The last lecture
left us in a state of expectancy. What may the practical fruits for life have
been, of such movingly happy conversions as those we heard of? With this question
the really important part of our task opens, for you remember that we began all
this empirical inquiry not merely to open a curious chapter in the natural history
of human consciousness, but rather to attain a spiritual judgment as to the total
value and positive meaning of all the religious trouble and happiness which we
have seen. We must, therefore, first describe the fruits of the religious life,
and then we must judge them. This divides our inquiry into two distinct parts.
Let us without further preamble proceed to the descriptive task. It ought
to be the pleasantest portion of our business in these lectures. Some small pieces
of it, it is true, may be painful, or may show human nature in a pathetic light,
but it will be mainly pleasant, because the best fruits of religious experience
are the best things that history has to show. They have always been esteemed so;
here if anywhere is the genuinely strenuous life; and to call to mind a succession
of such examples as I have lately had to wander through, though it has been only
in the reading of them, is to feel encouraged and uplifted and washed in better
moral air.
The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery
to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for
religious ideals. I can do no better than quote, as to this, some remarks which
Sainte-Beuve in his History of Port-Royal makes on the results of conversion or
the state of grace.
"Even from the purely human point of
view," Sainte-Beuve says, "the phenomenon of grace must still appear sufficiently
extraordinary, eminent, and rare, both in its nature and in its effects, to deserve
a closer study. For the soul arrives thereby at a certain fixed and invincible
state, a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of which the greatest deeds
which it ever performs are executed. Through all the different forms of communion,
and all the diversity of the means which help to produce this state, whether it
be reached by a jubilee, by a general confession, by a solitary prayer and effusion,
whatever in short be the place and the occasion, it is easy to recognize that
it is fundamentally one state in spirit and in fruits. Penetrate a little beneath
the diversity of circumstances, and it becomes evident that in Christians of different
epochs it is always one and the same modification by which they are affected:
there is veritably a single fundamental and identical spirit of piety and charity,
common to those who have received grace; an inner state which before all things
is one of love and humility, of infinite confidence in God, and of severity for
one's self, accompanied with tenderness for others. The fruits peculiar to this
condition of the soul have the same savor in all, under distant suns and in different
surroundings, in Saint Teresa of Avila just as in any Moravian brother of Herrnhut."
*
* SAINTE BEUVE: Port-Royal, vol. i. pp. 95 and 106, abridged.
Sainte-Beuve
has here only the more eminent instances of regeneration in mind, and these are
of course the instructive ones for us also to consider. These devotees have often
laid their course so differently from other men that, judging them by worldly
law, we might be tempted to call them monstrous aberrations from the path of nature.
I begin, therefore, by asking a general psychological question as to what the
inner conditions are which may make one human character differ so extremely from
another.
I reply at once that where the character, as something
distinguished from the intellect, is concerned, the causes of human diversity
lie chiefly in our differing susceptibilities of emotional excitement, and in
the different impulses and inhibitions which these bring in their train. Let me
make this more clear.
Speaking generally, our moral and practical attitude,
at any given time, is always a resultant of two sets of forces within us, impulses
pushing us one way and obstructions and inhibitions holding us back. "Yes! yes!"
say the impulses; "No! no!" say the inhibitions. Few people who have not expressly
reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of inhibition is upon
us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we
were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar. The influence is so incessant that
it becomes subconscious. All of you, for example, sit here with a certain constraint
at this moment, and entirely without express consciousness of the fact, because
of the influence of the occasion. If left alone in the room, each of you would
probably involuntarily rearrange himself, and make his attitude more 'free and
easy.' But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any great emotional
excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy appear in the street with his face
covered with shaving-lather because a house across the way was on fire; and a
woman will run among strangers in her nightgown if it be a question of saving
her baby's life or her own. Take a self-indulgent woman's life in general. She
will yield to every inhibition set by her disagreeable sensations, lie late in
bed, live upon tea or bromides, keep indoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds
her obedient to its 'no.' But make a mother of her, and what have you? Possessed
by maternal excitement, she now confronts wakefulness, weariness, and toil without
an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The inhibitive power of pain
over her is extinguished wherever the baby's interests are at stake. The inconveniences
which this creature occasions have become, as James Hinton says, the glowing heart
of a great joy, and indeed are now the very conditions whereby the joy becomes
most deep.
This is an example of what you have already heard of as the 'expulsive
power of a higher affection.' But be the affection high or low, it makes no difference,
so long as the excitement it brings be strong enough. In one of Henry Drummond's
discourses he tells of an inundation in India where an eminence with a bungalow
upon it remained unsubmerged, and became the refuge of a number of wild animals
and reptiles in addition to the human beings who were there. At a certain moment
a royal Bengal tiger appeared swimming towards it, reached it, and lay panting
like a dog upon the ground in the midst of the people, still possessed by such
an agony of terror that one of the Englishmen could calmly step up with a rifle
and blow out its brains. The tiger's habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled
by the emotion of fear, which became sovereign, and formed a new centre for his
character.
Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but
many contrary ones are mixed together. In that case one hears both 'yeses' and
'noes,' and the 'will' is called on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier,
for example, with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his fears impelling
him to run, and his Propensities to imitation pushing him towards various courses
if his comrades offer various examples. His person becomes the seat of a mass
of interferences; and he may for a time simply waver, because no one emotion prevails.
There is a pitch of intensity, though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones
that one as alone effective and sweeps its antagonists and all their inhibitions
away. The fury of his comrades' charge, once entered on, will give this pitch
of courage to the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of fear.
In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grow natural because
the inhibitions are annulled. Their 'no! no!' not only is not heard, it does not
exist. Obstacles are then like tissue-paper hoops to the circus rider- no impediment;
the flood is higher than the dam they make. "Lass sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig
sind!" cries the grenadier, frantic over his Emperor's capture, when his wife
and babes are suggested; and men pent into a burning theatre have been known to
cut their way through the crowd with knives. *
* "'Love would not be love,'
says Bourget, 'unless it could carry one to crime.' And so one may say that no
passion would be a veritable passion unless it could carry one to crime." (SIGHELE:
Psychologie des Sectes, p. 136.) In other words, great passions annul the ordinary
inhibitions set by 'conscience.' And conversely, of all the criminal human beings,
the false, cowardly, sensual, or cruel persons who actually live, there is perhaps
not one whose criminal impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the presence
of some other emotion to which his character is also potentially liable, provided
that other emotion be only made intense enough. Fear is usually the most available
emotion for this result in this particular class of persons. It stands for conscience,
and may here be classed appropriately as a 'higher affection.' If we are soon
to die, or if we believe a day of judgment to be near at hand, how quickly do
we put our moral house in order- we do not see how sin can evermore exert temptation
over us! Old-fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to extract from fear
its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion
value.
One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly
important in the composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive
power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility
to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience,
grimness, earnestness, severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to
live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people
or pain to one's self- it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood
is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates
an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction
pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of
every other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure
the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations
are elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-rooted
privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we take a stern
joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called weakness of character
seems in most cases to consist in the inaptitude for these sacrificial moods,
of which one's own inferior self and its pet softnesses must often be the targets
and the victims. *
* Example: Benjamin Constant was often marveled at as an
extraordinary instance of superior intelligence with inferior character, He writes
(Journal, Paris, 1895, p. 56), "I am tossed and dragged about by my miserable
weakness. Never was anything so ridiculous as my indecision. Now marriage, now
solitude; now Germany, now France, hesitation upon hesitation, and all because
at bottom I am unable to give up anything." He can't 'get mad' at any of his alternatives;
and the career of a man beset by such an all-round amiability is hopeless.
So far I have spoken of temporary alterations produced by shifting excitements
in the same person. But the relatively fixed differences of character of different
persons are explained in a precisely similar way. In a man with a liability to
a special sort of emotion, whole ranges of inhibition habitually vanish, which
in other men remain effective, and other sorts of inhibition take their place.
When a person has an inborn genius for certain emotions, his life differs strangely
from that of ordinary people, for none of their usual deterrents check him. Your
mere aspirant to a type of character, on the contrary, only shows, when your natural
lover, fighter, or reformer, with whom the passion is a gift of nature, comes
along, the hopeless inferiority of voluntary to instinctive action. He has deliberately
to overcome his inhibitions; the genius with the inborn passion seems not to feel
them at all; he is free of all that inner friction and nervous waste. To a Fox,
a Garibaldi, a General Booth, a John Brown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the
obstacles omnipotent over those around them are as if non-existent. Could the
rest of us so disregard them, there might be many such heroes, for many have the
wish to live for similar ideals, and only the adequate degree of inhibition-quenching
fury is lacking. *
* The great thing which the higher excitabilities give
is courage; and the addition or subtraction of a certain amount of this quality
makes a different man, a different life. Various excitements let the courage loose.
Trustful hope will do it; inspiring example will do it; love will do it; wrath
will do it. In some people it is natively so high that the mere touch of danger
does it, though danger is for most men the great inhibitor of action. 'Love of
adventure' becomes in such persons a ruling passion. "I believe," says General
Skobeleff, "that my bravery is simply the passion and at the same time the contempt
of danger. The risk of life fills me with an exaggerated rapture. The fewer there
are to share it, the more I like it. The participation of my body in the event
is required to furnish me an adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears
to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger into which I
can throw myself headforemost, attracts me, moves me, intoxicates me. I am crazy
for it, I love it, I adore it. I run after danger as one runs after women; I wish
it never to stop. Were it always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure.
When I throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it, my heart palpitates
with the uncertainty; I could wish at once to have it appear and yet to delay.
A sort of painful and delicious shiver shakes me; my entire nature runs to meet
the peril with an impetus that my will would in vain try to resist." (JULIETTE
ADAM: Le General Skobeleff, Nouvelle Revue, 1886, abridged.) Skobeleff seems to
have been a cruel egoist; but the disinterested Garibaldi, if one may judge by
his 'Memorie,' lived in an unflagging emotion of similar danger-seeking excitement.
The difference between willing and merely wishing, between
having ideals that are creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus
depends solely either on the amount of steam-pressure chronically driving the
character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement transiently
acquired. Given a certain amount of love, indignation, generosity, magnanimity,
admiration, loyalty, or enthusiasm of self-surrender, the result is always the
same. That whole raft of cowardly obstructions, which in tame persons and dull
moods are sovereign impediments to action, sinks away at once. Our conventionality,
* our shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demands for precedent and permission,
for guarantee and surety, our small suspicions, timidities, despairs, where are
they now? Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun
"Wo sind die
Sorge nun und Noth
Die mich noch gestern wollt' erschlaffen?
Ich scham'
mich dess' im Morgenroth."
The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly
under that their very contact is unfelt. Set free of them, we float and soar and
sing. This auroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright
and caroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the controlling
emotion is religious. "The true monk," writes an Italian mystic, "takes nothing
with him but his lyre."
* See the case in Lecture III, above, where the writer
describes his experiences of communion with the Divine as consisting "merely in
the temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually cover my life."
We may now turn from these psychological generalities to
those fruits of the religious state which form the special subject of our present
lecture. The man who lives in his religious centre of personal energy, and is
actuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previous carnal self in perfectly
definite ways. The new ardor which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the
lower 'noes' which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against infection
from the entire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimities once impossible
are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold
no sway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has
broken down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state
of feeling in those temporary 'melting moods' into which either the trials of
real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throw us. Especially if we weep!
For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam, and let
all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now
washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler leading. With most of us the
customary hardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons. Many saints,
even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessed what the church traditionally
reveres as a special grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these persons the
melting mood seems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with
tears and melting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reign may
come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have 'come to
stay.'
