The
last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil as a pervasive
element of the world we live in. At the close of it we were brought into full
view of the contrast between the two ways of looking at life which are characteristic
respectively of what we called the healthy-minded, who need to be born only once,
and of the sick souls, who must be twice-born in order to be happy. The result
is two different conceptions of the universe of our experience. In the religion
of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose
accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which
naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and
minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living
on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other
hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple
addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply
insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being.
Cancelled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance,
and can never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from
our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in
the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual,
and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other. In their
extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two types are violently
contrasted; though here as in most other current classifications, the radical
extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we
oftenest meet are intermediate varieties and mixtures. Practically, however, you
all recognize the difference: you understand, for example, the disdain of the
methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise
enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism
of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the
inversion of natural appearances the essence of God's truth. *
* E.g., "Our
young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin
of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty
to any man- never darkened across any man's road, who did not go out of his way
to seek them. These are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs," etc.
EMERSON: 'Spiritual Laws.'
The psychological basis of the twice-born character
seems to be a certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of
the subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.
"Homo duplex, homo duplex!" writes Alphonse Daudet. "The first time that I perceived
that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out
so dramatically, 'He is dead, he is dead!' While my first self wept, my second
self thought, 'How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.'
I was then fourteen years old.
"This horrible duality has often given me matter
for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is
on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have
never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it
sees into things, and how it mocks!" *
* Notes sur la Vie, p. 1.
Recent
works on the psychology of character have had much to say upon this point. * Some
persons are born with an inner constitution which is harmonious and well balanced
from the outset. Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows
without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions; are not excessive,
and their lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted;
and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result in
a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the consequences
may be inconvenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent kinds of heterogeneity
I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant's autobiography.
* See, for example,
F. Paulhan, in his book Les Caracteres, 1894, who contrasts les Equilibres, les
Unifies, with les Inquiets, les Contrariants, les Incoherents, les Emiettes, as
so many diverse psychic types.
"I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness
and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer
tortures of shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that
every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink away from
strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude
to any one who noticed me kindly; as the young mistress of a house I was afraid
of my servants, and would let careless work pass rather than bear the pain of
reproving the ill-doer; when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of
spirit on the platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel
rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the platform in
defense of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or disapproval in the
house, and am a coward at heart in private while a good fighter in public. How
often have I passed unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up my courage to find
fault with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and how often
have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking
from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word
has availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on
the platform, opposition makes me speak my best." *
* ANNIE BESANT: an Autobiography,
p. 82.
This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but
a stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject's life. There
are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zig-zags, as now one
tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh,
they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate
plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair
misdemeanors and mistakes.
Heterogeneous personality has been explained as
the result of inheritance- the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic
ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other. * This explanation
may pass for what it is worth- it certainly needs corroboration. But whatever
the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples of
it in the psychopathic temperament, of which I spoke in my first lecture. All
writers about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their
descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe
that temperament to a man at all. A 'degenere superieur' is simply a man of sensibility
in many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in keeping his spiritual
house in order and running his furrow straight, because his feelings and impulses
are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas,
in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which
beset the psychopathic temperament when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite
examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, "Sell
Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!" which would run through
his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath with retorting,
"I will not, I will not," he impulsively said, "Let him go if he will," and this
loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a year. The lives of the saints
are full of such blasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency
of Satan. The phenomenon connects itself with the life of the subconscious self,
so-called, of which we must erelong speak more directly.
* SMITH BAKER, in
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September, 1893.
Now
in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion
as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to
the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal
evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of
the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses,
begin by being a comparative chaos within us- they must end by forming a stable
system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize
the period of order-making and struggle. If the individual be of tender conscience
and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse
and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false
relations to the author of one's being and appointer of one's spiritual fate.
This is the religious melancholy and 'conviction of sin' that have played so large
a part in the history of Protestant Christianity. The man's interior is a battle-ground
for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal.
