WERE
one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general
terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an
unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves
thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul.
I wish during this hour to call your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities
of such an attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our
attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the
'objects' of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether
really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses,
or they may be present only to our thought. In either case they elicit from us
a reaction; and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in many cases
as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory
of an insult may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are
frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment
of making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based
on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence
on our action than ideas of remoter facts. The more concrete
objects of most men's religion, the deities whom they worship, are known to them
only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for example, to very few Christian believers
to have had a sensible vision of their Saviour; though enough appearances of this
sort are on record, by way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later.
The whole force of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the
divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in general
exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual's
past experience directly serves as a model.
But in addition to these ideas
of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which
prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice,
his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the
various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments,
etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian believers.
* We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images is positively
insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of
a successful orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations
are expected (and abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to
influence the believer's subsequent attitude very powerfully for good. -
*
Example: "I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the passages which show
the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from the Father and the
Son. It is a subject that requires searching into to find out, but, when realized,
gives one so much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead,
and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit in its effect
on us." AUGUSTUS HARE: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H. Hare.
Immanuel
Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God, the design
of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter. These things, he said,
are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a
sense-content to work with, and as the words 'soul,' 'God,' 'immortality,' cover
no distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows that theoretically speaking
they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite
meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were
free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if
we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference
in our moral life. Our faith that these unintelligible objects actually exist
proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls it,
or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of what they might be,
in case we were permitted positively to conceive them. So we have the strange
phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the
real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.
My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to express
any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy,
but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are considering,
by an example so classical in its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed
attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized
through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed
in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said
to be present to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or
sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly
endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various
arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it
might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a
bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had
the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance
for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being.
It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have this power
of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe.
All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal.
Remember those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole
universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist
writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that
lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things,
so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance,
justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.
Such
ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the
fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its 'nature,'
as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is 'what' it is by sharing
in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them,
for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things
by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness
in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and
adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception.
This absolute
determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our
human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards
them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if
they were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the
realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.
Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling,
that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic
theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly
definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional
to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says,
in the often quoted passage in his 'Banquet,' "is to use the beauties of earth
as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going
from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions,
and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the
notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." *
In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer
like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure
of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without
a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies,
we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as
an ultimate object. 'Science' in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a
religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the 'Laws of Nature' as objective
facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology would
have it that in their origin the Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications
of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world
falls apart- the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like;
just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the breeze,
or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these phenomena of nature
actually wear a human face. *(2)
* Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.
*(2)
Example: "Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself,
that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping. She appears the more
beautiful, the more afflicted she is." B. de St. Pierre.
As regards
the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an opinion. But the
whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion something like this: It is
as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective
presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more
general than any of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology
supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might
suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do,
by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example,
that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing
real which objects of sense normally possess. So far as religious conceptions
were able to touch this reality-feeling, they would be believed in in spite of
criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable,
even though they might be such non-entities in point of whatness, as Kant makes
the objects of his moral theology to be.
The most curious proofs of the existence
of such an undifferentiated sense of reality as this are found in experiences
of hallucination. It often happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed:
the person affected will feel a 'presence' in the room, definitely localized,
facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often
coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor
cognized in any of the usual 'sensible' ways. Let me give you an example of this,
before I pass to the objects with whose presence religion is more peculiarly concerned.
An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects
I know, has had several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response
to my inquiries:- -
"I have several times within the past few years felt the
so-called 'consciousness of a presence.' The experiences which I have in mind
are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience which I have had very
frequently, and which I fancy many persons would also call the 'consciousness
of a presence.' But the difference for me between the two sets of experience is
as great as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I know
not where, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with all the ordinary
senses alert.
"It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience.