At the end of the last lecture we saw this permanence
to be true of the general paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in the
ebbs of emotional excitement meaner motives might temporarily prevail and backsliding
might occur. But that lower temptations may remain completely annulled, apart
from transient emotion and as if by alteration of the man's habitual nature, is
also proved by documentary evidence in certain cases. Before embarking on the
general natural history of the regenerate character, let me convince you of this
curious fact by one or two examples. The most numerous are those of reformed drunkards.
You recollect the case of Mr. Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry McAuley Water
Street Mission abounds in similar instances. * You also remember the graduate
of Oxford, converted at three in the afternoon, and getting drunk in the hay-field
the next day, but after that permanently cured of his appetite. "From that hour
drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. The same thing
occurred with my pipe,... the desire for it went at once and has never returned.
So with every known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and complete.
I have had no temptations since conversion."
* Above, Lecture IX. "The only
radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania," is a saying I have heard
quoted from some medical man.
Here is an analogous case from Starbuck's manuscript
collection:
"I went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where there was a Holiness
meeting,... and I began saying, 'Lord, Lord, I must have this blessing.' Then
what was to me an audible voice said: 'Are you willing to give up everything to
the Lord?' and question after question kept coming up, to all of which I said:
'Yes, Lord; yes, Lord!' until this came: 'Why do you not accept it now?' and I
said: 'I do, Lord.'- I felt no particular joy, only a trust. Just then the meeting
closed, and, as I went out on the street, I met a gentleman smoking a fine cigar,
and a cloud of smoke came into my face, and I took a long, deep breath of it,
and praise the Lord, all my appetite for it was gone. Then as I walked along the
street, passing saloons where the fumes of liquor came out, I found that all my
taste and longing for that accursed stuff was gone. Glory to God!... [But] for
ten or eleven long years [after that] I was in the wilderness with its ups and
downs. My appetite for liquor never came back."
The classic case of Colonel
Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual temptation in a single hour. To Mr.
Spears the colonel said, "I was effectually cured of all inclination to that sin
I was so strongly addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the
head could have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed,
as entirely as if I had been a sucking child; nor did the temptation return to
this day." Mr. Webster's words on the same subject are these: "One thing I have
heard the colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted to impurity before
his acquaintance with religion; but that, so soon as he was enlightened from above,
he felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing his nature so wonderfully that his
sanctification in this respect seemed more remarkable than in any other." *
* Doddridge's Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious Tract Society,
pp. 23-32.
Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and
propensities reminds us so strongly of what has been observed as the result of
hypnotic suggestion that it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences
play the decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in hypnotism.
* Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of cure, after
a few sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which the patient, left to ordinary
moral and physical influences, had struggled in vain. Both drunkenness and sexual
vice have been cured in this way, action through the subliminal seeming thus in
many individuals to have the prerogative of inducing relatively stable change.
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal
door, then. But just how anything operates in this region is still unexplained,
and we shall do well now to say good-by to the process of transformation altogether,-
leaving it, if you like, a good deal of a psychological or theological mystery,-
and to turn our attention to the fruits of the religious condition, no matter
in what way they may have been produced. *(2)
* Here, for example, is a case,
from Starbuck's book, in which a 'sensory automatism' brought about quickly what
prayers and resolves had been unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:
"When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was on me,
and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God to quit, but could
not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was fifty. three, as I sat by the
fire one day smoking, a voice came to me. I did not hear it with my ears, but
more as a dream or sort of double think. It said, 'Louisa, lay down smoking.'
At once I replied, 'Will you take the desire away?' But it only kept saying: 'Louisa,
lay down smoking.' Then I got up, laid my pipe on the mantel-shelf, and never
smoked again or had any desire to. The desire was gone as though I had never known
it or touched tobacco. The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never
gave me the least wish to touch it again." The Psychology of Religion, p. 142.
*(2) Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old influences
physiologically, as a cutting off of the connection between higher and lower cerebral
centres. "This condition," he says, "in which the association-centres connected
with the spiritual life are cut off from the lower, is often reflected in the
way correspondents describe their experiences.... For example: 'Temptations from
without still assail me, but there is nothing within to respond to them.' The
ego [here] is wholly identified with the higher centres, whose quality of feeling
is that of withinness. Another of the respondents says: 'Since then, although
Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of brass around me, so that his darts
cannot touch me.'"- Unquestionably, functional exclusions of this sort must occur
in the cerebral organ. But on the side accessible to introspection, their causal
condition is nothing but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so
high and strong as to be sovereign; and it must be frankly confessed that we do
not know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one person and not in
another. We can only give our imagination a certain delusive help by mechanical
analogies.
If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its
different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided solid with
different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental revolutions
to the spatial revolutions of such a body. As it is pried up, say by a lever,
from a position in which it lies on surface A, for instance, it will linger for
a time unstably halfway up, and if the lever cease to urge it, it will tumble
back or 'relapse' under the continued poll of gravity. But if at last it rotate
far enough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond surface A altogether, the
body will fall over, on surface B, say, and abide there permanently. The pulls
of gravity towards A have vanished, and may now be disregarded. The polyhedron
has become immune against farther attraction from their direction.
In this
figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional influence making for
a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to the ancient drawbacks and inhibitions.
So long as the emotional influence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy,
the changes it produces are unstable, and the man relapses into his original attitude.
But when a certain intensity is attained by the new emotion, a critical point
is passed, and there then ensues an irreversible revolution, equivalent to the
production of a new nature.
The collective name for the
ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness. * The saintly character
is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal
energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness,
the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced. *(2)
* I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of 'sanctimoniousness' which sometimes
clings to it, because no other word suggests as well the exact combination of
affections which the text goes on to describe.
*(2) "It will be found," says
Dr. W.R. INGE (in his lectures on Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 326),
"that men of preeminent saintliness agree very closely in what they tell us. They
tell us that they have arrived at an unshakable conviction, not based on inference
but on immediate experience, that God is a spirit with whom the human spirit can
hold intercourse; that in him meet all that they can imagine of goodness, truth,
and beauty that they can see his footprints everywhere in nature, and feel his
presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as
they come to themselves they come to him. They tell us what separates us from
him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its forms; and, secondly,
sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of darkness and death, which
hide from us the face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light,
which shineth more and more unto the perfect day."
They are these:
1. A
feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world's selfish little interests;
and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existence
of an Ideal Power. In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as
God; but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of
holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life,
in ways which I described in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen. *
*
The 'enthusiasm of humanity' may lead to a life which coalesces in many respects
with that of Christian saintliness. Take the following rules proposed to members
of the Union pour l'Action morale, in the Bulletin de l'Union, April 1-15, 1894.
See, also, Revue Bleue, August 13, 1892.
"We would make known in our own persons
the usefulness, of rule, of discipline, of resignation and renunciation; we would
teach the necessary perpetuity of suffering, and explain the creative part which
it plays. We would wage war upon false optimism; on the base hope of happiness
coming to us ready made; on the notion of a salvation by knowledge alone, or by
material civilization alone, vain symbol as this is of civilization, precarious
external arrangement, ill-fitted to replace the intimate union and consent of
souls. We would wage war also on bad morals, whether in public or in private life;
on luxury, fastidiousness, and over-refinement; on all that tends to increase
the painful, immoral, and anti-social multiplication of our wants; on all that
excites envy and dislike in the soul of the common people, and confirms the notion
that the chief end of life is freedom to enjoy. We would preach by our example
the respect of superiors and equals, the respect of all men; affectionate simplicity
in our relations with inferiors and insignificant persons; indulgence where our
own claims only are concerned, but firmness in our demands where they relate to
duties towards others or towards the public.
"For the common people are what
we help them to become; their vices are our vices, gazed upon, envied, and imitated;
and if they come back with all their weight upon us, it is but just.
"We forbid
ourselves all seeking after popularity, all ambition to appear important. We pledge
ourselves to abstain from falsehood, in all its degrees. We promise not to create
or encourage illusions as to what is possible, by what we say or write. We promise
to one another active sincerity, which strives to see truth clearly, and which
never fears to declare what it sees.
"We promise deliberate resistance to
the tidal waves of fashion, to the 'booms' and panics of the public mind, to all
the forms of weakness and of fear.
"We forbid ourselves the use of sarcasm.
Of serious things we will speak seriously and unsmilingly, without banter and
without the appearance of banter;- and even so of all things, for there are serious
ways of being light of heart.
"We will put ourselves forward always for what
we are, simply and without false humility, as well as without pedantry, affectation,
or pride."
2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our
own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control.
3. An immense elation
and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down.
4. A shifting
of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards 'yes,
yes,' and away from 'no,' where the claims of the non-ego are concerned.
These
fundamental inner conditions have characteristic practical consequences, as follows:
a. Asceticism.- The self-surrender may become so passionate as to turn into self-immolation.
It may then so overrule the ordinary inhibitions of the flesh that the saint finds
positive pleasure in sacrifice and asceticism, measuring and expressing as they
do the degree of his loyalty to the higher power.
b. Strength of Soul.- The
sense of enlargement of life may be so uplifting that personal motives and inhibitions,
commonly omnipotent, become too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience
and fortitude open out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity takes
their place. Come heaven, come hell, it makes no difference now!
c. Purity.-
The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first, increase of purity.
The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced, and the cleansing of existence
from brutal and sensual elements becomes imperative. Occasions of contact with
such elements are avoided: the saintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency
and keep unspotted from the world. In some temperaments this need of purity of
spirit takes an ascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless
severity.
d. Charity.- The shifting of the emotional centre brings, secondly,
increase of charity, tenderness for fellow-creatures. The ordinary motives to
antipathy, which usually set such close bounds to tenderness among human beings,
are inhibited. The saint loves his enemies, and treats loathsome beggars as his
brothers.
I now have to give some concrete illustrations of these fruits of
the spiritual tree. The only difficulty is to choose, for they are so abundant.
Since the sense of Presence of a higher and friendly Power
seems to be the fundamental feature in the spiritual life, I will begin with that.
In our narratives of conversion we saw how the world might look shining and
transfigured to the convert, * and, apart from anything acutely religious, we
all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us round with friendliness.
In youth and health, in summer, in the woods or on the mountains, there come days
when the weather seems all whispering with peace, hours when the goodness and
beauty of existence enfold us like a dry warm climate, or chime through us as
if our inner ears were subtly ringing with the world's security. Thoreau writes:
* Above, Lecture X.
"Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for
an hour I doubted whether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a
serene and healthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But, in the midst
of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such
sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and
in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness
all at once, like an atmosphere, sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages
of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every
little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was
so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought
no place could ever be strange to me again." *
* H. THOREAU: Walden, Riverside
edition, p. 206, abridged.
In the Christian consciousness this sense of the
enveloping friendliness becomes most personal and definite. "The compensation,"
writes a German author, "for the loss of that sense of personal independence which
man so unwillingly gives up, is the disappearance of all fear from one's life,
the quite indescribable and inexplicable feeling of an inner security, which one
can only experience, but which, once it has been experienced, one can never forget."
*
* C.H. HILTY: Gluck, vol. i. p. 85.
I find an excellent description
of this state of mind in a sermon by Mr. Voysey:
"It is the experience of
myriads of trustful souls, that this sense of God's unfailing presence with them
in their going out and in their coming in, and by night and day, is a source of
absolute repose and confident calmness. It drives away all fear of what may befall
them. That nearness of God is a constant security against terror and anxiety.
It is not that they are at all assured of physical safety, or deem themselves
protected by a love which is denied to others, but that they are in a state of
mind equally ready to be safe or to meet with injury. If injury befall them, they
will be content to bear it because the Lord is their keeper, and nothing can befall
them without his will. If it be his will, then injury is for them a blessing and
no calamity at all. Thus and thus only is the trustful man protected and shielded
from harm. And I for one- by no means a thick-skinned or hard-nerved man- am absolutely
satisfied with this arrangement, and do not wish for any other kind of immunity
from danger and catastrophe. Quite as sensitive to pain as the most highly strung
organism, I yet feel that the worst of it is conquered, and the sting taken out
of it altogether, by the thought that God is our loving and sleepless keeper,
and that nothing can hurt us without his will." *
* The Mystery of Pain and
Death, London, 1892, p. 258.