As Victor Hugo makes his Mahomet say:
"Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats:
Tantot l'homme d'en haut, et tantot l'homme d'en bas;
Et le mal dans ma
bouche avec le bien alterne,
Comme dans le desert le sable et la citerne."
Wrong living, impotent aspirations; "What I would, that do I not; but what
I hate, that do I," as Saint Paul says; self-loathing, self-despair; an unintelligible
and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the heir.
Let
me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with melancholy
in the form of self-condemnation and sense of sin. Saint Augustine's case is a
classic example. You all remember his half-pagan, half-Christian bringing up at
Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent
skepticism, and his restless search for truth and purity of life; and finally
how, distracted by the struggle between the two souls in his breast, and ashamed
of his own weakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had
thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and
the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, "Sume, lege" (take and read),
and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, "not in chambering and wantonness,"
etc., which seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the inner storm to rest
forever. * Augustine's psychological genius has given an account of the trouble
of having a divided self which has never been surpassed.
* LOUIS GOURDON (Essai
sur la Conversion de Saint Augustine, Paris, Fischbacher, 1900) has shown by an
analysis of Augustine's writings immediately after the date of his conversion
(A.D. 386) that the account he gives in the Confessions is premature. The crisis
in the garden marked a definitive conversion from his former life, but it was
to the neo-platonic spiritualism and only a halfway stage toward Christianity.
The latter he appears not fully and radically to have embraced until four years
more had passed.
"The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough
to overcome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So these two wills,
one old, one new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contended with each other and
disturbed my soul. I understood by my own experience what I had read, 'flesh lusteth
against spirit, and spirit against flesh.' It was myself indeed in both the wills,
yet more myself in that which I approved in myself than in that which I disapproved
in myself. Yet it was through myself that habit had attained so fierce a mastery
over me, because I had willingly come whither I willed not. Still bound to earth,
I refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as much afraid to be freed from all bonds,
as I ought to have feared being trammeled by them.
"Thus the thoughts by which
I meditated upon thee were like the efforts of one who would awake, but being
overpowered with sleepiness is soon asleep again. Often does a man when heavy
sleepiness is on his limbs defer to shake it off, and though not approving it,
encourage it; even so I was sure it was better to surrender to thy love than to
yield to my own lusts, yet, though the former course convinced me, the latter
pleased and held me bound. There was naught in me to answer thy call, 'Awake,
thou sleeper,' but only drawling, drowsy words, 'Presently; yes, presently; wait
a little while.' But the 'presently' had no 'present,' and the 'little while'
grew long.... For I was afraid thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once
of my disease of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than to see extinguished.
With what lashes of words did I not scourge my own soul. Yet it shrank back; it
refused, though it had no excuse to offer.... I said within myself: 'Come, let
it be done now,' and as I said it, I was on the point of the resolve. I all but
did it, yet I did not do it. And I made another effort, and almost succeeded,
yet I did not reach it, and did not grasp it, hesitating to die to death, and
live to life; and the evil to which I was so wonted held me more than the better
life I had not tried." *
* Confessions, Book VIII., chaps. v., vii., xi.,
abridged.
There could be no more perfect description of the divided will,
when the higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive
intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists), that
enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously into life
and quell the lower tendencies forever. In a later lecture we shall have much
to say about this higher excitability.
I find another good description of
the divided will in the autobiography of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist,
of whose melancholy I read a brief account in my last lecture. The poor youth's
sins were, as you will see, of the most harmless order, yet they interfered with
what proved to be his truest vocation, so they gave him great distress.
"I
was now very moral in my life, but found no rest of conscience. I now began to
be esteemed in young company, who knew nothing of my mind all this while, and
their esteem began to be a snare to my soul, for I soon began to be fond of carnal
mirth, though I still flattered myself that if I did not get drunk, nor curse,
nor swear, there would be no sin in frolicking and carnal mirth, and I thought
God would indulge young people with some (what I called simple or civil) recreation.