On the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms in College,
a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm, which made me get up
and search the room for an intruder; but the sense of presence properly so called
came on the next night. After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay
awake awhile thinking on the previous night's experience, when suddenly I felt
something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute
or two. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly
unpleasant 'sensation' connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots
of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had something of the quality
of a very large tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within
the organism- and yet the feeling was not pain so much as abhorrence. At all events,
something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I
have ever known the presence of any fleshly living creature. I was conscious of
its departure as of its coming: an almost instantaneously swift going through
the door, and the 'horrible sensation' disappeared.
"On the third night when
I retired my mind was absorbed in some lectures which I was preparing, and I was
still absorbed in these when I became aware of the actual presence (though not
of the coming) of the thing that was there the night before, and of the 'horrible
sensation.' I then mentally concentrated all my effort to charge this 'thing,'
if it was evil, to depart, if it was not evil, to tell me who or what it was,
and if it could not explain itself, to go, and that I would compel it to go. It
went as on the previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state.
"On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same 'horrible
sensation.' Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In all three instances the
certainty that there in outward space there stood something was indescribably
stronger than the ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close
presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely
more real than any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself,
so to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize
it as any individual being or person."
Of course such an experience as this
does not connect itself with the religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do
so; and the same correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture
he had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only
then it was filled with a quality of joy. -
"There was not a mere consciousness
of something there, but fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness
of some ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some
poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence
of a sort of mighty person, and after it went, the memory persisted as the one
perception of reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that." -
My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter experiences theistically,
as signifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural
to interpret them as a revelation of the deity's existence. When we reach the
subject of mysticism, we shall have much more to say upon this head.
Lest
the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture to read you
a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show that we are dealing
with a well-marked natural kind of fact. In the first case, which I take from
the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the sense of presence developed
in a few moments into a distinctly visualized hallucination,- but I leave that
part of the story out. -
"I had read," the narrator says, "some twenty minutes
or so, was thoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was perfectly quiet, and for
the time being my friends were quite forgotten, when suddenly without a moment's
warning my whole being seemed roused to the highest state of tension or aliveness,
and I was aware, with an intenseness not easily imagined by those who had never
experienced it, that another being or presence was not only in the room, but quite
close to me. I put my book down, and although my excitement was great, I felt
quite collected, and not conscious of any sense of fear. Without changing my position,
and looking straight at the fire, I knew somehow that my friend A.H. was standing
at my left elbow, but so far behind me as to be hidden by the armchair in which
I was leaning back. Moving my eyes round slightly without otherwise changing my
position, the lower portion of one leg became visible, and I instantly recognized
the gray-blue material of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semi-transparent,
reminding me of tobacco smoke in consistency,"- * and hereupon the visual hallucination
came.
* Journal of the S.P.R., February, 1895, p. 26. -
Another informant
writes:- -
"Quite early in the night I was awakened.... I felt as if I had
been aroused intentionally, and at first thought some one was breaking into the
house.... I then turned on my side to go to sleep again, and immediately felt
a consciousness of a presence in the room, and singular to state, it was not the
consciousness of a live person, but of a spiritual presence. This may provoke
a smile, but I can only tell you the facts as they occurred to me. I do not know
how to better describe my sensations than by simply stating that I felt a consciousness
of a spiritual presence.... I felt also at the same time a strong feeling of superstitious
dread, as if something strange and fearful were about to happen." *
* E. GURNEY:
Phantasms of the Living, i. 384. -
Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the
following testimony of a friend of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic
or involuntary writing:
"Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes
me feel that it is not due to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have
of a foreign presence, external to my body. It is sometimes so definitely characterized
that I could point to its exact position. This impression of presence is impossible
to describe. It varies in intensity and clearness according to the personality
from whom the writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I feel
it immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems to recognize it."
In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of presence
felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a gray-bearded man
dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself under the crack of the door
and moving across the floor of the room towards a sofa. The blind subject of this
quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without
internal visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is
positive that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false
perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the feelings
of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it- in other words, a
fully objectified and exteriorized idea.
Such cases, taken along with others
which would be too tedious for quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence
in our mental machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general
than that which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing of
the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty problem- nothing could
be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, with the feeling that
our muscles were innervating themselves for action. Whatsoever thus innervated
our activity, or 'made our flesh creep,'- our senses are what do so oftenest,-
might then appear real and present, even though it were but an abstract idea.