More excited expressions of this condition are
abundant in religious literature. I could easily weary you with their monotony.
Here is an account from Mrs. Jonathan Edwards:
"Last night," Mrs. Edwards
writes, "was the sweetest night I ever had in my life. I never before, for so
long a time together, enjoyed so much of the light and rest and sweetness of heaven
in my soul, but without the least agitation of body during the whole time. Part
of the night I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and sometimes between sleeping and
waking. But all night I continued in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the
heavenly sweetness of Christ's excellent love, of his nearness to me, and of my
dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in an entire rest
in him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divine love come down from the
heart of Christ in heaven into my heart in a constant stream, like a stream or
pencil of sweet light. At the same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love
to Christ, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing of heavenly
love, and I appeared to myself to float or swim, in these bright, sweet beams,
like the motes swimming in the beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which
come in at the window. I think that what I felt each minute was worth more than
all the outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in my whole life put
together. It was pleasure, without the least sting, or any interruption. It was
a sweetness, which my soul was lost in; it seemed to be all that my feeble frame
could sustain. There was but little difference, whether I was asleep or awake,
but if there was any difference, the sweetness was greatest while I was asleep.
* As I awoke early the next morning, it seemed to me that I had entirely done
with myself. I felt that the opinions of the world concerning me were nothing,
and that I had no more to do with any outward interest of my own than with that
of a person whom I never saw. The glory of God seemed to swallow up every wish
and desire of my heart.... After retiring to rest and sleeping a little while,
I awoke, and was led to reflect on God's mercy to me, in giving me, for many years,
a willingness to die; and after that, in making me willing to live, that I might
do and suffer whatever he called me to here. I also thought how God had graciously
given me an entire resignation to his will, with respect to the kind and manner
of death that I should die; having been made willing to die on the rack, or at
the stake, and if it were God's will, to die in darkness. But now it occurred
to me, I used to think of living no longer than to the ordinary age of man. Upon
this I was led to ask myself, whether I was not willing to be kept out of heaven
even longer; and my whole heart seemed immediately to reply: Yes, a thousand years,
and a thousand in horror, if it be most for the honor of God, the torment of my
body being so great, awful, and overwhelming that none could bear to live in the
country where the spectacle was seen, and the torment of my mind being vastly
greater. And it seemed to me that I found a perfect willingness, quietness, and
alacrity of soul in consenting that it should be so, if it were most for the glory
of God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my mind. The glory
of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up, and every conceivable suffering,
and everything that was terrible to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing before
it. This resignation continued in its clearness and brightness the rest of the
night, and all the next day, and the night following, and on Monday in the forenoon,
without interruption or abatement." *(2)
* Compare Madame Guyon: "It was my
practice to arise at midnight for purposes of devotion.... It seemed to me that
God came at the precise time and woke me from sleep in order that I might enjoy
him. When I was out of health or greatly fatigued, he did not awake me, but at
such times I felt, even in my sleep, a singular possession of God. He loved me
so much that he seemed to pervade my being, at a time when I could be only imperfectly
conscious of his presence. My sleep is sometimes broken,- a sort of half sleep;
but my soul seems to be awake enough to know God, when it is hardly capable of
knowing anything else." T.C. UPHAM: The Life and Religious Experiences of Madame
de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, vol. i. p. 260.
*(2) I have considerably
abridged the words of the original, which is given in EDWARDS's Narrative of the
Revival in New England.
The annals of Catholic saintship abound in records
as ecstatic or more ecstatic than this. "Often the assaults of the divine love,"
it is said of the Sister Seraphique de la Martiniere, "reduced her almost to the
point of death. She used tenderly to complain of this to God. 'I cannot support
it,' she used to say. 'Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire under the
violence of your love.'" *
* BOUGAUD: Hist. de la Bienheureuse Marguerite
Marie, 1894, p. 125.
Let me pass next to the Charity and
Brotherly Love which are a usual fruit of saintliness, and have always been reckoned
essential theological virtues, however limited may have been the kinds of service
which the particular theology enjoined. Brotherly love would follow logically
from the assurance of God's friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as
men being an immediate inference from that of God's fatherhood of us all. When
Christ utters the precepts: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do
good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
persecute you," he gives for a reason: "That ye may be the children of your Father
which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good,
and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." One might therefore be tempted
to explain both the humility as to one's self and the charity towards others which
characterize spiritual excitement, as results of the all-leveling character of
theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism.
We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible
degree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they harmonize with
all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on general causes; and
we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but coordinate parts of that great
complex excitement in the study of which we are engaged. Religious rapture, moral
enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind,
in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness
to rule. The best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic
affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find ourselves at
home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving
them too cleverly from one another. Like love or fear, the faith-state is a natural
psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence. Jubilation
is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections are self-forgetful and
kindly so long as they endure.
We find this the case even when they are pathological
in origin. In his instructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie, * M. Georges Dumas
compares together the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity, and
shows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other is marked by altruistic
impulses. No human being so stingy and useless as was Marie in her melancholy
period! But the moment the happy period begins, "sympathy and kindness become
her characteristic sentiments. She displays a universal goodwill, not only of
intention, but in act.... She becomes solicitous of the health of other patients,
interested in getting them out, desirous to procure wool to knit socks for some
of them. Never since she has been under my observation have I heard her in her
joyous period utter any but charitable opinions." *(2) And later, Dr. Dumas says
of all such joyous conditions that "unselfish sentiments and tender emotions are
the only affective states to be found in them. The subject's mind is closed against
envy, hatred, and vindictiveness, and wholly transformed into benevolence, indulgence,
and mercy." *(3)
* Paris, 1900.
*(2) Page 130.
*(3) Page 167.
There is thus an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their
companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise. Along with
the happiness, this increase of tenderness is often noted in narratives of conversion.
"I began to work for others";-"I had more tender feeling for my family and friends";-
"I spoke at once to a person with whom I had been angry";- "I felt for every one,
and loved my friends better";- "I felt every one to be my friend"; - these are
so many expressions from the records collected by Professor Starbuck. *
*
Op. cit., p. 127.
"When," says Mrs. Edwards, continuing the narrative from
which I made quotation a moment ago, "I arose on the morning of the Sabbath, I
felt a love to all mankind, wholly peculiar in its strength and sweetness, far
beyond all that I had ever felt before. The power of that love seemed inexpressible.
I thought, if I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and
cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would still be impossible that I should
cherish any feelings towards them but those of love, and pity, and ardent desires
for their happiness. I never before felt so far from a disposition to judge and
censure others, as I did that morning. I realized also, in an unusual and very
lively manner, how great a part of Christianity lies in the performance of our
social and relative duties to one another. The same joyful sense continued throughout
the day- a sweet love to God and all mankind."
Whatever be the explanation
of the charity, it may efface all usual human barriers. *
* The barrier between
men and animals also. We read of Towianski, an eminent Polish patriot and mystic,
that "one day one of his friends met him in the rain, caressing a big dog which
was jumping upon him and covering him horribly with mud. On being asked why he
permitted the animal thus to dirty his clothes, Towianski replied: 'This dog,
whom I am now meeting for the first time, has shown a great fellow-feeling for
me, and a great joy in my recognition and acceptance of his greetings. Were I
to drive him off, I should wound his feelings and do him a moral injury. It would
be an offense not only to him, but to all the spirits of the other world who are
on the same level with him. The damage which he does to my coat is as nothing
in comparison with the wrong which I should inflict upon him, in case I were to
remain indifferent to the manifestations of his friendship. We ought,' he added,
'both to lighten the condition of animals, whenever we can, and at the same time
to facilitate in ourselves that union of the world of all spirits, which the sacrifice
of Christ has made possible.'" Andre Towianski, Traduction de l'Italien, Turin,
1897 (privately printed). I owe my knowledge of this book and of Towianski to
my friend Professor W. Lutoslawski, author of 'Plato's Logic.'
Here, for instance,
is an example of Christian non-resistance from Richard Weaver's autobiography.
Weaver was a collier, a semi-professional pugilist in his younger days, who became
a much beloved evangelist. Fighting, after drinking, seems to have been the sin
to which he originally felt his flesh most perversely inclined. After his first
conversion he had a backsliding, which consisted in pounding a man who had insulted
a girl. Feeling that, having once fallen, he might as well be hanged for a sheep
as for a lamb, he got drunk and went and broke the jaw of another man who had
lately challenged him to fight and taunted him with cowardice for refusing as
a Christian man;- I mention these incidents to show how genuine a change of heart
is implied in the later conduct which he describes as follows:
"I went down
the drift and found the boy crying because a fellow-workman was trying to take
the wagon from him by force. I said to him:
"'Tom, you must n't take that wagon.'
"He swore at me, and called me a Methodist devil. I told him that God did
not tell me to let him rob me. He cursed again, and said he would push the wagon
over me.
"'Well,' I said, 'let us see whether the devil and thee are stronger
than the Lord and me.'
"And the Lord and I proving stronger than the devil
and he, he had to get out of the way, or the wagon would have gone over him. So
I gave the wagon to the boy. Then said Tom:
"'I've a good mind to smack thee
on the face.'
"'Well,' I said, 'if that will do thee any good, thou canst
do it.' So he struck me on the face.
"I turned the other cheek to him, and
said, 'Strike again.'
"He struck again and again, till he had struck me five
times. I turned my cheek for the sixth stroke; but he turned away cursing. I shouted
after him: 'The Lord forgive thee, for I do, and the Lord save thee.'
"This
was on a Saturday; and when I went home from the coal-pit my wife saw my face
was swollen, and asked what was the matter with it. I said: 'I've been fighting,
and I've given a man a good thrashing.'
"She burst out weeping, and said,
'O Richard, what made you fight?' Then I told her all about it; and she thanked
the Lord I had not struck back.
"But the Lord had struck, and his blows have
more effect than man's. Monday came. The devil began to tempt me, saying: 'The
other men will laugh at thee for allowing Tom to treat thee as he did on Saturday.'
I cried, 'Get thee behind me, Satan;'- and went on my way to the coal-pit.
"Tom was the first man I saw. I said 'Good-morning,' but got no reply.
"He
went down first. When I got down, I was surprised to see him sitting on the wagon-road
waiting for me. When I came to him he burst into tears and said: 'Richard, will
you forgive me for striking you?'
'I have forgiven thee,' said I; 'ask God
to forgive thee. The Lord bless thee.' I gave him my hand, and we went each to
his work." *
* J. PATTERSON'S Life of Richard Weaver, pp. 66-68, abridged.
'Love your enemies!' Mark you, not simply those who happen not to be your
friends, but your enemies, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a
mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should,
as far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside
of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally.
Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in general be a level of emotion
so unifying, so obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity
may come to be an irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests
aroused? If positive well-wishing could attain so supreme a degree of excitement,
those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings. Their life would
be morally discrete from the life of other men, and there is no saying, in the
absence of positive experience of an authentic kind,- for there are few active
examples in our scriptures, and the Buddhistic examples are legendary,- * what
the effects might be: they might conceivably transform the world.
* As where
the future Buddha, incarnated as a hare, jumps into the fire to cook himself for
a meal for a beggar- having previously shaken himself three times, so that none
of the insects in his fur should perish with him.
Psychologically and in principle,
the precept 'Love your enemies' is not self-contradictory. It is merely the extreme
limit of a kind of magnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of
our oppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would involve
such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole, and with the
present world's arrangements, that a critical point would practically be passed,
and we should be born into another kingdom of being. Religious emotion makes us
feel that other kingdom to be close at hand, within our reach.