I still kept a round of duties, and would not suffer myself to run into any open
vices, and so got along very well in time of health and prosperity, but when I
was distressed or threatened by sickness, death, or heavy storms of thunder, my
religion would not do, and I found there was something wanting, and would begin
to repent my going so much to frolics, but when the distress was over, the devil
and my own wicked heart, with the solicitations of my associates, and my fondness
for young company, were such strong allurements, I would again give way, and thus
I got to be very wild and rude, at the same time kept up my rounds of secret prayer
and reading; but God, not willing I should destroy myself, still followed me with
his calls, and moved with such power upon my conscience, that I could not satisfy
myself with my diversions, and in the midst of my mirth sometimes would have such
a sense of my lost and undone condition, that I would wish myself from the company,
and after it was over, when I went home, would make many promises that I would
attend no more on these frolics, and would beg forgiveness for hours and hours;
but when I came to have the temptation again, I would give way: no sooner would
I hear the music and drink a glass of wine, but I would find my mind elevated
and soon proceed to any sort of merriment or diversion, that I thought was not
debauched or openly vicious; but when I returned from my carnal mirth I felt as
guilty as ever, and could sometimes not close my eyes for some hours after I had
gone to my bed. I was one of the most unhappy creatures on earth.
"Sometimes
I would leave the company (often speaking to the fiddler to cease from playing,
as if I was tired), and go out and walk about crying and praying, as if my very
heart would break, and beseeching God that he would not cut me off, nor give me
up to hardness of heart. Oh, what unhappy hours and nights I thus wore away! When
I met sometimes with merry companions, and my heart was ready to sink, I would
labor to put on as cheerful a countenance as possible, that they might not distrust
anything, and sometimes would begin some discourse with young men or young women
on purpose, or propose a merry song, lest the distress of my soul would be discovered,
or mistrusted, when at the same time I would then rather have been in a wilderness
in exile, than with them or any of their pleasures or enjoyments. Thus for many
months when I was in company, I would act the hypocrite and feign a merry heart,
but at the same time would endeavor as much as I could to shun their company,
oh wretched and unhappy mortal that I was! Everything I did, and wherever I went,
I was still in a storm, and yet I continued to be the chief contriver and ring-leader
of the frolics for many months after; though it was a toil and torment to attend
them; but the devil and my own wicked heart drove me about like a slave, telling
me that I must do this and do that, and bear this and bear that, and turn here
and turn there, to keep my credit up, and retain the esteem of my associates:
and all this while I continued as strict as possible in my duties, and left no
stone unturned to pacify my conscience, watching even against my thoughts, and
praying continually wherever I went: for I did not think there was any sin in
my conduct, when I was among carnal company, because I did not take any satisfaction
there, but only followed it, I thought, for sufficient reasons.
"But still,
all that I did or could do, conscience would roar night and day."
Saint Augustine
and Alline both emerged into the smooth waters of inner unity and peace, and I
shall next ask you to consider more closely some of the peculiarities of the process
of unification, when it occurs. It may come gradually, or it may occur abruptly;
it may come through altered feelings, or through altered powers of action; or
it may come through new intellectual insights, or through experiences which we
shall later have to designate as 'mystical.' However it come, it brings a characteristic
sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious
mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in which men gain
that gift. Easily, permanently, and successfully, it often transforms the most
intolerable misery into the profoundest and most enduring happiness.
But
to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and the process
of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological
process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily
assume the religious form. In judging of the religious types of regeneration which
we are about to study, it is important to recognize that they are only one species
of a genus that contains other types as well. For example, the new birth may be
away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into
freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual's
life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge,
or patriotic devotion. In all these instances we have precisely the same psychological
form of event,- a firmness, stability, and equilibrium succeeding a period of
storm and stress and inconsistency. In these non-religious cases the new man may
also be born either gradually or suddenly.
The French philosopher
Jouffroy has left an eloquent memorial of his own 'counter-conversion,' as the
transition from orthodoxy to infidelity has been well styled by Mr. Starbuck.