But with such vague conjectures we have no concern at present, for our interest
lies with the faculty rather than with its organic seat.
Like
all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its negative
counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which persons may be haunted,
and of which one sometimes hears complaint:- -
"When I reflect on the fact
that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through
space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann;
"when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I
am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling
of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong
I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dreaming.'" *
* Pensees d'un Solitaire, p. 66.
In another lecture we shall see how in morbid
melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and
even lead to suicide.
We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively
religious sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess
the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect
accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended.
As his sense of the real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the believer
alternates between warmth and coldness in his faith. Other examples will bring
this home to one better than abstract description, so I proceed immediately to
cite some. The first example is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense
in question. I have extracted it from an account given me by a scientific man
of my acquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that
the feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellectual
operation properly so-called. -
"Between twenty and thirty I gradually became
more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that
'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute
Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer's
philosophy, for although I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never prayed
to It in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to have been
in a relation to It which practically was the same thing as prayer. Whenever I
had any trouble, especially when I had conflict with other people, either domestically
or in the way of business, or when I was depressed in spirits or anxious about
affairs, I now recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious
relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical It. It was on my
side, or I was on Its side, however you please to term it, in the particular trouble,
and it always strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its
underlying and supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing fountain of living
justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively turned at times of weakness,
and it always brought me out. I know now that it was a personal relation I was
in to it, because of late years the power of communicating with it has left me,
and I am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to find
it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when sometimes I found it, and
then again I would be wholly unable to make connection with it. I remember many
occasions on which at night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account
of worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentally for
the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind which had always seemed to be
close at hand as it were, closing the passage, and yielding support, but there
was no electric current. A blank was there instead of It: I couldn't find anything.
Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting into connection with it has
entirely left me; and I have to confess that a great help has gone out of my life.
Life has become curiously dead and indifferent; and I can now see that my old
experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of the orthodox,
only I did not call them by that name. What I have spoken of as 'It' was practically
not Spencer's Unknowable, but just my own instinctive and individual God, whom
I relied upon for higher sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost."
Nothing
is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons
of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every
religious person has the recollection of particular crises in which a directer
vision of the truth, a direct perception, perhaps, of a living God's existence,
swept in and overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell
Lowell's correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of this kind:-
-
"I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary's, and happening
to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly
aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. As I
was speaking, the whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming
from the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around
me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro
with the presence of Something I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and
clearness of a prophet. I cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not
yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear
it and acknowledge its grandeur." *
* Letters of Lowell, i. 75. -
Here
is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript communication by a
clergyman,- I take it from Starbuck's manuscript collection:
"I remember the
night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as
it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds,
the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep,- the deep that my own
struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without,
reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the
beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek
Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of
things around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation
remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect
of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling
harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being
wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness
of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence
that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have
doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible,
the less real of the two.
"My highest faith in God and truest idea of him
were then born in me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the
Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring
of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God, and was
born anew of his spirit. There was, as I recall it, no sudden change of thought
or of belief, except that my early crude conception had, as it were, burst into
flower. There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful unfolding.
Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the proofs of God's existence
has been able to shake my faith. Having once felt the presence of God's spirit,
I have never lost it again for long. My most assuring evidence of his existence
is deeply rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme experience,
and in the conviction, gained from reading and reflection, that something the
same has come to all who have found God. I am aware that it may justly be called
mystical. I am not enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or
any other charge. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with words rather
than put it clearly to your thought. But, such as it is, I have described it as
carefully as I now am able to do."
Here is another document, even more definite
in character, which, the writer being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.
*
* I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy's permission, from his rich collection
of psychological documents.