The inhibition
of instinctive repugnance is proved not only by the showing of love to enemies,
but by the showing of it to any one who is personally loathsome. In the annals
of saintliness we find a curious mixture of motives impelling in this direction.
Asceticism plays its part; and along with charity pure and simple, we find humility
or the desire to disclaim distinction and to grovel on the common level before
God. Certainly all three principles were at work when Francis of Assisi and Ignatius
Loyola exchanged their garments with those of filthy beggars. All three are at
work when religious persons consecrate their lives to the care of leprosy or other
peculiarly unpleasant diseases. The nursing of the sick is a function to which
the religious seem strongly drawn, even apart from the fact that church traditions
set that way. But in the annals of this sort of charity we find fantastic excesses
of devotion recorded which are only explicable by the frenzy of self-immolation
simultaneously aroused. Francis of Assisi kisses his lepers; Margaret Mary Alacoque,
Francis Xavier, St. John of God, and others are said to have cleansed the sores
and ulcers of their patients with their respective tongues; and the lives of such
saints as Elizabeth of Hungary and Madame de Chantal are full of a sort of reveling
in hospital purulence, disagreeable to read of, and which makes us admire and
shudder at the same time.
So much for the human love aroused
by the faith-state. Let me next speak of the Equanimity, Resignation, Fortitude,
and Patience which it brings.
'A paradise of inward tranquillity' seems to
be faith's usual result; and it is easy, even without being religious one's self,
to understand this. A moment back, in treating of the sense of God's presence,
I spoke of the unaccountable feeling of safety which one may then have. And, indeed,
how can it possibly fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appease
the fret, if one be sensibly conscious that, no matter what one's difficulties
for the moment may appear to be, one's life as a whole is in the keeping of a
power whom one can absolutely trust? In deeply religious men the abandonment of
self to this power is passionate. Whoever not only says, but feels, 'God's will
be done,' is mailed against every weakness; and the whole historic array of martyrs,
missionaries, and religious reformers is there to prove the tranquil-mindedness,
under naturally agitating or distressing circumstances, which self-surrender brings.
The temper of the tranquil-mindedness differs, of course, according as the
person is of a constitutionally sombre or of a constitutionally cheerful cast
of mind. In the sombre it partakes more of resignation and submission; in the
cheerful it is a joyous consent. As an example of the former temper, I quote part
of a letter from Professor Lagneau, a venerated teacher of philosophy who lately
died, a great invalid, at Paris:
"My life, for the success of which you send
good wishes, will be what it is able to be. I ask nothing from it, I expect nothing
from it. For long years now I exist, think, and act, and am worth what I am worth,
only through the despair which is my sole strength and my sole foundation. May
it preserve for me, even in these last trials to which I am coming, the courage
to do without the desire of deliverance. I ask nothing more from the Source whence
all strength cometh, and if that is granted, your wishes will have been accomplished."
*
* Bulletin l'Union pour l'Action Morale, September, 1894.
There is something
pathetic and fatalistic about this, but the power of such a tone as a protection
against outward shocks is manifest. Pascal is another Frenchman of pessimistic
natural temperament. He expresses still more amply the temper of self-surrendering
submissiveness:
"Deliver me, Lord," he writes in his prayers, "from the sadness
at my proper suffering which self-love might give, but put into me a sadness like
your own. Let my sufferings appease your choler. Make them an occasion for my
conversion and salvation. I ask you neither for health nor for sickness, for life
nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life
and my death, for your glory, for my salvation, and for the use of the Church
and of your saints, of whom I would by your grace be one. You alone know what
is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your
will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know
but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart
from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is most
profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in
the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden
among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom."
*
* B. PASCAL: Prieres pour les Maladies, SS SS xiii., xiv., abridged.
When we reach more optimistic temperaments, the resignation grows less passive.
Examples are sown so broadcast throughout history that I might well pass on without
citation. As it is, I snatch at the first that occurs to my mind. Madame Guyon,
a frail creature physically, was yet of a happy native disposition. She went through
many perils with admirable serenity of soul. After being sent to prison for heresy,
"Some of my friends," she writes, "wept bitterly at the hearing of it, but
such was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it failed to draw any tears
from me.... There appeared to be in me then, as I find it to be in me now, such
an entire loss of what regards myself, that any of my own interests gave me little
pain or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myself only the very thing
which God does." In another place she writes: "We all of us came near perishing
in a river which we found it necessary to pass. The carriage sank in the quicksand.
Others who were with us threw themselves out in excessive fright. But I found
my thoughts so much taken up with God that I had no distinct sense of danger.
It is true that the thought of being drowned passed across my mind, but it cost
no other sensation or reflection in me than this- that I felt quite contented
and willing it were so, if it were my heavenly Father's choice." Sailing from
Nice to Genoa, a storm keeps her eleven days at sea. "As the irritated waves dashed
round us," she writes, "I could not help experiencing a certain degree of satisfaction
in my mind. I pleased myself with thinking that those mutinous billows, under
the command of Him who does all things rightly, might probably furnish me with
a watery grave. Perhaps I carried the point too far, in the pleasure which I took
in thus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swelling waters. Those who were
with me took notice of my intrepidity." *
* From THOMAS C. UPHAM's Life and
Religious Opinions and Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877,
ii. 48, i. 141, 413, abridged.
The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm
produces may be even more buoyant still. I take an example from that charming
recent autobiography, "With Christ at Sea," by Frank Bullen. A couple of days
after he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there gives an account,
"It was blowing stiffly," he writes, "and we were carrying a press of canvas
to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four bells we hauled down the
flying-jib, and I sprang out astride the boom to furl it. I was sitting astride
the boom when suddenly it gave way with me. The sail slipped through my fingers,
and I fell backwards, hanging head downwards over the seething tumult of shining
foam under the ship's bows, suspended by one foot. But I felt only high exultation
in my certainty of eternal life. Although death was divided from me by a hair's
breadth, and I was acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but
joy. I suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds, but in that
time I lived a whole age of delight. But my body asserted itself, and with a desperate
gymnastic effort I regained the boom. How I furled the sail I don't know, but
I sang at the utmost pitch of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over
the dark waste of waters." *
* Op. cit., London, 1901, p. 130.
The annals
of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumph for religious imperturbability.
Let me cite as an example the statement of a humble sufferer, persecuted as a
Huguenot under Louis XIV.:
"They shut all the doors," Blanche Gamond writes,
"and I saw six women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could
hold, and a yard long. He gave me the order, 'Undress yourself,' which I did.
He said, 'You are leaving on your shift; you must take it off.' They had so little
patience that they took it off themselves, and I was naked from the waist up.
They brought a cord with which they tied me to a beam in the kitchen. They drew
the cord tight with all their strength and asked me, 'Does it hurt you?' and then
they discharged their fury upon me, exclaiming as they struck me, 'Pray now to
your God.' It was the Roulette woman who held this language. But at this moment
I received the greatest consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since
I had the honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of being
crowned with his mercy and his consolations. Why can I not write down the inconceivable
influences, consolations, and peace which I felt interiorly? To understand them
one must have passed by the same trial; they were so great that I was ravished,
for there where afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly. In vain the
women cried, 'We must double our blows; she does not feel them, for she neither
speaks nor cries.' And how should I have cried, since I was swooning with happiness
within?" *
* CLAPAREDE et GOTY: Deux Heroines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, 112.
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and
worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those
shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of energy,
which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often
comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.
This abandonment of self-responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically
religious, as distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is
independent of philosophies. Mind-cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological
hygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable
of entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed. * Christians who
have it strongly live in what is called 'recollection,' and are never anxious
about the future, nor worry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint Catharine of
Genoa it is said that "she took cognizance of things, only as they were presented
to her in succession, moment by moment." To her holy soul, "the divine moment
was the present moment,... and when the present moment was estimated in itself
and in its relations, and when the duty that was involved in it was accomplished,
it was permitted to pass away as if it had never been, and to give way to the
facts and duties of the moment which came after." *(2) Hinduism, mind-cure, and
theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this concentration of the consciousness
upon the moment at hand.
* Compare these three different statements of it:
A.P. CALL: As a Matter of Course, Boston, 1894; H.W. DRESSER: Living by the Spirit,
New York and London, 1900; H.W. SMITH: The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life,
published by the Willard Tract Repository, and now in thousands of hands.
*(2) T.C. UPHAM: Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, 3d ed., New York, 1864, pp.
158, 172-174.
The next religious symptom which I will note
is what I have called Purity of Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive
to inner inconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable.
All the mind's objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the special
spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is unspiritual taints
the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with this exaltation of the
moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of sacrifice, for the beloved deity's
sake, of everything unworthy of him. Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign
that purity is achieved at a stroke- we have seen examples. Usually it is a more
gradual conquest. Billy Bray's account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good
example of the latter form of achievement.
"I had been a smoker as well as
a drunkard, and I used to love my tobacco as much as I loved my meat, and I would
rather go down into the mine without my dinner than without my pipe. In the days
of old, the Lord spoke by the mouths of his servants, the prophets; now he speaks
to us by the spirit of his Son. I had not only the feeling part of religion, but
I could hear the small, still voice within speaking to me. When I took the pipe
to smoke, it would be applied within, 'It is an idol, a lust; worship the Lord
with clean lips.' So, I felt it was not right to smoke. The Lord also sent a woman
to convince me. I was one day in a house, and I took out my pipe to light it at
the fire, and Mary Hawke- for that was the woman's name- said, 'Do you not feel
it is wrong to smoke?' I said that I felt something inside telling me that it
was an idol, a lust, and she said that was the Lord. Then I said, 'Now, I must
give it up, for the Lord is telling me of it inside, and the woman outside, so
the tobacco must go, love it as I may.' There and then I took the tobacco out
of my pocket, and threw it into the fire, and put the pipe under my foot, 'ashes
to ashes, dust to dust.' And I have not smoked since. I found it hard to break
off old habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and he gave me strength, for
he has said, 'Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee.' The
day after I gave up smoking I had the toothache so bad that I did not know what
to do. I thought this was owing to giving up the pipe, but I said I would never
smoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head. I said, 'Lord, thou hast told us
My yoke is easy and my burden is light,' and when I said that, all the pain left
me. Sometimes the thought of the pipe would come back to me very strong; but the
Lord strengthened me against the habit, and, bless his name, I have not smoked
since."
Bray's biographer writes that after he had given up smoking, he thought
that he would chew a little, but he conquered this dirty habit, too. "On one occasion,"
Bray said, "when at a prayer-meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me,
'Worship me with clean lips.' So, when we got up from our knees, I took the quid
out of my mouth and I whipped 'en' [threw it] under the form. But, when we got
on our knees again, I put another quid into my mouth. Then the Lord said to me
again, 'Worship me with clean lips.' So I took the quid out of my mouth, and whipped
'en under the form again, and said, 'Yes, Lord, I will.' From that time I gave
up chewing as well as smoking, and have been a free man."
The ascetic forms
which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may take are often pathetic
enough. The early Quakers, for example, had hard battles to wage against the worldliness
and insincerity of the ecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle
that cost them most wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their
own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, in
not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox that
these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followers
thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and
the spirit they professed might be more in accord.
"When the Lord sent me
into the world," says Fox in his Journal, "he forbade me to put off my hat to
any, high or low: and I was required to 'thee' and 'thou' all men and women, without
any respect to rich or poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and down, I
was not to bid people Good-morning, or Good-evening, neither might I bow or scrape
with my leg to any one. This made the sects and professions rage. Oh! the rage
that was in the priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and
especially in priests and professors: for though 'thou' to a single person was
according to their accidence and grammar rules, and according to the Bible, yet
they could not bear to hear it: and because I could not put off my hat to them,
it set them all into a rage.... Oh! the scorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh!
the blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent for not putting
off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently plucked off and thrown away,
so that they quite lost them. The bad language and evil usage we received on this
account is hard to be expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing
our lives for this matter, and that by the great professors of Christianity, who
thereby discovered they were not true believers. And though it was but a small
thing in the eye of man, yet a wonderful confusion it brought among all professors
and priests: but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity of that custom
of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth's testimony against it."