Jouffroy's doubts had long harassed him; but he dates his final crisis from a
certain night when his disbelief grew fixed and stable, and where the immediate
result was sadness at the illusions he had lost.
"I shall never forget that
night of December," writes Jouffroy, "in which the veil that concealed from me
my own incredulity was torn. I hear again my steps in that narrow naked chamber
where long after the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking up and
down. I see again that moon, half-veiled by clouds, which now and again illuminated
the frigid window-panes. The hours of the night flowed on and I did not note their
passage. Anxiously I followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer they descended
towards the foundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one by one all the
illusions which until then had screened its windings from my view, made them every
moment more clearly visible.
"Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked
sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at the unknown
void in which I was about to float, I turned with them towards my childhood, my
family, my country, all that was dear and sacred to me: the inflexible current
of my thought was too strong,- parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me
to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more severe
as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end was reached. I knew then
that in the depth of my mind nothing was left that stood erect.
"This moment
was a frightful one; and when towards morning I threw myself exhausted on my bed,
I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire,
and before me another life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must
live alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiled me thither, and which
I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this discovery were the saddest
of my life." *
* TH. JOUFFROY: Nouveaux Melanges philosophiques, 2me edition,
p. 83. I add two other cases of counter-conversion dating from a certain moment.
The first is from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection, and the narrator
is a woman.
"Away down in the bottom of my heart, I believe I was always more
or less skeptical about 'God;' skepticism grew as an undercurrent, all through
my early youth, but it was controlled and covered by the emotional elements in
my religious growth. When I was sixteen I joined the church and was asked if I
loved God. I replied 'Yes,' as was customary and expected. But instantly with
a flash something spoke within me, 'No, you do not.' I was haunted for a long
time with shame and remorse for my falsehood and for my wickedness in not loving
God, mingled with fear that there might be an avenging God who would punish me
in some terrible way.... At nineteen, I had an attack of tonsilitis. Before I
had quite recovered, I heard told a story of a brute who had kicked his wife downstairs,
and then continued the operation until she became insensible. I felt the horror
of the thing keenly. Instantly this thought flashed through my mind: 'I have no
use for a God who permits such things.' This experience was followed by months
of stoical indifference to the God of my previous life, mingled with feelings
of positive dislike and a somewhat proud defiance of him. I still thought there
might be a God. If so he would probably damn me, but I should have to stand it.
I felt very little fear and no desire to propitiate him. I have never had any
personal relation with him since this painful experience."
The second case
exemplifies how small an additional stimulus will overthrow the mind into a new
state of equilibrium when the process of preparation and incubation has proceeded
far enough. It is like the proverbial last straw added to the camel's burden,
or that touch of a needle which makes the salt in a supersaturated fluid suddenly
begin to crystallize out.
Tolstoy writes: "S., a frank and intelligent man,
told me as follows how he ceased to believe:
"He was twenty-six years old when
one day on a hunting expedition, the time for sleep having come, he set himself
to pray according to the custom he had held from childhood.
"His brother,
who was hunting with him, lay upon the hay and looked at him. When S. had finished
his prayer and was turning to sleep, the brother said, 'Do you still keep up that
thing?' Nothing more was said. But since that day, now more than thirty years
ago, S. has never prayed again; he never takes communion, and does not go to church.
All this, not because he became acquainted with convictions of his brother which
he then and there adopted; not because he made any new resolution in his soul,
but merely because the words spoken by his brother were like the light push of
a finger against a leaning wall already about to tumble by its own weight. These
words but showed him that the place wherein he supposed religion dwelt in him
had long been empty, and that the sentences he uttered, the crosses and bows which
he made during his prayer, were actions with no inner sense. Having once seized
their absurdity, he could no longer keep them up." Ma Confession, p. 8.
