in a precisely similar way. In a man with a liability to a special sort of emotion, whole ranges of inhibition habitually vanish, which in other men remain effective, and other sorts of inhibition take their place. When a person has an inborn genius for certain emo- tions, his life differs strangely from that of ordinary peo- ple, for none of their usual deterrents check him. Your\ mere aspirant to a type of character, on the contrary, . only shows, when your ‘natural lover, fighter, or reformer, © with whom the passion is a gift of nature, comes along, the hopeless inferiority | of ‘voluntary. to instinctive. action. He has deliberately to overcome his inhibitions; the genius with the inborn passion seems not to feel them at all; he is free of all that inner friction and nervous waste. To a Fox, a Garibaldi, a General Booth, a John Brown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the obstacles om- nipotent over those around them are as if non-existent. Could the rest of us so disregard them, there might he many such heroes, for many have the wish to live for similar ideals, and only the adequate degree of inhibition- quenching fury is lacking.’
1 The great thing which the higher excitabilities give is courage; and the addition or subtraction of a certain amount of this quality makes a different man, a different life. Various excitements let the courage loose. Trustful hope will do it; inspiring example will do it; love will do it; wrath will do it. In some people it is natively so high that the mere touch of danger does it, though danger is for most men the great inhibitor of action. ‘Love of adventure’ becomes in such persons a ruling passion. “T believe,” says General Skobeleff, “that my bravery is simply the pas- sion and at the same time the contempt of danger. The risk of life fills me with an exaggerated rapture. The fewer there are to share it, the more I like it. The participation of my body in the event is required to furnish
me an adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger into which I can
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The difference between willing and merely wishing, between having ideals that ar are ‘creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus depends solely either on the amount of steam-pressure chronically driving | the character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement transiently acquired. Given a certain amount of love, indignation, generosity, magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or enthusiasm of self-surrender, the result is always the same. That whole raft of cowardly obstructions, which in tame persons and dull moods are sovereign impediments to action, sinks away at once. Our conventionality,' our shyness, laziness, and stingi- ness, our demands for precedent and permission, for guar- antee and surety, our small suspicions, timidities, despairs, where are they now? Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun —
“Wo sind die Sorge nun und Noth Die mich noch gestern wollt’ erschlaffen ? Ich schiim’ mich dess’ im Morgenroth.”
The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly under that their very contact is unfelt. Set free of them, we float and soar and sing. This auroral openness and
throw myself headforemost, attracts me, moves me, intoxicates me. I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop. Were it always the same, it would always bring me anew pleasure. When I throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it, my heart palpitates with the uncertainty ; I could wish at once to have it appear and yet to delay. A sort of painful and delicious shiver shakes me; my entire nature runs to meet the peril with an impetus that my will would in vain try to resist.” (JULIETTE ADAM : Le Général Skobeleff, Nouvelle Revue, 1886, abridged.) Skobeleff seems to have been a cruel egoist ; but the disinterested Garibaldi, if one may judge by his ‘ Memorie,’ lived in an unflagging emotion of similar danger- seeking excitement. ? See the case on p. 70, above, where the writer describes his experiences _ ef communion with the Divine as consisting “ merely in the temporary oblit- eration of the conventionalities which usually cover my life.”
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uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright and carol- ing quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the controlling emotion is religious. ‘The true monk,” writes an Italian mystic, “takes nothing with him but his lyre.”
a o—
We may now turn from these psychological general- ities to those fruits of the religious state ‘which form the special subject of our present lecture. The man who, lives in his religious _ centre of personal energy, 2 , and i ds actuated by | spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previ- ous carnal self in perfectly definite | ways, The new min which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the lower ‘noes’ which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy ; paltry. conyentionalities and mean incentives once tyran- nical hold no sway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary ‘melting moods’ into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throw us, Especially if we weep! For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler leading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not § so ) with. ‘saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessed what
the church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood seems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears and melting moods, so it is with
eed
268 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
other exalted affections. Their reign may come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have ‘ come to stay.’
At the end of the last lecture we saw this permanence to be true of the general paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in the ebbs of emotional excitement meaner motives might temporarily prevail and backsliding might occur. But that lower temptations may remain completely annulled, apart from transient emotion ‘and as if by alteration. of the man’s habitual nature, is_ ‘also proved by documentary evidence i in certain cases. Be fore embarking on the general natural history of the regenerate character, let me convince you of this curi- ous fact by one or two examples. The most numerous are those of reformed drunkards. You recollect the case of Mr. Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry Medley
| Water Street Mission abounds in similar instances.1 You . also remember the graduate of Oxford, converted at three ‘in the afternoon, and getting drunk in the hay-field the next day, but after that permanently cured of his appe- ‘tite. “From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe, . . . the desire for it went at once and has
| jnever returned. od with every known sin, the deliver- i i
ance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptations since conversion.”
Here is an analogous case from Starbuck’s sbetenrtoy collection : — :
““T went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where there was a Holiness meeting, . . . and I began saying, ‘Lord, Lord, I must have this blessing.’ Then what was to me an audible voice said: ‘Are you willing to give up everything to the
1 Above, p. 201, “The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania ig religiomania,” is a saying i have heard quoted from some medical man.
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Lord?’ and question after question kept coming up, to all of which I said: ‘Yes, Lord; yes, Lord!’ until this came: ‘ Why do you not accept it now?’ and I said: ‘I do, Lord.’ —I felt no particular joy, only a trust. Just then the meeting closed, and, as I went out on the street, I met a gentleman smoking a fine cigar, and a cloud of smoke came into my face, and I took a long, deep breath of it, and praise the Lord, all my appetite for it was gone. Then as | walked along the street, passing saloons where the fumes of liquor came out, I found that all my taste and longing for that accursed stuff was gone. Glory to God! . . . [But] for ten or eleven long years [after that] I was in the wilderness with its ups and downs. My appetite for liquor never came back.”
The classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual temptation in a single hour. To Mr.
pO
Spears the colonel said, “I was effectually cured of all
inclination to that sin I was so strongly addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the head could have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed, as entirely as if I had been a suck- ing child; nor did the temptation return to this day.” Mr. Webster’s words on the same subject are these: “‘ One thing I have heard the colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted to impurity before his acquaint- ance with religion ; but that, so soon as he was enlight- ened from above, he felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing his nature so wonderfully that his sanctifica- tion in this respect seemed more remarkable than in any other.” *
Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensi- ties reminds us so strongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion that it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the decisive
1 Doddridge’s Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious Tract Society, pp. 23-32.
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