"I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth
day of tramping, and in good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to
Trient by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind
was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news from home; I was subject to
no anxiety, either near or remote, for we had a good guide, and there was not
a shadow of uncertainty about the road we should follow. I can best describe the
condition in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once
I experienced a feeling, of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of
God- I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it- as if his goodness and
his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent
that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down
on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked
God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained
my life and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that
I was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of
his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day,
in humility and poverty, leaving him, the Almighty God, to be judge of whether
I should some time be called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly,
the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communion
which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but very slowly, so strongly
was I still possessed by the interior emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly
for several minutes, my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to
see me. The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes, although it
seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades waited for me ten minutes
at the cross of Barine, but I took about twenty-five or thirty minutes to join
them, for as well as I can remember, they said that I had kept them back for about
half an hour. The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly the
slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a
more intimate communication with God. I think it well to add that in this ecstasy
of mine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling
of his presence was accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather
as if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a spiritual spirit.
But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel
the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom
the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though
invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him."
-
The adjective 'mystical' is technically applied, most often,
to states that are of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last
two persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture I shall
have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another mystical or
semi-mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature for ardent piety.
I owe it to Starbuck's collection. The lady who gives the account is the daughter
of a man well known in his time as a writer against Christianity. The suddenness
of her conversion shows well how native the sense of God's presence must be to
certain minds. She relates that she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian
doctrine, but, when in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends, she
read the Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her
like a stream of light.
"To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying
with religion and the commands of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry
calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my
arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should
I do? 'Love me,' answered my God. 'I do, I do,' I cried passionately. 'Come unto
me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question?
Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate
over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or... to wait
until I should be satisfied. Satisfied! I was satisfied. Had I not found my God
and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church
into which I might enter?... Since then I have had direct answers to prayer- so
significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The
idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment."
Here is still another
case, the writer being a man aged twenty-seven, in which the experience, probably
almost as characteristic, is less vividly described:
"I have on a number of
occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine.
These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the
temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover
my life.... Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over
a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended
to the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see nothing beneath
me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a few
high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they were
dragging their anchors. What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of
my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper
significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find
my justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God. Of course
the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life
without its presence."
Of the more habitual and so to speak
chronic sense of God's presence the following sample from Professor Starbuck's
manuscript collection may serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine,-
probably thousands of unpretending Christians would write an almost identical
account.
"God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel
his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with his laws
as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled
with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him
as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful. He answers
me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear
must have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually
a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care
for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school matters, social problems,
financial difficulties, etc. That he is mine and I am his never leaves me, it
is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless
waste." -
I subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and
sexes. They are also from Professor Starbuck's collection, and their number might
be greatly multiplied. The first is from a man twenty-seven years old:- -
"God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers. Thoughts sudden
and distinct from any I have been entertaining come to my mind after asking God
for his direction. Something over a year ago I was for some weeks in the direst
perplexity. When the trouble first appeared before me I was dazed, but before
long (two or three hours) I could hear distinctly a passage of Scripture: 'My
grace is sufficient for thee.' Every time my thoughts turned to the trouble I
could hear this quotation. I don't think I ever doubted the existence of God,
or had him drop out of my consciousness. God has frequently stepped into my affairs
very perceptibly, and I feel that he directs many little details all the time.
But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me very contrary to my ambitions
and plans."
Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for
being so decidedly childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:
"Sometimes as
I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and before I go out I feel as
if God was with me, right side of me, singing and reading the Psalms with me....
And then again I feel as if I could sit beside him, and put my arms around him,
kiss him, etc. When I am taking Holy Communion at the altar, I try to get with
him and generally feel his presence.
I let a few other cases follow at random:
"God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me than my
own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my being."-
"There are
times when I seem to stand in his very presence, to talk with him. Answers to
prayer have come, sometimes direct and overwhelming in their revelation of his
presence and powers. There are times when God seems far off, but this is always
my own fault."-
"I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time
soothing, which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me with sustaining
arms."
Such is the human ontological imagination, and such
is the convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized,
and realized with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine
our vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined
by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the world.
A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when
his attention is addressed to other matters and he no longer represents her features.
He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through and through.