In
John Foster's Essay on Decision of Character, there is an account of a case
of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to quote:
A
young man, it appears, "wasted, in two or three years, a large patrimony in profligate
revels with a number of worthless associates who called themselves his friends,
and who, when his last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect
or contempt. Reduced to absolute want, he one day went out of the house with an
intention to put an end to his life; but wandering awhile almost unconsciously,
he came to the brow of an eminence which overlooked what were lately his estates.
Here he sat down, and remained fixed in thought a number of hours, at the end
of which he sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion. He had formed
his resolution, which was, that all these estates should be his again; he had
formed his plan, too, which he instantly began to execute. He walked hastily forward,
determined to seize the first opportunity, of however humble a kind, to gain any
money, though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and resolved absolutely not
to spend, if he could help it, a farthing of whatever he might obtain. The first
thing that drew his attention was a heap of coals shot out of carts on the pavement
before a house. He offered himself to shovel or wheel them into the place where
they were to be laid, and was employed. He received a few pence for the labor;
and then, in pursuance of the saving part of his plan, requested some small gratuity
of meat and drink, which was given him. He then looked out for the next thing
that might chance; and went, with indefatigable industry, through a succession
of servile employments in different places, of longer and shorter duration, still
scrupulous in avoiding, as far as possible, the expense of a penny. He promptly
seized every opportunity which could advance his design, without regarding the
meanness of occupation or appearance. By this method he had gained, after a considerable
time, money enough to purchase in order to sell again a few cattle, of which he
had taken pains to understand the value. He speedily but cautiously turned his
first gains into second advantages; retained without a single deviation his extreme
parsimony; and thus advanced by degrees into larger transactions and incipient
wealth. I did not hear, or have forgotten, the continued course of his life, but
the final result was, that he more than recovered his lost possessions, and died
an inveterate miser, worth L60,000 (pounds)." *
* Op. cit., Letter III., abridged.
I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession, and which
represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent sort of conversion,
if the opposite of 'falling in love,' falling out of love, may be so termed. Falling
in love also conforms frequently to this type, a latent process of unconscious
preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is
irretrievably done. The free and easy tone in this narrative gives it a sincerity
that speaks for itself.
"For two years of this time I went through a very
bad experience, which almost drove me mad. I had fallen violently in love with
a girl who, young as she was, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As I look back
on her now, I hate her, and wonder how I could ever have fallen so low as to be
worked upon to such an extent by her attractions. Nevertheless, I fell into a
regular fever, could think of nothing else; whenever I was alone, I pictured her
attractions, and spent most of the time when I should have been working, in recalling
our previous interviews, and imagining future conversations. She was very pretty,
good humored, and jolly to the last degree, and intensely pleased with my admiration.
Would give me no decided answer yes or no, and the queer thing about it was that
whilst pursuing her for her hand, I secretly knew all along that she was unfit
to be a wife for me, and that she never would say yes. Although for a year we
took our meals at the same boarding-house, so that I saw her continually and familiarly,
our closer relations had to be largely on the sly, and this fact, together with
my jealousy of another one of her male admirers, and my own conscience despising
me for my uncontrollable weakness, made me so nervous and sleepless that I really
thought I should become insane. I understand well those young men murdering their
sweethearts, which appear so often in the papers. Nevertheless I did love her
passionately, and in some ways she did deserve it.
"The queer thing was the
sudden and unexpected way in which it all stopped. I was going to my work after
breakfast one morning, thinking as usual of her and of my misery, when, just as
if some outside power laid hold of me, I found myself turning round and almost
running to my room, where I immediately got out all the relics of her which I
possessed, including some hair, all her notes and letters, and ambrotypes on glass.
The former I made a fire of, the latter I actually crushed beneath my heel, in
a sort of fierce joy of revenge and punishment. I now loathed and despised her
altogether, and as for myself I felt as if a load of disease had suddenly been
removed from me. That was the end. I never spoke to her or wrote to her again
in all the subsequent years, and I have never had a single moment of loving thought
towards one who for so many months entirely filled my heart. In fact, I have always
rather hated her memory, though now I can see that I had gone unnecessarily far
in that direction. At any rate, from that happy morning onward I regained possession
of my own proper soul, and have never since fallen into any similar trap.