In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one time was
secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid account of
the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in following Fox's canons of
sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but Elwood sets down his
manner of feeling about these things in a shorter passage, which I will quote
as a characteristic utterance of spiritual sensibility:
"By this divine light,
then," says Elwood, "I saw that though I had not the evil of the common uncleanliness,
debauchery, profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I had,
through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been preserved out of
those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils to put away and to cease from;
some of which were not by the world, which lies in wickedness (1 John v. 19),
accounted evils, but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me to be evils,
and as such condemned in me.
"As particularly those fruits and effects of
pride that discover themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel; which
I took too much delight in. This evil of my doings I was required to put away
and cease from; and judgment lay upon me till I did so.
"I took off from my
apparel those unnecessary trimmings of lace, ribbons, and useless buttons, which
had no real service, but were set on only for that which was by mistake called
ornament; and I ceased to wear rings.
"Again, the giving of flattering titles
to men between whom and me there was not any relation to which such titles could
be pretended to belong. This was an evil I had been much addicted to, and was
accounted a ready artist in; therefore this evil also was I required to put away
and cease from. So that thenceforward I durst not say, Sir, Master, My Lord, Madam
(or My Dame); or say Your Servant to any one to whom I did not stand in the real
relation of a servant, which I had never done to any.
"Again, respect of persons,
in uncovering the head and bowing the knee or body in salutation, was a practice
I had been much in the use of; and this, being one of the vain customs of the
world, introduced by the spirit of the world, instead of the true honor which
this is a false representation of, and used in deceit as a token of respect by
persons one to another, who bear no real respect one to another; and besides this,
being a type and a proper emblem of that divine honor which all ought to pay to
Almighty God, and which all of all sorts, who take upon them the Christian name,
appear in when they offer their prayers to him, and therefore should not be given
to men;- I found this to be one of those evils which I had been too long doing;
therefore I was now required to put it away and cease from it.
"Again, the
corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural number to a single person,
you to one, instead of thou, contrary to the pure, plain, and single language
of truth, thou to one, and you to more than one, which had always been used by
God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the oldest record
of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times, to flatter,
fawn, and work upon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that false and senseless
way of speaking you to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and
hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of men;- this evil custom
I had been as forward in as others, and this I was now called out of and required
to cease from.
"These and many more evil customs which had sprung up in the
night of darkness and general apostasy from the truth and true religion were now,
by the inshining of this pure my of divine light in my conscience, gradually discovered
to me to be what I ought to cease from, shun, and stand a witness against." *
* The History of THOMAS ELWOOD, written by Himself, London, 1885, pp. 32-34.
These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistency between
profession and deed jarred some of them to active protest. John Woolman writes
in his diary:
"In these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed;
and have at sundry times walked over ground where much of their dyestuffs has
drained away. This hath produced a longing in my mind that people might come into
cleanness of spirit, cleanness of person, and cleanness about their houses and
garments. Dyes being invented partly to please the eye, and partly to hide dirt,
I have felt in this weak state, when traveling in dirtiness, and affected with
unwholesome scents, a strong desire that the nature of dyeing cloth to hide dirt
may be more fully considered.
"Washing our garments to keep them sweet is
cleanly, but it is the opposite to real cleanliness to hide dirt in them. Through
giving way to hiding dirt in our garments a spirit which would conceal that which
is disagreeable is strengthened. Real cleanliness becometh a holy people; but
hiding that which is not clean by coloring our garments seems contrary to the
sweetness of sincerity. Through some sorts of dyes cloth is rendered less useful.
And if the value of dyestuffs, and expense of dyeing, and the damage done to cloth,
were all added together, and that cost applied to keeping all sweet and clean,
how much more would real cleanliness prevail.
"Thinking often on these things,
the use of bats and garments dyed with a dye hurtful to them, and wearing more
clothes in summer than are useful, grew more uneasy to me; believing them to be
customs which have not their foundation in pure wisdom. The apprehension of being
singular from my beloved friends was a strait upon me; and thus I continued in
the use of some things, contrary to my judgment, about nine months. Then I thought
of getting a hat the natural color of the fur, but the apprehension of being looked
upon as one affecting singularity felt uneasy to me. On this account I was under
close exercise of mind in the time of our general spring meeting in 1762, greatly
desiring to be rightly directed; when, being deeply bowed in spirit before the
Lord, I was made willing to submit to what I apprehended was required of me; and
when I returned home, got a hat of the natural color of the fur.
"In attending
meetings, this singularity was a trial to me, and more especially at this time,
as white hats were used by some who were fond of following the changeable modes
of dress, and as some friends, who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew
shy of me, I felt my way for a time shut up in the exercise of the ministry. Some
friends were apprehensive that my wearing such a hat savored of an affected singularity:
those who spoke with me in a friendly way, I generally informed in a few words,
that I believed my wearing it was not in my own will."
When the craving for
moral consistency and purity is developed to this degree, the subject may well
find the outer world too full of shocks to dwell in, and can unify his life and
keep his soul unspotted only by withdrawing from it. That law which impels the
artist to achieve harmony in his composition by simply dropping out whatever jars,
or suggests a discord, rules also in the spiritual life. To omit, says Stevenson,
is the one art in literature: "If I knew how to omit, I should ask no other knowledge."
And life, when full of disorder and slackness and vague superfluity, can no more
have what we call character than literature can have it under similar conditions.
So monasteries and communities of sympathetic devotees open their doors, and in
their changeless order, characterized by omissions quite as much as constituted
of actions, the holy-minded person finds that inner smoothness and cleanness which
it is torture to him to feel violated at every turn by the discordancy and brutality
of secular existence.
That the scrupulosity of purity may
be carried to a fantastic extreme must be admitted. In this it resembles Asceticism,
to which further symptom of saintliness we had better turn next. The adjective
'ascetic' is applied to conduct originating on diverse psychological levels, which
I might as well begin by distinguishing from one another.
1. Asceticism may
be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
2.
Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity, and non-pampering
of the body generally, may be fruits of the love of purity, shocked by whatever
savors of the sensual.
3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may
appeal to the subject in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making to
the Deity whom he acknowledges.
4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments
may be due to pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theological beliefs
concerning expiation. The devotee may feel that he is buying himself free, or
escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by doing penance now.
5. In Psychopathic
persons, mortifications may be entered on irrationally, by a sort of obsession
or fixed idea which comes as a challenge and must be worked off, because only
thus does the subject get his interior consciousness feeling right again.
6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted by genuine perversions
of the bodily sensibility, in consequence of which normally pain-giving stimuli
are actually felt as pleasures.
I will try to give an instance under each
of these heads in turn; but it is not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced
enough to be immediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usually
work together. Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must invite you
to some general psychological considerations which apply to all of them alike.
A strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over our
Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to face physical pain
with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should either endure it or
inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of it makes our flesh
creep morally as well as physically. The way in which our ancestors looked upon
pain as an eternal ingredient of the world's order, and both caused and suffered
it as a matter-of-course portion of their day's work, fills us with amazement.
We wonder that any human beings could have been so callous. The result of this
historic alteration is that even in the Mother Church herself, where ascetic discipline
has such a fixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come
into desuetude, if not discredit. A believer who flagellates or 'macerates' himself
to-day arouses more wonder and fear than emulation. Many Catholic writers who
admit that the times have changed in this respect do so resignedly; and even add
that perhaps it is as well not to waste feelings in regretting the matter, for
to return to the heroic corporeal discipline of ancient days might be an extravagance.
Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive- and distinctive
it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and painful
as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely abnormal. Nevertheless,
in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual to human nature to court the
arduous. It is only the extreme manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded
as a paradox.
The psychological reasons for this lie near the surface. When
we drop abstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it
is a very complex function. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; it
follows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and it leaves
a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner of the performance.
The result is that, quite apart from the immediate pleasure which any sensible
experience may give us, our own general moral attitude in procuring or undergoing
the experience brings with it a secondary satisfaction or distaste. Some men and
women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word 'yes' forever. But
for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive
happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity
and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some 'no!
no!' be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture
and power. The range of individual differences in this respect is enormous; but
whatever the mixture of yeses and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware
when he has struck it in the right proportion for him. This, he feels, is my proper
vocation, this is the optimum, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the
degree of equilibrium, safety calm, and leisure which I need, or here I find the
challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul's energy expires.
Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or organism,
has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will run best under
a certain steam-pressure, a certain amperage; an organism under a certain diet,
weight, or exercise. You seem to do best, I heard a doctor say to a patient, at
about 140 millimeters of arterial tension. And it is just so with our sundry souls:
some are happiest in calm weather; some need the sense of tension, of strong volition,
to make them feel alive and well. For these latter souls, whatever is gained from
day to day must be paid for by sacrifice and inhibition, or else it comes too
cheap and has no zest.
Now when characters of this latter sort become religious,
they are apt to turn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their
natural self; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.
When Professor
Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that Thomas Carlyle put him into his bath-tub
every morning of a freezing Berlin winter, proclaimed one of the lowest grades
of asceticism. Even without Carlyle, most of us find it necessary to our soul's
health to start the day with a rather cool immersion. A little farther along the
scale we get such statements as this, from one of my correspondents, an agnostic:
"Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so on the warmth,
and whenever the thought would come over me I would have to get up, no matter
what time of night it was, and stand for a minute in the cold, just so as to prove
my manhood."
Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next
case we probably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3- the asceticism becomes far more
systematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whose sense of moral energy
could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms, and I take his case from Starbuck's
manuscript collection.
"I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh.
I secretly made burlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore pebbles
in my shoes. I would spend nights flat on my back on the floor without any covering."
The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, and given
it a market-value in the shape of 'merit.' But we see the cultivation of hardship
cropping out under every sky and in every faith, as a spontaneous need of character.
Thus we read of Channing, when first settled as a Unitarian minister, that
"He was now more simple than ever, and seemed to have become incapable of any
form of self-indulgence. He took the smallest room in the house for his study,
though he might easily have commanded one more light, airy, and in every way more
suitable; and chose for his sleeping chamber an attic which he shared with a younger
brother. The furniture of the latter might have answered for the cell of an anchorite,
and consisted of a hard mattress on a cot-bedstead, plain wooden chairs and table,
with matting on the floor. It was without fire, and to cold he was throughout
life extremely sensitive; but he never complained or appeared in any way to be
conscious of inconvenience. 'I recollect,' says his brother, 'after one most severe
night, that in the morning he sportively thus alluded to his suffering: "If my
bed were my country, I should be somewhat like Bonaparte: I have no control except
over the part which I occupy; the instant I move, frost takes possession."' In
sickness only would he change for the time his apartment and accept a few comforts.
The dress too that he habitually adopted was of most inferior quality; and garments
were constantly worn which the world would call mean, though an almost feminine
neatness preserved him from the least appearance of neglect." *
* Memoirs
of W.E. Channing, Boston, 1840, i. 196.
Channing's asceticism, such as it
was, was evidently a compound of hardihood and love of purity. The democracy which
is an offshoot of the enthusiasm of humanity, and of which I will speak later
under the head of the cult of poverty, doubtless bore also a share. Certainly
there was no pessimistic element in his case. In the next case we have a strongly
pessimistic element, so that it belongs under head 4. John Cennick was Methodism's
first lay preacher. In 1735 he was convicted of sin, while walking in Cheapside,
"And at once left off song-singing, card-playing, and attending theatres.