I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must dwell a
moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who have them as
any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing
than results established by mere logic ever are. One may indeed be entirely without
them; probably more than one of you here present is without them in any marked
degree; but if you do have them, and have them at all strongly, the probability
is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations
of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in
words, can expel from your belief. The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy
is sometimes spoken of as rationalism. Rationalism insists that all our beliefs
ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for
rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) definitely statable abstract principles;
(2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite hypotheses based on such facts;
and (4) definite inferences logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable
have no place in the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely
a splendid intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits
of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its result.
Nevertheless,
if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that
lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and
privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism
can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige
undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop
logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you
all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have
intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious
level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses,
your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which
your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely
knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk,
however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic
level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion
as when it argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God's existence
drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing,
to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that
our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever
sort of a being God may be, we know to-day that he is nevermore that mere external
inventor of 'contrivances' intended to make manifest his 'glory' in which our
great-grandfathers took such satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot
possibly make clear by words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you
here fully to account for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a more
cosmic and tragic personage than that Being.
The truth is that in the metaphysical
and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate
feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.
Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world-ruling
systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow up.
Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and
our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas.
The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument
is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If
a person feels the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations,
your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves
to change his faith.
Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it
is better that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the
religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold
it as a matter of fact.
So much for our sense of the reality
of the religious objects. Let me now say a brief word more about the attitudes
they characteristically awaken.
We have already agreed that they are solemn;
and we have seen reason to think that the most distinctive of them is the sort
of joy which may result in extreme cases from absolute self-surrender. The sense
of the kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with determining
the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is more complex than
any simple formula allows. In the literature of the subject, sadness and gladness
have each been emphasized in turn. The ancient saying that the first maker of
the Gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious
history; but none the less does religious history show the part which joy has
evermore tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary,
being the gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of things,
being the more complex, is also the more complete; and as we proceed, I think
we shall have abundant reason for refusing to leave out either the sadness or
the gladness, if we look at religion with the breadth of view which it demands.
Stated in the completest possible terms, a man's religion involves both moods
of contraction and moods of expansion of his being. But the quantitative mixture
and order of these moods vary so much from one age of the world, from one system
of thought, and from one individual to another, that you may insist either on
the dread and the submission, or on the peace and the freedom as the essence of
the matter, and still remain materially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally
sombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite
aspects of what lies before their eyes.
The constitutionally sombre religious
person makes even of his religious peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers
in the air about it. Flexion and contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike
and childish after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper-cutting,
and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low, rather, lie low; for
you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence
of man and the omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its author's mind.
"It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?- deeper than hell; what canst thou
know?" There is an astringent relish about the truth of this conviction which
some men can feel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to
the feeling of religious joy.
"In Job," says that coldly truthful writer,
the author of Mark Rutherford, "God reminds us that man is not the measure of
his creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which the
intellect of man can grasp. It is transcendent everywhere. This is the burden
of every verse, and is the secret, if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or
insufficient, there is nothing more.... God is great, we know not his ways. He
takes from us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in patience, we may
pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight again. We may or we may
not!... What more have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over two
thousand five hundred years ago?" *
* Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London,
1885, pp. 196, 198.
If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand,
we find that deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether
overcome and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions that seem
to the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to leave out all the solemnity
that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys. In the opinion
of some writers an attitude might be called religious, though no touch were left
in it of sacrifice or submission, no tendency to flexion, no bowing of the head.
Any "habitual and regulated admiration," says Professor J.R. Seeley, * "is worthy
to be called a religion"; and accordingly he thinks that our Music, our Science,
and our so-called 'Civilization,' as these things are now organized and admiringly
believed in, form the more genuine religions of our time. Certainly the unhesitating
and unreasoning way in which we feel that we must inflict our civilization upon
'lower' races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so much
as of the early spirit of Islam spreading its religion by the sword.
* In
his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d edition, Boston, 1886,
pp. 91, 122.
In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical opinion
of Mr. Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious
exercise, for it bears witness to the soul's emancipation. I quoted this opinion
in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores more carefully
with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too complex to be decided
off-hand. I propose accordingly that we make of religious optimism the theme of
the next two lectures.