This seems to me an unusually clear example of two different levels of personality,
inconsistent in their dictates, yet so well balanced against each other as for
a long time to fill the life with discord and dissatisfaction. At last, not gradually,
but in a sudden crisis, the unstable equilibrium is resolved, and this happens
so unexpectedly that it is as if, to use the writer's words, "some outside power
laid hold."
Professor Starbuck gives an analogous case, and a converse case
of hatred suddenly turning into love, in his Psychology of Religion, p. 141. Compare
the other highly curious instances which he gives on pp. 137-144, of sudden non-religious
alterations of habit or character. He seems right in conceiving all such sudden
changes as results of special cerebral functions unconsciously developing until
they are ready to play a controlling part, when they make irruption into the conscious
life. When we treat of sudden 'conversion,' I shall make as much use as I can
of this hypothesis of subconscious incubation.
Let me turn now to the kind
of case, the religious case, namely, that immediately concerns us. Here is one
of the simplest possible type, an account of the conversion to the systematic
religion of healthy-mindedness of a man who must already have been naturally of
the healthy-minded type. It shows how, when the fruit is ripe, a touch will make
it fall.
Mr. Horace Fletcher, in his little book called Menticulture, relates
that a friend with whom he was talking of the self-control attained by the Japanese
through their practice of the Buddhist discipline said:
"'You must first get
rid of anger and worry.' 'But,' said I, 'is that possible?' 'Yes,' replied he;
'it is possible to the Japanese, and ought to be possible to us.'
"On my way
back I could think of nothing else but the words 'get rid, get rid'; and the idea
must have continued to possess me during my sleeping hours, for the first consciousness
in the morning brought back the same thought, with the revelation of a discovery,
which framed itself into the reasoning, 'If it is possible to get rid of anger
and worry, why is it necessary to have them at all?' I felt the strength of the
argument, and at once accepted the reasoning. The baby had discovered that it
could walk. It would scorn to creep any longer.
"From the instant I realized
that these cancer spots of worry and anger were removable, they left me. With
the discovery of their weakness they were exorcised. From that time life has had
an entirely different aspect.
"Although from that moment the possibility and
desirability of freedom from the depressing passions has been a reality to me,
it took me some months to feel absolute security in my new position; but, as the
usual occasions for worry and anger have presented themselves over and over again,
and I have been unable to feel them in the slightest degree, I no longer dread
or guard against them, and I am amazed at my increased energy and vigor of mind;
at my strength to meet situations of all kinds, and at my disposition to love
and appreciate everything.
"I have had occasion to travel more than ten thousand
miles by rail since that morning. The same Pullman porter, conductor, hotel-waiter,
peddler, book-agent, cabman, and others who were formerly a source of annoyance
and irritation have been met, but I am not conscious of a single incivility. All
at once the whole world has turned good to me. I have become, as it were, sensitive
only to the rays of good.
"I could recount many experiences which prove a
brand-new condition of mind, but one will be sufficient. Without the slightest
feeling of annoyance or impatience, I have seen a train that I had planned to
take with a good deal of interested and pleasurable anticipation move out of the
station without me, because my baggage did not arrive. The porter from the hotel
came running and panting into the station just as the train pulled out of sight.
When he saw me, he looked as if he feared a scolding, and began to tell of being
blocked in a crowded street and unable to get out. When he had finished, I said
to him: 'It does n't matter at all, you could n't help it, so we will try again
to-morrow. Here is your fee, I am sorry you had all this trouble in earning it.'
The look of surprise that came over his face was so filled with pleasure that
I was repaid on the spot for the delay in my departure. Next day he would not
accept a cent for the service, and he and I are friends for life.