Sometimes he wished to go to a popish monastery, to spend his life in devout retirement.
At other times he longed to live in a cave, sleeping on fallen leaves, and feeding
on forest fruits. He fasted long and often, and prayed nine times a day.... Fancying
dry bread too great an indulgence for so great a sinner as himself, he began to
feed on potatoes, acorns, crabs, and grass; and often wished that he could live
on roots and herbs. At length, in 1737, he found peace with God, and went on his
way rejoicing." *
* L. TYERMAN: The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley,
i. 274.
In this poor man we have morbid melancholy and fear, and the sacrifices
made are to purge out sin, and to buy safety. The hopelessness of Christian theology
in respect of the flesh and the natural man generally has, in systematizing fear,
made of it one tremendous incentive to self-mortification. It would be quite unfair,
however, in spite of the fact that this incentive has often been worked in a mercenary
way for hortatory purposes, to call it a mercenary incentive. The impulse to expiate
and do penance is, in its first intention, far too immediate and spontaneous an
expression of self-despair and anxiety to be obnoxious to any such reproach. In
the form of loving sacrifice, of spending all we have to show our devotion, ascetic
discipline of the severest sort may be the fruit of highly optimistic religious
feeling.
M. Vianney, the cure of Ars, was a French country priest, whose holiness
was exemplary. We read in his life the following account of his inner need of
sacrifice:
"'On this path,' M. Vianney said, 'it is only the first step that
costs. There is in mortification a balm and a savor without which one cannot live
when once one has made their acquaintance. There is but one way in which to give
one's self to God,- that is, to give one's self entirely, and to keep nothing
for one's self. The little that one keeps is only good to trouble one and make
one suffer.' Accordingly he imposed it on himself that he should never smell a
flower, never drink when parched with thirst, never drive away a fly, never show
disgust before a repugnant object, never complain of anything that had to do with
his personal comfort, never sit down, never lean upon his elbows when he was kneeling.
The Cure of Ars was very sensitive to cold, but he would never take means to protect
himself against it. During a very severe winter, one of his missionaries contrived
a false floor to his confessional and placed a metal case of hot water beneath.
The trick succeeded, and the Saint was deceived: 'God is very good,' he said with
emotion. 'This year, through all the cold, my feet have always been warm.'" *
* A. MOUNIN: Le Cure d'Ars, Vie de M.J.B.M. Vianney, 1864, p. 545, abridged.
In this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrifices for the pure love
of God was probably the uppermost conscious motive. We may class it, then, under
our head 3. Some authors think that the impulse to sacrifice is the main religious
phenomenon. It is a prominent, a universal phenomenon certainly, and lies deeper
than any special creed. Here, for instance, is what seems to be a spontaneous
example of it, simply expressing what seemed right at the time between the individual
and his Maker. Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan divine, is generally reputed
a rather grotesque pedant; yet what is more touchingly simple than his relation
of what happened when his wife came to die?
"When I saw to what a point of
resignation I was now called of the Lord." he says, "I resolved, with his help,
therein to glorify him. So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled
by her bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest in the world.
With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely gave her up unto the Lord:
and in token of my real Resignation, I gently put her out of my hands, and laid
away a most lovely hand, resolving that I would never touch it more. This was
the hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did. She... told me that
she signed and sealed my act of resignation. And though before that she called
for me continually, she after this never asked for me any more." *
* B. WENDELL:
Cotton Mather, New York, no date, p. 198.
Father Vianney's asceticism taken
in its totality was simply the result of a permanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm,
longing to make proof of itself. The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion,
collected all the motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that
any one wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system mapped
out for him in any one of a number of ready-made manuals. * The dominant Church
notion of perfection is of course the negative one of avoidance of sin. Sin proceeds
from concupiscence, and concupiscence from our carnal passions and temptations,
chief of which are pride, sensuality in all its forms, and the loves of worldly
excitement and possession. All these sources of sin must be resisted; and discipline
and austerities are a most efficacious mode of meeting them. Hence there are always
in these books chapters on self-mortification. But whenever a procedure is codified,
the more delicate spirit of it evaporates, and if we wish the undiluted ascetic
spirit,- the passion of self-contempt wreaking itself on the poor flesh, the divine
irrationality of devotion making a sacrificial gift of all it has (its sensibilities,
namely) to the object of its adoration,- we must go to autobiographies, or other
individual documents.
* That of the earlier Jesuit, RODRIGUEZ, which has been
translated into all languages, is one of the best known. A convenient modern manual,
very well put together, is L'Ascetique Chretienne, by M.J. RIBET, Paris, Poussielgue,
nouvelle edition, 1898.
Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flourished-
or rather who existed, for there was little that suggested flourishing about him-
in the sixteenth century, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose.
"First of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitual affectionate will in all
things to imitate Jesus Christ. If anything agreeable offers itself to your senses,
yet does not at the same time tend purely to the honor and glory of God, renounce
it and separate yourself from it for the love of Christ, who all his life long
had no other taste or wish than to do the will of his Father whom he called his
meat and nourishment. For example, you take satisfaction in hearing of things
in which the glory of God bears no part. Deny yourself this satisfaction, mortify
your wish to listen. You take pleasure in seeing objects which do not raise your
mind to God: refuse yourself this pleasure, and turn away your eyes. The same
with conversations and all other things. Act similarly, so far as you are able,
with all the operations of the senses, striving to make yourself free from their
yokes.
"The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great natural
passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief. You must seek to deprive these of every
satisfaction and leave them as it were in darkness and the void. Let your soul
therefore turn always:
"Not to what is most easy, but to what is hardest;
"Not to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful;
"Not to what
most pleases, but to what disgusts;
"Not to matter of consolation, but to
matter for desolation rather;
"Not to rest, but to labor;
"Not to desire
the more, but the less;
"Not to aspire to what is highest and most precious,
but to what is lowest and most contemptible;
"Not to will anything, but to
will nothing;
"Not to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst,
so that you may enter for the love of Christ into a complete destitution, a perfect
poverty of spirit, and an absolute renunciation of everything in this world.
"Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you will find in
a short time great delights and unspeakable consolations.
"Despise yourself,
and wish that others should despise you.
"Speak to your own disadvantage,
and desire others to do the same;
"Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and
find it good when others hold the same;
"To enjoy the taste of all things,
have no taste for anything.
"To know all things, learn to know nothing.
"To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.
"To be all things, be
willing to be nothing.
"To get to where you have no taste for anything, go
through whatever experiences you have no taste for.
"To learn to know nothing,
go whither you are ignorant.
"To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever
you own nothing.
"To be what you are not, experience what you are not."
These later verses play with that vertigo of self-contradiction which is so dear
to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical, for in them Saint
John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion of the All.
"When you
stop at one thing, you cease to open yourself to the All.
"For to come to
the All you must give up the All.
"And if you should attain to owning the
All, you must own it, desiring Nothing.
"In this spoliation, the soul finds
its tranquillity and rest. Profoundly established in the centre of its own nothingness,
it can be assailed by naught that comes from below; and since it no longer desires
anything, what comes from above cannot depress it; for its desires alone are the
causes of its woes." *
* SAINT JEAN DE LA CROIX, Vis et Oeuvres, Paris, 1893,
ii. 94, 99, abridged.
And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5,
in fact of all our heads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathic
individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the sincere Suso's
account of his own self-tortures. Suso, you will remember, was one of the fourteenth
century German mystics; his autobiography, written in the third person, is a classic
religious document.
"He was in his youth of a temperament full of fire and
life; and when this began to make itself felt, it was very grievous to him; and
he sought by many devices how he might bring his body into subjection. He wore
for a long time a hair shirt and an iron chain, until the blood ran from him,
so that he was obliged to leave them off. He secretly caused an undergarment to
be made for him; and in the undergarment he had strips of leather fixed, into
which a hundred and fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp, were driven, and
the points of the nails were always turned towards the flesh. He had this garment
made very tight, and so arranged as to go round him and fasten in front, in order
that it might fit the closer to his body, and the pointed nails might be driven
into his flesh; and it was high enough to reach upwards to his navel. In this
he used to sleep at night. Now in summer, when it was hot, and he was very tired
and ill from his journeyings, or when he held the office of lecturer, he would
sometimes, as he lay thus in bonds, and oppressed with toil, and tormented also
by noxious insects, cry aloud and give way to fretfulness, and twist round and
round in agony, as a worm does when run through with a pointed needle. It often
seemed to him as if he were lying upon an ant-hill, from the torture caused by
the insects; for if he wished to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied
with one another. * Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness of his
heart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man is killed by murderers
or strong beasts of prey it is soon over; but I lie dying here under the cruel
insects, and yet cannot die. The nights in winter were never so long, nor was
the summer so hot, as to make him leave off this exercise. On the contrary, he
devised something farther- two leathern loops into which he put his hands, and
fastened one on each side his throat, and made the fastenings so secure that even
if his cell had been on fire about him, he could not have helped himself. This
he continued until his hands and arms had become almost tremulous with the strain,
and then he devised something else: two leather gloves; and he caused a brazier
to fit them all over with sharp-pointed brass tacks, and he used to put them on
at night, in order that if he should try while asleep to throw off the hair undergarment,
or relieve himself from the gnawings of the vile insects, the tacks might then
stick into his body. And so it came to pass. If ever he sought to help himself
with his hands in his sleep, he drove the sharp tacks into his breast, and tore
himself, so that his flesh festered. When after many weeks the wounds had healed,
he tore himself again and made fresh wounds.
* 'Insects,' i. e. lice, were
an unfailing token of mediaeval sainthood. We read of Francis of Assisi's sheepskin
that "often a companion of the saint would take it to the fire to clean and dispediculate
it, doing so, as he said, because the seraphic father himself was no enemy of
pedocchi, but on the contrary kept them on him (le portava adosso), and held it
for an honor and a glory to wear these celestial pearls in his habit." Quoted
by P. SABATIER: Speculum Perfectionis, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 231, note.
"He
continued this tormenting exercise for about sixteen years. At the end of this
time, when his blood was now chilled, and the fire of his temperament destroyed,
there appeared to him in a vision on Whitsunday, a messenger from heaven, who
told him that God required this of him no longer. Whereupon he discontinued it,
and threw all these things away into a running stream."
Suso then tells how,
to emulate the sorrows of his crucified Lord, he made himself a cross with thirty
protruding iron needles and nails. This he bore on his bare back between his shoulders
day and night. The first time that he stretched out this cross upon his back his
tender frame was struck with terror at it, and blunted the sharp nails slightly
against a stone. But soon, repenting of this womanly cowardice, he pointed them
all again with a file, and placed once more the cross upon him. It made his back,
where the bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he sat down or stood up, it was
as if a hedgehog-skin were on him. If any one touched him unawares, or pushed
against his clothes, it tore him."
Suso next tells of his penitences by means
of striking this cross and forcing the nails deeper into the flesh, and likewise
of his self-scourgings,- a dreadful story,- and then goes on as follows: "At this
same period the Servitor procured an old castaway door, and he used to lie upon
it at night without any bedclothes to make him comfortable, except that he took
of his shoes and wrapped a thick cloak round him. He thus secured for himself
a most miserable bed; for hard pea-stalks lay in humps under his head, the cross
with the sharp nails stuck into his back, his arms were locked fast in bonds,
the horsehair undergarment was round his loins, and the cloak too was heavy and
the door hard. Thus he lay in wretchedness, afraid to stir, just like a log, and
he would send up many a sigh to God.
"In winter he suffered very much from
the frost. If he stretched out his feet they lay bare on the floor and froze,
if he gathered them up the blood became all on fire in his legs, and this was
great pain. His feet were full of sores, his legs dropsical, his knees bloody
and seared, his loins covered with sears from the horsehair, his body wasted,
his mouth parched with intense thirst, and his hands tremulous from weakness.
Amid these torments he spent his nights and days; and he endured them all out
of the greatness of the love which he bore in his heart to the Divine and Eternal
Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing sufferings he sought to imitate.
After a time he gave up this penitential exercise of the door, and instead of
it he took up his abode in a very small cell, and used the bench, which was so
narrow and short that he could not stretch himself upon it, as his bed. In this
hole, or upon the door, he lay at night in his usual bonds, for about eight years.
It was also his custom, during the space of twenty-five years, provided he was
staying in the convent, never to go after compline in winter into any warm room,
or to the convent stove to warm himself, no matter how cold it might be, unless
he was obliged to do so for other reasons. Throughout all these years he never
took a bath, either a water or a sweating bath; and this he did in order to mortify
his comfort-seeking body. He practiced during a long time such rigid poverty that
he would neither receive nor touch a penny, either with leave or without it. For
a considerable time he strove to attain such a high degree of purity that he would
neither scratch nor touch any part of his body, save only his hands and feet."
*
* The Life of the Blessed HENRY SUSO, by Himself, translated by T.F. KNOX,
London, 1865, pp. 56-80, abridged.
I spare you the recital of poor Suso's
self-inflicted tortures from thirst. It is pleasant to know that after his fortieth
year, God showed him by a series of visions that he had sufficiently broken down
the natural man, and that he might leave these exercises off. His case is distinctly
pathological, but he does not seem to have had the alleviation, which some ascetics
have enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibility capable of actually turning torment
into a perverse kind of pleasure. Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order, for
example, we read that
"Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable.... She
said that she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she might
always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a single day without
suffering would be intolerable. She said again that she was devoured with two
unassuageable fevers, one for the holy communion, the other for suffering, humiliation,
and annihilation. 'Nothing but pain,' she continually said in her letters, 'makes
my life supportable.'" *
* BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie,
Paris, 1894, pp. 265, 171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387.
So much for the phenomena
to which the ascetic impulse will in certain persons give rise. In the ecclesiastically
consecrated character three minor branches of self-mortification have been recognized
as indispensable pathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity, obedience, and
poverty which the monk vows to observe; and upon the heads of obedience and poverty
I will make a few remarks.
First, of Obedience. The secular
life of our twentieth century opens with this virtue held in no high esteem. The
duty of the individual to determine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the
consequences seems, on the contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary
Protestant social ideals. So much so that it is difficult even imaginatively to
comprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their own could ever have come
to think the subjection of its will to that of other finite creatures recommendable.
I confess that to myself it seems something of a mystery. Yet it evidently corresponds
to a profound interior need of many persons, and we must do our best to understand
it.
On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency of obedience
in a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as meritorious.
Next, experience shows that there are times in every one's life when one can be
better counseled by others than by one's self. Inability to decide is one of the
commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves; friends who see our troubles more broadly,
often see them more wisely than we do; so it is frequently an act of excellent
virtue to consult and obey a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these
lower prudential regions, we find, in the nature of some of the spiritual excitements
which we have been studying, good reasons for idealizing obedience. Obedience
may spring from the general religious phenomenon of inner softening and self-surrender
and throwing one's self on higher powers. So saving are these attitudes felt to
be that in themselves, apart from utility, they become ideally consecrated; and
in obeying a man whose fallibility we see through thoroughly, we, nevertheless,
may feel much as we do when we resign our will to that of infinite wisdom. Add
self-despair and the passion of self-crucifixion to this, and obedience becomes
an ascetic sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of whatever prudential uses
it might have.
It is as a sacrifice, a mode of 'mortification,' that obedience
is primarily conceived by Catholic writers, a "sacrifice which man offers to God,
and of which he is himself both the priest and the victim. By poverty he immolates
his exterior possessions; by chastity he immolates his body; by obedience he completes
the sacrifice, and gives to God all that he yet holds as his own, his two most
precious goods, his intellect and his will. The sacrifice is then complete and
unreserved, a genuine holocaust, for the entire victim is now consumed for the
honor of God." * Accordingly, in Catholic discipline, we obey our superior not
as mere man, but as the representative of Christ. Obeying God in him by our intention,
obedience is easy. But when the text-book theologians marshal collectively all
their reasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds to our ears rather odd.
* LEJEUNE: Introduction a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaust simile
goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola.
"One of the great consolations
of the monastic life," says a Jesuit authority, "is the assurance we have that
in obeying we can commit no fault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding
you to do this thing or that, but you are certain that you commit no fault so
long as you obey, because God will only ask you if you have duly performed what
orders you received, and if you can furnish a clear account in that respect, you
are absolved entirely. Whether the things you did were opportune, or whether there
were not something better that might have been done, these are questions not asked
of you, but rather of your Superior. The moment what you did was done obediently,
God wipes it out of your account, and charges it to the Superior. So that Saint
Jerome well exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience, 'Oh, sovereign
liberty! Oh, holy and blessed security by which one becomes almost impeccable!'
"Saint John Climachus is of the same sentiment when he calls obedience an
excuse before God. In fact, when God asks why you have done this or that, and
you reply, it is because I was so ordered by my Superiors, God will ask for no
other excuse. As a passenger in a good vessel with a good pilot need give himself
no farther concern, but may go to sleep in peace, because the pilot has charge
over all, and 'watches for him'; so a religious person who lives under the yoke
of obedience goes to heaven as if while sleeping, that is, while leaning entirely
on the conduct of his Superiors, who are the pilots of his vessel, and keep watch
for him continually. It is no small thing, of a truth, to be able to cross the
stormy sea of life on the shoulders and in the arms of another, yet that is just
the grace which God accords to those who live under the yoke of obedience. Their
Superior bears all their burdens.... A certain grave doctor said that he would
rather spend his life in picking up straws by obedience, than by his own responsible
choice busy himself with the loftiest works of charity, because one is certain
of following the will of God in whatever one may do from obedience, but never
certain in the same degree of anything which we may do of our own proper movement."
*
* ALFONSO RODRIGUEZ. S.J.: Pratique de Perfection Chretienne, Part iii.,
Treatise v., ch. x.
One should read the letters in which Ignatius Loyola recommends
obedience as the backbone of his order, if one would gain insight into the full
spirit of its cult. * They are too long to quote; but Ignatius's belief is so
vividly expressed in a couple of sayings reported by companions that, though they
have been so often cited, I will ask your permission to copy them once more:
* Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translated into French by BOUIX, Paris,
1870.
"I ought," an early biographer reports him as saying, "on entering religion,
and thereafter, to place myself entirely in the hands of God, and of him who takes
His place by His authority. I ought to desire that my Superior should oblige me
to give up my own judgment, and conquer my own mind. I ought to set up no difference
between one Superior and another,... but recognize them all as equal before God,
whose place they fill. For if I distinguish persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience.
In the hands of my Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to
require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters, to speak or not
to speak to such a person, or the like; and I must put all my fervor in executing
zealously and exactly what I am ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which
has neither intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without resistance
lets itself be placed wherever it may please any one; like a stick in the hand
of an old man, who uses it according to his needs and places it where it suits
him. So must I be under the hands of the Order, to serve it in the way it judges
most useful.
"I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular
place, to be employed in a particular duty.... I must consider nothing as belonging
to me personally, and as regards the things I use, be like a statue which lets
itself be stripped and never opposes resistance." *
* BARTOLI-MICHEL, ii.
13.
The other saying is reported by Rodriguez in the chapter from which I
a moment ago made quotations. When speaking of the Pope's authority, Rodriguez
writes:
"Saint Ignatius said, when general of his company, that if the Holy
Father were to order him to set sail in the first bark which he might find in
the port of Ostia, near Rome, and to abandon himself to the sea, without a mast,
without sails, without oars or rudder or any of the things that are needful for
navigation or subsistence, he would obey not only with alacrity, but without anxiety
or repugnance, and even with a great internal satisfaction." *
* RODRIGUEZ:
Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi.
With a solitary concrete example
of the extravagance to which the virtue we are considering has been carried, I
will pass to the topic next in order.
"Sister Marie Claire [of Port Royal]
had been greatly imbued with the holiness and excellence of M. de Langres. This
prelate, soon after he came to Port Royal, said to her one day, seeing her so
tenderly attached to Mother Angelique, that it would perhaps be better not to
speak to her again. Marie Claire, greedy of obedience, took this inconsiderate
word for an oracle of God, and from that day forward remained for several years
without once speaking to her sister." *
* SAINTE-BEUVE: Histoire de Port Royal,
i. 346.
Our next topic shall be Poverty, felt at all times
and under all creeds as one adornment of a saintly life. Since the instinct of
ownership is fundamental in man's nature, this is one more example of the ascetic
paradox. Yet it appears no paradox at all, but perfectly reasonable, the moment
one recollects how easily higher excitements hold lower cupidities in check. Having
just quoted the Jesuit Rodriguez on the subject of obedience, I will, to give
immediately a concrete turn to our discussion of poverty, also read you a page
from his chapter on this latter virtue. You must remember that he is writing instructions
for monks of his own order, and bases them all on the text, "Blessed are the poor
in spirit."
"If any one of you," he says, "will know whether or not he is
really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the ordinary consequences
and effects of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation
of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out habit full of patches.
See if you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are passed
by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to you, when your cell
is out of repair. If you are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them
you avoid them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection
of poverty of spirit." Rodriguez then goes on to describe the practice of poverty
in more detail. "The first point is that which Saint Ignatius proposes in his
constitutions, when he says, 'Let no one use anything as if it were his private
possession.' 'A religious person,' he says, 'ought in respect to all the things
that he uses, to be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but which
feels no grief and makes no resistance when one strips it again. It is in this
way that you should feel towards your clothes, your books, your cell, and everything
else that you make use of; if ordered to quit them, or to exchange them for others,
have no more sorrow than if you were a statue being uncovered. In this way you
will avoid using them as if they were your private possession. But if, when you
give up your cell, or yield possession of this or that object or exchange it for
another, you feel repugnance and are not like a statue, that shows that you view
these things as if they were your private property.'
"And this is why our
holy founder wished the superiors to test their monks somewhat as God tested Abraham,
and to put their poverty and their obedience to trial, that by this means they
may become acquainted with the degree of their virtue, and gain a chance to make
ever farther progress in perfection,... making the one move out of his room when
he finds it comfortable and is attached to it; taking away from another a book
of which he is fond; or obliging a third to exchange his garment for a worse one.
Otherwise we should end by acquiring a species of property in all these several
objects, and little by little the wall of poverty that surrounds us and constitutes
our principal defense would be thrown down. The ancient fathers of the desert
used often thus to treat their companions.... Saint Dositheus, being sick-nurse,
desired a certain knife, and asked Saint Dorotheus for it, not for his private
use, but for employment in the infirmary of which he had charge. Whereupon Saint
Dorotheus answered him: 'Ha! Dositheus, so that knife pleases you so much! Will
you be the slave of a knife or the slave of Jesus Christ? Do you not blush with
shame at wishing that a knife should be your master? I will not let you touch
it.' Which reproach and refusal had such an effect upon the holy disciple that
since that time he never touched the knife again."...
"Therefore, in our rooms,"
Father Rodriguez continues, "there must be no other furniture than a bed, a table,
a bench, and a candlestick, things purely necessary, and nothing more. It is not
allowed among us that our cells should be ornamented with pictures or aught else,
neither armchairs, carpets, curtains, nor any sort of cabinet or bureau of any
elegance. Neither is it allowed us to keep anything to eat, either for ourselves
or for those who may come to visit us. We must ask permission to go to the refectory
even for a glass of water; and finally we may not keep a book in which we can
write a line, or which we may take away with us. One cannot deny that thus we
are in great poverty. But this poverty is at the same time a great repose and
a great perfection. For it would be inevitable, in case a religious person were
allowed to own superfluous possessions, that these things would greatly occupy
his mind, be it to acquire them, to preserve them, or to increase them; so that
in not permitting us at all to own them, all these inconveniences are remedied.