"During
the first weeks of my experience I was on guard only against worry and anger;
but, in the mean time, having noticed the absence of the other depressing and
dwarfing passions, I began to trace a relationship, until I was convinced that
they are all growths from the two roots I have specified. I have felt the freedom
now for so long a time that I am sure of my relation toward it; and I could no
more harbor any of the thieving and depressing influences that once I nursed as
a heritage of humanity than a fop would voluntarily wallow in a filthy gutter.
"There is no doubt in my mind that pure Christianity and pure Buddhism, and
the Mental Sciences and all Religions, fundamentally teach what has been a discovery
to me; but none of them have presented it in the light of a simple and easy process
of elimination. At one time I wondered if the elimination would not yield to indifference
and sloth. In my experience, the contrary is the result. I feel such an increased
desire to do something useful that it seems as if I were a boy again and the energy
for play had returned. I could fight as readily as (and better than) ever, if
there were occasion for it. It does not make one a coward. It can't, since fear
is one of the things eliminated. I notice the absence of timidity in the presence
of any audience. When a boy, I was standing under a tree which was struck by lightning,
and received a shock from the effects of which I never knew exemption until I
had dissolved partnership with worry. Since then, lightning and thunder have been
encountered under conditions which would formerly have caused great depression
and discomfort, without [my] experiencing a trace of either. Surprise is also
greatly modified, and one is less liable to become startled by unexpected sights
or noises.
"As far as I am individually concerned, I am not bothering myself
at present as to what the results of this emancipated condition may be. I have
no doubt that the perfect health aimed at by Christian Science may be one of the
possibilities, for I note a marked improvement in the way my stomach does its
duty in assimilating the food I give it to handle, and I am sure it works better
to the sound of a song than under the friction of a frown. Neither am I wasting
any of this precious time formulating an idea of a future existence or a future
Heaven. The Heaven that I have within myself is as attractive as any that has
been promised or that I can imagine; and I am willing to let the growth lead where
it will, as long as the anger and their brood have no part in misguiding it."
*
* H. FLETCHER: Menticulture, or the A-B-C of True Living, New York and Chicago,
1899, pp. 26-36, abridged.
The older medicine used to speak
of two ways, lysis and crisis, one gradual, the other abrupt, in which one might
recover from a bodily disease. In the spiritual realm there are also two ways,
one gradual, the other sudden, in which inner unification may occur. Tolstoy and
Bunyan may again serve us as examples, as it happens, of the gradual way, though
it must be confessed at the outset that it is hard to follow these windings of
the hearts of others, and one feels that their words do not reveal their total
secret.
Howe'er this be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending
questioning, seemed to come to one insight after another. First he perceived that
his conviction that life was meaningless took only this finite life into account.
He was looking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole
result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics which
end with 0=0. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by itself can go,
unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite
as common people do, and life grows possible again.
"Since mankind has existed,
wherever life has been, there also has been the faith that gave the possibility
of living. Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does
not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.
If Man did not believe that he must live for something, he would not live at all.
The idea of an infinite God, of the divinity of the soul, of the union of men's
actions with God- these are ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of
human thought. They are ideas without which there would be no life, without which
I myself," said Tolstoy, "would not exist. I began to see that I had no right
to rely on my individual reasoning and neglect these answers given by faith, for
they are the only answers to the question."
Yet how believe as the common
people believe, steeped as they are in grossest superstition? It is impossible,-
but yet their life! their life! It is normal. It is happy! It is an answer to
the question!
Little by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction- he
says it took him two years to arrive there- that his trouble had not been with
life in general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of
the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personally always
led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personal
ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs,
to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, to believe
in God, therein lay happiness again.
"I remember," he says, "one day in early
spring, I was alone in the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I
listened,. and my thought went back to what for these three years it always was
busy with- the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how did I ever come
by the idea?
"And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations
towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning.... Why do I look
farther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he, without whom one cannot live.
To acknowledge God and to live are one and the same thing. God is what life is.
Well, then I live, seek God, and there will be no life without him....