Among the various good reasons why the company forbids secular persons to enter
our cells, the principal one is that thus we may the easier be kept in poverty.
After all, we are all men, and if we were to receive people of the world into
our rooms, we should not have the strength to remain within the bounds prescribed,
but should at least wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a
better opinion of our scholarship." *
* RODRIGUEZ: Op. Cit., Part iii., Treatise
iii., chaps. vi., vii.
Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan
dervishes unite with Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest
individual state, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds for
such a seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those which lie closest to common
human nature.
The opposition between the men who have and the men who are
is immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old-fashioned sense of the man who
is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and reveled in lands
and goods, yet he has never identified his essence with these possessions, but
rather with the personal superiorities, the courage, generosity, and pride supposed
to be his birthright. To certain huckstering kinds of consideration he thanked
God he was forever inaccessible, and if in life's vicissitudes he should become
destitute through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he
was all the freer to work out his salvation. "Wer nur selbst was hatte," says
Lessing's Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, "mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe nichts!"
This ideal of the well-born man without possessions was embodied in knight-errantry
and templardom; and, hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still dominates
sentimentally, if not practically, the military and aristocratic view of life.
We glorify the soldier as the man absolutely unincumbered. Owning nothing but
his bare life, and willing to toss that up at any moment when the cause commands
him, he is the representative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer
who pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future,
offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make his bed
wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and athletic attitude
of observation, the property-owner seems buried and smothered in ignoble externalities
and trammels, "wading in straw and rubbish to his knees." The claims which things
make are corrupters of manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our
progress towards the empyrean.
"Everything I meet with," writes Whitefield,
"seems to carry this voice with it,- 'Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim
on earth; have no party or certain dwelling place.' My heart echoes back, 'Lord
Jesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thou seest me in danger of nesting,-
in pity- in tender pity,- put a thorn in my nest to prevent me from it.'" *
* R. PHILIP: The Life and Times of George Whitefield, London, 1842, p. 366.
The loathing of 'capital' with which our laboring classes to-day are growing more
and more infected seems largely composed of this sound sentiment of antipathy
for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist poet writes:
"Not by accumulating
riches, but by giving away that which you have,
"Shall you become beautiful;
"You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones;
"Not by
multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and healthy, but rather by
discarding them...
"For a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek
what fresh furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave behind;
"Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely use and handle
is an impediment." *
* EDWARD CARPENTER: Towards Democracy, p. 362, abridged.
In short, lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing
or on being, and in the interest of action people subject to spiritual excitement
throw away possessions as so many clogs. Only those who have no private interests
can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth and cowardice creep in with every dollar
or guinea we have to guard. When a brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying:
"Father, it would be a great consolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing
that our general should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like also
to have your consent," Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne, Roland,
and Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally dying on the
field of battle. "So care not," he said, "for owning books and knowledge, but
care rather for works of goodness." And when some weeks later the novice came
again to talk of his craving for the psalter, Francis said: "After you have got
your psalter you will crave a breviary; and after you have got your breviary you
will sit in your stall like a grand prelate, and will say to your brother: 'Hand
me my breviary.'... And thenceforward he denied all such requests, saying: A man
possesses of learning only so much as comes out of him in action, and a monk is
a good preacher only so far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every tree is
known by its fruits." *
* Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. SABATIER, Paris, 1898,
pp. 10, 13.
But beyond this more worthily athletic attitude involved in doing
and being, there is, in the desire of not having, something profounder still,
something related to that fundamental mystery of religious experience, the satisfaction
found in absolute surrender to the larger power. So long as any secular safeguard
is retained, so long as any residual prudential guarantee is clung to, so long
the surrender is incomplete, the vital crisis is not passed, fear still stands
sentinel, and mistrust of the divine obtains: we hold by two anchors, looking
to God, it is true, after a fashion, but also holding by our proper machinations.
In certain medical experiences we have the same critical point to overcome. A
drunkard, or a morphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals
to the doctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence.
The tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies of it among
his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled in in case of need. Even so
an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in his own expedients. His money is
like the sleeping potion which the chronically wakeful patient keeps beside his
bed; he throws himself on God, but if he should need the other help, there it
will be also. Every one knows cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire
for reform,- drunkards whom, with all their self-reproaches and resolves, one
perceives to be quite unwilling seriously to contemplate never being drunk again!
Really to give up anything on which we have relied, to give it up definitively,
'for good and all' and forever, signifies one of those radical alterations of
character which came under our notice in the lectures on conversion. In it the
inner man rolls over into an entirely different position of equilibrium, lives
in a new centre of energy from this time on, and the turning-point and hinge of
all such operations seems usually to involve the sincere acceptance of certain
nakednesses and destitutions.
Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly
life, we find this ever-recurring note: Fling yourself upon God's providence without
making any reserve whatever,- take no thought for the morrow,- sell all you have
and give it to the poor, only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless will
the higher safety really arrive. As a concrete example let me read a page from
the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, a good woman, much persecuted in her day
by both Protestants and Catholics, because she would not take her religion at
second hand. When a young girl, in her father's house,
"She spent whole nights
in prayer, oft repeating: Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And being one night
in a most profound penitence, she said from the bottom of her heart: 'O my Lord!
What must I do to please thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to my soul
and it will hear thee.' At that instant she heard, as if another had spoke within
her: Forsake all earthly things. Separate thyself from the love of the creatures.
Deny thyself. She was quite astonished, not understanding this language, and mused
long on these three points, thinking how she could fulfill them. She thought she
could not live without earthly things, nor without loving the creatures, nor without
loving herself. Yet she said, 'By thy Grace I will do it, Lord!' But when she
would perform her promise, she knew not where to begin. Having thought on the
religious in monasteries, that they forsook all earthly things by being shut up
in a cloister, and the love of themselves by subjecting of their wills, she asked
leave of her father to enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but he
would not permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave. This seemed
to her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in the cloister the true Christians
she had been seeking, but she found afterwards that he knew the cloisters better
than she; for after he had forbidden her, and told her he would never permit her
to be a religious, nor give her any money to enter there, yet she went to Father
Laurens, the Director, and offered to serve in the monastery and work hard for
her bread, and be content with little, if he would receive her. At which he smiled
and said: That cannot be. We must have money to build; we take no maids without
money; you must find the way to get it, else there is no entry here.
"This
astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to the cloisters, resolving
to forsake all company and live alone till it should please God to show her what
she ought to do and whither to go. She asked always earnestly, 'When shall I be
perfectly thine, O my God?' And she thought he still answered her, 'When thou
shalt no longer possess anything, and shalt die to thyself. 'And where shall I
do that, Lord?' He answered her, In the desert. This made so strong an impression
on her soul that she aspired after this; but being a maid of eighteen years only,
she was afraid of unlucky chances, and was never used to travel, and knew no way.
She laid aside all these doubts and said, 'Lord, thou wilt guide me how and where
it shall please thee. It is for thee that I do it. I will lay aside my habit of
a maid, and will take that of a hermit that I may pass unknown.' Having then secretly
made ready this habit, while her parents thought to have married her, her father
having promised her to a rich French merchant, she prevented the time, and on
Easter evening, having cut her hair, put on the habit, and slept a little, she
went out of her chamber about four in the morning, taking nothing but one penny
to buy bread for that day. And it being said to her in the going out, Where is
thy faith? in a penny? she threw it away, begging pardon of God for her fault,
and saying, 'No, Lord, my faith is not in a penny, but in thee alone.' Thus she
went away wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the cares and good things
of this world, and found her soul so satisfied that she no longer wished for anything
upon earth, resting entirely upon God, with this only fear lest she should be
discovered and be obliged to return home; for she felt already more content in
this poverty than she had done for all her life in all the delights of the world."
*
* An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, London, 1699, pp. 269, 270, abridged.
Another example from Starbuck's MS. collection:
"At a meeting held at six
the next morning, I heard a man relate his experience. He said: The Lord asked
him if he would confess Christ among the quarrymen with whom he worked, and he
said he would. Then he asked him if he would give up to be used of the Lord the
four hundred dollars he had laid up, and he said he would, and thus the Lord saved
him. The thought came to me at once that I had never made a real consecration
either of myself or of my property to the Lord, but had always tried to serve
the Lord in my way. Now the Lord asked me if I would serve him in his way, and
go out alone and penniless if he so ordered. The question was pressed home, and
I must decide: To forsake all and have him, or have all and lose him! I soon decided
to take him; and the blessed assurance came, that he had taken me for his own,
and my joy was full. I returned home from the meeting with feelings as simple
as a child. I thought all would be glad to hear of the joy of the Lord that possessed
me, and so I began to tell the simple story. But to my great surprise, the pastors
(for I attended meetings in three churches) opposed the experience and said it
was fanaticism, and one told the members of his church to shun those that professed
it, and I soon found that my foes were those of my own household."
The penny
was a small financial safeguard, but an effective spiritual obstacle. Not till
it was thrown away could the character settle into the new equilibrium completely.
Over and above the mystery of self-surrender, there are
in the cult of poverty other religious mysteries. There is the mystery of veracity:
"Naked came I into the world," etc.,-whoever first said that, possessed this mystery.
My own bare entity must fight the battle- shams cannot save me. There is also
the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality before God of all his creatures.
This sentiment (which seems in general to have been more widespread in Mohammedan
than in Christian lands) tends to nullify man's usual acquisitiveness. Those who
have it spurn dignities and honors, privileges and advantages, preferring, as
I said in a former lecture, to grovel on the common level before the face of God.
It is not exactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes so close to it in
practice. It is humanity, rather, refusing to enjoy anything that others do not
share. A profound moralist, writing of Christ's saying, 'Sell all thou hast and
follow me,' proceeds as follows:
"Christ may have meant: If you love mankind
absolutely you will as a result not care for any possessions whatever, and this
seems a very likely proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a proposition
is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a fact. If you loved mankind
as Christ loved them, you would see his conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious.
You would sell your goods, and they would be no loss to you, These truths, while
literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ's love for mankind, become
parables to lesser natures. There are in every generation people who, beginning
innocently, with no predetermined intention of becoming saints, find themselves
drawn into the vortex by their interest in helping mankind, and by the understanding
that comes from actually doing it. The abandonment of their old mode of life is
like dust in the balance. It is done gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly. Thus
the whole question of the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere
incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we abandon ourselves
to the remorseless logic of our love for others." *
* J.J. CHAPMAN, in the
Political Nursery, vol. iv. p. 4, April, 1900, abridged.
But
in all these matters of sentiment one must have 'been there' one's self in
order to understand them. No American can ever attain to understanding the loyalty
of a Briton towards his king, of a German towards his emperor; nor can a Briton
or German ever understand the peace of heart of an American in having no king,
no Kaiser, no spurious nonsense, between him and the common God of all. If sentiments
as simple as these are mysteries which one must receive as gifts of birth, how
much more is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments which we have
been considering! One can never fathom an emotion or divine its dictates by standing
outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities
are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious.
Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic
can draw. Piety and charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and
fears, and form another centre of energy altogether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser
vexations may become a consolation; as a supreme love may turn minor sacrifices
into gain; so a supreme trust may render common safeguards odious, and in certain
glows of generous excitement it may appear unspeakably mean to retain one's hold
of personal possessions. The only sound plan, if we are ourselves outside the
pale of such emotions, is to observe as well as we are able those who feel them,
and to record faithfully what we observe; and this, I need hardly say, is what
I have striven to do in these last two descriptive lectures, which I now hope
will have covered the ground sufficiently for our present needs.