"After
this, things cleared up within me and about me better than ever, and the light
has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide. Just how or when the change
took place I cannot tell. But as insensibly and gradually as the force of life
had been annulled within me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually
and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was strange was that
this energy that came back was nothing new. It was my ancient juvenile force of
faith, the belief that the sole purpose of my life was to be better. I gave up
the life of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody
on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending,"- and Tolstoy
thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or
at least relatively so, ever since. *
* I have considerably abridged Tolstoy's
words in my translation.
As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely
an accidental vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was
logically called for by the clash between his inner character and his outer activities
and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of those primitive oaks
of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities, the cupidities, complications,
and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying, and for
whom the eternal veracities lie with more natural and animal things. His crisis
was the getting of his soul in order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and
vocation, the escape from falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It
was a case of heterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and
level. And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps,
of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel as if
it might be better for us if we could.
Bunyan's recovery
seems to have been even slower. For years together he was alternately haunted
with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but at last with an ever growing
relief in his salvation through the blood of Christ.
"My peace would be in
and out twenty times a day; comfort now and trouble presently; peace now and before
I could go a furlong as full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold." When
a good text comes home to him, "This," he writes, "gave me good encouragement
for the space of two or three hours"; or "This was a good day to me, I hope I
shall not forget it"; or "The glory of these words was then so weighty on me that
I was ready to swoon as I sat; yet not with grief and trouble, but with solid
joy and peace"; or "This made a strange seizure on my spirit; it brought light
with it, and commanded a silence in my heart of all those tumultuous thoughts
that before did use, like masterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and make
a hideous noise within me. It showed me that Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken
and cast off my Soul."
Such periods accumulate until he can write: "And now
remained only the hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond
me, only some drops would still remain, that now and then would fall upon me";-
and at last: "Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosed from my
afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time,
those dreadful Scriptures of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home
rejoicing, for the grace and love of God.... Now could I see myself in Heaven
and Earth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my Righteousness and
Life, though on Earth by my body or person.... Christ was a precious Christ to
my soul that night; I could scarce lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph
through Christ."
Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his
neurotic constitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his non-conformity,
his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker and doer of good, and the
immortal Allegory which he wrote has brought the very spirit of religious patience
home to English hearts.
But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we
have called healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness
ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories
deep. Each of them realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness;
yet the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith
by which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that as a matter of fact
they could and did find something welling up in the inner reaches of their consciousness,
by which such extreme sadness could be overcome. Tolstoy does well to talk of
it as that by which men live; for that is exactly what it is, a stimulus, an excitement,
a faith, a force that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full
presence of the evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable. For
Tolstoy's perceptions of evil appear within their sphere to have remained unmodified.
His later works show him implacable to the whole system of official values: the
ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of empire; the spuriousness of the
church, the vain conceit of the professions; the meannesses and cruelties that
go with great success; and every other pompous crime and lying institution of
this world. To all patience with such things his experience has been for him a
permanent ministry of death.
Bunyan also leaves this world to the enemy.
"I must first pass a sentence of death," he says, "upon everything that can properly
be called a thing of this life, even to reckon myself, my wife, my children, my
health, my enjoyments, and all, as dead to me, and myself as dead to them; to
trust in God through Christ, as touching the world to come; and as touching this
world, to count the grave my house, to make my bed in darkness, and to say to
corruption, Thou art my father, and to the worm, Thou art my mother and sister....
The parting with my wife and my poor children hath often been to me as the pulling
of my flesh from my bones, especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart
than all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have
for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold,
nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure that the wind
should blow upon thee. But yet I must venture you all with God, though it goeth
to the quick to leave you." *
* In my quotations from Bunyan I have omitted
certain intervening portions of the text.
The 'hue of resolution' is there,
but the full flood of ecstatic liberation seems never to have poured over poor
John Bunyan's soul.
These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general
way with the phenomenon technically called 'Conversion.' In the next lecture I
shall invite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some detail.